The United States governed by six hundred thousand despots A true story of slavery : a rediscovered narrative, with a full biography

Schroeder (Rhode Island School of Design), a literary historian, has published his stunning discovery of the 1855 ex-slave narrative of John Swanson Jacobs, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots. He combines it with a stellar biography, No Longer Yours, as well as a helpful introduction and relevant period letters. John Jacobs was the younger brother of Harriet Jacobs, who fled slavery in 1837, a year before her brother, but remained hidden in North Carolina for seven years before escaping the South. Harriet's powerful story, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, first published in 1861 and recovered just a few decades ago, was unfortunately watered down by white abolitionist Lydia Marie Child. Schroeder restores John Jacobs as Frederick Douglass's co-lecturer on the abolitionist circuit based in Rochester, New York, where "Harriet ran the Anti-Slavery Reading Room above the North Star's office" (p. xviii). John fled America in the 1850s to travel the world, working as a mariner. Publishing his book in Australia, he deemphasized the personal while accentuating the depravity of, and resistance to, slavery. This is an important addition to both primary and secondary literature of Black abolitionist activism and ex-slave narratives. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Philip F. Rubio, North Carolina A&T State University