The Story Of The Letters:

Why He Wrote Them

Without a doubt, Thomas Jackson’s most important gifts to posterity are the long letters recording first hand his experiences during the American civil war. Reading the letters, it is hard not to feel that he was keenly aware that he was recording history as it was unfolding.

At some point early in his time in America, he witnessed a slave market and that seemingly radicalized him to become a lifetime advocate for the abolition of slavery and a strong supporter of Abraham Lincoln.

In many of his letters, Thomas records his disgust with members of the Tory party in England whom he saw as shameless supporters of the South and the continuation of slavery. He was particularly angry that many leading politicians in his old homeland seemed willing to overlook the clear immorality of slavery in favor of protecting their cotton supplies.

In an effort to correct that, he started to write letters that had virtually no family pleasantries but contained voluminous details and personal commentary about the war, the horrors of slavery and the illegality of those states that were leaving the union. His purpose was to send those to his British cousins with the request that they should try to get them published in the local newspapers.

One of Thomas Jackson’s letters ends with the following words emphasized by being ringed in ink “Get this letter published and send me the paper”. We are fortunate to have one copy of an old English newspaper dated, September 11th 1862 in which one of his letters was indeed printed. (A later letter records Thomas’s delight at this development. )

There is another letter where it appears that after he had finished reading what he had written, he penned at the end in a different ink “American Affairs by an Ilkestonian in America”. That presumably was a suggestion for a possible heading for his article.

(As Ambassadors for Thomas Jackson, we initially thought to head this website with those words that he himself had suggested. But in these days of Google search engines, we recognized that that title had nothing to recommend it as keywords! So instead, you see our “Passionate Opponent of Slavery and Witness to the American Civil War.”)