Fearless Speech: Radical Truth-Telling of John Swanson Jacobs - Jonathan Schroeder at PC

Summary

Highlights

• Jonathan Schroeder's talk sheds light on the fascinating yet largely forgotten narrative of John Swanson Jacobs 📜.
• Jacobs' life, from self-emancipated slave to a transatlantic sailor, exemplifies resilience and global awareness 🚢.
• The rediscovered autobiography called 'The United States governed by 600,000 despots' illustrates Jacobs' bold critique of American democracy and its failures 📖.
• Jacobs' narrative challenges the romanticized view of American progress, highlighting a dual history of democracy and authoritarianism 🇺🇸.
• Schroeder’s discovery in an Australian archive demonstrates the unexpected paths historical research can take and its significant impacts 🕵️‍♂️.
• Schroeder contextualizes Jacobs' autobiography within broader abolitionist efforts, emphasizing its unique contributions to understanding the complexities of freedom and oppression 🕊️.

Key Takeaways

• John Swanson Jacobs was not just a historical figure but a radical truth-teller who challenged American norms from abroad, making his voice a crucial part of 19th-century abolitionist history 💪.
• Jacobs' autobiography was an unexpected discovery, hidden in an Australian archive until Jonathan Schroeder's sleuthing brought it back into the light of day 🔍.
• Unlike many slave narratives, Jacobs emphasized his life post-emancipation, showcasing his global experiences and continuous fight for justice, defying the norms of his time 🌍.
• Schroeder's exploration of Jacobs' life underscores the complex history of America's foundational documents and their implications on issues like slavery and democracy ⚖️.
• The interplay between Jacobs' personal narrative and his critical examination of U.S. political structures provides a timeless critique on liberty and justice 🤔.
• Schroeder restores Jacobs' narrative to its historical prominence, linking past truths with present-day societal challenges 🕰️.

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:30: Introduction to the Humanities Forum and Event Format The chapter introduces the audience to the first Humanities Forum of 2025, setting a formal yet engaging tone. Ian Bernhoft, the coordinator of the Forum, greets an eager audience, differentiating them from those who seek extra credit at the end of the year. He outlines the Forum's objective as an initiative by the humanities program, aimed at bringing together scholars, journalists, thinkers, and academics from across the country.
• 02:30 - 10:00: Introduction of Jonathan Schroeder by Dr. Breen The chapter introduces the format of the campus talks, emphasizing the importance of engaging with new ideas, exploring diverse perspectives, and deepening intellectual life within the community. The typical session includes a 45-minute talk by a speaker, followed by a Q&A session. Notably, students are encouraged to ask the first question during the Q&A period.
• 10:00 - 15:00: John Swanson Jacobs - A Remarkable Discovery The chapter titled 'John Swanson Jacobs - A Remarkable Discovery' mainly focuses on the Q&A session preparation instructions given to participants. Individuals are reminded to wait for the microphone and introduce themselves, for instance, by stating their name and major, like 'My name is Ian and I'm an English major.' The conclusion of the Q&A session is scheduled for 4:45 PM, followed by a reception in the great room where heavy hors d'oeuvres will be served.
• 15:00 - 27:00: John Jacobs' Life at Sea and his Contributions The chapter titled 'John Jacobs' Life at Sea and his Contributions' seems to focus on the nostalgic and grounding practice of disconnecting from electronics and reverting to traditional methods like using pen and paper. The speaker emphasizes being present and attentive without the distractions of technology, possibly drawing a parallel to John Jacobs' way of life or work ethic at sea. This might reflect Jacobs' values or methods amid his maritime experiences and contributions.
• 27:00 - 32:00: Analysis of John Jacobs' Autobiography The chapter begins with instructions to put away personal items and acknowledges opening remarks. It mentions a handover of the microphone to Dr. Breen from the History department, who is introducing the main speaker of the event, Jonathan Schroeder. Jonathan Schroeder is noted as a professor at RDI, highlighting the diverse international presence at the event, including local attendees.
• 32:00 - 40:00: John Jacobs' Influence and Legacy Professor Jonathan Schroers, an expert in English and literary arts, has an impressive academic background and has taught at prestigious universities such as Rybrandise and Warwick. His educational journey includes undergraduate studies at Dartmouth and Brown, establishing a strong connection with Rhode Island, and achieving his PhD from the University of Chicago. Schroers' intellectual work and contributions are notable in his field.
• 40:00 - 50:00: Technology's Role in Rediscovering John Jacobs The chapter titled 'Technology's Role in Rediscovering John Jacobs' introduces the diverse interests and academic background of the speaker, focusing on their analysis of the interaction between man and nature as explored in their first book 'Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn'. The book discusses the impact of materialism in literary works, in this case, Melville's. The chapter promises to explore new insights derived from a different source, suggesting a focus on historical or literary discovery through technology, particularly highlighting a new finding related to a slave, referred to as John Jacobs.
• 50:00 - 57:00: John Jacobs' Critique of American Democracy In this chapter, the focus is on John Jacobs' critique of American democracy as it is addressed through the lens of slave narratives. It emphasizes the importance of first-person accounts and reflections on slavery, which are crucial for studies in both English and history. The narrative highlights the rarity of new slave narratives and directs readers to a valuable resource, 'Documenting the South' at UNC, for research purposes related to slave sources.
• 57:00 - 80:00: Conclusion and Relevance to Modern Times The chapter discusses the rediscovery of a historical document originally published in Australia in 1855. This document had remained undiscovered for years until recently being published as a book by the University of Chicago Press. The chapter may delve into the journey of its rediscovery and its publication significance in the modern context.

Fearless Speech: Radical Truth-Telling of John Swanson Jacobs - Jonathan Schroeder at PC Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 good afternoon everybody and welcome to the first Humanities Forum of 2025 you all are the The Cutting Edge crowd right not the uh the end of year desperate extra credit pack in the Halls crowd of late December legit all right my name is Ian bernhoft I'm the coordinator of the Forum which is an initiative the humanities program bringing Scholars journalists thinkers academics from around the country around
• 00:30 - 01:00 the world to campus to so that you can hear new ideas um explore diverse perspectives deepen your intellectual life outside of class and do it all within our community uh the format if you haven't been to one of these before is we'll hear from our speaker talk for about 45 minutes after which there's a Q&A period and you should know that it falls upon a student to ask the first question so during
• 01:00 - 01:30 Q&A you can't wait for your props it's going to be you uh what I do ask you to do is when you've raised your hand you've got that question formulated you wait for the microphone to get to you and just introduce yourself to say my name is Ian and I'm an English major or whatever it is right uh after so Q&A wraps up like 4:45 pretty sharp after which there's a reception down the hall in the great room and we've got some pretty nice you know morsels heavy or derves I think they're called in the business World which sounds a little
• 01:30 - 02:00 gross but is actually really delicious so um join us for that uh in the meantime here's what you need to do you need to close down those beautiful Electronics you got going back to the old school of of pencil and paper um or pen and paper I know I know but you know what it's it's a way that you can actually be in the room and not skittering all over the globe and I think so so it's okay so you
• 02:00 - 02:30 put away your stuff you ask the first question you go down the hall for the reception I think that's all you need to know let me pass a microphone to my colleague in History Dr Breen who's going to introduce our speaker it's my great excuse me it's my great pleasure to introduce to you today Jonathan Schroeder a professor at RDI so we get people from all over the world and sometimes we get people from just
• 02:30 - 03:00 around the corner it's uh it's nice Jonathan schroers um a professor in English uh and literary arts and studies he's taught at Ry brandise Warwick um and that followed his education he went undergrad uh Dartmouth Brown so he's got this deep Rhode Island Connection and then uh got his PhD from the University of Chicago his intellectual work work is
• 03:00 - 03:30 diverse um his first book as I think it is is the one Ahab Unbound uh Melville and the materialist turn which is trying to understand the interaction of man and nature um that came out in the University of Minnesota uh today though we're going to be looking at a different Source his his interests are varied wide and varied and this is a this is a really a remarkable work and I'm glad you guys are here to hear this um he found a new slave
• 03:30 - 04:00 narrative uh slave narrative is important genre for uh people who teach English a very important genre for people like me who teach history this is a this is a really interesting thing to get the first person accounts and Reflections on slavery we don't get many new slave narratives right they're mostly there they're mostly available on a website called documenting the south at a UNC wonderful thing if you ever need to do a research project and want to do one on slave sources go go there
• 04:00 - 04:30 um but he found one and he found one and maybe he'll tell us how he found it I don't know I haven't heard the story yet uh but he found one that was published in Australia In 1855 it was published in a newspaper in Australia and has been undiscovered since then um and so now this was published last year as a book um out of the University of Chicago um by the University to Chicago press so this is a
• 04:30 - 05:00 really exciting exciting Discovery and this has gotten a lot of attention in the media in fact it was sort of weird how it came out usually what all what what people like us do is we just talk for like a year about we got a book coming out by the way we're gonna we're gonna and we tell everyone we know like by the way talk it up they you guys had a pretty good embargo going on where people weren't talking about it and then the news came out and it was it was in the New York
• 05:00 - 05:30 Times when this book got released uh and has been covered many other places including all things considered the Boston Globe WNY WNYC and other places so he's really gotten some traction with this work it's a really interesting work it's really recent work um that he's been taking out um and uh and he will tell us about that today he has a couple other works in Project again as you would expect they are interesting and diverse one is on his Lauren Berlant his major professor
• 05:30 - 06:00 at his his dissertation adviser at the University of Chicago an important figure um in the academy and another one is prisoners of loss an Atlantic history of nostalgia uh which is under under contract with Harvard University press he's got really interesting work he's really got diverse interests and he's got one more interest that I'll mention which is um he started I think co-founded the Congress of the birds
• 06:00 - 06:30 which is a Rhode Island uh 501c3 which is a charity that is about um rescuing rehabilitating and releasing wild birds um and they've they've done that in they they have a they're engaged in building a land Center 42 acre forest in chip pachet Island so if you are a burder interested in Birds I encourage you to come join us at that reception afterwards and talk about it that'll
• 06:30 - 07:00 that'll certainly be interesting but with no further Ado I will introd I I will turn the mic over to Professor Schroeder to talk about um John Swanson Jacob's narrative thank you I've got I got this got that yeah but yeah thank you for that gracious introduction and which I guess also serves as segue to say that uh you want to volunteer and help save wild animals
• 07:00 - 07:30 um you don't have to talk about this book with me you could just talk about that uh last year we saved uh 2,000 of Rhode Islands wild birds um not my partner and I alone we have about 50 people working with us um but I'm also delighted to be here to talk to you about John Jacobs and about his remarkable autobiography um published in an Australian newspaper
• 07:30 - 08:00 in 1855 this is the first time since 1855 this past year that we've actually been as Americans or people who live in America able to reckon and engage with his language to ask what does it mean what is its significance and why should we be paying attention to this forthright outspoken
• 08:00 - 08:30 Unapologetic unfiltered autobiography one thing I'm probably going to be saying in many ways over and over again is that a book like this published outside of the us in many ways teaches us that what is permissible to say and to write in the US is not as Broad and wide uh a bandwidth as we might be led to think when we think of
• 08:30 - 09:00 America as a democracy that the limits on Civic speech affect people and they affect people differently depending on who you are what kind of identities you inhabit and so on so to speak and write as a black man in America means that you might be subject to different repercussions then if I were to speak and write or if uh you if you occupy any other different kind of positions if you
• 09:00 - 09:30 were to speak and right um there might be more threat involved there might be the threat of violence there might be the kind of emotional threat that opening yourself up in public uh creates John jacobs's autobiography and the lives he lived that didn't make it into the pages of his autobiography because this is two books in one this is his autobiography and then this is the biography that I wrote about him that I
• 09:30 - 10:00 wrote about him to explain why he's so so remarkable in ways that are invisible in the autobiography these different lives serve as important sites of memory and countermemory that I believe we need to recall today the title of his autobiography the United States governed by 600,000 despots remains arguably as relevant today as when it was first published in
• 10:00 - 10:30 1855 rather than succumb to political disappointment and despair this is a text and this might be why it's relevant today that trains us to challenge this nation's authoritarian history it teaches us also that if on social media we get the usually overly dramatized exaggerated claims that everything is new all the time that actually America has had a long
• 10:30 - 11:00 authoritarian history that goes alongside its Democratic history for John Jacobs the story of America is not the story of the expansion of democracy and the overcoming of the nation's original sin it's not about the expansion of civil rights and the gradual enfranchisement of all people who live here rather his is a story of a Nation found
• 11:00 - 11:30 on two experiments at once one in democracy the other in tyranny and right now at a moment when inequality to speak of nothing but just inequality is at its Most Extreme More extreme than even in the era that was associated with robber barons and was called the Gilded Age we might we can say that we know all too well which side of this which one of these experiments is
• 11:30 - 12:00 winning um and as has been mentioned I stumbled upon this work in an Australian archive uh in 2016 I actually remember the day October 26 2016 because I was it was like 11:30 I had a job application due at midnight um I had hit send finished like tweaking the same cover letter that i' had been writing for like three months as if that was going to
• 12:00 - 12:30 make a difference um and because if you do a PhD you're trained to be a masochist I decided that the best way to blow off steam would be then to do some research um I'll talk a little bit about this in a second um but when I found this narrative it had been lost since 1855 and lost in part because what happens to old newspapers when they're no longer new Well Physical newspapers wind up if they're saved at all in
• 12:30 - 13:00 libraries attics and probably auctions or wherever else old newspapers go as an americanist meaning someone who studies the history and literature and culture of America or more broadly the Americas I immediately knew that this was a super important Discovery for John Jacobs was not just someone who was coming out of the distance complet completely
• 13:00 - 13:30 Anonymous he was the brother of Harriet Jacobs and the friend and Ally of Frederick Douglas which is another way of saying the most important um the two most important black authors of the 19th century arguably some of the most important authors in American history um and the authors of the most widely read and studied autobiographical
• 13:30 - 14:00 slave narratives incidents in the life of a slave girl written by herself there's an irony in that last part of that title and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas and American slave another irony that there would be slavery in a democratic country many of you here have read these works if you haven't you've also likely encountered their influence without
• 14:00 - 14:30 realizing it because they inform works by authors and artists like Tony Morrison and K gson whose broken Earth uh Trilogy is an amazing work of sci-fi and fantasy Coulson Whitehead Simone Lee the artist who represented uh America at the Venice bional the last Venice banal Glen Lian and torquas Dyson Douglas and Harry jacobs's narratives have emerged Ed over the past
• 14:30 - 15:00 half century as radiant objects for understanding men's and women's lives under slavery the problems awaiting African-Americans after slavery and the potential of black lives to thrive against the odds since writing his narrative however John Jacobs has become or had become a footnote in his sister Harriet's life yet during during his own life he
• 15:00 - 15:30 once stood side by side with some of the most important and daring transatlantic abolitionist of his day William and Ellen craft Martin Delaney William Lloyd Garrison Frederick Douglas George Thompson and others on both sides of the Atlantic in the US and the UK because he led a life that was not only daring but also largely a life where he was working outside the US and that daring life outside America
• 15:30 - 16:00 is one that we have precious few opportunities to learn about the story that I'm telling is also a story really about what can you do with the technology you have when documents start to get digitized well then all of a sudden that old newspaper lost in a stack becomes findable again because we have that Apple F or that control F or that search uh search uh function
• 16:00 - 16:30 we can search for keywords we can use more creative ways of finding texts that a scholar working 30 years ago would have just thrown their hands up because what are you going to do when faced with tens of billions of words your life would be spent just combing through newspaper and finding not what you want John Jacobs however as I'm now saying was not just Frederick Douglas's
• 16:30 - 17:00 Ally not just Harry jacobs's brother he was also remarkable in his own right and that's kind of what this slide starts to hint at um we see an amazing rediscovered uh dearo type of Frederick Douglas in the middle we see the only known image of his sister Harry Jacobs from 1890 I think 1890 or 1887 when she's in her 80s and then we see the only known image of John
• 17:00 - 17:30 Jacobs or what I think to be what I think is the only known image this is a portrait uh painted in 1848 and the process of figuring out how do you know what someone looks like if you have no photographs of them or no portraits of them uh and you just have a little bit of scraps of text that say oh he had light colored skin and could pass for Italian that's kind of analogous to what it means to write a biography of someone who's been lost to history how can you really say what someone was
• 17:30 - 18:00 like how can you even sketch the outlines of that person's life yet the outlines are remarkable a self- emancipated slave and a transatlantic abolitionist a sailor on four oceans a resident of four continents Don Jacobs was an African ex American who chose to become a citizen of the world rather than remain in a nation that had enslaved six generations
• 18:00 - 18:30 of his family and was not about to Grant citizenship to him by 1855 when his autobiography was published in Sydney he had given up a promising career as an abolitionist and that word abolitionist um we might just say that that's a synonym for someone who seeks to bring about the end of an injustice um someone who when we say an
• 18:30 - 19:00 anti-slavery activist that's only one type of abolitionist there are prison abolitionists today who seek to bring about uh the end of the warehousing of people in prisons uh without any real uh effort to actually rehabilitate those people by 1855 he' be given up this promising career the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which is one of the most heinous laws passed in American history which
• 19:00 - 19:30 commanded and compelled everyone in America to help southern slave owners recapture their escaped slaves including what would have been all of us in the north um that act confronted him with a terrible choice either betray the radical abolitionist Credo no Union with slaveholders by letting others purchase his Freedom which would
• 19:30 - 20:00 represent kind of a union with slaveholders because to give money to someone who uh practices slavery who is a slave owner is to T indirectly endorse or condone it to say that it is okay to Value someone's life in dollars and cents and to buy and sell them so he didn't want to do that because that would be to betray one of the core principles of his ethics and his political
• 20:00 - 20:30 philosophy but also what about if he continued to speak in public every time and he gave hundreds probably five six hundred speeches in public against slavery telling his life story telling the story that becomes the autobiography in print to do so would be to risk re-enslavement a slave catcher hired by someone in the South could come to a talk like this and come through the door and try to drag him off uh into a waiting
• 20:30 - 21:00 vehicle so John Jacobs chose a third way he left America he fell back on the one trade that he knew would take men of color like him the sea sailing and this is the career that gives him Mobility it gives him the kind of Mobility that is usually enjoyed by people with wealth with the ability to travel
• 21:00 - 21:30 with a passport with all of with all of the documents and Privileges and affluence that's necessary to say take a vacation somewhere far away he's not going to take a vacation he's going to work his way to somewhere far away um I'll go through what these different uh images represent the middle one which I don't expect you to be able to read is just a spreadsheet of all of the different steam ships and other vessels
• 21:30 - 22:00 that he worked on outside of America when he lived in England between 1857 and 1872 um raised on the waterways of North Carolina John Jacobs spent 17 out of his 33 years of postr slavery life at Sea meaning he didn't just work as a sailor for 17 years he was sleeping on a boat some where in the world on the water for
• 22:00 - 22:30 17 years of his life more time than he spent on land in 1839 and these are the two images on the left he escaped by boat from Manhattan to New York uh to New Bedford where he signed up for a wailing Voyage to the Pacific to distance himself from his owner and he came back four years later a professional sailor from 1856 when he left Australia for the UK until 187 72 when he returned
• 22:30 - 23:00 to the us for what proved to be the final year of his life he worked more than 35 voyages as a steward which is sort of like a combination chef and gentleman servant on Merchant ships that were transporting goods to and from England so why is that interesting um why is this belong as part of his biography well he was shipping sugar from St kits oranges from the Black Sea cotton from Egypt and India it's remarkable that he
• 23:00 - 23:30 was circling the globe over and over again during a moment when if we don't think about it too much we think oh people in the 19th century must have been not very mobile because they didn't have the kinds of Technology we have now they weren't able to get on a jet and then go to Hong Kong in 14 hours and yet someone like this probably circled the globe and globe and traveled more than almost anyone in this room will travel for any of our entire lives um it's also
• 23:30 - 24:00 interesting because there's a different type of history that plays out when we start to look at the work he's doing this is not just a comparative history of say what were the systems of discipline and Punishment like on board these ships how did they remind him of the systems of discipline and Punishment he found in slavery how did they also put that in contrast because of their differences it's also the the fact that in the Civil War during a moment
• 24:00 - 24:30 when England is questioning where it should be getting its cotton from to feed the Mills that are producing the clothing that is being sent around the world and other cotton garments and goods he's working ships that go to Egypt and India the places where England might be getting its cotton from if it chooses to abandon America the Confederacy and the Deep Cell which was the other large cotton producer so he's
• 24:30 - 25:00 bringing back he's almost like a spy bringing back information to London to the kinds of abolitionists we usually know as people who give strong condemning speeches against slavery or tell their life stories in the manner of John Jacobs um but a lot softer because uh of reasons I'll get into so all of these things are fascinating in fact when he was going to Egypt he
• 25:00 - 25:30 was Shipwrecked off the coast of Egypt when he was uh sailing to Cuba he found out that the boat he was on was trying to run guns into South Carolina and when he was down in the hold doing his job he really said what are these long skinny boxes that look like the exact shape of a box you would put rifles in and then when the boat stopped in NASA and the Bahamas and he realized this was wasn't on the itinerary we were supposed to go
• 25:30 - 26:00 straight to Cuba he actually went before a judge in a police court and said I don't want to go to Charleston South Carolina I know that he probably didn't say this in court but any black Sailor knew that to go to Charleston whether you were a fugitive slave or free meant that the chances of you being enslaved were extremely extremely high that at least you would not have a say over what happened to you there he was successfully allowed to successfully won
• 26:00 - 26:30 his case and was discharged even though the Bahamas were super super Confederate because they their economy increased tenfold during the Civil War because they were the chief trans shipment point for smuggling goods into the Confederacy and somehow on his own power John Jacobs was able to get out of a predicament that many people would
• 26:30 - 27:00 have succumbed to sim a few voyages later he helped complete the transatlantic Telegraph line uh he even sailed a special gift from um England to the new uh king of sayam a gunboat and that king of sayam is the king that is now best remembered in the movie The King and I uh so on average he spent about 10 months at sea and two in London during
• 27:00 - 27:30 this 15year period um so if you've watched a movie like Forest Gump uh Forest Gump is kind of the Hollywood uh like kind of sentimental sacaran version of a historical novel it's about an seemingly ordinary person who just winds up seemingly by chance intersecting with all of these major historical events and it seems like oh this person maybe
• 27:30 - 28:00 has a Charmed Life but if you read a good historical novel or re or watch a good historical film one of the things that those genre this genre does is it shows that that seemingly ordinary person didn't wind up there by chance that history is a series of processes that are working on all of us and connecting all of us in different ways at different times and that Ordinary People actually often play extraordinary roles
• 28:00 - 28:30 in producing these historical events the books you read in a history class may not be able to reconstruct what that average individual was doing why that average person is actually not average but should be remembered and someone like John Jacobs is maybe an exemplary figure for this he led exactly this kind of life he was extraordinary and so many ways and yet if I hadn't accidentally
• 28:30 - 29:00 stumbled upon his autobiography or if someone else hadn't accidentally stumbled upon it we would have no knowledge about him he would just be a minor character in the biography of his sister still so if these incidents in his life suggest why I decided to write a biography of this man to accompany his autobiography we should also remember that his own
• 29:00 - 29:30 words constitute the strongest proof of who he was and what he stood for for John Jacobs wrote and spoke fearlessly in fact despots speaks truth to power in ways that few black Americans save Frederick Douglas and David Walker have ever been able to do
• 29:30 - 30:00 and I'm not saying that that's that's not a condemnation against black Americans and not a way of saying they are unable to come up with the words but rather within the space called America that space curtails What can be said I view John Jacobs as a radical truth tell what the ancient Greeks called a perast a person who has the courage to tell the truth truth all the while knowing the risks involved in
• 30:00 - 30:30 doing so for Jacob's violence was the most obvious of these risks but less obvious was the possibility but that by telling the truth he exposed himself to the possible psych psychic damage of finding out that most US citizens did not want to imagine a nation that included him is just such a manner of speaking truth to power that I believe John and Harriet Jacobs learned from Frederick
• 30:30 - 31:00 Douglas and fellow abolitionists in Rochester in the late 1840s where they all lived and I bring up Rochester because I mentioned Frederick Douglas a second ago so Frederick Douglas in 1847 moves to Rochester New York and he founds maybe the one of the two most important abolitionist newspapers uh of all time the North Star the beacon of freedom um and he does so because he'd been
• 31:00 - 31:30 working with white abolitionist uh run organizations and found that it was frustrating to be told to basically go up on speech and perform his life story and just just tell the facts we and then the people running the organization would would say we'll take care of the philosophy he found that condescending and insulting especially if we think of Frederick Douglas we think of nothing but a virtuoso orator and rhetorician
• 31:30 - 32:00 someone who was able to hold crowds in spaces like this not for the 30 minutes I'm hopefully going to speak for but for three to three and a half hours speaking alone without a microphone um Douglas went to Rochester I would contend because what is Rochester next to next to Canada if there were people that came after him because of what he said he was
• 32:00 - 32:30 two hours away from touching down in Ontario I think Ontario is across from Rochester or at least somewhere in Canada Quebec otherwise um as a former slave John Jacobs refuses to depict the way that slavery dehumanized him he even refuses to lay 100% of the blame at the slave owner's feet not only does his autobiography zero in
• 32:30 - 33:00 on the Stark Injustice of owning humans but he does so for a higher end to prove that slavery and racial cast are written into the conceptual Bedrock of the American Republic starting with the Constitution which he calls the bul workk of American slavery this is another reason why this text and John Jacobs are really interesting because what's going to
• 33:00 - 33:30 happen in 2026 America's going to turn 250 and there's going to be a lot of celebrations and you can imagine given our political climate that it's going to be pretty contested about what should be remembered of American History what should be ignored what should be banned and censored Etc many parts of America many rooms where the Constitution is read are going to cut
• 33:30 - 34:00 out the things that John Jacobs might say about American history he writes the slave's life is a lingering death not simply because 600,000 legalized robbers the number of slave owners in America plus their families operate a violent abusive system of Labor exploitation but because American law permits them to do so and since he continued the law is the will of the people a
• 34:00 - 34:30 mirror to reflect a nation's character he holds all American citizens not just Southerners but also Northerners accountable for writing authoritarianism in his word despotism into a democratic Charter that devil in sheepkin called the Constitution of the United States which contains and tolerates the black code of laws in existence these are his
• 34:30 - 35:00 words represents the great chain that binds the North and South together a union to Rob and plunder the sons of Africa a union cemented with human blood and blackened with the guilt of 68 years and we don't have to look very far to know what he's talking about if we're thinking historically by the middle of the 19th century the vast majority of clothing worn by slaves which was manufactured out of the cotton that some of those
• 35:00 - 35:30 slaves picked was manufactured here in Rhode Island and then sent back south how does a state like Rhode Island disentangle itself from something like slavery if it benefits so much economically well it turned out that it took a war to do so uh hopefully if we run into problems like this in our future it will not in taking to Heart the radical AB abolitionist position that the
• 35:30 - 36:00 transformation of the United States from a slave state into a free Society could not be achieved through politics within the union and so radical abolitionists actually believed the Constitution was so written in favor of the slave states uh that any formal political participation was bound to fail and that the only thing that you could do was give speeches and change the hearts and Minds The morality of people to see if
• 36:00 - 36:30 that would make a difference um they called for basically a different type of politics within the union an informal politics John Jacobs however chose a different route he chose to pursue politics without the union without being in the US writing from beyond the reach of American law and outside the heavy hand of the white abolition editor who often kind of served as we would say a
• 36:30 - 37:00 gatekeeper uh to the keys to publication and often said you have to write this or soften your words or not write this in order to publish your life story John Jacobs demonstrates the potential of unfiltered Unapologetic black writing to speak these truths if the American flag is to be planted on the altar of Freedom he writes at the beginning of the Civil War from London then I am ready to be
• 37:00 - 37:30 offered on that altar if I am wanted but if it must wave over the slave with his chains and feds clanking let me breathe the free air of another land and die a man and not a chatt the recovery of despots gives us an unprecedented chance to understand how outside American law and humanitarian Authority African-Americans
• 37:30 - 38:00 reconfigured the relationship between Liberty and truth and I might add that also if you come from say an Italian-American or an Irish American background and you look at the middle of the 19 century you look at the rhetoric of someone like Daniel oconnell um some of the rhetoric of a garabaldi you will see how there was an international movement for Liberation and Independence that many people of different stripes
• 38:00 - 38:30 and beliefs and Persuasions were caught up in uh that is incre incredibly powerful and moving and worth thinking about holistically um Beyond American power Jacobs is speaking truth to American power in a life story built on the conviction that words can ring so true as to build new world world do sorry build new worlds
• 38:30 - 39:00 and he would sign his letters to Frederick Douglas yours for the truth or yours in Liberty with a constitution and Union like this he writes what hope of freedom is there left for the slave when shown your oppressive laws you point us to the Congress of the United States as if something could be done there what has Congress ever done for Freedom you might say based on recent
• 39:00 - 39:30 years that they've used the word a lot and not produced a lot of it um he continues Give me liberty with a cannibal rather than slavery with a professed Christian and here he's talking about how an entire branch of Christianity that endorsed slavery ruled over the South to the point that many abolitionists argued whether the law or Christianity were more responsible for trenching slavery in America no man should hold unlimited
• 39:30 - 40:00 power over his fellow man so it goes without saying almost that when I was when I did find this autobiography I wasn't looking for it because I would you know just like when the thing you find in your dorm room is the last thing that you're looking for that just is a that's just a l logical consequence so you don't start sorry you don't you stop looking when you found a
• 40:00 - 40:30 thing and also you wouldn't need to find a thing if you knew it was there I was working on a completely different book um about the history of nostalgia because uh I teach a class at RDI called Nostalgia at the end of the world that's about just the question why is Nostalgia so Omni so prevalent nowadays seemingly increasingly prevalent as crises Mount and increase um but I was curious about the
• 40:30 - 41:00 fact that in the 18th and 19th centuries Nostalgia didn't mean what it me meant today and in fact the only person who would speak that word and say something is nostal something is nostalgic would be a physician because Nostalgia referred to a disease in the 18th and 19th centuries and the people who were nostalgic were only the people who had been forcibly displaced from home that
• 41:00 - 41:30 had been taken from their homes against their will and this was common in the 18th and 19th centuries people were conscripted and made to join the army they were press ganged and made to join a ship they were enslaved they were taken to across the Atlantic in many cases and found themselves 3,000 Mi away without the possibility of returning if they reacted strongly and resisted if
• 41:30 - 42:00 they tried to run away if they tried to drown themselves if they tried to go in a hunger strike a physician working for one of these institutions might say oh this is a clear case of nostalgia because to diagnose someone with Nostalgia was a way of saying oh actually what they're saying is not something that we need to take seriously because they're suffering from a mental illness and they're not in the right mind therefore what they need is Medical
• 42:00 - 42:30 Care the problem is not slavery the problem is not the Army the problem is not uh the Navy or the merchant marines the problem is this person and where they've come from the home they came from their racial background their ethnic background these are the problems that we need to be paying attention to according to these Physicians and so the diagnosis was a way of managing confined and captive
• 42:30 - 43:00 populations because to be a soldier is to be part of a captive population it's just that the the way you're treated is different than if you're part of a different captive population the goal of the Army is to make as many people battle ready and healthy as possible so they can possibly die in the battlefield the goal of the plantation and slavery is to get as much work economic value out of an investment in a human life as possible and then after that
• 43:00 - 43:30 that life is Expendable disposable what I was curious about was what about the people who were subject to this kind of diagnosis what did they say about being subject to medical treatment that treated them as the problem as the fa as the person with a weakness a vulnerability a person whose home was was to to blame not what had happened to
• 43:30 - 44:00 them and so John jacobs' sister's autobiography enters the picture here because as I now know both John and Harriet Jacobs knew a lot about medical care they knew about the formal kind of medical care that their owner The Physician James norcom uh would practice on his patients the Articles he would write for medical journals um which were often often involved taking his slaves and Performing pretty gruesome
• 44:00 - 44:30 experiments on them they also knew a lot about the informal medical care that enslaved peoples developed um to take care of themselves because slave owning because slavery was brutal and violent and many people wound up hurt needing bandages needing dressings needing salves those were the kinds of things that harod and John Jacobs could prepare I was also reading Harry jacobs'
• 44:30 - 45:00 biography at the time which I've alluded to before and I was just curious because I came across this little end note maybe like on page 225 it looks like looks like or actually probably later because this is referring to 224 which said that John Jacobs and his nephew Joseph Jacobs went to Australia to become gold miners and that Joseph Jacobs did didn't come back possibly because he committed
• 45:00 - 45:30 suicide and for this project I was working on I was just asking myself well was there a similar kind of physician in Australia that looked at this death saw that Joseph Jacobs might be might tick the box as African-American and then assign the cause of death as death from Nostalgia um which was actually listed as a cause of death on death certificates in the 19th century and it even this also uh extends to
• 45:30 - 46:00 people who died after immigrating from Italy and Ireland sometimes acute Melancholia or Nostalgia was listed as the cause of death the Jacobs men both of them had gone to Australia they had gone first to California to try their luck in the gold rushes um we don't learn that Australia has a concurrent gold rush to the California Gold Rush 1849 but once you learn about that you
• 46:00 - 46:30 start to see that the modern shape of the Pacific Rim which connects Asia Australia and the Americas really begins to take shape when tens of thousands of people are taking ships back and forth between these gold rushes or to the sites of these gold rushes so it turned out that Joseph Jacobs did not die uh did not commit suicide turned out
• 46:30 - 47:00 there were many people named Joseph Jacobs who immigrated to Australia in the 19th century not that surprising to hear it's a pretty generic name um but I also thought I could probably solve this like minor mystery of his Fate by just doing what Jee Fagan Yellen wasn't able to do that's the biographer wasn't able to do in the 80s and 90s which is literally not leave my couch and see if there's a digital database on my on my laptop that I can access of Australian
• 47:00 - 47:30 historical documents that I can just type a few Search terms into and see if I can find Joseph Jacobs um Turned out there was a big uh publicly available freely available database put together by the National Library of Australia and so I began plugging in the search terms I quickly realized that Joseph Jacobs is too generic even if you put quotes around it and then oh what about his uncle maybe because we know
• 47:30 - 48:00 his middle initial is s there'll be a more unique search term with quotes around it and I also knew that the software that recognizes page images of newspapers misrecognizes uh what's on the page a lot so you have to search for SE spelling variants um and I figured maybe I'll come up with a document that mentions mentions both of them uh mentions something about what they're doing in Australia because that's what newspapers are good for reporting on
• 48:00 - 48:30 small things that happen on a daily basis so then this happened and this is like something that I was not prepared for at all which is this spelling variant turned up this hit and I think like I was like in a small like grandparents apartment on the the third floor of um an apartment in New Haven which is like Providence but
• 48:30 - 49:00 without fun um and my my experience of New Haven um uh it's arguable if Providence has as much fun as we need but um New Haven definitely has no fun um so the first two hits actually were this title the United States governed by 600,000 despots and then this Curious by line by a fugitive slave the next one also said the same thing there was a little parenthesis that said the number of
• 49:00 - 49:30 words on this earlier version of this website it was like 11,000 words and I was like that's not a newspaper article and then this was like 10,000 words I was like unless this is the advertisements at the end of the paper all condensed into one article also not a newspaper article um because as I also mentioned grad school teaches you to be masochistic and to not have fun which is probably why Yale's in New Haven um not where I went to grad school but it was also not fun
• 49:30 - 50:00 um I concealed any possible excitement at this moment and was just like it says by a fugitive slave this looks to be something spectacular but I still haven't figured out what this has to do with John Jacobs and so where does that name appear even I also am like Search terms are increasingly unreliable as Sear sech engines are trying to make you find the things they want you to find and so even
• 50:00 - 50:30 a Boolean search with quotes around it is not always effective and I don't know anything about this site so maybe it's trying to take me a place that uh I don't want to go and maybe there is no John S Jacobs and it's just John up here Jacob's down here anyways skepticism is good uh it's not a a friend of pleasure I suppose but um to be radically skeptical of the world around you will teach you a lot and make you more Curious uh better more examined person
• 50:30 - 51:00 so I clicked and then I saw this um and I was like okay I actually saw this with a little box that you see on your laptop where you feel uh claustrophobic because you only see like one tiny portion of this entire thing um and then this is so what you're looking at is this is the first hit and then this is the second they correspond to two different days of the two different issues of the newspaper and they were uh because his
• 51:00 - 51:30 autobiography was published across two days so the thing you do when you're excited but want to conceal your excitement and verify your research is you start SK skimming really quickly and not really reading but just seeing if things catch your eye um and so I scrolled through or scan scanned down column by column one thing I started noticing is that names from the biography I'd just
• 51:30 - 52:00 been reading started to Flow by and that's notable already for one thing it doesn't tell me it tells me circumstantially that this is probably John Jacobs it's not a smoking it's not a Smoking Gun but also in reflection what it tells me is that he's using the actual names of people he's not using pseudonyms he's not saying Mr s to try to say
• 52:00 - 52:30 something bad about Mr s he's saying Mr Sawyer or Samuel Treadwell Sawyer and nobody is changing that because as we now can say there's nobody to censor him he's in Australia or and it's to the editor's credit that on the periphery of British Empire they did not censor these censor what he's saying um and that's a big deal because when you read Harry jacobs'
• 52:30 - 53:00 autobiography all of the characters have been given pseudonyms possibly to protect uh the press or the publisher against liable and slander laws within the US possibly to protect Harry Jacobs against from being identified so I kept scrolling through and then I hadn't come across what my search hit was referring to but then I came across about 34 of the
• 53:00 - 53:30 way down the first installment I came across this note um and I apologize in advance I'll probably swear here because this note is very like powerful and exciting and I think deserves a curse or two um left on the bed of his owner Samuel Treadwell Sawyer a congressman from North Carolina and in a uh to say the least complicated manner the father of his sister's two children
• 53:30 - 54:00 the father uh who did not legitimize emancipate or otherwise take care of those two children the note reads sir I have left you not to return When I have got settled I will give you further satisfaction no longer yours John S Jacobs before like getting into any
• 54:00 - 54:30 analysis let's just look at that sign off because that's what we call the end of a letter or the end of an email it's a sign off it's a there's probably a formal term for that but you often sign off some people will sign off and say yours bill which is a term of affection or endearment to be in the possession of someone else you're maybe you're saying my emotions my heart my love is in your possession to say no longer yours
• 54:30 - 55:00 is far more than the opposite it is to say I am no longer in your possession I am still operating within the rules of politeness here and yet I'm giving you an order I'm telling a slave owner as someone from the position of someone who has been owned by this person I am not yours which is not something that a slave can say when they're in the
• 55:00 - 55:30 position of being a slave because the slave owner Rules by force and the slave does not have agency autonomy Freedom this is the biggest you possible a polite you it's hard to do that but he pulls it off so well if we were to I what I wasn't thinking of the the time when I found this this is the moment when I did get excited and it was like getting punched in the stomach but
• 55:30 - 56:00 in a good way uh all the breath was sucked out of me what I wasn't really thinking about though at this at that time in 2016 is that when John Jacobs escapes from the ritzy hotel in Manhattan the aster Place Hotel and he walks to Battery Park Warf to take uh basically like a ferry to Providence and then takes uh Overland travel to New Bedford all in a really
• 56:00 - 56:30 perfectly executed Escape that we wouldn't really say is the kind of Escape that you imagine when you think about the Underground Railroad there you think of desperation um fleeing By Night hiding in the woods this is someone who walked slowly and almost as if casually out of a hotel with a suitcase in his hand because he had pulled off a stunt a ploy
• 56:30 - 57:00 and fooled everyone around him and planned everything so well that went they went off without a hitch however in 1839 when all this happened he did not write this note he did not write his own Declaration of Independence because he was illiterate his laws of North Carolina and the laws of many slave states prohibited enslaved people people from learning to read and write and penalized anyone from teaching
• 57:00 - 57:30 them to read and write so that's 1839 this obviously that we're looking at behind the note was published in 1855 In 1855 he writes the note and so if we've been reading his life story up to this point what this note is saying is not not only he is declaring his own independence but also he has been able
• 57:30 - 58:00 to declare his own independence in a different manner because of the 16 years and how he has used that time since escaping from slavery he has come a great distance from 1839 to 1855 and really a lot of um black autobiography written by formerly enslaved people brings up this question can you be free if you can't write can you be free if you don't have the powers
• 58:00 - 58:30 to articulate yourself to others U both in speech and in writing for someone like John Jacobs or Frederick Douglas the answer is no um the answer is that that is not Liberation that is just to be free from a condition that is not a positive sense of Freedom so it's really I think remarkable also that if this note measures the distance between 1839 and
• 58:30 - 59:00 1855 it also measures the distance between 2016 when I found it in 1855 because this note In 1855 proved that John Jacobs is the author of his own life story and that he is developed a way of embodying and enacting freedom but in 2016 it proves for us that he is the author
• 59:00 - 59:30 of his life story and that we can say this is by not just a fugitive slave but John Jacobs and it's for this reason that I would say that this kind of writing represents a spectacular performance of freedom and let's think of that word spectacular not in the glib way we usually use it but in the sense of a spectacle he's making a spectacle of himself he's exhibiting himself but he
• 59:30 - 60:00 has Supreme control over how he's doing it and this note I choose not just because it's so memorable but also because it epitomizes two of the narrative's most remarkable aspects the first has to do with jacobs's use of performance so have you had to read any Auto biographies in an English class or history class uh that's not a slave
• 60:00 - 60:30 narrative um what what kind of texts have you read like The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin or like uh other texts shout out a name or two if you have what's that well all right not as forthcoming as I thought what's that and Frank okay oh that's what he
• 60:30 - 61:00 said what's that St Augustine that's St Augustine is a per is great that's a perfect one actually um when we think of autobiography I think generally we think a story about one's life written by oneself we think that this is a story that narrates the key plot points and events of one's life
• 61:00 - 61:30 that have made that person that person we also think that there's going to be a certain style to it because we want to get get access to who that person is through their creative and deliberate narration the way that they string events together however when someone like Harriet Jacobs or John Jacob Jacobs if they were seeking to write their autobiography they were told the exact
• 61:30 - 62:00 opposite narrate the plot of your life with the key events but constrict it or constrain it just to the things that are supposed to help bring about the end of slavery um basically this takes us back to tell us the facts we'll take care of the philosophy just tell us the bare uh things that can be were're were publicly witnessed it could be they UI witnessed or that happened to you about that
• 62:00 - 62:30 concern slavery and that put slavery in the worst light possible but also tell it truthfully and factually unlike typical autobiographies unlike that type of autobiography that formerly enslaved people were supposed to write Jacobs does something I think really special which he reduces es the account of his autobiographical experience to a minimum he doesn't put
• 62:30 - 63:00 in his many plot points he doesn't say here's all the bad things that happened to me here's the pain I felt here's the pain that others felt around me but rather he wants to create space in his narration for critiquing slavery and for narrating his own life on his own terms so why did I say performance
• 63:00 - 63:30 because to write something that performs who you are who you are at the moment of writing In 1855 or in 2025 is in some ways always autobiographical always historical because we are all composits of history that we carry with us if we weren't life would be a lot easier um we are composits of the bad history that we've inherited the world we live in the families we live we come uh up in the institutions
• 63:30 - 64:00 we're a part of there's good things and bad things about them um but we are inevitably bundles of all those things with all their contradictions and complications um so at the moment that we're writing or that we're performing we are all of those things at once and yet if we've spent years training ourselves giving speeches telling our life story writing it down
• 64:00 - 64:30 on paper then we also bring a certain set of analytical elocutionary rhetorical skills with us that is also on display that's kind of the dis displ showing an audience what you've made yourself into how you've unlearned or reworked or reformed the bad parts of the the history that you carry with you and how all the events in your life have led up
• 64:30 - 65:00 to who you are now that is performing that is different than saying here are the events that led up to who I am now finally by absolutely refusing the expectations placed upon ex-slave authors to portray the horrors of slavery through graphic depictions of their own suffering in slavery Jacobs is able to perform his life rather than describe it he refuses
• 65:00 - 65:30 to repeat the experience of slavery in a new format because he doesn't believe that by showing how he was dehumanized that that's going to do anything more than make some readers feel like they've already done something good by having feelings of pity and sympathy while reading the thing he doesn't believe that they're going any of person is going to read sentimental descriptions and go
• 65:30 - 66:00 about and enact political change in this book who John Jacobs is is located in how John Jacobs writes in his style which he began cultivating on board that wailing ship where he taught himself to read and write in William Cooper Nell's Boston Nell was an important black abolitionist who ran virtually all uh black black abolitionist and self-improvement organizations and Frederick Douglas's
• 66:00 - 66:30 Rochester where he developed his rhetorical and analytical skills and though it's less visible in the clamorous protest culture of Pacific gold miners and the British Empire Sailors for John Jacobs autobiography is a style and a manner of Performing Freedom the defiant eloquence of despots epitomizes who he has become testifies to how far he has come and casts a sharp
• 66:30 - 67:00 light on how much he has overcome read in this light we begin to see how this autobiographical style is part and parcel of John jacobs's education as an abolitionist for he does not just showcase his talents as a writer and speaker it's not just a performance of who he is but rather he uses this performance and
• 67:00 - 67:30 his talents to denounce American authoritarianism refusing to yield to pressures to represent black pain in order to incite White anti-slavery sentiment Jacobs instead draws up a revolutionary contract between text and reader calling North Car Carolina slave owners and Washington politicians out by name exposing Northern
• 67:30 - 68:00 complicity exposing the fact that for example maybe some of those Factory owners in Rhode Island who are manufacturing uh the cloth that slaves wore chose to turn a blind eye to this so that they could keep reaping profits and finally arguing that the nation's founding documents represent the found Foundation of American slavery if slave owners can be
• 68:00 - 68:30 considered an evil he writes they are a necessary evil and you can only remove the evil by removing the cause namely the laws that uphold and condone and permit this institution to exist when he submitted his autobiography to a London magazine in 1860 however they cut out the final quarter of his autobiography which is a 5,000-word
• 68:30 - 69:00 critique of America's founding documents which is the most sustained demonstration of his talents and his most urgent call for justice and if we think that a place where he's no longer narrating the events of his life that actually that's probably the best place for performing who he is then they're also eliminating what is most autobiographical about this different sort of
• 69:00 - 69:30 autobiography while he began developing his life story in the late 1840s in Rochester it is this section that he wrote all or most of when he walked into the Empire office in Sydney and asked for an abolitionist History of the United States recently completed and the newest copy of the US Constitution remarkably this concluding part of the narrative the 18551 abandons any attempt to narrate
• 69:30 - 70:00 individual experience in favor of delivering readings of the Constitution declaration the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 he calls these readings interlineations and I think we should hear in that word reading between the lines um and I think we should hear in that word an illusion to Frederick Douglas's narrative where
• 70:00 - 70:30 he no one is teaching him to read and write or at least virtually no one so he starts stealing the son of his master's uh spelling books and they've already been filled in because the master's son is able to go to school and is able to learn to read and write so he takes the pencil and he writes in between the lines um because space is not made for him similarly later on when he has to go into the streets of Baltimore during the winter and his the fingers grow so
• 70:30 - 71:00 frostbitten that he said you could lay a pencil between the grooves and cracks in my fingers I think we should also hear a word like interlineation these readings or interlineations resemble nothing so much as David Walker's appeal to the colored citizens of the world which is the text that is said to really ignite the black radical tradition and is really one of
• 71:00 - 71:30 the texts that is uh should be read alongside this one because it is so out outspoken um and because it was a favorite text among Sailors like Jacobs and one that um Sailors in New York Boston Providence would actually take this political pamphlet sew it into the Linings of their jackets and because they knew they were working uh ship shipping routes that went from the north to the South
• 71:30 - 72:00 when they got out in Charleston or they got out in North Carolina or in Virginia they would unseo the lining of their jackets take out the pamphlet probably go to let's say a warehouse space where there's a group of people there some of whom are literate some illiterate and they would read out this pamphlet to people gathered there and it was considered so controversial by the pro slavery self that people found with this document in their
• 72:00 - 72:30 possession were imprisoned find even hanged for when it was found and so here's just one example right here of one of these interlineations the way that John Jacobs delivers it we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their crator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and
• 72:30 - 73:00 the pursuit of happiness familiar so far we'll be hearing everyone reading this out loud in 2026 we won't be hearing this which is from the original Constitution read out loud in 2026 that no slave held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof escaping into another shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor but shall be delivered up on
• 73:00 - 73:30 claim of the party to wh whom such service or labor may be due so this isn't in our constitution now but it was basically a win for the pro slaver for the slave states in the drafting of the Constitution that they got this fugitive slave uh clause in there which said that no slave could escape to another state and then be free that that that there had to be some mechanism for recapturing an a fugitive slave and bringing them
• 73:30 - 74:00 back uh to their Master to secure these rights we're back onf familiar territory governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed excluding Indians and free Negroes not so familiar I might just highlight two things that are happening in these interlineations one is kind of obvious it's kind of a mashup or a splicing together of different parts of these
• 74:00 - 74:30 documents to what end we might say well what happens when we read the most universal Declarations of the freedom of Americans and then ju suppose it against the fact that quite clearly many Americans were not enjoying the benefit of these universals there's also another subtle oper a that he's performing on these texts that unless you have a copy of the
• 74:30 - 75:00 original Constitution next to you you probably don't notice no notice that it says no slave held to service or labor in one state the word slave does not appear in the Constitution famously or infamously when slaves are referred to for example that they are not treated as the value of a full person for voting purposes but as three fifths of a person they're called a person which is kind of
• 75:00 - 75:30 a Dodge by many of the founding figures who wrote the Constitution um and I think in the Madison papers you can find some discourse about this question should we mention the word slave or just say person Jacobs makes it explicit who they're talking about similarly excluding Indians and free Negroes
• 75:30 - 76:00 also reiterates the fact that this is a partial document that is passing itself off as a universal document and so when he writes he trains us his readers to understand that he writes between the lines of American law and that he does so not as a citizen but as a stranger a person who not benefit from these laws because they were not written for him and because as
• 76:00 - 76:30 an exile they no longer apply to him from outside America John Jacobs writes back against a nation that had made it impossible for him to live freely within it that had enslaved him in the South refused him Liberty life and the pursuit of happiness in the north and after 1850 destroyed any hopes he might have of living as an autonomous sovereign individual in America all right so I will conclude
• 76:30 - 77:00 briefly just to try to bring it back to our present and also to bring it back to John jacobs's language um and I think it's funny like now every time if I write something and it's a few months old it already seems really dated so what I'm about to say I'm going to uh revise in real time which is basically like 10 years ago maybe 5 years ago
• 77:00 - 77:30 even when the rolling back of civil rights in America was starting to become relatively apparent news outlets kind of conditioned us to think that what was happening was that there were extremists that were approaching from the outside and I don't think we would say that anymore um all of the so called extremists of January 6th have been pardoned now uh
• 77:30 - 78:00 formally but even if we were to take a time machine back five or 10 years and read this document and read John jacobs's life we might learn a lesson to not look to the outside to not think that there are these malevolent evil forces that are somehow elsewhere that are infiltrating and affecting us for John Jacobs lived in a world of encroaching extrem extremism in which slave owners politicians and Northerners
• 78:00 - 78:30 who financially benefited from slavery worked out proslavery deal after proslavery deal in 1820 1833 in 1850 there were anything but equal compromises that word that we often get in our high school history books for Jacob's Rising authoritarianism is no no outlier no incursion from outside but a logical consequence of America's institutions
• 78:30 - 79:00 and laws beginning with the Constitution and declaration so we can start to return this remarkable individual and his life story to the heart of an America that has forgotten him we can now imagine what his sister's autobiography would have been like if she had gone to California with him as she had talked about doing in 1850 um but then was unable to do so because of the fact that she was working
• 79:00 - 79:30 as a governor and a nurse on an estate in the Hudson River Valley and because during her own Escape From Slavery she hid in an attic for up to for almost seven years which was a display of willpower but also a display that gave her chronic mobility issues for the rest of her life gave her a chronic uh disability looking outside the nation by taking off the blinders of ideology as John Jacobs
• 79:30 - 80:00 did means writing back against the myth of the United States of America as a nation that progressively eradicates the legacy of its original sin through the development of its Democratic institutions and the infan andran of its citizens taking John Jacobs at his word requires taking seriously the claim that in 177 6 as I will say again The American Nation embarked on two experiments simultaneously one in
• 80:00 - 80:30 democracy the other in tyranny perhaps as the real possibility of democracy dying in darkness seems to be at our doorstep the words of despots have taken on a new urgency as we work to figure out what can be done I'll end by reciting John jacobs's final words in desperates in conclusion let me say that
• 80:30 - 81:00 the experience of the past the present feeling and above all this the promise of God assure me the oppressor rod shall be broken but how it is to be done has been the question among our friends for years after the prayers of 25 years the slaves chains are tighter than they were before their escape more dangerous and their cups of misery filled nearer their
• 81:00 - 81:30 brim since I cannot forget that I was a slave I will not forget those that are slaves what I would have done for my Liberty I am willing to do for theirs whenever I can see them ready to fill a free man's grave rather than wear a tyrant's chain the day must come it will come human nature will be human nature crush it as you may it changes changes not but
• 81:30 - 82:00 woe to that country where the son of Liberty has to rise up out of a sea of blood when I have thought of all that would pain the eye sicken the heart make us turn our backs to the scene and weep I then think of the oppressed struggling with their oppressors and have a scene more horrible still but I must drop this subject I do not like to think of the past nor look to the future of wrongs like these God
• 82:00 - 82:30 save us from the blood of the innocent ask nothing more thank [Applause] you we hope that you can continue the conversation with us down the hall at the reception thank you all for coming out and please give another round of applause for Dr schroer