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