The autobiography of John Swanson Jacobs offers a new look at slavery and migration

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4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

Harriet Jacobs is one of the best-known female abolitionists and authors who wrote about their experiences of enslavement in the South. But while searching for information about Jacobs' children, literary historian Jonathan Schroeder discovered something else: The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, the long-lost autobiography of Jacobs' brother, John Swanson Jacobs. In today's episode, Schroeder speaks with NPR's Juana Summers about the life of the author, his escape to freedom and the blistering critique of the United States that he wrote in 1855 while living in Australia.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The book we're talking about today
0:06.6	is not a new book by any stretch. It was written in 1855 in Australia by John Swanson Jacobs, a man who
0:14.0	was born into slavery. How he found his way to Australia is a story on its own, but when he got
0:19.5	there, he wrote this book. That's a scaling
0:21.7	critique of America. It's titled, The United States governed by 600,000 despots. And it's
0:28.6	important to the story that he was in Australia when he wrote it, because there were no Americans
0:33.4	around to clutch their pearls and say, oh, you're being too spicy with his writing right now.
0:38.0	But it was eventually lost a time until now.
0:41.3	NPR's Juana Summer spoke with literary historian Jonathan Schroeder about finding the book
0:45.8	and who exactly John Swanson Jacobs was.
0:48.9	That's after the break.
0:50.6	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
0:55.5	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.
1:00.0	On our new show, Sources and Methods.
1:02.0	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,
1:05.8	helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:09.3	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:14.7	You know that feeling of going down a rabbit hole on the internet?
1:18.2	One thought, one click, one page leading to dozens of others.
1:23.1	That's kind of how it started for Jonathan Schroeder.
1:25.8	This is 2016. I'm applying for jobs. And I had a question that was bugging me. It was basically
1:33.7	what had happened to Harriet Jacobs' son.
	...

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