A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Toms Cabin

(Hardback)

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The remarkable life story of the man behind the book that helped spark the Civil War, in a stunning historical detective story

In December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stayed for only one night, he made a lasting impression: drawing from this experience, Stowe began to write Uncle Toms Cabin, one of the most influential books in American history and the novel that helped inspire the overthrow of slavery in the United States.

A Plausible Man unfolds as a historical detective story, as Susanna Ashton combs obscure records for evidence of Jacksons remarkable flight from slavery to freedom, his quest to liberate his enslaved family, and his emergence as an international advocate for abolition. This fresh and original work takes us through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the restoration of white supremacywhere we last glimpse Jackson losing his freedom again on a Southern chain gang. And in a riveting encounter, Ashton meets Jacksons descendants in South Carolina and they are introduced to his epic biography for the first time.

In the spirit of Tiya Miless prizewinning All That She Carried and Erica Armstrong Dunbars Never Caught, Susanna Ashton breathes life into a striving and nuanced American character, one unmistakably rooted in the vast sweep of nineteenth-century America.

Author Bio

Susanna Ashton is professor of English at Clemson University. An expert on slavery and freedom narratives, she was a Du Bois fellow at Harvards Hutchins Center, a fellow with Yales Gilder Lehrman Center, and a Fulbright scholar. The author of Collaborators in Literary America, 18701920, she lives in Clemson, South Carolina.