Person

Edmund Jackson

Boston African American National Historic Site

Boston merchant and abolitionist Edmund Jackson served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

Born in 1795 in Newton, Massachusetts, Edmund Jackson later moved to nearby Boston where he became a successful soap and candle merchant. He married Mary Hewes in the 1820s and soon began a family with her.¹

The son of a Revolutionary War veteran, Jackson likewise supported the fight for freedom. In the 1830s, he began his long association with the radical editor William Lloyd Garrison and the abolition movement. He held leadership positions in and generously donated to such groups as the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and the American Anti-Slavery Society. One activist recollected that in the early days of the movement, the abolitionists dedicated themselves to waking up “the then Sleeping North. With Garrison & his Press. & Edmond Jackson & Co. who backed him up.”²

Jackson also served on the Boston School Committee where he and future Vigilance Committee member, Henry I. Bowditch, advocated for the Equal Schools movement. Black activists, such as William Cooper Nell, spearheaded this effort to integrate the Boston Public Schools. As Jackson and Bowditch wrote:

we oppose any distinction whatever being made on the ground of color or race, and that all applicants for admission into the primary schools, whether white or black, should... be ‘especially entitled to enter the school nearest his or her place of residence.³

When Bostonians celebrated Nell for his role in desegregating the schools in 1855, he gave a special thank you to his friends, Jackson and Bowditch, as well as their respective brothers, who joined them in the cause of abolition and integration:

The brothers Francis and Edmund Jackson, and those other brothers Henry I. and William I. Bowditch...were especially active, rivaling each other in these kind defences.⁴

In 1847, Jackson wrote a stirring piece in the Liberty Bell, a literary magazine published annually by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. In his article, “The Fugitive,” Jackson talked about meeting freedom seeker Jonathan Thomas in Boston. Jackson detailed Thomas’ harrowing escape from slavery in Kentucky to freedom in Canada.⁵

Following the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, Jackson, along with Nell, Garrison, his brother Francis, and others formed the Boston Vigilance Committee to help freedom seekers escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad. Jackson served on the Executive Committee of this organization. He donated funds numerous times to support the work of the group. For example, he gave money towards the purchase of an artificial leg for freedom seeker Johnson H. Walker, who had severely injured himself during his escape from slavery.⁶

In 1854, Jackson and others on the Executive Committee called upon the cities and towns of Massachusetts to protest the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and the return of freedom seeker Anthony Burns by refusing to celebrate the Fourth of July in the traditional manner. Instead, they urged them to “mark by the tolling of bells, and other appropriate means, their sense of disgrace and humiliation of the North” for “the fresh insult offered to the Commonwealth by the kidnapping of Anthony Burns in the City of ADAMS and HANCOCK!”⁷

Jackson continued to live and work in Boston until his death in 1875 at age 80. According to his obituary:

His eighty years were the consummation of a life filled with deeds prompted by the highest sense of duty, the inspirations of tender sensibility, and performed in obedience to the dictates of a scrupulous conscience.⁸

His remains are interred at East Parish Burying Ground, Newton, MA.⁹

Footnotes:

1. “Edmund Jackson,” Find a Grave Memorial, The National Archives in Washington, DC; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of the Census; Record Group Number: 29; Series Number: M432; Residence Date: 1850; Home in 1850: Boston Ward 11, Suffolk, Massachusetts; Roll: 338; Page: 203b, Source Information: Ancestry.com. 1850 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009. Images reproduced by FamilySearch., George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 200

2. “New England Anti-Slavery Convention,” Liberator, June 9, 1848, 2, “Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society," National Anti-Slavery Standard, February 16, 1843, “American Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator, May 29, 1840, 2, “Receipts,” Liberator, February 1, 1839, 3 Susan Martin, “’Long live the line’: An Abolitionist Remembers the Fight Against Slavery.” The Beehive (Massachusetts Historic Society, 2021), “Long live the line”: An Abolitionist Remembers the Fight Against Slavery | Beehive Accessed 3/11/2025

3. Liberator, August 21, 1846, 2, “Equal School Rights,” Liberator, August 2, 1850, 3, See also, Edmund Jackson and Henry I. Bowdith, Report of the minority of the committee of the primary school board, on the caste schools of the city of Boston; with some remarks on the city solicitors's opinion. | Library of Congress

4. William Cooper Nell, William Cooper Nell: Selected Writings 1832-1874, edited by Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2002), 438

5. Edmund Jackson, “The Fugitive,” The Liberty Bell, 1847, 5-15, The Liberty Bell 1847 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

6. "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society, Austin Bearse, Remininscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston, (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 4, 6, Francis Jackson, Account Book of Francis Jackson, Treasurer The Vigilance Committee of Boston, Dr. Irving H. Bartlett collection, 1830-1880, W. B. Nickerson Cape Cod History Archives, https://archive.org/details/drirvinghbartlet19bart/page/n3/mode/2up, 35, 61,63, 75, 11, 45

7. “Celebration of the Fourth of July,” Liberator, June 16, 1854, 2

8. “In the death of Mr. Edmund Jackson,” Boston Post, April 19^th, 1875, 2

9. “Edmund Jackson,” Find a Grave Memorial