The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots

Lost on the other side of the world since 1855, the story of John Swanson Jacobs finally returns to America. This student edition reproduces his narrative in full and presents it on its own without any editorial or biographical apparatus. For one hundred and sixty-nine years, a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobsbrother of Harriet Jacobswas buried in a pile of newspapers in Australia. Jacobss long-lost narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, is a startling and revolutionary discovery. A document like thiswritten 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 abolitionistshas 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 Americas founding documents, and indicting all citizens who maintained the racist and intolerable status quo. Reproduced in full, this narrativewhich entwines with that of his sister and with the life of their friend Frederick Douglasshere 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. 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.