Jermain Wesley Loguen Writes His Former Owner

Jermain Wesley Loguen was a slave who escaped his Tennessee captors in 1834 and eventually learned to read and write, opened schools for African American children, became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and operated a stop on the Underground Railroad. The blog Letters of Note -- a blog which, by the way, is awesome -- has a letter the wife of his former captor (or "owner" or "master" if one prefers those terms) wrote him in 1860 demanding he pay $1,000 to cover the damage he supposedly caused by running away. Specifically, she want him to pay so she can recover land she had to sell after he escaped. His response is a classic.


Here are a few choice paragraphs; the full texts of both letters are at Letters of Note:

You sold my brother and sister, ABE and ANN, and 12 acres of land, you say, because I ran away. Now you have the unutterable meanness to ask me to return and be your miserable chattel, or in lieu thereof send you $1000 to enable you to redeem the land, but not to redeem my poor brother and sister! If I were to send you money it would be to get my brother and sister, and not that you should get land. You say you are a cripple, and doubtless you say it to stir my pity, for you know I was susceptible in that direction. I do pity you from the bottom of my heart. Nevertheless I am indignant beyond the power of words to express, that you should be so sunken and cruel as to tear the hearts I love so much all in pieces; that you should be willing to impale and crucify us out of all compassion for your poor foot or leg. Wretched woman! Be it known to you that I value my freedom, to say nothing of my mother, brothers and sisters, more than your whole body; more, indeed, than my own life; more than all the lives of all the slaveholders and tyrants under Heaven.

You say you have offers to buy me, and that you shall sell me if I do not send you $1000, and in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you say, "you know we raised you as we did our own children." Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping-post? Did you raise them to be driven off in a coffle in chains? Where are my poor bleeding brothers and sisters? Can you tell? Who was it that sent them off into sugar and cotton fields, to be kicked, and cuffed, and whipped, and to groan and die; and where no kin can hear their groans, or attend and sympathize at their dying bed, or follow in their funeral? ....

     * * *
But you say I am a thief, because I took the old mare along with me. Have you got to learn that I had a better right to the old mare, as you call her, than MANNASSETH LOGUE [his captor] had to me? Is it a greater sin for me to steal his horse, than it was for him to rob my mother's cradle and steal me? ...

If you or any other speculator on my body and rights, wish to know how I regard my rights, they need but come here and lay their hands on me to enslave me. Did you think to terrify me by presenting the alternative to give my money to you, or give my body to Slavery? Then let me say to you, that I meet the proposition with unutterable scorn and contempt. The proposition is an outrage and an insult. ...

I'll keep this in mind the next time a national figure like Michelle Bachman recommends a book that calls slavery a mutual pact between black and white where slaves were lucky or signs a statement that says slavery helped keep black families together. I'm just sayin' is all.