By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Growing up around a household with ancestral names like O’Brien, Gleason, Sullivan, McCarthy, Leonard, and Duffy, you might hear, from time to time, someone remark (only half-jokingly) that God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world. It now appears, however, that God had a different, much more constructive purpose in mind.
A story last year in the New York Times has told how one of the greatest producers of whiskey, the Jack Daniel’s company in Lynchburg Tennessee, has revised its public corporate history to include the contributions of Nearest Green, a black slave who taught a young Jack Daniel about the art of distilling sometime in the 1850s. Daniel was very open about the help he received from Green and even hired him and his descendants to work at the company after Emancipation. Unfortunately, the story of Green’s contributions to one of Tennessee’s most famous and delicious products later was downplayed and excluded from the official Jack Daniel’s history.
A New York writer named Fawn Weaver has done more in depth research and now is writing a book about the relationship between Green and Daniel. In a recent 2017 NPR interview, she called it an exemplary friendship: “Nearest Green was not Jack’s slave. Jack did not have any slaves. Nearest Green was Jack’s mentor. And Jack’s descendants and Nearest’s descendants, not only were they friends, they lived side by side. They worked side by side.”
The news from Jack Daniel’s distillery mirrors recent efforts at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. to come to terms with its slave owning past. In 1838, Jesuit priests running the University sold 227 black slaves to help keep the school afloat financially. The current leaders of the school have undertaken various efforts to come to terms with this stain on its past, and to reconcile with the descendants of those sold slaves. I think it all is a good trend. We are facing the past with honesty, seeking reconciliation, giving forgiveness, and looking to live the future with such lessons in mind.
Whiskey writer Fawn Weaver strongly agrees that we can learn from the past. She told NPR: “So I think when we look at what’s going on with the Confederate monuments, when you look at Charlottesville, putting that in context with what I have been uncovering over the last 10 months is pretty phenomenal because if we can somehow figure out how to do in the rest of America what Jack and Nearest and their descendants learned how to do in Lynchburg, we’ve got hope.”
I’ll drink to that!
