• Quote for the Day: After the end of the Civil War, many former slavers tried to contact the black men and women they had once enslaved — even those who had escaped during the war and headed north — to try to convince them to return to the plantation and work the land as hands or tenant farmers. One of those freedmen, Jourdon Anderson, wrote a letter back to his former captor, explaining the terms on which would return. This may be my favorite thing that I read all week. Emphasis is added.

  Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865

  To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson
  Big Spring, Tennessee

  Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

  I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and are learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, Them colored people were slaves down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

  As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost Marshal General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly–and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future.

  I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee there was never any pay day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

  In answering this letter please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve–and die if it comes to that–than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

  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

  The letter was reprinted by Lydia Maria Child in her anthology, The Freedmen’s Book. Jourdon Anderson’s body now rests in the Woodland Cemetary, in Dayton, Ohio, so it seems that his old captor never accepted his offer. For reference, the back wages he demanded — $11,680 in 1865, before adding interest — would be worth about $162,452 in 2008 dollars.

  Discovered thanks to stuff white people do (2009-04-28)

• The invasion begins tomorrow: SubRosa community space (2009-05-02): First Ever Santa Cruz Anarchist Convergence! May 7-11. The Santa Cruz Anarchist Convergence is coming to town! Yes, here, between the forest and the ocean, among the students and the yuppies, where Santa Cruz anarchists have fostered a close-knit community dedicated to destruction of this world and the creation of another. Santa Cruz is a hub of anarchist culture and resistance, with a long history of radical struggle and active anarchist projects spanning decades. Santa Cruz is proud to host the Santa Cruz Anarchist Convergence, a four-day anarchist event for building community and resistance and sharing radical ideas.

• More one-way mirror transparency (+): Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-04-23): In Bailouts End Responsibilities.

• On crony-statism, state capitalism, and living in a bubble: Sheldon Richman, The Goal Is Freedom (2009-05-01): Of, by, and for the elite

• Libertarianism or Barrbarism? Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2009-05-04): More Crap from the Libertarian Party (with a hat tip to Soviet Onion in the comments back here). In which the Libertarian Party sends out a press release urging the United States government to control the border, escalate the use of police-state checkpoints against immigrants, and consider all would-be immigrants diseased until proven healthy.

  I’d be pissed if I weren’t beyond caring about anything the LP says or does. Individual party members are often perfectly good people, and well worth talking to, and well worth inviting to something new and better; but the party, as an organization, is worth taking notice of only as an enemy, to be shoved out of the way along with the rest of the belligerent busybody Know-Nothing creeps.

• He’s wasn’t using it, anyway: Mike Gogulski (2009-05-03): Steal this number: 595-12-5274

• More on decentalism and localism: A couple of comments from Darian Worden following up on the recent monster thread here: DarianWorden.com (2009-04-27): Individualist International and DarianWorden.com (2009-04-30): Stick It To Your Kind. Whether or not I agree with Darian about multiculturalism depends on what the word’s being used to mean (there’s a lot of different things called multiculturalism, some of them descriptive theories about American history; some of them normative theories; some of them overtly relativistic; others universalistic; etc.). Otherwise, twinkles.

• On the production of knowledge in a peer-to-peer society: Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation (2009-04-27): Ryan Lanham: dissolving universities?. I think that the discussion underestimates the importance of architecture and physical space in creating scholarly community; I think it also underestimates what I think would be the most noticeable effect of less businesslike, more mutualistic universities, without the distorting effects of state funding and state-imposed accreditation systems — that they would be smaller, more numerous, and less oriented towards churning out professional degrees in subjects that would be better taught completely outside of the university setting, if not for the political-economic distortions that shove them into institutional structures where they don’t belong. I also protest the notion that there’s something wrong with esoteric subject-matters or that best-selling authors, just as such, somehow have a better grip on what’s relevant than scholars working intensely on a tightly-focused subject. (Surely they have a better grip on what’s relevant to people outside the University. But that’s not necessarily the kind of relevance that a University ought to be concerned with.) But I agree that Universities are set for a radical change, in an increasingly peer-to-peer world, and that the change will involve less institutional aping of business, a more mutualistic orientation, and hopefully less credentialism. It’s an important discussion and this is a good start.

• I’ll never finish the Internet: Dare Obasanjo, (2009-05-05): RSS readers modeled after email clients are fundamentally broken. Actually, I’m inclined to say that presently-existing e-mail clients are also fundamentally broken, although they call for a different sort of fix.

• Shameless Self-Promotion opportunities: Jeremy Trombley is now running a regular What Are You Up To? Wednesday feature.

Here is a piece of correspondence that I actually received quite a long time ago, but which I just noticed recently as I was cleaning old out e-mail. The letter is apparently in response to my remarks in GT 2005-01-03: Robert E. Lee owned slaves and defended slavery. I suppose that it’s better late than never, when it comes to reprinting such valiant efforts to clear the name of such a great man and great American.

From: Todd
Subject: Hero
Date: 11 May 2006

General Lee is and will ever be my hero. Despite Slavery. He was a Great American. One can look with hind sight and say things, but we are careful about this. Never damning such people as Washington, or Jefferson. My point is we make our history to meet the PC thought of the day.

Lee was a loyal patriot, that had history provided a different out come, would be the model of every young person of every race.

The one thing I don’t like about America is we dismiss the brave heroes of our past because they don’t fit the PC world of today. We have a rich history, of which we should be proud. Men like Lee should be praised along side others like Washington, Lincoln, F.D.R. and so on.. They are part of what made us American.

I have traveled to the former USSR many times, and the subject of Gen Lee came up with ex Soviet Army Vets. All knew him as a great General. They had studied his tactics. When I told them that Americans were ashamed and renamed schools which once bore his name, they always laughed, saying you Americans have become weak, and cant honor your own This was hurtful words, but true words.

Slavery was an evil, one we should always remember, but something more important we should know , it still exist. In the heart of Africa it is there, why don’t we do something ? The only answerer I can provide myself is that, it isn’t PC. If it were P.C. every Hollywood actor, and Liberal Political would be screaming from roof tops. Dear Lord, it would be the biggest political thing in 150 years.Because we don’t here about it leaves me to wonder about the legitimate cry over the history American Slavery. It is just an agenda of the left. Because if they really cared they would do something to help the people around the world still enslaved. I don’t think they really care, but blaming men like Robert E. Lee makes them feel better.

For the record, I would like to admit that I have been convinced, in spite of the seditious libel spread throughout the P.C. world of today, that Robert E. Lee should indeed be praised about as much as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and whichever of their own nationalist heroes as may be honored by the proud veterans of the Red Army.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-03-05: Fair’s fair (or: Refuge of Oppression #1)

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This one is unusual for my Over My Shoulder quotes, in that it comes from a novel, whereas all my previous quotations came from works of nonfiction. Specifically, this is from The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, by James Weldon Johnson. It seemed particularly appropriate in light of the recent battle over how best to write the introductory paragraph for WikiPedia: Robert E. Lee.

It was over before I realized that time had elapsed. Before I could make myself believe that what I saw was really happening, I was looking at a scorched post, a smoldering fire, blackened bones, charred fragments sifting down through coils of chain; and the smell of burnt flesh–human flesh–was in my nostrils.

I walked a short distance away and sat down in order to clear my dazed mind. A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive. My heart turned bitter within me. I could understand why Negroes are led to sympathize with even their worst criminals and to protect them when possible. By all the impulses of normal human nature they can and should do nothing less.

Whenever I hear protests from the South that it should be left alone to deal with the Negro question, my thoughts go back to that scene of brutality and savagery. I do not see how a people that can find in its conscience any excuse whatever for slowly burning to death a human being, or for tolerating such an act, can be entrusted with the salvation of a race. Of course, there are in the South men of liberal thought who do not approve lynching, but I wonder how long they will endure the limits which are placed upon free speech. They still cower and tremble before Southern opinion. Even so late as the recent Atlanta riot those men who were brave enough to speak a word in behalf of justice and humanity felt called upon, by way of apology, to preface what they said with a glowing rhetorical tribute to the Anglo-Saxon’s superiority and to refer to the great and impassable gulf between the races fixed by the Creator at the foundation of the world. The question of the relative qualities of the two races is still an open one. The reference to the great gulf loses force in the face of the fact that there are in this country perhaps three or four million people with the blood of both races in their veins; but I fail to see the pertinency of either statement subsequent to the beating and murdering of scores of innocent people in the streets of a civilized and Christian city.

The Southern whites are in many respects a great people. Looked at from a certain point of view, they are picturesque. If one will put oneself in a romantic frame of mind, one can admire their notions of chivalry and bravery and justice. In this same frame of mind an intelligent man can go to the theatre and applaud the impossible hero, who with his single sword slays everybody in the play except the equally impossible heroine. So can an ordinary peace-loving man sit by a comfortable fire and read with enjoyment of the bloody deeds of pirates and the fierce brutality of Vikings. This is the way in which we gratify the old, underlying animal instincts and passions; but we should shudder with horror at the mere idea of such practices being realities in this day of enlightened and humanitarianized thought. The Southern whites are not yet living quite in the present age; many of their general ideas hark back to a former century, some of them to the Dark Ages. In the light of other days they are sometimes magnificent. Today they are often cruel and ludicrous.

–James Weldon Johnson (1912), The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, ISBN 0-14-018402-3, pp. 136–138.

Up top of a good post from AllyWorks on some of the idiot arguments favored by slavery apologists, there’s an excellent quote from Eric Miller at blackprof.com (2006-03-04), on something that I’ve been concerned about for a while now:

Similarly, slavery- and segregation-denial seeks to create a counter-myth of America, one that reconstructs the South, the Klan, and the Confederate flags as the culture-blind symbols of a distinct region with its own traditions. Slavery- and segregation-denial is an attempt to rewrite history in a manner that minimizes whites' active or passive participation in the state-sponsored violence that lasted well into the 1960s (some would say much later).

Such a critique makes clear that in celebrating the heroes or symbols of the Confederacy or a variety of other institutions, without acknowledging their racism and the violence that they perpetrated, promoted, or permitted, Justice Parker and his ilk are intent on denying or minimizing acts of extreme violence or genocide.

— Eric Miller, blackprof.com (2006-03-04): Slavery Denial

One popular form of slavery denial is the to single out some historical slave-driver or another, whom we are supposed to like for some other reasons — such as George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson, or Robert E. Lee — and to praise them for their inerringly humane treatment of their slaves (or at least, their public advocacy of humane treatment for slaves). For example, here’s the National Park Service on what they teach the young students at the Arlington plantation site, in commemoration of the fiefdom of the Custises and the Lees:

The Custis and Lee families provided their slaves with a rudimentary education, spending money, and specialized medical care. Complex relations between owner and slave are also examined. For her slave Selina Gray, Mary Custis Lee arranged an elaborate wedding ceremony, which was conducted by an Episcopal priest in the same room where Mrs. Lee herself had been married. As students attempt to reconcile the inherently exploitive nature of slavery with examples of humane treatment that existed at Arlington, they begin to realize that some of the questions raised during the program have no answers.

— Karen Byrne, National Park Service: The Power of Place: Using Historic Structures to Teach Children About Slavery

Here’s how Lee himself indignantly replied to charges that he had Wesley Norris, Mary Norris, and their cousin George lashed, and their lacerated backs rubbed with brine, after they tried to leave and were recaptured in Maryland:

… this slander ... There is not a word of truth in it. ... No servant, soldier, or citizen that was ever employed by me can with truth charge me with bad treatment.

— Robert E. Lee to E. S. Quirk, Lexington, March 1, 1866, Virginia Historical Society (reprinted in Fellman 2000).

Master George, humanely farming

And here’s what WikiPedia made of George Washington’s views on slavery a few days ago. They’re referring to his public advocacy of violent punishments for slaves that were less harsh and unrestrained, less stingy provisions for slaves’ food and shelter, and work-loads for field slaves that were lighter, than what some of his fellow slave-driving whites advocated:

Historians’ perceptions of Washington’s stand on slavery tend to be mixed. Although he advocated humane treatment of his slaves, according to an eyewitness, his slaves lived in miserable huts, and were often poorly clothed, according to plantation records.

— Washington and slavery, at WikiPedia: George Washington (revision as of 20:23, 18 March 2006)

The problem with this kind of talk is, of course, that the only way to treat slaves humanely is to stop enslaving them. No matter how restrained or unrestrained the punishments used, no matter how aloof or how domineering the style of slave-driving that the slaver adopts, no matter how bountiful or how meagre the rations or the medical care or the opportunities for education, slavery requires physically confining people against their will, forcing them to work without their consent, taking for yourself the profits that they earned by their own sweat and blood, asserting authority over their lives and livelihoods, and using intimidation and physical violence to compel, restrain, or punish those who defy your dictates. That’s what the word slavery means; it means kidnapping, robbery, assault, and tyranny.

Lee, and Washington, and Jefferson, all had it within their power to stop enslaving their slaves. They could be manumitted; and even before they were formally manumitted there was nothing at all to stop slavers from treating them as free farmers, with a right to work on their own tasks according to their own schedule, and free to come and go as they please. It’s an option that they mostly didn’t avail themselves of: Lee avoided doing that for as long as he could legally get away with it. Washington avoided it for his whole life, only offering freedom to his slaves in his will after both his death and Martha’s. Jefferson couldn’t even bring himself to have his will provide for it after his death. Any claim that these men advocated humane treatment of slaves is nothing more and nothing less than a sentimental lie, based on some particularly noxious forms of Moonlight-and-Magnolias nostalgia.

Here’s George Orwell, in Politics and the English Language:

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable.

— George Orwell (1946): Politics and the English Language

I can think of a long list of phrases that merit a co-ordinated jeering campaign, and humane treatment of slaves is as good a candidate as any for the top of the list. It deserves public, explicit contempt; where we see it, we ought to ridicule it, or — depending on the format — excise it.

For example, consider my revision of the WikiPedia article on George Washington:

Revision as of 20:23, 18 March 2006

Historians’ perceptions of Washington’s stand on slavery tend to be mixed. Although he advocated humane treatment of his slaves, according to an eyewitness, his slaves lived in miserable huts, and were often poorly clothed, according to plantation records. …

Revision as of 21:32, 18 March 2006

Historians’ perceptions of Washington’s stand on slavery tend to be mixed. He publicly advocated milder punishments and lighter workloads for slaves than some of his slaveholding contemporaries, but according to an eyewitness, his slaves lived in “miserable” huts, and were often poorly clothed, according to plantation records.

— WikiPedia: George Washington, differences between revision 44400066 and revision 44408684

My revision excises the morally bankrupt, slavery-denying myth of humane treatment, and replaces it with a short, unvarnished description that simply spells out the specific practices Washington advocated. Now let’s watch as this change becomes a matter of controversy, and as a couple of other editors object to the use of neutral description over a sentimental, evaluative summary — on Neutral Point of View grounds, no less! Watch as these editors express alarm at how my edits make the sentence 9 words more verbose — and then propose an even longer compromise sentence to replace it, just so that they can make sure that the word humane is still used somewhere to describe Washington’s treatment of his slaves. What does the word humane contribute that’s so important to preserve? (I think I know the answer — but if I’m right about that, then it’s contributing something that’s not part of the purpose of WikiPedia.)

Pushing an agenda? You’re damn right I am. The agenda is giving an unvarnished, objective account of slavery, and the sort of treatment that Washington in particular advocated. That’s WikiPedia’s job; repeating sentimental lies is not.

Nor should it be.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-03-04: Republican virtue (or: the Man who would be King)
• GT 2006-02-24: Over My Shoulder #12: Michael Fellman (2002), The Making of Robert E. Lee
• GT 2005-06-26: Lost Causes
• GT 2005-01-03: Robert E. Lee owned slaves and defended slavery

I suppose that if I’m going to be issuing public calls for corrections on other people’s articles, I ought to hold my own articles up to the same scrutiny. So here’s some e-mail I received from Nate yesterday, writing from the heart of the Confederacy, apparently in reply to my article GT 2005-01-03: Robert E. Lee owned slaves and defended slavery (cf. also GT 2006-02-24: Over My Shoulder #12: Michael Fellman (2002), The Making of Robert E. Lee):

Fuck you you fucking yankee son of a bitch you can go strait to hell for all care you dirty lieing son of a bitch. You need to die before any one else is taunt by your motherfucking lies. How dare you call the confedrates as Neo-confderate if that is trying to call me a Nazi then fuck you my Grandfather was a proud southerner and went to france and D-Day and killed hateful Nazi sons of bitches like your Dumb ass. For your fucking info Robert E. Lee didn’t own slaves but Gen. Grant did so get your fucking facts strait before you post shit. I mean you aloud to freedom of spech which I don’t deny you that right but I have freedom of speech too and I’m going to fucking cuss you the fuck out you fucking hateful son of a bitch go to hell. You need a lesson in History before you start critsing my hertage you son of a bitch I hope you get messages like this daily because you need it maybe it will crame some truth into your Dumb ass head.

signed go to hell,
Citizen of the C.S.A.

Well, then. I stand corrected.

In unrelated personal news, my parents are coming up from Yankee Alabama to visit toward the end of this month. Also, there’s been a lot of new additions to the Fair Use Repository since last I mentioned it; for example, check out William Lloyd Garrison’s American Colorphobia, from The Liberator of 11 June 1847.