Isabel Bliss hurried her three children, aged four through seven, off to bed on the night of March 20, 1775. The two men who had come to her door looked like local farmers seeking counsel from her husband, lawyer Daniel Bliss. They wore the homespun coats of plain country folk, but the muskets they carried told a different story. 

As the men huddled with Daniel in the parlor, talking in whispers, Isabel was startled by another knock at the door. She opened it cautiously and was relieved to see the familiar face of a neighbor. The woman was out of breath, and tears stained her cheeks. She begged Isabel to forgive her, because she had given the two strangers directions to the Bliss home without knowing who they were. 

Concord was a small community in 1775, with a population around 1,500, and the Bliss family lived right in the middle of it, on Walden Street just a few steps from the milldam. As the strangers approached their highly visible home, local patriots recognized them as officers of the occupying British army, disguised as civilians to gather intelligence for their commander, General Thomas Gage. 

John Jack’s gravestone in Concord’s Old Hill Burial Ground, with the stirring epitaph composed by Squire Daniel Bliss

| Photo by Tom Brosnahan. concordma.info

Squire Daniel Bliss was a prominent and respected member of the community, but just three months earlier he had exposed his loyalist sympathies at the Middlesex County Convention. “The colonies are England’s dependent children,” he declared. “Cut off from Britain, they will perish.” When army spies were seen going into his house, it wasn’t hard to figure out that he was giving them information about the caches of arms and ammunition concealed around Concord. 

Now the woman who had given them directions stood in the Blisses’ front hall, sobbing that she had been threatened with tar and feathers for her mistake. Worse, she said, Concord patriots had given her a message for Squire Bliss: If he was still in town the next morning, he would pay for his treachery with his life. 

The two spies—Captain John Brown and Ensign Henry De Berniere—at once proposed to escort Bliss out of town, defending him with their muskets if necessary. They left under cover of darkness via a back road that took them to Lexington and on to the safety of the British garrison in Boston. 

Detail of Concord from a map drawn in 1775 by the spies Brown and De Berniere

| Library of Congress

The terrified Bliss had left Isabel and their three children behind in Concord. His neighbors’ rage had been directed at him, not them, but he knew they wouldn’t be safe for long. He sent word to his brother Samuel (also a loyalist), asking him to bring Isabel and the children to join him, and they soon fled to Canada. 

Squire Daniel Bliss and his family settled in Quebec, where he served in the British army during the American Revolution and rose to the rank of colonel. In 1780 he and Isabel welcomed a fourth child, Hannah. After the war, he and his family moved to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he resumed his law career. He prospered and went on to become the head of the New Brunswick Bar, and the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. 

Bliss lived in New Brunswick until his death in 1806. His son, John Murray Bliss, followed his father into the legal profession, served as an officer in the War of 1812, and achieved some distinction in New Brunswick as a judge and politician. Daniel Bliss might have been entirely forgotten in his native Concord, except for an epitaph he composed for one of his clients.  

John Jack was born sometime around 1713 in Africa and was kidnapped into slavery. Enslavers rarely bothered to document the lives of the people they enslaved, so we know nothing of Jack’s life before he became enslaved to a Concord shoemaker named Benjamin Barron, whose home and workshop were on the Bay Road (now Lexington Road) where Jack learned the shoemaker’s trade. 

Barron died in 1754, when slavery was still widespread in Massachusetts, and his probate inventory listed Jack among his other property as “One Negro servant named Jack . . . £120.” Barron’s daughter, Susanna, became Jack’s enslaver, and he labored for seven years to earn the money to purchase his own freedom, with enough left over to buy six acres of farmland in the great fields (near the Concord River along present-day Bedford Street). 

As a free Black man, he was denied many of the rights his white neighbors enjoyed, such as voting, but in the words of historian Robert Gross, “His was a marginal place in the community, but it was nonetheless a real place.”¹ To earn his living, he hired himself out as a farm laborer and butcher, and cobbled shoes. 

In 1772 his health began to fail, and with the aid of Squire Daniel Bliss, he drew up a will, naming Bliss as his executor and bequeathing his property to Violet, a Black woman who had also been enslaved in the Barron household. At the time of his death, he owned eight acres of land, two oxen, a cow, a calf, a Bible and a psalm book, and seven barrels of cider. 

Jack died in March 1773, and was buried in Concord’s Old Hill Burial Ground. Daniel Bliss composed the inscription carved on his gravestone. The original stone was knocked down and damaged in the early 19th century, but thanks to the efforts of Rufus Hosmer, a Concord native who lived in Stow, a new stone was made and installed around 1830. The abolitionist Mary Rice, who lived near the burial ground, was the self-appointed caretaker of Jack’s gravesite. 

Bliss’ epitaph contains a not-so-subtle jab at the neighbors who would force him to flee for his life two years later, who held others in slavery while they cried out for liberty. Those words have made John Jack’s grave one of Concord’s most memorable historic sites. “God wills us free,” it proclaims. “Man wills us slaves. I will as God wills. God’s will be done.”

NOTES 1 Gross, Robert A. The Minutemen and Their World. Picador, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.