The following letter is written by the
owner of a successful printing business to his brother some years
after the American Revolution.
Dear -----,
I have failed to write to you for
several months because little has happened that I thought worthy of
your attention, which is a very good thing. Life has settled into a routine
free of the instabilities and crises of youth. My business is doing
well as is my wife. My kids are well too. There are of course always
scandals amongst the town at large, the stuff my paper thrives in, but I would regret to behave in the manner of a gossip.
I spend some days quietly reflecting on
this and that and the same themes continually assert themselves no
matter what path I took to reach them. I will always honor you for
fighting in the war, but I no longer regret that I did not do the
same. My task was to make something of myself from nothing, and I
think I have done that. I have managed to found a thriving business with the sweat off my own back, something I could only do in
this country thanks to men like you. If I owe anyone anything I owe
them an example of how far one can go in life. I find that it is my
patriotic duty to be successful.
There is another way that I feel that I
have contributed to the public, and that is through the content of
the paper itself. As you know, my paper, like that of all of its
competitors, regularly features advertisements for runaways, and I've come to realize that these as much as any other article have a function. The
advertisements of course generate significant profit, but this value
is far less than that of the service the press (not just my paper) is
providing. Having been born unto freedom I can on some level
understand the desire to escape and be free, but the disguise and the
deception runaways employ continually reminds me that these people
are not fit to be free. There are actually legitimate avenues for
some to earn wages and buy their freedom, but these wage earners,
grown accustom to the ways of their betters through their trades,
often become the most wily runaways, attempting to circumvent the
necessity of hard work. Freedom is not stolen, it is earned. Freedom
ennobles; it does not debase.
Throughout the day I think of many other
trivial things but I will not, of course, repeat them here. They are
like footprints in the sand that get erased with the tide. And what
came in with the tide to stay, and what does not get washed away, is
a concept of human dignity which I try daily to uphold and for which
I have an exemplar in you.
Sincerely,
-----
Najja,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed the concept of your letter. Through the printing press owner, you were able to express some opinions on advertisements for runaways. A theme I noticed in both your work and Waldstreicher's involves the idea that many people considered slaves "not fit to be free" even when these people could speak fluently and with no accent, worked effectively in trade, etc.
Beautifully written! I like the way that you support Waldstreicher's point about the centrality of slavery (via runaway slave advertisements) to the print culture of the late eighteenth century. You are writing from a very intriguing perspective and you leave open the question of whether the man actually believes his words or is more focused on the fact that the business of printing runaway slave advertisements is quite profitable.
ReplyDeleteNajja,
ReplyDeleteGreat piece. This definitely inspires me to think more creatively in this blog posts. I like how your piece highlights the duplicity of the nature of slaves using their skills to pass as free. Waldstreicher makes the point that often the skills and qualities that make a slave able to pass as free are precisely skills and qualities that would be valued in a free white man. However, your writer believes that the use of this deception reflects the quality of the slaves themselves rather than an result of their situation. Prof. Hobbs brings up an interesting point to question whether your writer believes his own words. In my initial reading I thought he did, but perhaps another question is the role the printing industry influenced whether someone would believe capturing runaways to be a service to society.