An NC slave’s forgotten story reappears after a century, speaking truth to power

By 1855, John Swanson Jacobs had fled slavery in North Carolina, escaped on a whaling ship, circled the globe from Peru to Alaska, tried his hand at gold mining and — in his spare time — penned the story of his life in chains.

His account of bondage in Edenton described men flogged 100 times and doused with brandy to increase the pain, and white owners so cruel they whipped other people’s slaves for failing to tip their hats.

But more than this, Jacobs kept his focus squarely on the people, customs and laws that made slavery possible — starting with the framers of the Constitution, a document he called “that devil in sheepskin.”

This indictment of American democracy, written by a Black man before the Civil War, would have meant execution at home.

“There is not a sworn United States officer but what has sworn to act the part of the bloodhound in hunting me down, if I dare to visit the land of Stars and Stripes, the home of the brave, and land of the free,” he wrote.

An Australian newsroom and an unearthed story

Jacobs’ words would have died along with him but for two accidents of history:

▪ In 1855, he walked into an Australian newsroom and asked the editors for a copy of the Constitution and a volume of American history. By the time the puzzled newsmen finished questioning the well-dressed, well-spoken stranger, they agreed to publish his fierce autobiography, which vanished almost as quickly as it hit the streets.

▪ And thankfully, in 2016, historian Jonathan Schroeder unearthed Jacobs’ story by accident while digging through digital archives. Once he realized the scope of his find, Schroeder presented it for a new century.

The result is “The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots,” a newly published book that contains both Jacobs’ original document and Schroeder’s deeply researched biography and context.

In rescuing Jacobs from history’s lost-and-found, Schroeder introduces North Carolina readers to a writer who not only experienced the worst of America but pointed a righteous finger at all those responsible, especially self-described Christians.

“They steal infants from their mothers to buy Bibles to send to heathens,” Jacobs wrote, “and flog women to unpaid toil to support their churches. This is what they do for the glory of God and the good of souls.”

Fewer than 100 firsthand slave narratives survive, Schroeder notes, some of them forgotten. But when he sought advice from colleagues on how to handle Jacobs’ life story, he drew mostly shrugs because nobody could think of a comparable find.

“If they were forgotten, they were still sitting in libraries,” Schroeder said in an interview last week. “The conclusion I came to was nothing has ever been so thoroughly lost as this.”

‘No longer yours’

As a slave in Edenton, John Swanson Jacobs had five owners in 18 years. The last one, whom he described as kindly by comparison, took him on a trip through New York and left him unguarded to run errands. When Jacobs fled and left a note behind, he signed it, “No longer yours.”

But until now, his sister Harriet Jacobs owned the better-known story, escaping her bondage by hiding for seven years inside an attic so small she couldn’t stand. Her autobiography, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” is standard classroom reading and her quotations appear at NC Freedom Park downtown.

Schroeder, a lecturer at Rhode Island School of Design, was researching Harriet Jacobs’ son’s experiences as an Australian gold miner when he stumbled on her brother’s narrative. It appears in type tiny enough almost to require a microscope, but its words still sizzle.

Though Jacobs grew to prominence as an abolitionist, touring and lecturing alongside Frederick Douglass, he remained largely unknown. He appeared in his sister’s book under the pseudonym William. When the British journal “The Leisure Hour” published his story, the editors cut it in half and rewrote nearly every sentence.

But in “Six Hundred Thousand Despots,” Jacobs gives an unvarnished look at American life, untouched even by the white abolitionists who edited or wrote many of the surviving slave narratives.

A different kind of slave narrative

Jacobs’ story is unique, Schroeder notes, because he does not linger on the gruesome details readers expect from slave stories. Even as he writes of things like the floggings while doused with brandy, he holds back:

“It would be in vain for me to attempt to give a description of my feelings while standing under the auctioneer’s hammer,” he wrote, and, “I could mention other slaves that have been shot to my knowledge, but why should I? If one has been shot, and the laws justify the shooting of that one, every slave in the States is liable to be shot.”

Jacobs saves his energy for his merciless attack on the American society that allowed this misery to exist. He spares no one but the Quakers, and especially not Northerners who tut-tutted over slavery’s evil but allowed compromise after compromise.

”Rather than make himself into an example of the horrors of slavery,” Schroeder wrote, “John Jacobs turns his life into an arc of refusal. And what he refuses is America itself.”

Some words, and some lives, are so resistant to history’s indifference that continents and centuries can’t keep them hidden.