Corey Robin directs us to a letter written by a man named Jourdan Anderson to his former master, who had requested that he come back and work on his Tennessee farm. Anderson, now free, had moved to Ohio and found paying work. This is his response.
Here's a pdf of the newspaper in which it appeared, the August 22, 1865 issue of the New York Daily Tribune. Below are excerpts, but I urge you all to read the letter in its entirety. Nothing I could say could match the poignancy of the letter, which shows how powerful irony can be. Robin describes the letter as a "Most Delightful Fuck-You."
I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters...
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
Dignity? Yeah, this man had some. Amazing.
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Here's another take on the letter from Trymaine Lee at Huffington Post.
In a tone that could be described either as "impressively measured" or "the deadest of deadpan comedy," the former slave, in the most genteel manner, basically tells the old slave master to kiss his rear end.
Also poco points me to this August Ta Nehisi-Coates post in which he cites the letter as part of a larger post about the civil war. (Apparently people who know about this stuff knew about this letter.)
If you read through the oral histories you find that the slaves themselves, like real Americans, never accepted their status as property. They never believed anyone had the implicit right to buy, sell, or barter them away.
I think of Jourdan Anderson writing to his old master who tried to coax him into returning:
I would rather stay here and starve, and die if it comes to that, than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood, the great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
P.S. --Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
Mr. Anderson was among that last generation of a people who lived under a two and half centuries of perpetual war, of perpetual violence, of perpetual destruction of black families, of sexual violence and near-ritual torture. I will not privilege the last four years of that conflict over the preceding two centuries.