Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads & MLK Day Event: Professor Roy E. Finkenbine: Searching for Jordan Anderson: A Personal Journey Into Race And Slavery In America

Fri, 04/10/2009 - 12:35pm

When: January 21, 2013 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Jordan Anderson, an African-American who moved to Ohio when he was freed from slavery in 1864, is famous for his "Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master," addressed in response to a request from his former master that Jordan return to help restore the farm after the Civil War. The letter became an immediate media sensation with reprints in the New York Daily Tribune and other publications and has been described as a rare example of documented "slave humor" of the period - its deadpan style compared to the writing of Mark Twain.In the famous letter, Anderson asks his former master to prove his goodwill by paying the back wages he and his wife are owed for 52 years combined of slave labor and asks if his daughters will be safe and able to have an education, since Jordan would rather die "than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. He concludes with, "Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me."Professor Roy E Finkenbine, Chair of History at Detroit Mercy College, is a specialist on slavery, abolition, and the Underground Railroad, and is writing a biography on Anderson and the famous letter. Join us on MLK Day as Dr. Finkenbine discusses his search for information about Anderson's fascinating life and the history of the famous letter. He will also share his personal experiences involving the heritage of race and slavery in America while on this research journey.Dr. Finkenbine co-edited the five-volume "Black Abolitionist Papers, 1830-1865" and "Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation." He recently completed a second edition of "Sources Of The African American Past" and was appointed to the Michigan Freedom Trail Commission. This event is held in conjunction with Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads 2013. This year's Reads' theme is 'Understanding Race.'

Transcript

• [00:00:25.98] CECILE DUNHAM: I'd like to introduce Roy Finkenbine, who is currently the interim dean at the College of Liberal Arts and Education and Professor of History at the University of Detroit Mercy, and he's graciously agreed to come here tonight to discuss his work on searching for Jordan Anderson. So please join me in welcoming Professor Finkenbine.
• [00:00:46.70] [APPLAUSE]
• [00:00:51.07] ROY E. FINKENBINE: Hi. Good evening. Well, I suppose it's doubly appropriate on a day in which the first black president was re-inaugurated and which we celebrated also Martin Luther King Day to talk about race and racial heritage in America. And I'm going to focus in on a project that I've been working on for several years in and around other things like chairing a department, and teaching, and being interim dean now in my third year, and other things that slowed down the progress. I'm looking forward to next year when I'll actually have more time to try to finish the project.
• [00:01:40.01] But it's a project that's intriguing to me for several reasons, one because it's allowed me to focus on one man and his family as they moved from slavery to freedom in the search for citizenship and respectability in post-war America, and to give meaning to what freedom is. He's also a man who, although illiterate his entire life according to his own indication in census after census after census enumeration, produced, by virtue of dictating it to a colleague, produced one of the more interesting documents in American history, one that was widely republished and is still widely republished in the contemporary reparations movement as well as in American history textbooks, historical scholarship having to do with the period of emancipation, et cetera.
• [00:03:00.40] So my search for Jordan Anderson really began about seven and a half years ago. I was in the midst of a project that I stumbled into looking at what the generation of slaves becoming freedmen during the Civil War era thought about the question of reparations. Did they feel they were owed something? If so, what did they feel they were owed?
• [00:03:32.34] And I began to look at that. And what led me in that direction was actually finding an interesting campaign by abolitionists before the Civil War in which they lobbied for reparations from Congress to a freed black, Solomon Northrop, who had been kidnapped into slavery and had to work for 12 years on plantations in Louisiana, and then had been able to use the law to free himself. And abolitionists thought this guy is owed something. Although Congress never came up with anything, it was an interesting and instructive campaign, and I started looking at that and raising the questions.
• [00:04:17.29] And over time, I came around to look at this man, Jordan Anderson, and the document that he produced in August of 1865 that has been widely reproduced ever since, although his name was given different spellings and different [INAUDIBLE] with these reproductions. The letter itself, as you see a version of the original reprinting, here in August 12, 1865. The letter was written August 7, five days before. It's published in the Cincinnatti Commercial which is at that point, one of the major Midwestern newspapers.
• [00:05:01.50] And as you can see, there's several interesting things. One is he's dictating it, but the editors make it very clear they want us to know that this is a genuine document, it's dictated by the old servant, and it contains his ideas and forms of expression. It's interesting they use the "old servant" at this point. He's not quite 40. But he's dictating this to his master, Colonel Patrick Henry Anderson, who is the owner of Big Spring Farm just east of Nashville near Lebanon, Tennessee and Wilson County, Tennessee, middle Tennessee.
• [00:05:42.96] And we don't have the letter, if there was one, that Patrick Henry Anderson sent. There's another possibility that I've been developing based on Anderson family stories, that in fact, there was not a letter sent, that there was actually a person sent to Dayton to track down Jordan to get him to return. And Patrick Henry Anderson is offering Jordan the opportunity to work for wages on the old plantation and tell him that he'll offer him a better deal than anybody else can.
• [00:06:27.26] Well, why does Patrick Henry Anderson go to all this trouble of apparently sending somebody to Dayton to find this former slave, George Anderson, and to try to get him to return? Well, as I found the back story as I researched this, Patrick Henry Anderson is not unlike situations we've had at other points in American history where people think that the economy is kind of on a permanent rise and he has an opportunity, if he invests and takes out loans, to invest them and to dramatically build himself into a man of substance. In fact, in the 1850s, Patrick Henry Anderson begin to style himself a planter, to take out large numbers of loans from individual creditors as well as national banks, and to begin to buy a substantial number of plantations in Tennessee and in Arkansas, town lots in Tennessee and other places, and his prize plantation, Big Spring Farm in middle Tennessee.
• [00:07:47.19] But what we know and what Jordan's reply doesn't tell us is Patrick Henry Anderson is in deep, deep debt in August, '65. The war has taken its toll. There's a book about the effect of the war on the slave holders economy called Broke by the War. Well, Patrick Henry Anderson was broke by the war. First of all, he was mired in debt. Secondly, half of the assets that he owned, slaves, were now free people.
• [00:08:25.94] He's looking at the prospect of losing his other properties. He's lost his slaves. He's trying to hang on to the home place, Big Spring Farm. Why contact Jordan? There's all sorts of evidence that Jordan had been his most trusted slave. He was probably the oldest male slave on Big Spring Farm at the beginning of the Civil War, and he'd had somewhat of a managerial role, directing the other slaves, et cetera.
• [00:08:57.91] So he wants him back. This is his last ditch effort to save the place, to get the harvest in. It's no accident it's August 7 and he's looking forward to the harvest. To get the harvest in to make some money. Jordan is a man that can help recruit some of those slaves that have left the plantation, gone into eastern Wilson County, gone into Nashville and other places, get them back, get them to work on the plantation for wages, get the harvest in, and save the plantation.
• [00:09:32.28] Well, Jordan didn't return, and a little over a month later, Patrick Henry Anderson sold the plantation and all of his personal goods for $5 to Benjamin Tarver, a Wilson County lawyer friend, in exchange for him assuming the debts on the place, including-- and it's talked about in the deed of sale-- my prize piano. You can just imagine the emotion that went with that language.
• [00:10:10.73] Well, that got rid of his debts on Big Spring Farm, but it didn't get rid of all these other debts, and one of the interesting things in tracing this through is Patrick Henry Anderson continued to be plagued by debts, and shame, and possibly depression, certainly constant court cases. Two years later, in September 18 1867, he dictated his will and expressed extreme embarrassment over the financial situation that he found himself in. Two days later, he was dead.
• [00:10:48.93] Although I have no reason other than this happened to lots of other planters to believe this, it well may have been suicide. People didn't talk about that then, and we don't have the records to document that, but it's kind of a curious coincidence. Well, his creditors continued to bring suit against his survivors for a quarter century, and it wasn't until 1890 that the Supreme Court of Tennessee finally irrevocably settled the case.
• [00:11:23.03] Well, the letter dictated by Jordan to his employer and friend, leading banker in Dayton, leading abolitionist, leading Republican political figure, Valentine Winters, continued to has a life of its own up to the present day. Written August 7, published in Cincinnati Commercial August 12, this leading Midwestern newspaper, then published in other newspapers across the Midwest, then in a couple weeks reprinted the New York Tribune, Horace Greely's paper, the New York Times of its day, and then reprinted in hundreds of other US and British papers, as well as abolitionist and Freedman Aids journals on both sides of the Atlantic. By late 1865, Lydia Maria Child, who was a leading feminist and abolitionist who we probably today remember best for her poem about "over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go," included the letter in her Freedman's Book, which was a widely circulated reader that she compiled for use in the emerging schools in the South for his children of ex-slaves and even adult ex-slaves. So it reaches several generations of folks that way.
• [00:12:52.21] And the latest contemporary publication of it that I found was in 1867 in French in reform journals in Switzerland. So this has quite a circulation initially in the Atlantic world, and then it'll have a 20th century life, as I'll talk about. As I said, everybody wants to make clear that it's Jordan's thoughts and words, but what's the purpose of the letter? The latter starts, as you see there, "I've got your letter and glad to find that you had not forgotten Jordan." He goes on to express his mixed feelings about his former owner, Patrick Henry Anderson, both a mix of, you could say, something bordering on love and respect mixed with fear and disgust at what slavery had done to he and his wife and children.
• [00:13:58.97] The letter, as I see it, is doing three things. One, it's a personal declaration of independence by an ex-slave. There are some of these that you see. It's almost a genre of its own where slaves, both during the time of slavery and after, once they got freedom, would write back-- and in a few cases after slavery ended, even go back to visit-- their former master or slave mistress as a way of saying, see? I'm doing just fine without your ownership, without your direction. I can operate as a free person. I've got a job, I've got a family, I've got kids who are being educated. We have a home. We have all these kinds of things. And so Jordan seems to be doing that as well. Patrick, I'm doing well.
• [00:14:54.65] It's also a claim for reparations and redress, back wages. It's interesting in the latter part of the letter, Jordan actually does some calculating where he talks about the 32 years that he served Patrick Henry Anderson, uses contemporary labor costs, subtracts a couple of medical bills that the master would have paid, does the same thing for his wife at a lower rate of pay, because she would not have generated as much income as a wage worker that was female, and sends him a bill for $11,600. And said basically in so many words, once you pay that, then we can talk about me coming back.
• [00:15:47.06] It's also abolitionist propaganda. The amanuensis, the person to whom this was dictated, who was a leading Republican politician in Ohio, an abolitionist of some note in Dayton, a person concerned about the well-being of the freedmen and about their issues and the debate over these issues, wanted to influence that debate and saw this letter as a good piece of propaganda in the debate. So he took the role of sending it to the newspapers-- general newspapers, the abolitionists' press, the freedman's aid press, et cetera-- and seeing that it got circulated. And he's the person that always sent along in his letter the notion that this is genuine, and it's the old servant's words, because that enhanced its propaganda value.
• [00:16:45.55] Throughout this letter, Jordan, as I said, although illiterate throughout his life, continues to influence the debate at the time and today as it's been widely were printed over and over and over again. If you just Google it on the internet, you'll have to use the misspellings that Horace Greeley introduced into his reprinting in the New York Tribune, which is, I think, J-O-U-R-D-A-N, you'll find many, many versions of it on the internet. But it still influences us today, and as I said, has become not only something that scholars look at, but something that gets used in propaganda coming from the contemporary reparations movement.
• [00:17:38.82] This is Jordan, the only known photograph, probably taken circa 1880. And not atypically, he looks rather dour faced. You don't see a lot of smiling going on in 19th century portraits. They took some time. They took some effort. I want to avoid doing what one scholar did years ago in a book called Wisconsin Death Trip, in which he looked at all these 19th century portraits from Wisconsin and said, people were really sad in the 19th century. No, it was the technology, it was the process of holding still for a long period of time so that the portrait worked. You see him looking rather stately, dressed in his best, I'm sure. And this was probably an important act on his part to document his importance, to document his respectability.
• [00:18:46.32] Jordan was born 15th of December, 1825, which that alone makes it kind of unique as a slaves. Most slaves did not know their birth date. Someone as important as Frederick Douglass through his entire life was off by a year, and it wasn't until recently that scholars determined that Frederick had been off by a year.
• [00:19:13.93] Jordan's family had apparently been owned by the Andersons for several generations. In fact, I think it's more than a generic reference when the latter part of the letter, Jordan talks about, quote, "the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers." I think he's being very specific here. His father, his grandfather, and so forth had been owned by the Andersons, and they had been brought over the mountains from Amelia County, Virginia when the Andersons migrated to Wilson County, Tennessee about 1800.
• [00:19:51.88] We do know that Jordan's parents were born in Wilson County. He notes that in a later census. And we do know from particularly the family stories passed down through the Anderson family that he claimed some Cherokee heritage. That was not atypical. A lot of the contemporary African American population claims some Native American heritage. Dating all the way back to colonial America, there's been kind of this tripartite biological interaction that's gone on in America that, quite frankly, oftentimes, isn't acknowledged by white descendants, although increasingly so, including the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of slave holders.
• [00:20:56.17] We don't know what Patrick Henry Anderson looked like. There's no known photo. This is his gravestone in Cedar View Cemetery in Lebanon, Tennessee. And you actually see some of his children, including Patrick Anderson Junior on the left side, Patrick Henry Anderson Senior, Jordan's owner, on the right side, and then several listed underneath, including right here, it says H. Times. He actually had a child he named Hard Times, that was born early in his marriage.
• [00:21:44.91] By Jordan's own account, he became the slave of Patrick Henry Anderson at about the point he was six and Patrick would have been eight. He was then Patrick's personal servant and playmate, and ended up being his servant for 32 years, up until he ran away in the midst of the war. Being so close in age, knowing each other since childhood, being playmates, there was that bond that was not unusual between slave and master when that kind of thing developed. Jordan expressed that in the letter, as I indicated.
• [00:22:31.12] In 1844, Jordan meets his lifelong companion, Mandy, or as she would be known once slavery ended, Amanda Anderson, who had been born in 1829 to the McGregor family, Rutherford County, Tennessee, another middle Tennessee family of some note. And Mandy became the property of Mary McGregor, Jordan's wife, or wife to be, through appropriate in 1837 after her father died and his affairs were settled.
• [00:23:13.50] I spent hours looking for the trust deed indicating that passage, and I was must tell you it was a joyful moment when I found this hand written trust deed which indicated that Mary was now the owner of, quote, "Matthew, Siller, and her child." Her mother, after freedom, went by the full name of Priscilla, but Silla during slavery times was what they called her. And obviously, this is a corruption, "Siller," that her master wrote down, Matthew, Siller, and her child.
• [00:23:54.14] And then Mandy became Patrick Henry Anderson's property when he and Mary McGregor married in 1844. And not only did Patrick Henry Anderson and Mary McGregor Anderson have many children, but in bringing Jordan and Mandy together, they sparked what would be a lifelong relationship. Here is Amanda Anderson. The two photos of Jordan and Amanda, the family did not even have once I tracked down family members. These turn up in a church centennial history of the church that they attended in Dayton, and one of their daughters was active in putting the centennial history together late in her life, and she included the photos and information about her parents.
• [00:24:59.26] Well, Jordan and Mandy, after courting, were married with Patrick Henry Anderson's permission. Remember, this is not a marriage recognized under the law because slave marriage in the South was a non sequitur. Slaves could not be married under the law. Masters, however, would permit them to couple and would even allow, on occasion, formal marriage ceremonies. And that's what happened Christmas Day 1847. They didn't have to work on that day.
• [00:25:34.63] And Patrick Henry Anderson, possibly with his encouragement, allowed them to go into Lebanon, the county seat, and they were married by a white minister, most likely in a house, not a church, and there were two white witnesses. And the reason we know this detail is because one of Jordan's literate daughters, shortly after freedom came, convinced her parents to buy a family Bible, and you know the middle section of those big family bibles where you have all the information where you list the births, list the deaths, list the marriages, et cetera. And there's one whole page in which they list the details about Jordan and Mandy's marriage from memory.
• [00:26:29.25] Well, they had three children over the next few years, Millie in 1848. They didn't wait. Literally nine months after the marriage, Millie is born. Jane, often called Jenny, is born in 1851, and Felix Grundy Anderson, named after a local Jacksonian politician, is born in 1859.
• [00:26:57.59] Childbirth was tough in slavery, and we know from census information that Mandy ultimately had 11 pregnancies, and only eight of them actually came to birth and live children. It's likely those other three miscarriages occurred during that long period between 1851, when Jane is born, and 1859, when Felix Grundy is born.
• [00:27:32.38] Much of Jordan's life, as well as Mandy's revolved around their work for Patrick Henry Anderson. In the 1840s and early 1850s, Patrick worked with his father, Paulding, who was a noted local merchant and political figure. They worked together in the mercantile trade, both in Lebanon and in Nashville. There's a lot of trust deeds, and you can see Patrick buying and selling large numbers of slaves.
• [00:28:03.21] And I've also been able to find that they took advantage of something that was natural in the landscape. Lebanon and Wilson County, Tennessee, have lots of stands of natural cedar, and as they cleared fields, they cut cedar and shipped it to Illinois and other places in the Midwest where it was in demand in order to enhance their income.
• [00:28:33.85] Well, as you get into the 1850s, Patrick Henry Anderson begins to style himself a planter. He calls himself a planter even though he doesn't get a plantation immediately in the '50s. He starts subscribing to the appropriate magazines, like The Southern Planter, and turning up at planters' conventions in the South. Eventually, he assembled enough credit to amass a good bit of slaves and to earn the name of planter, including a plantation and slaves in Arkansas, a plantation and slaves near McMinnville, Tennessee, in the south central part of Tennessee, town lots of McMinnville. All of this meant massive debt on his part.
• [00:29:20.23] In 1858, he purchased what would be his showplace. Now, this is not the original house. This is a house built in the 20th century. But you can still see what would have been the entry point, the driveway, and the stands of trees on both sides. This is Big Spring Farm. What remains of what was an 1,000 acre showplace plantation six miles northeast of Lebanon on what was called the Old Rome Pike. This was an important thoroughfare in the early 19th century between Lebanon and Rome, and in fact, continuing onto Nashville for people moving from Nashville into the middle part of Tennessee, and actually into the northeastern part of Tennessee.
• [00:30:13.31] In the first half of the 19th century, it had been an important village. There was an academy, there were churches, there were general stores. There was a post office. There was all sorts of activity. But by 1850, it was a declining village, but its land was known as fertile bottom land, and was still sought after. And so it was a prize piece of real estate when Patrick Henry Anderson bought it and moved his slaves, including Jordan and Mandy and their children, here in 1858.
• [00:30:50.75] Here's another shot of the land, and you see the stone wall, almost certainly built with slave hands. Big Spring was noted for its mixed agriculture. You have a mix of grains, and Patrick Henry Anderson also raised prize Arabian horses that won various honors at the state level, and of course, cut down cedar stands and shipped them away. By 1860, Patrick had assets valued over $100,000. In 1860 terms, that is a phenomenal amount. That's millions of dollars. Now, the problem is he had more millions in debt for as other plantations as well.
• [00:31:42.47] His 1860 slave schedule shows 32 slaves, mostly living in families, and five slave houses at Big Spring. And if you know anything about the slave schedules in the census before the Civil War, they list slaves by gender, by age, but not name. You can look through that list and you can figure out which are Jordan, and which is Mandy, which are the children, which is Priscilla, Siller.
• [00:32:15.40] And that's what convinced me that Jordan was the oldest male slave of working age. There's a much older male slave, but he's beyond working age, probably broken down at that point. And one of the things that convinces me that Jordan was, in fact, a man of importance on a plantation as a slave that would have had a managerial role. I mean, the fact that he was a man in the prime of his life but still older than the other male slaves and the other female slaves would have given him an importance and his wisdom would have been sought out. Plus the fact that he had had all of this working experience working for Patrick in different locations, Nashville, and Lebanon, and in stores, and shipping cedar, and all this would have given him a cosmopolitanism that would have been unusual among many slaves.
• [00:33:10.94] Well, Big Spring is important for other reasons. On the plantation is a natural spring. Here you see it's quite still. In the mid-19th century, we're told that the natural spring pumped about 1,800 gallons of water a minute into Cedar Creek, which ran from the spring a few miles to the Cumberland River where it's now part of this important river system that runs into the Ohio.
• [00:33:47.54] Covered with vegetation now, but the land is arranged in a way that in the early and mid-19th century, there was a natural amphitheater around the spring, and in fact, this was the site of frequent campground revivals starting in 1801 and continuing up to the middle of the century for the Cumberland Presbyterians. Many apparently felt the power of God here. A lot of Cumberland Presbyterian ministers had their conversion, their born again experience here, one of whom talked about, in the midst of the visions he was having, of seeing drops of blood falling from the trees as God's power was descending on him.
• [00:34:40.53] Jordan was proud of being the slave of such an important man at such an important place, and he talks about this in his letter to Patrick in 1865, the pride he had in being the slave of such an important man at such an important place. But in the same letter, he also indicated how he had been troubled by the harsh realities of slavery, the absence of personal choice, the absence of wages, the inability to educate his children. One of the family stories I got from descendants is they continue to pass down the story of how Patrick Henry Anderson caught one of his daughters trying to teach Jane, his second oldest daughter, the one that was born in 1851, how to read. Violation of the law, violation of what was considered good practice, and in fact, led to the whipping of the white girl for having the effrontery to try to teach a slave to read.
• [00:35:54.16] Most slave masters knew that was bad practice. There's a great scene in Frederick Douglass's narrative in which his slave master's wife attempts to teach Frederick to read. The master finds out, and it leads to this tense emotional scene. And at one point, the master says to his wife, don't you know that learning to read-- and pardon the expletive-- learning to read will spoil the best nigger in the world? Once you have that consciousness raising, once you have that skill, and as Frederick admits, because he did learn to read.
• [00:36:41.23] Once he was taken to Baltimore, he bribed white young boys his age to share their lessons with him on a daily basis for a crumb of bread or a favor, whatever. And in fact, he immediately says, I started to dream bigger dreams. I started to think that I could be something other than a slave. Well, that's what Patrick Henry Anderson is worried about Jane. If she learns how to read, she'll think more of herself and she'll want to be more than a slave.
• [00:37:16.06] Certainly, Jordan was also concerned about what he-- and he talks about this in the letter, reflecting back-- about the sexual abuse of two slave girls, Catherine and Matilda, at Big Spring by male members of Patrick Henry Anderson's household, probably his older sons. Jordan knew that Millie and Jane were reaching the age of puberty and would be targets themselves, and he feared that greatly.
• [00:37:53.41] Well, the coming of the Civil War and emancipation certainly changed things. It changed things for four million slaves in the South, and Jordan and Mandy and their children were among them. Things changed early in middle Tennessee because that part of the Confederacy fell to Union occupation early. Ulysses S. Grant and federal forces went up the Tennessee and Cumberland, and in February 1852, very, very quickly, Fort Donaldson and Henry along those two rivers which were supposed to be the keys to protecting the interior of the Confederacy fell. And then Nashville fell, the first Confederate state capital to fall, and then Wilson County became occupied territory as well.
• [00:38:56.78] As occupied territory, it was outside the scope of the Emancipation Proclamation once Lincoln proclaimed that. Lincoln was using the Emancipation Proclamation as a device to try to prompt Confederate states to come back in. He didn't want to alienate border states. He didn't want to alienate unionists in occupied territory, and so he took emancipation off the table in those areas. That meant Jordan and Mandy, even though it was union occupied territory, were still legally slaves, and so they remained at Big Spring.
• [00:39:36.95] To complicate matters, Patrick Henry Anderson, the Anderson family, his McGregor in-laws, were all rebel sympathizers to the hilt. His father, Paulding, his five brothers, many of his other relatives enlisted in Confederate units as officers. Patrick himself helped organize a Confederate Union in Wilson County. We know that he harbored Confederate soldiers in his home. Jordan refers, in the letter back, to the fact that he was surprised he wasn't killed by Union troops because word had reached him after he'd left the plantation that Patrick had killed a wounded Union soldier on a neighboring plantation.
• [00:40:25.15] Patrick Henry Anderson was such a reb that in the midst of the war, 1862, when his youngest son was born, he named him States Rights. Hard Times, States Rights. His sister, Eudora, who lived with Patrick Henry Anderson, we know regularly harassed the occupying Union troops. She was always showing up at headquarters in Nashville filing a complaint. She would write letters to the Union headquarters complaining about the treatment, particularly of women, pro-Confederate women, by the troops. And she printed editorials in local newspapers complaining about the occupation.
• [00:41:15.71] So this probably was not a family was very well-liked or respected by the Union troops occupying Wilson County. Now the slaves, including Jordan, knew of and secretly celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation, and they quietly applauded the occupying Union forces. We know of cases where they passed secrets about the Confederate troops on to occupying Union forces, and we know from comments by soldiers in their letters that as troops would come up and down the Old Rome Pike past Big Spring, that in fact, slaves, if they could, would crowd up to the edge of the road to see, and probably to dream of what could happen.
• [00:42:01.05] One of the complicating factors in occupied Wilson County was the Union forces were far away from their supply depots across the Ohio River. So very quickly, as they occupied middle Tennessee, they understood that they had to get by by foraging for food and supplies and extra horses, et cetera, from the residents of occupied middle Tennessee. And we know that the first time that the troops came to Big Spring, actually onto Big Spring, occurred in April.
• [00:42:34.81] April 3, 1863, during a major foraging raid, they encamped overnight at Big Spring. And I'm guessing they may have done that simply because they knew that Patrick Henry Anderson was a rebel sympathizer, and this was a way of targeting him and looking at him a little closer. Well, they found and ate cured hams, feasted on cured hams that they found that Patrick had ordered his slaves to hide in the straw stacks on the plantation in the barn. They ate well, and they left the next morning with full bellies, many horses, and seven liberated slaves.
• [00:43:14.46] Jordan was not among them, but in the next few weeks, he would make the decision to leave, heading to the big city of Nashville, 30 miles or so to the southeast. Feeling that there was some protection because of the general presence of occupying Union troops, Jordan and his family literally walked off the plantation in broad daylight, having made their decision to go to Nashville. We know from Jordan's letter back to Patrick Henry Anderson that Patrick, feeling betrayed, tried to shoot at Jordan as he left, and probably what saved Jordan was the fact that there was a white carpenter doing work on the plantation that literally took the gun away from Patrick.
• [00:44:09.55] They went into Nashville, and slaves that flooded into Nashville-- and they flooded in in large number in 1862, 1863-- ended up typically in the many contraband camps that were created in and around the city, literally in the spur of the moment, to house. This was a refugee crisis of the first order. And certainly, sanitation, and food, and health care, housing, and so forth were wanting. Most that flooded in, at least the male slaves, ended up working as laborers on road and defense projects, teamsters moving goods and supplies around. Starting with 1863 when blacks could enlist in the Union Army, they either enlisted or were rounded up and drummed into service, in other words, into black Union units.
• [00:45:15.59] And some, like Jordan and Mandy, ended up working in the hospital corps because Nashville, obviously, was not just a supply depot now for Union troops in middle Tennessee. It was where the wounded were taken from the battlefield to try to nurse them back to health or to give them comfort. They worked north of the city in the Cumberland Field Hospital, a main military hospital for ordinary soldiers. There was a vast sea of tents, and Mandy worked as a laundress and nurse. Jordan patrolled the grounds and helped with orderly duties.
• [00:46:00.93] And most importantly, they-- and this is not a good picture, but there isn't one-- they made the point of Dr. Clark McDermont of Dayton, Ohio. McDermont was the chief surgeon at the Cumberland Field Hospital. He was an Irish immigrant. He had come over from Ireland, had apparently a sketchy history once off the boat for short time in New York City, did what one could do in the 19th century, and that is move to another state and develop a whole new, positive identity. And he got medical training in Kentucky, settled in Dayton, established himself as a skilled physician and surgeon, and before you know it was married to one of the daughters of Valentine Winters, this prominent banker.
• [00:46:55.33] Well, now he is in the Civil War. He's enlisted in the military corps of an Ohio unit, and he's chief surgeon. He takes an interest in the contraband working as nurses and laundresses and orderlies and so forth at his hospital. Among other things, he provides actually short term for literacy training, and there's some indication Mandy may have benefited from that. Jordan didn't, but Mandy may have gotten some basic literacy there.
• [00:47:26.76] He also writes his church in Dayton and other figures he knows in Dayton, because he's very concerned about the needs of these people. When they walk off the plantation, it's not like they have a lot, including changes of clothes and these kinds of things, particularly with colder weather coming on. And so he writes his Presbyterian church in Dayton, and they start a drive to raise clothes to send to the contraband, and Jordan and Mandy benefit from that. But they also benefit from getting to know this guy.
• [00:48:02.43] Sometime in early 1864, Jordan and the rest of his family get their freedom papers from the Provost Marshall in Nashville and head to Dayton, Ohio. Think of here's people for whom Nashville is really on the edge of what has been their lifetime experience. That was a huge leap of faith on their part. And now they're heading to somewhere they can't even imagine, Dayton, Ohio.
• [00:48:37.65] Their exodus to Dayton takes place in the spring of 1864. It's part of what scholars have called the Emancipation's Diaspora. We're all familiar with the Great Migration of the 20th century to places like Detroit, and Harlem, and other places, Chicago, south side of Chicago. Well, Emancipation's Diaspora is the movement in the midst of the Civil War of some 80,000 former slaves to the Midwest, especially to Ohio, where a high percentage of them go. And it's the largest voluntary interstate migration of African Americans during the first century of the nation's history, and it dramatically increases the black population, the small black population, in the North, and particularly in the Midwest.
• [00:49:31.53] Jordan and Mandy, like most ex-slaves moving northward, took little with them but the clothes on their back, perhaps a bundle or to personal belongings, their freedom papers, and I know from family stories, Jordan's prized Cherokee peace pipe, his single claim, other than the genetics in his own body, to the Cherokee part of his heritage. The family members that, and particularly a man, Jewell Wilson, I'm going to talk to you about later-- Jewell, who's now in his late 80s, said, I grew up. I've seen that peace pipe dozens of times. He says, my brother, once he became an adult, always kept it in his house. He says, the problem is my brother now has Alzheimer's. He doesn't know where it is and we can't find it. I said, boy, that would be nice to have your hands on that peace pipe.
• [00:50:36.37] One other thing they carried northward, Mandy was in the advanced stages of pregnancy for a baby that she would deliver in Dayton called William, the family's first child that would be born in freedom, a major accomplishment.
• [00:50:52.93] They followed, interestingly enough, the route that hundreds of slaves had taken north from Kentucky and Tennessee during the era of slavery. They headed out for Ripley, Ohio, which had been a major crossing point for runaway slaves, a major Underground Railroad center. And they probably got word about that route simply from the slave grapevine that had existed before emancipation.
• [00:51:20.57] They headed to Ripley. Family stories say that Jane, then a 12-year-old girl, was so excited and even though it was spring and the water was still chilly, she threw off her shoes and she danced and frolicked in the edge of the river. And then they got someone to take them across, where someone informed them that their better bet to get to Dayton was to go westward to Cincinnati and take either the river or the north-south railroad from Cincinnati to Dayton.
• [00:51:57.79] They had a few tense moments in Cincinnati. 12-year-old Jane disappeared for hours. And so here's this family, overjoyed from having reached the free North, overjoyed to begin their life over away from the land of slavery, and their daughter is gone, and they spent several hours tracking her down, and fortunately, find her. But they make it to Dayton, which may seem a curious choice at first, but Dayton was thriving industrially because of the war. There were literally hundreds of small machine shops and small factories making wagon wheels, and a whole range of other goods.
• [00:52:45.88] And because of the war and because of this Industrial Revolution occurring in Dayton, pay, even for relatively unskilled workers, was relatively high. Those were all positives. The downside is Dayton, like Cincinnati further south, had really, really close ties to the slave economy of the South before the war. A high percentage of their population was Southerners.
• [00:53:21.86] There was a sizable Copperhead presence. The Copperhead, that was the name given to the opponents of Lincoln and the war effort, the folks that wanted the Civil War to end, that didn't want to defeat slavery, didn't want to defeat the Confederacy. In fact, Clement Vallandingham, a leading Copperhead politician in Dayton, was Lincoln's chief critic and managed to tick Lincoln off so much that in the midst of the war, Lincoln charged him with being an enemy of the Union and had him deported to Canada, banished to Canada. It's sad that Vallandingham is the person that Edward Everett Hale was thinking of when he crafted his story about a man without a country. That came from the period when Vallandingham was so anti-Union that he was sent to Canada.
• [00:54:20.10] But there were personal factors that drew Jordan and Mandy there, too, the Dr. McDermont connection, the fact that Dayton had an established African American community, including many former slaves from Tennessee, and some of these were former slaves from Tennessee bearing the name McGregor, and possibly relatives of Mandy. Jordan and his family initially thrived in Dayton.
• [00:54:50.58] A key part of the letter that he writes back, this personal declaration of independence thing I talked about, he tells Patrick Henry Anderson, "I'm doing tolerably well here. I get $25 a month with victuals and clothing. I have a comfortable home for Mandy." And then he adds, "The folks here call her Mrs. Anderson. And the children, Millie, 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." It's an absolute utopia.
• [00:55:28.14] Well, one of the things that happens when they get to Dayton is they're immediately befriended by this father-in-law of Clark McDermont, Valentine Winters, who is, quite frankly, one of the most important men in Dayton, if not in the Midwest. Winters is the leading banker. He's a prominent community figure. He was an abolitionist before the war. He is a leader in the local Republican Party. When Lincoln is campaigning for election to the presidency in 1860 before the war starts and he comes to Dayton, he is hosted by Valentine Winters and gives one of his two speeches in Dayton from the front porch of Valentine Winters's mansion.
• [00:56:15.50] As a sidelight, Valentine Winters is also the great grandfather of comedian Jonathan Winters. The apple sometimes does fall far from the tree. This dour Presbyterian somehow sired someone who would become Jonathan Winters.
• [00:56:38.74] This is his mansion in Dayton on Third Street. It later became the first YMCA in Dayton. You can see it's a place of substance. Winters becomes Jordan's employer, his landlord. He rents him a house a block away of more modest appearance, but a nice house nonetheless. And he's his patron, employer, landlord, and they, over the course of a quarter century plus, become friends, I'm convinced.
• [00:57:15.86] Jordan is initially his coachman and his hostler. In other words, he took care of the coach and the horses and getting this man of importance around and taking him to the bank, taking him to church, going and picking up other men of importance coming in at the Union terminal on the railroad, et cetera. Later, when Jordan was older, in the 1880s, he would serve in the house as a butler when simply working with the horses, working with coach, working outside all the time, was going to be more troublesome for an aging person.
• [00:57:58.43] Winters rented them one of his properties initially, and Jordan refers in a letter to having good interaction with the white neighbors, the Mrs. Anderson comment. The only downside they mention was the fact that the children are embarrassed because the neighbors sometimes would remark in private that they had been slaves, and that was a source of embarrassment for the children.
• [00:58:26.75] Jordan got to do what many slaves dreamed of doing, that is, setting up something approximating a 19th century middle class existence. First of all, the $25 a month he drew, along with the other assistance he received from Winters, gave him a reasonable working class income. It allowed Mandy to stay at home and to be a traditional 19th century wife. It allowed the children to attend the Colored 10th District School, a school in which they had black teachers.
• [00:59:08.69] And these were folks who had, based on what I've looked at, had the significant consciousness raising that had taken place on their own. They were freed blacks that had been activists before the war. They had some education, and they named their own children-- these teachers, several of them, named their own children after people like Frederick Douglass and Toussaint Louverture and people of importance in black history. They joined the first Wesleyan Methodist Church, which had been an abolitionist church before the war and it sheltered runaway slaves. And both of those institutions were an easy walk from their comfortable home.
• [01:00:03.70] So his growing relationship with Winters led to the letter and to its circulation. I'll just comment quickly on a couple things. One is the letter seems to be an outgrowth both of Winters's abolitionist ideas. Certainly, there were abolitionists that were talking about the need to compensate former slaves, who talked about it particularly during the war and before the war.
• [01:00:32.34] In the movement away from the war and the effort to reunite the nation and harmonize the sections, they started backing away from that. And one of the few white abolitionists that actually held onto that idea was Thaddeus Stevens. If you've seen the Lincoln movie, you know the Tommy Lee Jones character. He's one of the few whites after the war, along with Winters, that's continuing to hold onto that idea of the need to compensate the ex-slaves.
• [01:01:01.53] The slaves themselves really were expressive of the idea. I've come across lots of documentation, certainly there's lots of examples of slaves leaving the plantation when they could and attempting to take goods with them, feeling they were owed. And everything from, well, in Nashville, white missionaries in the contraband camps were surprised to come across slaves in their refugee housing where they had bedding they had taken from the plantation, and clothing from their masters and mistresses, and work animals, and furniture and jewelry. And when confronted, they said that they were owed Egypt's spoil, a reference to the children of Israel in the book of Exodus when Moses was leading them out of Egypt. And in Exodus, it talks about the notion that God said they were to take the spoils of Egypt with them, the gold, the jewelry, the fine things.
• [01:02:13.70] Certainly, we know about 40 acres, a mule, and the demand for land that emerges in the freedman's community. There's even some black leaders in the South that are calling for all black state or states, and there's petitions that go from people like Frederick Douglass and others to Congress calling for making Florida an all black state that will literally be given as compensation to the descendants of slaves. And then there's people like Jordan, who ask for cash compensation and later on in the 1890s and early 20th century, there'll actually be a slave pension movement that wants the whole thing institutionalized for all of the descendants of African Americans who had come out of slavery.
• [01:03:01.68] Certainly, Jordan would have encountered these ideas in Nashville, and he would have had some of these ideas even earlier. One of the most popular spirituals, "Go Down Moses," has a line we typically don't hear sung but is one of the usual lines in there where it talks about coming out with Egypt's spoil. "No more let them in bondage toil. Let my people go. Let them come out with Egypt's spoil. Let my people go." So Jordan would have drawn on not only things he heard from Winters, but from a lifetime, both in Nashville and on the plantation, of slaves and ex-slaves considering these ideas.
• [01:03:46.94] Well, the letter becomes kind of a dividing line in Jordan's life. He's not quite 40 when he writes it. He's not quite 80 when he dies. What does he do for the rest of his life? Well, it's really a search on his part for citizenship and respectability and family. In the quarter century between 1865 and 1890, his nuclear family grows. He has four more children, one of them Valentine Winters in 1870, he names after his friend and patron and employer. One born in 1876, Eva Ophelia, Mandy and Jordan name after two prominent characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
• [01:04:32.66] They work to reconstitute their extended family. I've been able to locate information that Priscilla McGregor, Mandy's mother-- apparently her father is now dead. Mandy's mother comes north and joins them in Dayton by 1868. Green Anderson, who's either a cousin of Jordan or what anthropologists call fictive kin from the slave community at Big Spring-- in other words, somebody who he considered a cousin even though they weren't biologically cousins-- joined them in Dayton by the early 1870s.
• [01:05:06.00] Family stories talk about joyous times during that period. Their home was full of singing. They were a very musical family. Jane had a prized harpsichord. And lots of stories of cooking treats on their wood stove, Jane's famous peanut butter patties, as well as communion bread for First Wesleyan Methodist communion services.
• [01:05:33.96] In the 1800s, probably about 1880, Jordan and Mandy went to get those pendant photos that you saw, a sign of their growing respectability. Jordan prized his work for Valentine Winters. Here, just as in Tennessee, he was a servant for one of the most important men in the area, a man of state, regional, and national importance. And he met many other important figures.
• [01:06:02.06] He was so cherished and served so long with the Winters family that in the mid-1950s when one of them, Jonathan Harshman Winters, wrote a family memoir, he misremembered that Jordan had been the old servant that had picked Lincoln up in 1860 at the railroad station when Lincoln came to Dayton. That tells us more about the family relationship, but certainly not accurate because Jordan was still in Tennessee at that point in slavery. But the fact that they remembered him that way, that they would have given him that task.
• [01:06:44.33] He certainly was proud of his citizenship. We have documentary evidence of Jordan referring to himself as a citizen on multiple occasions. In 1867, with the help of Winters and his son-in-law, Lewis Gunckel, another prominent Republican politician in Ohio, one of three National Soldiers' Homes, which were veterans' homes for aged soldiers from the Civil War, were placed in Dayton. And through the Winters' connections, they hired Jordan to essentially survey off the several hundred acres of land.
• [01:07:32.79] In 1870, when African Americans in the city celebrated April 1870 with a parade and a celebration noting the nation's ratification of the 15th Amendment that gave black men the vote, Jordan was made the Grand Marshall, a sign of his importance in the African American community. They also got their share of the American dream in 1885. Because of their savings that they had accumulated over a couple decades, along with the assistance of Winters, they were able to buy a home of their own, 60 Burns, in a quaint mixed race residential neighborhood with lots of German immigrants, an area that interestingly enough today is the site of an inner city Christian mission, but one that was a source of tremendous pride for them.
• [01:08:42.26] Well Winters dies in 1890, leaving Jordan a personal pension in his will that allows Jordan, now 65 or so, to retire and to live out the remaining 15 years of his life in comfort and peace. Of course, he never received any recompense from Patrick Henry Anderson, even though this was the period of the slave pension movement in American history. But he had source of pride to look back on in this stage of his life. His sons became men of some significance, and they were sources of pride.
• [01:09:24.05] Valentine Winters Anderson, who was a close friend of African American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar in Dayton, together in the early '90s, they published the Dayton Tattler, the first black newspaper in Dayton. Their printers were the young Wright brothers. Later, Valentine Winters Anderson studied to become a physician, first in Louisville, and then at the Michigan College of Medicine and Surgery in Detroit, graduating in 1904, a year before Jordan's death. And I was interested to find that in fact, the Reuther Archives houses the records of that now defunct institution, and they were are quite useful. Valentine would practice medicine then in Dayton.
• [01:10:17.27] Captain Felix Grundy Anderson, his oldest son, served with the 25th US Infantry Regiment, the Buffalo Soldiers. It's called Buffalo Soldiers in the West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Andrew Anderson, one of his younger sons, became a restaurateur of some note in New York City. Jordan also took pride in the successful marriages of his daughters, Jane, Charlotte, and Eva Ophelia.
• [01:10:48.53] Well, Jordan died in 1905. He's buried in Woodland Cemetery, a major cemetery in Dayton where his life is marked by a modest stone that indicates he's the father of the family, his name, Jordan Anderson, and the year of his birth and death, 1825, 1905. It's just a few feet away from a much more ostentatious stone noting the life and death of Valentine Winters. And in fact, all around the Valentine Winters gravestone area, there are these small headstones noting various members of the Jordan Anderson immediate family.
• [01:11:43.24] The letter and Jordan's emancipation migration to Dayton, as I said, divided his life into two neat halves, but it also continues to be widely referenced by scholars and used by advocates of the contemporary reparations movement. I'll just say a couple things real quick, and then we can go to questions.
• [01:12:04.23] One is I want to talk a little bit about my personal journey, and I'll talk two things there. I started, as I said, in 2005 actively researching this, and it took me to Tennessee, Dayton, DC, Howard Historical Society, a whole lot of other places that I met a lot of interesting people connected to the story. A couple of interesting examples of what I came across.
• [01:12:29.68] One is this is downtown Lebanon, Tennessee, once an important city, now kind of a sleepy village if you don't count the separated part of it that's close to the interstate and miles removed from the traditional downtown. Like many Southern cities, it still points to its Confederate heritage. This is the Confederate memorial General Robert Hatton, who was a Confederate general from the town who was killed early in the war.
• [01:13:10.32] I had an opportunity. One of my trips to Lebanon and Nashville was in August, 2008 in the midst of the election of Barack Obama as our first African American president. And on this trip, I was introduced to a guy named Jack Cato. Jack Cato is one of the real icons of Lebanon. He was 78 when I met him. Jack was what he called himself, a business developer, still active, and someone in the local archive says, you've got to meet this guy. He has a huge personal Civil War collection that he's accumulated at document auctions and all sorts of places.
• [01:13:55.91] So I went and I ended up spending a day with this guy. In addition to using many of his voluminous documents in his personal archives, my day included-- no surprise-- lunch at Cracker Barrel because he was one of the founding investors in Cracker Barrel, followed by a tour of Cedar View Cemetery, which he took me on the tour because that's where many of the Confederate veterans are buried, including people connected to Confederate veterans like Patrick Henry Anderson. There's no evidence that Patrick himself ever served. There was something called the 20 Negro Law in the South, which exempted planters from service if they had 20 or more slaves. It was a way of making sure there was a sufficient number of white men present to control the slaves.
• [01:14:49.31] It meant stopping and having a moment of reverence at the Hatton statute, which I'm told Jack Cato does every day, rain or shine, spends about five minutes thoughtfully viewing the statute. At the end of my day with Jack, he said, you know, Thursday night is our regular Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter meeting. Would you like to come? And I thought to myself, this is one of these things you've got to do if you're invited. You've got to do it. You've got to find out what this is all about.
• [01:15:31.35] So on August 28, 2008, the night that Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in Denver, I spent the first part of my evening at the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It was a group of about 40 men primarily, middle aged, a few young ones, in a mix of suits, three piece suits all the way to cat hats and overalls.
• [01:16:03.71] We started with the pledge of allegiance to the American flag and then the Confederate flag, and then a prayer by the chaplain of the organization thanking God for the blessings of the Confederate heritage, followed by an interesting speaker, followed by a discussion of Obama in which one rather rotund gentleman under his breath, but I heard him because he was near enough to me that I could said, "We ought to just kill him now."
• [01:16:38.13] Like many men's organizations, they took a smoke break about halfway through the evening, and I thought it was a good time to exit. There were a couple of, as I said, guys in overalls and cat hats outside the door that wanted to talk Civil War with me. And one of them, having understood from my few comments there that I taught college history, says, do you teach the Civil War? I said, yes I do. I teach a Civil War class regularly. Do you tell the truth? And I said, well, I'd like to think that I do.
• [01:17:11.37] And he said, well, you know, the Civil War didn't have a single thing to do with slavery. It was all about economics. Seeing myself being served better by probably exiting, I said, well, I think it had to do many things, and I excused myself and headed to the car and came back to my hotel, and then the speech was just starting and I had the opportunity to watch Barack Obama give his acceptance address. It was one of the more surreal experiences of my life.
• [01:17:48.54] While I was there in Lebanon during those days, I had the opportunity to speak to a former owner of Big Spring Farm, a 20th century owner. And when he found out about Jordan's letter and the connection my research had to the reparations issue, he launched into an angry and lengthy soliloquy about four generations of blacks on welfare. When I later visited the Roy Bailey African American History Center, a not entirely professional, somewhat amateurish attempt by local non-historians to remember their history, Mary Harrison, an elderly black woman, told me, when she found what I was working on, said, "The election of Barack Obama is as much reparations as I expect to get."
• [01:18:47.77] On my way back, in the September of 2008, I finally made a breakthrough on something else I'd been trying to work on, and that is to trace descendants of Jordan Anderson, and that's the last thing I'll mention here. This is Jewell Wilson, late '80s. He and his wife, they live in Northwest Dayton. He is the great grandchild of Jordan Anderson.
• [01:19:22.78] Jane, Jordan's second oldest daughter, was his grandmother. He was 14 when she died. He spent a lot of time in his first 14 years with Jane since they both lived in Dayton. And you can imagine he heard a lot of family stories from her, and he was very willing to share them, as well as he had photocopies of the inserts in the family Bible that had all the family genealogical information.
• [01:20:05.56] It turned out to be a tough task to find him. There was some persistence needed. The family had stopped attending, as I found out, the First Wesleyan Methodist Church in the latter half of the 20th century. This is a small institution with a part time pastor today, and virtually no staff beyond that, and my attempts to make contact were just rebuffed, rebuffed, rebuffed. Since there was virtually nobody to make contact with, I even got to the point at one point of just tacking notes outside the church, hoping someone would find them on the way in.
• [01:20:46.38] On the way back from Lebanon in 2008, I stopped for a Sunday morning service at First Wesleyan Methodist Church-- now an all black congregation in Dayton, and a small one at that-- and to my surprise, was asked to get up in the middle of the service and give about a 15 minute explanation of what I was working on. But there was an elderly woman in the choir, Lucille Clifton, herself in her late 80s, who still remembered the family.
• [01:21:31.93] The Anderson name has largely disappeared. They're Mumfords, and they're Wilsons, and others. But she helped me get in contact with living descendants, which led to interviews with Jewell and others and the excerpts from the family Bible. And it's been a wealth of information, the kinds of things that you don't get. The personal things, like I said, what Jane did when they reached the Ohio River, about the whipping of Patrick's daughter for trying to teach Jane to read, et cetera, and other things passed down.
• [01:22:08.25] Raymond Winbush, a Black Studies scholar at Johns Hopkins University, has traced a few white Anderson descendants and he claims, having talked to them, that some of them expressed that the family still harbors a grudge for Jordan not returning to the plantation because it meant that the family lost that plantation. Well, the different responses I found in my research and to Jordan's letter, I think, demonstrates the still opposing viewpoints in America on matters of race of the heritage of slavery, as Barack Obama reminded us today on MLK Day in his inaugural address, that we still need to work to become one country. Thank you, and I'd love to answer any questions I could.
• [01:22:53.73] [APPLAUSE]
• [01:22:58.78] ROY E. FINKENBINE: I'll put Jordan back up there so we can think about him.
• [01:23:05.08] AUDIENCE: My question just is, are you going to do a presentation of this somewhere else again for--
• [01:23:13.40] ROY E. FINKENBINE: I'd be glad to and I plan to. I'm currently working on a book on the Jordan Anderson story. Last July, the Associated Press did a wire service story that was widely picked up on the Jordan Andersen story and the book project, and if you Google my name, Finkenbine, Jordan Anderson, you'll get various reprintings of that story. Since I have an unusual last name, it helps bring that up, but that's probably the easiest way to do it.
• [01:23:46.40] AUDIENCE: OK, so--
• [01:23:47.69] ROY E. FINKENBINE: But I'm glad to give further talks on this, and I am working actively on a book project.
• [01:23:53.92] AUDIENCE: Great, because there were so many overlapping different things going on, and [INAUDIBLE].
• [01:23:59.37] ROY E. FINKENBINE: OK.
• [01:24:05.26] AUDIENCE: So you said that the name Anderson disappeared. Does that mean that none of his sons had descendants, or you couldn't find them?
• [01:24:13.75] ROY E. FINKENBINE: Well, the evidence had led me to believe that only Jane had children. Charlotte had stepchildren. She married a man with children, but only Jane had living children. And in fact, I found confirmation of that once I went to the probate records. So Mandy had 11 pregnancies, eight born as live children that made it to adulthood, and I think it's a great oddity. Only one of those eight actually produced a line.
• [01:24:57.30] And so the Mumfords and then the Wilsons, which married into the Mumfords, the only family. They're a large group at this point, which is quite good, but it is unusual. I don't have a lot of the opportunities that you might have with a family that large where you can pick up people all over the United States and talk to them to see if their family stories match with the Mumford Wilson family stories. But fortunately, there is that one line. It's large. They're very proud of their history. Jewell, while he had nothing to offer in terms of the background of the letter, said it doesn't surprise me because Jane always told me-- his grandmother-- that daddy was really smart.
• [01:25:51.65] AUDIENCE: I'm wondering about, he, I'm sure, knew that his former owner killed himself. I wonder if he was ever known to have said anything more about him anecdotally, or any evidence of anything that he said about him.
• [01:26:08.46] ROY E. FINKENBINE: I don't know that he knew that because you remember, he was writing back in 1865 and the owner died in 1867. I don't know that word filtered to Dayton. It very might well have since there were some Tennessee slaves from that area up in Dayton, but if he did, he didn't leave us a record, and that's unfortunate.
• [01:26:32.04] Because one of the things that you can sense as you read this letter-- and you can find the letter online, too, in various versions-- here's a guy who, because he spent 32 years from childhood on every day with Patrick Henry Anderson, he was of two minds. He loved this guy and respected this guy was proud that he had been the slave of such an important man. At the same time, he was extremely troubled by all the things that he and his family, and people he knew like these two girls who were sexually abused, Catherine and Matilda, had experienced under slavery.
• [01:27:11.73] So it's kind of the ultimate love hate relationship, and I think that a lot of that went into the reason why he wouldn't go back to Tennessee because as much as he felt a kinship with Patrick, he ultimately didn't feel he could trust him. And he anted up a pretty substantial marker to say, you've got to prove I can trust you. Send me the $11,600 to a guy who is ultimately going bankrupt.
• [01:27:45.39] AUDIENCE: Does Jewell have children?
• [01:27:47.69] ROY E. FINKENBINE: Jewell has several children, yes.
• [01:27:49.47] AUDIENCE: What are their ages approximately?
• [01:27:53.09] ROY E. FINKENBINE: Not quite my age. I think Judith, who's the one I'm most familiar with, is in her 50s. She's actually a minister. The family, the broader Mumford Wilson family, has an annual family reunion. One of my goals is to try to catch up with them at the next family reunion and talk to some folks I haven't been able to talk to yet. But it's a large family. It's a proud and successful family, and it's one I think Jordan would be very proud of today, the heritage that continues on. She's coming with the mic.
• [01:28:46.92] AUDIENCE: I have two questions. One is, how did you choose Jordan Anderson as the topic for study?
• [01:28:54.23] ROY E. FINKENBINE: Well, I was actually working on a different book, outlining a different book, and it was going to be much more of a dry, academic study and was looking at different people, including some 19th century scholars, politicians, and others, as well as activists, who had gotten at different parts of this question of what are the slaves owed?
• [01:29:30.77] And as I was working on that, increasingly, that letter kept haunting me because here's one from an ordinary person, a slave, and it revolves around a very personal matter-- broad questions, and I think, at the end of his letter where he says, "There needs to be a reckoning for what you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers," I think he's certainly talking about what the Anderson's have done since this is multi-generational within the Anderson family. But I think he's also raising that broader question, the multi-generational question of, what are black people, descendants of slavery, owed?
• [01:30:15.61] And it was just too intriguing to let go of because of the personal connections. And so I'm thinking this is going to be a chapter. How are the ex-slaves responding? And I'm going to use him as well as some other folks to drive that answer home. And the more I looked at Jordan-- I originally went down there in 2005. The more I looked at Jordan, the more it seemed to provide a really good vehicle for not only addressing the ex-slave part of the thing, but the whole question of emancipation in microcosm.
• [01:30:49.34] How does a family of slaves, now freedmen, try to make a life, get respectability, get citizenship, get education for their children, all of these things that define the American dream for all of us? How did they go about doing that? So it became a question not just of reparations in microcosm, but the emancipation in microcosm, and I think it became a fuller, fleshier story for me to tell. And so I couldn't let go of it at that point, and it was big enough, I think, to become the book project. So a few years ago, I started redirecting that way.
• [01:31:32.92] AUDIENCE: It's an interesting story, and then I'm wondering, how did Jordan's descendants, when you reached them, were they surprised that you were doing this? What was their reaction to it?
• [01:31:44.49] ROY E. FINKENBINE: They had a fair bit of information. Now, they were surprised that I was doing it. They applauded that I was doing it, and they were very encouraging of the project. I think their only question, along with a fellow, Dave Roberts, who is Caucasian who has been very helpful who lives on Big Spring Farm in the house that you saw there in the photo, their only thing is not understanding an academic time frame. They want this out yesterday.
• [01:32:16.00] But no, everybody in the Anderson extended family, the Mumford Wilson family, has been very, very encouraging. As I said, that's not true of all the people I encountered in Lebanon who think this is frivolous, who make this far too easy connection saying basically, welfare has been all the reparations that African Americans deserve. Why are you raising these kind of questions? Why are you digging up old and painful history? And then you have the white Andersons who told Raymond Winbush, we blame Jordan.
• [01:33:01.79] AUDIENCE: What is the significance, do you think, about the Cherokee connection?
• [01:33:07.80] ROY E. FINKENBINE: Well, I think it speaks to two things. One is the personal pride the family, including Jordan, seem to take in it. But the broader thing it drives home is that much overlooked fact that a large portion of people who claim African American ancestry also have some Native American ancestry. That's something that sometimes people even in that community don't talk about a lot. Some do.
• [01:33:34.45] And so Jordan is being born on the frontier. Tennessee is the frontier at that point, at a point in which there is a lot of interaction between whites, black slaves, and Native Americans, and sometimes that's something that makes the personal histories a little messier, and we don't get into that. But the fact is, this is, in all probability, a tri-racial family, and that's not that unusual.
• [01:34:08.98] Even sometimes, as I found when I was teaching in the South for people who claim Caucasian ancestry. A friend of mine worked for few years at a local history library and archives in southwest Georgia, and there were a couple of what he referred to as blue haired ladies came in one day, and he knew enough of the local history that he knew that their ancestors had owned the local plantation, and they wanted to get into their family history.
• [01:34:42.10] And he started pulling out all sorts of antiquarian books, as well as archival records, and they spent the morning into the afternoon cheerily working through this stuff. And then at one point, they just closed everything up and left in a huff. And he says, isn't this curious? Well, what he finally found in going through this stuff himself and reconstructing it is they had found that they had some African American ancestry which they had never known about.
• [01:35:18.65] A sociologist that worked at Ohio State in the 1950s did a sampling of Caucasian families in the South who traced their ancestry to the period of slavery, and his estimate was, based on this sampling, that 55% of those older white families in the South have some African American ancestry. The same is probably true of Native American. But this tri-racial heritage in the South is something that, I think it's a smaller point, but it's one that I'm trying to bring out there.
• [01:35:56.70] AUDIENCE: What you're speaking on, a couple things, the reparation issue and the tri-racial issue, tonight, they had another symposium at North Campus with respect to Native Americans and African Americans. It's kind of understood, as I was growing up, that my great grandma, and of course, we don't know exactly which tribe or where was the connection of Native American blood. It was just this known thing that it's the case.
• [01:36:35.59] And there was a thing called the Bacon Rebellion at one time, that got the people that were considered poor whites and the Native Americans and the African Americans all together because the landowners were basically ripping them all off and working them all to death. And that's when they started a lot of the devices to keep people separate. But it's regional, too. There's different frontiers as things weren't states yet, but people banded together.
• [01:37:19.36] And it would be the case of sometimes it was Native Americans and African Americans, and that's the thing where you say some of the Caucasians get introduced in too, without it necessarily being from the plantation master fathering children. It's just this known thing in the black community where I come from, that somebody down the line, somewhere, there's the Native American blood is there.
• [01:37:50.13] ROY E. FINKENBINE: Sure. Yeah, and all the way back to colonial America. And one of the things that we don't talk about enough is in early colonial America, slaves and white indentured servants frequently saw each other as being a common status and would, in fact, couple and marry. Later, the law made that illegal. Anti-miscegenation laws essentially were created not just because there was this fear that somehow, interracial sex was a vile thing. It was a way of dividing and conquering people of a common working class background so that instead, the white indentured servants would see the white planters as their natural allies, rather than seeing the black slaves as their natural allies.
• [01:38:48.25] AUDIENCE: They gave them a little higher status [INAUDIBLE]. You're not just the lowest on the totem pole, quantified somehow.
• [01:38:57.05] ROY E. FINKENBINE: And people have suggested, for 150 years plus, suggested ways of calculating that. I think part of it is what you suggested. It just would be so immense compared to Japanese internment reparations and other things that have been done in smaller amounts. You're talking millions of people, four million just at the point of emancipation, and four million people with probably 30 million descendants.
• [01:39:33.61] But I think there's another thing going on, is our refusal to deal with the long term impact of race and slavery in America. We kind of have this myth that America is God's new Eden. Well, like Eden, there was this one original sin and it was called slavery, but we got rid of that. Oh, but then there was this kind of continuation, segregation, but then we got rid of that. That's part of what we're celebrating today, right? And now there is no continuing effect.
• [01:40:13.64] And to suggest there's a continuing effect is to suggest that America is not God's new Eden, that it's not exceptional, that it's not the best place. Things that make us uncomfortable as Americans frequently. We've got one patient gentleman in the back that gets the last question.
• [01:40:34.42] AUDIENCE: I wish I [INAUDIBLE]. So you don't know [INAUDIBLE]. But the book will be out in--
• [01:40:39.50] ROY E. FINKENBINE: My goal is to have this out by August 2015, which will be the sesquicentennial of Jordan's letter.