Jonathan D. S. Schroeder - "The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots"
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder will discuss his book The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, a rediscovered narrative from John Swanson Jacobs, an ex-slave and ex-American. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
At the Seminary Co-op
In partnership with the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture
About the Book: 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.
About the Author: Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a historian, literary critic, and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2016, shortly after receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago, he rediscovered John Swanson Jacobs’s long lost autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery, in an Australian archive. Republished by The University of Chicago Press in 2024 and profiled in the New York Times, NPR, and elsewhere, his edition returns this incredible narrative to America after 169 years, and features the first full-length biography of Harriet Jacobs’s globe-spanning brother, No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs.
Schroeder is also the co-editor of Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Material Turn, and the co-director of Congress of the Birds, a 501(c)3 organization that annually rescues, rehabilitates, and releases over 2,000 of Rhode Island’s native and migratory birds. The recipient of long-term fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, and the American Antiquarian Society, Schroeder is currently editing Lauren Berlant: A Reader, writing Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia, and planning and building a 42-acre forest wildlife rehabilitation center in Chepachet, Rhode Island.
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