We are in the last week of February and I have yet to produce a post for Black History Month, so here it is!  I like to engage with historical markers and months; it keeps history “current” for me. I’ve known about two formerly enslaved men with connections to Salem for a while, but have never wrote about either Jacob Stroyer or John Andrew Jackson. Both came from South Carolina and both wrote narratives of their lives in the South. Stroyer’s My life in the South (1879)is the better-known book, and he lived in Salem for a much longer time, arriving in 1876 as a newly-ordinated Methodist Episcopal pastor and establishing a chapel for Salem’s small African American community on Lafayette Street shortly thereafter, a mission which he oversaw for the rest of his life. Jackson’s time in Salem was relatively short, and his memoir less well-known, but he’s my focus today. I first learned about him a decade or so ago when I came across an advertising piece for a talk he gave on a ship in Salem Harbor, the SS Alliance, in 1867: a fundraiser for a school he hoped to open in his native state in particular, and for the Freedmen’s Bureau in general. It was just about this time that the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society was shifting its focus to the Bureau, so I imagine Jackson’s talk was well-attended.

As you can see, the event flyer featured the same “flyer” as the title page of Jackson’s book from five years before: this was definitely Jackson’s calling card, and it evokes the personality on display in his book. Stroyer was emancipated, but Jackson escaped, and the details of his adventurous journeys balance those of his more harrowing experience of enslavement (somewhat–not really). First he fled to Charleston during the Christmas celebrations of 1846, and then he was New England-bound on a ship whose captain vowed to put him off on the first southbound vessel they met. Fortunately for Jackson, they met none, and  he made it to Boston where he felt his first sense of freedom on  February 10, 1847:  I had escaped from hell to heaven, for I felt as I had never felt before — that is, master of myself \ and in my joy I was as a bouncing sparrow.

Jackson worked in Boston briefly but then made his way to Salem, where he worked in tanneries during the day and a sawmill at night: he was desperate to raise enough money to purchase his family members and his inquiries toward that aim eventually endangered his position in Massachusetts, especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Just as I was beginning to be settled at Salem, he writes, that most atrocious of all laws….was passed, and I was compelled to flee in disguise from a comfortable home (on Pratt Street), a comfortable situation, and good wages, to take refuge in Canada. Jackson made his way north along the Underground Railroad, staying at none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house in Brunswick, Maine en route. She listened to his story and even examined the scars on his back, one year before beginning to work on what would become Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Jackson’s journey(s) continued from New Brunswick to Great Britain, where he lectured on the Anti-Slavery circuit: I keep wondering if he crossed paths with Sarah Remond Parker there, but I think I can’t find any documentation (yet).

Maine and New Hampshire: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House in Brunswick, now owned by Bowdoin College, and the African-American Burial Ground in Portsmouth, NH: the statue on the right made me think of Jackson yesterday morning. 

After the war and his return to America, Jackson became an agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau and lived in the Connecticut River Valley, taking frequent trips back to South Carolina and returning to Salem at least once, to lecture at the Salem Lyceum in 1872. He had missions: of finding family members, building schools in the South, even buying the plantation on which he was enslaved to provide work opportunities for the his fellow formerly-enslaved brethren. He didn’t accomplish any of those goals, but he told his story, really well and to as many people as possible,  in both print and person, demolishing the folklore of that most “peculiar institution.”

A new collection of 19th century speeches by African Americans in Britain and Ireland from Edinburgh University Press will be published next month—including speeches by the Remonds—not sure about Jackson. The connections—-metaphorical, literary, artistic—between birds and slavery are many of course, and the National Audobon Society has been under intense pressure over the past few years to change its name as its namesake was a slaveowner: see statement here.

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