The Black Fugitive Who Inspired ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and the End of Slavery in the United States

by Susanna Ashton, Clemson University

Around 1825, John Andrew Jackson was born a slave on a plantation in South Carolina and trained to spend his life picking cotton.

But instead of living as a slave, he escaped and became an influential antislavery speaker and writer. He also played a key role in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which historians believe helped spark the Civil War by depicting the inhumane treatment of black men and women.

As a scholar of slave life and writings, I have studied Jackson’s life for years and am still puzzled by his ignorance of much of the history 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 angry, he was determined to make money and buy his family’s freedom. Jackson waited until Christmas Day and made a bold decision: he escaped on horseback.

He found work on the docks of Charleston and eventually hid among bales of cotton aboard a ship bound for Boston.

Once there, Jackson began speaking at abolitionist meetings throughout Massachusetts to raise money to free his wife and child. But before he could raise the money, President Millard Fillmore signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which imposed harsh penalties on anyone who aided escaped slaves.

Although Jackson lived in a supposedly free state, he was in dire danger of being returned to slavery 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 encounter

One of these houses belonged to Thomas C. Upham, professor of mental and moral philosophy at Bowdoin College.

He had told his friends that although slavery was a grave wrong, the Fugitive Slave Law was still the law and must be obeyed.

But when Jackson knocked on his door, Upham immediately put aside his qualms.

Upham invited him in and offered him food and encouragement. Since Upham could not put Jackson up for the night, he directed him to his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a friend who had long been frustrated by the political timidity of the otherwise kindly professor.

Stowe was a little-known writer at the time, living as the wife of a Bowdoin College professor. When Jackson arrived at her home, she too ran afoul of the law.

She opened the door and welcomed him in. Jackson entertained his children, told her of his grief, and accepted money, food, and clothing from her before leaving the next morning.

Although she never used Jackson’s name, she later wrote about the incident, noting that her visitor was “a real article from ‘Ole Carliny State'”—a reference to a popular minstrel song that Jackson was later to add to his own memoirs.

‘The Little Woman’

A few weeks later, Stowe began writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

The scene is familiar: the novel’s heroine, Eliza, a black fugitive, knocks on the door of a U.S. senator who had promised to comply with the Fugitive Slave Laws.

But when faced with a terrified person on his doorstep, the senator let his heart override his reason. Like the real Professor Upham, the fictional senator and his wife defied the law.

Art always arises from a myriad of influences, and other individuals or experiences certainly inspired Stowe’s writing.

But beyond this scene, which was clearly inspired by Upham’s meeting with Jackson, this encounter moved Stowe from the broader debate about antislavery politics to the immediacy of direct action.

Published in 1852, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” galvanized abolitionists across the country and became the second best-selling book in the United States in the 19th century, second only to the Bible.

Ten years later, when Stowe visited the White House in November 1862, President Abraham Lincoln reportedly told her, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

A life on the run

While Stowe was writing his novel, Jackson was crossing the border between the United States and Canada.

He left Maine and settled in St. Johns, New Brunswick, for a few years. But his desire to have a greater influence in the antislavery movement prompted him to sail for Liverpool, England, with a letter of support from Stowe herself.

Over the next decade, Jackson lectured throughout Britain, as did many black abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass. It was during this time that Jackson wrote his 1862 memoir, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, in which he recounts his encounter with Stowe.

“During my escape from Salem to Canada, I met a very sincere friend who helped me find shelter for the night and get on my way. Her name was Mrs. Beecher Stowe. She took me in, fed me, and gave me clothes and five dollars. She also examined my back, which is covered with scars that I will take with me to the grave.”

It was only after the end of the Civil War in 1865 that Jackson returned to the United States from Britain.

He continued to lecture and raise funds, this time for relief supplies for the destitute freedmen of South Carolina. He raised money to establish an orphanage, a church, and a home for elderly black people without family to care for them.

Few of these projects actually came to fruition, but diaries and correspondence with government officials attest to his relentless advocacy.

Jackson’s daring life ended in the early 20th century. Before his death, his actions had become legendary among those who knew him in the black community.

One of his neighbors remembered him with admiration.

In the 1930s, a reporter asked Jake McLeod, an elderly black sharecropper, what he remembered of Jackson.

“I don’t know how he got away,” McLeod said, “but they didn’t catch him until it was too late.”

Susanna Ashton, English teacher, Clemson University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.