Jack, Isaac Allen

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: D. G. Bell, “JACK, ISAAC ALLEN,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/jack_isaac_allen_13E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Lawyer and author; b. 26 June 1843 in Saint John, N.B., son of William Jack, a lawyer, and Emma Carleton Kenah; d. there 5 April 1903, unmarried and without issue.
    • Allen Jack was descended from loyalists on both sides and was the namesake of one of New Brunswick’s original judges, Isaac Allen. Educated at the Fredericton Collegiate School, he began higher studies in 1861 at the newly secularized University of New Brunswick (Fredericton). Soon, however, he led several other scions of the Anglican gentry in preferring charges against the institution’s first lay, and first non-Anglican, president, Joseph R. Hea, accusing him of ungentlemanly conduct in his treatment of students and staff. The charges, prosecuted by William Jack, were sustained and Hea was dismissed. Nevertheless, Jack chose to pursue his degree at the more genteel King’s College (Windsor, N.S.), from which he was graduated with a ba in 1863.
    • For 21 months in 1870–71 Jack had kept a journal, the most substantial extant for a late-19th-century New Brunswick lawyer. It is a remarkable document, chronicling the vicissitudes of law practice and reflecting in detail some of the literary, scientific, and religious enthusiasms of the age, while not omitting its author’s occasional visits to brothels. It reveals Jack as a frequent lecturer at the Mechanics’ Institute, an active member of Saint John’s important Natural History Society of New Brunswick, and an avid concert goer. Apart from law, its principal concern is religion.
    • From the 1860s to the 1880s Jack wrote prose and poetry for many newspapers and magazines, on a variety of subjects. The literary productions for which he is remembered are historical and came during the long period of retirement. A founding member of both the New Brunswick Historical Society and the New Brunswick Loyalist Society, Jack felt the need to attract interest in Maritime history by emphasizing the “well regulated family pride” that came from a loyalist descent. Thus his Biographical review . . . of leading citizens of the province of New Brunswick (Boston, 1900) printed lengthy, sympathetic notices of 360 New Brunswickers, most of them Jack’s contemporaries, and focused on genteel ancestry. The History of St. Andrew’s Society of St. John, N.B., Canada, 1798 to 1903 (Saint John, 1903) took the form of annals but was more accomplished than the Biographical review. Jack’s most notable historical imprint was based on an ironic misunderstanding. Joseph Wilson Lawrence had presented Jack with Ward Chipman Sr’s lengthy brief in an 1800 test case, arguing the unlawfulness of slavery. The document became the centre-piece of Jack’s 1898 article on “The loyalists and slavery in New Brunswick.” Though later research has shown that the test case was initiated by Samuel Denny Street and that Chipman argued the side of the slave owner in subsequent litigation, Jack’s celebratory portrait of Chipman still dominates the historiography.
  • Second Great Grandson of Proven United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=9369
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/137916761/isaac-allen-jack