A Long-Lost, First-Person Slave Narrative
While John Swanson Jacobs is often remembered as the brother of Harriet Jacobs, he was an accomplished author and activist in his own right.
Literary historian Jonathan D.S. Schroeder recently discovered John Swanson Jacobs’s long-lost narrative, originally published in Australia in 1855—six years before Harriet’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
In uncovering Jacobs’ life story, Schroeder identified a portrait believed to depict him, now housed in the permanent collection of the African American Museum in Philadelphia.
Schroeder is the editor of The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery by John Swanson Jacobs.
A Startling and Revolutionary Discovery
For one hundred and sixty-nine years, a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs was buried in a pile of newspapers in Australia. 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—entwined with that of his sister and with the life of their friend Frederick Douglass—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.
This new guide to the world of John Jacobs will transform our sense of it—and of the forces and prejudices built into the American project. To truly reckon with the life of John Jacobs is to see with new clarity that in 1776 America embarked on two experiments at once: one in democracy, the other in tyranny.
Harriet Jacobs
Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in Edenton, NC in 1813. After escaping to New York City in 1842, Jacobs eventually moved to Rochester, New York, to work in the antislavery reading room above abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, The North Star.
As John Jacobs became more and more involved with abolitionism, he undertook several lecture tours, either alone or with fellow abolitionists, among them Frederick Douglass. In 1849, John S. Jacobs took responsibility for the Anti-Slavery Office and Reading Room in Rochester. His sister Harriet supported him.
Harriet became an African American abolitionist and writer whose autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, is now considered an American classic.
