Jesse B. Jackson

Jesse Benjamin Jackson (November 19, 1871 – December 4, 1947) was a United States consul and an important eyewitness to the Armenian genocide.

[3] As early as November 19, 1912, after four years as consul in Aleppo, Jackson had his staff raise concerns with the foreign embassies in Constantinople that the Turkish government was determined to place the Vilayet of Aleppo under martial law, warning that Muslims, who had abandoned their duties from the army, were engaged in "depredations" in the province, which the Turkish authorities accused the Armenians of carrying out, so that the latter "shall be at the mercy of the Moslems.

"[5] Jackson requested that the embassies raise the issue with the Ottoman government, so as to prevent massacres against the Armenians "which, under the present strained conditions, would spread like wildfire, and likely engulf Christians of all denominations far and wide.

"[5] In April 1915, some months after the outbreak of World War I, a copy of a thirty-page "seditious" pamphlet was sent by Jackson to Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador in Constantinople.

Published and printed in Arabic by the National Society of Defense for the Seat of the Caliphate and entitled "A Universal Proclamation to All the People of Islam", the pamphlet was distributed by the Germans and encouraged every Muslim to free the believers "in the Unity of God" from "the grasp of the infidels.

As during the massacres of 1895–96, it noted, the Turkish government was spreading false rumors that the Armenians in the Marash region were threatening law and order.

Jackson claimed that the local officials deceived the Armenians in Zeitun and in nearby Furnus into surrendering their arms in hopes of averting punishment, as during the Adana massacres of 1909, while causing the death of innocent women and children.

Merrill believed that the deportation of the Marash region was "a direct blow at American missionary interests, menacing the results of more than fifty years of work and many thousands of dollars of expenditure.

"[20][21][22] Jackson reported the statistics in detail of Meskene, a deportation zone, in a 10 September 1916 dispatch: "Information obtained on the spot permits me to state that nearly 60,000 Armenians are buried there, carried off by hunger, privations of all sorts, intestinal diseases and the typhus that results.

"[23] On September 29, in a letter to Morgenthau, Jackson placed the survival rate of the deportees at about 15 percent and further noted that this had amounted to the deaths of about a million Armenians.

[27] Jackson also reported that those who were deported from Urfa were never heard of again, "though I sent a trustworthy Mohammedan on a five weeks journey throughout the interior into which they had disappeared to make a diligent search for any of the survivors, and I personally made many inquiries to that end.

Without a doubt they suffered the fate of their fellow townsmen when at a safe distance from the city, and their bones lie bleaching in the sun and sands of the vast Mesopotamian desert.

"[28] In October 1916, Jackson depicted the circumstances of those who were deported in caravans: "For another five days they [the Armenians] did not receive a morsel of bread, neither a drop of water.

[36] Jackson died on December 6, 1947, at the White Cross Hospital after suffering a short illness and is buried in Sunset Cemetery in Galloway, Ohio.

Jesse Jackson in his youth
Jackson reported that thousands had been sent to Aleppo and thence to Deir ez-Zor . "The misery these people are suffering is terrible to imagine," Jackson wrote. "The Armenians themselves say that they would by far have preferred a massacre, which would have been less disastrous to them." [ 7 ]
Map of Armenian refugee camps in and around the Deir ez-Zor province. Jackson estimated that around 350,000 refugees had converged at Deir el-Zor, and more than 500,000 Armenians had been killed in the area months after the Armenian Genocide started. He reported that "the sides of the roads are strewn with the bones or decaying bodies" of the deportees in and around the province. [ 2 ] [ 9 ]
Armenian woman kneeling beside dead child in field "within sight of help and safety at Aleppo". Jackson reported that thousands of men, women, and children were being "scattered over the desert to starve or die of disease in burning heat".
Jackson led a campaign to save the lives of Armenians and support the relief effort. According to an article published by The Sun on February 9, 1916, he is credited for saving the lives of "thousands of Armenians".
January 29, 1916, Bisbee Daily Review , "U.S. Consul and Wife Rescue Thousands of Armenians". Jackson is pictured with his wife with a caption that says, "Armenians say that it was solely owing to the energetic action of U.S. Consul Jesse B. Jackson at Aleppo, Syria, who adopted a strong attitude toward the Turkish military authorities, that thousands of Armenian lives in Aleppo and in the surrounding regions were saved."
A telegraph sent by Jackson to Secretary of State. The telegraph describes Talat Pasha's ordering of massacres: "The attention of the Department is respectfully drawn to the substance of the various telegraphic instructions from Talaat Pasha to the different Turkish officials, especially in Aleppo, the character of the said instructions being such as would indicate that few if any of the victims should have survived."