How Do We Tell a Tale of People Who Sought to Disappear?

In December 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, who had a modest sideline in magazine writing, hid a fugitive in her house. A friendly neighbor had sent the man over, and so it was that the little-known writer and harried mother Harriet Beecher Stowe opened her door.

It was bitterly cold, and Stowe’s house was crowded with children. Her husband was away. And yet she opened the door — a criminal act, in 1850. The man stayed for only one night, but he made an impression upon both Stowe and her children, singing and entertaining them all and telling Stowe about his hardships. In a space apart from the children, no doubt, he bared his back and showed her his scars from whippings he had received in a slave labor camp. We might imagine he spoke, too, of his wife and child he had left behind: “He was,” she later wrote to her sister, “a genuine article from the “Ole Carliny State.”

Drawing from this experience, some seven weeks later, in 1851, Stowe began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that helped inspire the most consequential social revolution in the history of the Western world: the overthrow of modern slavery.

Stowe never named the man who was fleeing to Canada. It is possible he didn’t even share his name with her. Yet he was, indeed, “a genuine article.” He went by John Andrew Jackson, and his encounter with Stowe was only one pivotal incident in his rich and complicated career. And while there is a good argument to be made that his life story inspired some parts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin — even serving as a model for a crucial chapter that portrays a fugitive being welcomed into a Northern senator’s home, a house unprepared for hosting a freedom seeker — the more significant story he created was his own. Through determination and canny charisma, Jackson reclaimed what it was to be genuine, not according to the condescending assessment of white America, but through his savvy self-fashioning. 

Born enslaved sometime around 1820, Jackson endured the suffering expected for a man in bondage until his wife, Louisa, and young daughter he called “Jinny” were sent away from him. Then, facing heartbreak beyond endurance, Jackson fled on horseback across the dangers of the South Carolina terrain until reaching the coastal port of Charleston. Once there, he engineered a harrowing escape, hiding between bales of cotton aboard a northbound vessel. Over the next years, in the comparative freedom of the Northern states and later Canada and Great Britain, he carved out a life for himself and constructed a destiny of broad, strange horizons.

Jackson’s life reflects an era of new possibilities for a generation of African American authors arising out of bondage. His particular experiences in first engineering an escape from slavery and then building a life in freedom are powerful, to be sure. But once out of the South, his experiences are uniquely telling. He navigates an international lecturing career initially under the mercurial patronage of powerful British Baptist Evangelicals who assist him in publishing his 1862 memoir, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina.

Yet, in another striking turn, once that relationship grew sour, Jackson returned to the United States for some 35 years of independent operations as an advocate for freed people, collecting donations, lecturing across postbellum America, and promoting ill-fated social experiments. He even attempted to purchase back his enslaver’s family land to resettle forty Black families in a utopian plan for communal farming. Jackson faced failure regularly but somehow kept at his dreams. Implausibly and yet truly, when in 1880 he was arrested in North Carolina and sentenced to hard labor on a convict work gang, this man in his midfifties somehow managed to escape. Again, Jackson was not going to be kept down.

Unlike most other extant narratives of slavery and freedom, Jackson’s tale is one of independent negotiations and survival. His is a tale of individual hustle; separate from most established Black and white organizations, he would almost always go it alone.

John Andrew Jackson is a remarkable but overlooked American figure who challenges what we might think of as the history of fugitivity and, in particular, how the Reconstruction-era lives of these freedom seekers arose from their earlier experiences in slavery. His story spans generations and lingers today with his family descendants in South Carolina.

At the same time, his story is a tale of the archive and its vacillating richness and scarcity: How do we tell a tale of the 19th century and of people who sought to disappear? Of a person whose color meant that his history was ultimately relegated to the folk knowledge of his neighbors? Jackson’s story is about the archive of the marginal, the folklore of the underground, and the truths of the forgotten networks that make up how we see our histories and our communities.

In telling Jackson’s story, I have chosen to depart from the biographical practice of using archival documentation simply as fodder for fact-checking and footnotes. Rather, each chapter in my new book, A Plausible Man, focuses on one particularly telling historical document that frames a perspective not merely upon Jackson’s life activities, but upon notions of what can and cannot be recorded.

The first chapter, for instance, weighs interpretative possibilities around an assault charge leveled between two white men in 1821. One of these white men accused the other of stealing or “inveigling” away from his personal property, property which happened to be, according to the Sumter County Court records, a man named “Doc.” A physical altercation between the white men ensued.

While “Doc” is referenced in the county records of this case, he is not called to witness or testify about the events. This enslaved man held the full name of “Doctor Clavern,” according to his own family, at least. His story was at the core of the court record, and yet it only glancingly acknowledges his presence in the case. Doctor was Jackson’s father, and my examination of this document launches the book not merely to provide context for the violent world Jackson was born into but also to highlight how its passing reference to “Doc” reminds us how certain stories are allowed to survive.

A court record embodies a kind of archival assault. That is to say, the practice of retaining and indexing this kind of legal conflict, registering the white names of the dispute but deliberately ignoring the experience of the man listed within the document’s core, is an aggressive act in and of itself. In this instance, as in the case of the other documents that provide a threshold of entry for each chapter that follows (a runaway slave advertisement, a newspaper clipping, a family letter, an addendum page to a census report, a self-published pamphlet, a solicitation letter, a census map, and a property deed), such historical documents cannot be understood as solely a background to one man’s life. Rather, these documents demonstrate how Black presence and identity bleed through the otherwise obfuscatory 19th century ledger lines.

The name of “Doc” eventually connected what started as a largely historical study to a 21st century world. As I struggled to figure out who Jackson’s descendants might be and why he had been named “Jackson” at all, I realized that his father’s first name, “Doc,” was a name to follow. And indeed, it was his father’s first name that led me to the living members of the Clavon / Clabon / Clyburn family. While it doesn’t appear that any direct descendants of Jackson survived, children of his sisters and brothers did, and they sweetly continued to honor their patriarch “Doc” with generation after generation naming at least one child “Doctor,” “Dock,” or “Doc.” This modern family of Clavons, which is perhaps disproportionately rich with clergy, salespeople, and vibrant personalities, embodies the hustle, talent, and collective love which enabled Jackson to survive. 

Stories of escape and survival can be celebrations of unimaginable individual achievement. But those people carried tremendous burdens of guilt and loss.

Jackson’s survival and escape were, of course, unfathomably brave. There was also a cost, likely a terrible cost, to the families he left behind. There are indeed no records with details on what happened to the Clavon / Jackson family immediately after Jackson fled. And yet, it would have been tragic but typical for remaining enslaved family members to be punished or tortured to find out where freedom seekers such as Jackson might have gone. We shouldn’t be surprised that much of Jackson’s narrative thus dances between the tension of providing testimony about his achievements and establishing himself as a speaker on behalf of others. Fortunately, records of his life go far beyond his testimony in his memoir. It is the other ephemera that flesh out the story of his life, particularly in the four decades after he wrote his book, and that suggest to us how he may have balanced out this flashy and heroic persona that allowed him to survive and succeed alongside a quieter regret and responsibility to the people he had left behind. 

The questions that plagued Jackson remain relevant today. The notion that only virtuous citizens deserve freedom is one he struggled with. He was accused of lying, misrepresentation, exaggeration, and fraud on various occasions throughout his life. It is certainly possible, even probable, that on occasion these accusations had some truth behind them. He hustled, for sure. He collected money for years on behalf of others, and while we have evidence that some of his collections made their way to their destination, it is not clear that they always did. Certainly, he would have used some collected funds for his survival and support, perhaps in either an honest or an underhanded way.

The historical records that provide us with incomplete knowledge, therefore, are especially ripe for scrutiny, though the historical record appears to check out. Thanks to digital tools of the modern age, I’ve been able to crossreference addresses, newspaper notices, government records, and census data that support a contention that he was usually, if not always, who he said he was.

This question about documentation and reliability was a notion coded and inflected with racist assumptions about character. Jackson’s enslavers posted an advertisement in their local paper, the Sumter Banner, in March 1848, three months after he fled — a notice that warned against listening to him, because he “speaks plausibly.” Cautioning white readers against the duplicitous nature of fugitives was a relatively common rhetorical technique in advertisements. This language served the dual function of heightening suspicion about this garrulous and clever man and implicitly reminding audiences that sincerity of character was rarely found in Black people — particularly those who had the effrontery to steal themselves. In the eyes of many powerful people at that time, self-theft was a serious property crime. Warning readers about the inherent untrustworthy nature of even the most well-spoken or persuasive runaways had the additional effect of reminding newspaper audiences that words, logic, skill, and even truth had no precedence over the color of one’s skin. 

How Jackson renders himself “plausible” is the heart of my entire project. It is not the copious documentation compiled that “authenticates” his life story. Jackson would never have given pieces of paper that kind of power. Instead, it is Jackson’s assertion of his manhood, his place in the world, and even his status as an “advocate for the freeman” that undergird any documents. Not the other way around. He subverted the casual assertion of slaveholders and turned the notion of “plausibility” in on itself. His identity was to be on his terms and articulated in books he would write, pamphlets he would author, and speeches he would deliver. Without much of a white amanuensis or editor, what we know of Jackson’s life is largely on his own terms. As readers, our choice to assess his witness as plausible or not is up to us. But Jackson lays out his tools and the criteria for such assessment.

These documents tell a difficult tale that resists designation as a triumph narrative despite occasional moments of happiness. Even his greatest moments, such as when he escaped from South Carolina, were tinged with bittersweet knowledge about those he had left behind. The location of Jackson’s grave is unknown. He may have died with friends and family, but he certainly died in poverty. Few of his dreams came true for himself or his community; he never established or built a church, he never appears to have built a home for the aged freedmen, and he wasn’t able to bring any orphaned children north. He had dreamed of creating a Black utopia on his ruined enslaver’s property. But it was not to be.

And yet, Jackson’s spectacular self-creation allowed him to travel the world. His confidence allowed him to speak to thousands about the most consequential social movements of the modern age. He was able to build and rebuild a family. He managed to reconnect with a devastated community, deliver supplies to the starving, escape from a chain gang, and ensure his voice would survive. He spent the last decades of his life traveling between New England and the rural South, trying to fulfill the promise of a post–Civil War Union. He had friends, for sure, but as an independent operator in a world that demanded Black people stay quiet, he was a self-promoter and self-proprietor.

Jackson’s bold self-fashioning as a man of substance pushes back against the paternalistic affirmations he often was met with by white people — after all, Stowe appointed herself as arbiter by asserting he was the “genuine article” with some bemused racism. And his enslavers put out advertisements for him, cautioning that he “speaks plausibly” and should not be trusted. They were right.

Jackson hectored and lectured. He sang and scolded. He was quick to speak truths but he’d hustle with lies. The story of his survival was always linked to the survival of his stories. 

History’s judgment on what is real might be only an assessment of what is or what we think is plausible — as we consider which truth fits our predictions, our preconceptions. Jackson’s story eluded scholars until now precisely because his clear-spoken claims about who he was, what he did, and how he moved through the world didn’t fit the subservient, unctuously grateful, truth-telling role in, indeed, the Uncle Tom model.

Jackson instead built a life in which he could be plausible according to the whims of his mercurial patrons or enemies. Being plausible could buy Jackson time. It could allow him to elude pursuers and detractors alike. Being plausible didn’t mean he was a fraud. It simply meant that other people couldn’t read him as well as they thought they could.

For Jackson, being plausible gave him space.

This excerpt originally appeared in A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published by The New Press. Copyright © 2024 by Susanna Ashton. Reprinted here with permission.

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