John Swanson Jacobs

However, the unabridged and uncensored version, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, had already been published by him in a Sydney, Australia newspaper in 1855.

He was allowed to continue living with his father, until at the age of nine he was hired out to Dr. James Norcom, the deceased tavern keeper's son-in-law.

[9] While enslaved by Norcom, John Jacobs learned basic health care and succeeded in teaching himself to read (only very few slaves were literate),[10] but even when he escaped from slavery as a young adult he was not able to write.

Hoping to escape his constant harassment, she started a relationship with Samuel Sawyer, a white lawyer, who would later be elected to the House of Representatives.

Furious, Norcom sold John Jacobs together with Harriet's two children to a slave trader, hoping he would transport them outside the state, thus separating them forever from their mother and sister.

Both he himself and his sister make a point of mentioning in their respective memoirs, that John fulfilled his servant's duties to the last, leaving everything in good order and not stealing any money from his master (he took stolen pistols for self defense but it's not clear from who).

He had a friend leave a note at the hotel for Sawyer:[12] "Sir — I have left you not to return; when I have got settled I will give you further satisfaction.

"After unsuccessfully trying to work for his living by day and to attend school at night, in August 1839[c] he went on a whaling voyage, taking with him all the books he wanted to study.

[11] After returning after three and a half years, John S. Jacobs, as he called himself after his escape to freedom,[d] became more and more involved with the abolitionists led by William Lloyd Garrison.

[e] For a short period in 1849, Jacobs, with the help of his sister Harriet, took over the management of the "Anti-Slavery Office and Reading Room" in Rochester, New York, which was situated in the same building as Douglass's newspaper The North Star.

[20] On the other hand, Garrison wrote many years later on occasion of John Jacobs's funeral, that he stayed on in the North until the Fugitive Slave Law was passed and then left the county "knowing that there was no longer any safety for him on our soil.

When his sister went to Great Britain in 1858 and again in 1867/68, the siblings failed to meet, because on both occasions John was at sea — in 1858, he was in the Middle East, ten years later in India.

Signally, the narrative refuses the sentimental objectification of Black life in favor of a go-for-broke denunciation of slavery and the state".

Harriet's biographer Jean Fagan Yellin supposes that Elleanor Jacobs severed the ties so that her children would not fall victims to American racism.