Jordan Anderson

Jourdon Anderson
Author of the 1865 Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master
Born	Jourdon Anderson December 1825 Tennessee, USA
Died	April 15, 1907(1907-04-15) (aged 81) Dayton, USA

Jordan Anderson or Jourdon Anderson (December 1825 – April 15, 1907) was a Black-American former slave noted for a letter he dictated, known as "Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master". It was addressed to his former master, Colonel P. H. Anderson, in response to the Colonel's request that Mr. Anderson return to the plantation to help restore the farm after the disarray of the war. It has been described as a rare example of documented "slave humor" of the period and its deadpan style has been compared to the satire of Mark Twain.

Anderson was born around 1825 somewhere in Tennessee. By age 7 or 8, he was sold as a slave to General Paulding Anderson of Big Spring in Wilson County, Tennessee, and subsequently passed to the general's son Patrick Henry Anderson, probably as a personal servant and playmate as the two were of similar age. In 1848, Jordan Anderson married Amanda (Mandy) McGregor. The two eventually would have eleven children together. In 1864, Union Army soldiers camped on the Anderson plantation and freed Jordan Anderson. He then may have worked at the Cumberland Military Hospital in Nashville before eventually settling in Dayton, Ohio, moving with the help of the surgeon in charge of the hospital, Dr. Clarke McDermont. There he found work as a servant, janitor, coachman, or hostler, until 1894, when he became a sexton, probably at the Wesleyan Methodist Church; a position he held until his death. His employer, Valentine Winters, was father-in-law to McDermont. Anderson died in Dayton on April 15, 1907 of "exhaustion" at 81 years old, and is buried in Woodland Cemetery, one of the oldest "garden" cemeteries in the United States. Amanda died April 12, 1913; she is buried next to him.

In July 1865, a few months after the end of the Civil War, Colonel P. H. Anderson wrote a letter to his former and now freed slave Jordan Anderson asking him to come back and work on the Tennessee plantation which had been left in disarray from the war. Harvest season was approaching with nobody to bring in the crops; the colonel was making a last-ditch effort to save the farm. On August 7, from his home in Ohio, Jordan Anderson dictated a letter in response through his abolitionist employer, Valentine Winters, who had it published in the Cincinnati Commercial. The letter became an immediate media sensation with reprints in the New York Daily Tribune of August 22, 1865 and Lydia Maria Child's The Freedmen's Book the same year.