He had seven children, five boys and two girls.  The last, Francis Jackson, was born to him in the year 1848.  Two of them died in childhood, a boy and a girl.  The loss of the boy, whom the father had “named admiringly, gratefully, reverently,” Charles Pollen, was a terrible blow to the reformer, and a life-long grief to the mother.  He seemed to have been a singularly beautiful, winning, and affectionate little man and to have inspired sweet hopes of future “usefulness and excellence” in the breasts of his parents.  “He seemed born to take a century on his shoulders, without stooping; his eyes were large, lustrous, and charged with electric light; his voice was clear as a bugle, melodious, and ever ringing in our ears, from the dawn of day to the ushering in of night, so that since it has been stilled, our dwelling has seemed to be almost without an occupant,” lamented the stricken father to Elizabeth Pease, of Darlington, England.

“Death itself to me is not terrible, is not repulsive,” poured the heartbroken pioneer into the ears of his English friend, “is not to be deplored.  I see in it as clear an evidence of Divine wisdom and beneficence as I do in the birth of a child, in the works of creation, in all the arrangements and operations of nature.  I neither fear nor regret its power.  I neither expect nor supplicate to be exempted from its legitimate action.  It is not to be chronicled among calamities; it is not to be styled “a mysterious dispensation of Divine Providence”; it is scarcely rational to talk of being resigned to it.  For what is more rational, what more universal, what more impartial, what more serviceable, what more desirable, in God’s own time, hastened neither by our ignorance or folly?...

“When, therefore, my dear friend, I tell you that the loss of my dear boy has overwhelmed me with sadness, has affected my peace by day and my repose by night, has been a staggering blow, from the shock of which I find it very difficult to recover, you will not understand me as referring to anything pertaining to another state of existence, or as gloomily affected by a change inevitable to all; far from it.  Where the cherished one who has been snatched from us is, what is his situation, or what his employment, I know not, of course; and it gives me no anxiety whatever.  Until I join him at least my responsibility to him as his guardian and protector has ceased; he does not need my aid, he cannot be benefited by my counsel.  That he will still be kindly cared for by Him who numbers the very hairs of our heads, and without whose notice a sparrow cannot fall to the ground; that he is still living, having thrown aside his mortal drapery, and occupying a higher sphere of existence, I do not entertain a doubt.  My grief arises mainly from the conviction that his death was premature; that he was actually defrauded of his life through unskillful treatment; that he might have been saved, if we had not been so unfortunately situated at that time.  This to be sure, is not certain; and not being certain, it is only an ingredient of consolation that we find in our cup of bitterness.”