Person

Eliphalet W. Jackson

Boston African American National Historic Site

Clergyman and merchant Eliphalet W. Jackson participated in the abolition and temperance movements and served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

Born in 1815, Eliphalet W. Jackson grew up in Maine. He attended the Bangor Theological Seminary and, following graduation, entered the Methodist ministry. He married his first wife, Sarah McLellan in 1840 in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Following Sarah’s death in 1844, he married his second wife, Tabitha “Abba” McLellan and began a family with her. By the late 1840s, Jackson worked as a commission merchant in Boston.¹

Throughout his life, Jackson participated in numerous reform causes, including the temperance and international peace movements. His work in the antislavery movement included participation in the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Convention, the Chelsea Anti-Slavery Society, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and the Free Soil party. He also helped organize a convention to protest the arrest of freedom seeker George Latimer in the early 1840s.²

Jackson’s work on behalf of freedom seekers escaping slavery continued into the 1850s when he joined the Boston Vigilance Committee. Founded in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, this organization provided critical assistance to people escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad.³

Following the arrest of freedom seeker Thomas Sims in 1851, Jackson and fellow committee member Samuel Sewall served as signed witnesses to Sim’s written plea to the clergymen of Boston and the surrounding areas:

The undersigned, a freeman, and in peril, desires the prayers of this congregation that God may deliver him from his oppressor, and restore him to freedom. – Thomas Sims ⁴

Despite the calls for prayer and the work of the Vigilance Committee and others, authorities returned Sims to slavery shortly after his arrest.

By 1860, Jackson and his family moved to Gorham, Maine, where he worked as a clergyman.⁵

During the Civil War, Jackson enlisted as a chaplain in the Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C. In 1865, he served as Grand Chaplain during President Lincoln’s funeral procession through Washington.⁶

He later worked in South Carolina with the recently freed African American community. According to one account, Jackson had “long been known as a friend to the cause of the late bondmen,” and “In laboring for their welfare and that of their descendants...will devote himself to the preparation and circulation in the Southern country of brief papers, in tract form, containing fundamental truths of morality and good government.”⁷

Jackson died of paralysis in Middletown, Connecticut, on June 18, 1873. His remains are interred in Maine.⁸

Footnotes:

1. 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: Chelsea, Suffolk, Massachusetts; Roll: 339; Page: 468b, “Local Items,” Constitution, June 25, 1873, Family History Library; Salt Lake City, UT; Film # 0874029, Source Information: Ancestry.com. Massachusetts, U.S., Compiled Marriages, 1633-1850, Ancestry.com. Maine, U.S., Nathan Hale Cemetery Collection, 1780-1980, “Died,” Portland Press Herald, March 23, 1844, 3, George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1847, 132 and 1850, 200

2. “Rev. E.W. Jackson at the World Temperance Convention,” Liberator, November 11, 1853, 3, “Address to the Public,” Boston Evening Transcript, February 17, 1849, 1, “Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Convention,” Liberator, September 1, 1837, 2, “Chelsea Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator, August 9, 1839, 3, “Eighth Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator, January 31, 1840, 2, “Delegates to Buffalo Convention,” Springfield Daily Republican, July 22, 1848, 2, “Great Latimer Convention!!”, Liberator, December 23, 1842, 3

3. "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

4. Bearse, 26.

5. The National Archives in Washington D.C.; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of the Census; Record Group Number: 29; Series Number: M653; Residence Date: 1860; Home in 1860: Gorham, Cumberland, Maine; Roll: M653_437; Page: 74; Family History Library Film: 803437

6. Historical Data Systems, Inc.; Duxbury, MA 02331; American Civil War Research Database, Source Information, Historical Data Systems, comp. U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861-1865 [database on-line]. Times Record, May 13, 1864, 2, “Local Items,” Constitution, June 25, 1873

7. “New Southern Mission,” New National Era, March 30, 1871

8. "The Rev. E.W. Jackson,” The Methodist, July 5, 1873, 5, “Local Items,” Constitution, June 25, 1873