Join us for a presentation from Susanna Ashton on her new book, A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin!

A Plausible Man is a historical detective story that draws on extensive records for evidence of Jackson’s remarkable flight from slavery to freedom, his quest to liberate his enslaved family, and his emergence as an international advocate for abolition. This tale takes us through the Civil War, Reconstruction and the restoration of white supremacy —where we last glimpse Jackson losing his freedom again on a Southern chain gang.

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 Tom’s Cabin, one of the most consequential books in American history and the novel that helped inspire the overthrow of slavery in the United States.

Registration requested for attendance tracking, but not required.

Susanna Ashton is a professor of English at Clemson University. An expert on slavery and freedom narratives, she was a Du Bois fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center, a fellow with Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center, and a Fullbright scholar. The author of Collaborators in Literary America, 1870-1920 and A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin (The New Press), she lives in Clemson, South Carolina.