Passionate Abolitionist and
Witness to the American Civil War
Passionate Abolitionist and
Witness to the American Civil War
GoReadingBerks, a news outlet local to Reading, PA, recently published a detailed piece highlighting the business side of Thomas Jackson life’s in America. While the article regrettably omits Jackson’s significant abolitionist activities, the focus on his Jackson Rope Company underscores the fact that Jackson wore many hats throughout his life: anti-slavery crusader, staunch Union supporter, irreverent political commentator, and yes, founder and owner of one of Reading’s oldest and longest-lasting manufactories.
The article details the English immigrant’s savvy decision to locate his business along the Schuylkill Canal, where demand for towlines was high due to heavy barge traffic. Jackson’s adaptability in the face of industrialization is prominently featured as we’re shown how the Jackson Rope Company responded to increased demands and production expectations by ditching the old-fashioned ropewalk in favor of machine-driven rope-making–first via steam power, later with electricity. In his lifetime, Jackson also filed three different patents, in full awareness that patents granted their owners protection and distinction in an increasingly competitive market. Taken together, these advantages allowed the company to survive a century and a half, until cheaper land and labor in the Sun Belt caused a postwar flight of capital out of the Northeast.
Many of these details can be found in Thomas Jackson’s letters, in which he regularly opined on the virtues and necessities of having business acumen, reported on the economic headwinds that threatened to ruin him (namely the destruction of his property), and expressed gratitude for the windfalls that brought him back from the abyss.
Yet a more complete biography of Thomas Jackson would integrate his political life with his professional life and even personal life. These seemingly disparate aspects of his life informed one another and often intersected. This isn’t detailed in the GoReadingBerks article, but we know from his letters that he employed former slaves at his ropewalk, transforming his business into an exemplar of equal opportunity and a way of supporting the victims of the institution he fought to abolish. In the face of a potential Confederate advance on Reading, he not only made arrangements to protect his property from seizure, but he also took strides to expedite his black employees’ flight further north, which included offering his carriage to an employee and his family.
When his factory was destroyed not once, but three times, by arsonists in the early 1870s, he suspected Confederate sympathizers; each time he rebuilt his business out of financial necessity, but perhaps also as a message to his political opponents that he would not be bullied into submission.
In personal letters to family members, he took on the role of interlocutor between relatives separated by states and oceans while also happily assuming the role of family “thought leader,” even enlisting relatives living in England in helping to publish some of his letters in English newspapers.
Jackson’s business trajectory reminds us that history’s selective memory tends to flatten its multi-faceted characters from the past. For those interested in Reading’s industrial legacy, Thomas Jackson’s story becomes a one-sided parable of the classic American entrepreneurial spirit: appetite for risk, resilience in the face of adversity, and constant improvement–in business and in life. Conversely, for those examining America’s conflict over slavery and racial equality, Jackson’s story is re-oriented toward his abolitionist work and the “progressive” views that emerge in his letters and editorials (progressive in the sense that his views on racial equality often outpaced the prevailing sentiment of the time).
Ultimately, what distinguishes Thomas Jackson is the simultaneously larger-than-life and down-to-earth qualities that the historical record reveals to us. An ordinary businessman who, upon witnessing political and humanitarian crises, displayed an extraordinary commitment to civic duty.