Professor Ashton to speak on new book, “A Plausible Man”

Susanna Ashton, professor of English at Clemson University, will speak on her latest book, “A Plausible Man,” which tells the true story of John Andrew Jackson, a freedom seeker who inspired the book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Ashton’s lecture will be Thursday, November 7, at 5:30 p.m. in the Watt Family Innovation Center auditorium.

In December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive from captivity in her house. While John Andrew Jackson of South Carolina stayed for only one night, he made a lasting impression. Drawing, in part, 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.

“A Plausible Man” unfolds as a historical detective story, as Ashton combs obscure 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. The book details a journey through the Civil War, Reconstruction and the restoration of white supremacy, when Jackson loses his freedom again on a Southern chain gang.

Ashton is a professor in the Department of English at Clemson University. Among other awards, she has been a Fulbright Scholar in Ireland; a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; a Mark Twain Fellow for the Mark Twain Society; and held archival fellowships at Emory University and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. In 2021–2022 she was the W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She has published work on the topic of life writing written by enslaved people as well as works on book history, authorship, libraries, copyright, and the author Charles W. Chesnutt. In 2018 one of her books won an award for the best scholarly work on Chesnutt by the Charles W. Chesnutt Society.

Ashton’s lecture is free and open to the public. This event is sponsored by Clemson Libraries and the Watt Family Innovation Center in collaboration with the Department of English and the College of Arts and Humanities.