Historic Discovery: Rhode Island Professor Unearths Fugitive Slave’s Long-Lost Autobiography

There are few first-person accounts by slaves about their experience in America. That’s why a local college professor’s inadvertent discovery of a long-lost autobiography, written by a man who escaped bondage, is rare and exciting.

Jonathan Schroeder teaches fiction literature at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Schroeder believes finding this true story was a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.

“I think my head exploded and my first reaction to my head exploding was this can’t be real,” said Schroeder.

While doing online research, the professor stumbled upon the document written by fugitive slave John Swanson Jacobs.

It was printed in an Australian newspaper in 1855.

Jacobs had previously escaped to New Bedford where he met famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass who, according to Schroeder, introduced “the possibility of decrying slavery by calling out slave owners and politicians and American law by their names.”

And that’s what Jacobs did.

He escaped slave catchers a second time aboard a New Bedford whaling ship and wound up as a gold prospector in Australia.

It was there he persuaded the abolitionist newspaper, the Empire, to print his autobiography. He called it “The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots.”

“The 600,000 Despots refers to the slave owners and their families who owned the three million plus enslaved people in the United States in 1850,” said Schroeder.

Schroeder has now re-published the long-lost article along with a full biography of Jacobs.

According to Schroeder, what made Jacobs’ writing so extraordinary “is the fact that he is writing from outside the United States without fear of reprisal…in an unfiltered, unapologetic manner.”

Schroeder has recently received two fellowships to write another book tracing eleven generations of the Jacobs family