Join the Mandarin Community Club and the Mandarin Museum & Historical Society for a joint presentation with Dr. Susanna Ashton, author of "A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin". This captivating event will explore the extraordinary life of John Andrew Jackson, the fugitive slave whose brief stay in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s home in 1850 inspired her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that fueled the abolitionist movement and reshaped American history.
The Mandarin Community Club will open its door at 6:00 PM and attendees will be welcomed to a Reception hosted by the Mandarin Museum and Historical Society. The presentation will begin at 7:00 PM.
Dr. Susanna Ashton, a Professor of English at Clemson University, is a renowned scholar of slavery and freedom narratives. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Smithsonian, and The New Republic. Known for her lively and engaging presentations, Dr. Ashton combines humor, verve, and insightful storytelling to captivate both public and academic audiences. Her distinguished career includes a W.E.B. DuBois Fellowship at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center, a Fulbright to Ireland, and a fellowship at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance. She has authored or co-edited works such as “I was Born in South Carolina,” South Carolina Slave Narratives and The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought.
In A Plausible Man (The New Press, 2024), Dr. Ashton meticulously reconstructs John Andrew Jackson’s journey from slavery to freedom, his fight to liberate his family, and his emergence as an international advocate for abolition. Through a historical detective story, the book follows Jackson’s life from a single night in Stowe’s Brunswick, Maine, home through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the resurgence of white supremacy, where he faced renewed hardship on a Southern chain gang. In the spirit of Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried and Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught, this work brings a complex American figure to life within the vast sweep of the nineteenth century.
This event is especially meaningful in Mandarin, where Harriet Beecher Stowe spent winters after the Civil War, following the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe’s time in Mandarin, where she wrote essays and sketches about life in Florida, deepened her connection to the South and its complex post-war landscape. Her legacy in this community makes this exploration of Jackson’s life and influence particularly poignant.
Purchase "A Plausible Man" by clicking the link below:
https://www.amazon.com/Plausible-Man-Story-Escaped-Inspired/dp/1620978199
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