Hosted by Maine Historical Society, in partnership with the Abyssinian Meeting House
Jan 23, 2025 at 1:00 p.m. ET
On Zoom
In December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive enslaved man 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 influential books in American history and the novel that helped inspire the overthrow of slavery in the United States. Join author Susanna Ashton for a talk on her book A Plausible Man, a historical detective story 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.
Susanna Ashton is 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 Fulbright 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.
