"No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs"

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.