John S. Jacobs: The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots

IN-PERSON

Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, literary historian, recovered a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs buried in the archives in Austraila. Jacobs is described as "radical abolitionist, sailor, and miner,[who]has a life story that is as global as it is American." The brother of Harriet Jacobs, author of the widely known Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), was born into slavery then fled the U.S. The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots contains Jacobs's first-person narrative and a full-length, nine-generation biography of Jacobs and his family by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder.

Join us for a conversation with Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, a literary historian and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design.

A book signing will follow.

GET THE BOOK

Copies of John S. Jacobs: The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots will be available for purchase from the Schomburg Shop in Harlem.

ABOUT

For one hundred and sixty-nine years, a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs—brother of Harriet Jacobs—was buried in a pile of newspapers in Australia. Jacobs’s long-lost narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, is a startling and revolutionary discovery. A document like this—written by an ex-slave and ex-American, in language charged with all that can be said about America outside America, untampered with and unedited by white abolitionists—has never been seen before. A radical abolitionist, sailor, and miner, John Jacobs has a life story that is as global as it is American. Born into slavery, by 1855, he had fled both the South and the United States altogether, becoming a stateless citizen of the world and its waters. That year, he published his life story in an Australian newspaper, far from American power and its threats. Unsentimental and unapologetic, Jacobs radically denounced slavery and the state, calling out politicians and slaveowners by their names, critiquing America’s founding documents, and indicting all citizens who maintained the racist and intolerable status quo.

Reproduced in full, this narrative—which entwines with that of his sister and with the life of their friend Frederick Douglass—here opens new horizons for how we understand slavery, race, and migration, and all that they entailed in nineteenth-century America and the world at large. The second half of the book contains a full-length, nine-generation biography of Jacobs and his family by literary historian Jonathan Schroeder.

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