The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery

Lost on the other side of the world since 1855, the story of John Swanson Jacobs finally returns to America. This student edition reproduces his narrative in full and presents it on its own without any editorial or biographical apparatus.

For one hundred and sixty-nine years, a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs—brother of Harriet Jacobs—was buried in a pile of newspapers in Australia. Jacobs’s long-lost narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand...