The black refugee who inspired “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and brought in regards to the end of slavery within the USA

Around 1825 John Andrew Jackson was born a slave on a plantation in South Carolina and trained to select cotton for the remainder of his life.

But as a substitute of living a life as a slave, he escaped bondage and have become an influential anti-slavery lecturer and writer. He also played a key role in Harriet Beecher Stowe's acclaimed novel “Uncle Tom's Cabin”, which historians say contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War through its portrayal of the inhumane treatment of black men and girls.

As a scholar I even have spent years researching the lives of slaves and their writings and am still baffled that he’s barely mentioned in most histories of slavery in America. My biography of Jackson states: “A reputable man“, I describe his remarkable life.

North to freedom

In early 1846, Jackson's wife and daughter were sold to a different plantation in South Carolina. Heartbroken and offended, he was determined to generate income and buy his family's freedom. Jackson waited until Christmas Day and took a daring step – he escaped on horseback.

He found work on the docks in Charleston and eventually hid amongst bales of cotton aboard a ship certain for Boston.

Once there, Jackson began speaking at abolitionist meetings throughout Massachusetts to lift money for the discharge of his wife and child. But before he could raise the essential amount, President Millard Fillmore signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850which provides for severe penalties for any assistance in escape.

Although Jackson lived in a supposedly free state, the brand new law put him in great danger of being enslaved again. Jackson decided to flee again, this time to Canada.

Along the best way, abolitionists sent Jackson to sympathetic homes in Maine.

A probability encounter

Such a house belonged to the stuffy Thomas C. UphamProfessor of mental and moral philosophy at Bowdoin College.

He had explained to his friends that although slavery was a grave injustice, the Fugitive Slave Act was nevertheless the law and needed to be obeyed.

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

Upham invited him in and offered him food and encouragement. Since Upham couldn’t accommodate Jackson for the night, he sent Jackson to his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe – a friend who had long been frustrated by the timid politics of the otherwise friendly professor.

Stowe was a little-known author At the time, she was living because the wife of a professor at Bowdoin College. When Jackson got here to her doorstep, she too broke the law.

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

Although she never mentioned Jackson’s name, later wrote about this incidentand noted that their visitor was “a true specimen of 'Ole Carliny State'” – a reference to a well-liked minstrel song that Jackson later included in his own memoirs.

'The Little Woman'

A number of weeks later, Stowe began designing aUncle Tom's Cabin.”

It was a well-recognized scene. The novel's protagonist, Eliza, a black refugee, knocks on the door of a U.S. senator who had previously promised to uphold the laws for escaped slaves.

But when the Senator found himself confronted by a terrorized person on his doorstep, he let his heart guide him, not his head. Like the actual Professor Upham, the fictional Senator and his wife flouted the law.

Art all the time emerges from quite a lot of influences, and Stowe's writing was actually inspired by other people or experiences.

But aside from this scene, which clearly referred to Upham's meeting with Jackson, this encounter moved Stowe from the broader debate of anti-slavery policy to the immediacy of direct motion.

Published in 1852, “Uncle Tom's Cabin” inspired abolitionists across the country and have become the second best-selling book within the United States within the nineteenth century. Only the Bible was higher.

A decade later, when Stowe visited the White House in November 1862, President Abraham Lincoln He allegedly 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 her novel, Jackson crossed the US-Canadian border.

He moved from Maine and settled in St. Johns, New Brunswickfor a number of years. But his desire to have a greater influence within the Anti-slavery movement prompted him to sail to Liverpool in England with a letter of suggestion from Stowe himself.

Over the subsequent decade, Jackson lectured throughout Britain, as did many black abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass. During this time, Jackson wrote his Memoirs of 1862“The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina”, by which he writes about his Encounter with Stowe.

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

Only after the top of the Civil War in 1865 did Jackson sail from Great Britain back to the USA.

He continued to lecture and lift money, this time for supplies for destitute freedmen in South Carolina. He raised money to ascertain an orphanage, a church, and a house for black elders without families to look after them.

Few of those projects were ever fully realized, but newspapers and correspondence with government officials document his tireless commitment.

Jackson's daring life ended sometime within the early twentieth century. Before he died, his exploits had turn into legend amongst those that knew him within the black community.

One of his neighbors remembered him with admiration.

In the Nineteen Thirties, an interviewer asked Jake McLeod, an elderly black sharecropper, about his memories of Jackson.

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