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Lost on the other side of the world since 1855, the story of John Swanson Jacobs finally returns to America. This comprehensive edition includes Jacobs's narrative in full alongside a full-length 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.
Contents
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
![Codice di procedura civile : Costituzione della Repubblica italiana, appendice di leggi complementari, indici, sommario, cronologico e analitico-alfabetico : [con le nuove norme in materia di notificazioni giudiziarie (L. 30 dic. 2018, n. 145)] (Codi](../images/goods/../parts/goods-list/no-phooto.jpg)
