One evening in December 1850, an escaped slave named John Andrew Jackson arrived at a handsome, white clapboard house in Brunswick, Maine, cold and desperate for somewhere to stay. He was fleeing north to Canada, striving to evade the slave-catchers who had just been empowered by a new law, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, to capture runaways even in free states like Maine. Upon arriving at the Brunswick house, Jackson encountered its mistress, a young housewife (and burgeoning writer) named Harriet Beecher Stowe. She considered whether to grant him refuge. Her husband was hundreds of miles from home. Before the Fugitive Slave Act had passed, Stowe later reflected in a letter, she might have “tried to send him somewhere else.” But these were desperate times. She allowed Jackson to sleep under her roof, giving him a bed in “our waste room.” Jackson, a gifted raconteur, entertained her children with stories and songs. Jackson stayed with Stowe for just a single night, but—writes the historian Susanna Ashton—it was “an encounter that, quite possibly, changed the world.” As Ashton argues in her intriguing new book, A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe drew on this fleeting interaction when, just seven weeks later, she began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The novel, which tells the story of a long-suffering enslaved man, sold at least 300,000 copies in its first year and helped to inflame the passions of a nation hurtling toward war.Yet if Stowe’s protagonist was so forbearing that his name has become an epithet, Jackson is a far more compelling figure. An epic, thousand-mile escape from slavery to freedom was only the first act in a life that spanned the pulpit, the jailhouse, and a daring attempt to buy his former owners’ land. Jackson told his own life story in an 1862 memoir that serves as one of Ashton’s main sources. She came upon the memoir while “hunting down rare or out-of-print slave narratives” and was so entranced by Jackson’s “big personality” that she decided to dig further. The resulting book, though billed as biography or literary history, is more properly read as somewhere between a detective story and a caper. In searching for John Andrew Jackson, Ashton has depicted with nuance and restraint a life story that complicates the kind of mawkish or tidy assumptions about enslaved people contained in many works, perhaps most famously Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her main character’s elusiveness is the story’s most remarkable feature.“I was born in South Carolina,” begins John Andrew Jackson’s memoir, published a decade after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His parents, Betty and the unusually named Doctor Clavern, were slaves on the Sumter County plantation of Robert English. John Andrew came into the world in 1825, one of the more than 50 slaves owned by English, most of whom were forced to pick short-staple cotton beneath a burning sun. For reasons still obscure, he was apparently also known to his enslavers as “Jackson.”English was a striver, a locally powerful but widely disliked property owner; his wife, Elizabeth, and four daughters were memorably abusive, apparently delighting in whipping their slaves. According to Jackson’s memoir, the youngest English daughter, Martha, once ordered Jackson’s sister to be whipped 100 times for refusing to stop praying; the sister died as a result of the beating. Jackson himself was forced to endure “many whippings,” he would write.Sometime before 1840, Jackson began a relationship with another enslaved woman, Louisa, with whom he soon had a daughter, Jinny. English was irate, as Louisa belonged to a neighboring enslaver, meaning Jinny and any other children Jackson and Louisa would have would be the property of Louisa’s owner. English beat Jackson every time he visited Louisa—“at least every week,” Jackson later wrote. “I shall carry these scars to my grave.” To make matters worse, Louisa’s owner soon moved to Georgia, sundering Jackson’s family.Jackson apparently sought solace in prayer—and in resistance. In 1846, he somehow acquired a pony and rode it to a religious meeting without permission, an act of defiance so unforgettably bold that Irving Lowery, an enslaved man who lived nearby, wrote about it more than 50 years later in his own memoir. Elizabeth English ordered her overseer to give Jackson a hundred lashes—“a terrifying punishment … not far off from being a death sentence,” Ashton wrote—but he managed to flee into the nearby trees. Realizing he was “stuck in the swampy woods without recourse, supplies, or a feasible plan for sustainable escape,” Jackson returned the next day, but soon thereafter, on Christmas Day, he retrieved his pony and escaped for good. Desperate to recapture their lost property, the English family ran an advertisement offering a reward for his apprehension. Noting his cleverness, the advertisement warned white readers that Jackson “speaks plausibly.”Armed with little more than his plausible tongue, Jackson managed to charm a procession of acquaintances into helping him escape nearly 900 miles to Massachusetts. He quickly set about trying to raise enough money to purchase Louisa and Jinny’s freedom, making valuable contacts with nearby abolitionist activists. Soon, he was traveling around Massachusetts, telling his story and soliciting donations. It was the beginning of a life of storytelling, reinvention, and tireless fundraising.Not long thereafter, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, forcing Jackson to flee once again. It was on his trip north that he spent a single night at the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe. From her waste room (essentially a storage closet), Jackson moved on to other towns in Maine, apparently passing the freezing winter of 1850–51 in Portland. Once again, his skill at connecting with nearby activists ensured his safety—and ultimately his passage into Canada.Ashton recounts the remainder of Jackson’s life with aplomb, ably covering his years of lecturing in Canada and then in England, his itinerant preaching, his acquisition of literacy, his decision to write a memoir, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, and his remarriage, to Julia Watson, a runaway slave from North Carolina. The details of Watson’s life are few, but it is evident she accompanied her husband to England and sometimes lectured onstage alongside him, making her “possibly the first African American woman to speak in the British Isles about her enslaved experiences.” Throughout the 1860s, Jackson attracted fans and donations yet consistently alienated allies, including financial benefactors. He had “spent his life carefully constructing a persona of resilient bravado,” Ashton writes carefully; he “wasn’t a man to back down.” Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Jackson and Watson returned to the United States, where he found work with the Freedmen’s Bureau. He set about trying to buy up his former owners’ land and turn it into a community for freed slaves—or for his own family. It was just one among many utopian visions for the postwar South, and—like most of these visions—it faded amid fierce white supremacist resistance.Jackson continued to lecture and fundraise but repeatedly encountered legal jeopardy; in North Carolina, authorities brought charges of financial swindling against him (Ashton calls them “trumped-up”) and he was sentenced to five years of hard labor. The aging man served little of it, briefly escaping from prison and then managing to secure a swift release after journalistic allies turned his conviction into an international scandal.In reconstructing a life that included so many wild twists and turns, Ashton has accomplished a remarkable feat of historical excavation.Toward the end of his life, Jackson did attain small plots of South Carolina soil, including property that had “almost certainly” been owned by “English family relatives.” But his dreams for this land amounted to little. It was “not unlikely” Ashton writes, again with tact, that he was “pilfering or profiting from goods that had been donated.… He had always been a bit of a hustler, a survivor.”In reconstructing a life that included so many wild twists and turns, drawing on sources drenched alternately in their recordkeepers’ racism and the protagonist’s self-mythologization, Ashton has accomplished something remarkable, a feat of historical excavation. She unearths myriad newspaper articles, court records, and letters, though she also reflects on “what can and cannot be recorded.” The result of her digging is a nuanced depiction of Jackson, a man possessed of almost unfathomable resilience and also chutzpah, a combination that led to both iconoclasm and apparently fraud. Understandably, her sources do not allow Ashton to paint her other characters as convincingly, occasionally resulting in a flattening sentimentality. Jackson’s mother, Betty, “must have been someone special. Someone fearless”; his wife, Julia Watson, “must have been remarkable.” Must they? Ashton is on firmer ground in refusing to make such demands of Jackson.The most newsworthy of Ashton’s conclusions are her claims about Jackson’s influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe. For it is these claims—featured centrally on A Plausible Man’s book jacket and in its marketing material—that go beyond the biographical, instead seeking to reframe one of the most famous works of American literature. While Ashton insists that the more “significant story” inspired by Jackson was “his own,” no doubt many readers will arrive at this book trying to learn more about the origins of another.From nearly the first moment it appeared in print, Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired readers to try to discover Stowe’s inspirations. Within a year, Stowe had published The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an assemblage of the press reports, slave narratives, and other sources from which she claimed to have either drawn or found subsequent “confirmation.
https://newrepublic.com/article/184492/searching-elusive-man-inspired-uncle-toms-cabin