After fleeing slavery in 1839, abolitionist, miner and sailor John Swanson Jacobs embarked on a journey that would take him to Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and ultimately Australia. It was there that he published his life story in a local newspaper – a unique document that not only gave an account of his experience under enslavement, but also named his enslavers, criticized America’s founding documents, and called out the American citizens who allowed slavery to persist. A new book shares his manuscript in full, accompanied by a biography of Jacobs. It’s called “The True Story of Slavery: The United States Governed by Six Thousand Despots.” Morning host Luis Hernandez spoke with the book’s editor, Jonathan Schroeder, a literary historian at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Transcript:
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: Jonathan, I really appreciate the time. Thank you so much for being here with us.
Jonathan Schroeder: It’s a pleasure to be here.
Hernandez: I loved this opening line for the book, and this is the manuscript from Mr. Jacobs. “I was born in Edenton, North Carolina. I had five different owners in 18 years. My first owner was Miss Penelope Hanablue.” He named his enslavers. He named a lot of people in this story. That’s not usual in a first person slave narrative. I wonder, why did he do that?
Schroeder: I’m glad that you focused on the first line, because one thing that most slave narratives have in common is they begin with the phrase, “I was born…” And after that, often they say something like, “I can’t tell you when.” This is a way of showing the injustice of slavery. However, John Jacobs, to show the injustice of slavery, points straight to the owners – not to knowing when his birthday is, but to the fact that he was owned. I think what is remarkable is, like you said, that he names names. He doesn’t pull his punches, and he does so to draw attention explicitly to those who run slavery, make slavery possible, the laws that allow slavery to exist. And he does that to make sure that his readers are paying attention to the actual source of the injustice and not to the pain caused by the system.
Hernandez: I get to the chapter where he finally finds his freedom. And maybe it was just something in me, I was ready for some tension and some kind of big escape. And he basically leaves a note. He leaves. He ends up in New Bedford. Just briefly tell me about how this all unfolded.
Schroeder: So, in John Jacobs’ case, he waits until his master, or his owner, a congressman named Samuel Treadwell Sawyer, goes to Washington, D.C., to serve as a congressman, and then goes on a honeymoon and travels through the Great Lakes and down the Erie Canal and down the Hudson to New York. In New York City, when Sawyer is staying at the fancy hotel of the day, the Astor Place Hotel, John Jacobs realizes this is his moment to escape. He concocted a scheme where he figured out what time the boat was leaving from Battery Park Wharf to go to Providence first, and then through Providence to New Bedford. The day before, he made it look like he was bringing his owner’s trunk to a shop nearby to get it fixed up, and he shows the owner that the trunk is empty. He thinks about every possible kind of loose thread that he needs to tie up to give himself a seamless cover.
Hernandez: What was life like in New Bedford for him? What was going on at the time?
Schroeder: New Bedford was widely known by 1839 as a safe haven for fugitive slaves. By one estimate, as many as eight to nine hundred fugitive slaves made their homes in New Bedford in the first half of the 19th century. When John Jacobs arrived, he probably actually knew, both from the sailing men in his family and from his ancestors, that New Bedford was the place to go to. Actually, his great-grandfather in 1791 escaped to New Bedford, too. There are some things that he did not expect, though. He probably didn’t know that someone named Frederick Bailey, who became known as Frederick Douglass, had just escaped there himself in 1838. He fell back on the kind of occupation that would become his life’s occupation, which is the occupation of a sailor. And so he signed up for a whaling voyage to the Pacific, and it was there that he taught himself to read and write, and it was there that he fully learned the trade that would sustain him in his life outside America, which was where he spent the majority of his emancipated life.
Hernandez: Why Australia? What led him to Australia?
Schroeder: At the same time, or soon after, the California gold rush began, a concurrent gold rush began in Australia. A lot of the miners started taking ships for Australia. There were routes set up already because of whaling. Going between the U.S. and Australia was not unheard of. For John Jacobs, as for many African American miners, the gold rush promised something greater than it did for other miners, which was the possibility of extracting the wealth from the land that had been extracted from them; a chance to bring freedom and wealth together. When John Jacobs went to California in 1850, he went because the Fugitive Slave Act had been passed. He went because California was not a state and had not passed the law that obligated people in the North to help capture fugitive slaves who had made it to the North. Soon after, California becomes a state and actually passes a more severe version of the Fugitive Slave Law, and many African American miners – I would say four to five hundred, at least – took boats for Australia.
Hernandez: How long was his story, kind of, lost to history for a while and why? What happened?
Schroeder: It was never published as a standalone volume by a publisher. It was printed in a newspaper. It was printed in a newspaper in Australia where American historians and scholars don’t look and where Australian scholars aren’t particularly interested – with some notable exceptions – in African American history. So it was kind of in a blind spot. And it’s only when, in the last 15 years, we have digitized records that we can start to search through these kinds of records, through periodicals, through newspapers and find things like this.
Hernandez: So how did this finally find the light?
Schroeder: I was stressed out one night finishing a cover letter for a job application. To burn off some steam after I hit send, I started following up a lead that I had, which was something about not John Jacobs, but Harriet Jacobs, John Jacobs’s more famous sister, who is probably the best known black woman author of the 19th century and the author of a landmark autobiographical slave narrative “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” I was curious about what happened to her son who supposedly went to Australia and never came back. And lo and behold, the National Library of Australia had made publicly available a massive archive of Australian historical newspapers and periodicals. I found John Jacobs’s narrative because we know his middle initial is John S., which I later found out stands for Swanson. I couldn’t believe my eyes and I started doubting myself immediately because I had never known of this kind of discovery happening, of an autobiographical slave narrative that had been completely lost. I was fascinated with the fact that it was published outside the transatlantic world where we usually think of ex-slave authors writing their narratives.
Hernandez: What do you want people to take away from this book?
Schroeder: The very biggest thing that I want people to take away is an understanding of the long running place of tyranny – John Jacobs would say despotism, we would say authoritarianism – in the American experiment, and the dangers that that authoritarian strain of American history poses throughout American history, but especially as we come up to Nov. 5.
Click here to learn more about “The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots.”
