Lost on the other side of the world since 1855, the story of John Swanson Jacobs finally returns to America.
 
For one hundred and sixty-eight 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. 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 lives 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.
 

John Swanson Jacobs was an abolitionist, miner, sailor, and citizen of the world.
 
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a literary historian and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design.

 

 Introduction: A Global Slave Narrative xi
 A Note on the Text xxxi

The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery
John Swanson Jacobs
 
One
The Death of Mrs. Hanablue, and the Sale of Her Slaves at Public Auction
 
Two
The Happy Family, or Practical Christianity
 
Three
Brutality and Murder among Slaves

Four
The Different Ways of Punishing Slaves
 
Five
My Sister Has Run Away, My Aunt, Two Children, and Myself Sent to Gaol
 
Six
My Fifth and Last Master
 
Seven
Dr. Sawyer’s Death—His Brother’s Election to Congress—and Marriage—and My Escape from Him
 
Eight
My Voyage to the South Seas, and the Object of the Voyage—My Sister’s Escape, and Our Meeting
 
Nine
The Laws of the United States respecting Slavery
 
Ten
The Agreement between the North and South at the Adoption of the Constitution
 
Eleven
The Declaration of American Independence, with Interlineations of United States and State Laws

 
No Longer Yours:
The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder

Prologue
 
One
Bondservants of Liberty
 
Two
Toward a New Grammar of Justice
 
Three
The World My Country

Epilogue: Afterlives

John Jacobs at First Sight: Notes on a Frontispiece
 
List of Emendations
Appendix 1: Writings by John Swanson Jacobs
Appendix 2: Writings on John Swanson Jacobs
Acknowledgments  Abbreviations
Notes  Index