John S. Jacobs

John Swanson Jacobs was a Black author and abolitionist. After escaping from slavery in North Carolina, he became prominent in abolitionist circles of the northeastern United States. He was closely connected with the authors of the two slave narratives read most widely today, his sister Harriet Jacobs and his friend and ally Frederick Douglass. Following the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, he left the United States and published his autobiography, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, in a Sydney, Australia newspaper in 1855. After being republished in 2024, it was described as unique among slave narratives "for its global perspective and its uncensored fury".