John Swanson Jacobs’s remarkable 1855 autobiographical slave narrative,
The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, was lost until it
was found in 2016 in an Australian archive. Writing from the other side of the world, beyond the reach of American law and humanitarian authority, John Jacobs—brother of Harriet Jacobs and friend of Frederick Douglass—demonstrates the potential of unfiltered, unapologetic Black writing to speak truth to power. Literary Historian Jonathan Schroeder, who found and has now brought to life this remarkable manuscript, describes how John S. Jacobs’s world-altering words compel us to reckon with America as a nation that, in 1776, commenced two experiments at once:
one in democracy, the other in tyranny.
