In a photo of Daniel and his workers taken in the late 19th century, a black man, possibly one of Green’s sons, sits at his immediate right - a sharp contrast to contemporaneous photos from other distilleries, where black employees were made to stand in the back rows.īut corporate history-keeping was a rare practice in those days, and over time memories of Green and his sons faded.
Slavery ended with ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, and Daniel opened his distillery a year later, employing two of Green’s sons. “Uncle Nearest is the best whiskey maker that I know of,” the book quotes Call as saying. Green (no relation to Nearis), Call told his slave to teach Daniel everything he knew. The Green story has been known to historians and locals for decades, even as the distillery officially ignored it.Īccording to a 1967 biography, “Jack Daniel’s Legacy,” by Ben A. Jack Daniel’s says it simply wants to set the record straight. In the same way that white cookbook authors often appropriated recipes from their black cooks, white distillery owners took credit for the whiskey. Enslaved men not only made up the bulk of the distilling labor force, but they often played crucial skilled roles in the whiskey-making process. Slavery and whiskey, far from being two separate strands of Southern history, were inextricably entwined. Left out of that account were men like Nearis Green. Still, the decision to tell it resonates far beyond this small city.įor years, the prevailing history of American whiskey has been framed as a lily-white affair, centered on German and Scots-Irish settlers who distilled their surplus grains into whiskey and sent it to far-off markets, eventually creating a $2.9 billion industry and a product equally beloved by Kentucky colonels and Brooklyn hipsters. Frontier history is a gauzy and unreliable pursuit, and Nearis Green’s story - built on oral history and the thinnest of archival trails - may never be definitively proved.
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