Jonathan Schroeder ’99 Returns as Heyburn Speaker

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 last fall 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’s 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.”

Schroeder discovered 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.

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?’”

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 United States, 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.”