The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative by John Swanson Jacobs, edited by Jonathan D. S. Shroeder
By Timothy Sandefur
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024
295 pp. paperback, $20
John Swanson Jacobs was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1815 or 1817. Exactly when is unclear, because slaves’ birth dates rarely were recorded with precision. But we do know that he was the younger brother of Harriet Jacobs, who in 1861 published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, now among the most celebrated of the memoirs that fugitives wrote in the years before the Civil War. Less well known is the fact that he also published his own memoir. Historians have paid it little attention, because it existed only in a heavily edited version that appeared in a London magazine in 1861, far shorter and less interesting than Harriet’s book. That London edition was based on a longer original that an obscure Australian newspaper published in 1855 and which attracted little notice before vanishing into library archives, where it was forgotten.
Now, at last, literary historian Jonathan D. S. Schroeder has found and republished that original under Jacobs’s own title, _ The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots _, to which he has added a long biographical essay and a collection of Jacobs’s letters and newspaper articles. Six Hundred Thousand Despots offers us a fresh view on slavery by one who not only experienced it but evinced extraordinary heroism in escaping from bondage.
Among Jacobs’s most traumatic experiences was being sold at auction in 1828, alongside Harriet, his grandmother, and his uncle, after the death of their original master. The buyer was a physician named James Norcom, who was infatuated with Harriet and hoped to make her his concubine. In an effort to evade his grasp, she entered into a relationship with another slave owner, an attorney named Samuel Sawyer, for whom she bore two children. This did not dissuade Norcom, however, so Harriet made the astounding decision to fake her disappearance by hiding in a tiny crawl space in her grandmother’s home—a cell only sixty-three cubic feet in size, in which she remained hidden for seven entire years while Norcom searched for her in vain.
To convince Norcom that Harriet had fled, her family devised a scheme to send him on wild goose chases by writing a series of letters purporting to come from various cities; the letters were then smuggled to friends who mailed them from those cities in order to obtain the appropriate postmark. Norcom, intercepting them and thinking them genuine, would then rush to those locations in futile efforts to catch her, unaware that she was concealed only yards from his house the entire time. Eventually, in 1842, an abolitionist group found a way to smuggle her to freedom.
That tale is so incredible that when Harriet related it in her book, many readers dismissed it as fiction—an impression bolstered by the fact that in writing it, she collaborated with a well-known fiction writer named Lydia Maria Child. Consequently, most historians thought Incidents was a novel until 1987, when it was proven to be a true story.
John’s own escape was less complicated but no less dramatic. Knowing that his best hope lay in feigning absolute loyalty to his “owner” until an opportunity to flee presented itself, he patiently gained Sawyer’s trust—until the day in 1839 when Sawyer took him on a trip to New York City. Sent on an errand to get a trunk mended, Jacobs was able to buy a ticket and board a ship for the free state of Rhode Island. He left behind a note in the hotel room: “Sir—I have left you not to return; when I have got settled I will give you further satisfaction. No longer yours, John S. Jacob [sic]” (49).
He soon moved to Massachusetts, where he became a sailor and spent much of the rest of his life at sea, voyaging to the goldfields of California, the islands of Hawaii, and the ports of India, Siam, and Egypt, among other places. On one occasion in 1862, he was almost tricked into evading a Union blockade and conveying supplies to the Confederacy. When he discovered the plan and refused to participate, the ship’s captain accused him of desertion—a charge he successfully defended himself against at trial.
It was during a stopover in Sydney in 1855 that Jacobs published Six Hundred Thousand Despots, in two long installments of a newspaper called The Empire. By then, he had befriended the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his followers—which then included Frederick Douglass, alongside whom Jacobs worked as a traveling antislavery lecturer in the 1840s. Later that decade, the partnership between Garrison and Douglass fell apart after Douglass came to reject Garrison’s pacifism, his belief that the U.S. Constitution was a pro-slavery document, and his insistence that abolitionists abstain from politics. Douglass had shared these views after his own escape from slavery in 1838, but a decade later, after studying constitutional law in greater detail, he decided that the Constitution not only gave slavery no protection but allowed—perhaps even required—the federal government to abolish it. He also concluded that abolitionists should vote, run for office, and engage in forcible resistance to slavery. In 1852, he declared the Constitution “a glorious liberty document” that “contained principles and purposes entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.”1 He and Garrison never reconciled.
Jacobs made no mention of Douglass’s change of opinion in his 1855 memoir. Instead, he simply reiterated the Garrisonian view that the Constitution sanctioned slavery and that Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court were so dominated by slaveholders that there was “no hope of freedom . . . left for the slave” under “a Constitution and Union like this” (66). Douglass was to refute these points in the years that followed, pointing out that the mere fact that pro-slavery politicians controlled the government did not prove the Constitution to be pro-slavery and observing that constitutional provisions such as the Due Process Clause and the Privileges and Immunities Clause were ultimately incompatible with slavery. But Jacobs appears not to have thoroughly evaluated Douglass’s legal arguments, and he did not confront them head-on in Six Hundred Thousand Despots. In fact, his brief discussion of this question revealed little understanding of legal principles; for example, he repeatedly confused Congressionally enacted statutes (such as the Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1850) with constitutional sections (such as the Fugitive Slave Clause, adopted in 1787).
Unfortunately, Schroeder also fails to weigh the arguments of pro-Constitution abolitionists such as Douglass and instead lauds Jacobs for “proving that slavery and white supremacy are written into the conceptual bedrock of the American republic, starting with the Constitution”—which he certainly did not do. Likewise, he praises Jacobs for “calling for reparations,” which was entirely foreign to Jacobs’s intent: Jacobs, in fact, wrote, “I have not asked you for gold or silver . . . [but only] to take your feet off the necks of three millions of your countrymen” (xiv, 112, 216).
Alas, comments such as these are symptomatic of Schroeder’s approach—which combines the gibberish lingo of critical race theory with the nihilism (or as Schroeder prefers, “Black radical antisentimentalism”) of the 1619 Project—and these severely mar the biographical essays and explanatory notes in the book (xxiv). Consider Schroeder’s assertions that “the sentimental mode that is hardwired into the liberal contradictions of American national fantasy . . . makes scenes of pain serve as both embodiment of Black inhumanity and proof of Black humanity,” or that Six Hundred Thousand Despots “radically rewrites the humanitarian contract between reader and text” (xxiv, xx). To the extent that these phrases mean anything, they aren’t true.
Faddish jargon like this is bad enough when it merely distracts, but Schroeder’s efforts at profundity repeatedly cross the line into the ridiculous. At one point, for example, he says that “slaveowners enacted their violence in the marketplace by breaking the bodies of the enslaved down into parts (field hands, long fingers for picking cotton, and so on)” (xxv). Presumably, if using a term such as “field hands” constitutes “breaking the body,” Douglass was also breaking it when he wrote “Men of Color, to Arms!” during the war; and Garrison was equally to blame when he prayed, “Let us shiver to atoms those galling fetters, under the pressure of which so many hearts have bursted [sic]. Let us not shackle the limbs of the future workmanship of God.”2
In another place, Schroeder interprets Jacobs’s farewell letter to his slave master, Sawyer, in an equally bizarre way. Jacobs wrote, “when I have got settled I will give you further satisfaction,” which Schroeder sees as “a play on words,” because “[the term] ‘settled’ often meant putting things in a desired order and closing an account.” He concludes that Jacobs was really “calling for reparations” (112), but it’s more likely that Jacobs just meant . . . settled.
Schroeder also takes unwarranted—and, frankly, unscholarly—intuitive leaps in his understandable eagerness to laud Jacobs’s heroism. He claims, for example, that Jacobs “argued his case brilliantly” at his desertion trial, for which there is no evidence (175). He presumes that Jacobs was disturbed at the prospect of “killing life for profit [sic]” while serving aboard whaling ships, even though we have no reason to suspect that Jacobs found the harvesting of whales objectionable (123). He assumes that Jacobs considered himself in “an ethical bind” due to the fact that “the more whales [the ship’s crew] killed, the more money he earned and the more likely he would be able to help his sister,” but it’s more likely that Jacobs—who wrote “my pride would not allow me to let a man feed and clothe me for nothing, I would work the ends of my fingers off first”—jumped at the chance to support himself and his family (121, 41). Schroeder even concludes with a brief essay asserting that the portrait of an unknown man held at Philadelphia’s African American Museum is of Jacobs—and even includes the picture as a frontispiece of the book, with Jacobs’s name attached—but later admits that he has no solid evidence: “let’s hope that this is a picture of John Jacobs” (195, emphasis added).
Other parts of Schroeder’s essay are merely sloppy. He never quite tells us, for example, whether the London version of Jacobs’s memoir was revised by Jacobs or by someone else—in an endnote, he says he doesn’t know—but then quotes passages from it as Jacobs’s own words (279, 5). He quotes a man named Slocum describing one of Jacobs’s sailing voyages without ever telling us that Slocum wrote a diary of that voyage. And he resorts to the childish euphemism “the n-word” because he considers the word “nigger” inappropriate in all circumstances—but then reprints the word in full whenever Jacobs used it in his narrative, which was often (276; e.g., 9, 10, 11).
These flaws are regrettable because they detract from the magnificent story of a man of exceptional virtue. The patience and intellect Jacobs needed to engineer his flight from slavery, the courage and steadfastness necessary to make a life of adventure on the seas, the eloquent indignation with which he describes his experiences in captivity, and, most of all, the calm and unshakable self-esteem reflected in every line of his book are striking, even thrilling. A vivid example of Douglass’s insistence that personal pride is the indispensable foundation of liberty, Jacobs wrote with a ferocious calm, “God created me a freeman and with His assistance I will die one. . . . The slaveholder who gets my labour shall pay as much as it is worth for it, and his life, if possible, with it” (31–32). His laconic references to the brutality of slavery—and his refusal to “trouble readers with any fishing stories”—bespeak a man of focus and candor (51). “Liberty,” he wrote with his distinctive straightforwardness, is “the fountain of all our joy” (50).
Sickened at the religious and political hypocrisy of slave masters in the South and their willing collaborators in the North—who professed a religion that Jacobs thought incompatible with slavery and who boasted of their allegiance to a land of freedom while holding human beings in bondage—Jacobs thought most Americans “would sell their God, and worship the gold. . . . Woe to that country where the sun of liberty has to rise up out of a sea of blood” (72). When the Civil War broke out, he told Harriet that “if the American flag is to be planted on the altar of freedom, then I am ready to be offered on that altar” (222).
Yet he chose to stay in Britain, or on British ships, throughout the hostilities. We do not know why (or, as Schroeder characteristically puts it, we are “foreclosed by the Scylla of archival erasure and the Charybdis of uniform standards for historical evidence” [183]). Nor do we know why he chose to return to Massachusetts in 1870 or 1871, along with his white English wife, Eleanor, and their three children.
Finally, we know nothing about what he thought of America after emancipation, because no writing of his from the postwar period survives. He had predicted in 1855 that “the oppressor’s rod shall be broken. . . . The day must come; it will come” (73). But even after the South was defeated, and the slaves were freed, the vast challenges of Reconstruction and the era of Jim Crow must have seemed daunting. It is unfortunate to have no record of his impressions of that era.
Jacobs died in Massachusetts in 1873. Garrison spoke at his funeral. “Branded a chattel slave from his birth,” he recalled, Jacobs had asserted his “right to be free . . . in every situation leading an upright life, exhibiting a manly spirit, and commanding the respect of all who knew him.”3 For all its flaws, Schroeder’s book gives us the rare opportunity to read the man’s own words for ourselves—and thus to get to know and respect him, too.