The story behind this publication is in some ways cooler than the book itself and perfect for Juneteenth.
Schroeder, who wrote the biography of the author that is included in this publication, is a literary historian, and he knew the story of Harriet Jacobs, the abolitionist who famously wrote about her life and abuse while enslaved, her secret relationship with a white politician and her escape to freedom in the 1800s. Schroeder searched a database of historical documents for details on Harriet's son. He wasn't getting far, so he tried another search term focused on Harriet's brother, Johnathan S. Jacobs.
That is how he stumbled upon an autobiography by John Swanson Jacobs, first published in Australia in 1855 and largely lost to time - until now. Six hundred thousand despots is a reference to the number of slave owners in the U.S. at the time.
John Swanson Jacobs was born in 1815 in Edenton, N.C., and he was born a sixth-generation slave. Today, he's a footnote in the life of his older sister, Harriet Jacobs, who is the best-known Black female author of the 19th century. He was an abolitionist in the U.S. and U.K. He was a gold miner in California and Australia. He was a sailor on four oceans and four continents. And he was an expat for nearly all of his free life.
He had become a gold miner after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. He left the U.S. for California, and then for Australia, which was going through its own gold rush at the same time as America's gold rush. And he eventually struck it rich or at least did well in the Australian gold rush. And that gave him a rare moment of time off from the kind of labor that dominated most of his life to go to Sydney and to finish the life story that he had begun practicing in the 1840s as an abolitionist in William Lloyd Garrison's Boston and Frederick Douglass' Rochester.
This is a recreation of his autobiography, and then a biography of what we know about him now with the help of time.
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