William Johnson's Natchez PDF Download

Author: William Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 850

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Author: Edwin Adams Davis
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807102121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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In The Barber of Natchez, Edwin Adams Davis and William Ransom Hogan tell the remarkable story of William Johnson, a slave who rose to freedom, business success, and high community standing in the heart of the South—all before 1850. Emancipated as a young boy in 1820, Johnson became a barber’s apprentice and later opened several profitable barber shops of his own. As his wealth grew, he expanded into real estate and acquired large tracts of nearby farm and timber land. The authors explore in detail Johnson’s family, work, and social life, including his friendships with people of both races. They also examine his wanton murder and the resulting trial of the man accused of shooting him. More than the story of one individual, the narrative also offers compelling insight into the southern code of honor, the apprentice system, and the ownership of slaves by free blacks. Based on Johnson’s two-thousand-page diary, letters, and business records, this extraordinary biography reveals the complicated life of a freedman in Mississippi and a new perspective on antebellum Natchez.

Author: Josh Foreman and Ryan Starrett
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1467148202
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Since prehistory, the bluffs of Natchez have called to the bold, the cruel and the quietly determined. The diverse opportunists who heeded that call have left behind more than three hundred years of colorful and tragic stories. The Natchez Indians, who inhabited the bluffs at the time of European contact, made a calculated but ultimately catastrophic decision to massacre the French who had settled nearby. William Johnson, a Black man who occupied a tenuous position between two worlds, found wealth and status in antebellum Natchez. In the wake of Union occupation, thousands of the formerly enslaved became the city's protective garrison. Join authors Ryan Starrett and Josh Foreman and rediscover the people who toiled and bled to make Natchez one of the most unique and interesting cities in America.

Author: Nik Ribianszky
Publisher: Early American Places
ISBN: 9780820364841
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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In Generations of Freedom Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery's legal demise in 1865. Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi's free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America's system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one's status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual's continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system. Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together-by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies-these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property-including that most precious, themselves.

Author: William Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Natchez (Miss.)
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: William Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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The discovery in 1938 of the diary and personal papers of William Johnson (ca. 1809–1851), a free Negro of Natchez, Mississippi, made possible the publication of this fascinating volume. Johnson’s diary offers a firsthand account of a former slave who rose from harsh circumstances to become a successful businessman. It is also an intimate portrait of life and social relations in a southern town in the years leading up to the Civil War. A barber by trade, Johnson was also a landlord, moneylender, slave owner, and small farmer, and despite his color he became a prominent, well-respected citizen of Natchez. Johnson kept a ledger on the various aspects of his thriving businesses, and in this ledger he also recorded his impressions of the daily occurrences of life around him. “I am always ready for Anything,” reads one of his entries for 1845. This dictum is borne out in his acutely observed accounts of births and deaths, weddings and elopements, political campaigns and conventions, races and cockfights, concerts and trials, balls and epidemics—all related with a naïve yet passionate curiosity and with the private frankness of a man of color denied a public outlet for his opinions. In a vividly colloquial voice, Johnson set down the whole of the Natchez scene for sixteen years. No other southern diary provides such a broad picture of numerous aspects of everyday life or reveals so many of the well-to-do free Negro’s attitudes on timely questions. It is one of the most remarkable documents in American historiography.

Author: Douglas Walter Bristol
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 080189283X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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They advocated economic independence from whites and founded insurance companies that became some of the largest black-owned corporations.--L. Diane Barnes "Alabama Review"

Author: Greg Iles
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062311107
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 746

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From #1 New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles comes the first novel in his Natchez Burning trilogy—which also includes The Bone Tree and the upcoming Mississippi Blood—an epic trilogy that interweaves crimes, lies, and secrets past and present in a mesmerizing thriller featuring Southern lawyer and former prosecutor Penn Cage. Raised in the southern splendor of Natchez, Mississippi, Penn Cage learned all he knows of duty from his father, Dr. Tom Cage. But now the beloved family doctor has been accused of murdering the African American nurse with whom he worked in the dark days of the 1960s. Once a crusading prosecutor, Penn is determined to save his father, but Tom, stubbornly invoking doctor-patient privilege, refuses even to speak in his own defense. Penn's quest for the truth sends him deep into his father's past, where a sexually charged secret lies. More chilling, this long-buried sin is only one thread in a conspiracy of greed and murder involving the vicious Double Eagles, an offshoot of the KKK controlled by some of the most powerful men in the state. Aided by a dedicated reporter privy to Natchez's oldest secrets and by his fiancée, Caitlin Masters, Penn uncovers a trail of corruption and brutality that places his family squarely in the Double Eagles' crosshairs. With every step costing blood and faith, Penn is forced to confront the most wrenching dilemma of his life: Does a man of honor choose his father or the truth?

Author: Timothy R. Buckner
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807180548
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Winner of the Jules and Frances Landry Award Historians have long considered the diary of William Johnson, a wealthy free Black barber in Natchez, Mississippi, to be among the most significant sources on free African Americans living in the antebellum South. Timothy R. Buckner’s The Barber of Natchez Reconsidered reexamines Johnson’s life using recent scholarship on Black masculinity as an essential lens, demonstrating a complexity to Johnson previously overlooked in academic studies. While Johnson’s profession as a barber helped him gain acceptance and respectability, it also required his subservience to the needs of his all-white clientele. Buckner’s research counters earlier assumptions that suggested Johnson held himself apart from Natchez’s Black population, revealing instead a man balanced between deep connections to the broader African American community and the necessity to cater to white patrons for economic and social survival. Buckner also highlights Johnson’s participation in the southern performance of manliness to a degree rarely seen in recent studies of Black masculinity. Like many other free Black men, Johnson asserted his manhood in ways beyond simply rebelling against slavery; he also competed with other men, white and Black, free and enslaved, in various masculine pursuits, including gambling, hunting, and fishing. Buckner’s long-overdue reevaluation of the contents of Johnson’s diary serves as a corrective to earlier works and a fascinating new account of a free African American business owner residing in the prewar South.

Author: James F. Barnett Jr.
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604733098
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735 is the story of the Natchez Indians as revealed through accounts of Spanish, English, and French explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and colonists, and in the archaeological record. Because of their strategic location on the Mississippi River, the Natchez Indians played a crucial part in the European struggle for control of the Lower Mississippi Valley. The book begins with the brief confrontation between the Hernando de Soto expedition and the powerful Quigualtam chiefdom, presumed ancestors of the Natchez. In the late seventeenth century, René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle's expedition met the Natchez and initiated sustained European encroachment, exposing the tribe to sickness and the dangers of the Indian slave trade. The Natchez Indians portrays the way that the Natchez coped with a rapidly changing world, became entangled with the political ambitions of two European superpowers, France and England, and eventually disappeared as a people. The author examines the shifting relationships among the tribe's settlement districts and the settlement districts' relationships with neighboring tribes and with the Europeans. The establishment of a French fort and burgeoning agricultural colony in their midst signaled the beginning of the end for the Natchez people. Barnett has written the most complete and detailed history of the Natchez to date.