Jonathan Schroeder ’99
A pivotal first-person account of slavery in the United States lay dormant in Australia for a century and a half until a literary scholar’s curiosity led him to it. The scholar, Jonathan D.S. Schroeder ’99, returned to Milton this month as a Heyburn Lecturer and shared his amazing journey toward resurfacing John Swanson Jacobs’s story.
“Who was John Jacobs?” asked Schroeder, the editor of Jacobs’ The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, published in full this year by the University of Chicago Press. “At the very least, he was the brother of Harriet Jacobs and an ally and friend of Frederick Douglass, two of the most important Black writers of the 19th century.”
Jacobs was born into slavery in North Carolina and was enslaved for 24 years before he escaped in 1839 and joined a whaling voyage, during which he taught himself to read and write. From there, he traveled extensively, returning to the U.S. to participate in the abolitionist movement before striking out again as a sailor and citizen of the world.
Schroeder rediscovered Jacobs’s narrative through an internet search in 2016 while he was reading a biography of Harriet—whose book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was a groundbreaking work and the first published account of slavery written by a formerly enslaved Black woman in the United States. He learned that Harriet’s son Joseph and her brother, John, had gone to Australia, where The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots first appeared in a Sydney newspaper in 1855.
The New York Times in May detailed Schroeder’s research and the narrative’s importance as an uncensored, furious indictment of American slavery. During his lecture, Schroeder, a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, described his motivation to give Jacobs’s narrative the platform it deserved in the U.S., where it had never been published.
“In 2016, I could not say what I now know: that the rediscovery of John Jacobs’s narrative represents the most important recovery of an autobiographical slave narrative on record,” Schroeder explained to students. “What I could do was ask the question, ‘How can one do justice to this text?’” He wrote a biography of Jacobs that accompanies the original text.
“His own words constitute the strongest proof of who he was and what he stood for, for John Jacobs wrote and spoke fearlessly,” Schroeder said. “Here, we might invoke the Milton motto, ‘Dare to be true.’ I think it’s important to ask ‘What does it mean to tell the truth? And in what conditions or situations can telling the truth actually make a change?’”
The Henry R. Heyburn ’39 Lecture in History Fund was established in 1991 to support an annual lecture in history and commemorate Mr. Heyburn’s love of history and geography and his many years of association with Milton as a student, parent, and Trustee. In addition to his lecture to the Upper School, Schroeder spent time with students in English and history classes during his visit.
