‘A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin’
By Susanna Ashton
The New Press, 368 Pages

The man was on the run and carrying quite a story about escaping slavery on a pony — a dangerous means of transportation not meant for Black men who were supposed to be the beasts of burden. He had eluded captors by stowing away on a ship, and then suddenly showed up at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Brunswick, Maine, home seeking shelter and food.

This was in December 1850, an especially precarious time when the Fugitive Slave Act forced Northerners to return runaways or suffer heavy fines and even imprisonment. Stowe’s husband was away from home and she was alone with her children. It would not be proper for a man, Black or white, to spend the night, yet she could not turn away what she later referred to in a letter as “the genuine article.”

John Andrew Jackson, a powerfully built and outspoken man in his 20s, entranced Stowe and her children. He showed them his scars from numerous whippings. Just a few months after their encounter, she began her most famous novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Jackson was not the model for Uncle Tom, but he brought home to Stowe the reality of slavery with his palpable presence.

Sponsored by abolitionists, Jackson departed for Canada and England, penning his autobiography and lecturing to acclaim — but also to ridicule.  One alarming feature of Susanna Ashton’s book is how much racism he experienced in Canada and in England from those who called him an imposter.

Jackson nonetheless persisted, claiming his independence when he was asked about the identity of his master. Not yet safe in the North, he boldly responded that he belonged to South Carolina. He considered the state his native land, and during Reconstruction returned to make several attempts at buying land for a cooperative of Black farmers.

Jackson’s plans were often grandiose and he failed many times, and yet he never gave up, eventually purchasing some of the land owned by the slaveholders who had brutalized him and his family.

One striking strength of Ms. Ashton’s biography is her discussion of evidence, and her efforts to fill in the gaps of Jackson’s story. Her reading of Census reports, for example, yields remarkable details about the communities Jackson lived in and the conditions of African Americans after their liberation.

Jackson is no paragon in Ms. Ashton’s account. He made bold promises to Black people and white supporters that he rarely was able to fulfill, and yet he inspired many of them to continue the struggle for Black civil rights and property ownership.  

Jackson’s courage — some might say his foolhardiness — led him back to South Carolina even as Reconstruction was coming to an end and Black people were again vulnerable to the depredations of former owners and the Ku Klux Klan. Arrested and put on a chain gang, Jackson again escaped, and evaded incarceration. Ms. Ashton is not quite sure just how he did so, but plausibly suggests he had help from Northern white supporters who could vouch for him.

That word plausible is a kind of refrain in this biography. Slaveholders used it to warn that Jackson could seem “plausible” in the stories he told: that he could seem, in other words, trustworthy and authentic. Plausible means something else, however, when the ramifications of his extraordinary story are considered: What Jackson said he could accomplish — a better world for Black people — seemed plausible. That he could not carry out very many of his ambitious plans does not make him a fraud in Ms. Ashton’s story, but rather someone who never gave up on the aspirations and the dignity of Black lives that Harriet Beecher Stowe wanted to dramatize.

It is curious, as Ms. Ashton observes, that Jackson never tried to exaggerate his connection to Stowe, other than soliciting a testimonial from her. She, in turn, never made too much of her contact with him — probably, Ms. Ashton surmises, because Stowe did not want to arouse questions about what she was doing with a Black man in her home in her husband’s absence.

It was just like John Andrew Jackson to get people like the proper Stowe to join him in his crusade for freedom, even if all too often he had to crusade alone.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”