The way old slaves were treated helps explain the attitude toward older workers, social security...

[Octafish]

The way old slaves were treated by the ownership class helps explain the attitude toward older workers, social security, medicare and medicaid, and anything else that's tarred as "socialism" by the Grover Norquist and the rest of the 1-percent's paid monkey class.

Doubt it, Justice Scalia? Just remember the words of someone who knew, personally, there "was never pay-day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows."

[G_j]

1. yikes!

K&R

[Octafish]

3. Mr. Jourdon Anderson's excellent letter to his old master.

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 that 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 Colonel 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 gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that 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 twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks 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 Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, 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 of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were 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 twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. 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.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson.

[lumberjack_jeff]

7. +1 n/t

[drm604]

8. Wow. That is great.

That letter is dripping in sarcasm, mockery, and contempt. I'll bet that Mr. Anderson took a lot of pleasure in writing that.

Here's to Mr. Jourdon Anderson.

[loudsue]

9. WOW!! Just WOW!

Brilliant. Dead-on. I wish this could be posted in our local newspaper here in White-supremistville, NC.

[G_j]

12. remarkable

[cliffordu]

13. I do believe this letter is worthy of Mark Twain.

Yes, yes I do.

[goclark]

19. Kick and Recommend ~ thanks Octafish

you are the best.

Thank you for sharing this with us.
I am especially moved because I see the tone set by the Republican Party today --- they think that Democrats are their slaves and they can say and do anything to us. ..say the President is not born here but don't ask for the Birth Certificates for Mitt or his father.

They are the 1%

The irony is that "they" are also the TEA PARTY.
The Tea Party needs to wake up and realize that they too are Slaves.
SLAVES to that 1% that control America.

And, as an African American, I am so proud to read the letter.
It tells me that my ancestors were mighty brave and mighty strong to endure the hate and pain of Slavery. My ancestors made it possible for each generation in our family to step higher up the ladder of success.

I enjoy building my TREE on Ancestry.com because I believe that when you find out where you came from you know how much higher you want to climb in order to make their journey even more meaningful.

Thank you for making Jourdon Anderson my new Hero.

[grasswire]

2. and we all know how the ownership class felt about educating their workers, too

...which might explain the drive to ruin public education today.

[Octafish]

5. Isn't that the truth?

And that's why the Truth -- the profession of the Educator -- is so poorly compensated.

Now, in lying, some bastards become near-billionaires.

[SoCalDem]

4. Until fairly "recent" history, the older people were just a normal part

of families. Their younger family members often lived in the elders' homes, taking care of them until they died & the younger ones then took over what they left behind.

"Retirement" for the masses, was not always available.

The golden age of retirement seems to me to be the 1980's & 1990's. Millions of people who retired then had pensions, and had the benefit of rising SS payments (thanks to us Boomers who got our donations doubled by Reagan)...Lots of the men who retired in those decades also had military pensions.. Those were also the decades where the HMO's were falling all over themselves with really cheap (and bountiful) Medicare add-ons.

[Octafish]

6. Excellent points. Nowadays, Corporate America absconds with the Workers' Pensions.

Social Security today is the main "pension plan" for the large majority of Americans. From what I can see, that is the situation because there is little in the way of the law anymore to stop the owners of a corporation from taking whatever funds they have access to. And now the ownership class' loyal servants in the Federal Government are getting into the Act:

Republicans Stealing Postal Workers Pension *

* Sorry about the missing apostrophe -- something about special characters and the link code.

[enough]

10. My eyes are burning after reading that.

So much sadism, torture, monstrosity in one page, and all "legal."

[Octafish]

11. Truly heartbreaking. The thing is, this all isn't the ancient past:

We've got multi-generational slavemasters-cum-warmongers to think about:

The Bush Family's Slaveholding Past

Was their dynasty built on slavery?

By: Edward Ball|Posted: February 15, 2008 at 12:00 AM
TheRoot.com

The image most people have of slavery involves a cotton plantation with a big white house, a black village where 300 people live in cabins and a cruel overseer in the wings. This was not the model followed by the ancestors of President George W. Bush when, 175 years ago, they enslaved about 30 people on the shores of the upper Chesapeake.

SNIP...

A new book by Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, mentions in passing that at one time some of the president's family owned slaves. Weisberg doesn't dwell on the links between the White House and the antebellum past except to say the Bush clan's story is a long-held "family secret." The Bush Tragedy, a revealing book about family dynamics in the Bush political dynasty, treats the slavery matter only briefly, focusing instead on the "spectacular, avoidable flame-out" of the receding administration. But the story that joins the 43rd president to predecessors who held title to dozens of people bears retelling in detail.

The skeletal facts surfaced in April 2007, when an amateur historian named Robert Hughes published his research in the IllinoisTimes, a small paper out of Springfield. Hughes found census records showing that during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, in Cecil County, Maryland, five households of the Walker family, the president's ancestors via his father's mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, had been slaveholding farmers. The evidence is simple but persuasive: genealogies of the Bush family match up with census data that counted farmers who used enslaved workers. With this, the president joins perhaps fifteen million living white Americans who trace their roots to the long-gone master class.

SNIP...

The family, nevertheless, seems to have looked back with nostalgia on their old slave hold. There are two pieces of evidence for this. In The Bush Tragedy, Jacob Weisberg refers to one of the later patriarchs, David Walker, as "a believer in eugenics and the 'unwritten law' of lynching," and cites as proof a letter Walker published in the St. Louis Republic in 1914. Black people, he wrote at the time, were more insidious than prostitution and "all the other evils combined."

The second piece of evidence is within living memory. In 1930, when they could afford it, the family again embraced the antebellum lifestyle. That year President Bush's great-grandfather, George Herbert Walker, bought Duncannon plantation, an old cotton estate in South Carolina, to use as a hunting retreat and vacation home. His namesake, George Herbert Walker Bush, the current president's father, spent many youthful vacations on Duncannon, where teams of black cooks, valets, and drivers served him and opened doors when he approached. The Bush heirs no longer own Duncannon plantation; but for a time, the estate provided a version of the baronial life, to which the antebellum Walkers aspired, but never achieved.

CONTINUED...

http://www.theroot.com/views/bush-familys-slaveholding-past

In a very real sense, Prescott must've felt he owned Tricky Dick.

[ErikJ]

14. Southern slave culture

I wonder if there are any good books on old Southern slavery and culture? Describing life/slavery on the plantation and the rest of the southern culture pre-Civil War. I suppose 95% of the whites werent slave owners and owned worked farms etc. How did they interact. Did slavery cause unemployment etc?

[Octafish]

16. Thomas Johnson wrote an excellent accounting: 'Twenty-Eight Years a Slave'...

Courtesy of DUer John Simkin, proprietor of SpartacusSchoolnet:

Thomas Johnson, Twenty-Eight Years a Slave (1909)

I can well remember when others little children and I were very happy, not knowing that we were slaves. We played merrily together, knowing nothing of the world and of the long oppression of our people. But as time passed on, first one and then another of those who were as helpless as myself were missed from the company of little slaves.

One day we saw John, who was much older than the rest, with a small bundle in his hand, saying good-bye to his mother, while a white man stood waiting in the hall for him. His mother and mine, with others, were crying, and all seemed very sad. I did not know what to make of it. A vague fear came over me, but I did not know why. We heard that the man who took John away was a "Georgia Trader," or slave dealer.

Whenever we saw a white man looking over the fence as we were at play, we would run and hide, sometimes getting near our mothers, ignorantly thinking they could protect us. But another and again another of us would be taken away. All this showed to us the difference - the great difference - there was between the white and coloured children. White children were free but black children were slaves and could be sold for money. What seemed worse than all was the discovery that our mothers, whom we looked upon as our only protectors, could not help us. Often we were reminded that if we were not good the white people would sell us to Georgia, which place we dreaded above all others on earth.

SOURCE: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASjohnsonJ.htm

Documenting the American South has a copy online -- incredible.

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/johnson1/johnson.html

[ieoeja]

18. "95% of the whites weren't slave owners" ... at any given time.

My family rarely owned slaves, but owned them we did. The Norman/Celtic military culture of the South viewed workers as a subclass^^ only fit for inferior races like Africans and Anglo-Saxons**.

A group of Northern industrialists tried manufacturing in the South once. Every worker they hired ended up buing a slave as soon as they'd saved up enough money then tried to convince the owners to pay them to have their slaves do their job. The owners tried explaining that if they were going to use slave labor, they might as well fire the employee and buy their own slaves.

In the South one did not hire an employee even for temporary jobs. Need help building a barn? Buy a slave. When the barn is built, you sell the slave.

So while only a very small percentage of free males owned slaves at any given time, most of them owned slaves from time to time.



^^The South eventually stopped burning bridges in the North because the North was rebuilding them almost as fast as the South could burn them. Southern Generals who looked upon laborers with contempt were completely befuddled. Similiarly when Sherman began his march through South Carolina, Lee concured with South Carolina's decision not to call up their militia since they "knew" it was impossible to march through the swamps of South Carolina in the winter. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes," wrote a South Carolina General to Lee in what may have been the first time those words were ever written down. These Normans should have learned from their Danish cousins that Anglo-Saxons in a swamp during winter time is a dangerous thing.


**Yes, the South hated Anglo-Saxons. There were even two proposals made for enslaving Anglo-Saxons. One would have replaced Africans with Anglo-Saxons by raiding an independant North. The other involved conquering the North, tearing down their cities and industries***, and reimposing feudalsim; "our ancestors did it in England, and we can do it here."


***Capitalism may not be where we want to end, but it was a big step away from feudalism. The South had fewer railroads, canals, roads and manufacturers because they were opposed to all those things pre-War. Those things led to upward mobility for those who were not part of the landed gentry.

For the same reason they had poll taxes and literacy tests to keep poor Whites from voting. And no public schools. One state even criminalized public schools to prevent any county or city governments from setting up a school. Not sure which, but I'd put my money on it being Louisiana as New Orleans had a far different culture to the rest of the South.

Conversely, every Northern state had a public school system with a nearly universal reach. Contrary to common wisdow, the North actually had over 95% literacy rate compared to the South under 45%. A quick reading of diaries/letters by opposing soldiers certainly demonstrates this.

Southern defenders always like to say that the war was about more than slavery. They're right. What they don't tell you, and what most probably don't even know, is that the rest was almost as bad. The old South was brutal in more ways than just slavery, and to more people than just Africans.

[countryjake]

15. Reading those accounts at your first link...

made me almost physically ill, so I skipped on to the second link...thanks for sharing that amazing letter! I'm so glad that someone took the time to research the genealogy of that family to verify the truth behind it; what an incredibly kick-ass statement and wonderful record this man has put to paper, no matter who may have helped him do it! What a treasure!

Reading those words of Jourdan's has made my day and I also fully agree with the rest of your post. We are always expendable and once we can no longer produce for them, we are worthless in their eyes.

[Octafish]

17. It is sickening. I force myself to learn these things because the slaveowner class had children.

Rothschild and Freshfields founders had links to slavery, papers reveal



Baron de Rothschild and Prescott Bush,
sharing a moment and a bit o' information in this small world.