A PLAUSIBLE MAN

A scholarly detective story about a man who would inspire a world-changing book.

In December 1850, writes Clemson English professor Ashton, John Andrew Jackson, a formerly enslaved person in South Carolina, spent a night in Maine with Harriet Beecher Stowe. He showed her the scars left by the whippings he had endured, likely told her of the family members who had been sold away from him, and recounted his flight from Charleston to Boston as a shipboard stowaway. He left the next day, having unknowingly provided Stowe the germ from which Uncle Tom’s Cabin would grow. He might have become a powerful symbol for the abolitionist cause, but, writes Ashton, Jackson had a talent for alienating fellow travelers: “His is a tale of individual hustle; separate from most established Black and white organizations, he would almost always go it alone.” His path would take him to Canada, then to England, where, having decided to “forcefully intervene in the global politics of slavery with nothing more than his witness and testimony,” he tried to become known on the lecture circuit while subsisting on work as a whitewasher and rough painter. Perhaps daringly—or perhaps out of desperation, once he’d burned enough bridges—he returned to South Carolina after the war with the intention of creating a Black farming community on the land held by his former enslaver. Ashton sorts diligently through what she memorably calls “obfuscatory nineteenth-century ledger lines,” piecing together the life of a man who might have been better known had his former allies not repudiated him. The narrative she unfolds has moments of both tragedy and victory as she capably returns a “canceled” man to history. It’s a story worth knowing and makes a solid complement to Ilyon Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife.

A capable contribution to the literature of slavery and abolition.