William Johnson’s Natchez: The Ante-Bellum Diary of a Free Negro

The discovery in 1938 of the diary and personal papers of William Johnson (ca. 1809–1851), a free Black man who resided in Natchez, Mississippi, made possible the 1951 publication of this edited version of his journal. Johnson’s diary offers a firsthand account of a formerly enslaved man who rose from appalling circumstances to become a successful businessperson. 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, enslaver, and small farmer, who, despite his status as a free Black man living in a stridently racist society, became a prominent, well-respected citizen of Natchez. Johnson kept a ledger on the various aspects of his thriving businesses, and in this journal, 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 the private frankness of a person denied a public outlet for his opinions.In a conversational 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 provides such deep insight into the life of a free person of color. It is among the most remarkable documents of antebellum America. Read more