[2][3] Jordon found employment as a clerk in the firm of James Brydon, a Kingston merchant, who later terminated Jordon's service because he objected to the free coloured's growing participation in the campaign for equal rights for Jamaica's free people of colour.
The Jamaican colonial government deported the leaders of the free coloureds, Louis Celeste Lecesne and John Escoffery, in an attempt to destroy the movement.
Instead, together with another leader of the community of free people of colour, Robert Osborn (Jamaica), they started a bookshop.
Unlike other newspapers, which expressed the views of white planters, The Watchman presented issues of importance to the Jamaican free coloureds, and it forged ties with the humanitarian movement and the Anti-Slavery Society in England.
In 1830, when Jordon and his colleagues presented another petition to the Jamaican Assembly, enough pressure was brought to bear to grant free coloureds the rights to vote and to run for public office.
When The Watchman printed an editorial calling on the Jamaican authorities to "knock off the fetters, and let the oppressed go free", Jordon was arrested and charged with sedition.
In 1865, when the Morant Bay Rebellion took place, governor Edward John Eyre used the opportunity to persuade the Assembly to abolish itself, ending the growing influence of the people of colour in elective politics.