[1] Following years of working as an itinerant preacher and lecturer, Jones became a prominent figure within the Colored Conventions Movement.
Also the Surprising Adventures of Wild Tom, of the Island Retreat, a Fugitive Negro from South Carolina, captures his early life as a slave and his subsequent escape from slavery.
[2] Thomas moved his family to the free northern states and eventually joined them after stowing away on a brig bound for New York City.
Slave hunters forced Jones to relocate to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia where he continued to lecture, frequently attracting large audiences.
In July 1850 he met British abolitionist Wilson Armistead in a chance encounter on a train travelling from Lynn to Boston.
[3] Armistead described how Jones, "a fugitive from the horrors of slavery","furnished me with a few particulars of his history, as [sic] also of the providential escape of his family (a wife and three children), whom he succeeded in aiding away previously.