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. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years.

This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. 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. 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.Īs 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. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. Anderson,-and the children-Milly, Jane, and Grundy-go to school and are learning well. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing have a comfortable home for Mandy,-the folks call her Mrs. I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. 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. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this.

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. 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. 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. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. 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. Together they had a total of 11 children. He passed away in 1907, aged 81, and is buried alongside his wife who died six years later. Jourdon Anderson never returned to Big Spring, Tennessee. Jourdon’s reply to the person who enslaved his family, dictated from his home on August 7th, is everything you could wish for, and quite rightly was subsequently reprinted in numerous newspapers. Then, a year later, shortly after the end of the Civil War, Jourdon received a desperate letter from Patrick Henry Anderson, the man who used to own him, in which he was asked to return to work on the plantation and rescue his ailing business. They grasped the opportunity with vigour, quickly moved to Ohio where Jourdon could find paid work with which to support his growing family, and didn’t look back. In 1864, after 32 long years in the service of his master, Jourdon Anderson and his wife, Amanda, escaped a life of slavery when Union Army soldiers freed them from the plantation on which they had been working so tirelessly.

Old manuscript letter