Lost on the other side of the world since 1855, the story of John Swanson Jacobs finally returns to America. For one hundred and sixty-nine years, a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs-brother of Harriet Jacobs-was buried in a pile of newspapers in Australia. Jacobs-s long-lost narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, is a startling and revolutionary discovery. A document like this-written by an ex-slave and ex-American, in language charged with all that can be said about America outside America, untampered with and unedited by white abolitionists-has never been seen before. A radical abolitionist, sailor, and miner, John Jacobs has a life story that is as global as it is American. Born into slavery, by 1855, he had fled both the South and the United States altogether, becoming a stateless citizen of the world and its waters. That year, he published his life story in an Australian newspaper, far from American power and its threats.
