"Fearless Speech: John Swanson Jacobs, Harriet Ann Jacobs, and Truth-Telling in Frederick Douglass's Rochester"

By Dr. Jonathan Schroeder

When John Swanson Jacobs and his sister, Harriet Ann Jacobs, moved from Boston to Rochester in the late-1840s, they moved to the capital of the Black nineteenth century, the place where Black Americans forged dreams of self-reliance and self-sufficiency into ways of life. It was in Rochester that the siblings learned the frank, unsentimental truth-to-power language that characterizes Frederick Douglass’ speech and writing and that white abolitionist editors such as Lydia Maria Child found too unnervingly radical to put into print. And it was in Rochester that they began writing their landmark autobiographies, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, the latter lost for 169 years in an Australian archive before it was rediscovered and republished this year. This talk returns John and Harriet Jacobs to the epicenter of Black abolition and situates the siblings within a larger conversation about the rhetoric of Douglass and his circle, which included Martin Delany and William Cooper Nell. 

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Jonathan Schroeder seeks to find new routes through the histories of race, ethnicity, migration and emotion in his research and teaching. Trained as an Americanist at the University of Chicago, he is particularly interested in understanding how frameworks of knowledge were devised in Europe and developed in the Americas to hierarchize humans and justify colonialism. If these hierarchies helped define what it means to be human, they also defined what it means to be racist—to divide humans. In tracking the movement of Enlightenment knowledges to the Americas, he aims to address blind spots in the histories of science and colonialism respectively, since these fields typically focus on either the emergence of knowledge or the reality of colonial exploitation, but not both. To address both at once is to ask how accounts of the human helped justify the reality of slavery, organize American institutions and shape subjectivity to this day.

In the midst of this research, Schroeder discovered a lost autobiography, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery (Chicago, 2024), that changed the course of his career. Written by Harriet Jacobs’ brother, John Swanson Jacobs, and published in Australia in 1855, this narrative is written in frank truth-to-power language that is unapologetic and defiant—and that urgently needed to be brought back into the world. In his attempt to do justice to John Jacobs, Schroeder produced an “auto/biographical” edition that complemented Jacobs’ autobiography with a biography. The resulting publication, Despots, has been reviewed by The New York Times, All Things Considered, The Boston Globe, WNYC and many other outlets.

Schroeder is working on two books: Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia (under contract with Harvard) and Lauren Berlant, A Reader (under contract with Duke). The first project tracks nostalgia’s formation in European Enlightenment medicine and its application to three American institutions of confinement: slavery, the military and the prison. The second is a collection of Berlant’s most important writings, acting as both a gateway for new readers and a touchstone for old ones. Much of this work was made possible thanks to long-term fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society and the John Carter Brown Library, as well as short-term fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Huntington Library.

Beyond these interests, Schroeder is also interested in changing how we interact with and understand the nonhuman. Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) followed Melville’s lead in considering the white whale and Captain Ahab as equally entangled in the natural world around them. And at Congress of the Birds, a 501(c)3 that he co-founded with his partner, Sheida Soleimani, Schroeder annually rescues, rehabilitates and releases over 1,200 wild birds and is currently engaged in building a land center in a 42-acre forest in Chepachet, RI.