The University of Chicago Press recently published a unique account of an escape from enslavement in North Carolina decades before the Civil War. The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots (2024) by John Swanson Jacobs tells of his escape from enslavement by North Carolina plantation owner and Congressional Representative Samuel Sawyer in 1838 while he and the slaveholder were in transit through the City of New York.
Jacobs eventually made it to Australia where his story was published serially in 1855 by the Sydney Empire. It was later republished in 1861 in London, UK under the title “A True Tale of Slavery” by The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation. The 1861 version of Jacob’s story is available online at the website Documenting the American South.
John Swanson Jacobs was born in 1815 in Edenton, North Carolina, the younger brother of his better-known sister Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Harriet Jacobs originally published her book under the pseudonym Linda Brent, possibly to protect those who remained enslaved at home. In the book she referred to her brother John as “William” and Samuel Sawyer, the white father of her two children who “owned” both them and John, as “Mr.
Sands.” John Swanson Jacobs, safely in Australia, published under his own name.
In 1838, Sawyer traveled north because he and his fiancé planned to be married in Chicago, Illinois where she had family. He was able to bring an enslaved John Swanson Jacobs with him to New York State because although slavery had been abolished there in 1828, state law permitted enslavers visiting or residing in New York part-time to maintain slaves within their households for up to nine months. This statute was not repealed until 1841.
The following is an excerpt from chapter 5 of “A True Tale of Slavery,” in which John Swanson Jacobs describes his escape from slavery while in the city of New York.
:”THE latter end of the third year after I was sold, my master was elected Member of Congress. I was ordered to get ready for Washington… After my master had been there a short time, he went to board with Mrs. P—-, who had two young nieces here, to one of whom he was soon engaged to be married. As good luck would have it, this young lady had a sister living in Chicago, and no place would suit her like that to get married in…
“Everything was ready, and the hoped-for time came. He took his intended, and off we started for the West. When we were taking the boat at Baltimore for Philadelphia, he came up to me and said, ‘Call me Mr. Sawyer; and if anybody asks you who you are, and where you are going, tell them that you are a free man, and hired by me.’
“We stopped two or three days at the Niagara Falls; from thence we went to Buffalo, and took the boat for Chicago; Mr. Sawyer had been here but a few days before he was taken sick. In five weeks from the time of his arrival here, he was married and ready to leave for home. On our return, we went into Canada. Here I wanted to leave him, but there was my sister and a friend of mine at home in slavery… I tried to get a seaman’s protection from the English Custom-house,
but could not without swearing to a lie, which I did not feel disposed to do.
“We left here for New York, where we stopped three or four days. I went to see some of my old friends from home, who I knew were living there. I told them that I wanted their advice. They knew me, they knew my master, and they knew my friends also. ‘Now tell me my duty,’ said I. The answer was a very natural one, ‘Look out for yourself first.’
“I weighed the matter in my mind, and found the balance in favour of stopping. If I returned along with my master, I could do my sister no good, and could see no further chance of my own escape. I then set myself to work to get my clothes out of the Astor House Hotel, where we were stopping; I brought them out in small parcels, as if to be washed. This job being done, the next thing was to get my trunk to put them in. I went to Mr. Johnson’s shop, which was in sight of the Astor House Hotel, and told him that I wanted to get my trunk repaired.
“The next morning I took my trunk in my hand with me: when I went down, whom should I see at the foot of the steps but Mr. Sawyer? I walked up to him, and showed him a rip in the top of the trunk, opening it at the same time that he might see that I was not running off. He told me that I could change it, or get a new one if I liked. I thanked him, and told him we were very near home now, and with a little repair the old one would do. At this we parted. I got a friend to call and get
my trunk, and pack up my things for me, that I might be able to get them at any minute.
“Mr. Sawyer told me to get everything of his in, and be ready to leave for home the next day. I went to all the places where I had carried anything of his, and where they were not done, I got their cards and left word for them to be ready by the next morning. What I had got were packed in his trunk; what I had not been able to get, there were the cards for them in his room.
“They dine at the Astor at three o’clock; they leave the room at four o’clock; at half-past four o’clock I was to be on board the boat for Providence. Being unable to write myself at that time, and unwilling to leave him in suspense, I got a friend to write as follows: — ‘Sir–I have left you, not to return; when I have got settled, I will give you further satisfaction. No longer yours, JOHN S. JACOB.’
“This note was to be put into the post-office in time for him to get it the next morning. I waited on him and his wife at dinner. As the town clock struck four, I left the room. I then went through to New Bedford, where I stopped for a few months… The lawyer I have quite a friendly feeling for, and would be pleased to meet him as a countryman and a brother, but not as a master.”
Once free, John Swanson Jacobs moved to New England where he became an active abolitionist.
His efforts took him to Rochester, New York and vicinity on a number of occasions and to New York City at least three times, in May 1849, October 1850, and July 1862. On May 11, 1849, the New York Herald printed an account of a speech by Jacobs at an American Anti-Slavery Society meeting where he called on attendees to make it “disreputable” for people who claimed to be Christians to hold other people in bondage.
According to North Star on October 24, 1850, Jacobs spoke in New York City calling for active resistance to fugitive slave laws following the seizure of James “Hamlet” Hamilton by slave-catchers and on July 28, 1862, New York Independent reported on an interview with Jacobs where he recounted his experience as a cook on a British ship, with the support of British authorities in the Bahamas, that was attempting to enter the port of Charleston, South Carolina in violation of the federal blockade of Southern ports.
Excerpts from these articles follow.
“American Anti-Slavery Society” (New York Herald, May 11, 1849)e
“A slaveholder named Skinner, who was a skinner in every sense of the word, was in the habit of coming every year, to visit his brother, Re. Dr. Skinner, who… lived at 160 Green[e] street; and yet the baby-stealing, women-whipping tyrant never received a rebuke from his reverend brother, at whose table he sat… If anyone asked him what must be done to abolish slavery, his answer was, that it must cease to be respectable. They must make it disreputable, and then slaveholders would be ashamed of it… If they had less of religion, and more of Christianity, it would be all for the better.”
“Meeting of the Colored Citizens of New York” (North Star, October 24, 1850)
“My colored brethren, if you have not sword, I say to you, sell your garments and buy one… I would, my friends, advise you to show a front to our tyrants, and arm yourselves; aye, I would advise the women to have their knives too… I advise you to trample on this bill, and I further advise you to let us go on immediately, and act like men.”
“Running the Blockade” (New York Independent, July 28, 1862)
“[A] very intelligent colored man, formerly a slave in North Carolina, but recently for several years a resident of England, called at our office the other day, and related facts showing that British vessels are stilled engaged in running our blockade, and that the British officials in the Bahamas are, if possible, more inimical to our Union than are the same class of people at home…
“He shipped as a cook on board the steamship Lloyds, at London… ‘for Havana and any of the West Indies Islands’… the captain [Smith] announced to the crew that he designed to run the blockade before Charleston, and offered three months pay extra to such as would remain with the ship… Jacobs refused to go to Charleston at any price whatever, and demanded, what was his undoubted right, that he be sent home to London.
“After various efforts on the part of Capt. Smith to indure [sic] Jacobs to either go to Charleston or to settle and sign a satisfaction, he attempted coercion. He had Jacobs taken before a police magistrate to answer the charge of having deserted the ship… The law was all on the side of Jacobs, but the public sentiment of Nassau was so strongly against him, and in favor of the unlawful and contraband trade with the Rebels.”
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Illustration: John Swanson Jacobs.
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