It's Complicated: Rethinking Family Life in Early New England

When his pregnant wife Joan and son Jack were taken from him by law and forced into slavery, a penniless former slave named John Jackson refused to submit to the prevailing powers or to society's conception of him. Instead, he bided his time and planned a most audacious rescue of his family. After many months of preparation, he pulled it off—traveling across land and rough waters in the middle of the night to break into the house where they were held and "steal" them home. The year in which John Jackson staged this daring rescue was 1711, and the place he ran back home to was New London, Connecticut.

John and Joan Jackson belonged to New England's first generations of enslaved people, men and women dispersed across English households and found especially along the region's long coastline and in its port cities. John had arrived in Connecticut in 1686 as a young man of eighteen, emerging as freight and human property from the hold of a West Indian trade ship. At first, he probably worked the wharves at New London Harbor, then went on to receive training in husbandry, the stock and trade of the vast majority of New England men. His wife Joan was a different sort of New Englander. Hers was already an "old" New England family by colonial standards, one that could trace itself at least to the 1650s and the early years of settlement in New London. Joan herself was a native Connecticut girl. Arriving enslaved in a new land, John Jackson would nevertheless make a place for himself in its cold, unwelcoming clime. In time, he would unabashedly assert a life and family of his own—in freedom.

Around 1700 John Jackson became free and married Joan. Still, whatever happiness the couple felt at uniting in marriage was dimmed by the reality that they had to live apart. Joan was an enslaved woman living in another man's house entirely under another man's control. Their first two children, a boy and girl, were born into this grim and uncertain reality—mother and father separated against their will and by miles. Within just a few years, however, Joan Jackson received a highly unusual grant of freedom from her master and mistress, acknowledging in part her dutiful service. Once free, Joan was able to join her husband, but even that reunion was cruelly shortchanged. Because their children, toddler Adam and baby Miriam, had been born while Joan was in bondage, they inherited their bonded status from her as well. By law, Adam and Miriam would be perpetual slaves, the property of their mother's former owner. When she left to join her husband, Joan was forced to leave the children behind. She and John could visit them, but they would never live together as a family. Yet the Jacksons added a succession of additional children to their family, spending nearly a decade together in relatively peaceful domesticity. John was a farmer who owned no land but who could nevertheless hire himself out in support of his family. Joan was skilled at housewifery, an occupation that she, too, performed for others, as necessary. Any tranquility was abruptly halted in 1710, however, when a powerful local landowner claimed ownership of Joan in court, calling her freedom into question and eventually winning her as his property at trial. The sheriff came and seized a then pregnant Joan, along with their youngest child, two-year-old Jack. Joan and little Jack were taken to live in slavery across the Sound on Long Island, and it was from there that their husband and father would rescue them.

From John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections (New Haven, Connecticut, 1836).

When John Jackson did act, he was not alone. With him that night in 1711 when he retrieved Joan and two of his children (a baby, Rachel, was born in slavery on Long Island) was an aging merchant by the name of John Rogers. The merchant, too, was an ardent family man, and one who had also found...