Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Myth of the Great-Hearted Former Slave - Yahoo! News

Myth of the Great-Hearted Former Slave - Yahoo! News


COMMENTARY | Being skeptical of a story is not the same thing as believing it is entirely untrue, as in the following: The Sideshow presents items of peculiar interest. An item purports to be a letter from a former Tennessee slave to his former slave owner.


The newspaper of attribution was the New York Daily Tribune of August 1865. Presumably, the letter and the Flickr image of the Tribune have been verified as accurate, a stated requirement of the Letters of Note website.

A curious problem with authenticity arises, however, if you note the Library of Congress' New York Daily Tribune list of digitized volumes begins in 1875. A minor point, perhaps, but it signals the letter might have had a different origin.

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