Jacob Gibson (b. circa 1790 - 1836)
MSA SC 5496-51352
Maryland State Colonization Society Emigrant to Liberia from Talbot
County, 1835
Biography:
Jacob Gibson was a free resident of Talbot County, who emigrated with his wife Rebecca, his children Joseph, Henry, Mary Ann, Samuel, Garrison, and Louisa, and his niece Ellen Gibson.1, 2 The Gibsons left Baltimore on the schooner Harmony on June 28, 1835 and arrived at Cape Palmas, Liberia on August 23, 1835.3 Despite emigrating with so many family members, Gibson still left some of his children behind in slavery. Gibson wrote a letter expressing his sadness about the separation to John H. B. Latrobe, secretary of the Maryland State Colonization Society, and to Rev. William McKenney, the Society's agent. Gibson requested their help in freeing his children, "I will be ten thousand times obliged to you if you will make an effort to get my children freed and sent out to me. Neither of you, perhaps, know the pain which a father feels at being seperated [sic] from his offspring." He concluded by praising the work of the Colonization Society, "I hope you will go on in the work of colonization. ... I look upon it as the cause of God and the hope of benighted Africa."4 Jacob Gibson was probably never reunited with his enslaved children as he died suddenly sometime before March 1836.5
2. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS (Papers of the Maryland State Colonization Society), Manumission Lists, 1832-1839, MSA SC 5977, Film Number M 13248-1, Emigrants, Lines 252-254. Lines 255-260.
3. Hall, Richard L. On Afric’s Shore: A History of Maryland in Liberia, 1834-1857. (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2003), 450.
4. Quoted in Hall, 109.
5. Hall, 450.
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