A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography
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. 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. (From the publisher)
Juror Citation
The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots is a stunning achievement of autobiographical writing, political commentary, historical sleuthing, and critical interpretation. Originally written and published by the abolitionist and sailor John Swanson Jacobs in 1855, the memoir was rediscovered and republished by the literary scholar Jonathan Schroeder in 2024. John Jacobs’s text stands as a shining example of the intellectual prowess and political savvy of Black activists before the Civil War. The innovative, multidimensional book that enfolds it is an exquisitely curated, brilliantly illuminating textual assemblage that establishes a new model for presenting and understanding the antebellum slave narrative as a genre.
The original narrative is a rare text written by John Jacobs, the formerly enslaved brother of the more famous formerly enslaved abolitionist-author, Harriet Jacobs. Through the meticulous research carried out over eight years by Jonathan Schroeder, we now know that John Jacobs was a prolific writer and intrepid lecturer in his own right with a piercing authorial voice that he directed toward exposing the corrupt legal, political, and moral dynamics of slavery as well as relations of power in the context of colonialism and global empire. In reframing Jacobs’s ferocious commentary after discovering it in an Australian newspaper, and in pairing it with an original biography of Jacobs, Schroeder has unveiled the sophistication of Black activists and seamen, the existence of a new genre that he calls the “global slave narrative,” and a parallel work that sheds more light on Harriet Jacobs’s remarkable experience.
In the title alone, and throughout the stunning autobiography and astute biography that share space between these two covers, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots brilliantly speaks to pressing themes in our own time – tyranny, despotism, the abuse of political power, migration, statelessness, race, and radicalism. – Tiya Miles and Charles King
