John James Flournoy

The name of this eccentric deaf author has been recalled from half a century of oblivion by tile late George W, Veditz, who mentiollsim incident in his essay appearing in the March Annals. As so eminent a critic has seen fit to bring him back into the limelight, we win resurrect what is known of him biographical.

John James Flourney was "a semi-mute gentleman who resided on patrimonial estates near Athens, Georgia." He was a descendant of Jean Jacques Flournoy, a Huguenot refugee who landed at Jamestown in 1720, leaving behind him the pedigreed Seigneury of Vassay-et-Flournoy in Champagne, France. The date of our hero’s birth is uncertain: Edmund Booth gives the year as 1810, and by other authorities as 1800. He attended for a time the American School for the Deaf in Hartford. Subsequently, he became active in the establishment of the Georgia School for the Deaf, which was opened in 1847, He was a facade writer, and contributed frequently to the newspapers of Georgia. He also issued printed pamphlets on political and social questions; one of his tracts ("Go to the Bible,” 1858) is mentioned in 0. W. Holmes' "Professor at the Breakfast Table,” in Chapter 1. The nature of his subject can be gathered from Dr. Holmes’ comment: "What you carry away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it. This man has gone to the Bible, and he has come back from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing social evils, which, if it is the real specific, as it professes to be, is of great interest to humanity.... It is what he calls tfigarry, or the marrying of three wives."

Most of Flournoy published work was marked by the same popularity of thought and unsoundness of judgment. He was best known to the deaf of past generations by an article in the American Annals in which he advocated a "deaf-mute colony” on government land, in which all the citizens would be deaf and the sign-language the of medium of business. His project included a seating Congress for such a self-existing community, and he was willing to contemplate the possibility of being the first Congressman from Deafdom, Edmund Booth, who pointed out that a commonwealth of deaf-mutes would disappear in the second or third generation, as the children of deaf parents usually can hear, opposed His plan.

John J. Flournoy died January 15th, 1879. Otherwise than as a writer, he seems to have been held in great estimation by his contemporaries. The editor of the Southern Watchman Ed him one of the most scrupulously honest and truthful men he ever knew, and a man who disliked all kinds of deception and dishonesty. He took part in the agitation for the establishment of a national college for the deaf, along with John Carlin and Edmund Booth.