Carolinian championed freedom for all

As the United States celebrates its semiquincentennial — Americans launched their rebellion against British rule 250 years ago this month at Lexington and Concord — I’ve been writing a series of columns chronicling the contributions North Carolinians made to the birth of our great nation.

Today’s subject doesn’t fall precisely within the chronology. It does fit the broader theme, however: how North Carolinians have helped our country establish and honor its commitment to liberty. Some did so with words, others with deeds.

John Swanson Jacobs did both. Born in Edenton around 1815 to enslaved parents, both John and his older sister Harriet came to be owned by a local physician named James Norcom. As related in her famous 1861 memoir “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Harriet was repeatedly subjected to sexual harassment by Norcom. First taking up with a white lawyer, Samuel Spencer, to protect herself, Harriet Jacobs would later spend seven years hiding from Norcom in the crawl space of her grandmother’s roof.

Infuriated by her apparent escape, Norcom sold Harriet’s brother John and the two children she’d had with Spencer to a slave trader. Unbeknownst to Norcom, the trader was in cahoots with Spencer and transferred the three to him.

When Spencer took John on a trip to the free state of New York in 1838, the latter seized the opportunity to liberate himself, penning Spencer the following note: “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.”

After several years at sea on a whaling ship, John returned to find that Harriet had finally escaped northward. They reunited in Boston and became committed abolitionists. John Jacobs helped manage anti-slavery organizations and went on speaking tours with the likes of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.

After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, however, neither Jacobs sibling could rest easy. John spent much of the next two decades abroad, pursuing mining and other professions in Australia and England.

It was during John’s time Down Under that he followed the lead of Douglass and began writing the story of his life. The work first saw publication 170 years ago this week in an Australian newspaper called The Empire. Headlined “The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery,” it was attributed to “A Fugitive Slave.” Six years later, an abridged version entitled “A True Tale of Slavery” ran in four weekly installments in an American periodical called The Leisure Hour.

Deftly combining autobiography and argument, John Jacobs excoriated slaveowners for their cruelty and questioned how white Americans could profess a love of liberty and virtue while tolerating the institution anywhere in their country.

“The Christian religion, that binds heart to heart and hand to hand, and makes each and every man a brother, is at war with it,” he wrote, and “the experience of the past, the present feeling, and above all this, the promise of God, assure me that the oppressor’s rod shall be broken.”

But would moral suasion be sufficient to snap it? “Human nature will be human nature,” Jacobs warned. “Crush it as you may, it changes not; but woe to that country where the sun of liberty has to rise up out of a sea of blood.”

These were prophetic words, unfortunately. It took a bloody war to abolish slavery. It took many decades of further activism, against implacable and often-violent opposition, to secure the rights of black Americans. Jacobs and his successors were fighting not to undermine the American republic but to fulfill its promise — to redeem the “promissory note” of the Declaration of Independence, as Martin Luther King Jr. memorably put it.

“Freedom is as natural for man as the air he breathes,” Jacobs wrote, “and he who robs him of his freedom is also guilty of murder; for he has robbed him of his natural existence.”

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy and American history.