The Black Fugitive Who Inspired 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and Helped End Slavery in the U.S.

A few weeks after Harriet Beecher Stowe crossed paths with John Andrew Jackson, she began drafting Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons In or around 1825, John Andrew Jackson was born enslaved on a plantation in South Carolina and trained to spend his life picking cotton. But instead of living a life of enslavement, he escaped bondage and became an influential antislavery lecturer and writer. He…