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With its focus on free black life in the old South, the Sixteenth Annual Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration was built around the reopening by the National Park Service of the William Johnson House, a Greek Revival town house at 210 State Street in Natchez once home of the antebellum free African American William tiler Johnson. (Figure. 1)2 If we know more about him than most other free persons of color in the United States before the Civil War, it is because of the papers he left, especially the personal and business diaries or journals he kept. Together, these volumes still hold the record as the longest manuscript by an American free black person before the abolition of slavery, numbering more than two thousand pages.3 They show him enjoying the rare privilege for a person of African descent in Mississippi at that time to move about pretty much as he wished and, in so doing, to leave behind a detailed record of daily life in Natchez, white and black, free and enslaved. How this unique historical resource came to be preserved, edited, and published; the role it played in the development of archives in the Deep South; and the changing scholarly reception it has received over the better part of a century together form the subject of this paper.
Johnson was born a slave in Natchez in 1809. It has been assumed that his father was the white slaveholder Captain William Johnson of Adams County, Mississippi, who also owned the youth's mother Amy and sister Adelia. In early February 1814, Captain Johnson crossed the Mississippi River from Natchez to Vidalia, the governmental seat of Concordia Parish, Louisiana, to make legal declaration that he intended to emancipate Amy. Six weeks later, no legal protest having materialized, the petition was granted. In 1818, the Captain sent Delia to be freed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On January 21,1820, he successfully petitioned the Mississippi state legislature, then in session at Natchez, to allow him to grant young William his freedom.4
The Captain's (or his attorney's) openly Rationalist petition characterizes the requested manumission as "that disposition of his property most agreeable to his feelings & consonant to humanity," in order to give
that Liberty to a human being which all are...