The oldest child of Joan and John Jackson, Adam Jackson represented the third generation in his family to be enslaved in New London, a bustling seaport community where most residents, free and enslaved, were engaged in work connected to the West Indies trade. For someone who was born around 1700, Adam’s life story is remarkably well chronicled, between the 700-page, handwritten diary kept by Joshua Hempsted, his enslaver for much of his adult life, the paper trail of his parents’ herculean effort to keep their family together, and For Adam’s Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England, historian Allegra di Bonaventura’s 2013 book about colonial New London. Together with primary documents, these sources tell an inspiring tale of endurance, agency, productivity, and humanity in the face of legal, economic, and societal structures designed to treat Adam and his family as chattel.