John Andrew Jackson: The Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin

Arnold
00:00:00

An ad that was published in the Sumter Banner on March 24, 1847. Said $50 reward ran away from the plantation of Robert English in Sumter District, South Carolina about the 25th of December last.

A Negro man named Jackson.

Jackson is about 30 years of age, near 6ft in height, stout and well proportioned, has high and naked temples, speaks plausibly, has a wife in Houston County, Georgia, belonging to Mr. J.R. mcLaw whither he may have gone.

The above reward will be paid for his delivery to the subscriber or for his lodgment in any jail so that I may get him again. In December of 1850, the wife of a faculty member 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 opened her door. It was bitterly cold and the 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 the woman and her children, singing and entertaining them all and telling 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 old Killarney state.

Well, drawing from this experience, some seven weeks later in 1851, Harriet Beecher 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. We're going to talk more about who that slave was on St. Louis in Tune. Welcome to St.

Louis in Tune and thank you for joining us for fresh perspectives on issues and events with experts, community leaders and everyday people who make a difference in shaping our society and world. I'm Arnold Stricker along with co host Mark Langston. Good morning, Mark.

Mark
00:02:18

Good morning. I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to be anywhere, if you gotta know.

Arnold
00:02:24

Yeah, it is an interesting show we're going to have today. When I first found out about this, I was like, whoa. Didn't know about that. And I've been around the block a couple times, but.

And we live in a very historic area here in St. Louis with a lot of wonderful history. Dred and Harriet Scott, etc. Etc. But when I found out about this.

I was like, I need to talk to the author of this book and really get some lowdown and give some good information to people that they probably don't even know about.

Mark
00:02:55

And this author was not easy to find. She's not even on this continent.

Arnold
00:02:59

She's not on this continent. She's currently doing some research in the Netherlands. And before we do that, we're glad that you joined us today, folks.

You can listen to previous shows@stlintune.com please help us continue to grow by leaving a review on our website, Apple Podcast, or your preferred podcast platform.

Mark
00:03:18

That's good.

Arnold
00:03:18

Our return to civility today is if you're having a disagreement over the phone and feel the urge to hang up, say so before you do. If your goal is to end the call, you can do it without slamming down the phone in a moment of mindless furor.

Mark
00:03:38

In my younger years, when I was more of a loose cannon and I would do that, I'd hang up and then I'd feel really bad about it and then you can't call if you don't know the person. Let's say it's a customer service person. You can't call back and apologize. Yeah, don't do that to yourself or the person on the other end.

Arnold
00:03:55

And the customer service people many times are the ones that catch the guff, but they're not the ones that really need to hear the fervor.

Mark
00:04:03

You're right.

And I acknowledge that when I tell them I'm very sorry, I'm frustrated and that you have to take this and they it's a whole different thing when you talk, when you explain yourself that way.

Arnold
00:04:13

We are keeping the line open on this phone because of our guest. Dr. Susanna Ashton is Professor of English at Clemson University.

She's also a scholar, storyteller, baker, gardener, reader, active political citizen, and family member, but her work has been profiled in the New York Times, cnn, and other media outlets across the country.

She's authored, edited, or co authored multiple titles on American literacy and cultural history, including Collaborators in Literary America, 1870-1920 I belong in the South Carolina South Carolina Slave Narratives these Colored United States African American Essays from the 1920s, the South Carolina Roots of African American Thought and Approaches to Teaching. Charles W.

Chestnut in addition to these books, she has published in many scholarly journals as well as popular newspapers and public facing digital media where she's appeared in various media interviews and served as featured expert in the documentary film Gina's Journey. The Search for William Grimes. I love this part She's a faculty Fulbright Scholar in Ireland. She was a faculty fellow at Yale University's.

Another favorite, Gilder Lehrman center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. A Mark Twain Fellow for the mark Twain Society. W.E.B. du Bois fellow at the Hutchins center for African American Research at Harvard University.

Mark
00:05:34

Hold that. He's on page two now.

Arnold
00:05:36

Yes, I'm on page two right now. And she works as an expert on contested authorship of slavery or freedom narratives. Wow. Dr. Ashton, welcome to St. Louis. In tune.

Susanna Ashton
00:05:48

Thank you. It's my pleasure.

Arnold
00:05:50

Wow. So what sparked your interest in slave narratives?

Susanna Ashton
00:05:55

20 or so years ago, I got my first job, which there aren't a lot of jobs in academia. So I was thrilled and I landed in South Carolina at Clemson University, which is a big public university.

People know it as a football powerhouse, which it sure is. But it's an amazing place in many other ways as well. And it happens to be located on a plantation. Labor camp. Indeed.

The plantation house is in the center of campus. And nobody. It's not that you were hiding it. It was just, I think particularly students were so polite. No one wants to say the wrong thing.

Everyone's very careful and a little shy about talking about it. Nobody could really talk easily about the fact that we were on an educational.

We're at a university that was on a plantation site, which frankly, I think is the best possible scenario. If you're on a place that has a dark history, let's put public education that brings everybody in and lifts everybody up.

I think it's the best possible scenario. But anyways, I started working with students, trying to understand that a little bit better. And often teaching is where the best research starts.

And my students and I said, let's look at a lot of. Let's look at people from South Carolina, like survivors. I'm really interested. Witness testimony.

Let's look at how survivors explained what it was like. And that's where I started looking at little known or unpublished.

I didn't discover these, but they're little known narratives, working with them, editing them, publishing them.

And one of them I stumbled across was by this man named John Andrew Jackson, who had survived slavery in South Carolina, had escaped from bondage, and had lived to write his story, but he wrote it in England. And so it never really got distributed in America. Never really for all sorts of reasons I go into in my book.

It never got very well known in America, and yet it was this crazy story. So that's sort of how I began with all my work on narratives by formerly enslaved people, and particularly with John Andrew Jackson.

Arnold
00:07:58

And we're talking with you about the book. It's called A Plausible man, the True Story of the Escaped Slave who Inspired Uncle Tom's Cavern.

And this is unlike any other book that I've read because his narrative was different than many other narratives that were going on. And you mentioned it was really published in England. The other ones were in the states here.

What was so odd about or different about his narrative from other slave narratives that have been published at that time?

Susanna Ashton
00:08:29

One thing that made it stand out was. And can I say this, it was a little bit funny. He had an edge to him. He had a little bit of sarcasm. He had a little bit of.

He was a talker and he was a writer and he had a personality. And it really came out at one point.

He was trying to escape through the city of Charleston, and he was trying to get on a boat, getting onto a boat so that he could smuggle himself out of South Carolina. And so he's just trying to figure things out and wandering around the docks. And some people come to him. They say, who do you belong to?

And he answers, I belong to South Carolina. Which. That is nonsensical. And that context. It was just something he just did on my face type of answer. But when he.

And it worked, the people walked away. They're like, what? That didn't make any sense. What. But they walked away. So that's fine. But later he wrote about this.

He said it was none of their business who I belong to. I was trying to belong to myself. You really get a sense of. He all. He has a lot of little asides, a lot of little comments. And I was like.

And a sense of humor about. About the horror, which is hard to have. And so his personality really jumped out.

Arnold
00:09:39

He had a little swag to him. Say, so who was John Andrew Jackson? Let's let the listeners know a little bit about.

Susanna Ashton
00:09:48

Okay. And first off, hey, folks, if you haven't heard of him, that's fine. Most people haven't. You have now. I hadn't heard of him.

He has completely been disappeared from history, except in particular situation. I can explain in a minute, but yeah. So, Don, Andrew Jackson was born in Sumter County, South Carolina, probably around 1820. Don't know exactly.

And he was taught to be a machine for making money.

He was taught to have a life that would endure great suffering and would be picking cotton and taking care of horses and animals and doing labor around a farm, around a plantation site to enrich the people who enslaved him. He tried to do the best he could to find love and family and community, but it was very difficult.

Fell in love with a girl at a neighboring site named Louisa. And they. They got married as much as they were allowed to get married, which is not at all, but in their minds they were married.

And a little girl, Ginny. Little Ginny he refers to. And he sneaks out at night to go visit her. And they try to build a life the best they can.

But then a couple of years later, his in the Enslavers of Louisa and little Jenny decide to send her away, send them both away to Georgia. And Jackson's devastated. He's pretty confident he'll never see them again, he'll never be reunited, and he has nothing left to lose.

So he decides to run away. And that's really where the story really begins. He manages to get to the city of Charleston. He manages through lots of drama to get aboard a boat.

He smuggles himself between bales of cotton and he lands in Massachusetts. But that sounds really easy and it sounds like his story would be over.

But in a way the story was in some ways just beginning because he wasn't really safe in Massachusetts. He fast forward a little bit, but he tries to raise money for his family to free them. And he's making, he's getting some money. It's complicated.

He's making some inroads. But before he can really get enough money for Louisa and Little Ginny, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law Slave act passes.

And that basically means he could be. The free states are no longer really free states. There's no safety for fugitives now. That's required that they go back. And everyone is.

All the officials are under extra legislation that requires them to assist in the recapture of fugitives. So he. And he's been very prominent. He's not been quiet and hiding his name and hiding or anything.

He's been out there talking about his experiences, tries him to raise money. So he's a known entity. So this time he escapes to Canada and he.

This time he's assisted by the Underground Railroad, which was just really getting organized around that. And it was a lot less organized than people think. And his first escape he did all on his own.

But this one, he had people helping him a little bit from house to house, giving him money here and there. And he makes his way up to Maine, right? There's no railroad into Canada. It's not easy.

And it's winter time and he goes through the town of Brunswick, Maine, which little College Town then and now. And that's where he has a encounter with Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Now, I think Jackson's life is rich and wild and complicated and goes on into the 20th century. He spends the rest of his life trying to save people and to maybe stitch our nation back together.

But this little incident with Stowe is, of course, a very marvelous and exciting hook for how his life unfolds. So that's some of the big picture.

Arnold
00:13:41

As I was reading the book. And, folks, the book is really a Great read because Dr.

Ashton goes through what you've just heard in way more detail and really explains his character. And if I would, it seems like his character changes a little bit. He's quite a salesman. He's what I would call a stump speaker.

And then in his last days, gets a little desperate. And would you. Would you agree with that?

Susanna Ashton
00:14:09

Or let's start with, I think, calling a little bit of a hustler. I think that word is fair. I think he had to be to survive. He's a talker. He will talk his way out of problems. He often talks his way into problems.

Everybody likes him or dislikes him, says, oh, my gosh, he's a talker. And Harriet Beecher Stowe, when he visited her and the children, he says, oh, she entertained my children. He entertained my children.

They loved listening to him talk and sing. And that you also read out loud that advertisement where his enslaver points out he talks plausibly. He may talk his way out of a situation.

He may give you some, give you information, but don't believe it. Right. Whether you like him or dislike him, everybody comments on how he could talk his way in and out of problems.

And then he becomes a public speaker. Absolutely. That's a big part of his character. But later on, he gets, you know, he's not afraid to talk back.

And even, well, after the Civil War is over and there's emancipation and he comes back to America after having been abroad in Canada and England for a couple of years, he talks back. He's overconfident and he doesn't quite recognize the problems.

And indeed, he gets into fights with officers and people like that, white officers, for talking back in.

When the Reconstruction era gets thrown off trains and gets in fights and is eventually arrested and even put on a chain gang, probably really under false charges. But just because he had a big mouth about what he was doing and who he was. Well, yeah, that was his character, but he was also. He never gave up.

He was just tired. He was a very old Man, I have going around collecting money, trying to give them to the freed people in South Carolina.

And he wasn't, for the most part, he wasn't embezzling, as far as I can tell. He may have taken some to line his pocket and to survive.

But I do have actual receipts for donations that he helped coordinate so that I know they actually reached the people he wanted them to reach, which is beautiful to think of. He was helping so far away from time. I can still. I can prove that he did donate stuff.

Arnold
00:16:14

It was the Freedmen's Bureau he was working with or for after the war.

And it seemed, as I was reading the book, as he was running into dead ends, then he would change his course a little bit or change exactly what he was raising money for. First it was, you know, to get his wife and child out. Then it was to get his other immediate family.

And then it was to, now I'm going to help the people down in South Carolina. Now I'm going to build a school. Now I'm going to build a church. And I don't want to use the word opportunist or I know you used the word hustler.

But he was trying to just, I guess, fulfill a dream and some urge in himself to make a difference from where he came from.

Susanna Ashton
00:17:00

And again, I think some of those were maybe situations change. He later says he believes his wife and child have died.

So he starts raising money to free his elderly father and the children of his sister who had been murdered under slavery. These are legitimate sort of changes in his thing. But, yeah, he is. When you look at their. So I think I've gotten a little ahead of myself.

So he encounters Harriet Beecher Stowe in Maine and then spends a night or two with a night with her talks. And in his memoir, he talks about this meeting. And then he goes to Canada, where he's there for a while and remarries another fugitive slave.

And then they go to England, where he becomes a lecturer. And there he gets involved with a whole other exciting sort of celebrity, other than Harriet Beecher Stowe.

He gets involved with Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher who is a beloved charismatic figure in Baptist history. And so Jackson becomes Spurgeon, becomes his patron, really.

And Jackson is sort of a protege for a while, and everything's going great, and then that relationship falls apart.

So Jackson sees a lot of ups and downs, and then he races back to America and spends many years raising money going back and forth between New England and the south, trying to bring the country together. So, yeah, that's the big picture of Jackson. But about the change in personalities and hustles, I don't think it's a change in personality.

I think it just. He pivots when he needs to, and some of his projects fail. He tries to raise money to buy his enslavers land. Do you remember that part? That's crazy.

Arnold
00:18:39

That is crazy. But he.

Susanna Ashton
00:18:41

I know there's plenty of bankrupt people in the South. He could have bought land from anybody. Oh, no, I want that chunk of land.

Arnold
00:18:48

And I get that. That makes perfect sense to me because it's a pride thing. It's, hey, I'm a man. I can do this.

I can own land and become productive and be a part of what this country is about. Sure.

Susanna Ashton
00:19:02

And not only that, he dreamed of putting other families there, too. He was like, let's get 40 black families here and we'll live as a community and be safe and we can look out for each other.

And like most of his ideas, it didn't happen. He didn't get the money together. But the audacity of even trying is crazy.

Arnold
00:19:19

And to think about it, he was really. And I think about this in this way, he was ahead of his time in where he wanted the country to be and where he wanted other people to be.

And maybe that's why he had that audacity.

And I was really surprised in reading the book that what I would call the circuit speakers or the speakers, that there were so many that went around and talked about slavery in the States and how they needed people to validate their quest for getting help. He had a letter from Harriet Beecher Stowe or had, I guess, some support from her verbally from Charles Spurgeon and then General Howard.

You know, the importance of that, I guess I had really not realized that gave somebody validation to stand up and speak to other people back in England and also in the New England area.

Susanna Ashton
00:20:07

Well, I think it's important because it wasn't just, oh, he's black and is not trustworthy, which might have been a little of how audiences were a little worried about it. Right. They consider black people as necessarily honest as white people.

But I think also the pre Internet era, it was very easy to run into scammers and con men. Right. You couldn't fact check people on the Internet.

Now, if somebody comes and makes a claim, things are fake on the Internet, we all know that, but at least you have a better shot at tracking down someone's identity and verifying their story. And that didn't exist in the 19th century.

So when he goes to England in 1856 and he invents himself as a lecturer and I love that you notice the detail. A number of ministers at various churches say things either to newspapers or in letters.

They say, I saw he had a document from Harriet Beecher Stowe endorsing him. And that letter had since disappeared, but we know it existed. So we know Harriet Beecher Stowe did not disavow that she had met Jackson.

She believed him, she endorsed his story. And so that opened a lot of doors for him.

But yeah, I think at that time you needed, if you're going to get up at a church or in a town hall and talk about slavery in America and you're in England, you got to have a local minister has to introduce you. You have to have all these endorsements maybe from fancy people who you can read out loud their letters, things like that to say.

And now we welcome to Jackson to the stage.

Arnold
00:21:39

And we are actually talking to Dr. Susanna Ashton. She's an author of the book. We're talking about a plausible the true story of the escaped slave who inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin.

I was looking at one of the wonderful spots on the Internet. I'm looking at Mark and getting ready to smile on Wikipedia, on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Wikipedia page. Maybe it's Uncle Tom's Cabin Wikipedia page.

And she wrote a book about the truth behind Uncle Tom's Cabin about who the people were. Now, John Andrew Jackson is not mentioned there. So that Wikipedia site has to be updated, folks, if you want to check that out.

Mark
00:22:18

You can do that.

Arnold
00:22:19

You can do that.

Susanna Ashton
00:22:20

It's complicated. It is complicated. Well, I want to be careful here because I'm actually from English. I'm not a historian by training. I do historical work.

But I'm really interested in stories and how we tell our stories and where our stories come from. And you'll notice in the title of my book, I don't say that he's a model for Uncle Tom or a model for any character, because we could say he is.

But what I'm interested in is what she was just a little magazine writer and she was an intellectual and she had family who were very famous ministers and who were involved in anti slavery stuff. She certainly was an abolitionist, but she wasn't an activist, right? That's different.

And so she went from sort of theory to practice when she opened her door to this fugitive who knocked on her door in Maine and she brought him inside, she fed him, she gave him a place to sleep. She let her children chatter with him.

The next morning she gave him some clothes and money, send him off on his way to Bath, another little town in Maine, where he might be able to get some help there. And so she may not even have known his name at that time, which is interesting. But she.

Six weeks later, or five weeks later, just a few weeks later, she was sitting in church and suddenly had this revelation from God as she described.

And she was struck by the fact that she had a vision that she could write a story, a book about slavery and family separations and the obscenity of the injustice that human bondage represented. And so she started writing this book.

And so what I'm really interested in is how this encounter with Jackson inspired her to start writing, inspired her to activism, what that moment was. And Jackson wasn't the only thing. There were other experiences she had, other things she read about that informed what she did.

But that encounter was really pivotal in making it personal, bringing it into her kitchen, which it never had before in that way. That's sort of part of my argument. Also the key. Uncle Tom's Cabinet is a weird book. So she wrote this spectacular novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

They had to invent a new kind of printing press to handle how many books needed to be printed of that. Does that keep. I love that detail. Uncle Tom's Cabin was crazy popular. Like it was such best selling. Doesn't even begin to describe success.

Arnold
00:24:52

The best selling novel second only to. In literary works to the Bible.

Mark
00:24:58

No kidding.

Arnold
00:24:58

During that time.

Susanna Ashton
00:24:59

Yeah. To the King James bible in the 19th century. That's absolutely right. It's just everywhere. Everywhere.

And even people who had never read it all heard of it and knew the characters and there were plays and songs and it was just like a totally total common cultural writing reference. Who knew that everybody would know about anyway. So she wrote this incredibly important book, but a lot of. And it was really effective. Right.

And when something's effective, there's a backlash. So you started getting all these southern writers saying she's exaggerating. Things aren't that bad. She doesn't know what she's talking about.

She's just a little New Englander who's really ignorant, things like that. So she decided to write something called A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which. Oh, it's a weird book. Court cases that she's citing.

And she doesn't say that this is exactly this or I drew on this. It's more that she's saying I talk about evil and pain. And here is a person who talked about evil and pain.

Or here's a newspaper article about laws about something terrible in the treatment of black people.

And then she does listen people who she found useful and she lists a couple of them who she said someone so and so's narrative was very helpful to me. She mentions a guy named Henson who she says my stories are parallel to some of his life, I think is the phrase she uses.

Anyway, so she's acknowledging other things. But what's interesting is she's careful. She doesn't say I read all these before I wrote my book. She often says I read some of them after.

Or we know she didn't buy those books or read them until after she had started writing. So the whole key to Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very weird and messy sort of source. And she doesn't mention Jackson in it.

But again, we know later on Jackson was in Canada, decided to go to England, and by that point she was famous.

And he clearly contacted her in some way and got her to write a letter of endorsement for him, which she did and which he carried with him to England.

Arnold
00:26:57

We're talking to Susanna Ashton. She is professor of English at Clemson University and the author of A Plausible the True Story of the Escaped Slave who Inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin.

We'll be right back to talk more to her about that. This is Arnold Stricker of St. Louis in tune on behalf of the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation.

In 1857, the Dred Scott decision was a major legal event and catalyst that contributed to the Civil War. The decision declared that Dred Scott could not be free because he was not a citizen.

The 14th Amendment, also called the Dred Scott Amendment, granted citizenship to all born or naturalized here in our country and was intended to overturn the US Supreme Court decision on July 9, 1868.

The Dred Scott Heritage foundation is requesting a commemorative stamp to be issued from the US Postal Service to recognize and remember the heritage of this amendment by issuing a stamp with the likeness of the man Dred Scott. But we need your support and the support of thousands of people who would like to see this happen.

To achieve this goal, we ask you to download, sign and share the one page petition with others. To find the petition, please go to dredscottlives.org and click on the Dred Scott Petition Drive on the right side of the page.

On behalf of the Dred Scott Heritage foundation, this has been Arnold Stricker of St. Louis in Tune. Welcome back to St. Louis in Tune. This is Arnold Stricker with Mark Langston. We're talking to Dr.

Susannah Ashton about her book A Plausible the True Story of the Escaped Slave who Inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin. And just listeners. So, you know, we're not strictly about St.

Louis kinds of things, although all of these things we talk about that are not related to St. Louis impact, those of us who live there live here in one way or another.

It educates us about what's happening in the greater region, in our country and internationally, and that's why we're having her on to talk about this. I don't know how many people actually knew that John Andrew Jackson ever existed.

Number two, that he went to Harriet Beecher Stowe's house one night and spent the night there, which was totally unheard of as an escaped slave, and then three, that he was an inspiration behind Uncle Tom's Cabin. It's always interesting to know what are the facts behind that. And Dr.

Ashton, I wanted to tell you that I know you say you're just a professor of English and not a historian, but you have done your homework. You have all of your references listed.

I read through at the end on the epilogue, all the people you thanked and all the people that you had from the History Department check out your research. And that is really critical because a lot of people will just put it down and throw it out there and publish it.

But you have done your work on this, and I think that is one reason that actually the folks at Harriet Beecher Stowe's house, really, they have on their website that this is. And it was the inspiration for her. They've said that. At least that's what I recall reading. So that's kudos to you for that.

Susanna Ashton
00:30:14

Yeah, part of. Part of. Thank you so much.

Actually, if I can say one of the lessons in the book has nothing to do with Harriet Beecher's scale, but one of the messages I was hoping to convey is I want to embolden readers. We live in a marvelous time in some ways, in terms of finding stories and family stories and finding out about our history.

Things are digitized and searchable and accessible in ways that they never were before. And I don't mean generations. Like even 10 years, five years ago, you couldn't do things that you can do now.

And so one thing I tried to do in my book is each chapter is focused around a document. A receipt.

Arnold
00:30:50

Yes.

Susanna Ashton
00:30:51

A court case, a census page, a letter, a memoir. There's some sort of document, an advertisement, and I want people to walk through like how can you can read these?

How do you deal with reading these? How do we learn to read a census page for the story? Because these are all imperfect, messy documents. But they tell us just incredible things.

And I really wanted to walk people through it so they feel like you too can.

It used to be this kind of research was only for fancy scholars and rare book libraries, but now anybody with an Internet connection can look up old census data and city directories and put things together. So I wanted to encourage that.

Arnold
00:31:29

I think you really did. And this wasn't a like a couple year project. I think I was reading this is like an 8 to 10 year project that you were working on.

And did you take more than that?

Mark
00:31:41

My friends write the book.

Arnold
00:31:42

Did you take time off from Clemson? Did they give you some sabbatical time to.

Susanna Ashton
00:31:46

Clemson was. Yeah, Clemson was very supportive. And you saw I had fellowships at Yale and Harvard that supported my work for semesters at a time.

I'll also say because I had three small children and it was Covid happened and I had three kids homeschooling in my house for a year and a half and I was trying to run a department life. But I think it's okay. I'm not actually complaining about that.

I think life on unfolds and you just keep plugging away at things and Jackson just stayed with me until I was able to finish the project.

Arnold
00:32:17

Did you have llamas to take care of at that time too?

Susanna Ashton
00:32:21

I'm sorry?

Arnold
00:32:22

Did you have llamas to take care of at that time too?

Susanna Ashton
00:32:25

Oh, I wish, I wish. Oh, yes. You know, during COVID I managed to sneak out to a farm that had llamas to try to take something we could do outdoors. It was safe.

And I took all my kids to go look at llamas and I have a wonderful picture of all the llamas on my webpage.

Arnold
00:32:43

Yeah, I saw that. I didn't know if you were raising llamas or had llamas there or something.

Susanna Ashton
00:32:49

Oh, I wish. Shouldn't we all just retire and raise llamas? That would be a life.

Mark
00:32:53

Oh my gosh.

Arnold
00:32:55

Listeners. Her website is susannahashton.com s u s A N N A A S N susannahasht Lash Llamas. Yes. You were mentioning about each chapter starts with a document.

Give an example.

And when you were talking about that, the one that came to mind to me was the census in Canada that identifies a group of people as from the United States, basically. But that was not all the story. But you pick one.

Susanna Ashton
00:33:33

Oh no, thank you. Actually, I love it because this reminds you that every document and census, all the census data is different.

I looked at census data from Canada where they asked how much maple syrup people produce for a year. You learn a lot about the story of a locality. But this particular census of 1850, 1851 in Canada, and it had this little appendix page.

Where to begin with, why does the census have an appendix page? Is a little weird. But it was just throwing the name of a cluster of people who were black. And instead of listing them as.

It had a section where you're supposed to list people by race. And this is the 19th century. They're black, white. They'll use all sorts of ugly words we don't use now. But they list people by race, even in Canada.

And yet instead of listing them by. It listed them as black. And then it listed them as United States.

It listed them instead of a racial identity, it gave them a national identity, which is really weird. Right?

Arnold
00:34:34

I thought.

Susanna Ashton
00:34:35

So I looked at that. And what you think was this was. I try to think of what I called guerrilla inscription. Somebody decided they wanted to.

They wanted to help the fugitives. They didn't want to say, these are fugitives from the law in the United States state.

Arnold
00:34:49

Right.

Susanna Ashton
00:34:50

Instead they wrote something a little weird, a little ambiguous, so these people could slip through without too much, too many problems. And it reminds you that they were fugitives from the law, they were fugitives from bondage, but they were also criminals of.

And I'm very careful as I say this. Take a deep breath. Self theft. Right. That was their crime. And that was an actual thing.

And in Canada, which was supposed to be sending people back, and they didn't usually, but. So that census was crazy.

And it listed Jackson's name and it suddenly told me about the little community he was with and the people he was traveling with. But it also told me that something very special had happened with that census taker in Canada in 1851 who had decided to.

I think he decided to see people as people for who they were. Instead of just being bureaucratic.

He decided to really look at the suffering in front of him and do something a little bit careful, a little bit thoughtful.

Arnold
00:35:53

And it could have been, as you were stating the other way around, and the fact that there were other individuals who were probably running at the time and fleeing to Canada because that was. There was some quote, unquote, little freedom there.

But then even in England, where he found a community of black citizens where he could be comfortable with my words and not be Afraid of, because there was still some issues over there at the time. It wasn't all fun and games because they had abolished Lively earlier in the century. But I was just really taken by how he sought out and.

Which just tells me he was a very determined man. He was very smart about what he did, where he wanted to be. He worked hard. If he needed money, he would go work, he would.

He would talk in the wintertime and work in the summertime. He was a whitewasher, a painter. He worked in a foundry, a lot of different things like that.

And one of the things I thought was very interesting that you talked about was his literacy and how did he write his own particular, what I'm going to call memoir or his story without really any training? And then there's a recent info that I think you can talk about related to that.

Susanna Ashton
00:37:12

Oh, yes. Oh, I'm so glad you asked that question because his literacy is just fascinating to begin with.

Let me just have a moment for you and for your listeners. Learning to read and write as an adult is just one of the hardest things to do. It's children learn like magic, right?

But for adults, learning to be literate is just a spectacular achievement. And I'm not totally clear about every detail how he learned to read.

I have some theories, and he definitely, I have letters he wrote and documents he signed in later life. So he was definitely functionally literate. But literacy is a spectrum, right? It's not just, yes, you're literate or no, you're not.

I think he was functionally literate. I think he was able to write letters. I think he was able to sign things. I don't think he was very polished.

So the written work, like the book that he wrote in England, it says, written by John Andrew Jackson, Authored by John Andrew Jackson. It doesn't say there was an editor. It doesn't say as told to. And yet I bet you somebody edited it.

I bet somebody there was a church he was working with who was helping him do things, and I think they probably edited it pretty heavily. On the other hand, later on, he got mad at the leader of that church. He got mad at Charles Spurgeon. He felt Spurgeon had betrayed him.

And so he wrote a little pamphlet about how angry he was at Spurgeon. And this pamphlet is a mess. This pamphlet just. He is throwing. I don't like Spurgeon. He stole money that was supposed to be raised on my behalf. And.

And I think he has alcohol in the basement. I mean, he's throwing everything he Can. And it's a little incoherent. It's really badly written. It's out of order. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

And yet it seems really genuine because of that. That's how people who are not good writers write. So the way that's oddly a little bit more of his literacy, I think, in the.

I have one theory I wrote about in the book, and then I have a little twist on it that I've since discovered in the book. I say, look, I just don't know how he learned to read. He couldn't have learned as a young person.

But I think maybe he got a little bit of education in Canada. I don't have really evidence. I'm just guessing on that. But maybe his second wife might have been literate. Maybe somebody tutored him a little bit.

Maybe he learned a little bit in Canada, and then he went to England. And I believe he may have continued to try to learn. I know he was trying to attend Sunday schools in England, and he wanted books.

So he clearly wanted books at that point. So he was literate enough to want books. And so that's how I suspect in the book I talk about it.

What I've discovered since the book came out is while in South Carolina in the 1820s and 1830s, there were many laws forbidding people to teach slaves from reading. Many laws. Nonetheless, sometimes people did. And it seems that the particular church where Jackson's enslavers were right near something.

Black River Church, Presbyterian Church, which has records about teaching slaves to read. And I know that Jackson and his family went there. And I know that Jackson's family and his enslavers also went there.

So it is possible that Jackson had some low level of literacy that began actually in that church in South Carolina, because there are documents attesting to the fact that they decided they wanted to teach slaves to read the Bible. They didn't want them to be free. They didn't want them to forge passes to get themselves freedom or read maps or do anything like that.

But they wanted them to be able to read the Bible. And so, although it wasn't really officially sanctioned, this particular church community did do that in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s.

So it is very possible Jackson got some level of education starting there.

Arnold
00:41:04

At least you have, which is just crazy. It is crazy. He. He is a man who just wouldn't let go of something he never would let. Like if a door closed, he would find a way another way through.

I was surprised at the fervency at which he responded to Charles Spurgeon and then really pushed General Howard, too, that things weren't going his way. And he was almost in what I would call a little pest to General Howard a little bit, and pushing the envelope.

Susanna Ashton
00:41:37

Yes. General Howard, who was head of the Freedmen's Bureau and had known Jackson at some point, perhaps through their connections in Maine.

And we have letters that Jackson kept writing, you know me. Please don't forget me. Really, you know me. Because Jim Loud was quite elderly and may have refused to see him or something. Yeah. Jackson was not.

He would not give up. He would solicit people and then solicit them again. But he did make a difference.

One of the other points I'd love to share with your audience in the book is that early on in the process of writing this book, I tried to figure out why he was called Jackson, and was that a first name or a last name? And I couldn't figure it out for sure.

And I decided to look into his family tree, and I couldn't find any surviving members that seemed connected to that. I couldn't find his family tree. I couldn't figure it out with genealogy.

And then I finally realized in the very beginning of the book, he mentions his father, who he was called Dr. Clavern. And he was enslaved, but he had learned.

This man had learned the African method of curing snakebite, says Jackson, and as a result was considered like a healer in the community, not just for his local plantation site, but for other labor camps around there. And so his father was really important. And Jackson talks about his father. And I later find out that this is delightful, that Dr.

Clavern lived long enough to be free and to register to vote, which I think is terrific. I found a voting registration for Dr. Clavern, but anyway. But that name Dr. Became a first name in a family of that era called Clayvon.

And every generation, they had one or two people named Clayvon.

And so that's how I managed to meet many members of the Clayvon family who are Jackson's family descendants, including one gentleman who is terrific, and he has a PhD and he's in Army. The Army. And his name is Dr. Dr. Clavon today. Yeah, I know. Isn't that fantastic? Everyone thinks they were named after their uncle or their grandfather.

And that's all true. It's all honoring an immediate relative. But if you go way back, the original Dr. Clavern was someone very special and a real leader in his community.

And I just love that's how I was able to finally track Jackson's down. And again, that's what we can do now with genealogy sites and library access and scanned newspapers.

Any of your readers, you can go out there, you can do this now, get a librarian to help you and.

Arnold
00:44:10

Get started and get started. You know, you could actually. If you're going to be in Florida or you're going to be at the University of Michigan, or you're going to be.

Where's this one at? It's in Minnesota. If you're going to be In Ohio, Dr. Ashton is going to be speaking in a variety of things this spring. Or you're.

Mark
00:44:32

I'd call it storytelling.

Arnold
00:44:34

And she would, too.

Mark
00:44:36

Dr. Ashton. I know. I'm just like, enthralled with what I'm just like. I don't want to stop her. I mean, it's wonderful. It really is. It's.

I like a story better than being told and preached to and that kind of thing.

Arnold
00:44:50

That's what's neat about the book, Mark, is it's just not a history book. It's told in a story form, and everybody likes story stories.

Mark
00:44:58

Who knew about all of this? I didn't know who inspired Uncle Tom's Guy.

Arnold
00:45:02

That's why we're talking to Dr. Ashton.

Mark
00:45:04

Never, ever knew.

Arnold
00:45:05

So what are your conversations going to be about when you do all of these speaking events?

Susanna Ashton
00:45:11

I love talking to people about the story. And then, as I said, I like to end with talking about it can empower other people to learn things sometimes in ways that are unexpected.

Right now, there are a lot of people who are really frightened of painful history. It's a political climate. It's hard to talk about. It's upsetting. People don't want to mislead people. People want to look at sunny side of everything.

Okay, I do actually understand that impulse, but primary source documents don't lie and that you can decide for yourself.

What I'm working on right now, actually working on this week, is I'm trying to write a young adult version of A Plausible man for younger readers, not children, but like high school students.

And my goal with that book is also is to allow students to say, look, you look at a census record, go look up an arrest record, go look up tax records where people reported slaves as property. And that's just there. You tell me what you think about it, but you make up your own mind.

But let's look at primary sources from our history and the stories it can tell, and we'll all be richer for it.

Arnold
00:46:21

That's A wonderful comment. That's a wonderful encouragement to people, whether they're young or old, to find out what those primary sources are and dig a little deeper and get.

Get the true story about what's going on.

Mark
00:46:35

I don't want this to be an unfair question, but what was the inspiration for you to even take on this kind of a subject and go this way? I want to tell you it's very needed.

And knowing the history of where all of this started, we're talking a man that lived over 200 years ago, I would think, is that if my math is right, for you to just say, this is an interesting part in our history. This is someone we need to know about. And I'm so interested in him because he would find a project or something that he thought was really important.

Instead of doing one labor job or whatever, he bounced around, he saw a project, something that needed to be tended to, and he would focus and put all of his efforts to it, from what I can see. So this is right.

Susanna Ashton
00:47:21

And they didn't always work. They usually didn't work, honestly.

But I do, like, at his very end of his life, I know he took donated money and he bought some land in South Carolina to build his church or his school or something. It didn't work out. But you know what?

I have a record of him sending the property deed back to Massachusetts so that the people who donated would know that they now had the control of the land and that he hadn't absconded it or embezzled it or stolen their money. He did things like that. So I know he wasn't totally full of it.

Arnold
00:47:55

He wasn't a scoundrel.

Susanna Ashton
00:47:57

Yeah, again, maybe he was a little bit.

Lined his pockets a little bit for survival, but most of the time he seems to have been just absolutely earnest about what he was doing and about trying to help. And what's also fascinating about his story, too, is he lived a long time, folks. He was probably 18, 20 to probably like 1900, 1901, maybe 1902.

And we see, of course, we see he talked about his life under slavery, but then there's another 40 years of his life where he's involved and engaged in traveling around the country. And then I said, I'm getting arrested. And oh, did we mention he got put on a chain gang and escaped?

So the next 40 years, it really tells us about American history of that era in a very different way, too.

Arnold
00:48:42

That's a whole nother show right there.

Mark
00:48:44

Oh, yeah.

Arnold
00:48:46

Talking about the election at 1878 and the downfall there. Wow. I am so glad, number one, that you wrote this book and then number two, that we're able to talk to you about this.

And I really encourage everyone to get the book. It's a Plausible man. The true story of the escaped slave who inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin by Susannah Ashton.

You can check out her website@susannahashton.com she is a professor of English at Clemson University.

Mark
00:49:16

Can you buy the book on the website?

Susanna Ashton
00:49:17

You can, yeah. There are a number of links both to bookshop.org and Amazon and the press itself. So go for it.

People also shout out to the fact that there is a fantastic voice actor who does the. Read my book for Audible. And it is. It blew me away. He's really good. So if you're a. If you're an Audible book person, that's a great option too.

Mark
00:49:36

That's a growing industry right there.

Arnold
00:49:39

Yes, it is.

Mark
00:49:39

Yeah.

Susanna Ashton
00:49:39

It really is. Yeah.

Arnold
00:49:41

Dr. Ashton, thank you very much for taking time to talk to us today. I really greatly appreciate.

Mark
00:49:45

Yep, that was fun. Very fun.

Susanna Ashton
00:49:48

Thanks so much. It was fun too.

Arnold
00:49:50

We'll be in touch. Thank you.

Mark
00:49:51

Y. Thank you, doctor.

Susanna Ashton
00:49:52

Okay, bye.

Mark
00:49:53

Bye. I don't think she was finished, Mark.

Arnold
00:49:58

I'm just amazed at how many things. I don't want to say this in a bad way. How many things we don't know. Oh, yeah, but everybody knows about Uncle Tom's Cabin.

And when I saw this, I was like, what are you talking about?

Mark
00:50:10

Yeah, I had no idea. I had none.

Arnold
00:50:12

And I.

Mark
00:50:12

Not till today.

Arnold
00:50:13

Did she just drop. Draw on her. I'm talking about Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Now did she just draw on what she saw or maybe some things she read in the newspaper and the fact that she had Uncle Tom's Cabin in a newspaper that was published that went. And it was like a series that she did and then it was finally published in the book. It wasn't initially published in the book.

It was published in the newspaper. And that's how she gained that reputation. And she didn't even. She sold the rights to. She didn't get a whole lot of money at all for the. The book.

Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was really the book she wrote that was on dread that she actually made some money.

Mark
00:50:52

Okay.

Arnold
00:50:52

And the fact that her husband was a professor and she was just doing her thing at home and had an audience that she wrote for in some anti slavery newspapers.

Mark
00:51:01

And I'd love to spend some time talking about Dred Scott with her. I think that'd be great.

Arnold
00:51:06

Yeah. And it was on. Dread was a. It wasn't Dred Scott. It was Dredd, who was a. A slave and was a companion story to Uncle Tom's cat.

Mark
00:51:16

Okay, gotcha.

Arnold
00:51:16

Yeah. Now, we've had. We've had Dred and Harriet Scott's great granddaughter on the show before, Right.

And we need to have her back because the old courthouse is going to be reopening in May and they're going to have a whole big display on Dred and Harriet Scott and the fact that they can't get a stamp, but, gee, we can get a stamp for Betty White. Seriously.

Mark
00:51:36

I know, it's crazy going on. Why, why, why can't you do both?

Arnold
00:51:40

How hard is that?

Mark
00:51:41

Yeah, really, how it. Apparently very hard.

Arnold
00:51:44

Yes.

Mark
00:51:44

Because we've been work helping, trying to help for years now and got nowhere.

Arnold
00:51:49

So that was a lot of fun.

Mark
00:51:51

Yeah. She's really something. She really is.

Arnold
00:51:54

So you need to check out her website, folks. She also has a whole lot of other interesting information about other people who she's done some work on.

James Matthews, William Grimes, Samuel Williams. Check her website out. Susanaashton.com susannahashton.com and she likes llamas. Yeah, she likes llamas.

I thought she raised llamas there for a minute there by the picture. I know there's the family around with the llamas. Weren't feeding them. So. Our word of the day, Mark, I've been waiting.

Mark
00:52:27

We've got time. Not a lot of time, but time.

Arnold
00:52:31

Decorticate. Decorticate. It's to remove the bark or husk or an outer covering from something.

In other words, the farmer bought a machine that quickly decorticates cottonseed. Or the botany students learn how to decorticate a tree without damaging layers below the bark.

Mark
00:52:52

I'll be darned.

Arnold
00:52:53

It's also a word that has something to do with if you have a brain injury, too. Decorticate is how you look where your limbs will turn in, your hands will turn in or turn out, depending. I think decorticates turn in.

So that wasn't the definition that I got initially, but that is also decorticate.

Mark
00:53:15

Wow.

Arnold
00:53:16

A meaning for that.

Mark
00:53:17

That's quite a word.

Arnold
00:53:18

It is.

Mark
00:53:19

That is quite a word.

Arnold
00:53:20

It is.

Mark
00:53:20

I know.

Arnold
00:53:22

Have some days of the day.

Mark
00:53:23

Just a couple. We only have time for a few. National Chili Day. I'm gonna go home and ask that we have some chili today. I like chili. I've been wanting chili.

Arnold
00:53:34

Do you do chicken chili or do you do beef chili or.

Mark
00:53:37

Ooh, there's so many I know. And I'd like a chili cook offs where you can go and try different people's chilies.

Arnold
00:53:45

Yes.

Mark
00:53:45

And there's even. Who makes chili without beans? But some people do, and it's really great. And speaking of eating, Fat Thursday is today, I'll tell you that right now.

Arnold
00:53:54

Is that right? Today?

Mark
00:53:55

Today's fat Thursday. Yeah. That's where you just need to eat a lot of chili because Ash Wednesday is coming right up.

Arnold
00:54:02

That's correct.

Mark
00:54:03

And 40 days of fasting. Something. I don't know what.

Arnold
00:54:06

Yeah, okay, I have a joke or two here. And yet another time this morning, no one was standing next to my bed saying, your royal highness, here is your mimosa.

You know, here's some marriage advice, husbands. If your wife does something wrong, just explain it to explain to her how your mom did it.

She will appreciate your advice and strive to do it as she did. Don't do that, guys. Don't do that.

Mark
00:54:33

Holy smoke.

Arnold
00:54:34

Having a dog named Shark at the beach was a mistake. Shark. Shark. Get back here. Shark.

Mark
00:54:43

Wow.

Arnold
00:54:44

Okay. And I think I have one more.

Mark
00:54:46

Oh, thank goodness.

Arnold
00:54:47

Okay. To my children. Don't make fun of me for asking questions about my cell phone. I once taught you how to use a spoon.

Mark
00:54:58

Wow, that's so true.

Arnold
00:55:02

Okay.

Mark
00:55:03

Wow. Thanks, doc.

Arnold
00:55:04

That's all for this hour and we thank you for listening.

Folks, if you've enjoyed this episode, you can listen to additional shows@stlintune.com consider leaving a review on our website, Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or your preferred podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners and continue to grow.

Want to thank Bob Bertha Self for our theme music, our guest Susanna Ashton and co host Mark Langston. And we thank you for being a part of our community of curious minds. St.

Louis in tune is a part production of Motif Media Group and the US Radio Network. Remember to keep seeking, keep learning, walk worthy, and let your light shine. For St. Louis in tune, I'm Arnold Stricker.