In or around 1825, John Andrew Jackson was born enslaved on a plantation in South Carolina and trained to spend his life picking cotton.
But instead of living a life as a slave, he escaped bondage and became an influential anti-slavery lecturer and writer. He also had a key role in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s celebrated novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which historians have argued helped trigger the Civil War by its depiction of the subhuman treatment afforded Black men and women.
As a scholar of the lives of enslaved people and their writings, I have researched the life of Jackson for years and still remain puzzled by his obscurity from most histories of slavery in America. In my biography of Jackson, “A Plausible Man,” I detail his remarkable life.
North to freedom
In early 1846, Jackson’s wife and daughter were sold to another South Carolina plantation. Heartbroken and furious, he was determined to earn money and buy his family’s freedom. Jackson waited until Christmas Day and took a bold step – he escaped on horseback.
He found work on the docks in Charleston and eventually hid between cotton bales aboard a boat heading to Boston.
Once there, Jackson started speaking at abolitionist meetings across Massachusetts to raise money to free his wife and child. But before he could raise the necessary amount, President Millard Fillmore signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which would impose harsh penalties on anyone who assisted runaways.
Even though Jackson was living in a supposedly free state, he was in terrible danger of being returned to enslavement under the new law. Jackson decided to flee again, this time to Canada.
Along the way, abolitionists directed Jackson to sympathetic homes in Maine.
A chance meeting
One such home belonged to the stuffy Thomas C. Upham, a professor of mental and moral philosophy at Bowdoin College.
He had told his friends that while slavery was a grievous wrong, the Fugitive Slave Act was nonetheless the law and should be obeyed.
But when Jackson knocked on his door, Upham immediately put aside his scruples.
Upham invited him in and offered food and encouragement. Because Upham couldn’t put Jackson up for the night, he directed Jackson to his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe – a friend who had long been frustrated with the otherwise kindly professor’s timid politics.
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