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John S. Jacobs

John Swanson Jacobs was a Black author and abolitionist. After escaping from slavery in North Carolina, for a time he worked in whaling and other employment that took him around the world. In 1861, an edited autobiography entitled A True Tale of Slavery was published in four consecutive editions of the London weekly The Leisure Hour. He had left the manuscript for the autobiography with acquaintances. However, the unabridged and uncensored version, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, had already been published by him in a Sydney, Australia newspaper in 1855. The Australian version was rediscovered and subsequently republished in 2024. The full autobiography is described among slave narratives as "unique for its global perspective and its uncensored fury". He castigated both the slave holders and the rest of American society for their complicity. John Jacobs also features prominently, under the pseudonym "William", in the classic Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), authored by his sister Harriet Jacobs.

Life
Early life in slavery The enslaved ancestors of John S. Jacobs can be traced back to Tenea and Primus who were transported to North Carolina in the 1720s or early 1730s. In 1792, Maria Knox, the daughter of Tenea's and Primus's daughter Lucy, "pulled off one of the largest and most daring escapes on record" together with Jack Cotton, the father of her children. They sailed to New Bedford with their five children, among them Athena "Theney", Jacobs's future grandmother, but were returned to slavery after nearly six years. John Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1815. His mother was Delilah Horniblow, a slave of the Horniblow family who owned a local tavern. The father of John and his sister Harriet (born 1813) was Elijah Knox, the son of Athena and an unknown father. Elijah Knox, although enslaved, was in some ways privileged because he was an expert carpenter. He died in 1826. John's mother died when he was four years old. He was allowed to continue living with his father, until at the age of nine he was hired out to Dr. James Norcom, the deceased tavern keeper's son-in-law. His sister Harriet, whom her former owner had willed to Norcom's three-year-old daughter, was also living with Norcom. After the death of Horniblow's widow, her slaves were sold at New Year's Day auction 1828, among them John, his grandmother Molly and Molly's son Mark. Being sold at public auction was a traumatic experience for 12-year-old John. He was bought by Dr. Norcom and continued living in the same house as his sister. While enslaved by Norcom, John Jacobs learned basic health care and succeeded in teaching himself to read (only very few slaves were literate), but even when he escaped from slavery as a young adult he was not able to write. Soon Norcom started to harass John's sister Harriet sexually. Hoping to escape his constant harassment, she started a relationship with Samuel Sawyer, a white lawyer, who would later be elected to the House of Representatives. In June 1835, Harriet's situation as Norcom's slave had become unbearable and she decided to escape. Furious, Norcom sold John Jacobs together with Harriet's two children to a slave trader, hoping he would transport them outside the state, thus separating them forever from their mother and sister. But the trader had been secretly in league with Sawyer, the children's father, to whom he sold all three of them. Escape and abolitionism In 1838, John accompanied his new owner Sawyer as his personal servant on his honeymoon trip through the North and got his freedom by simply leaving Sawyer in New York, where slavery had been abolished. Both he himself and his sister make a point of mentioning in their respective memoirs, that John fulfilled his servant's duties to the last, leaving everything in good order and not stealing any money from his master (he took stolen pistols for self defense but it's not clear from who). He had a friend leave a note at the hotel for Sawyer: After unsuccessfully trying to work for his living by day and to attend school at night, in August 1839 he went on a whaling voyage, taking with him all the books he wanted to study. After that, Jacobs undertook other lecture tours for the abolitionist cause on his own. Early in 1849, he went on a 16-day tour together with Frederick Douglass, who had made his escape from slavery in 1838 only weeks before Jacobs had made his. For a short period in 1849, Jacobs, with the help of his sister Harriet, took over the management of the "Anti-Slavery Office and Reading Room" in Rochester, New York, which was situated in the same building as Douglass's newspaper The North Star. In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law which made it easier for slaveholders to force fugitives back into slavery. John S. Jacobs was one of the speakers on rallies protesting against that law. At the end of that year, he went to California to try his luck as a gold miner. Later he went on to Australia together with Harriet's son Joseph, again searching for gold. It is not clear, whether his decision to go to California and on to Australia was caused by the Fugitive Slave Law. His sister explicitly states that the law did not apply to John S., because he did not come to the free states as fugitive, but was brought there by his master. On the other hand, Garrison wrote many years later on occasion of John Jacobs's funeral, that he stayed on in the North until the Fugitive Slave Law was passed and then left the county "knowing that there was no longer any safety for him on our soil." He did not have much success either in California or in Australia, and so went on to England, going to sea from there. When his sister went to Great Britain in 1858 and again in 1867/68, the siblings failed to meet, because on both occasions John was at sea — in 1858, he was in the Middle East, ten years later in India. Still, John S. and Harriet Jacobs always kept in touch by mail. Autobiography (picture taken between 1847 and 1852) The idea to write down their experiences as slaves cannot have been new to the Jacobs siblings. As early as 1845 Frederick Douglass had written A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. John S. himself was the one to urge his sister to write down her story. Abolitionist and feminist Amy Post whom Harriet Jacobs had come to know through John, finally was the person to convince Harriet, who in 1853 started working on her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in January 1861. For well over a century, the only known version of John Jacobs' own narrative was a short version in the four February editions of the London weekly The Leisure Hour in 1861, entitled A True Tale of Slavery. In 2024, historian Jonathan D. S. Schroeder revealed that in 1855 Jacobs had published a version that was nearly twice as long in the Australian newspaper Empire. The publication of Jacobs's full narrative under its original title, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery for the first time since its newspaper appearance gave a wide audience access to Jacobs's complete life story for the first time and without censorship. Writes Schroeder, "Despots strains against the conventions of the slave narrative genre, ultimately turning them inside out. Signally, the narrative refuses the sentimental objectification of Black life in favor of a go-for-broke denunciation of slavery and the state". The first seven chapters of the full narrative narrate Jacobs’s life from his birth up to his escape from slavery in 1839. The second installment covers his whaling voyage of 1839 to 1843 and his reunion with his sister. He also relates the attempts of the Norcom family to recapture her. The final section departs from the conventions of slave narratives and from Jacobs’s life story to offer a critique of the Constitution of the United States, the United States Declaration of Independence, and the Fugitive Slave Act.