American Antiquarian Society
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The remarkable story of John Swanson Jacobs—lost for 168 years—was rediscovered in 2016 by historian Jonathan Schroeder. In a conversation with AAS member Manisha Sinha (elected October 2006), Schroeder will discuss his incredible discovery of Jacobs’s first-person slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, first published in Australia in 1855.
The brother of writer Harriet Jacobs and a friend of Frederick Douglass, John Jacobs is singular among ex-slave authors because he published and lived his life overseas, beyond the reach of American law and humanitarian authority. By leaving the United States after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Jacobs doubled down on the radical abolitionist credo, “No Union with Slaveholders,” and found space, on the other side of the world, to speak truth to American power in a manner virtually unparalleled within America’s borders.
Accompanying the autobiography is Schroeder’s full-length biography of John Jacobs, No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs. The product of seven years of archival research, the account traces Jacobs’s many lives: slave, abolitionist, miner, sailor, and Black citizen of the world.
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a historian of literature, medicine, and emotion. He is the co-editor of Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Material Turn (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), a collection that considers literature’s most famous whaling captain in terms of Melville and our moment’s seemingly boundless interest in the nonhuman world. Schroeder is also a state-licensed wildlife rehabilitator and co-director of Congress of the Birds, a non-profit organization that annually rehabilitates over 1,000 wild birds—virtually every injured and orphaned wild bird found in the state of Rhode Island.
Schroeder is the author of No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs, and editor of Jacobs’s lost autobiography, published by the University of Chicago Press (2024) as a dual volume. This work was completed during three successive long-term fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, and, most importantly for the present occasion, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society in 2020-21.
Essays, articles, and translations by Schroeder can be found in American Literary History, Critical Inquiry, Theory, Culture & Society, and A Cultural History of the Sea. He is currently putting together Lauren Berlant: A Reader, finishing up Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia, which is under contract with Harvard University Press, and building a wildlife rehabilitation land center in 42 acres of forest.
Schroeder's work was reported in the article "A Furious, Forgotten Slave Narrative Resurfaces After Nearly 170 Years" in the May 23, 2024 issue of the New York Times.