Slave, Abolitionist, Expatriate: The Lives of John S. Jacobs (1815-1873)

FAIN: FEL-267832-20

Jonathan David Shelly Schroeder
University of Warwick (Coventry CV47AL England)

Research and writing leading to a biography of John S. Jacobs (1815-1875) and a critical edition of Jacobs’s 1855 autobiographical slave narrative.

This NEH fellowship will support the completion of a project with two components: a book-length biography of John Swanson Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs’s brother and Frederick Douglass’s protégé, and a critical edition of his rediscovered autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery. The publication of this 1855 narrative will give scholars the unprecedented opportunity to compare two versions of the same slave narrative in order to understand the impact of white abolitionist editors on the latter version. This will be the first biography of John Jacobs and the most chronologically extensive history of a black family from enslavement to emancipation. It will also serve as an essential companion piece to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which now rivals Douglass’s Narrative in importance for the study of the history of slavery. This project is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.