There were three brothers at Moreton who went out to America. They were not relations of mine, but were connexions by the marriage of their eldest brother to one of my great-great-aunts, a sister of my father’s mother’s mother. So far as I know the family history, it begins with Clement Jackson of Moreton and Honor his wife, and goes on through their son Abraham, born 1678, their grandson Jabez, born 1700, and their great-grandson James, born 1730, to their great-great-grandsons Jabez, born 1756, James, born 1757, Abraham, born 1767, and Henry, born 1778. The last three went to America in 1772, 1783 and 1790, married there, and died there in 1806, 1809, and 1840. They all settled in Georgia. Their father had a friend out there, John Wereat; and Wereat looked after James, and James looked after his young brothers.
James sided with the colonists in the War of Independence. He was in a law-office at Savannah in the spring of 1776, when the British ships came down from Boston commandeering; and he joined in the resistance there and went on through the war, becoming a colonel then and a major-general ten years afterwards. He was in the House of Representatives in the first Congress of the United States, 1789 to 1791, and (after a disputed election) again till 1793, and then in the Senate from 1793 to 1795, when he resigned and went back to Georgia to attend to matters there. He was Governor of Georgia from 1798 to 1801, and a Senator again from 1801 until his death (at Washington) in 1806. It was a strange career for anybody born at Moreton.
His brothers Abraham and Henry did not go out to America until the war was over. Abraham became a colonel. He fought a dozen duels, and in the last one he and his opponent shot each other through the legs. They had no seconds and no doctor, and were fighting on a lonely island in a stream; and both were nearly dead when they were found. That was the story that my father always told me; but I see there is a similar story in Charlton’s Life of James Jackson, page 18—“They went upon the ground without seconds, and fought at the desperate distance of a few feet.... Mr Wells lost his life, and Major Jackson was badly wounded in both of his knees.” That was in 1780, and the Major was James, not Abraham, who was still in England then.
The youngest brother, Henry, came over to Paris in 1814 as secretary of legation under Crawford, the United States minister-plenipotentiary; and, when Crawford left, he stayed on as chargé d’affaires till a new minister came. And his son, Henry Rootes Jackson, came over to Vienna as chargé d’affaires in 1853, and was United States minister-resident there from 1854 till 1858. At that time Francis Joseph was quite young, and had not yet acquired the kindly dignity that graced his later years; and H. R. Jackson told my father how very difficult it was, in speaking to that great raw boy, to realize that one was speaking to an Apostolic Majesty.
He was staying in London with my father in July and August 1854, and was talking of coming down to stay here, but I am not certain that he ever came. In an undated letter from Vienna he says, “If you could get my father’s likeness for me, I should be most grateful.” And my grandfather writes to my father, 31 December 1854, “I have Mr Jackson’s picture and have paid a pound for it. It is a much better thing than I expected: it is very well done, and the colours are very good; but the paper is rotten. He has but one eye: his dress resembles more of the nobility than of the middle classes.” This suggests some earlier member of the Jackson family; but I do not know which one had lost an eye.
He wrote my father letters of rather ponderous jocosity: thus, Vienna, 8 December 1855, “I have determined, on the whole, not to take immediate notice of the aspersions which you have felt yourself called upon to launch at my country in general, and at the hogs of my native state in particular. If I recollect aright, there are certain points in the British Isles where persons, who raise hogs, are in the habit of tying knots in their tails to prevent them from getting entirely through such holes as may be accidentally left in barn walls. I leave it to be determined whether these would, or would not, be apt scholars in the art of snake killing.” On sending her one of these letters to read, 11 December 1856, my father remarks to my mother that it is “a strange contrast to the refined and classic taste of his poems.” His poems, I believe, were never much known in England; or even in America, outside the southern states. And the best of them, My wife and child, was attributed to T. J. Jackson, usually called ‘Stonewall.’
H. R. Jackson had been a colonel in the Mexican war, and was made a brigadier-general in the Confederate army at the beginning of the War of Secession; and he went through it all, surrendering at last at Nashville. He had a son whom I remember very well; and the boy went all through it too, from the beginning (when he was under sixteen) down to the bitter end. So late as 31 May 1864 he writes from Savannah, “I am confident of our ultimate success.” Thirty years afterwards, when he talked of it to me, he said the Southerners had not been beaten by the Northerners themselves, but by an alien force: there were comparatively few real Yankees amongst the prisoners and dead. No doubt, the South would have enlisted foreigners too, had not the blockade excluded them.
People in England mostly saw things from the Southern point of view; and when the Northern point of view was put before them, it was not always put persuasively. A certain Dr Jephson of Boston, U.S., delivered an address at the Athenæum at Exeter on 17 March 1863. “The present murderous and fratricidal war in the United States has been fomented by the American slave-holders and the cotton-brokers in England.... This plot on the part of the American slave-holders and the cotton fraternity in England conjointly, to destroy the American Union, has served to evoke such a bitter feeling on the part of the American people against England....” Here was a red rag for John Bull. What right had the Northerners to call themselves the American people? They were only part of it, and the Southerners were part as well. If this had been a cotton-spinning district, there would have been a riot. In those years I was often staying with an aunt of mine not far from Macclesfield and Bollington, where there were cotton mills; and I saw something of the misery and destitution there, when the mills ceased work for want of raw material. No one cared a bit about the merits of the quarrel between the North and South; but everyone could see it was the Northerners who caused all this distress—the supply of cotton was stopped by their blockade.
It usually was called a fratricidal war; but in many of the letters here I find it called ‘this stupid war,’ and perhaps that was the better epithet. Had the northern states said Go In Peace, the Wayward Sisters would have been home again by now.
My father writes to my grandfather, Basle, 8 August 1849, “Mr Elihu Burritt, the American writer, is travelling to get converts to the Peace Congress, who are going to hold their next meeting at Paris on the 22nd. I had several hours of conversation with him about America.... Four Americans arrived here with us last evening, for a rapid run thro’ the country and then on to attend the Peace Congress. They cannot speak anything but English, and I had to translate for them at the stations, else they would have got nothing to eat all day.”