Ninety Percent of Everything is Crap, Especially So-called History
Slaves were forbidden from learning to read, I've seen this letter or one like it before. It may be genuine and DICTATED by him to someone or he may have learned to read while enslaved like Frederick Douglass did.
Or maybe it's a hoax or written as satire or something. I don't know. I haven't researched it.
Joan of Arc was illiterate and dictated letters to be sent in her name to the occupying English. The Chastity Belt was probably not anything real and was more like satire or metaphor seen in drawings of the day and later misinterpreted, sort of like someone seeing a political cartoon and taking it too literally.
Frederick Douglass ended up a diplomat to a foreign country because he really was that eloquent. So it seems unlikely a complete unknown former slave actually wrote something so witty himself.
Douglass was the most photographed American of the 19th century. It was a conscious and intentional political act and he chose to never smile in photos because he didn't want people claiming slaves are happy with their condition.
I'm skeptical that letter was actually written by a former slave. Perhaps it was ghost written for a former slave with his input about what details to include, but most slave states made it illegal for slaves to learn to read and that level of eloquence was rare even among the very educated elite.
I have heard love letters were frequently ghost written at one time because average literacy wasn't great. This is a plot point in the semi-fictional play Cyrano de Bergerac where de Bergerac has been ghost writing letters for another man to a woman he's actually in love with himself.
Prior to seeing the above video, I watched much of this video about a French town hiding Jewish kids during World War II. I couldn't get to the end.
It fails to be internally consistent and doesn't match up with what Wikipedia says.
I've seen quite a few videos supposedly about historical events which contain a lot of color -- a lot of details of people saying x and body language to go with it -- which inadequately provide supporting citations and for which real citations likely do not exist. One such video gave intimate details of an unsung female hero from World War II and bluntly stated her activities were secret, she signed a nondisclosure agreement and never spoke of it.
So she took her secrets to her grave, but somehow you can describe her like she had a TikTok account and regularly uploaded selfie video clips of her top secret activities. Gotcha.
It may well be based on something true but most of it is almost certainly made up for entertainment purposes. It gets more clicks or likes or subscribes or makes more ad money than sticking to what we can actually verify.
The piece about the French town had me thinking of the ending of The Devil's Own where Brad Pitt tells Harrison Ford something like "This isn't an American story. It's an Irish one." and promptly dies.
Modern Americans are descended from people who bet everything on an epic journey to a New World and lived to tell the tale and claim the spoils. Our stories tend to follow a formulaic plot of "Everyone you care about in the story lives happily ever after no matter how harrowing most of the movie is."
Samuel L. Jackson gets used to good effect in Deep Blue Sea to mess with your mind and break with that tradition and movies from The Great Depression tend to be dark and depressing, but generally speaking American stories involve fighting the good fight and the righteous winning out blah blah blah.
That's unlikely to be true of any real world events involving World War II. My extremely upper class German mother whose family moved to a farm and used cigarette rations to hire guards during the war years still had a son die as a German soldier.
I love the movie Cool Runnings. Someone I thought was erudite, educated blah blah told me it was a highly accurate presentation of historical events.
Wikipedia charitably calls it loosely based on real world events. I would describe it as inspired by real world events.
It's extremely entertaining. It's wonderful for getting people interested in what really happened. It's nothing remotely approaching something akin to a documentary.
In most cases, reality falls short of Hollywood drama and entertainment standards. But not always and then Hollywood may tone down reality to preserve audience suspension of disbelief.
When I and my then husband watched The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, we pulled multiple history books off our shelves and looked up specific battles.
1. They combined details of two or more battles in some scenes.
2. She wasn't shot in the chest or shoulder with an arrow and slept it off. She was actually shot in the neck and slept it off.
The real Joan of Arc was such bullshit, most modern audiences wouldn't believe an accurate depiction of her life.
We also have no record of what she said to the Dauphin in their initial private meeting. Everything in that scene is fabricated.
It is true she picked the real Dauphin out of a crowd after they tried to trick her and this so impressed him he granted her a private audience which could have gotten him assassinated.
She routinely showed up at meetings to which she wasn't invited nor informed about.
She was taken seriously during her lifetime because she pulled off stuff other people didn't have an explanation for other than "Must be sent by God like she says she was." While openly admitting she was hearing voices that today would have her in a psych ward getting her meds adjusted, not freeing occupied territories from the British, putting a crown prince on the thrown and ending the Hundred Years War.
I'm too truthful to be socially acceptable. I have no friends. Get off my blog if you like the fairytales you grew up with and don't confuse you with the facts.
See also: Understanding History.