Reddit Challenge #23

Reddit user ANewLowInGettingHigh Submits: The sadness of a plantation owner who lost everything after the civil war.


Anderson White was not like many people who bore witnessed the rise and fall of Dixie. Many people in the south strongly believed in their convictions about slavery and its relation to states rights, many of them believed in the supremacy of White Protestant Americans, but not Anderson White. Anderson White was the only black southerner.
He was born in 1841 in a small town in in Minnesota from an African couple who had escaped the south before realizing what they were destined for. Running the minute the boat hit port, they missed the fact that their friends were entering slavery and ended up in the north. There they adopted American language and culture. The newly named Richard White and his wife Angela White proceeded to Minnesota to become farmers- it was there that they decided to raise a family as well.
Anderson loved the farm- not just the farming activities but the business as well. He had raised thousands by properly managing the family farm and this love of business led a young Anderson to make a drastic decision. Anderson decided to head south to start his own farm in Georgia. He knew that even the cost of non-slave labor was cheaper in the south, and he was closer to major ports.
Leaving his family in his early 20s and heading south, Anderson became a model southerner and somehow became accepted by the whites in the community. Anderson had so much money and business savvy that he bought out every person in town with gifts and kindness. He had all white employees who he paid fairly and when the Civil War broke out he decided to stick with the South.
Despite this, and despite his African heritage, the Union army burned Anderson's farm because of his southern sympathies- he lost everything.