GLC Book Talk: Jonathan Schroeder, "The U.S. Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots"

GLC Book Talk: David Blight in conversation with Jonathan Schroeder about "The U.S. Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots"
David Blight in conversation with Jonathan Schroeder (Lecturer, Literary Arts and Studies, Rhode Island School of Design) about his critical edition of John Swanson Jacobs’s autobiography, "The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery" (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
John Swanson Jacobs’ long-lost narrative, "The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots," is a startling and revolutionary discovery. John Jacobs-brother of Harriet Jacobs, a radical abolitionist, sailor, and miner-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.