In 1855 the Australian newspaper The Empire published a 20,000-word article under the byline “A Fugitive Slave.” Arrestingly titled “The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots,” it described the author’s life under and escape from slavery. It also offered an unflinching critique of his home country and its framing documents, the Declaration of Independence and “that devil in sheepskin called the Constitution.”

More than 150 years later, Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, PhD’16, who had just completed his doctorate in English Language and Literature at UChicago, found the article in an archival newspaper database while searching for something else.

Schroeder immediately recognized its importance—there are only about 300 written accounts of slavery in existence—and soon after, he recognized its author as well.

As he read the piece, names and other identifying details in the text suggested to Schroeder that the writer could have been only one person: John Swanson Jacobs, whose sister, Harriet Jacobs, published the canonical 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Schroeder was able to confirm his hunch before long—Jacobs had inserted his real name into the second half of the narrative.

The article seemed to have been lost to time. Despite its power and obvious scholarly significance, Schroeder had never seen it referenced anywhere. Its rediscovery sent him into “a tizzy,” he says. Before long, Schroeder had secured a contract to publish a new edition of the text, along with a biography of its author. That book, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography (University of Chicago Press, 2024), was published this past summer.

Jacobs’s text is unusual among so-called slave narratives of its time, most of which were heavily shaped by White editors to incite sympathy for the abolitionist cause. Despots, by contrast, appears to have been written by Jacobs alone and edited only minimally by the staff of The Empire. “Outside of American jurisdiction and humanitarian authority,” Schroeder says, “[Jacobs] had more freedom to speak in an unfiltered way and write in an unfiltered way.” The result is a markedly different approach—one rooted in argument rather than mawkishness.

Schroeder says the text is also distinctive in that Jacobs doesn’t include a narrative account of his own life focusing on his suffering. Instead, Jacobs “supplies readers with a revolutionary performance of his life,” Schroeder says, “by virtue of his powers of communication.” Understood this way, the text is itself an enactment and demonstration of liberation.

Biographical research offered a new direction for Schroeder, now a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design, who was trained as a literary scholar, not a historian. The original project that led to his serendipitous encounter with Despots was his dissertation, which explored the idea of nostalgia. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nostalgia was a medical diagnosis of pathological homesickness, often given to returned soldiers. Over time, the term’s meaning shifted to the one we know today. “I was basically slowly and diligently tracing the way that this concept changed,” Schroeder explains.

For one chapter of the dissertation, Schroeder was trying to answer the question of how enslaved people described their sense of displacement and, in particular, how they constructed their own versions of nostalgia.

For that chapter, Schroeder read Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents. In doing research about the book, he learned Harriet’s son, Joseph, had died, seemingly by suicide, while working as a miner in Australia. He wondered if Joseph’s death had been attributed to nostalgia—hence, the archival newspaper search that led him to John Swanson Jacobs and Despots.

Schroeder’s research into Jacobs uncovered a fascinating life. Jacobs had been born into slavery and was, from an early age, intent on escaping it. When he was in his twenties, he finally got the chance. Jacobs fled from his enslaver, a North Carolina congressman, while they were on a trip to New York. He lived in the Northeast and held a variety of jobs over the next decade: sailor, abolitionist lecturer, oyster saloon owner.

The passage of the second Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed for the seizure of escaped slaves living in free states, upended Jacobs’s life. Along with his nephew, Joseph, Jacobs went to California and then to Australia, seeking to outrun the reach of the law. Midway through his five-year stay in Australia, he published Despots.

In the narrative, Jacobs is openly contemptuous of American laws, politicians, and institutions. “When shown your oppressive laws, you point us to the Congress of the United States, as if something could be done there,” he writes. “What has Congress ever done for freedom?”

He sees slavery as a sign of the country’s essential moral deficiency: “If a man steals my horse, he is a horse-thief; but if he steals me from my mother, why he is a respectable slaveholder, a member of Congress, or President of the United States; while in fact he is as far beneath the horse-thief as I am above a horse,” he writes. “I cannot agree with that statesman who said ‘what the law makes property, is property.’ What is law, but the will of the people—a mirror to reflect a nation’s character?”

For Schroeder, Jacobs’s forceful tone is reminiscent of his dissertation adviser, the late Lauren Berlant, as well as James Baldwin, both of whom were skeptical of the notion that feeling and sentimentality can communicate truths or reliably guide action. In fact, Schroeder sees the last quarter of Despots, in which Jacobs writes most about politics and least about the content of his own life, as “the most purely autobiographical, the most pure writing of the self.”

That sense of the self is lacking in many of the extant historical records about Black Americans living under slavery. In fact, finding records of any kind can be challenging when writing about historically marginalized groups. Despite these challenges, Schroeder was able to amass a surprising amount of information about not just John but the entire Jacobs family, which he hopes to turn into a multigenerational biography. (He is also at work on Lauren Berlant, A Reader [Duke University Press, forthcoming] with Lauren Michele Jackson, PhD’19, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, PhD’18, as well as a book based on his dissertation.)

Schroeder thinks a Jacobs family history will find a ready audience: The success of his edition of Despots, which received wide acclaim, taught him “how hungry people are … for Black history from below, and for strong denunciations of American tyranny.”