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.
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