Tuesday, February 19, 2013 3:30:31 AM
UTA Student Discovers Forgotten Poem by Nation's First African-American Writer
Video [embedded]
A student at the University of Texas at Arlington has discovered a piece of American history in the form of a letter written by Jupiter Hammon, it gives insight into how slaves viewed their lives.
Mola Lenghi, NBC 5 Arlington Reporter
Student finds previously unknown poem by Jupiter Hammon
By Mola Lenghi | Wednesday, Feb 13, 2013 | Updated 5:47 PM CST
A University of Texas at Arlington graduate student recently found a piece of American history that offers more insight on U.S. slavery.
Julie McCown, a doctoral student, discovered one of the earliest poems by Jupiter Hammon [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Hammon ], the nation's first African-American writer.
"He is the first black person, period, that we know of to publish in America," said Cedrick May, a UTA professor and expert on African-American literature.
McCown found the poem while researching the writer, who was born into slavery on Long Island in New York in 1711, for May's Electronic Text Design and Web Publishing class.
She was looking for a specific Hammon writing, but kept falling short.
"[Librarians] kept emailing me: 'No, we don't have what you want. We don't have what you want.' And then finally someone said, 'We don't have what you want, but here's this other poem,'" she said.
The poem was buried in documents at the Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University Library in Connecticut.
"For a 200-plus-year-old manuscript, it was in perfect condition," May said. "I took one look at it and I said, 'This looks pretty authentic. It's either a great hoax or this is the real deal.' This is a poem that we've never seen before."
The poem is dated 1786. Hammon's first work was published in 1760.
"It's both really exciting, but then it's also hard to believe. Who am I to happen across this?" McCown said.
"We get to see what he thought, written by his own words in his own hand, and that's a very rare thing," May said.
In the newly discovered poem, Hammon shifts from the ideology he held in previous writings, in which he described slavery as the will of God, to a new line of thinking that says slavery was a manmade evil.
"There's a big difference in the way that he talks about slavery here than how he talks about slavery in other works," said May, who said the shift is "a game-changer" in how Hammon's writing is viewed.
May said such an anti-slavery perspective could have been viewed as too inflammatory at the time.
"I think Jupiter Hammon's masters thought they were going to keep that out of the public eye and they put [the poem] away," he said.
After time, the poem was likely misplaced and overlooked, he said. But fortunately and, most importantly, it was not destroyed.
Hammon said it gives him hope for future discoveries.
"We know there's more," he said. "We know that Jupiter Hammon has at least one other lost poem that's out there, and there's a lot more out there by other African-Americans. I think it's really important to get that perspective on our history."
© 2013 NBCUniversal Media, LLC
http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/UTA-Student-Discovers-Forgotten-Poem-by-Nations-First-African-American-Writer-190931171.html [with comments]
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Emory president apologizes
UPDATED: After defending the "Three-Fifths Compromise," James Wagner apologizes for "clumsiness and insensitivity"
By David Daley
Saturday, Feb 16, 2013 02:31 PM CST
UPDATED, 3:20 p.m., Sunday:
Emory University president James Wagner has apologized [ http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/issues/2013/winter/register/president.html ] for “the hurt caused by not communicating more my own beliefs.” He writes that “To those hurt or confused by my clumsiness and insensitivity, please forgive me. ”
And he says that he considers slavery “heinous, repulsive, repugnant, and inhuman. I should have stated that fact clearly in my essay.”
* * *
The full text of Wagner’s explanation/apology can be read here [id.].
Wagner now insists that “The point was not that this particular compromise was a good thing in itself. It was a repugnant compromise. Of course it is not good to count one human being as three fifths of another or, more egregiously, as not human at all, but property.”
But while he says his point was not to praise this compromise as a good thing in itself, here is his original text:
Some might suggest that the constitutional compromise reached for the lowest common denominator—for the barest minimum value on which both sides could agree. I rather think something different happened. Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared—the aspiration to form a more perfect union. They set their sights higher, not lower, in order to identify their common goal and keep moving toward it.
Later in the essay, he wrote this:
A university by its inclusiveness insists on holding opposing views in nonviolent dialogue long enough for common aspirations to be identified and for compromise to be engaged—compromise not understood as defeat, but as a tool for more noble achievement. The constitutional compromise about slavery, for instance, facilitated the achievement of what both sides of the debate really aspired to—a new nation.
Aside from not ever taking the opportunity in the original piece to call slavery any of the things he did in his statement on Sunday, it’s impossible to read that last statement without the clear suggestion that he believes this compromise was “a tool for more noble achievement.” One certainly would not take from that what Wagner wants us to today, that, of course he believes it was “repugnant.” In reality, it is his very — and only — example of compromise as noble achievement.
It will be interesting to see if this “compromise” statement satisfies the Emory community, and how the university’s trustees react in upcoming days.
* * *
Saturday: In a shockingly horrible column [id.], the president of Emory University held up the “Three-Fifths Compromise” — the deal between Northern and Southern states which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person — as a shining example of political compromise at its best.
In his “from the president” column — titled “As American as … Compromise” — in the winter issue of Emory magazine, president James Wagner writes about the fiscal cliff and the importance of keeping one’s mind open to other points of view. All standard president’s letter dullness so far, right?
Then comes this:
One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—“to form a more perfect union”—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.
Some might suggest that the constitutional compromise reached for the lowest common denominator—for the barest minimum value on which both sides could agree. I rather think something different happened. Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared—the aspiration to form a more perfect union. They set their sights higher, not lower, in order to identify their common goal and keep moving toward it.
So under Wagner’s formulation, one of the basest and demeaning political deals of American history, if not the basest, is an example of working toward a “highest aspiration.” Counting slaves as three-fifths of a person becomes an example of American politicians setting their sights high!
Wagner, thankfully, is at least not a history professor. His academic specialty is electrical engineering. But he has held some awfully important positions for a man of such strange historical views: he’s taught at Johns Hopkins, served as dean and provost at Case Western Reserve University. and is on the board of The Carter Center in Atlanta.
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/16/emory_president_holds_up_three_fifths_compromise_as_noble_honorable/ [with comments]
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How Did Ex-Slave’s Letter to Master Come to Be?
This combination picture shows an undated image of Jordon Anderson, left, and the beginning of a letter dated Aug. 7, 1865 from Jordan Anderson to his former master, Patrick H. Anderson, published in the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper. Jordon Anderson was a former slave who was freed from a Tennessee plantation by Union troops in 1864 and spent his remaining 40 years in Ohio. He lived quietly and likely would have been forgotten, if not for the remarkable letter published shortly after the Civil War.
(AP Photo)
[ http://mymajicdc.com/3064118/former-slave-letter-published-worldwide/ ]
Old trees line the drive to a house in Lebanon, Tenn. The land was once part of a plantation where Jordan Anderson was a slave to Col. Patrick Henry Anderson. In September 1865, Professor Roy E. Finkenbine says Col. Anderson sold the nearly 1,000-acre estate to his attorney for a pittance, in an apparent attempt to get out from under his crushing debt. Just two years later, Patrick Henry Anderson died at the age of 44.
(AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)
[ http://mymajicdc.com/3064118/former-slave-letter-published-worldwide/ ]
By Allen G. Breed, Hillel Italie
Jul 15, 2012
NEW YORK (AP) — The photograph, scratched and undated, is captioned "Brother Jordan Anderson [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Anderson ]." He is a middle-aged black man with a long beard and a righteous stare, as if he were a preacher locking eyes with a sinner, or a judge about to dispatch a thief to the gallows.
Anderson was a former slave who was freed from a Tennessee plantation by Union troops in 1864 and spent his remaining 40 years in Ohio. He lived quietly and likely would have been forgotten, if not for a remarkable letter to his former master published in a Cincinnati newspaper shortly after the Civil War.
Treasured as a social document, praised as a masterpiece of satire, Anderson's letter has been anthologized and published all over the world. Historians teach it, and the letter turns up occasionally on a blog or on Facebook. Humorist Andy Borowitz read the letter recently and called it, in an email to The Associated Press, "something Twain would have been proud to have written."
Addressed to one Col. Patrick Henry Anderson, who apparently wanted Jordan to come back to the plantation east of Nashville, the letter begins cheerfully, with the former slave expressing relief that "you had not forgotten Jordon" (there are various spellings of the name) and were "promising to do better for me than anybody else can." But, he adds, "I have often felt uneasy about you."
He informs the colonel that he's now making a respectable wage in Dayton, Ohio, and that his children are going to school. He tallies the monetary value of his services while on Anderson's plantation — $11,608 — then adds, "we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you."
Turning serious, he alludes to violence committed against women back in Tennessee and wonders what would happen to his own family members. "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."
He asks if there are schools now for blacks. "The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits," he writes.
Then he signs off with a swift, unforgettable kick.
"Say howdy to George Carter," he says, "and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me."
Anderson's words, a timeless kiss-off to a hated boss, are also a puzzle: How could an illiterate man, newly released from bondage, produce such a work of sophisticated satire?
After the letter resurfaced online earlier this year, along with questions about its authenticity, The Associated Press sought answers.
From documents compiled by the AP and in interviews with scholars, Anderson emerges as a very real person and the very real author of his story — though, from the beginning, it was reported to have been "dictated." His letter is an outstanding, but not unique, testament to the ability of slaves to turn horror into humor.
"The sly irony is very much in the Mark Twain style," Twain biographer Ron Powers says of the letter, especially the request for unpaid wages. "Whammo."
"It is that wonderful combination of serious thought and satirical chastisement," says Yale University history professor David Blight, who loves to read the letter during a lecture class on Reconstruction. "It represents so many definitions of freedom — dignity, access to education, family. And in the end, it also meant wages."
According to available records, Jordan Anderson was born somewhere in Tennessee around 1825 and by age 7 or 8 had been sold to a plantation owned by Gen. Paulding Anderson in Big Spring, Tenn. Patrick Henry Anderson was one of the general's sons and, by the mid-1840s owned Jordan and other slaves. Jordan Anderson married Amanda McGregor in 1848 and they apparently had 11 children.
Union troops camped on the plantation, and Jordan was freed in 1864 by the Provost-Marshall-General of the Department of Nashville.
Roy E. Finkenbine, a professor at the University of Detroit-Mercy who is planning a biography of Anderson, thinks it's likely Jordan was given to Patrick (born in 1823) as a playmate and personal servant when they were young. According to the 1860 slave schedules in the U.S. Census, Patrick had five "slave houses" totaling 32 people — 19 males and 13 females.
While the schedules don't list the slaves by name, there were two men, aged 34 and 35, who would have been about the age Jordan was in 1860. Finkenbine says Jordan appears to have been the oldest male slave of working age, and that might be why the plantation owner was so eager to entice him back. Many of the slaves had fled, and Anderson was mortgaged to the hilt.
"Harvest is coming on. Jordan's a guy who's played … sort of a quasi-managerial role in the past," he says. "And if he can convince this guy to come back, here's a guy who can not only maybe get the harvest in, but convince some of these other slaves that have gone …, get them to come back and be workers on the plantation. It's kind of his last-ditch effort to save it."
But he doesn't save it. In September 1865, Finkenbine says, Anderson sold the nearly 1,000-acre estate to his attorney for a pittance, in an apparent attempt to get out from under his crushing debt. Just two years later, Patrick Henry Anderson died at the age of 44.
That's what's known of the famous letter's recipient. What of its writer?
Jordan Anderson's collaborator — to whom he reportedly dictated the letter — was a Dayton banker named Valentine Winters. An abolitionist who once hosted Abraham Lincoln at his mansion, Winters regarded the letter as excellent propaganda, according to Finkenbine. It was originally published in August 1865 by the Cincinnati Commercial, a paper with Republican leanings.
Jordan likely made his way to Dayton with the help of Winters' son-in-law, Dr. Clarke McDermont, the surgeon in charge of the Cumberland Military Hospital in Nashville, where both Jordan and Mandy worked for a time, says Finkenbine, who places Jordan and his family in Dayton by August 1864. Anderson becomes an employee and tenant of Winters.
McDermont expressed concern for the former slaves working as nurses and orderlies and laundresses at the hospital. "And he actually writes back and forth to both his father-in-law and some of the other abolitionists in Dayton, saying, 'Can you raise money for these people? Can you send clothing for these people? "' Finkenbine says.
Anderson's letter comes right out of the life he had survived. From the insanity of slavery, he and others developed a deadpan, absurdist take that revealed their feelings to each other and hid them from their masters.
"Slaves had to be guarded as to what they said because they would be punished if caught critiquing or offending the master class — thus they developed sophisticated forms of indirection and other forms of masking," says Glenda Carpio, a professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard University and author of "Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery."
Anderson's letter is special in part, Carpio says, because it was written down. Until late in the 19th century, when Joel Chandler Harris' Br'er Rabbit tales were first published, slave humor was essentially an oral tradition. And while newspapers sometimes printed letters to former masters, Finkenbine notes, few were "so challenging" as Anderson's.
"Most were rather supplicating," he says.
Powers finds the letter's tone curious, because Anderson "seems to veer back and forth between irony and aching earnestness. " Twain, he adds, would have given the letter a vernacular voice, as he did in such pieces as "Sociable Jimmy" and "A True Story Just as I Heard It." Anderson's diction, meanwhile, "is pretty much standard English."
The letter was soon reprinted by Lydia Maria Child in her "Freedmen's Book," used by schools in the South for former slaves. Other anti-slavery newspapers in the U.S. published it, and Finkenbine says he has found instances of Anderson's letter appearing as far away as Switzerland, where it was translated into French.
Notes on some of these publications state that Jordan dictated the letter verbatim to Valentine Winters, and that Winters is the one submitting it for publication.
Regarding questions about whether the letter was really Anderson's, Finkenbine says: "It's kind of a racist assumption … that when someone is illiterate, we make the assumption they're stupid." Enslaved people had deep folk wisdom and a rich oral culture, he adds. "Why would we think that he hadn't been thinking about these things and couldn't dictate them to willing abolitionists?"
"I think the letter is clearly his ideas and, for the most part, his own words" — though Winters probably had "some minor role in shaping the language."
In a 2006 speech at a conference on slavery reparations, historian Raymond Winbush retold the story of Anderson's letter. He also revealed that he had tracked down some of Patrick Henry Anderson's descendants, still living in Big Spring.
"What's amazing is that the current living relatives of Col. Anderson are still angry at Jordan for not coming back," knowing that the plantation was in serious disrepair after the war, said Winbush, director of the Institute for Urban Research at Maryland's Morgan State University.
As a boy, Jewell Wilson, Jordan Anderson's great-grandson, lived with Jordan's daughter Jane and remembers some of her stories from the plantation.
"She said that there was a (white) girl there who was about her age," says the 87-year-old Wilson, who still lives in Dayton. "And they would whup her for trying to teach my grandma to read and write."
Jane could have been talking about Col. Anderson's daughter, Martha. Likely the "Miss Martha" to whom Jordan refers in his letter, she would have been around 14 when the black Anderson family left Big Spring.
"She said they came here one time looking for Anderson to take him back," he says. "They wanted him because he was such a good worker and everything. But he said, 'I'm free now. I don't have to go back there.'"
According to probate records, Jordan Anderson died on April 15, 1905. While Wilson has no oral history about the letter's authorship, he has no problem believing that it reflects his great-grandfather's thoughts.
"They said he was smart." And he succeeded in educating his children.
Jordan's son, Dr. Valentine Winters Anderson, was a close friend of African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The two collaborated on the Dayton Tattler, the city's first black newspaper.
Among Dunbar's works is a 1904 story titled "The Wisdom of Silence." In it, a freed slave named Jeremiah Anderson rebuffs his former master's attempts to woo him back to the plantation.
"No, suh, I's free, an' I sholy is able to tek keer o' myse'f," the freedman in Dunbar's story declares. "I done been fattenin' frogs fu' othah people's snakes too long."
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[ http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a319/Cackalacky/Page.jpg , via http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=45660 \ http://message.snopes.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=950485 ]
Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P. H. Anderson
Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten
Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again,
promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt
uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before
this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never
heard about your going to Col. Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was
left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before
I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are
still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again
and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give
my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better
world, if not in this. I would have come back to see you all when I was
working in Nashville, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to
shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give
me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and
clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs.
Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and are
learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go
to Sunday-School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly
treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were
slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such
remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col.
Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call
you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I
will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move
back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained
on that score, as I got my free-papers in 1864 from the
Provost-Marshal-General of the Department at Nashville. Mandy says she
would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely
disposed to treat us justly and kindly -- and we have concluded to test
your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served
you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your
justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for
thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a
week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the
interest for the time our wages has 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 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 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.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson
P.S. -- Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol
from you when you were shooting at me.
[ http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=45660 ]
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Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://blackamericaweb.com/21922/how-did-ex-slaves-letter-to-master-come-to-be/
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French couple 'pay €4,500 for African slave girl'
As many as 76 percent of those victims helped by France's Committee against Modern Slavery are from Africa.
Photo: 300td.org
By Ben McPartland
Published: 14 Feb 2013 16:05 GMT+01:00
Updated: 14 Feb 2013 16:05 GMT+01:00
Slavery may have been abolished in France over 160 years ago but word has clearly taken a while to get around after reports emerged on Thursday that a couple living in France had allegedly paid €4,500 for a 14-year-old girl from the Ivory Coast to be a maid at their home.
The couple, both in their twenties, allegedly bought the girl on a recent trip to Africa and brought her back in September, when she began working as a housemaid in the couple’s home in the Vaucluse region of France, French regional La Depeche reported on Thursday [ http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2013/02/14/1560950-vaucluse-une-jeune-fille-ivoirienne-utilisee-comme-esclave.html ].
The girl, who had no official papers, was barred from going to school, worked without being paid and was even punished by being whipped with a belt when her cleaning was judged to be not up to scratch, reported La Depeche.
“This is a case of slavery in the true sense of the word,” Sylvie O’dy, president of the Committee against Modern Slavery told French daily Le Parisien.
The girl, named as Charlotte, finally managed to escape the clutches of her captors this week and fled to a nearby police station, where she is being cared for.
After hearing the girl’s recount of what happened, police arrested the couple. The woman, who is French, has been released but her partner, who is originally from the Ivory Coast has been kept in custody. They both face trial in March on charges of human trafficking and violence.
“This is a classic case. It is very common for people of foreign origin living in France to go back to their country, where they are connected and where it is easy to find someone poor to exploit,” said O’dy.
“The fact that they purchased her, however, is extremely rare,” she said, adding that it was more common to make deals over travel expenses or schooling than to exchange cash.
According to O’dy, 76 percent of the victims dealt with by her association are from Africa.
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Related
• Charity staff jailed for African child-smuggling (12 Feb 13)
http://www.thelocal.fr/page/view/charity-workers-jailed-for-african-child-smuggling
• Algeria: minister demands French own up to 'crimes' (30 Oct 12)
http://www.thelocal.fr/page/view/algeria-minister-demands-french-own-up-to-crimes
*
Copyright 2013 The Local Europe AB
http://www.thelocal.fr/page/view/french-couple-pay-4500-for-african-slave-girl [with comment]
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After 148 years, Mississippi finally ratifies 13th Amendment, which banned slavery
By Stephanie Condon
February 18, 2013, 10:51 AM
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, was ratified in 1865. Lawmakers in Mississippi, however, only got around to officially ratifying the amendment last month -- 148 years later -- thanks to the movie "Lincoln."
The state's historical oversight came to light after Mississippi resident Ranjan Batra saw the Steven Spielberg-directed film last November, the Clarion-Ledger reports.
After watching the film, which depicts the political fight to pass the 13th Amendment, Batra did some research. He learned that the amendment was ratified after three-fourths of the states backed it in December 1865. Four remaining states all eventually ratified the amendment -- except for Mississippi. Mississippi voted to ratify the amendment in 1995 but failed to make it official by notifying the U.S. Archivist.
Batra spoke to another Mississippi resident, Ken Sullivan, who contacted Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann about the oversight. Finally, on Jan. 30, Hosemann sent the Office of the Federal Register a copy of the 1995 resolution, and on Feb. 7, the Federal Register made the ratification official.
According to the Clarion-Ledger, it's unclear why the state never sent the U.S. Archivist its 1995 resolution. "What an amendment to have an error in filing," Dick Molpus, who served then as secretary of state, told the paper.
© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. (emphasis added)
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57569880/after-148-years-mississippi-finally-ratifies-13th-amendment-which-banned-slavery/ [with comments]
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Video [embedded]
A student at the University of Texas at Arlington has discovered a piece of American history in the form of a letter written by Jupiter Hammon, it gives insight into how slaves viewed their lives.
Mola Lenghi, NBC 5 Arlington Reporter
Student finds previously unknown poem by Jupiter Hammon
By Mola Lenghi | Wednesday, Feb 13, 2013 | Updated 5:47 PM CST
A University of Texas at Arlington graduate student recently found a piece of American history that offers more insight on U.S. slavery.
Julie McCown, a doctoral student, discovered one of the earliest poems by Jupiter Hammon [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Hammon ], the nation's first African-American writer.
"He is the first black person, period, that we know of to publish in America," said Cedrick May, a UTA professor and expert on African-American literature.
McCown found the poem while researching the writer, who was born into slavery on Long Island in New York in 1711, for May's Electronic Text Design and Web Publishing class.
She was looking for a specific Hammon writing, but kept falling short.
"[Librarians] kept emailing me: 'No, we don't have what you want. We don't have what you want.' And then finally someone said, 'We don't have what you want, but here's this other poem,'" she said.
The poem was buried in documents at the Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University Library in Connecticut.
"For a 200-plus-year-old manuscript, it was in perfect condition," May said. "I took one look at it and I said, 'This looks pretty authentic. It's either a great hoax or this is the real deal.' This is a poem that we've never seen before."
The poem is dated 1786. Hammon's first work was published in 1760.
"It's both really exciting, but then it's also hard to believe. Who am I to happen across this?" McCown said.
"We get to see what he thought, written by his own words in his own hand, and that's a very rare thing," May said.
In the newly discovered poem, Hammon shifts from the ideology he held in previous writings, in which he described slavery as the will of God, to a new line of thinking that says slavery was a manmade evil.
"There's a big difference in the way that he talks about slavery here than how he talks about slavery in other works," said May, who said the shift is "a game-changer" in how Hammon's writing is viewed.
May said such an anti-slavery perspective could have been viewed as too inflammatory at the time.
"I think Jupiter Hammon's masters thought they were going to keep that out of the public eye and they put [the poem] away," he said.
After time, the poem was likely misplaced and overlooked, he said. But fortunately and, most importantly, it was not destroyed.
Hammon said it gives him hope for future discoveries.
"We know there's more," he said. "We know that Jupiter Hammon has at least one other lost poem that's out there, and there's a lot more out there by other African-Americans. I think it's really important to get that perspective on our history."
© 2013 NBCUniversal Media, LLC
http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/UTA-Student-Discovers-Forgotten-Poem-by-Nations-First-African-American-Writer-190931171.html [with comments]
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Emory president apologizes
UPDATED: After defending the "Three-Fifths Compromise," James Wagner apologizes for "clumsiness and insensitivity"
By David Daley
Saturday, Feb 16, 2013 02:31 PM CST
UPDATED, 3:20 p.m., Sunday:
Emory University president James Wagner has apologized [ http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/issues/2013/winter/register/president.html ] for “the hurt caused by not communicating more my own beliefs.” He writes that “To those hurt or confused by my clumsiness and insensitivity, please forgive me. ”
And he says that he considers slavery “heinous, repulsive, repugnant, and inhuman. I should have stated that fact clearly in my essay.”
* * *
The full text of Wagner’s explanation/apology can be read here [id.].
Wagner now insists that “The point was not that this particular compromise was a good thing in itself. It was a repugnant compromise. Of course it is not good to count one human being as three fifths of another or, more egregiously, as not human at all, but property.”
But while he says his point was not to praise this compromise as a good thing in itself, here is his original text:
Some might suggest that the constitutional compromise reached for the lowest common denominator—for the barest minimum value on which both sides could agree. I rather think something different happened. Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared—the aspiration to form a more perfect union. They set their sights higher, not lower, in order to identify their common goal and keep moving toward it.
Later in the essay, he wrote this:
A university by its inclusiveness insists on holding opposing views in nonviolent dialogue long enough for common aspirations to be identified and for compromise to be engaged—compromise not understood as defeat, but as a tool for more noble achievement. The constitutional compromise about slavery, for instance, facilitated the achievement of what both sides of the debate really aspired to—a new nation.
Aside from not ever taking the opportunity in the original piece to call slavery any of the things he did in his statement on Sunday, it’s impossible to read that last statement without the clear suggestion that he believes this compromise was “a tool for more noble achievement.” One certainly would not take from that what Wagner wants us to today, that, of course he believes it was “repugnant.” In reality, it is his very — and only — example of compromise as noble achievement.
It will be interesting to see if this “compromise” statement satisfies the Emory community, and how the university’s trustees react in upcoming days.
* * *
Saturday: In a shockingly horrible column [id.], the president of Emory University held up the “Three-Fifths Compromise” — the deal between Northern and Southern states which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person — as a shining example of political compromise at its best.
In his “from the president” column — titled “As American as … Compromise” — in the winter issue of Emory magazine, president James Wagner writes about the fiscal cliff and the importance of keeping one’s mind open to other points of view. All standard president’s letter dullness so far, right?
Then comes this:
One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—“to form a more perfect union”—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.
Some might suggest that the constitutional compromise reached for the lowest common denominator—for the barest minimum value on which both sides could agree. I rather think something different happened. Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared—the aspiration to form a more perfect union. They set their sights higher, not lower, in order to identify their common goal and keep moving toward it.
So under Wagner’s formulation, one of the basest and demeaning political deals of American history, if not the basest, is an example of working toward a “highest aspiration.” Counting slaves as three-fifths of a person becomes an example of American politicians setting their sights high!
Wagner, thankfully, is at least not a history professor. His academic specialty is electrical engineering. But he has held some awfully important positions for a man of such strange historical views: he’s taught at Johns Hopkins, served as dean and provost at Case Western Reserve University. and is on the board of The Carter Center in Atlanta.
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/16/emory_president_holds_up_three_fifths_compromise_as_noble_honorable/ [with comments]
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How Did Ex-Slave’s Letter to Master Come to Be?
This combination picture shows an undated image of Jordon Anderson, left, and the beginning of a letter dated Aug. 7, 1865 from Jordan Anderson to his former master, Patrick H. Anderson, published in the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper. Jordon Anderson was a former slave who was freed from a Tennessee plantation by Union troops in 1864 and spent his remaining 40 years in Ohio. He lived quietly and likely would have been forgotten, if not for the remarkable letter published shortly after the Civil War.
(AP Photo)
[ http://mymajicdc.com/3064118/former-slave-letter-published-worldwide/ ]
Old trees line the drive to a house in Lebanon, Tenn. The land was once part of a plantation where Jordan Anderson was a slave to Col. Patrick Henry Anderson. In September 1865, Professor Roy E. Finkenbine says Col. Anderson sold the nearly 1,000-acre estate to his attorney for a pittance, in an apparent attempt to get out from under his crushing debt. Just two years later, Patrick Henry Anderson died at the age of 44.
(AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)
[ http://mymajicdc.com/3064118/former-slave-letter-published-worldwide/ ]
By Allen G. Breed, Hillel Italie
Jul 15, 2012
NEW YORK (AP) — The photograph, scratched and undated, is captioned "Brother Jordan Anderson [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Anderson ]." He is a middle-aged black man with a long beard and a righteous stare, as if he were a preacher locking eyes with a sinner, or a judge about to dispatch a thief to the gallows.
Anderson was a former slave who was freed from a Tennessee plantation by Union troops in 1864 and spent his remaining 40 years in Ohio. He lived quietly and likely would have been forgotten, if not for a remarkable letter to his former master published in a Cincinnati newspaper shortly after the Civil War.
Treasured as a social document, praised as a masterpiece of satire, Anderson's letter has been anthologized and published all over the world. Historians teach it, and the letter turns up occasionally on a blog or on Facebook. Humorist Andy Borowitz read the letter recently and called it, in an email to The Associated Press, "something Twain would have been proud to have written."
Addressed to one Col. Patrick Henry Anderson, who apparently wanted Jordan to come back to the plantation east of Nashville, the letter begins cheerfully, with the former slave expressing relief that "you had not forgotten Jordon" (there are various spellings of the name) and were "promising to do better for me than anybody else can." But, he adds, "I have often felt uneasy about you."
He informs the colonel that he's now making a respectable wage in Dayton, Ohio, and that his children are going to school. He tallies the monetary value of his services while on Anderson's plantation — $11,608 — then adds, "we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you."
Turning serious, he alludes to violence committed against women back in Tennessee and wonders what would happen to his own family members. "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."
He asks if there are schools now for blacks. "The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits," he writes.
Then he signs off with a swift, unforgettable kick.
"Say howdy to George Carter," he says, "and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me."
Anderson's words, a timeless kiss-off to a hated boss, are also a puzzle: How could an illiterate man, newly released from bondage, produce such a work of sophisticated satire?
After the letter resurfaced online earlier this year, along with questions about its authenticity, The Associated Press sought answers.
From documents compiled by the AP and in interviews with scholars, Anderson emerges as a very real person and the very real author of his story — though, from the beginning, it was reported to have been "dictated." His letter is an outstanding, but not unique, testament to the ability of slaves to turn horror into humor.
"The sly irony is very much in the Mark Twain style," Twain biographer Ron Powers says of the letter, especially the request for unpaid wages. "Whammo."
"It is that wonderful combination of serious thought and satirical chastisement," says Yale University history professor David Blight, who loves to read the letter during a lecture class on Reconstruction. "It represents so many definitions of freedom — dignity, access to education, family. And in the end, it also meant wages."
According to available records, Jordan Anderson was born somewhere in Tennessee around 1825 and by age 7 or 8 had been sold to a plantation owned by Gen. Paulding Anderson in Big Spring, Tenn. Patrick Henry Anderson was one of the general's sons and, by the mid-1840s owned Jordan and other slaves. Jordan Anderson married Amanda McGregor in 1848 and they apparently had 11 children.
Union troops camped on the plantation, and Jordan was freed in 1864 by the Provost-Marshall-General of the Department of Nashville.
Roy E. Finkenbine, a professor at the University of Detroit-Mercy who is planning a biography of Anderson, thinks it's likely Jordan was given to Patrick (born in 1823) as a playmate and personal servant when they were young. According to the 1860 slave schedules in the U.S. Census, Patrick had five "slave houses" totaling 32 people — 19 males and 13 females.
While the schedules don't list the slaves by name, there were two men, aged 34 and 35, who would have been about the age Jordan was in 1860. Finkenbine says Jordan appears to have been the oldest male slave of working age, and that might be why the plantation owner was so eager to entice him back. Many of the slaves had fled, and Anderson was mortgaged to the hilt.
"Harvest is coming on. Jordan's a guy who's played … sort of a quasi-managerial role in the past," he says. "And if he can convince this guy to come back, here's a guy who can not only maybe get the harvest in, but convince some of these other slaves that have gone …, get them to come back and be workers on the plantation. It's kind of his last-ditch effort to save it."
But he doesn't save it. In September 1865, Finkenbine says, Anderson sold the nearly 1,000-acre estate to his attorney for a pittance, in an apparent attempt to get out from under his crushing debt. Just two years later, Patrick Henry Anderson died at the age of 44.
That's what's known of the famous letter's recipient. What of its writer?
Jordan Anderson's collaborator — to whom he reportedly dictated the letter — was a Dayton banker named Valentine Winters. An abolitionist who once hosted Abraham Lincoln at his mansion, Winters regarded the letter as excellent propaganda, according to Finkenbine. It was originally published in August 1865 by the Cincinnati Commercial, a paper with Republican leanings.
Jordan likely made his way to Dayton with the help of Winters' son-in-law, Dr. Clarke McDermont, the surgeon in charge of the Cumberland Military Hospital in Nashville, where both Jordan and Mandy worked for a time, says Finkenbine, who places Jordan and his family in Dayton by August 1864. Anderson becomes an employee and tenant of Winters.
McDermont expressed concern for the former slaves working as nurses and orderlies and laundresses at the hospital. "And he actually writes back and forth to both his father-in-law and some of the other abolitionists in Dayton, saying, 'Can you raise money for these people? Can you send clothing for these people? "' Finkenbine says.
Anderson's letter comes right out of the life he had survived. From the insanity of slavery, he and others developed a deadpan, absurdist take that revealed their feelings to each other and hid them from their masters.
"Slaves had to be guarded as to what they said because they would be punished if caught critiquing or offending the master class — thus they developed sophisticated forms of indirection and other forms of masking," says Glenda Carpio, a professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard University and author of "Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery."
Anderson's letter is special in part, Carpio says, because it was written down. Until late in the 19th century, when Joel Chandler Harris' Br'er Rabbit tales were first published, slave humor was essentially an oral tradition. And while newspapers sometimes printed letters to former masters, Finkenbine notes, few were "so challenging" as Anderson's.
"Most were rather supplicating," he says.
Powers finds the letter's tone curious, because Anderson "seems to veer back and forth between irony and aching earnestness. " Twain, he adds, would have given the letter a vernacular voice, as he did in such pieces as "Sociable Jimmy" and "A True Story Just as I Heard It." Anderson's diction, meanwhile, "is pretty much standard English."
The letter was soon reprinted by Lydia Maria Child in her "Freedmen's Book," used by schools in the South for former slaves. Other anti-slavery newspapers in the U.S. published it, and Finkenbine says he has found instances of Anderson's letter appearing as far away as Switzerland, where it was translated into French.
Notes on some of these publications state that Jordan dictated the letter verbatim to Valentine Winters, and that Winters is the one submitting it for publication.
Regarding questions about whether the letter was really Anderson's, Finkenbine says: "It's kind of a racist assumption … that when someone is illiterate, we make the assumption they're stupid." Enslaved people had deep folk wisdom and a rich oral culture, he adds. "Why would we think that he hadn't been thinking about these things and couldn't dictate them to willing abolitionists?"
"I think the letter is clearly his ideas and, for the most part, his own words" — though Winters probably had "some minor role in shaping the language."
In a 2006 speech at a conference on slavery reparations, historian Raymond Winbush retold the story of Anderson's letter. He also revealed that he had tracked down some of Patrick Henry Anderson's descendants, still living in Big Spring.
"What's amazing is that the current living relatives of Col. Anderson are still angry at Jordan for not coming back," knowing that the plantation was in serious disrepair after the war, said Winbush, director of the Institute for Urban Research at Maryland's Morgan State University.
As a boy, Jewell Wilson, Jordan Anderson's great-grandson, lived with Jordan's daughter Jane and remembers some of her stories from the plantation.
"She said that there was a (white) girl there who was about her age," says the 87-year-old Wilson, who still lives in Dayton. "And they would whup her for trying to teach my grandma to read and write."
Jane could have been talking about Col. Anderson's daughter, Martha. Likely the "Miss Martha" to whom Jordan refers in his letter, she would have been around 14 when the black Anderson family left Big Spring.
"She said they came here one time looking for Anderson to take him back," he says. "They wanted him because he was such a good worker and everything. But he said, 'I'm free now. I don't have to go back there.'"
According to probate records, Jordan Anderson died on April 15, 1905. While Wilson has no oral history about the letter's authorship, he has no problem believing that it reflects his great-grandfather's thoughts.
"They said he was smart." And he succeeded in educating his children.
Jordan's son, Dr. Valentine Winters Anderson, was a close friend of African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The two collaborated on the Dayton Tattler, the city's first black newspaper.
Among Dunbar's works is a 1904 story titled "The Wisdom of Silence." In it, a freed slave named Jeremiah Anderson rebuffs his former master's attempts to woo him back to the plantation.
"No, suh, I's free, an' I sholy is able to tek keer o' myse'f," the freedman in Dunbar's story declares. "I done been fattenin' frogs fu' othah people's snakes too long."
*
[ http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a319/Cackalacky/Page.jpg , via http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=45660 \ http://message.snopes.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=950485 ]
Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P. H. Anderson
Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten
Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again,
promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt
uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before
this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never
heard about your going to Col. Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was
left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before
I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are
still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again
and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give
my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better
world, if not in this. I would have come back to see you all when I was
working in Nashville, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to
shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give
me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and
clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs.
Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and are
learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go
to Sunday-School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly
treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were
slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such
remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col.
Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call
you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I
will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move
back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained
on that score, as I got my free-papers in 1864 from the
Provost-Marshal-General of the Department at Nashville. Mandy says she
would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely
disposed to treat us justly and kindly -- and we have concluded to test
your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served
you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your
justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for
thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a
week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the
interest for the time our wages has 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 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 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.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson
P.S. -- Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol
from you when you were shooting at me.
[ http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=45660 ]
*
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://blackamericaweb.com/21922/how-did-ex-slaves-letter-to-master-come-to-be/
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French couple 'pay €4,500 for African slave girl'
As many as 76 percent of those victims helped by France's Committee against Modern Slavery are from Africa.
Photo: 300td.org
By Ben McPartland
Published: 14 Feb 2013 16:05 GMT+01:00
Updated: 14 Feb 2013 16:05 GMT+01:00
Slavery may have been abolished in France over 160 years ago but word has clearly taken a while to get around after reports emerged on Thursday that a couple living in France had allegedly paid €4,500 for a 14-year-old girl from the Ivory Coast to be a maid at their home.
The couple, both in their twenties, allegedly bought the girl on a recent trip to Africa and brought her back in September, when she began working as a housemaid in the couple’s home in the Vaucluse region of France, French regional La Depeche reported on Thursday [ http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2013/02/14/1560950-vaucluse-une-jeune-fille-ivoirienne-utilisee-comme-esclave.html ].
The girl, who had no official papers, was barred from going to school, worked without being paid and was even punished by being whipped with a belt when her cleaning was judged to be not up to scratch, reported La Depeche.
“This is a case of slavery in the true sense of the word,” Sylvie O’dy, president of the Committee against Modern Slavery told French daily Le Parisien.
The girl, named as Charlotte, finally managed to escape the clutches of her captors this week and fled to a nearby police station, where she is being cared for.
After hearing the girl’s recount of what happened, police arrested the couple. The woman, who is French, has been released but her partner, who is originally from the Ivory Coast has been kept in custody. They both face trial in March on charges of human trafficking and violence.
“This is a classic case. It is very common for people of foreign origin living in France to go back to their country, where they are connected and where it is easy to find someone poor to exploit,” said O’dy.
“The fact that they purchased her, however, is extremely rare,” she said, adding that it was more common to make deals over travel expenses or schooling than to exchange cash.
According to O’dy, 76 percent of the victims dealt with by her association are from Africa.
*
Related
• Charity staff jailed for African child-smuggling (12 Feb 13)
http://www.thelocal.fr/page/view/charity-workers-jailed-for-african-child-smuggling
• Algeria: minister demands French own up to 'crimes' (30 Oct 12)
http://www.thelocal.fr/page/view/algeria-minister-demands-french-own-up-to-crimes
*
Copyright 2013 The Local Europe AB
http://www.thelocal.fr/page/view/french-couple-pay-4500-for-african-slave-girl [with comment]
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After 148 years, Mississippi finally ratifies 13th Amendment, which banned slavery
By Stephanie Condon
February 18, 2013, 10:51 AM
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, was ratified in 1865. Lawmakers in Mississippi, however, only got around to officially ratifying the amendment last month -- 148 years later -- thanks to the movie "Lincoln."
The state's historical oversight came to light after Mississippi resident Ranjan Batra saw the Steven Spielberg-directed film last November, the Clarion-Ledger reports.
After watching the film, which depicts the political fight to pass the 13th Amendment, Batra did some research. He learned that the amendment was ratified after three-fourths of the states backed it in December 1865. Four remaining states all eventually ratified the amendment -- except for Mississippi. Mississippi voted to ratify the amendment in 1995 but failed to make it official by notifying the U.S. Archivist.
Batra spoke to another Mississippi resident, Ken Sullivan, who contacted Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann about the oversight. Finally, on Jan. 30, Hosemann sent the Office of the Federal Register a copy of the 1995 resolution, and on Feb. 7, the Federal Register made the ratification official.
According to the Clarion-Ledger, it's unclear why the state never sent the U.S. Archivist its 1995 resolution. "What an amendment to have an error in filing," Dick Molpus, who served then as secretary of state, told the paper.
© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. (emphasis added)
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57569880/after-148-years-mississippi-finally-ratifies-13th-amendment-which-banned-slavery/ [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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