 John Bachman, Jones traveled to New York for ordination as a missionary by the New York Synod, having accepted a job as a missionary to Liberia.There, he was to work with freed slaves sent by the American Colonization Society who emigrated to that new nation.However, Jones did not reach Liberia, for upon his return to Charleston after ordination, he was briefly jailed for violating South Carolina's new law (passed after Nat Turner's slave rebellion) which increased the prohibition on free blacks from returning to the state (which his mother Abigail had encountered after a trip to New York some time before 1827).