Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York 9781501715860

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LIBERTY’S CHAIN

LIBERTY’S CHAIN

S L AV E R Y, A B O L I T I O N , A N D T H E J AY ­F A M I LY O F N E W YO R K

David N. Gellman

THREE HILLS AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Lyr­ics from “Adam Raised a Cain” by Bruce Springsteen © 1978, copyright renewed 2003 by Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP). All rights reserved. Reprinted by kind permission of Universal ­Music Publishing Group. Some of the material contained herein originally appeared in “Abbe’s Ghost: Negotiating Slavery in Paris, 1783–4” by David Gellman in Experiencing Empire: Power, ­People, and Revolution in Early Amer­ic­ a, edited by Patrick Griffin. © 2017 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of ­Virginia. Reprinted by permission of the University of ­Virginia Press. Some of the material contained herein originally appeared in chapter 9 of A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Vol. 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse, edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021). Reprinted by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Copyright © 2022 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2022 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Gellman, David Nathaniel, author. Title: Liberty’s chain : slavery, abolition, and the Jay ­family   of New York / David N. Gellman. Description: Ithaca, [New York] : Three Hills, an   imprint of Cornell University Press, 2022. | Includes   bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021033243 (print) | LCCN 2021033244   (ebook) | ISBN 9781501715846 (hardcover) |   ISBN 9781501715853 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501715853 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Jay ­family—­History—18th ­century. |   Jay ­family—­History—19th ­century. | Slavery—­   New York (State)—­History—18th ­century. | Slavery—­   New York (State)—­History—19th ­century. | Antislavery   movements—­New York (State)—­History—   18th ­century. | Antislavery movements—­New York   (State)—­History—19th ­century. Classification: LCC E445.N56 G453 2022 (print) |   LCC E445.N56 (ebook) | DDC 306.3/6209747—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021033243 LC ebook rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​   /­2021033244 Cover image: Detail from Raphaelle and Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of John Jay, oil on canvas, c. 1795. Maryland Center for History and Culture, 1857.2.4.

For Hannah and Ben

You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames. —­Bruce Springsteen

Co n te n ts

Jay ­Family Trees  x List of African American Individuals in Jay House­holds  xiii Maps  xvi A Note to the Reader on Language  xix

Prologue: Founding





1

Part One: Slavery and Revolution

1. Disruptions

11

2. Rising Stars

28

3. Negotiations

50

4. Nation-­Building

73

5. Mastering Paradox

102

6. Sharing the Flame

129

Part Two: Abolitionism

7. Joining Forces

161

8. A Conservative on the Inside

189

9. Breaking Ranks

214

10. The Condition of ­Free ­People of Color

234

11. Soul and Nation

255

Part Three: Emancipation

12. Uncompromised

285

13. Parting Shots

309

vi i i Co n t e n ts

14. Civil Wars

336

15. Reconstructed

365

Epilogue: Reckoning

394

Acknowl­edgments  401 Appendix: Enslaved and ­Free Black Servants in the House­holds of John Jay and William Jay  405 Notes  407 Bibliography  471 Index  505

Figure 0.1.  Jay F­ amily Tree, Part 1: Centering on John Jay, this portion of the tree charts the Jay ­family from his grand­father’s immigration to New York in the late seventeenth ­century to John Jay and Susan Livingston’s offspring, born in the late eigh­teenth ­century. Courtesy of Beth Wilkerson.

Figure 0.2.  Jay F­ amily Tree, Part 2: Emphasizing the nineteenth-­century families of William Jay and Augusta McVickar and that of their son John Jay II and Eleanor Field, the tree extends to include writer and reformer John Jay Chapman. Courtesy of Beth Wilkerson.

L ist o f A f r ic a n A m e r ic a n I­ n d i vi d u a l s i n J ay H o use­h o l d s

Below is a list of African Americans mentioned in this book, or­ga­nized by Jay h ­ ouse­holds. Dates of birth and death are included when available. Names of ­people associated with more than one ­house­hold are repeated, with key events like manumission or giving birth listed in the ­house­hold where they occurred. If the person held or attained a status other than enslaved, that is also noted. Limits in information and the social structures of slavery and gradual emancipation make it difficult, as well as anachronistic, to construct a ­family tree including all the African Americans working and living in Jay ­house­holds. Only in some instances, which are covered in the book, is it clear that the ­people listed ­here ­were related. This list should not be considered parallel to the ­family tree on the preceding pages, although the information should be read in tandem. The organ­ization by Jay ­house­hold is not meant to suggest that the agency and familial relationships of African Americans in the narrative w ­ ere not central to their experiences or of lesser importance than relationships among Jay f­amily members. Even so, the structure of the following data speaks to the vulnerability and isolation that s­ haped lives lived in slavery and afterward. Augustus and Anne Marie Bayard Jay House­hold Ben (transported to Madeira) Peter and Mary Van Cortlandt Jay House­hold Brash (transported to Madeira, 1741), Hannah, Castor, Peter (aka Peet?), Anthony, Moll, Susan, Kingston, Zilpha (­free 1781), Old Plato (­free 1781; died 1791), Young Plato, Frank, Clarinda, Old Mary (died 1797), Young Mary Peter Jay and Mary Duyckinck Jay House­holds Susan, Peter Johnson (aka Peet; f­ree 1814), Caesar (­free 1824), Sylvia (­free 1824) Anna Maricka Jay House­hold Hannah (­free 1791) John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay House­hold xiii

xiv

L i s t o f A f r i ca n A m e r i ca n ­I n d i v i d ual s i n J ay H o u s e ­h o l d s

1774–1784: Abbe (died in France 1783), Claas (aka Massey, who departed with British in 1783?), Benoit (born c. 1765, ­free c. 1784), 1784–1802: Peet, Essex, Maria, Yaff, David, Benny, Phillis, Frank, Plato, Eliza, Caesar, Dinah (and 2-­year-­old child), Clarinda (married to Pompey; unnamed child died 1792), Zilpah. John Jay House­hold 1802–1829: Zilpah (child ­under 2 years of age died 1811; ­free 1817), Clarinda (­free by 1820), Chester Tilliston, elder (employee), Chester Tillitson, younger (indentured servant), Jack Pine (indentured servant) Peter Jay Munro House­hold Candice (­free 1803), Nelly, Charlot Peter Augustus Jay House­hold Caesar Valentine (servant) William Jay and Augusta McVickar Jay House­hold Clarinda (died 1837), Zilpah House­hold of John Jay II and Eleanor Field Jay Zilpah Montgomery (not listed in census as member of ­house­hold; died 1872)

Figure 0.3.  Key eastern seaboard sites in the Jay f­ amily’s abolitionist and reform worlds. Courtesy of Beth Wilkerson.

Figure 0.4.  Key Westchester County and New York State Jay-­connected sites of enslavement, po­liti­cal work, and antislavery activism. Courtesy of Beth Wilkerson.

A N ote to th e R e a d e r o n L a n g u ag e

Language shapes history and our understanding of history. When writing about an institution predicated on racism, choices about language have a bearing on the interpretation advanced by the historian and on the experience of the reader. It is impor­tant not to reinforce the language of subjugation, exploitation, and indignity that the past proj­ects into the pre­sent. Guided by that princi­ple, I have made some decisions about language that I wish to briefly explain. My strong preference is to refer to p­ eople by their names whenever pos­si­ble. Since racialized statuses and identities define e­ very single person whose story I share—­there is nothing color-­blind about American history—­I also regularly refer to “African Americans,” “Black p­ eople,” “Black New Yorkers,” “whites,” and “white New Yorkers” in exactly ­these terms. This choice reflects not only current and emerging usage standards but also the historical ways in which origins, descent, and physical identifiers s­ haped life experiences, as enforced by law and culture. When a white person’s ethnicity, religion, or ancestral origin is significant, I have described that person accordingly—­for example, as a Huguenot. When referring to p­ eople made subject to the laws, practices, demands, and abuses of the institution of slavery, I often used the word “enslaved” as both a noun and an adjective. This word draws attention to the fact that a person’s status or subordination was imposed—­more to the point, that some ­people imposed enslavement on ­others. That such an imposition was a ­matter of course and custom for many years in many places does not change the importance of drawing attention to that fact. When writing about slavery as an institution, a concept, and a meta­phor, I generally use the words “slavery” and “slave.” I also use ­these words when drawing attention to the perspective of the ­people claiming owner­ship or enforcing the subordination of a par­tic­u­lar individual or group of individuals. The same is true when I use the word “master” or “slaveholder,” even though t­hese terms are in no way morally neutral characterizations. All ­people who claimed owner­ship of ­others ­were also “enslavers.” When quoting historical documents, which I do quite a lot, I retained the usage and spelling of the original. Capitalization at the beginning of quotations xix

xx

A N ot e to t h e R e a d e r o n L a n g u ag e

has been standardized for grammatical consistency but has other­wise been preserved from the original. The language that the p­ eople quoted in this book used to describe themselves and o ­ thers overlaps with but, unsurprisingly, is not identical to our own. The gamut of cruelty, callousness, caring, and commitment expressed by members of the Jay ­family and ­others whom I quoted is bound to strike readers in a variety of ways. When writing about themselves and ­others publicly or privately, authors of what­ever race and class often had specific po­liti­cal or moral intent; word choices frequently expressed varying degrees of privilege, habit, and common parlance. I tried to avoid repeating patently offensive language while still presenting evidence of the historical language used to describe enslavement, emancipation, and freedom. ­There are two glaring exceptions regarding offensive language. In chapter 12, I quote a diarist who uses a word that drives home racist contempt for John Jay II’s efforts to advance the rights of Black Episcopalians. At the beginning of chapter 10, which focuses on mid-­nineteenth-­century racism, I reproduce a lightly edited version of a deeply troubling story that abolitionist David Lee Child shared in a November 1841 edition of the National Anti-­Slavery Standard. The story hinged on the public use of the same word the diarist in chapter 12 used privately. The word was meant to wound and offend then, as it most as­suredly does now. Child forced his readers to confront racial obscenity as a form of aggressively harmful language and action. I quote this language with the same trust that abolitionist Child had in the good faith and solidarity of his readers as they strug­gled against American racism. Their strug­ gle remains ours.

LIBERTY’S CHAIN

Prologue Founding

“Posthumous fame is in no other re­spect valuable than as it may be instrumental to the good of the survivors.” When forty-­ four-­year-­old John Jay penned this reflection in 1790, he had already earned his place as one of the most influential members of the revolutionary generation. The inaugural chief justice of the newly formed US Supreme Court had ample reason to believe he would remain famous long ­after his own death. He had served as president of the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War. As a leading po­liti­cal figure in New York, he helped author the state’s first constitution. Alongside John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, Jay played a crucial role in negotiating the treaty that concluded the War for In­de­pen­dence. ­After returning from his diplomatic triumph in Eu­rope, John Jay was entrusted with the nation’s fledgling foreign policy operations by the Continental Congress. The frustrations posed by the Articles of Confederation of performing this task prompted him to join with George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton in what historian Joseph Ellis has labeled “the quartet”—­the moving force ­behind calling a national convention to supplant the Articles and to ratify the resulting United States Constitution. A few years ­later, Jay negotiated a treaty with Britain that forever ­after bears his name; the Jay Treaty averted a potentially disastrous war with the former m ­ other country. In 1795, his fellow New Yorkers elected him as their governor. During his second

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term, he had the honor of approving a law to gradually abolish slavery in the North’s largest slave state.1 Slavery and fame—or, better yet, slavery and infamy. The enslavement of millions of ­human beings and the founding of the nation are inextricably bound. One need look no further than the US Constitution. The 1787 document made ominous references to “three fifths of all other persons” counting ­toward congressional appointments and to the need for Congress to “suppress Insurrections.” The bedrock of our laws required that ­people “held to Ser­vice” who had fled across state borders be returned to their masters’ states. The same seminal document also forbade Congress ­until 1808 at the earliest from banning the “Importation of such Persons as any of the States . . . ​think proper to admit.” All ­these phrases referred to the enslaved. Quietly but unmistakably, the found­ers e­ tched Black bondage into the nation’s charter.2 But Americans can—­and have since then—­amended the Constitution. Abolition, equal protection, and voting rights amendments removed chattel slavery from the living document. The lives of the found­ers themselves, however, ­were written in indelible ink. What good would their memory be to their survivors? What value is their memory to us—­Americans and world citizens of ­every color, identity, and creed? ­Because of slavery, the biographical rec­ord threatens to transform the found­ers’ fame into infamy at almost e­ very turn. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other revered southern founding ­fathers owned slaves: hundreds of men, ­women, and c­ hildren ­were the chattel property of ­these apostles of liberty. Thomas Jefferson’s role in fathering several ­children by his slave mistress Sally Hemings is virtually a historical subfield of its own, its combination of sex and hy­poc­risy serving as a meta­phor for our nation’s entire shameful history of racial injustice.3 The Mason-­Dixon Line, meanwhile, did not and does not secure the North’s revolutionary legacy from slavery’s disgrace. E ­ very colony that became a state legally enforced the enslavement of ­people of African descent. Northern colonial economies reaped profits from the slave trade and provisioned slave colonies.4 Once again, such facts force us to reconsider the found­ers’ biographies. Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin not only owned slaves but also helped keep his renowned newspaper operation profitable by advertising slaves for sale and rewards for capturing runaways. Alexander Hamilton’s twenty-­first-­century Broadway revival as the honor-­obsessed forward-­thinking founding ­father whose hip-­hop storytelling embodies a city’s and nation’s multicultural dreams poses far more questions than it answers about the revolution and slavery.5 And John Jay? He owned slaves, as did his f­ ather, his grand­father, his father-­ in-­law, and most if not all of the elite New York merchants and landholders to

F OUNDING 3

which he was related by blood, marriage, and class.6 The ties of the founding and the found­ers to slavery proved to be inextricable. In the years following John Jay’s death, his heirs demanded that slavery end. John Jay’s second son, William Jay, and his grand­son and namesake, John Jay II, embraced the new movement for immediate abolition in the 1830s, promoted the cause of national Black freedom for de­cades, and challenged the North’s racial caste system. Just two years before the outbreak of the Civil War, the nation’s foremost African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared in his eulogy for William, “In the ­g reat cause of universal freedom his name was a tower of strength, and his pen a two edged sword.” Soon ­after, the editors of DeBow’s Review, a leading mouthpiece of southern nationalism, offered John Jay II’s antislavery invective during the fateful 1860 presidential race as proof of why southerners should exit the Union.7 In the mid-­nineteenth ­century, the Jay name became, for many friends and foes, synonymous with abolitionism even as it remained intimately associated with the founding. Even so, members of the f­amily knew full well the Jays’ connection to enslavement. Zilpah Montgomery, who began life as the d­ aughter of a f­ amily slave and was a slave herself ­until John Jay freed her, served the Jay ­family for de­cades and on her death in 1872 was interred in the Jay ­family burial plot. Zilpah’s ­mother Clarinda had served the f­ amily as a slave and l­ater as a freed person u ­ ntil 1837. The former slave Caesar Valentine worked in the h ­ ouse­hold of John Jay’s oldest son, the abolitionist Peter Augustus Jay, receiving a modest annuity on Peter’s death in 1848. Fugitives making their way northward to freedom turned to the Jays for help. Generations of Jays formed a bond, albeit a lopsided one, to enslaved ­people and formerly enslaved ­people. The Jays did not imagine slavery as something that only took place in a distant region or at a distant time. Yet the l­ater Jays did not regard their principled, even daring, antislavery activities as a repudiation of their founding ­father, even as their abolitionism complicated the meaning of the nation’s origins and their f­ amily story. As his successors knew, despite being a slaveholder, John Jay had been an abolitionist too. In 1785, he became the founding president one of the world’s first anti­ slavery organ­izations, the New-­York Manumission Society. In 1799, as already noted, he served as governor while the state enacted a gradual emancipation law. And in 1819, in one of the last po­liti­cal statements of his long life, Jay opposed the admission of Missouri as a slave state—­a striking contrast to Thomas Jefferson’s response during the same crisis. To be sure, slavery deeply compromised the found­ers’ legacy. Yet the beliefs and actions of several found­ers regarding slavery, especially John Jay’s, complicated the interpretation of that legacy even before the last major found­ ers passed away. He embraced a gradual emancipation ethos that, although it

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was freighted with unfairness, moved steadily forward. This approach stood in contrast to Washington’s ­g rand “imperfect” gesture of liberating his slaves at his death and to Jefferson’s disturbing moral retreat.8 Unlike t­ hese three found­ers, Jay’s historically minded heirs, traditionalists in so many other ways, would seek to identify the ­family name with immediate emancipation and racial equality, even though that cause threatened to radically transform and even to destroy the nation that John Jay had played a central role in creating. Their f­ ather and the laws of New York ensured that they owned no slaves to ­free. The Jay story invites, indeed demands, that Americans treat the found­ers as a part of, rather than set apart from, subsequent conflicts over slavery.9 To link together this narrative chain of slavery and liberty, documents from John Jay’s long ­career as a public servant proved valuable, but I relied far more heavi­ly on ­family documents—­especially letters written by, to, and in between generations of Jays.10 Although the Jays’ style of letter writing was not generally confessional in nature, they freely shared their opinions about policies, politicians, and publications. They also corresponded frequently with their abolitionist colleagues and contemporaries. Their correspondence illustrates an abiding web of ­family and activist connections, distinctive personalities, and motivations emerging against an American historical landscape that from the colonial era to the industrial revolution, from the American Revolution to Reconstruction, underwent massive upheavals. The religious, po­liti­cal, and personal motives they ascribed to themselves and ­others do not have to be accepted at face value. But patterns of continuity and change abound. William Jay and John Jay II, the ­family’s most vociferous abolitionists, published essays and articles that contributed vitally to the antislavery strug­gles, reform movements, and po­liti­cal contests of their times. Placed into conversation with the rich scholarship of slavery and abolition, the Jays’ private correspondence and public advocacy shed new light on the transitions from the practice of gradual emancipation to the demand for immediate abolition, from the commitment to peace to the embrace of war, and on the waxing and waning of nationalism as a force of liberation. Getting at the motivations and personalities of enslaved and freed ­family servants is much more difficult, requiring the historian to read between the lines and against the grain in the vast trove of Jay documents. What their white masters and employers said about their Black slaves and servants or about slavery and racism does not directly convey African American life in and around the Jay ­house­hold. As the narrative ­will make plain, the Jays’ criticisms and blunt attacks on unjust institutions and their championing of vari­ous forms

F OUNDING 5

of emancipation w ­ ere neither divorced from nor a straightforward reckoning of the experiences of the enslaved and emancipated ­people in their midst. Although the Jays forged meaningful alliances with African American antislavery activists, ­those who served the f­ amily achieved much more modest forms of re­spect. Paternalism and personal loyalty never produced anything like equality within the Jays’ h ­ ouse­holds.11 For all that the Jays have to tell us about slavery, emancipation, and race in Amer­i­ca, as well as about the first ­century of politics in the United States more broadly, the historical and biographical rec­ord is stunningly thin—­dots are left unconnected when not outright neglected. John Jay has gotten more and broader attention than his ancestors and descendants, but engagement with his life as a slaveholder and abolitionist has been fleeting by critics and celebrants alike. Historians and biographers sometimes gesture to the fact that, what­ever his achievements and shortcomings regarding slavery, his sons carried the antislavery banner forward. What that entailed for the better part of the nineteenth c­ entury is a story with which the Jays themselves, especially William Jay and John Jay II, wrestled.12 The fight against slavery threatened to destroy the nation on which their f­ amily fame rested. Thus, to some contemporaries, the Jays’ abolitionism seemed to betray John Jay’s founding legacy. This book is no s­ imple story of sons finishing the work their ­fathers started. Indeed, telling the story requires resisting the temptation to assem­ble a series of discrete lives into neatly sequenced narratives. That is not how the Jays experienced the history they helped make. Their stories and t­ hose of the African Americans in their midst w ­ ere enmeshed. To shift the meta­phor, this is not the story of a relay race, baton smoothly passed from one hand to another; members of the h ­ ouse­hold ran alongside one another, albeit at dif­fer­ent speeds to dif­fer­ent finish lines. F ­ athers, sons, m ­ others, and ­daughters experienced the same events from distinct perspectives, the same moments in time coming at separate phases of long lives. They watched each other, collaborated with each other, and learned from each other. De­cades ­after ­family patriarch John Jay died, his survivors looked back over their shoulders for approval and repurposed ­family stories for public justification, for personal self-­understanding, and with the hopes of shaping American historical memory.13 The Jays are abiding characters in each ­others’ biographies, much as the colonial and revolutionary past s­ haped and marked the history of the nineteenth ­century and beyond. The moral incompatibility of slavery with the nation’s founding ideals clashed—in ways that the Jays found impossible to ignore—­ with slavery’s economic and po­liti­cal compatibility to the nation’s development. For long stretches, antislavery radicalized a conservative f­amily. Timing

6 P RO LOGUE

and temperament determined how individual members of the ­family experienced and made sense of this tension between radicalism and conservatism. The narrative unfolds in three parts. The first section, “Slavery and Revolution,” traces the long arc of the Jay f­amily’s rise to prominence. It begins in colonial New York, where enslaved Africans provided luxury and wealth to the upwardly mobile, like John’s grand­father Auguste, a French Protestant refugee; it ends in the 1820s, when, in part due to the efforts of members of the Jay ­family, slavery all but dis­appeared from the Empire State but sowed po­liti­ cal division in the new nation. The American Revolution propelled John Jay to the top ranks of his state’s and his nation’s leadership. Intensified currents of egalitarian thought and slave re­sis­tance forced Jay to negotiate conflicting impulses ­toward slavery in his po­liti­cal and personal life. Imagining himself a kindly patriarch to loyal slaves, he bristled when the enslaved asserted their own needs. Yet he increasingly, if inconsistently, embraced antislavery princi­ ples in vari­ous public roles, identifying gradual emancipation as an effective method of ending slavery within his state and in his h ­ ouse­hold. In national office, he tacked between compromise in the interest of national unity and censuring slaveholders who sought to assert their interests in ­matters of foreign policy. Meanwhile, a new generation of Jays engaged in their own antislavery activism through the New-­York Manumission Society and in po­liti­cal life. As John Jay manumitted the last of the ­people he held in bondage, new issues emerged. Slavery’s expansion westward, plans to colonize African Americans in West Africa, the right of Black men to vote, and the kidnapping of ­free ­people of color signaled that the gradual abolition of slavery in the North and constitutional compromises left gaping moral holes. The subject of the ­middle part, “Abolitionism,” is the radical antislavery movement of the 1830s and 1840s, as William Jay and John Jay II embraced the call for slavery’s immediate end. William lived in his ­father’s ­house, employed former f­amily slaves, worshiped in his ­father’s beloved Episcopalian church, and authored a laudatory biography of his ­father. Supported and pushed by his own son, John Jay II, William relentlessly articulated the case against slavery throughout this period. Navigating the choppy ­waters of the antislavery movement politics and the nation’s increasingly partisan, white man’s democracy, William entered into and then exited from the William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-­Slavery Society. He also formed lasting alliances with other leading abolitionists like Lewis Tappan and Gerrit Smith. The prestige accrued from his ­family’s connection to the founding made William a prized antislavery spokesman, as well as a puzzle to fellow conservatives surprised by this radical turn. William and his son, meanwhile, increasingly advocated for racially egalitarian

F OUNDING 7

positions, attacking the moral compromises of northern religious leaders, particularly within the Episcopalian church. William also issued strong historical critiques of national policies t­oward slavery and slaveholding and helped publish a seminal first-­person slave narrative. Although his patriarchal assumptions undermined his alliance with the Garrisonians, ­these same assumptions fueled his critique of what he saw as slavery’s fraudulent paternalism. By the time of the Mexican War, William Jay had staked out a position as a power­ful critic of territory-­hungry, militarized nationalism, a morally tattered cloak for the spread of what he regarded as an irreligious southern slaveholding regime. The Jays’ abolitionism bred hostility among their Westchester County neighbors and provoked consternation among their Manhattan social peers, but it provided the f­ amily with a coherent identity and sense of purpose. The final section, “Emancipation,” traverses a series of crises that shattered the nation, ended slavery, and, ultimately, allowed the Jay f­ amily to once again secure itself a place among Amer­i­ca’s po­liti­cal and social elite. From the late 1840s to the eve of the Civil War, work on behalf of fugitive slaves and unrelenting critiques of po­liti­cal compromise with the Slave Power—­slaveholding interests and their enablers in government and society—­continued to make the Jays seem like gadflies to mainstream po­liti­cal and cultural elites. ­These commitments also brought the Jays, particularly John, into alliance with Black activists. The emergence of the Republicans as a mainstream po­liti­cal party, meanwhile, gave the Jays and some of their antislavery allies a new vehicle that might legitimize their radical opposition to slavery. Whereas William remained a provocateur even in death, John Jay II invested his hopes in the party of Lincoln, if not always in Lincoln himself. The new patriarch of the Jay f­amily had ­great expectations for the Civil War as an abolitionist proj­ect that he hoped would propel him into a position of influence in government. The war alternately thwarted and rewarded John Jay II: po­liti­cal setbacks, a brutal Manhattan race riot, contempt from his neighbors at the ­family’s country homestead, and up-­and-­down news from the warfront w ­ ere balanced by the Emancipation Proclamation, the mustering from New York of African American regiments, and the Thirteenth Amendment. Reconstruction beckoned as a confirmation of radical abolitionist dreams of national transformation, but while Jay served as a Eu­ro­pean ambassador, the proj­ect collapsed. Rather than rage against or fully recognize the extent of that collapse, Jay, ever the restless reformer, threw himself into new ­causes fueled by a mix of long-­standing ­family prejudices against Catholics and a nationalism that recalled memories of his grand­father’s nation-­building, rather than his ­father’s distrust of politics and morally compromised nationalism. With slavery legally abolished and the last former slave buried in the ­family’s churchyard plot, the

8 P RO LOGUE

Jays’ abolitionism became part of a heroic past rather than an animating force in a nation where whites continued to brutally enforce racial subjugation. From the colonial era to the post-­Reconstruction age of Jim Crow, I examine how the Jays transmitted and transformed deeply held po­liti­cal, religious, and moral values.14 For the Jays, combating slavery did not entail repudiating their wealth, privilege, or historical reputation; instead, they leveraged their prestige and education to advocate, instigate, and or­ga­nize. Their approach had distinct limitations and sustained tragic blind spots, but it also allowed the Jays to make tremendous contributions to a ­g reat and necessary cause. This story reveals much about some of the most critical issues in American history—­slavery, race, and freedom, of course, as well as such perpetually charged concepts as patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. The Jay narrative makes manifest the dangers of conflating patriotism with morality and then choosing the former over the latter. The Jay story also reveals the protean nature of conservatism when facing Amer­i­ca’s greatest evils, while illustrating the radical implications of any public embrace of racial equality. The story of whites and Blacks in the Jay ­house­hold also makes clear that northern slaveholding found­ers ­were hardly immune to self-­serving illusions. The lingering costs of emancipation weighed far more heavi­ly on the emancipated than their former ­owners. Even so, the post-­independence era of gradual emancipation inculcated antislavery values and instincts that served as power­f ul resources that the Jay ­family drew on to the considerable benefit of the abolitionist movement. As a result, at many crucial moments in the tumultuous nineteenth ­century, the Jays chose the path of greater rather than lesser re­sis­tance to slavery’s pervasive power. A narrative of enslavers, enslaved, and abolitionists, of private ­people and public lives, this book provides new ways of thinking about an American past fraught with challenges constituent of our times. Taking the long view—­from as far back as the late seventeenth ­century and as far forward as the early twentieth ­century—­does not absolve the failures of the founding. Yet working across generations demands far more than moral score keeping. The Jays thought critically about the founding, about slavery, and about their own obligations. To be sure, the way the f­amily remembered and interpreted the past reflected changing po­liti­cal conditions and shifting psychological needs. Letting a heroic past obscure injustice was as tempting for vari­ous Jays as it remains for Americans ­today. Yet, when they ­were at their best, members of this remarkable, influential ­family resisted this seduction and instead demanded justice. Another word for “posthumous fame” is history.15 Across parts of four centuries, the Jays made history and made use of history, demonstrating the vitality and the elusiveness of liberty’s legacy.

Pa rt O n e

Slavery and Revolution

C h a p te r 1

Disruptions

Pierre Jay sent his eighteen-­year-­old son Auguste to Africa in 1683 “but,” John Jay wrote more than a c­ entury l­ater, “to what part and for what purpose is now unknown.”1 A prosperous merchant who conducted business from La Rochelle on France’s Atlantic coast, Pierre had cosmopolitan impulses. He previously sent his son for six years of education in ­England. Perhaps John Jay did not want to confront the distinct possibility that the Jays’ business in Africa had something to do with slavery. French Protestants, or Huguenots, like the Jays had played a role in the nascent stages of the French slave and West Indian trade; for example, the prominent Huguenot Jean-­ Baptiste du Casse at one time served as governor of the French Senegal Com­ pany. And La Rochelle was France’s leading slave trading port in the late seventeenth c­ entury. France, however, was only a minor player in the transatlantic slave trade in the 1680s; La Rochelle usually sent only one or two voyages from Africa to the Ca­rib­bean each year during this era, and none listed any Jays as owner or captain. Still, while in Africa, Auguste could have witnessed the embarkation of hundreds of slaves on the Etoile d’Or or the Conquis, two ships likely outfitted in La Rochelle in 1683 and bound for the Amer­i­cas. Given that Eu­ro­pe­ans set out for the Amer­i­cas with more than a million slaves in the seventeenth c­ entury alone, Pierre and Auguste surely would have understood the trade in enslaved Africans as one of the investment 11

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prospects available for merchants in La Rochelle and elsewhere. What­ever Pierre had in mind for Auguste’s sojourn in Africa, the Jays took part in a pro­ cess through which Eu­ro­pe­ans probed for profit on a continent increasingly integrated into a burgeoning Atlantic trading system in which the sale of Africans featured significantly.2 It was events in his native France, however, that soon propelled Auguste across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1685, Louis XIV’s regime renounced the toleration of French Protestantism, prompting the young man to sail westward to the En­glish colonies. In North Amer­i­ca, the Jays’ story would intertwine soon enough with the ­people who survived or whose forebears survived brutal ocean crossing on ships like the Etoile d’Or and the Conquis. Long before John Jay began to ponder the morality of slavery, his grand­father Auguste Jay and his ­father Peter Jay made their way upward in a society that embraced slavery and its fruits.3

Flight and Arrival By the time Auguste returned to La Rochelle from Africa in 1685 or 1686, the increasingly tenuous world of French Protestantism had collapsed, its loyal adherents in flight. The circumstances of Huguenot life, however, had not always been so grim. The Edict of Nantes, promulgated in 1598 by the French king Henry IV, allowed French Protestants to continue worshipping ­under the Calvinist doctrines that had gained currency ­earlier in the sixteenth ­century as the Protestant Reformation grew in strength. Yet toleration began to erode in the 1660s. Louis XIV and his ministers calculatedly constricted Huguenot religious and secular life. They forbade Protestant churches from holding national meetings, shuttered churches that could not supply evidence of having opened prior to the 1598 Edict of Nantes, imposed restrictions on Huguenot schools, prohibited Protestants from practicing law, and denied Protestant doctors the right to treat Catholics. Perhaps Pierre Jay de­cided to send his son for an En­glish education and then to Africa for mercantile work to prepare him for the inevitable and dramatic constriction of Huguenot religious and secular opportunities. In October 1685, Louis XIV intensified anti-­Protestant terror already underway by revoking the Edict of Nantes. Although most of Louis’s eight hundred thousand Protestant subjects knuckled u ­ nder to the effort to compel Catholic conversion, the stream of Huguenots pouring out of France swelled a­ fter 1685. In all, an estimated two hundred thousand Huguenots fled France b­ ecause of Louis XIV’s persecutions—­including Pierre Jay and his ­family.4

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Before revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Pierre anticipated this final blow, arranging for his ­family in early 1685 to flee to London, a Protestant city in a Protestant country. According to John Jay’s written account, Pierre was able to send many of the ­family’s possessions to the En­glish capital and to depart with a cargo of iron. T ­ hese arrangements allowed the Jays to avoid even temporary penury, unlike some of their less fortunate fellow refugees.5 Auguste took a less typical path to safety. Returning to La Rochelle from Africa ­after his ­family had already departed and finding the religious situation untenable, he boarded a ship that took him to Charles Town, South Carolina, the primary port of an En­glish proprietary colony barely more than two de­ cades old. Auguste was not alone among Huguenots in seeking refuge outside Eu­rope. Thousands traveled to En­glish and Dutch possessions, with ­those bound for En­glish colonies often stopping first in ­England. Of the approximately two thousand Huguenot refugees who came to the North American colonies, about five hundred went to South Carolina, many of them merchants and artisans by trade. The Carolina proprietors had actively recruited Huguenots with French-­language pamphlets extolling economic prospects in the colony. Charles Town’s population in 1685 was not even one thousand, so Huguenots quickly made up a significant proportion of the port city’s residents, even as some spread out to the hinterland to take up agricultural pursuits.6 Huguenots enjoyed remarkable success in South Carolina, integrating into a po­liti­cal and economic structure increasingly or­ga­nized around slaveholding. As early as 1700, two-­thirds of estates of deceased Huguenots listed slaves. Discrimination against Huguenots was mitigated in part ­because, as white Protestants, they could identify and be identified as part of the dominant group fending off potential dangers from Native Americans and the emerging Black slave majority. As the colony’s fortunes r­ ose rapidly with the adaptation of rice as a staple crop and the accelerating importation of slaves to do the brutal work of irrigation and harvesting in the swampy lowlands, Huguenots amassed land and slaves at a pace that exceeded that of their En­glish fellow colonists.7 Auguste Jay did not stay in South Carolina long enough to enjoy the opportunities pursued by his former countrymen, although his quick departure had no connection to the presence of slavery. Huguenot Calvinist teachings did not prohibit slaveholding among French émigrés; indeed, part of the appeal for the Huguenot arrivals in South Carolina was the chance to acquire land and slaves. Had Auguste remained in Charleston, given his ­family’s wealth and connections, as well as his talent, he likely would have experienced material success along with the fellowship of French expatriates. According to f­amily lore, however, Auguste had a ­great dislike of the hot climate of South Carolina; he found prospects wanting in the recently established city of Philadelphia,

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which lacked a Huguenot community, and chose to ­settle instead in New York. Along with Boston, New York was a major destination of French Protestant refugees.8 His new and permanent home, although not destined to become a plantation slave society like South Carolina, incorporated enslaved Africans from its early de­cades as a Dutch colony. Enslaved p­ eople ­were a critical part of the ­labor force both during the Dutch and the early En­glish period, and the system of slavery grew more stringent in the years following the En­glish capture of New Netherland in 1664. By the time Auguste arrived in the 1680s, freedom through conversion to Chris­tian­ity and working for the Dutch West ­India Com­pany was but a memory, and the path to Black freedom had begun to narrow. The numbers of slaves and their percentage of the total population, meanwhile, ­were also on the rise—­from approximately eight hundred ­people of African descent in 1664, making up one-­tenth of the colonial population, to more than two thousand slaves in 1698, or approximately 12 ­percent of the population.9

Ascent, Assimilation, Enslavement Auguste, who changed his name to Augustus, correctly anticipated that New York was the kind of place where a well-­connected Huguenot merchant with an En­glish education might succeed. But he had certainly not picked a stable or ­simple society as a place to begin his ascent. From its earliest Dutch days, the colony exhibited a diversity that contemporaries could hardly fail to notice and that has caught the attention of historians ever since. Dutch authorities, some more grudgingly than o ­ thers, supervised a province containing Belgian Walloons, En­glish Puritans, Scandinavians, Germans, Sephardic Jews, as well as African slaves. New York in the 1680s roiled with religious and ethnic conflict that echoed the contests for authority that had sent Augustus and his fellow Huguenots into exile. James II, the newly installed king of ­England, was a Catholic determined to impose imperial order, though not his religious faith, over many of his North American colonies. His plan included creating a single Dominion of New E ­ ngland, which would place e­ very colony north of Pennsylvania u ­ nder a unified administrative structure. This reor­ga­ni­za­tion stoked resentment among colonists who ­were highly suspicious of the motives of the Catholic king and who resented the loss of autonomy that the Dominion entailed. When news filtered back from ­England of the so-­called Glorious Revolution, in which James’s ­daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange

D i s r u p t i o n s

15

crossed the En­glish Channel to reclaim the realm for Protestantism and parliamentary government, American colonists, including New Yorkers, wasted ­little time toppling the colonial officials whom James had set over them.10 The po­liti­cal crisis that ensued in New York revealed the deep ethnic fissures and religious passions that Augustus Jay would have to interpret and negotiate to succeed in his new home. A militia captain and merchant named Jacob Leisler, himself a militant German Calvinist immigrant, jumped headlong into the po­liti­cal vacuum. He saw himself as an avenger and guardian against the sort of anti-­Protestant atrocities perpetrated by the likes of Louis XIV on the Huguenots. He and his more po­liti­cally radical colleague Jacob Milbourne rallied poorer, more ordinary Dutch inhabitants to their banner, some of whom continued to harbor resentment at the increasing En­glish cultural dominance in the province. The anti-­elite tone of the Leisler movement alarmed the merchant class, including many merchants of Dutch ancestry. During Leisler’s Rebellion, Huguenots, like the Dutch, split along lines of class and wealth—­the poorer Huguenots identifying with Leisler’s anti-­Catholicism, the richer ones disturbed by the pop­u­lism that led to the violent harassment of New York City’s merchant elite. T ­ hese elites ­were well pleased when the new monarchs William and Mary rejected any affinity for the Leislerians; indeed, the king’s newly appointed governor saw to it that Leisler and Milbourne ­were hung for their transgressions, a far cry from the result that the impassioned Protestant leaders had ­imagined. Commercial, po­liti­cal, and social stability—­not a pan-­Atlantic Protestant religious campaign—­animated the En­ glish crown in the wake of James II’s failed regime.11 Augustus’s economic ambitions and his social affiliations in the coming years suggest that this victim of Catholic persecution was less interested in settling religious or cultural scores than in taking advantage of opportunities for commercial success and social mobility. In 1697, Augustus married Anna Marie Bayard, whose u ­ ncle Nicholas Bayard had been one of Leisler’s staunchest detractors and who bore the brunt of lower-­status Dutch residents’ resentment for Leisler’s ultimate undoing. Of French Protestant extraction, the Bayards had settled in the Netherlands in the sixteenth ­century before coming to New York. Anne Marie was a grandniece of the famed former Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant, who had owned many slaves. It was a match that brought Augustus wealth, status, and affiliation with some of the most impor­ tant families in the colony.12 Augustus, like other Huguenots, was also able to take advantage of the international Huguenot trading networks that the post–­Edict of Nantes diaspora facilitated even as he assimilated into En­glish New York. In the eigh­teenth ­century, the Jays would enjoy a particularly close trading relationship with

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Stephen Peloquin of Bristol, E ­ ngland, who had married Augustus’s s­ ister in ­England. Augustus’s marriage into the Anglicizing Dutch elite did not compromise such networks, but rather expanded them in an age when having cultural and familial ties made it much easier to maintain the trust and credit necessary for fruitful long-­distance commercial relationships.13 Yet, like many French Protestants in the Anglo-­American colonies, Augustus did not feel constrained by a loyalty to explic­itly Huguenot institutions. The Huguenot church, of which Augustus was a member, actually grew by 1695 to be the second largest in New York City, two years before his marriage to Anna Marie. Even so, their wedding took place in the Dutch church, a sign of his denominational flexibility; the ­couple baptized some of their ­children in the French and ­others in the Dutch church. In the 1720s, Augustus broke with the Huguenot church a­ fter a scandal involving its minister Louis Rou. Rou married a fourteen-­year-­old ­after his first wife passed away, a move that provoked attempts by lay leaders to remove him and provided the pretext for Jay to decamp to the Trinity Church. Established in 1697, Trinity served as the flagship of New York’s established Anglican Church and became one of Manhattan’s landmark structures. Augustus embraced his new religious affiliation, serving as a member of Trinity’s vestry from 1727–1746, further confirming his elite status and cultural anglicization.14 In the years before Augustus joined Trinity, the Anglican congregation had attempted to bring Africans into the congregation. Elias Neau operated a school from 1703 u ­ ntil his death in 1722 for the purpose of converting slaves to Chris­tian­ity ­under the auspices of the Anglican Church’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). Like Jay, Neau was a Huguenot refugee who came to Manhattan to pursue his ambitions as a merchant. He found his way into the Anglican Church a­ fter surviving the harrowing experience of being captured by French privateers, serving as an enslaved oarsman on a French galley ship, and then spending more than two years in a French prison. When Neau fi­nally returned to New York, his strong religious convictions led him to become an official representative of the SPG and to launch his school. Although Neau was hardly an abolitionist pioneer, his story indicates the potential and the limitations of liberalizing approaches to slavery among the geo­g raph­i­cally mobile, culturally malleable class of mercantile New York Huguenots like Jay. Both African slaves and Eu­ro­pean masters had reasons to be skeptical of the school. Slaves found that the binary cosmology of sin and salvation resonated poorly with the Akan spiritual worldview that many brought with them from West Africa. Masters feared the spread of notions of spiritual equality to their slaves and worried that converts to Chris­tian­ity might

D i s r u p t i o n s

17

claim a right to freedom. Neau, himself a slave owner, worked with the provincial legislature to pass a law affirming that baptism did not make slaves f­ ree. Yet Neau’s per­sis­tence in spreading the gospel to slaves showed some results. He reported instructing more than two hundred enslaved students during his two de­cades of teaching. No other New York church in ­these de­cades or for many years afterward took a similar interest in the spiritual lives of slaves. Although Jay’s name does not appear on the list of masters whose slaves attended the school or received baptism, his wife’s u ­ ncle Col. Bayard had a slave catechized by Neau. Tantalizing but inconclusive as to Augustus’s opinions about slave conversion is a December 1722 appeal by officers of Trinity Church for the SPG to dispatch a new catechist to replace the recently deceased Neau. The request drew attention to “a vast increase of ­Children & Indians & Negro servants who cannot without such assistance be so well instructed in the Princi­ples of Chris­ tian­ity.”15 The Jays’ new church was not indifferent to the spiritual identity of nonwhites while not questioning the institution of slavery itself. Neau’s mission notwithstanding, the priorities for white New Yorkers regarding slavery ­were profit, exploitation, and control. As in South Carolina, New York Huguenots embraced slaveholding. French Protestants in the rural Westchester County town of New Rochelle, founded by Huguenots, and ­those in New York City ­were more likely to hold slaves than ­were Dutch and En­ glish New Yorkers. In 1698, slaves comprised more than 18 ­percent of the population of New Rochelle, where almost one-­quarter of the white ­house­holds owned slaves. In New York City, half the Huguenot ­house­holds owned slaves. The disproportionate percentage of Huguenots who w ­ ere merchants might account for their high levels of participation in the ranks of slaveholders. Slaveholding may be seen as reflecting the widely held desire among Huguenots to join other New Yorkers in holding impor­tant levers of economic advancement and social status.16 The spectacular rise of sugar production in the West Indies during the early de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century gave the Manhattan port a significant boost, to the benefit of merchants such as Augustus Jay. New York businesses supplied the grains, meat, and naval stores that West Indians demanded and refined sugar. Merchants, including Augustus Jay, profited from the business generated by such exchanges; an estimated 50 ­percent of ships embarking and entering into Manhattan’s harbor in the early eigh­teenth ­century came or went to the West Indies, and o ­ thers carried goods between colonies that would eventually find their way to the sugar-­producing islands. Even a merchant primarily oriented ­toward Eu­ro­pean trade would gain from the increased wealth and the multiplication and broadening of opportunities that a lively West Indian trade generated for the city.17

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The slave trade itself also was a source of profit. Augustus served a merchant apprenticeship with Frederick Philipse, a prominent member of the ethnically Dutch, Anglicized elite and a member of the governor’s council who had butted heads with Jacob Leisler. Philipse owned slave ships that made nine African voyages between 1685 and 1700. In most instances, his vessels traveled all the way to Madagascar and the southeast coast of Africa and then delivered their ­human cargo to New York and elsewhere. Philipse boarded approximately twelve hundred slaves to the Amer­ic­ as during this period, of which one-­sixth may have died along the way.18 In one dramatic documented instance, Augustus Jay facilitated, or at least attempted to, Philipse’s enterprises off the East African coast, scheming to mix the ­legal business of slave trading with the illegal business of trading with pirates. Philipse enlisted Augustus Jay to help him sell some of the nonhuman East India trade goods that he had acquired from his pirate connections. Frederick Philipse’s son Adolph, aboard the New York Merchant, met Augustus, who was on board Philipse’s ship the Frederick, to make a nighttime transfer of cargo. Augustus then sailed to Hamburg, Germany, where the dubious cargo would have been sold, if not for the intervention of a British diplomat t­ here. Meanwhile approximately seventy slaves sailed legally to New York.19 This was the world in which Augustus Jay made his fortune, one built on networks of trust, trade, and even intrigue. What­ever the extent of his involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, the burgeoning trade with the West Indies presented Augustus with opportunities to import slaves from the Ca­rib­bean as part of his mercantile business. In 1717, a ship he owned with three o ­ thers brought four slaves into New York. Another ship, the Mary, which he co-­owned with his son-­in-­law Pierre Valette and two ­others, carried sixty-­four slaves from Jamaica in four voyages, two in 1725 and two in 1727. The last of ­these voyages alone brought thirty slaves. The ­human cargo’s arrival in spring and summer may have made the adjustment from the climate of the tropics to that of the mainland less severe, but yet another departure and sea-­borne exposure added to the suffering of the enslaved.20 Augustus’s trans-­shipment of Jamaican slaves met a demand for slave ­labor and a sustained eighteenth-­century quest by New York merchants for slave trade profits. In the six de­cades prior to the American Revolution, an estimated 151 slaving voyages connected New York to Africa, 60 of which likely imported slaves from Africa into New York, with ­others transporting slaves to the West Indies. Most of the voyages bringing Africans directly to New York occurred from the late 1740s forward. Commerce with the sugar islands of the West Indies was undeniably a huge economic boon, but only a tiny proportion, likely less than 2 ­percent, of New York shipping tonnage involved trade with Africa.

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Still, in large cargoes from Africa or small lots from the West Indies, this trade made a significant impact on the size and composition of the province’s slave population. Likely, more than 7,000 slaves entered New York between 1701 and 1774, perhaps 2,800 of whom came straight from Africa.21 ­Those who remained in New York City or w ­ ere born to enslaved parents ­there suffered from the port’s brutal working conditions and from minimal attention to their nutritional and health needs. The majority, who worked in the countryside, could anticipate a life of drudgery in the h ­ ouse and field u ­ nder the watchful eyes of their white masters.22 Like most slave regimes, New York’s was built on conflict and the sharpening of lines. Only ­people of African descent and, at least in theory, Indians born out of state could be enslaved. Indentured servants had time-­limited contracts and protection from abusive masters that slaves did not enjoy. Slaves could not engage in commerce or gather together in groups of more than three. They could be publicly whipped and in certain cases executed. Legislators ­limited manumissions and curtailed interactions between slaves and f­ ree Blacks.23 If t­ here was any illusion that slaves accepted the full raft of ­legal disabilities imposed on them by New York’s white authorities or their masters’ exploitive owner­ship, that illusion was dramatically shattered in April 1712. An estimated twenty-­four Manhattan slaves launched the first major slave insurrection in mainland En­glish North Amer­i­ca. ­Under the leadership of men recently imported from Africa’s Gold Coast, the slaves put an out­house to flames and then assaulted the whites who rushed to fight the fire, using guns and blades they had secretly accumulated. Two Huguenots ­were among the nine whites killed, including Augustus Grasset who was run through the neck with a knife. ­After subduing the rebels, some who escaped capture through suicide, authorities undertook a brutal judicial repression. A dragnet of arrests led to more than twenty executions, most by hanging, but also by burning at the stake of one slave, the starvation in chains of another, and even the breaking of a slave named Clause on the wheel. In the revolt’s aftermath, city and provincial authorities tightened already stringent laws and added further impediments to manumission. Many white New Yorkers blamed the Huguenot-­turned-­Anglican catechist Neau for stoking the flames of re­sis­tance and sought to limit his f­ uture enrollment by restricting the ability of slaves to move around the city at night, the only time they had to attend his school. Although teaching Chris­tian­ity to slaves retained enough support to keep the school open, no one in authority in New York raised the more basic question about ­whether p­ eople, converted or other­wise, should be slaves at all.24

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Bound and Unbound As Augustus and Anna Marie Jay’s c­ hildren came of age, the f­ amily continued to integrate into a provincial elite and an economic order dependent on slavery in myriad ways. Augustus’s second ­daughter Marie married Pierre Valette, whose ­brother was a wealthy Jamaican. Augustus’s third ­daughter François and his only son Peter married siblings in the Van Cortlandt f­ amily, prominent New Yorkers to whom they ­were already related through their ­mother. Jacobus Van Cortlandt, the f­ ather of spouses Frederick (Françoise) and Mary (Peter), traded for West Indian slaves, selling them in New York City and to nearby farmers. The Van Cortlandts in turn w ­ ere related to the Philipse f­ amily, one of the province’s wealthiest families, with extensive slaveholdings in New York, as well as the West Indies, and, as we have seen, for a time a vigorous presence in the Africa–­to–­New York slave trade.25 By the time Peter Jay married Mary Van Cortlandt in 1728, he was already active in his f­ ather’s international trading business, having traveled to E ­ ngland and elsewhere in Eu­rope to strengthen ties with the f­ amily’s transatlantic connections. He soon would also join his ­father in the Trinity vestry.26 Peter’s ledger from 1725 shows trading activities with Bristol, ­England; Jamaica; Surinam; and Barbados. Foodstuffs w ­ ere a key part of his business, as was bringing finished goods from ­England to the New York and New Jersey hinterland. The Indian trade in animal skins also figured in his exchanges. Peter Jay joined his ­father and brothers-­in-­law Pierre Valette and Frederick Van Cortlandt in at least one investment that brought slaves into New York. Between 1730 and 1733, their co-­owned vessel, the Dolphin, carried forty-­seven enslaved ­people northward from Jamaica, Barbados, Curaçao, and Antigua. Customs rec­ords show that the Dolphin imported two more slaves in 1740. As on Augustus’s sloop the Mary in the 1720s, the slaves trans-­shipped on the Dolphin ­were likely recent arrivals from Africa, enduring one more disorienting leg of their brutal journey. Thrown in with trade goods such as casks of rum and sugar, ­human cargo originally shipped to the Amer­i­cas from the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra, or West Central Africa ­were another means by which merchants like the Jays could elevate their profits by filling their brig with return goods from the West Indies.27 The trans-­shipping of slaves was not a passive investment. Indeed, Peter’s role in trafficking in ­children found its way into his ledger. An entry from the mid-1720s noted a payment for “15 Spanish Pistols & a Negro Boy from Jamaica.” The Spanish coins could presumably be used in another transaction, but he may have kept the boy for his own ­house­hold. Peter also appears to have facilitated the sale of “a Negro girl” to a Martin Hoffman in Esopus, a

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town up the Hudson River in Ulster County. If not central to their business, the mercantile economy that slavery and the slave trade made pos­si­ble was central to Peter’s and Augustus’s prosperity.28 Ser­vices provided by the enslaved ­were also essential features of life among the city’s mercantile elite. As the proportion of Black Manhattanites increased to 20 ­percent of the population during the first de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century and surged past two thousand in total, they formed a network of dockworkers, artisanal laborers, and domestic servants. In an age where something as ­simple as getting ­water for tea required a trip to the pump and some heavy lifting, and virtually ­every act of cooking and cleaning had to be done by hand, ­there was no end to the work that a master could command a slave to do. The Jays and Van Cortlandts ­were surely no dif­fer­ent in this regard from other white Manhattanites of means. Peter’s ledger rec­ords a payment due to his father-­in-­law Jacobus Van Cortlandt for “one year’s Lodging & boarding & Washing of himself, his white Servt: & three Negro slaves.”29 Slaveholders like the Jays, Philipses, Roo­se­velts, and DeLanceys, however, did not and could not exert unlimited control over their slaves. Mobility was a key aspect of their utility. Not only did slaves have to get to and from places of work but they also had to run errands; fetch wood, ­water, and foodstuffs for their masters; dispose of waste; and carry messages on their masters’ behalf. When ­there was less work to be done, in the eve­nings and on Sundays, slaves, ignoring laws to the contrary, gathered to socialize with one another and with other members of the lower class in this polyglot Atlantic port. Slaves caroused with alcohol to lift their spirits and divert their psychological and physical pain, but they also plotted or­ga­nized theft and fencing rings. African New Yorkers also maintained communal and religious rituals of their own, some around burial rites and o ­ thers involving the maintenance of or­ga­nized secret socie­ties, an adaptation of West African practices.30 The irrepressible ­human urge to defy authority made Manhattan’s slaves an incendiary and potentially revolutionary threat to the comfortable world that the Jays and their more prominent relatives had made for themselves. A ­ fter a series of fires broke out in March 1741, authorities uncovered what they believed to be a widespread conspiracy among the city’s slaves not only to burn down the city but also to seize control of it. In the most lurid version, the slaves planned to kill their male masters and take their former female masters for wives. Conditions in New York ­earlier in the winter of 1741 had stoked white fears of vulnerability to this sort of challenge from the margins of society. The colony’s elites ­were riven by po­liti­cal factions over how much authority the royal governor should exercise. The winter of 1740–41 had choked with ice the harbor and rivers on which the city relied for trade, setting every­one further on edge. Meanwhile,

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­ reat Britain and Spain had been at war since 1739, making New York a target of G the British Empire’s Catholic rival. Just two years before, South Carolina’s slaves, taking advantage of English–­Spanish tensions, launched a rebellion. The suspicious fires in March 1741 sparked an intensive investigation for the culprits.31 A special court was called to track down and punish the alleged plotters, and it quickly seized on four key leaders among the Black population: Caesar Varick, Prince Auboyneau, Quaco Roo­se­velt, and Cuffee Philipse. The court, led by city recorder Daniel Horsmanden, pieced together a conspiracy that would also ensnare white tavern keeper John Hughson and, ultimately, John Ury, supposedly a crypto-­Catholic priest with base sectarian motives, as white masterminds of the alleged plot. The ­trials produced terrifying results. By the time the investigation ended, New York’s authorities had executed thirty slaves and transported more than eighty out of the colony.32 Peter Jay’s slave Brash was one of t­ hose sent to the Portuguese-­held island of Madeira. The stories of Brash and of Augustus Jay’s slave Ben reveal how difficult it is to separate fact from judicially coerced fiction, while at the same time indicating that Manhattan’s urban milieu provided opportunities to defy the law and perhaps contemplate rebellion. On June 25, 1741, Brash informed a judge that, a year before, Ben had brought him to Hughson’s home, where Brash learned from the two of them of a plan “to rise against the town, to burn the ­houses and to kill the ­people.” Hughson, according to Brash’s testimony, got Ben and Brash to “swear that they would set their master’s ­houses on fire, and murder their masters and mistresses,” having them kiss a book that he produced for the purposes of this bloody oath. Ben recruited a slave named Jack to the plot and l­ater four ­others whom he named as well. Hughson wanted Ben and Brash to steal weapons from their masters, but the best Brash came up with was a knife from another master’s cook.33 Brash’s admission may have saved his life, which is one of the reasons to suspect its veracity. By the time he confessed, sixteen slaves already had been hung or burned at the stake for their alleged roles in the revolutionary conspiracy. Another reason to question Brash’s story is that Ben at the time of the investigation was no longer in New York, having been shipped off to Madeira before m ­ atters came to a head. Yet, at least two slaves who testified a­ fter Brash also fingered Ben as an instigator. Toby recalled a meeting at Hughson’s ­house near Christmastime, when Ben tricked him into kissing the book that pledged him “to fight the white p­ eople.” Ben, claimed Toby, also boasted that they had already collected arms for the strug­gle, asking the witness to “bring him a pistol to Mr. Jay’s garden.” Thousands of miles away, Ben could neither deny nor contradict any of t­ hese claims. Then again, it is not clear that a slave’s

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denial would be taken seriously. Certainly, Brash reached that conclusion. At first he pled not guilty before quickly changing his mind.34 A straightforward ac­cep­tance of Brash’s confession is not pos­si­ble. Horsmanden himself compiled the official rec­ord of the case, on which historians must draw, editing it to justify his actions. Some at the time and since have judged the entire conspiracy to be the figment of an overheated white imagination—­a proverbial witch hunt around which white elites could coalesce their power.35 Before dismissing the evidence against Brash, Ben, and dozens of o ­ thers, it is worth considering what the case tells us about the Manhattan world that the Jays and their slaves inhabited in the 1740s. Brash, Ben, and other slaves participated in or at least knew about an interracial lower-­class culture operating beyond the supervision of their masters. The first person to identify Brash as a conspirator was Margaret Kerry, a white prostitute who had a child by Caesar Varick, one of the alleged plot’s leaders. The illiterate Kerry named Brash as part of a group of about a dozen Blacks who gathered to drink at the home of white shoemaker John Romme, whose kitchen doubled as a dram shop. Resentments of class as well as race seemed to drive the plans. According to Kerry’s deposition, “They proposed, to burn the fort first, and afterwards the city; and then steal, rob and carry all the money and goods they could procure, and was to be carried to Romme’s and w ­ ere to be joined by the country negroes; and that they ­were to murder every­one that had money.” Romme’s wife Elizabeth, in denying she knew anything about a conspiracy, confirmed her home as the venue for interracial socializing. She admitted that some of the Blacks named by Kerry had been to her home, but o ­ thers including “Mr. Jay’s Brash” had never visited; yet, presented by the judges with some of the individual accused, “she distinguished them ­every one” and “called them by their names.” Hughson’s servant Mary Burton also reported Brash and Ben’s presence and involvement in her employer’s plot.36 The African Americans hauled before the court seemed familiar with one another; even if we discount the pressure to name names, no one denied the existence of the social networks by which slaves, mostly but not exclusively men, knew each other and for whom they worked. On June 1, Sandy named “Mr. Jay’s Brash” as part of a gathering of twenty conspirators pre­sent at a meeting in slave owner Gerardus Comfort’s h ­ ouse. On June 5, a slave named Sarah also listed “Mr. Jay’s Brash” as part of the core group of conspirators. Two other witnesses, by contrast, when asked about Brash’s presence at planning meetings, indicated that the slave was not t­ here, having already named several ­others who had participated in the gatherings. Blacks traveled in circles beyond their masters’ reach or supervision.37

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In Ben’s and Brash’s social world, resentment of slavery in general and of masters in par­tic­u­lar seems not only plausible but likely. Although not identified as the very top lieutenants of the plot, by some accounts Brash and Ben ­were among its leaders. But what­ever Ben or Brash specifically did or did not say, plan, or do, slaves gathered illegally and likely discussed throwing off their bondage. Even if some of the oath-­swearing threats w ­ ere just bragging and ritual expressions of hostility, the antagonism ­toward masters was real enough. If ­there was a plan afoot for Black liberation, slaves ­were neither following ­orders nor being used as pawns in a white game.38 Brash’s fate—­exile instead of execution—­spoke to the dilemma faced by the master class amid the panic. If ­there was some truth or at least the possibility of truth to a conspiracy by the enslaved to wreak havoc in Manhattan, white authorities would inevitably feel compelled to investigate further, signal their resolve, and mete out some punishment. But where to draw the line? The killing and banishments w ­ ere extensive and brutal. Still, if the judges had to order the killing or transportation of ­every pos­si­ble Black conspirator, they would have almost emptied the town of slaves. To the men and ­women who relied on slave l­abor, that result certainly would be unacceptable. Meanwhile, even the zealous Horsmanden, who believed in a vast, pernicious interracial conspiracy, understood the need for some restraint, if only to secure Black testimony that would produce additional indictments. The confessions of Brash and a few o ­ thers made them good witnesses; indeed, they had testified on the promise that they would be spared death. Thus, commented Horsmanden, “Their escape could not be avoided, though their crimes merited a more severe fate” (see Figure 1).39 Peter Jay may have preferred the comparative leniency of transporting Brash out of New York as a punishment for his slave. The rec­ord hints that Jay may have been skeptical of mass slave disloyalty as a real source of danger. Four weeks prior to Brash’s confession, Horsmanden noted that Jay and a group of other masters had been asked to testify at their slave’s request. Horsmanden declined to include the substance of Jay’s testimony, dismissing it as supplying “nothing more material”—­presumably meaning that what Jay said did not help build a case for conspiracy. A month ­after Brash’s confession, ­Peter Jay was impaneled as a ­g rand juror in the proceeding, around the same time that the court pivoted ­toward the prosecution of the alleged Roman Catholic mastermind of the plot, the unfortunate John Ury.40 Even if the court ultimately turned to a religious rather than a racial ­enemy, the ­trials, executions, and deportations of 1741 represented a brief but fateful war by authorities against the city’s enslaved population. If ­there was any doubt that whites could marshal the strength to enforce their system of brutal in­

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Figure 1.  Table in Daniel Horsmanden, The New-­York Conspiracy, or a History of the Negro Plot, with the Journal of the Proceedings against the Conspirators at New-­York in the years 1741–2: Together with Several In­ter­est­ing ­Tables . . . (New York, 1810), originally published in 1744 ­under a dif­fer­ent title. Note the presence of the names Brash and Peter Jay in this ­table. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

equality and routine exploitation, the t­ rials that Horsmanden orchestrated made that point. Although the iron fist of authority did not end all thoughts of re­sis­tance by New York slaves, the message that the white elites ­were prepared to use their full power and authority against the slave community surely was received loud and clear. If Jay ­family slaves Ben and Brash ­were re­united in Madeira, they might even have discussed that fact.

Slave Country The ice, fire, and blood of 1741 did not deter the thirty-­seven-­year-­old merchant Peter Jay from expanding his business operations in Manhattan. That autumn, he contracted to have a new two-­story store­house of white oak built for him t­ here.41 At least for the moment, hope trumped fear. The events of 1741 also did not produce among whites a rethinking of slavery as ­either a system fundamentally too dangerous to maintain or one too morally compromised to defend. Although the number of slave ships with the primary disembarkation point of New York dipped in the 1740s and New York City’s slave population remained static for a time, slaveholding and slave trading

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did not cease. In the 1750s, slave importations shot up dramatically, making that de­cade the colony’s most active one for slave trading in the flourishing port.42 In the mid-1740s, however, Peter Jay reconsidered his commitment to city life and to mercantile affairs. Through his wife Mary and his father-­in-­law Jacobus Van Cortlandt, Peter had begun acquiring land in Westchester County, the sprawling county to the north of Manhattan and situated between the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. Meanwhile, f­ amily circumstances and a discomfort with the disruptions to trade caused by ongoing imperial warfare prompted Peter to move to a 400-­acre farm on the Long Island Sound in Rye, New York. That same year, 1745, Mary Van Cortlandt Jay was about to give birth to their sixth child, not counting two who died in their first year. Their brood was a troubled one. Their first ­daughter Eve was emotionally unstable; their first son Augustus had a severe learning disability; their third son Peter and their second ­daughter Anna Maricka permanently lost their sight ­after exposure to a 1739 smallpox epidemic. For a ­family of means like the Jays, ­these prob­lems seemed more manageable in a rural than an urban setting.43 One aspect of life that Peter and Mary Jay would not leave b­ ehind by moving to the country was slavery. Richard Morris transported slaves up to Westchester from the West Indies. Frederick Philipse purportedly landed some of his Madagascar slaves directly in Rye during the late seventeenth c­ entury, establishing the county as home to some of colonial New York’s largest individual slaveholders. At the beginning of the eigh­teenth c­ entury the number of slaves in the county hovered in the lower hundreds, enough to make up 10 ­percent or more of Westchester’s total population. Censuses taken in the quarter-­century a­ fter the Jays’ arrival show the numbers of slaves growing substantially, surpassing 1,000 for the first time in the 1749 count and peaking at 3,430 in 1771, or more than 15 ­percent of the county’s population.44 Slavery in Rye exhibited the institution’s general brutality. The town contained a l­ ittle stone structure where “refractory slaves” w ­ ere confined. In 1739, the town appointed a whipper, who did his work near the Anglican church where the Jays would have worshipped.45 Chief among Rye’s slaveholders was Peter Jay. Of the sixty-­three slaveholding families listed in 1755, most owned one or two slaves older than fourteen years of age. According to census taker James Horton, Jay owned three males and five females. The Jays and their neighbors likely owned enslaved ­children who went uncounted.46 Like their marriages and their landholdings, the enslaved p­ eople whom Peter owned marked the Jay ­family’s social ascendancy since Augustus’s arrival in the late seventeenth ­century. In 1751, Augustus Jay died at the advanced age of 86. In a single lifetime, the ­family had gone from French mercantile prosperity, to persecution-­induced

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flight, to entrepreneurship and assimilation in an urban outpost of a growing British Empire, to a wealthy rural slaveholding lifestyle. The enslaved in their midst had endured far more jarring journeys, without the prosperous ending. Brash and Ben perhaps finished their lives in Madeira, an island far closer to the land of their African origins than Manhattan—­but nowhere close to enjoying the freedom they may have i­magined or realizing the revenge they perhaps craved. Like the Jays, Brash and Ben’s lives interwove themes of persecution and displacement. As for Augustus’s young grand­son John Jay, the eighth child of Peter and Mary, he would soon enough go back to Manhattan to develop his talents and vocation—­and ­there witness the beginnings of a rebellion that would shake the world far more than the crushing repression of 1741. In time, John would contribute mightily to that rebellion, fusing the Jay name to a new nation and its revolutionary ideals. But it was in the Westchester countryside that the ­f uture statesman would first learn the ways of masters and slaves, of privilege and privation, and of freedom and bondage.

C h a p te r 2

Rising Stars

“[W]ill you ever Madam be able to reconcile yourself to the mortifying Reflection of being the M ­ other of Slaves?” John Jay pressed this urgent question to his cousin Susanna Philipse Robinson in March 1777. The War for In­de­pen­dence had taken on intensely personal dimensions for Jay, and he turned to the language of slavery to make his point. As a member of New York’s Committee for Detecting Conspiracies, he had just interviewed Susanna’s husband Beverly Robinson, whose likely defection to the Tories alarmed, even pained, the patriot leader. Jay sought to impress on Mrs. Robinson the dire consequences of seeking protection “­under the restless wings” of the British Army. Defeat of the patriot cause at the hands of the British would ensure American enslavement: “For who are Slaves but ­those, who in all Cases without Exception are bound to obey the uncontrollable Mandates of a Man. . . . ​Slaves Madam! can have no Property. They toil not for themselves, but live mere Pensioners on the Bounty of their Masters.”1 Slavery constrained lives, establishing bound­aries of authority and material well-­ being. It was not a status or a condition that anyone would reasonably choose for oneself, one’s ­children, or one’s country. In a moment of acute revolutionary crisis, Jay invoked the image of slavery—­a familiar, concrete social real­ity, as well as a philosophical concept—to stave off personal and po­liti­cal disaster. As he ascended the ranks of patriotic leadership, he began to consider w ­ hether he and his contemporaries should take 28

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mea­sures against slavery. At the same time, ­actual slaves, including some owned by his ­father, greeted the challenge as an opportunity and did exactly what Jay urged his cousin not to do—­seek refuge b­ ehind British lines. Like other patriots, the ambitious New Yorker understood the language of bondage and freedom as far more than a mere rhetorical abstraction. Yet making the leap from white po­liti­cal freedom to Black emancipation came far more quickly to ­others than to Jay, who observed and sometimes speculated but did not take initiative on behalf of the enslaved. Questions abound regarding Jay and o ­ thers of the Revolutionary generation who began to ponder the enslavement of the Black men, w ­ omen, and ­children in their midst. What would cause a person who grew up in a slaveholding ­house­hold and in a society where slavery was a social norm even imagine a ­future in which the enslavement of African Americans ceased? Conversely, what constraints did Jay’s upbringing and temperament place on his willingness to act against slavery? The fight for national in­de­pen­dence emerged as his overriding priority. And yet Jay did begin to draw connections between revolutionary po­liti­ cal ideas and emancipation, even as some of his white contemporaries took far bolder stances and opportunities for Blacks to seize their own freedom emerged.2 In 1780, Jay remained a long way from resolving the escalating tension between renouncing po­liti­cal slavery and the practice of slaveholding. But without the Revolutionary War, he may never have found the language to contemplate, let alone to articulate, an alternative to the slaveholding world in which he ­rose to prominence.

Striving John Jay was raised as a master, not as a servant. He did not take ­orders from ­others if he felt his obedience was not due. Just before his graduation, King’s College suspended John for refusing to reveal the culprits in a small bit of student vandalism. The eighteen-­year-­old Jay contended that t­ here was nothing in the college’s statutes, which e­ very student had formally promised to follow, that mandated that he divulge who destroyed a t­ able belonging to the college. Before commencement, President Myles Cooper restored Jay to good standing, and he received his degree.3 This haughty bit of bravado notwithstanding, John had always taken his education seriously; his ­father described the seven-­year-­old John as a boy with “a very grave disposition.” John also had far more potential for success than most of his siblings. Of his five living older ­brothers and ­sisters, only James, thirteen years John’s se­nior, did not suffer disabilities inhibiting advancement

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in the wider world. James studied medicine in Scotland and, in 1763, was knighted by King George III in recognition of his prowess as a fundraiser for King’s College, John’s f­ uture alma mater. Peter began equipping his John with a worldly perspective that connected him to his French heritage, thereby providing him fluency in more than one culture, by sending him to board at the school of Pierre Stouppe in New Rochelle, New York, a community located a few miles south of Rye. New Rochelle had been established in the late seventeenth ­century by Huguenots and still retained its French cultural flavor in the 1750s.4 Spending time with Rev. Stouppe in New Rochelle confirmed for John that it was not only in his parents’ comfortable home that enslaved ­people formed an impor­tant part of the social fabric. The proportion of slaves in New Rochelle’s population—18.1 ­percent in 1712 and 21.8 ­percent in 1771—­was higher than that in Westchester County as a ­whole. One colonial estimate placed the enslaved in ­every other ­house­hold in New Rochelle. Jay’s teacher, Pierre Stouppe, integrated his religious commitments into this slaveholding world. He was a spiritual heir to Elias Neau (see chapter 1). Born in Switzerland, he migrated from French Protestantism to Anglicanism. As a missionary for the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in rural New York, Stouppe took seriously his responsibility to convert and baptize slaves, enjoying at least modest success. T ­ hese actions, as long ago clarified in the colony’s laws, carried absolutely no implication of manumission, however.5 When John Jay subsequently attended the tiny but well-­endowed King’s College, he experienced the seamless integration of slavery into elite life in colonial New York City. The college welcomed its first students in 1754, and merchants invested in the slave trade and in commerce with the West Indies dominated the school’s board and provided much of its funding. Its first president, Samuel Johnson, who was still in charge during Jay’s first years at King’s, had no scruples about buying and selling enslaved servants. The many slaveowners on the governing board would have found Johnson’s practice unexceptional. Professor Robert Harpur expressed the business—­and slave-­trading—­ethos of the college when he devised a math prob­lem asking how three traders with dif­fer­ent levels of investment should divide a £1,010 profit from an African trading venture.6 During his years as a college student and then as a ­legal clerk in Manhattan, John remained connected to the rural Rye, New York, world of his ­father, his siblings, and the ­family slaves. ­These slaves helped Peter Jay manage the property and assist his ailing wife Mary Van Cortlandt Jay and their disabled adult ­children. In 1764, Peter enlisted John in obtaining l­egal forms for the

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transfer, presumably for the purposes of hiring out, of a slave named Mary to a Mrs. Paine. ­Because Mary had not yet contracted smallpox, Peter wished to have her inoculated at his expense.7 Peter Jay described the responsibilities of slave owner­ship as more of a burden than a benefit. The alleged burden of overseeing the health of his slaves, however, did not prompt Peter to contemplate slavery’s morality or to search for a social or economic alternative. In March 1765, the weary ­father described himself to his nineteen-­year-­old son John as almost overwhelmed by months of his slaves’ ill health. He shared with John the prognosis of six slaves by name: “our Hannah” was approaching death; despite a doctor’s care, Anthony and “­little Plat” suffered from per­sis­tent fevers; Susan and “big Mary” ­were ill, and London had only recently showed signs of recovery. Peter tended to “this distressed condition of my ­family” but chafed ­under the responsibility. Being cooped up with ailing slaves all winter had caused “­g reat fatigue of Body and perplexity [of] Mind.” ­After he unburdened himself of his complaints, Peter then expressed pious resignation to his lot: “We must submit to the W ­ ill of Providence, and hope for more comfortable days hereafter.”8 In Peter’s accounting, fate—­not class or racial privilege—­governed ­these relationships. In Manhattan, John fortified new social connections. In Benjamin Kissam’s ­legal office where John clerked, he made the acquaintance of Lindley Murray, a Quaker and son of a wealthy New York City merchant. Many years ­later, Lindley’s younger b­ rother John Murray Jr. became perhaps the most dedicated member of the New-­York Manumission Society; at this early date, however, New York’s Quakers had yet to catch up to the antislavery activities of their brethren in Pennsylvania.9 Of more immediate consequence to Jay’s social aspirations was his warm friendship with Robert R. Livingston Jr., which began in college and connected him to the highest reaches of New York society and politics. Livingston hailed from the “pastoral aristocracy”—­New York’s po­liti­ cally contentious Hudson River Valley landlord class. Like their wealthy New York peers, members of the Livingston ­family invested profitably in slave-­ trading voyages that brought hundreds of slaves to the Amer­i­cas. Slave owner­ship also helped the Livingstons live graciously. Robert Livingston’s twentieth-­century biographer vividly described life on their estates: “Their coachman and footmen, domestics and laborers ­were slaves or indentured servants; their t­ables groaned, but chiefly with homegrown provisions; if their confectionaries ­were famously elegant, it was b­ ecause sugar was a staple commodity of their exchanges with the West Indies.” Jay’s genuine affection for Livingston revealed a certain awe for a friend whose aristocratic background far surpassed even Jay’s privileged experience.

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The two young men formed a law partnership in 1768. Although this arrangement dissolved a­ fter three years, they remained close as each man ascended the ranks of New York and national politics.10 Tensions between crown and colonists over taxation and royal authority waxed and waned during the 1760s and early 1770s, but Jay did not directly join the fray. The Stamp Act Crisis of 1765, rather than drawing the young law clerk into protest politics, merely provided a respite from work while l­ egal proceedings ground to a halt. A ­ fter Jay went into l­ egal practice himself, he did work for both f­ uture patriots and for ­f uture loyalists. As an unmarried ­lawyer in New York City during this period, he expanded his social networks by participating in debating and dance socie­ties.11 Despite his po­liti­cal caution, John sometimes defended popu­lar interests from royal authority, while predicating his view of government on assumptions that ordinary ­people should put their trusts in well-­placed and well-­educated elites like himself. He advocated for settlers in southeastern Albany County, who feared that the land they had assumed would be granted to them might be distributed instead by crown officials to outsiders. In a March 1773 letter to the Earl of Dartmouth, then Britain’s secretary of state for colonial affairs, Jay avowed, “Princi­ples of Humanity” had prompted him to take up the ­people’s cause. He declared, “It gives me Pain my Lord! to observe that the prevailing mono­poly of Lands in this Colony has become a Grievance to the lower Class of ­People in it; and confines the Bounty of our gracious Sovereign to mercenary Land-­Jobbers, and Gentlemen who have already shared very largely in the royal Munificence.” Shortly thereafter, Jay inserted himself into the l­egal aftermath of disputed elections in Westchester County, attempting to thwart the claim of the crown’s representative that ineligible voters had participated. Thus, Jay did not solely advocate for members of his own landholding class and made distinctions between royal authority and the commonweal.12 Jay soon consolidated his social status and immeasurably enhanced his personal happiness when his courtship of eighteen-­year-­old Sarah Van Brugh Livingston culminated in marriage on April 28, 1774. Sarah’s f­ ather, William Livingston, was born into the Upper Manor branch of the Livingston f­ amily and was first cousin once removed of John’s close friend Robert R. Livingston Jr. Sarah possessed unmistakable vivaciousness, and their wedding secured a warm and loving bond. In their second year of marriage, John wrote Sarah, “I ­shall never hesitate more in sharing your Anx­i­eties, than in partaking of your Pleasures.” John and Sarah remained well matched and deeply committed to one another for the rest of their lives together.13 The newly married Jay also gained direct familial ties to the moderate Whigs. This faction engaged in a long-­standing po­liti­cal rivalry with other

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members of the New York elite who supported the power of the colony’s royal governors. During the imperial crisis the Whigs launched more fundamental attacks against the way Parliament and the crown exercised authority in the colonies. Jay’s new father-­in-­law, formerly a New York City l­ awyer, had played a role, though a relatively moderate one, in objecting to the Stamp Act in 1765. Having accumulated property in northern New Jersey for years, in 1770 William moved his f­amily ­there. In 1774, Livingston represented New Jersey at the First Continental Congress. John Jay and Sarah Livingston’s marriage came at a time when imperial relations had begun to deteriorate rapidly. The Tea Act provoked a decisive response not only in Boston but also in New York City. Boston caught the brunt of the empire’s anger through the Coercive Acts that shut down its harbor and upended the Mas­sa­chu­setts Colony’s long-­established institutions of self-­ government. Manhattanites also took to the streets in protest, menaced the captains of the tea ships, and ultimately emptied unwelcome tea in the harbor. At a public meeting, Jay was elected to a fifty-­one-­man committee, almost entirely made up of moderates, that coordinated New York’s response to the deepening po­liti­cal crisis. Several months l­ater, New York dispatched Jay to Philadelphia to attend the Continental Congress, joining his father-­in-­law.14 Marriage into the Livingston ­family not only connected Jay to Whig politics but also deepened his connections to the slaveholding elite. William Livingston named his New Jersey home “Liberty Hall” to honor the cause of colonial re­sis­tance to British authority, but, like John’s ­father Peter, Sarah’s ­father owned slaves. William’s ­father and ­brother, both named Philip, had participated substantially in the slave trade. Slaveholding was also an intimate part of William’s personal experience: enslaved p­ eople labored at Liberty Hall. As Sarah prepared herself for her wedding ceremony, the slave Abigail, also known as Abbe, may have attended to her.15

Liberty versus Slavery John Jay came of age at a time when imperial rule and the laws governing slavery came ­under unpre­ce­dented scrutiny. From the early 1760s, when colonial protest against new British policies on taxation and colonial governance began, pamphleteers gravitated ­toward the meta­phor of enslavement as a power­ful means to convey their grievances. In ­doing so, they tapped into a deeper vein of En­glish po­liti­cal thought that was deeply suspicious of government power, particularly power lodged in the hands of unchecked royal authority. This thinking prized the concept of En­glish liberty, predicated on control over one’s person

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and property. Enslavement, the illegitimate trammeling of the rights of freemen, was, in theory, the inevitable outcome of a po­liti­cal order in which the liberty of En­glish subjects no longer commanded the re­spect of rulers.16 On both sides of the Atlantic, the imperial crisis stimulated an increase in pointed criticisms of slavery itself. Vari­ous colonial assemblies, including New York’s, attempted to ban further slave imports, only to be thwarted by royal nullification. British officials wished to keep a profitable enterprise ­going and not cede the right to regulate colonial commerce. Conversely, British critics of patriot re­sis­tance mocked Americans for denouncing their po­liti­cal enslavement while practicing the real ­thing.17 A nascent transatlantic movement against slavery made headway during ­these turbulent years. The critique of slavery and the slave trade pioneered by Quakers had begun to find an audience beyond the bound­aries of this small but influential sect. The En­glish Countess Huntingdon became the sponsor of the poet Phillis Wheatley, the precocious Boston slave brought to Amer­i­ca as a girl on a slave ship. Her published work stood out as a rebuke of the racial assumptions of African inferiority. Slaves in Boston petitioned authorities for their freedom by making explicit appeal to the logic of revolutionary politics, whereas in Jay’s New York, rumors of violent slave rebellions abounded. The antislavery writings of the tireless Quaker pamphleteer and Philadelphia educator Anthony Benezet began to attract attention. Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush and the En­glish immigrant turned patriotic propagandist Thomas Paine published their own pointed critiques of slavery.18 Perhaps the clearest signal of slavery’s newly insecure place in the disturbed Anglo-­American w ­ aters came in 1772 when Chief Justice Lord Mansfield issued his famous Somerset decision in London. The case demonstrated how Black re­sis­tance, white activism, and the logic of natu­ral rights could combine to threaten the foundations of the institution. British civil servant and antislavery pioneer Granville Sharp had taken up the cause of James Somerset, a ­Virginia slave who was brought to E ­ ngland by his master Charles Stewart, a customs official in North Amer­i­ca. Somerset ran away, prompting Stewart to have his slave seized, bound in chains, and placed on a ship heading for Jamaica. A request on Somerset’s behalf for a writ of habeas corpus to establish on what grounds he was being held touched off a l­egal b­ attle before Lord Mansfield. In a holding, in which the chief justice referred to slavery as “odious,” Somerset won a victory that had profound reverberations. Mansfield ruled that his master lacked the right to seize his slave and that Somerset must be “discharged.” According to Mansfield, absent positive, which is to say written, law authorizing slavery, natu­ral law prevailed; thus, the prerogatives of slave ­owners ­under

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colonial slave laws did not apply in ­England. Many took an expansive view of the chief justice’s carefully tailored holding, insisting that slavery itself had been abolished in E ­ ngland and ­those held as slaves ­were now ­free.19 The case received immediate and widespread attention in the colonies. The default application of natu­ral law to their slaves set an ominous pre­ce­dent for slaveholders and was a beacon of hope for Blacks and for slavery’s growing number of white critics. Although positive law established slavery in ­every American province, slaveholders no longer could assume they had the full support of the m ­ other country. If En­glish common law banned slavery, might ­those same unwritten princi­ples apply across the Atlantic where colonists had made much of their inherent rights as En­glishmen? Even if such a conclusion ­were farfetched, property rights in men no longer existed as an inherent right and now stood protected only by mutable statutory law. The Somerset ruling also raised the challenge of how, in the midst of growing po­liti­cal disorder, slaveholders would maintain control of their slaves. In ­Virginia, some slaves learning of the decision attempted to run away in hopes of sailing to E ­ ngland and freedom. Slaves in Mas­sa­chu­setts sued for wages and freedom; ­others petitioned the provincial legislature. Although some writers throughout the colonies attacked the decision in print, provincial legislatures in Rhode Island and New Jersey took up antislavery mea­sures. That the re­sis­ tance of an American-­born slave and the ruling of a conservative pillar of ­England’s establishment could threaten Amer­i­ca’s racial order ­were tokens of disordered times.20 At the same time that enslavement was entering a period of heightened scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic, the conflict between colonies and empire cascaded past words, protest, and coercive legislation into armed conflict. In late 1775, Peter Jay, now more than seventy years old, shared a lament with his po­liti­cally influential thirty-­year-­old son John: “It gives me pain that t­here is no prospect yet of an accommodation with the ­Mother Country. God grant that a happy reconciliation may soon take place upon Equitable terms, instead of a long bloody strug­gle we are threatened with.” Peter then conveyed to “Johnny,” who was not yet a parent himself, that the happiness of real families—­not just meta­phorical ones—­was at risk: “I once expected to pass the remainder of my life in the injoyment of happy days with my ­Family, which to my inexpressible grief I’ve now no prospect of.”21 Peter Jay perhaps sensed that the divided opinions of his neighbors and the strategic location of Westchester County would make a prolonged war extremely disruptive to his entire h ­ ouse­hold, Black and white. He sensed as well that the po­liti­cal duties of his beloved son John would leave him l­ittle time to lend support to a beleaguered ­house­hold.

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From Reluctance to Revolution John Jay took a deliberative path ­toward revolution between 1774 and 1776. He possessed rhetorical gifts well suited to explaining the high po­liti­cal stakes but proceeded cautiously. As news of Parliament’s 1774 Coercive Acts punishing Boston for its insolent and provocative Tea Party arrived in New York, Jay felt conflicted. In a letter written that May to John Vardill, an Anglican New Yorker living in ­England, Jay reported from “a Town filled with Politics” that his “Mind” was “crouded with many indigested Ideas.” He actively participated in efforts to formulate a New York and a continental response to British retaliation against Boston, one that entertained the possibility of a new colonial non-­importation initiative without committing to such a disruptive mea­sure. Meanwhile, he wanted his friend Vardill to help him obtain a royal appointment as a cir­cuit judge in the provincial countryside. He suggested that British rule would be seen in a more favorable light if men with ­actual ­legal training w ­ ere to replace the ill-­informed, insufficiently dignified, and inconsistent judges currently “taken from among the Farmers.” Several months ­later, having been dispatched to Philadelphia as part of New York’s Continental Congress del­e­ga­tion, Jay exclaimed to Vardill, “God knows how the Contest ­will end. I sincerely wish it may terminate in a lasting Union with ­Great Britain.” Jay did not yet embrace in­de­pen­ dence in t­hese heady times. Even so, in October, Jay joined his fellow delegates to the Continental Congress in supporting the Continental Association that initiated a new phase of economic retaliation against ­Great Britain.22 His preference for reconciliation notwithstanding, Jay turned to slavery meta­phors in giving power­ful voice to what he regarded as the profound flaws in the current arrangements between the colonies and the ­mother country. In his October 1774 “Address to the P ­ eople of ­Great Britain” issued on behalf of the Continental Congress, Jay stated the prob­lem in stark terms: “when a ­Nation . . . ​descends to the ungrateful task of forging chains for her Friends and ­Children, and instead of giving support to Freedom, turns advocate for Slavery and Oppression,” its moral health comes into question. At the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, British tax policy crossed a line from external commercial regulation to direct and deleterious intervention in the economy of the colonies tantamount to a “system of slavery.” In the wake of the Boston Tea Party, rather than prosecute criminal actions through normal channels, the British attempted to prostrate the ­people of Boston ­until they would “consent to become slaves, by confessing the omnipotence of Parliament.” Rehearsing the litany of egregious acts—­the repeated compromising of American “property,” the suspension of jury ­trials, the invalidation of colonial self-­government, the tolerance

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and even expansion of Catholicism in Canada—­Jay accused the British government of “reduc[ing] us to a state of perfect humiliation and slavery.” The point that Jay’s address sought to impress on a British audience was that Amer­i­ca’s enslavement stood as a precursor to the enslavement of En­ glish and Irish subjects as well. He appealed over the heads of the unconstitutional usurpers, seeking to make common cause with the ­people of Britain. He hoped that they might bring their leaders back to their senses.23 About six months l­ater, the shooting war having begun between the British and New ­England patriots in April 1775, Jay authored a letter to Canada on behalf of the Continental Congress. Setting aside his anti-­Catholicism for the moment, he vividly and provocatively deployed the meta­phor of enslavement in an attempt to expand the colonial alliance northward: “By the introduction of your pre­sent form of government, or rather pre­sent form of tyranny, you and your wives and your ­children are made slaves. You have nothing that you can call your own, and all the fruits of your l­abour and industry may be taken from you, whenever” British authorities so chose. Slavery did not merely substitute rhetorically as a term for lopsided constitutional and l­ egal arrangements. Slaveholders specifically claimed slave property as their own and denied slaves the product of their hard work: Jay, as much as any southern patriot, knew this fact from experience. The British, this pre­sen­ta­tion implied, treated Americans the same way that Americans treated their negroes. The racist assumption then was that treating white colonists in this way was unacceptable, even though such tyranny was an everyday occurrence on colonial farms and in colonial h ­ ouse­holds. The slavery meta­phor also helped Jay establish that the contest between Britain and its colonies had stark implications for the f­ uture. He encouraged Canadians to follow the example set to their south, where “we . . . ​are determined to live ­free, or not at all; and are resolved, that posterity ­shall never reproach us with having brought slaves in to the world.” Of course, American slaveholders, including John’s ­father and grand­father, had already brought slaves into the world. Such bold projections about the f­ uture threatened to elide the past. Even so, Jay’s language also suggested something implicit to all revolutionary moments—­that of a new beginning where the world could be remade guided by princi­ple.24 Jay internalized the po­liti­cal tyranny-­as-­slavery trope. Writing from Philadelphia in March 1776, Jay rebuked his New York patriot colleague Alexander McDougall over the reported fact that New Yorkers had permitted patriot General Charles Lee to demand loyalty oaths from some New Yorkers. Of this military overreach of authority, Jay sternly commented, “To impose a Test is

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a sovereign Act of Legislation—­and when the army become our Legislators, the ­People that Moment become Slaves.”25 The meta­phor of enslavement retained for Jay much of its vivid descriptive force in the wake of in­de­pen­dence. The military fortunes of the new nation seemed to collapse in the second half of 1776, with the British occupying Manhattan, Long Island, and New Jersey. Working at a safe distance up the Hudson River Valley, Jay took up his pen in December 1776 on behalf of New York’s provisional patriotic government to rally not only New Yorkers but also patriotic Americans more broadly. Jay combined a biblical understanding of history with concrete reasons for New Yorkers and other Americans should remain steadfast in difficult times. He described the stakes in the very first sentence: “the freedom and happiness, or the slavery and misery, of the pre­sent and f­ uture generations.” The address repeatedly returned to this stark choice, claiming that the country fought “determined rather to die ­free, than live [as] slaves and entail bondage on our ­children” and noting that British terms of reconciliation came with “absolute unconditional obedience and servile submission.” British authority, in an appeal peppered with Old Testament references to Egyptian bondage and God’s punishment as well as protection of the ancient Jews, reeked with “impiety.” Jay asked w ­ hether “any history sacred or prophane, rec­ord[s] any t­ hing more impious, more horrible, more execrably wicked, tyrannical or dev­ilish” than Britain’s violent response to American re­sis­tance? Such be­hav­ior raised a searing question for ­those who made common cause with the crown: “Why are ­those pusillanimous, deluded, servile wretches among you, who, for pre­sent ease or impious bribes would sell their liberty, their ­children, and their souls” treated with such contempt and abuse by their alleged protectors? ­Those who “consent to be slaves” would receive no dispensation from a Britain lacking all regard for religion.26 In making his patriotic appeal against po­liti­cal slavery, Jay articulated a troubling yet revealing account of why, in a world governed by a just God, slavery existed at all. God doled out freedom to the “virtuous” and slavery as punishment for ­those who fell away. The primary purpose of the address was to stiffen sagging re­sis­tance, to offer patriots the incentive to fight on: “If we turn from our sins, he ­will turn from his anger,” Jay, writing on behalf of the Provincial Convention that had taken up the role of governing the state, reassured his readers. They must choose not to follow the ancient Israelites into the Egyptian bondage of permanent British rule. But such analogies raised knotty questions about birth and inheritance—­and ­whether slavery fundamentally transformed ­people. If t­hose who did ally with the British “deserve to be slaves, and are fit only for beasts of burden to the rest of mankind,” then slavery itself was not inherently wrong. Moreover, such choices had fearful consequences, b­ ecause sub-

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mission to the British would in effect “­people” the land “with a race of animals, who from their form must be classed among h ­ uman species, but possess none of t­ hose qualities which render man more respectable than the brutes.” Once so transformed, “you and your ­children ­after you ­shall be slaves for ever.”27 Although writing to and about white, European-­descended Americans, Jay presented an image of enslavement—­humans treated as brutes and receiving no more re­spect than brutes—­that may have appeared to his readers to resemble the African American enslavement that white Americans practiced. If so, what crime had their African ancestors committed to render their bondage permanent and inheritable? A set of racist assumptions shadowed Jay’s remarks. Jay, however, sought to castigate the concept of slavery, not defend it, in this December 1776 address. Shifting from racial to religious imagery t­ oward the end of this patriotic address, Jay revealed God’s plan for a continent ­free of slavery. He declared “that divine Providence ­will not permit this western world to be involved in the horrors of slavery.” Some Americans, he recognized, would “go into captivity” with the British. But God’s plan was not to “suffer Slavery” in the newly in­de­pen­dent land, ­because bondage would circumvent the f­ uture spread of the gospels across the continent.28 ­These ­were startling claims that transcended politics, even if he was primarily thinking in terms of po­liti­cal enslavement. The “horrors of slavery” ­after all had ­shaped much of the Western Hemi­sphere’s colonial history. And yet, at least rhetorically, Jay asserted that to follow the path of po­liti­cal in­de­pen­dence was thus to banish enslavement from the new country in accordance with God’s ­will, even though everywhere he had ever lived—­from Rye, to New Rochelle, to New York City—­actual slaves had been a significant, even defining, presence. Enslavement imagery helped him sail with, rather than against, the revolutionary wind. At the same time, he may have accepted the meta­phor b­ ecause the abstraction of po­liti­cal slavery matched his own knowledge and observation of slavery as a real-­life institution, which brought a harder edge to his expressions.29 What such talk had not done was prompt him to address the ­f uture of Black bondage in the newly in­de­pen­dent United States. The writing of New York’s constitution tested w ­ hether, in his own mind, meta­phorical and ­actual slavery connected, and, if so, what he and his colleagues should do about that connection.

Constitutional Misfire In 1777, New York State almost included a statement of abolitionist princi­ples in its new state constitution. Without such a document, t­ here could be no

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legitimate permanent government. Patriot leaders met as a Provincial Convention in the Hudson River town of Kingston that spring. Jay played a central role. As the representatives finalized his handi­work, however, Jay absented himself to tend to his ­dying ­mother. His friend and ally Gouverneur Morris took the initiative on the issue of slavery.30 On April 17, Morris moved that the convention commit itself in princi­ple to the abolition of slavery. In proposing the idea of Black emancipation, Morris, whose f­ ather had at one time amassed one of the largest slaveholdings in New York’s provincial history, showed flashes of the same eloquence that ten years ­later earned him the job of crafting the preamble to the US Constitution. He proposed the insertion of a paragraph to read, A regard to the rights of h ­ uman nature and the princi­ples of our holy ­religion, loudly call upon us to dispense the blessings of freedom to all mankind: and inasmuch as it would at pre­sent be productive of ­great dangers to liberate the slaves within this State: It is, therefore most earnestly recommended to the ­future Legislatures of the State of New-­York, to take the most effectual mea­sures consistent with the public safety, and the private property of individuals, for abolishing domestic slavery within the same, so that in f­ uture ages, e­ very ­human being who breathes the air of this State, ­shall enjoy the privileges of a freeman. Morris’s statement did not propose any specific action. But its language applied the value of universal liberty expressed in the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence, a document that New York’s convention incorporated into the constitution verbatim, to the f­uture of slavery in the state. New York should, the proposed language state clearly, abolish the practice. Echoing the princi­ple extrapolated from Lord Mansfield’s Somerset decision that natu­ral law made ­England a land f­ree of slavery, all who breathed New York’s air should be f­ree. New York might, the statement implied, maintain the positive law of slavery for a time, but the state’s constitution would enshrine the natu­ral law princi­ple of ­human liberty to guide its ­future.31 Perhaps in an attempt to make the proposed abolition clause more palatable, Morris stripped away most of the introductory language to the slavery proposal two days l­ater. The proposed constitutional language recommending abolition to ­future legislatures would simply be prefaced with the statement, “Inasmuch as it would be highly inexpedient to proceed to the liberating of slaves within this State, in the pre­sent situation thereof.” Even this muted preamble carried the suggestion that the only reason not to abolish slavery was the current state of military and po­liti­cal disorder. Absent such disorder, Morris’s language implied, the new state could move forward with some sort of

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gradual emancipation plan. Morris’s language received the initial endorsement of a large majority of the convention. Yet just as the Continental Congress the year before elected to excise antislavery sentiments from the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence, the convention ultimately declined to risk jeopardizing loyalty to the patriot rebellion for the sake of the incipient antislavery cause. Indeed, ­because the new constitution also validated all laws passed by the provincial legislatures before war broke out in 1775, the constitution procedurally endorsed the state’s long-­standing slave codes. Positive law won out over natu­ral law.32 A few months l­ater, Vermont, comprising three breakaway counties in the northeast corner of New York, became the first jurisdiction in the rebelling former colonies to ban slavery. Slavery had barely existed in this region. Yet Vermont’s repudiation of enslavement in the very first section of the “Declaration of Rights” that comprised chapter 1 of the new charter exemplified how the language of liberty versus slavery that fueled the imperial crisis could be applied to the a­ ctual institution of slavery. No adult, the new charter declared, could be held to ser­vice or slavery without their consent.33 Two months before Vermont banned slavery, Jay expressed regret that the newly completed New York constitution did not incorporate antislavery language. At last, he tentatively acknowledged the connection between his own revolutionary rhe­toric of cleansing Amer­i­ca of slavery and the ­f uture of enslavement in the state. Near the end of a lengthy letter to his collaborators Morris and Robert R. Livingston, which assessed in detail par­tic­u­lar aspects of the final document, Jay wrote, “I should also have been for a Clause against the continuation of domestic Slavery,” as well as one for “the Support and Encouragement of Lit­er­a­ture.” Jay’s modest dis­plea­sure indicated that the constitution did not do all it could to refine public morals. It is pure speculation, if not wishful thinking, to suggest, as his son ­later did, that a ­family emergency derailed a potentially landmark antislavery achievement. Neither Morris nor Jay attempted to insert antislavery language into constitution u ­ ntil the very end of the drafting pro­cess. Slavery had not been their priority.34 Misgivings aside, Jay had reason to be satisfied with the new state constitution. The final document reflected his moderate approach to po­liti­cal institutions in potentially revolutionary times. With British rule defunct, certain institutions, such as a royally appointed governor and the governor’s appointed council, w ­ ere eliminated, replaced by an elected governor and senate. Property-­ holding requirements for the election of state officials w ­ ere retained, with some adjusted downward and ­others upward depending on the office, and a balance between legislative, judicial, and executive branches was achieved. Voters now cast their ballots on paper instead of saying out loud who they supported.35

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Jay expressed ac­cep­tance rather than ebullience a­ fter the convention brought ­ atters to a close in his absence. At the end of Jay’s letter to Morris and Livm ingston, sent in late April, Jay offered an oddly morbid pronouncement of paternity: “Tho’ the Birth of the Constitution is in my opinion premature, I s­ hall nevertheless do all in my power to nurse and keep it alive—­being far from approving the Spartan Law which encouraged Parents to destroy such of their ­Children as perhaps by some cross accident, might come into the World defective or misshapen.”36 He made no pretense of having produced a perfect child, but he accepted ongoing responsibility for it. Amid the chaos of war, Jay and his colleagues had sown the seeds of the f­ uture po­liti­cal order, deferring to peacetime any change of status for the state’s African American population. W ­ ar­time, however, posed its own substantial threats to the slavery status quo.

Domestic Disorders As the war spread, John Jay and other members of his ­family had plenty of direct evidence that their hold on their slave property had grown insecure. The British occupation of Manhattan made Westchester County and northern New Jersey contested ground fraught with opportunity and danger for Blacks and whites. Indeed, Peter Jay and his ­house­hold left their home in Rye in October 1776, relocating dozens of miles to the north to Fishkill, a town in Duchess County. The British policy of granting freedom to African Americans departing their masters’ homes and farms for British lines in New York and New Jersey attracted thousands, some of them subsequently taking up arms against their former masters. More than five thousand African Americans from New York switched sides during the course of the war and, African Americans waged a war against their own bondage facilitated by the British policy of protecting the freedom of ­those who fled from rebel masters.37 Jay’s father-­in-­law William Livingston, serving then as governor of New Jersey, was acutely aware of the security challenges posed by slaves claiming their freedom and joining the British. Blacks operating on behalf of the British could strike with impunity. In June 1780, Governor Livingston received a letter from Monmouth County reporting that thirty African Americans had captured two patriot officers, while a group of “­those Refugees” had also killed a farmer named Joseph Murray in his cornfield. The writer trusted that such news “­will Induce your Excellency to exert your self in Establishing such a guard and w ­ ill tend to restore in some mea­sure the Security of the County.”38 The Jays learned firsthand how such chaotic conditions presented not only opportunities but also dangers to t­ hose they held as slaves. On March 23, 1777,

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Sarah Livingston Jay reported to her husband the harrowing tale of Claas, a slave in her ser­vice whom she had dispatched on an errand. Sally, as Sarah was known in the ­family, introduced the story with stunningly casual racism: “Thinking of your h ­ orse reminds me of an odd accident that happened yesterday to Claas” while performing an errand. Two men whipped him and stole the bag of grain he was transporting, injuring Claas sufficiently that he wanted to see a doctor. In September 1779, Peter Jay reported that two slaves, Frank and another (prob­ably, Claas), “are got to the ­Enemy, and are sold to the Officers by a white Man who carryed them off.” W ­ hether the two had wanted to escape to the British and w ­ ere duped or ­whether they w ­ ere kidnapped is unclear from the ambiguously worded descriptions of their circumstances. ­Peter Jay assumed that Claas, who was staying with a New York City minister, would be returned to the ­family ­after the war.39 Neither John’s wife nor his ­father thought that the conflict should sunder traditional master–­slave ties or end racial subordination. Writing in 1779, Peter warned John that it would be very dangerous for him to come to visit the ­family. He feared his son would be kidnapped by irregulars who would presumably turn him over to the British. The experience of their slave Plato served as a cautionary tale. A band of armed men ambushed Plato on the road one eve­ning ­after 9 p.m. Feigning a willingness to go along with his assailants, Plato tricked them and fled back to the safety of the Jay’s home. Peter, clearly grateful for this faithfulness to the Jays, went on to report that Plato “and old Plat have by uncommon hard ­Labour got 19 Bushels of wheat in the ground, [and] they appear very sensible of the difficulty we ­labour ­under.”40 The experiences of the Jays’ enslaved servants—­some seeking new options, ­others remaining with their masters—­fit into the broader war­time New York pattern. Black New Yorkers like white New Yorkers made a variety of calculations as to where their interests, loyalties, and safety lay, their choices expanded by the British offer of freedom to escaped patriot slaves. White patriots also calculated their own interests in varying ways—­confiscating the slaves of enemies, transferring or selling slaves to areas of the state farther from British lines, and, late in the war, officially recruiting Blacks for military ser­vice.41 Despite all the uncertainty and disruption, the institution of slavery did not disintegrate, nor did John Jay expect it to do so. Causal assumptions about the sale of c­ hildren and interracial, sexual liaisons continued to operate. In 1778, Jay informed his wife’s ­sister Susan that he knew of “a clever ­little Yellow Boy about seven Years old” who would serve Jay’s sister-­in-­law well. “What adds to his Value in Sally’s Estimation,” wrote Jay “is, his being the Son of a Wench brought up in your ­Family, as to the residue of his Parentage I know not.”42

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Nor, it might be added, was it worth asking, ­because it was the status of the boy’s ­mother that sealed his fate as a slave. In terms of slavery and the responsibilities of revolutionaries ­toward the institution, ­these ­were si­mul­ta­neously extraordinary and ordinary times.

Pragmatism and Piety Po­liti­cal leadership placed new and cross-­cutting pressures on Jay and ­others in his circle with regard to slavery. Thanks to the efforts of John Jay and Gouverneur Morris, Catherine Clopper of Ulster County got to keep her slaves. Patriot authorities had seized her property, including slaves W ­ ill and Suck, as a result of the suspect loyalties of her ­father Cornelius Clopper, a New York City merchant. Catherine sought relief from the Provincial Convention. Morris and Lewis Graham, acting as a two-­man committee to consider the m ­ atter, asked the Provincial Convention to act sympathetically by not stripping Clopper of her two slaves ­until an accurate assessment could be done of ­whether she was in fact their owner. Meanwhile, the committee also recommended enjoining Clopper from selling the slaves ­until ­matters ­were settled. Morris and his colleague reasoned that the slaves “appear . . . ​to be absolutely necessary for the comfortable subsistence and accommodation of the said Catherine Clopper, according to their rank and situation in life.” Yet Jay, Morris, and their fellow patriots had no intention of using their power to act as extraconstitutional emancipators. Six weeks l­ ater, the Council of Safety—­the New York State body charged with securing the domestic front during the war—­received affidavits taken by Morris asserting that Clopper’s ­father Cornelius had transferred owner­ship of the slaves ­Will and Suck to his ­daughter. As a result, the Council of Safety, which included Jay himself, warranted “that she be at liberty to remove and dispose of them at her plea­sure, as she may think proper.” Re­spect for property, as well as sensitivity to Catherine Clopper’s race, class, and gender, trumped any concerns about slavery. Even if the Council of Safety had seized Clopper’s slaves, the likely outcome would have been sale to another master, a policy that patriot authorities in New York followed throughout the war and even ­after it was over. To ­these revolutionaries, confiscation of ­humans who w ­ ere property did not necessitate emancipation.43 Even so, the found­ers’ slavery-­tinged notion of po­liti­cal piety left them open to criticism and to persuasion. Jay’s father-­in-­law, William Livingston, showed a surprising re­spect for the Quaker desire to extend the sect’s abolitionist princi­ ples to Revolutionary society more broadly. In the summer of 1778, the New

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Jersey governor received a letter from a Friend named Samuel Allinson making vari­ous arguments about his pacifist sect’s position in this time of war. Allinson included a pamphlet by the indefatigable Pennsylvania-­based Quaker reformer and abolitionist Anthony Benezet. On the subject of “the poor Negroes, now held in bondage among us,” Allinson appealed directly to Livingston. He chided patriots who, like Jay, used meta­phorical slavery in their rhe­toric but ignored the far worse practice of slavery in their midst. The Quaker correspondent feared divine retribution but offered a way to expunge this “guilt”: he encouraged Livingston to push for abolition legislation that would put New Jersey in the vanguard of solving the critical prob­lem of slavery.44 Livingston went out of his way to express solidarity with Allinson and Benezet on the subject of slavery. One might imagine a war­time governor ignoring such an appeal or even issuing a stern rebuke to a plea from a pacifist Quaker, a member of group often suspected of loyalist sympathies. Instead, Livingston congenially responded, “Respecting the Slavery of the Negroes, I have the plea­sure to be entirely of your sentiments.” Jay’s father-­in-­law even claimed that he had urged the New Jersey legislature “to lay the foundation for their Manumission.” However, the war­time crisis, according to Livingston, prompted the assembly to ask him to quietly rescind this written request. Livingston, nonetheless, maintained to his Quaker correspondent, “I am determined, as far as my influence extends, to push the m ­ atter till it is affected: being convinced that the practice is utterly inconsistent, both with the princi­ples of Chris­tian­ity & Humanity; & in Americans who have almost idolized liberty, peculiarly odious & disgraceful.” Livingston was not merely being polite. He praised Benezet’s work on slavery while dismissing the Pennsylvanian’s denunciation of war. Livingston’s views on slavery subsequently had more practical application. In 1780, he commented approvingly on word of the inclusion of an African American in a prisoner exchange with the British. Noting that the slave technically belonged to the state of New Jersey, having been confiscated from a loyalist, Livingston remarked, “I am so prejudiced against the Slavery of any part of the Species, that I should not have chosen to be instrumental in detaining him for that purpose.”45 John Jay’s slaveholding father-­in-­law had no trou­ble grasping the connection between patriotic language and Quaker moral claims against slavery. He endorsed that connection even if he felt constrained by po­liti­cal circumstances from translating that belief into systematic action to emancipate or abolish. Elected as the president of the Continental Congress in December  1778, John Jay also became the target of Quaker lobbying. Anthony Benezet wrote directly to President Jay in early 1779 about the evils of slavery and war, sending

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Jay his pamphlet Serious Consideration on several Impor­tant Subjects, which also included a section on the dangers of “spirituous liquors.” Benezet’s cover letter focused exclusively on the war. The Quaker explained that his sect’s pacifism did not flow from any ill ­will for their country on the part of Friends but rather from a sincere commitment to their understanding of Chris­tian­ity’s dictates. War, declared Benezet in his pamphlet, constituted “impious rebellion and defiance against” the Lord.46 The pamphlet’s section “Observations on Slavery” spoke more directly to the specific historical moment in language sharing Jay’s assumption that the patriots engaged in a divinely sanctioned war for the expansion of liberty. The Quaker announced at the outset that “the Slavery which now so largely subsists in the American Colonies . . . ​proceeds from the same corrupt root as War,” specifically “a lust for amassing wealth” and the desire for “ucontroulable power.” ­These immoral impulses governed “the minds of most Slave Holders” even in the current climate where “the rights and liberties of mankind have been” so frequently discussed. Benezet asserted that the continued legality of slavery compounded “that guilt which has so long lain upon Amer­i­ca.” Benezet’s critique was unrelenting and went far beyond hoisting American patriots on their own rhetorical petards. He emphatically dismissed any excuses that slaveholders might offer that they merely carried on an institution that their f­ athers, who ­were perhaps ignorant themselves of the moral meaning of the slave trade, deeded to them. The pamphlet insisted that the original colonial slaveholders understood the evils wrought on Africa by the trade. Pre­sent day slaveholders bore the same burden of guilt as the traders and merchants responsible for African bondage in Amer­ic­ a. The only righ­teous path was the granting of freedom to all.47 On the back of Benezet’s letter, Jay penned an endorsement of the Quaker princi­ple of universal freedom, but unlike his father-­in-­law, he did not address slavery directly. Jay wrote, “Civil and religious Liberty is a Blessing which I sincerely wish to all mankind,” and expressed his “hope [that] it ­will ever be the policy of ­these States so to extend and secure it to all their citizens” who “may have Reason to complain of Partiality or oppression.” As president of the Continental Congress, Jay could not subscribe to Benezet’s pacifism, but Jay thought of the war in religious terms; it was a biblical Exodus-­like strug­gle of freedom versus servitude. His comments about extending liberty “to all mankind,” like his brief expression of regret that the New York State constitution did nothing to advance slavery’s end, hint that he had begun to tentatively connect the dots between meta­phoric and ­actual enslavement.48 Nine days ­after Jay penned his thought on mitigating oppression, Alexander Hamilton wrote President Jay with a bold emancipation proposal. On

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March 14, 1779, George Washington’s energetic young aide-­de-­camp pitched a daring plan to put slaves u ­ nder arms in the South to stave off an imminent military collapse. Hamilton sought congressional approval for a plan developed by South Carolinian John Laurens to enroll as many as four battalions of Blacks in the patriot cause. The young and ambitious officer indicated to Jay that he found the plan worthy in a variety of ways. First, he expressed his confidence that Blacks would “make very excellent soldiers, with proper management.” Suggesting that “their natu­ral faculties are prob­ably as good as ours,” having crossed out the less emphatic “perhaps,” Hamilton wrote that slaves had plenty enough experience as slaves to know how to take ­orders as soldiers. “Prejudice and self-­interest” had “taught” whites to “fancy many ­things that are founded neither in reason nor experience.” Hamilton, despite his childhood in the West Indies and his education among a New York elite long habituated to racial subordination, refused to be confined by prejudice in assessing the situation. Hamilton was out to win a war, not to slay racism or end slavery. Yet putting the enslaved ­under arms had the advantage of advancing all of t­ hese purposes. The young, high-­placed officer made the argument that the failure to use this vast h ­ uman military resource would simply provide the British with the opportunity to do so. The Laurens Plan advocated by Hamilton viewed as “essential” the granting of “freedom with their muskets,” for to do so would “secure their fidelity” and “animate their courage.” But more than that, Hamilton argued that arming some southern Blacks would make it more likely that additional slaves would receive their freedom. And h ­ ere Hamilton concluded not with a practical but rather a moral argument. The prospect of a wider “emancipation,” he wrote, “I confess, has no small weight in inducing me to wish the success of the proj­ect; for the dictates of humanity and true policy equally interest me in favour of this unfortunate class of men.” Hamilton thus linked effective policy, morality, and national victory as all pulling in the same direction. He had gone much further ­here than Jay’s privately expressed preference for antislavery language in the New York State constitution or Jay’s notion of po­liti­cal liberty and po­liti­cal enslavement as an expression of piety and impiety.49 No direct response from Jay to Hamilton apparently survives, but barely two weeks ­after Jay received the letter, the congress over which Jay presided passed a unan­i­mous declaration in support of the Laurens Plan. With Jay’s support, the Continental Congress gave its blessing to South Carolina and Georgia to enlist “three thousand able bodied negroes.” It further agreed to make “a full compensation” to masters who made their slaves available for ser­vice. Although Black soldiers would not receive any payment on enlistment, the US

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government would clothe and feed them and, at the end of the war, would offer each African American soldier freedom and a $50 discharge payment. This stunning plan, a veritable pi­lot proj­ect in nationally backed mass emancipation, never went into effect. Not only did South Carolina’s legislature reject the plan but also George Washington failed to give it his support. The army’s supreme commander had willingly incorporated northern Blacks into his army ­going all the way back to the early New ­England campaigns. In the darkest days at Valley Forge, he approved of a Rhode Island scheme to recruit more Blacks for his integrated army. But the Laurens Plan struck too close to home for the V ­ irginia planter: he feared that his own slaves would be swept up into ser­vice and eventual liberty if the plan moved forward. Washington strug­gled with his conscience over the conundrum of revolutionary versus personal interests, writing to his cousin and plantation man­ag­er Lund Washington of heavenly “punishment” to the American cause “for our want of public, & indeed private virtue.” Though pointing the fin­ger at himself, his actions with regard to slavery, like t­ hose of so many of his contemporaries including Jay, remained partial, incomplete, and self-­serving.50 The nascent movement to connect universal revolutionary ideas with antislavery mea­sures continued despite the failure of the liberation plan of Laurens. In Anthony Benezet’s Pennsylvania, the state legislature enacted a precedent-­ setting gradual emancipation law. The law freed ­children born a­ fter its enactment to enslaved ­mothers, but ­those ­children had to remain in ser­vice u ­ ntil age twenty-­eight. The legislature couched the law in language familiar to Jay—­that of war, tyranny, and nature—­while making the connection to Black enslavement that Jay had yet to articulate. The act claimed to end for slaves “that state of thraldom to which we ourselves ­were tyrannically doomed” and to have taken “one more step to universal civilization” by rejecting color prejudice and extending the freedom to which “nature entitled” African Americans.51 By the time Pennsylvania’s legislature acted, John Jay was in Spain. Congress hoped that he could turn the Spanish court into an ally and financial benefactor now that it was also at war with Britain.52 Learning of Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation law, Jay wrote from Spain to his good friend and New York po­liti­cal ally Egbert Benson, expressing his thoughts on abolitionism. Jay’s language echoed his own ­earlier thinking on po­liti­cal liberty and Benezet’s thoughts on American slavery. “Till Amer­i­ca comes into this Mea­sure her Prayers to Heaven for Liberty w ­ ill be impious. This is a strong Expression but it is just.” Jay urged a concrete response. “­Were I in your Legislature I would prepare a Bill for the Purpose with ­great Care, and I wd. never cease moving it till it became a Law or I ceased to be a member.” And he framed this advice as a ­matter of high religious and philosophical princi­

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ple: “I believe that God governs this World, and I believe it to be a Maxim in his as in our Court that ­those who ask for Equity ­ought to do it.”53 Pennsylvania’s modest mea­sure might seem not to merit such emphatically principled rhe­toric. Still, save for breakaway Vermont’s constitution, no governing body in the new nation or anywhere ­else on ­either side of the Atlantic Ocean had acted to legally end slavery to any degree or on any timetable. The pioneering abolitionist Benezet himself believed gradualism answered the divine imperative of emancipation. From Jay’s perspective, slavery’s permanent perpetuation contradicted the expectation that the American Revolution would extend through time a godly regard for—to quote a 1779 circular he wrote on behalf of the Continental Congress—­“the rights of religion, justice, humanity, and mankind.” Piety demanded po­liti­cal action.54 Writing on American slavery from Eu­rope, Jay expressed ­matters as emphatically if less pragmatically than Hamilton had. H ­ uman bondage was wrong; equity was right. But “to do it”—to treat Black p­ eople with equity—­ would prove no more straightforward for Jay when residing overseas than for his ­family members, his fellow New Yorkers, or his fellow Americans grappling with slavery at home. During his four-­year stay in Eu­rope, tragically pragmatism and piety often pulled in conflicting directions.

C h a p te r 3

Negotiations

“I bought a very fine negroe Boy of 15 years old at Martinico,” John Jay reported from Spain to his ­father in May 1780. Now he had a slave to attend to him just as his wife Sally had Abbe, a female slave who had previously served in her ­father’s ­house­hold. Almost four years ­later, as he wound down his affairs in Eu­rope prior to returning to his now fully in­de­pen­dent country, Jay prepared a document spelling out the conditions for Benoit’s freedom. If Benoit “continue[s] to serve me with a common & reasonable degree of fidelity” for an additional three years, Jay would renounce “all my Right and Title” to Benoit, who would then “be as ­free to all Intents & Purposes as if he had never been a Slave.” Jay offered Benoit the ultimate reward in an asymmetrical pro­cess of negotiation that lay at the core of e­ very relationship between enslaver and enslaved. But ­there was more to Jay’s plan than material calculation, or so Jay told himself. Jay originally acquired Benoit for ser­vice. He would emancipate him on princi­ple, writing in the manumission document, “The ­Children of men are by nature equally ­free and cannot without Injustice be e­ ither reduced to or held in Slavery.” Before Jay would put nature’s law into effect, however, he intended to hold Benoit in slavery long enough so that his ser­vice equaled his purchase price.1 Jay’s decision to grant Benoit his liberty comported with his already stated desire to see slavery set on a course t­ oward abolition. But the statesman’s actions also reflected his personal experiences during his years in Eu­rope. Jay’s 50

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diplomatic ser­vice provided him with on-­the-­job training in conducting negotiations in which he had to stand on princi­ple, calculate interests, and make concessions. Ironically, it was in Eu­rope, where he sought to secure the nation’s liberty, that John Jay also encountered the paradoxes of ­human bondage in uncomfortably direct ways. This was particularly so when Abbe turned Sally’s life upside down, but also in his attempt to influence from afar the disposition of the many slaves in his f­ ather’s New York ­house­hold While the entourage resided in Spain and France, Jay’s desire to dispatch benevolence, near and far, competed with his impulse to exercise authority. He also encountered difficulties meeting the needs both of his expanding ­family in Eu­rope and of his struggling ­family at home in New York. In the midst of his Eu­ro­pean sojourn, the death of his ­father placed Jay in charge of more slaves than ever. Meanwhile, negotiating the terms of his country’s freedom produced treaty arrangements that defended rather than dismantled the rights of slave ­owners.

Travel and Travail Much of Jay’s mission, especially early on, did not go according to plan. Bad weather forced the Jay traveling party, which in addition to John, Sally, and Abbe, included John’s twelve-­year old nephew Peter Jay Munro, Sally’s b­ rother Brockholst Livingston, and John’s personal secretary William Carmichael, to land at Martinique Their Spain-­bound ship the Confederacy was so harshly buffeted by stormy seas that the badly damaged ship had to divert course to that French West Indian island. During their ten-­day stay in this sugar colony, the Jays got a taste of plantation society, for the first and only time in their lives. Martinique did not disappoint. Sally’s first shipboard glimpse revealed “the most verdant, romantic country I ever beheld.” She found the French to be good stewards of their colony, commenting, “The neatness that prevails ­here cannot be exceeded & I frankly confess I never saw it equal’d.” ­After their departure for France aboard the Aurora, Sally continued to write of Martinico with plea­sure and fascination. The production of coffee, coconuts, and sugar cane, in her telling, added to the island’s beauty, with the presence of slaves prompting only a mildly discordant note: as she reported to her f­ather, New Jersey governor William Livingston, “­Every h ­ ere and ­there the eye is supris’d [by] settlements aside & amid the hills belonging to the negros who are employed upon the plantations. Then again a plain of small extent with genteel h ­ ouses diversify the prospect.”

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Although John was apparently too preoccupied with work to take it in, Sally was intrigued by the demonstration she received of how cane was pro­cessed into sugar. The Jays also reviewed a French regiment. Sally remarked, “I recognized the friends of American Liberty,” but also noted with melancholy the fate of soldiers in war­time. As the Jay party, now enlarged by one with the addition of Benoit whom Jay bought on the island, departed for Spain, Sally indicated ­little or no ambivalence that “the friends of American Liberty” relied for their comfort and gentility on slaves—as did she and her husband, albeit on a much smaller scale.2 Jay’s mission to Spain on behalf of his country proved to be largely an exercise in frustration, despite his eagerness to accomplish his diplomatic goals. His zeal gave rise to a rare remark of impatience from Sally. To her ­sister Susan, she reported, “­There are many t­ hings in Cordova worth seeing but as Mr. Jay’s maxim is to prefer business to plea­sure,” they did not tarry t­ here on their way to Madrid, the capital where Jay hoped he might advance the purposes of his mission. The Jays need not have rushed. John strug­gled to gain access to Spanish officials who might be in a position to coordinate military and diplomatic strategy against their mutual British ­enemy or secure the recognition and financial assistance the new country needed. Unfortunately for Jay, the Spanish saw his presence on the periphery of their court as a goad to the British that might help bring their Eu­ro­pean rival to negotiate over the cession of Gibraltar. Aside from securing the loan of a paltry sum of money to the Americans, Jay accomplished virtually nothing during his more than two years in Spain.3 Personal relationships between the Jays and members of their American circle in Spain did not go smoothly ­either. ­These social prob­lems took a par­ tic­ul­ar toll on Sally and taxed the skills of John, still in his thirties, as a paternal figure. While in Spain, an eighteen-­year-­old Virginian named Lewis Littlepage attached himself to the Jay h ­ ouse­hold. Although the full extent to which Littlepage manipulated John financially and emotionally would not emerge ­until ­after the Jays moved on to France, Littlepage proved himself to be a challenging youth to mentor from the start. He spent Jay’s money freely and resisted career-­related advice.4 Meanwhile, Sally’s twenty-­three-­year-­old ­brother Brockholst provoked an out-­and-­out ­family crisis; Livingston, like Little­ page, displayed a tendency to bite the hands that fed him. Rather than feeling gratitude for the training and educational advice that John sought to provide, Brockholst expressed his resentment in ways that ­were publicly embarrassing and privately mortifying to his s­ ister. Brockholst’s insolence included disparaging the morals of the members of the Continental Congress in the presence of a French guest and disdaining John’s attempt to

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guide his younger brother-­in-­law t­ oward the study of law. According to Sally, her b­ rother “treated almost ­every ­thing recommended by Mr. Jay as unessential & frequently ridicu­lous.” Sally surmised that Carmichael, John’s secretary, saw Brockholst as a rival and de­cided to encourage an unpleasant relationship between the brothers-­in-­law as a strategy for preserving his own place. That tactic appeared to be working: one eve­ning, Brockholst declared to John “that he prefer’d g­ oing to Amer­i­ca to remaining like a slave h ­ ere.” Sally tossed in bed over “the insinuation of slavery” by her ­brother. Indeed, the complaint did not even work as a meta­phor. John provided Brockholst with a sizable monetary allowance, and “his washing and mending” ­were “done in the ­family”—­presumably by Abbe or the Irish servant whom Sally hired in Spain. Moreover, Sally noted, the Jays had placed no limits on his social life. Sally, her ­father, her ­brother, and her husband knew full well what slavery was; Brockholst’s condition was plainly anything but slavery.5 Making ­matters far worse, Sally gave birth in Spain to a child who died twenty-­three days ­later. For some time afterward, she would feel at wit’s end, “separated from my son, depriv’d of a lovely ­daughter, distress’d by a mistaken ­brother” and far from home.6 Abbe provided invaluable comfort to her mistress. Sally wrote her m ­ other Susannah French Livingston in devastation over the death of her infant ­daughter, pausing to note, “The attention and proofs of fidelity which we have receiv’d from Abbe, demand, & ever s­ hall have my acknowl­edgments, you can hardly imagine how useful she is to us, for indeed her place cou’d not be supplied, at least not h ­ ere.” Describing herself as “bewilder’d,” Sally no doubt relied on Abbe all the more b­ ecause, at the time she wrote her m ­ other, John had followed the Spanish royal court to St. Ildefonso. It was from t­ here that John penned his instructions to Egbert Benson regarding the moral necessity of pressing for the gradual abolition of slavery. Meanwhile, the importance of Abbe’s ser­vice continued to grow. In February 1782, Sally gave birth to Maria, a girl who remained healthy as the f­ amily relocated soon a­ fter from Spain to the epicenter of American revolutionary diplomacy in Paris.7 Sally Jay i­magined that the Martiniquan Benoit would be a part of her reconstituted ­family life in Amer­i­ca. The Jays had left their young son Peter Augustus in Amer­i­ca with Sally’s parents. Sally promised five-­year-­old Peter, “When I return I’ll bring you a clever ­little black boy that speaks french, & then if you can read & write en­glish well, you may learn that language.”8 The lack of self-­consciousness, the ease with which Mrs. Jay assumed that her class and racial privilege would contribute to her own son’s ascent to cosmopolitan achievement, conveys how perfectly normal slavery could seem to t­ hese revolutionary Americans.

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John also depended on the provision of intimate personal ser­vice. In March 1783, Jay dispatched a note to John Adams, informing his fellow peace commissioner that he could not join in a meeting with Count Sarsfield, a learned aristocratic French critic of slavery. His servant had taken nephew ­Peter Jay Munro to a fair and thus could not groom Jay’s hair.9 ­Whether that manservant was Benoit or someone hired in France, clearly t­ hese Americans ­were entrenched in a world where their social inferiors tended to their needs.

Long-­Distance Paternalism The vulnerabilities of the enslaved allowed Sally and John to imagine themselves as beneficent dispensers of ­favor. Abbe endured her own trying separation when she had to accompany the ­family to Eu­rope, a fact that her mistress’s cavalier commentary revealed. Sally noted in a postscript to her s­ ister Kitty, “Abbe is well & would be glad to know if she is mistress of a husband still.”10 Abbe’s ser­vice to Sally had severed a ­family bond, how permanently the ­future would tell. This separation provoked anxiety about her husband’s faithfulness, and the only way she could receive assurances of his faithfulness was to ask her literate white mistress to make inquiries on her behalf. Relying on Sally, the cause of Abbe’s removal, in this intimate ­matter could not have been pleasant. The cool irony with which Sally conveyed this request expressed a ­g reat deal about the inequalities of power at the core of Abbe’s relationship to her. Sally wrote with patronizing freedom about the fidelity of Abbe’s “husband” whom Abbe still wished to serve, even at the distance of three thousand miles. ­Because slave marriages had no l­egal meaning, their status as husband and wife was solely a ­matter of fidelity or at least personal devotion. Passing along Abbe’s message seemed to make Sally feel good about herself, whereas for Abbe, the emotional comforts of home remained distant and tenuous. In a dif­fer­ent way, John Jay’s Eu­ro­pean correspondence to his ­brother Frederick revealed his own sense of paternalistic mastery.11 John per­sis­tently attempted to extend his benevolence from across the ocean to the slaves in the struggling ­house­hold of his New York ­family. In ­these efforts, the diplomat blended an ac­cep­tance of the pre­sent real­ity of slavery with a personal sense of responsibility and offered hints of an emerging antislavery sensibility. While John and the ­family ­were living in peaceful conditions in Eu­rope, the Jay ­family was attempting to stay clear of the worst ravages inflicted by regular and irregular forces waging war in Westchester—­taking refuge in Dutchess County, first about fifty miles to the northwest of Rye in Fishkill, and then farther north in Poughkeepsie. It fell to John’s younger ­brother Fred-

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erick to manage a large and needy ­house­hold. That ­house­hold included their ­father Peter, who was well past seventy, and two blind siblings, Peter and Anna Maricka, as well as Frederick’s wife Margaret. The h ­ ouse­hold also included several enslaved ­people, perhaps initially as many as eleven or twelve. In April 1781, Frederick made no attempt to sugarcoat for John what he regarded as a very bad situation in their “large and helpless ­family.” As far as Frederick was concerned, most of their slaves ­were a burden rather than a benefit. A small number, including one Frederick referred to as “your Boy,” proved able to work on the farm, while the ­family sold Frank (possibly the same Frank who ­earlier ran away to the British) “for his good be­hav­ior.” Meanwhile, Frederick desperately wished to shrink the size of the ­house­hold, enlisting his blind older ­brother Peter to try to convince their ­father “to reduce the number of Blacks.” Such efforts ­were “without effect.” ­Because the expense of feeding and clothing ­those too old or too young to meet the ­family’s needs was “beyond conception,” Frederick appealed to John to intervene with their stubborn f­ ather.12 Although he was not entirely unsympathetic to Frederick’s predicament, distance seemed to make John more sanguine about the ­family’s ability to negotiate the challenges they faced without completely disregarding the needs of their slaves. In March 1781, near the end of the letter expressing his gratitude and admiration for Frederick, John wrote, “Tell all the servants that I remember them.” John continued, “The Trunk I sent from Bordeaux contained something for each of them.” He expressed regret that it got lost in transit.13 John wanted to play the role of benevolent patriarch. He became fixated on the idea that providing the ­family slaves with a type of coarse cloth he had come across in Spain would be helpful to every­one concerned and would serve as a token of his esteem for them. The cloth, which John noticed Spanish laborers wearing, “would make good warm Cloathing for Negroes in our northern States.” He took pains to make sure that a shipment reached the “Parcel” of slaves attached to his ­family, enlisting the Revolutionary War financier Robert Morris to help him with the importation and delivery.14 John also clearly felt uncomfortable with Frederick’s desire to cut the f­ amily loose of responsibility for the unproductive. He mixed paternalism and moralism to justify a foot-­dragging approach. In a July 1781 letter, John pointed out that he had sent cloth to “keep your servants warm” when winter arrived again. Claiming “I am r­ eally at a loss” as to what Frederick should do, John then proceeded to poke holes in plans to reduce the f­ amily’s slaveholdings. Three servants John understood to be already hired out and therefore of no financial burden. He authorized Frederick to threaten one particularly mischievous servant by informing her that John would not protect her if she continued to behave badly. But John balked at disposing of the ­family’s “old servants

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who have expended their Strength & youth for the f­ amily, they ­ought and must be taken good care of while we have the means of d­ oing it. Common Justice and I may say Gratitude demands it.” John conceded that Frederick might consider “part[ing] with” some from a list that included Clarinda, ­Little Mary, Castor, and Peet—­some or all of whom ­were relatively young, perhaps even ­children. John then immediately qualified that suggestion with the telling remark, “How far this may suit with your conscience I know not.” John cast caution as being in the best interests of his ­father and blind ­brother. His ­brother Peter “undoubtedly [should] have a Boy with him at all Times” and offered “my Boy as at all times at his absolute Disposal”—­thus combining his sincere concern for his ­brother’s well-­being with another roadblock to ridding themselves of slaves. John erected an additional obstacle by stating that their aging and ailing ­father should not be both­ered with such ­matters and that, for his sake, stability in the ­house­hold should be maintained as much as pos­si­ble. ­Toward the end of the letter, John offered his younger b­ rother the kind of advice far easier to give than to follow: “You must endeavour to keep up such ­others spirits and oppose misfortunes with manly firmness & cheerful Resignation.”15 John and Frederick Jay ­were both literally and figuratively talking past each other on the issue of what to do. They did not always receive each other’s letters, and Frederick got the feeling that John did not understand the ­family’s situation clearly. In 1781, as winter approached, Frederick derided the shipment of Eu­ro­pean fabric as “not much Superior to brown paper” and requested that John not send any more. The h ­ ouse­hold situation was dire. Their f­ ather was deathly ill, and a large band of armed men had forced their way into their ­house, “plundering ­every ­thing they could lay hands on.” Frederick felt compelled to take action to shrink the size of the ­house­hold, selling one slave, a girl named Clarinda, outright. He had already hired out Young Mary, who was prob­ably Clarinda’s s­ ister, and planned to sell her as well. Two other female slaves, Moll and Susan, and one male slave, Kingston, ­were hired out, while Old Mary, currently residing at a doctor’s home, was likely to “be an Invalid as long as she lives.” Their f­ ather manumitted Old Plato and Zilpha, possibly Clarinda’s parents, though they continued to live with the f­ amily. At pre­sent, reported Frederick, the h ­ ouse­hold included “five whites exclusive of my ­little Son & Six servants”; he impressed on his older ­brother that “I have already sacrificed my all for the sake of the ­Family” and that he was “determined to remain with them as long as Papa lives.” Fredrick did not describe the emotional suffering that Clarinda’s sale imposed on her and her ­family.16

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Even as John, Sally, Abbe, and Benoit made the transition from Spain to France in the spring and summer of 1782, John continued to express concern for his f­amily’s slaves and former slaves in New York. The level of personal responsibility that he felt is evidenced by his pressing associates from outside the f­ amily to get involved in this ­matter, while also attempting to communicate his feelings to the enslaved themselves. In April 1782, Jay inquired of his ­brother, “How do all the old servants do?” and requested that his b­ rother “tell them I have not forgotten them, and that they would have been convinced of it, if the ­Enemy had not intercepted the ­things I have sent for them.”17 On April 17, 1782, John’s f­ ather Peter passed away. The news reached Paris on June 23. Peter’s death deepened rather than dampened John’s concern for the f­ amily’s el­derly former slaves. In August, Jay reported to his friend Robert Livingston that his ­father, while still alive, had freed some slaves “and that some ­others of the older ones have been put out.” This prompted the reflection, “Old Servants are sometimes neglected.” and the instruction that their friend and fellow New Yorker Egbert Benson “keep an Eye over them, and not to let any of them want.” Putting his money where his sentiments w ­ ere, he asked Livingston to give Benson ₤50 to use on behalf of the slaves.18 The receipt in Paris of Peter Jay’s w ­ ill prompted John once again to articulate his responsibility for African Americans who ­were attached, legally or other­wise, to the Jay f­ amily. The ­will also made John the owner, or part owner, of additional ­people. When John received a copy of his ­father’s ­will and its three codicils in the fall of 1782, he expressed satisfaction with its terms. His ­father died with enough wealth to provide substantial sums to support his blind ­daughter Anna Maricka and his mentally challenged child Augustus, as well as to ensure the well-­being of his widowed eldest ­daughter Eve and her son Peter Jay Munro. The elder Peter Jay earmarked the ­family’s original Rye estate to his son Peter, one of his New York City properties to Frederick, and gave John a choice of farms in Bedford in northern Westchester County. Sir James Jay, whose erratic po­liti­cal be­hav­ior during the war troubled the ­family, received title to no specific piece of land, and his financial debt to his ­father was treated differently from that of the other ­children.19 The ­will, originally dated January 28, 1778, and its codicils, the last of which was written in December 1781, disposed of the enslaved. In the words of the deceased from the original ­will, “my two Negro ­women, Zilpha and the elder Mary, in consideration of their long and faithful Ser­vices be indulged by my Executors in the choice of their f­ uture masters” among his c­ hildren. If ­either of t­ hese w ­ omen chose to serve one of the sons—­Peter, James, John, or Frederick—­that man would pay up to ₤30 to the estate per enslaved ­woman.

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As a result of the third codicil, John Jay received Plato, though while the ­future master was overseas, Plato could decide for which of Peter’s other c­ hildren he would work. Peter bequeathed “my Negro Slave Mary to Such of my ­children as She ­Shall elect to live with,” with the estate providing “reasonable compensation” if she proved to be expensive to support. He went even further on this score; if none of his c­ hildren would support Mary, the executors should use interest from the estate to pay for her “maintenance.” Presumably, ­others belonged to the residual estate.20 As with his other wealth, notions of loyalty and legacy intermixed when thinking about ­human property In response, John once again assumed the stance of guardian and protector of their well-­being, an enlarged echo of his ­father’s concerns. He asked Frederick to assure Plato that “I ­shall remember and reward his attachmt. to my ­Father by making his Life as easy and happy as” pos­si­ble, while “Zelpha & Mary may also entertain the same Expectations.” More broadly, John asked Frederick to “comfort all the old Servants by letting them perceive that tho they have lost a kind & indulgent master, yet that his ­Children remember their Ser­vices and w ­ ill not permit the Ev[ening] of their Lives to be involved in Distress.” He also instructed Frederick how to deal with Claas, a f­amily slave who had spent the war b­ ehind loyalist lines in New York City: “If New York shd. be evacuated and Claas remain ­there, treat him kindly for his ­Mothers Sake.” John’s phrasing indicated that he was neither overly disturbed by Claas’s temporary disloyalty nor particularly concerned by the possibility that the slaves would make that disloyalty permanent by departing with the British.21

Slavery and the Peace of Paris Jay and other Americans made the moral link between the Revolution and slavery, but John Jay’s consultations on slavery in the Paris peace negotiations exposed the real­ity that slaves remained valuable property in which his countrymen retained a keen interest. B ­ ecause slaves had emphatically inserted themselves in the war, their disposition became a feature of the peace. The Laurens Plan to arm South Carolina slaves had been an attempt to play catchup. Even before in­de­pen­dence the British had tried to induce the V ­ irginia slaves of patriot masters to flee. Offering freedom to ­those ­running away from rebellious ­owners subsequently became official continental British war policy. Thousands of slaves would take advantage of t­hese opportunities to secure freedom on their own terms.22 ­After the British defeat at Yorktown, the formerly enslaved crowded ­behind loyalist lines, shielded for the time being from the claims of their once and

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would-be masters. As a delegate charged with formulating a formal peace treaty with the British, Jay found himself with a job to do that included advancing the demands of slaveholders. “Equity” in this arena, then, meant something quite dif­fer­ent from freeing ­people, regardless of what he had told Egbert Benson about the piety of passing laws for emancipation. Indeed, resolving the status of t­ hese African Americans and their potential evacuation put to the test the expressed antislavery inclinations of all four US peace commissioners who made it to Paris—­Jay, along with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Laurens. As negotiations of a preliminary peace agreement proceeded, the fate of Black p­ eople living among British forces and loyalists became a complicated question of compensation and of good faith. It also became a bargaining chip. The US Peace Commission tilted in geo­g raph­i­cal origin ­toward the North; South Carolina’s Laurens did not arrive ­until late November 1782, having been held captive in the Tower of London for more than a year. Virginian Thomas Jefferson, the planned fifth commissioner, never embarked for Eu­rope. Adams from Mas­sa­chu­setts, Franklin from Pennsylvania, and Jay from New York hammered out a broad framework and established the princi­ple of US in­de­pen­ dence well before the subject of slavery entered into the negotiations. The primary priorities of the Americans ­were to ensure that the British acknowledged US in­de­pen­dence before, rather than as a consequence of, peace talks and on establishing the widest pos­si­ble bound­aries of postwar US territory. Jay in par­tic­u­lar was determined to ignore congressional instructions to keep their French allies close at hand in negotiations. He suspected that French and Spanish diplomatic priorities diverged substantially from US interests, especially with regard to the f­uture sovereignty of lands in the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys and navigation rights on the Mississippi River. From the summer into the fall, with Franklin and Jay serving as the sole members of the commission in Paris, the subjects of slaves allegedly pilfered by the British did not come up. Meanwhile, Franklin identified the access of New E ­ ngland fisherman to the banks of Newfoundland as an early priority, an issue with relevance to the northernmost colonies alone.23 Yet as negotiations progressed t­ oward a preliminary peace document, Jay, Franklin, and Adams, who arrived on October 26, showed themselves quite willing to interject slavery into the conversation. In September 1782, the Continental Congress, on the motion of James Madison, instructed Secretary of Foreign Affairs Robert R. Livingston “to obtain as speedily as pos­si­ble au­then­ tic returns of the Slaves and other property which have been carried off or destroyed in the course of the War by the ­Enemy” and to forward that information to the US negotiating team in France. Meanwhile, Livingston was to

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apprise the US representatives “that many thousands of Slaves and other property . . . ​have been carried off.” Moreover, “the ­g reat loss of property which the Citizens of the United States have sustained by the ­Enemy ­will be considered by several States as an insuperable bar” to compensating Americans who cast their lot with the crown for property confiscated during the war. Livingston duly complied by sending off the congressional resolution to Paris, where it was received by mid-­November. Jay and Adams wasted ­little time introducing congressional concerns into negotiations with their British counter­parts. While British representative Richard Oswald asserted to the US del­e­ga­tion that anybody sold to the West Indies from Savannah must have been slaves belonging to loyalists, he confessed privately to British colonial secretary Thomas Townshend that he did not know this to be true. More importantly, Oswald understood that the Americans themselves felt aggrieved, which severely complicated British efforts to insist on the compensation for or return of loyalist property.24 Franklin also stressed to Oswald that Americans did not take lightly the manner in which the British had carried off ­those claimed as slaves. In a November 26 letter to Oswald, Franklin quoted the congressional resolution directly but also, at length, a Pennsylvania law calling for the detailed accounting of British depredations, including the specific demand “that all Losses of Negro or Mulatto Slaves and Servants, who have been deluded and carried away by the Enemies of the United States, and which have not been recovered or recompenced, ­shall be comprehended within the Accounts and Estimates” compiled. Even counties not actually “invaded” by British forces and therefore not suffering destruction of other property should account for “Damages suffered by the Losses of such Servants and Slaves” who joined the British. For Franklin, the carry­ing off of American slaves fit into a larger pattern that made the British and loyalists look “odious.” Any treaty provision compensating loyalists for their own losses would only stir deep resentment among patriotic Americans. Although the American negotiators preferred to frame the controversy as if the British had plundered slaves from American ­owners, Franklin ­here tacitly acknowledged the more searing truth: African Americans freed themselves. Other­wise, how to account for the claim that they ­were “deluded” or that slaves found their way ­behind British lines from counties into which the British had not entered?25 Jay, Adams, and Franklin willingly pressed British representatives on the ­matter of slaves now ­behind British lines. But not ­until late November, during the final day of negotiations, did this grievance translate into language proposed for inclusion in the ­actual Preliminary and Conditional Articles of Peace. In this final session, the newly arrived South Carolinian Henry Laurens

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played a key role, acting in concert with and enjoying the full support of his fellow delegates. The seventh article of the preliminary treaty established the terms meant to govern the pro­cess of British evacuation. As previously drafted, the article called for the release of prisoners by both sides and the withdrawal “with all con­ve­nient speed” of British land and sea forces. The British assented to Laurens’s request for the insertion of language explic­itly barring the “carry­ ing away any Negroes, or other Property of American Inhabitants”—­language consistent with the tenor of the recent back and forth between US and British representatives.26 In British negotiator Richard Oswald, the Americans in general and Laurens in par­tic­u­lar had a sympathetic partner on the issue of slavery. Oswald and Laurens had enjoyed a business connection for several years before the war, and the two men sought to continue that relationship in the wake of the peace treaty. During Laurens’s term as a prisoner in the Tower of London, Oswald had visited the South Carolinian several times. Oswald himself owned many p­ eople on a plantation in the British colony of East Florida.27 The mutual desire to reconstruct British mercantile relations between Laurens and his South Carolina peers with Oswald required the rebuilding of trust and good faith. A provision barring the British as they evacuated from taking African American demonstrated that good faith. This insertion, however, was not a mere afterthought reflecting a special concern of the South Carolina plantation master or the self-­interested courtesy of one slaveholder for another.28 Jay and his colleagues w ­ ere united in support of it. The four Americans entered the final day of talks hoping to use the removal of slaves by the British as a bargaining chip to resolve some final sticking points in their ­favor. They came to the session asking for even sterner and explicit language demanding “Compensation . . . ​for the Tobacco, Rice, Indigo and Negroes &c. seized and carried off ” by the British in “the States of V ­ irginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia.” Franklin took the lead in assimilating southern grievances into the broader case that he and his colleagues wished to make against holding Americans liable for debts to British merchants. The Pennsylvanian’s notes explained the logic and “Facts” ­behind the Americans’ desire for a treaty article on compensation to despoiled Americans. The premise of selling British imports on credit to Americans was that American planters would be able to pay back their debts “by the L ­ abour of their Negroes and the Produce of that ­Labour.” But the seizure of American property, including “even the Negroes,” undermined the ability of American planters to pay their debts. Franklin deployed an analogy that his alter ego, Poor Richard of almanac fame, would have approved: “If a Draper who had sold a Piece of Linnen to a Neighbor on Credit, should follow

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him, take a Linnen from him by Force, and then send a Bailiff to arrest him for the Debt,” that clearly would be considered unjust. That was the position Americans, particularly southern planters, found themselves in, the British wishing them “to pay for what they had been robb’d of.” Although the Americans did not get the explicit language about slaves that they wanted inserted into Article 5, the commissioners had made their point. On this final day of negotiation, the British acceded to American demands on the Newfoundland fisheries and allowed restrictions to be placed on the amount of time loyalists would have to seek restitution for their lost property. In return, the Americans backed off of their opposition to En­glish creditors by making Article 4 a commitment in princi­ple to allowing creditors on all sides to collect debts.29 The Americans had used British promises of freedom to Black slaves as leverage against the British, couching the defense of American slave property as a ­matter of ­simple fairness and homespun logic; they did so as part of a strategy to protect that property during the ensuing period of British withdrawal from American territory and to strengthen their hand on other key issues. The commissioners, including John Jay, expressed satisfaction with what they had accomplished together. The same day that the negotiation of the preliminary articles concluded, Adams recorded his plea­sure with how m ­ atters played out then and overall. He credited the late-­arriving Laurens with the Article 7 “Stipulation, that the British Troops should carry off no Negroes or other American Property,” a proposition to which the commissioners “all agreed” but “which would most prob­ably in the Multiplicity & hurry of Affairs have escaped Us.” Adams highly praised Jay’s work during the lengthy pro­cess, believing that New Yorkers deserved credit as “Le Washington de la Negotiation” (see figure 2). Franklin was also grateful for his colleagues. He commented to Livingston that the commissioners’ threat “to produce an Account of the Mischiefs done” by the loyalists to American property had forced the British team to back down on claims they wished to make on behalf of ­these same loyalists and that the treaty forbade the British from taking “Plunder” with them as they evacuated the United States.30 In a letter written to Livingston not long afterward and marked “Private,” Jay expressed his own contentment with how the negotiations had played out. The New Yorker remarked to his dear friend Livingston that the British had “yield[ed] in more than perhaps they wished” and generally acted in good faith. To ensure that the peace held, Jay cautioned against “improper Exultation” by Americans or the making of further “extravagant Demands.” Hinting at some internal disagreement between Jay and his fellow commissioners about how subsequent negotiations of a final treaty might proceed, he noted, “Some

Figure 2.  John Jay by Caleb Boyle. Kirby Collection of Historical Paintings, Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania.

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of my Colleagues flatter themselves with the Probability of obtaining Compensation for Damages,” which, though he did not say so explic­itly, might include the loss of slaves. Jay claimed not to mind attempting to gain compensation from the British, “but I confess I doubt its Success, for Britain has no money to spare, and w ­ ill think the Confiscation [of loyalist property] should s­ettle that account, for they do not expect that Retribution ­will be made to all [loyalists].” But overall, Jay proclaimed, “Our affairs have a very promising Aspect, and a ­little Prudence w ­ ill secure us all that we can reasonably wish [or] expect.” Reading between the lines, Jay approved of the princi­ple that the British should not evacuate former slaves and take other American property, though he did not regard such issues as an obstacle to concluding a permanent peace.31 In the interval between the provisional and the final treaty, Jay and his fellow diplomats would receive pressure from home to take a more aggressive stance on the dispensation of American slaves sheltered by the British. Much to the chagrin of George Washington and other American slaveholders, Manhattan, which the British occupied while awaiting a final treaty, became a haven of last resort for African Americans from up and down the East Coast who had availed themselves of the British offer of freedom. British commander Guy Carleton took the position that the departing Blacks w ­ ere already ­free when he arrived in New York, based on promises that British officials had made to them; he also maintained that it could not possibly have been the intent of the British peace commissioners that he return to slavery men and w ­ omen who might face severe reprisals from their masters. Carleton fulfilled his promise to rec­ord their names in order to prepare the way for ­future monetary compensation. But Carleton also credited the testimony of the refugees themselves as to their ­free or slave status and treated as ­free all who could claim they had been b­ ehind British lines for a year or more.32 South Carolinian Laurens having already departed Paris, Franklin, Adams, and Jay dutifully presented American grievances. Jay and his ­brother Frederick had a small stake in the evacuation question, even if John did not say so in any of his French correspondence. Among the slaves ultimately listed in the British evacuation rec­ords, the so-­called Book of Negroes, would be a former slave of Frederick’s, departing Manhattan on October 31, 1783, and a man named Massey (perhaps a renamed or misrecorded Claas), who embarked with the British on November 19. Months before ­these departures occurred, Jay and his colleagues sought “speedy and effectual Mea­sures be taken to render that Justice to the Parties interested which the true Intent and Meaning of the Article in question plainly dictates.” During negotiations over the definitive final treaty, the Americans also proposed adding a sentence to Article 7 stating that “all Destruction of Property, or carry­ing away of Negroes or other Property

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belonging to the American Inhabitants, contrary to the above Stipulation, s­ hall be duly estimated and compensated to the ­owners.” This attempt to tack on language to that document that would financially account for the British evacuation of Blacks and other American property failed.33 British officials viewed Carleton’s logic that the British must honor their promise of freedom to runaway slaves as “solid & founded in Equity.” ( Jay may have recalled this last word from his thoughts on emancipation he shared with Egbert Benson in 1780.) Ultimately, upward of three thousand African Americans embarked from Manhattan to Nova Scotia. They ­were part of a wave of more than thirteen thousand Blacks, some still held as slaves by loyalists, who embarked from Savannah, Charleston, and New York in 1783.34 The treaty negotiations integrated slavery’s conflicts and contradictions into the very achievement of in­de­pen­dence. All four American commissioners, not just Jay, held antislavery views. Adams, who had the least personal experience with slavery, was receptive to Enlightenment critiques and in the Continental Congress found himself unsympathetic when southern colleagues sought accommodations for the institution. Franklin had been a slaveowner and profited as printer from the sale of advertisements for runaway slaves but, in the 1770s, haltingly incorporated antislavery views into his po­liti­cal repertoire. In 1772, Franklin submitted an essay in the London Chronicle that closely paraphrased statistics provided to him by Quaker antislavery pioneer and fellow Pennsylvanian Anthony Benezet. Although Franklin’s article focused on the evils of the slave trade, it also expressed a desire for gradual emancipation. Even Henry Laurens, a wealthy South Carolina planter who in a previous ­career as a slave trader had participated in selling more than ten thousand ­human beings, had and would continue to express antislavery ideas. He sometimes wrote about the well-­being of his slaves back home in Amer­i­ca in solicitous tones that resembled Jay’s patrician attitudes. When Laurens arrived in Paris, his grief over the death of son John, with whom he had cooperated on a scheme to ­free and arm Black soldiers, was still fresh. Less than three months ­after the preliminary peace treaty, Laurens wrote letters to a fellow South Carolinian concerning the need to plan for a ­f uture abolition.35 Thus, emancipation was not an unimaginable or infinitely distant concept for any of the commissioners. Yet Jay and his colleagues set aside antislavery inclinations and aspirations in their talks with the British to pursue specific American material interests. Property rights in man mattered to the new nation, as did national sovereignty. The abolition of slavery, w ­ ere it to take place, should not be the product of revolutionary chaos taken advantage of by the enslaved and their British enablers. The British did not have a right, the commissioners believed, to interfere in the domestic arrangements of the United

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States, even though it had l­imited leverage to prevent the British from d­ oing so in ­actual practice. In the meantime, the incorporation of slaveholder grievances in the Anglo-­American treaty expressed an impor­tant national and diplomatic princi­ple. That Jay himself would inherent that princi­ple as an unwelcome, even debilitating, burden in the coming years is not something he anticipated in 1783.36

Abbe’s Ghost The final months of 1783 should have been a joyous time for the Jay h ­ ouse­hold. On September 3, Jay and his fellow US peace commissioners signed the official treaty with Britain. Three weeks before, Sally Jay gave birth to another ­daughter, Ann, who joined the one-­and-­a-­half-­year-­old Maria as part of their growing ­family in Eu­rope.37 Apparently taking the conventional male view of the time that he had ­little to offer in the way of ser­vice to a new ­mother and young ­children, John departed for E ­ ngland to attend to f­ amily business and to seek some rest and relaxation. Then Abbe, who had served Sally Jay in Eu­rope without noted incident, shattered the ­house­hold’s equilibrium by ­running away. Suddenly, Sally, John, Peter Jay Munro, and even Benjamin Franklin and his grand­son William ­Temple Franklin w ­ ere forced to consider how Abbe, a Black female slave, viewed her situation and what frustrations and anx­i­eties motivated her. As Abbe revealed her resentment and even desperation, whites used to exercising their command over her and p­ eople like her demonstrated how poorly they understood Abbe, a person from whom they expected self-­abnegating ser­vice, not self-­assertion. Abbe’s tale, then, is one of re­sis­tance and the life-­threatening limits of paternalistic benevolence, two core issues of American slavery played out in the unlikely setting of early 1780s France.38 A difficult relationship with a French nurse named Louisson hired to take care of Sally and John’s two young ­daughters was the immediate precipitant of Abbe’s departure.39 Louisson took offense at Abbe’s alleged incivility t­ oward her, a prob­lem that the Frenchwoman took up with Sally herself. Louisson, in Sally’s telling of the story, wished that Abbe could be “dismiss[ed]” but promised to tolerate Abbe’s rudeness and not quit her post b­ ecause even her mistress abided Abbe’s “impertinent” be­hav­ior. Sally attributed Abbe’s departure to “her extreme jealousy of Louisson” and “the inticements of an En­glish washer­-­woman who promised to pay her if she would assist her in washing.” Lacking Abbe’s own written account of her motives, we are left to guess how much credit to give to Sally’s explanation. A difficult, even jealous, rela-

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tionship with a rival French servant seems plausible, but this tension may have been exacerbated by the fact that Abbe observed two key differences between her and the other female servants: ­those servants received monetary compensation for their work and could choose to leave or turn down jobs if they desired. Abbe, in contrast, was bound to her mistress. In the face of the stress she felt, Abbe may have found the inducement of wages from the En­glish washer­woman an appealing chance to show her disfavor and to try out another life role, h ­ umble to be sure, yet dif­fer­ent from being someone’s slave. Abbe took her clothes and left the ­house­hold.40 ­Under French law, Abbe may have been entitled to her freedom all along. Pre­ce­dents dating to the sixteenth ­century established France as ­free soil, and French West Indian slaves brought to Eu­rope by their masters had successfully petitioned for their freedom in the 1780s. French authorities, however, w ­ ere far more interested in eliminating the presence of Blacks in France than in freeing slaves. Thus, the 1770s brought new regulations attempting to quarantine colonial slaves in dépôts on arriving in France with their Ca­rib­bean masters. Importantly, the 1777 law explic­itly banned “foreigners” from entering France with Blacks and imposed a fine for all violations. In addition, the law, which avoided the use of the word slave in order not to tread directly on free-­soil princi­ples, indicated that the servants covered by the law would retain the same status u ­ nder which they arrived, in essence trying to forestall freedom suits. This “­legal morass” still left enough ambiguity to allow some slaves to obtain their freedom by court petition. One way or another, the Jays’ owner­ship of Abbe lacked l­egal legitimacy. But no one seemed concerned with the ­legal details in Abbe’s case. She had ­violated American law and custom; Blacks w ­ ere to some extent illegal aliens ­under the law, and power­f ul whites wished to make sure that she understood that such transgressions would not be tolerated.41 Rather than wait for John Jay’s direction from ­England, indeed wanting not to trou­ble John with a prob­lem that could be solved locally, Benjamin Franklin intervened quickly to restore order. At Sally’s prompting, the eminent American diplomat contacted a police lieutenant, who went to the En­glish washer­woman’s residence, seized Abbe, and placed her in jail. Franklin had been in France long enough to know that technically Abbe potentially had a stronger l­egal position than her masters, but he was a prominent person who knew how to work the system far better than she.42 Abbe’s pique was no match for white p­ eople’s power, influence, and authority. Abbe’s white masters strug­gled to determine an appropriate outcome beyond the intimidation of imprisonment, believing that identifying the cause of her grievances should shape in some way a resolution to the predicament.

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Abbe’s resentments likely went deeper than an impulsive desire to vex her masters. She surely felt humiliated by her status as a slave among servants and had had enough of life far away from her American home. ­These motivations registered, albeit dimly, with the Jays. The attempt by John’s teenage nephew Peter Jay Munro to act as an emissary shed some light on Abbe’s state of mind, without suggesting a satisfactory way forward. His first visit to prison found Abbe defiant. The sixteen-­year-­old proposed that he play the role of peacemaker between his aunt and the slave, offering to ask Sally to let Abbe rejoin the h ­ ouse­hold. To this Abbe responded “that instead of desiring that, she would run-­a-­way again . . . ​& that she wd. remain where she was ‘till” John returned from ­England “or ‘till she might be sent to Amer­ i­ca instead of returning home to be laughed at & work too.” This answer, as filtered through Peter and Sally, indicated that Abbe understood that John Jay alone possessed the authority to address her situation. Moreover, her life in France had exposed her to humiliation; a white servant without such a deep connection to the ­family as she had occupied a higher status and commanded more re­spect than she did. She also told Peter Jay Munro that she “hop’d” Sally “was then Content” allowing herself to be “intirely govern’d by Louisson.” Subsequent attempts by Peter to broker a solution proved even more fruitless as they “increased her Ideas of her own importance,” and she became increasingly “sullen.”43 Abbe was tapping deeply into a reservoir of resentments. John and Sally Jay did not exhibit an inclination to peel back the layers of meaning b­ ehind Abbe’s actions; they assumed that a mea­sured approach to discipline would return her to the ­family and to her senses. From London, where John learned of Abbe’s revolt, he presumed that it “was not resolved upon in a sober moment” but was perhaps a product of drunken misjudgment. Other­wise, John wrote to Franklin’s grand­son, “I cannot conceive of a motive.” But, at least subconsciously, he did in fact conceive of a motive—­Abbe’s desire to be f­ ree. John noted, “I had promised to manumit her on our Return to Amer­i­ca, provided she behaved properly in the mean Time.” He had, in other words, already entered into a sort of negotiation with her, and what struck him as odd was the seemingly impulsive way in which she misplayed her far weaker hand. Jay presumed she would and should continue to endure her degradation calmly and that his authority would remain unquestioned.44 At some level, Abbe understood John more clearly than he understood her. ­After all, she insisted to Peter Jay Munro that she wished to deal directly with John. Perhaps she sensed from his promise of freedom in Amer­i­ca that he was on her side and was, in any case, the only one with the full authority to make her life better. In this she was not entirely wrong. For in John’s letter to William T ­ emple Franklin, he stated, “Amidst her Faults, she has several good Qual-

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ities, & I wish to see her happy and contented on [her] own account as well as our’s.” John hoped to mend the rift, and even ­after Abbe ran away, he did not take the offer of eventual manumission off the ­table. Indeed, Jay’s initial response was not especially vindictive, although it was certainly condescending in tone and blame-­shifting in its implications. His feeling was that “she should be punished, tho’ not vigorously.” His parting verdict on Abbe’s actions was “too much Indulgence & improper Com­pany have injured her—it is a Pity.” Sally reached a similarly self-­serving conclusion a­ fter Peter Jay Munro reported Abbe’s sarcastic refusal of amnesty, writing that being underworked had “been of ­g reat dis-­service to her.” Abbe’s servitude and the fact that she had been dragged overseas did not figure into Sally’s thinking.45 John and Sally agreed that leniency rather than hard work had triggered the slave’s recalcitrance, but their calculation of how much pressure should be applied to Abbe differed. John supported Benjamin Franklin’s recommendation that they simply ignore her imprisonment “for 15 or 20 days.” John assumed that if she was “separated from Wine and improper Com­pany” but given “all the Necessaries of Life,” she would in “Sobriety Solitude and want of Employment” become “more obedient to Reason.” Sally had her doubts from the start, writing John, “I’m so afraid of her suffering from the Cold,” and she dispatched their nephew to periodically check on Abbe’s well-­being.46 As it turned out, Sally’s fears w ­ ere well placed. Her male counter­parts’ counsel that they outwait Abbe’s alleged irrationality proved to be tragic. Abbe fell ill, prompting Sally Jay to have her brought home, thereby ending a confinement of dubious legality. Sally urgently contacted William ­Temple Franklin for his assistance in getting her out of jail. Even while writing in the formal third person, Sally’s fear for Abbe’s life was palpable. She wrote that her servant “is very ill & extremely desirous to return & Mrs. Jay fears a delay may be dangerous.” Wanting to put a braver face on ­matters to her husband, she drafted a letter to John the same day reporting that Abbe had “beg’d” to return and “as I fear’d she would not receive benefit from the society she had [in prison], I granted her request, & am glad to find her penitent & desirous to efface by her f­ uture Conduct the reproach her late misstep has merited.” Abbe prob­ably was scared and lonely, feelings that triggered an expression of regret. She also was very sick, with a cold so severe that Sally insisted that she stay in bed, with the “hope s­ he’ll recover in a week or two.”47 Instead of recovering, Abbe died. Abbe’s protest cost her life. In some sense, then, John’s puzzlement over why she would risk the freedom he meant to give her by ­running off was well placed. John wished her to be, in his phrase, “obedient to Reason” and therefore to wait patiently in subservience for the gift of liberty he intended to

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bestow. Sally wished her to remain loyal, attached to the ­family as Sally was attached to her, in a sort of familiar, mutual dependence. Master and mistress alike, however, underestimated the fullness of her desire for re­spect, her desire not to be mocked, and her need to have an outlet for emotions and rational goals that they expected her to suppress. On hearing the news of Abbe’s death, John focused far more on comforting his wife for her emotional trauma than on grieving the enslaved w ­ omen’s fatal trauma. To be sure, he “lament[ed] Abbys death” and remarked that “it would have given me ­great Plea­sure to have restored her in Health to our own Country.” But his paramount concern was for Sally. She had dealt not only with Abbe’s illness but also with the discomfort of their young ­daughters, recently inoculated against smallpox. He wished her to take “Consolation” in having done the right ­thing by bringing Abbe home and tending to her illness. Knowing “the Variety as well as Degree of Emotions which you have lately experienced . . . ​makes me extremely anxious to be with you,” he wrote. In the meantime, he urged her to remain calm and to reflect “that ­People passing thro’ this World are not to expect to have all the Way strewed with Roses.” “Let us,” he advised, “be grateful for Blessings & resigned to adverse Incidents.” No guilt, no remorse should cloud Sally’s thoughts about Abbe’s life. The dirt barely shoveled over a foreign grave, Sally should regard Abbe’s death as an “adverse Incident” put into a larger frame.48 For ­those serving the Jay ­house­hold, including the enslaved Benoit, Abbe’s death was something more daunting. Her passing was a genuinely frightening, deeply disorienting event. When Peter Jay Munro reported their response to John, the young man’s sneering and callousness exemplified how dif­fer­ent the ideas of justice and tragedy ­were for servants and masters living ­under the same roof. Peter wrote to his ­uncle that Abbe had “never kept the Servants in such awe as since her Death.” According to him, “her Friend Ben does not stir without a Candle,” calling out in French “C’est elle!” when hearing “the least noise.” A female servant (possibly Louisson) “was terribly frightened at seeing herself in the Glass”—to which Peter sniggered, “I think with reason.” When snow fell off the roof, t­ hese staff had to be convinced that a “Spirit” was not the cause. Peter went on that “nightly some ­thing happens which frightens them, and sets us a laughing.”49 The fear that Abbe’s ghost haunted the h ­ ouse­hold suggests a belief that Abbe’s death was unnatural. Her soul was literally restless, her time on earth cut short by events gone morally awry or at least before she had time to get her spiritual affairs in order. Benoit may have been trying subconsciously to communicate that someone in the h ­ ouse­hold, ­either Sally or the French servants, had wronged Abbe. Louisson, who had a tempestuous relationship with Abbe,

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may have expressed guilt through her reaction—­fearing the sight of her own image and sharing in Benoit’s broader fear of Abbe’s restless spirit. Another way of reading this reaction is that they saw in Abbe’s sad fate a reminder of their own vulnerability to a potentially lethal combination of their unchecked emotions, their master’s discipline, and plain bad luck. The servants’ reactions, which they did not attempt to keep secret from their masters, should not be dismissed as superstition without meaning. As Peter Jay Munro put it, Abbe exercised more power as a dead person than as a living one, a fact that a more mature person might have found sad rather than humorous.50

Homeward Bound John Jay did not believe in ghosts, nor was he one to ­favor gratuitous jokes, particularly regarding a subject as serious as death. The lawyer-­turned-­diplomat also did not like loose ends or unfinished business, and he thought himself a pious person committed to justice. Preparing to leave Eu­rope in 1784, Jay sought to wrap up his personal and financial affairs. Among Jay’s unfinished business was the f­ uture status of Benoit. Three months a­ fter Abbe’s death, John put in writing the terms that would define Benoit’s f­ uture. To what degree John and Benoit discussed the terms, w ­ hether Benoit initiated ­these discussions, or ­whether ­either of them understood the relevance of French law, Jay did not say. Master and slave would navigate their ­f uture through a l­egal bond—­the slave’s good be­hav­ior secured by a written promise of freedom in three years. Unlike his expressions of responsibility for his ­family’s aged and infirm slaves and former slaves back in New York, Jay did not claim to be acting ­toward Benoit out of benevolence for the weak. He was obligated, he wrote, to strike a deal with Benoit b­ ecause justice demanded that he restore the slave to his naturally f­ ree state once he had worked off his purchase price.51 Having lost control of Abbe, Jay constructed an orderly alternative—or so it seemed. Yet Benoit slipped out of the Jay archive silently, apparently not returning to the Amer­i­cas with the Jays. No one in the Jay entourage recorded a falling out or r­ unning away or a sale. His master, by contrast, came back to the United States with a sense of how slavery might be unwound over time—­ without the bloodshed or the compulsion of war—­but as a m ­ atter of morally sanctioned, legally binding contracts, rather than as a product of revolutionary po­liti­cal and social disorder.52 Matthew Ridley, an English-­born Mary­land merchant who socialized with the Jays in Paris, offered an astute observation about slavery and emancipation during this era of war­time upheaval. “Time,” Ridley wrote to Sally’s ­sister

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Kitty Livingston, “might reconcile you to the flight of the Slaves—­It is however painful reflection to a generous mind & o ­ ught never to have been introduced.” He then observed that eliminating slavery presented a particularly thorny prob­lem ­because “of all Reformations ­those are the most difficult to ripen when the Roots grow as it ­were in the pockets of Man.”53

C h a p te r 4

Nation-­Building

John Jay, president of the New-­York Manumission Society (NYMS) and US secretary of foreign affairs, found himself on the defensive. In a letter of May 1, 1788, British abolitionist Granville Sharp expressed dismay that the new US Constitution offered nothing better than postponement u ­ ntil 1808 of even the possibility of a slave trade ban. Sharp and his colleagues thought that “a consistincy of Character” would have produced something better. Jay responded that slavery survived “declarations on the subject of h ­ uman rights” b­ ecause “passions” took pre­ce­dence over “reason” and the practice had such deep roots. As for the stance of the Constitution, he offered a ­simple explanation: “local interests.” As Jay elaborated, “Several of the States conceived that restraint on slavery might be too rapid to consist with their par­tic­ul­ar circumstances; and the importance of ­union rendered it necessary that their wishes . . . ​be gratified.” The states, then, would be the crucial antislavery arena, but even their pro­g ress would be slow. Slaveholding and deep-­seated “prejudices” made “a sudden and total stop to this species of oppression” unlikely. Still, Jay offered up New York as an encouraging example. The state legislature had liberalized private manumission laws, white New Yorkers could no longer legally import or export slaves from the state, and slaves confiscated from loyalists during the Revolutionary War could claim their freedom. Jay and his colleagues hoped that the courts would soon operate on the assumption that all men “of what­ever 73

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colour” ­were ­free u ­ nless presented with countervailing evidence. He also claimed that most slaves already received “treatment” akin to “other servants.”1 Jay’s response—­a mix of glass-­half-­f ull optimism, accurate reporting, wishful thinking, and frank assessment—­illustrates the concentric circles in which Jay, as well as other founding brethren, operated with regard to slavery. Personal relationships with a­ ctual slaves and former slaves formed the core. The next circle encompassed regional conditions; beyond that, the found­ers considered—or avoided—­slavery as a ­matter of national policy and interest. National considerations ­were themselves nested in an international set of practices, conditions, and debates.2 The Jay–­Sharp exchange acknowledged all four of ­these circles. The two men valued an alliance between like-­minded Britons, Frenchmen, and Americans as a key to pro­g ress. Meanwhile, Jay offered up personal enlightenment—­the treatment and manumission of slaves—­and statewide ­legal initiatives as evidence that some Americans ­were ­doing their part. At the national level, however, Jay could offer up only excuses. During a crucial de­cade of ser­vice to his rapidly transforming country, John Jay’s actions regarding slavery crossed personal, regional, national, and international spheres. John Jay publicly embraced vital antislavery princi­ples in regional and international spaces—­positions not without po­liti­cal risk—­while giving himself significant leeway in his conduct as a slaveholder and an apologist for the proslavery Constitution. His roots in the mid-­Atlantic milieu afforded him a psychological freedom quite dif­fer­ent from some of his founding contemporaries, allowing Jay to make a significant, albeit problematic, imprint on the ­future of Black emancipation during this period.3 The secretary for foreign affairs, the chief justice, and the nation’s indispensable diplomat was an abolitionist, if not a consistently courageous or self-­sacrificing one: John Jay’s approach to slavery during this period was not all of a piece. He found ways to oppose slavery and to ignore it, to conduct himself meanly and magnanimously, without ever doubting that the developing society in which he took a leading role would be better off without slavery and without the misguidance of prejudice.4

Organ­izing Landing with Sally and their two ­daughters in New York City on July 24, 1784, John re­united with a Jay ­family itself relocating to the familiar ground of Rye and New York City. He leveraged his new position as the Continental Congress’s foreign affairs secretary to lobby that New York City, the place where he had already planned to ­settle, serve as the nation’s capital for the next sev-

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eral years. The city at the southern end of Manhattan to which the Jays returned was in the midst of a dramatic expansion in population and commercial opportunity. Although 1790 would be the last year that New York would serve as the capital of the nation, the city recovered from the war­time disruption and overcame lingering hostility from former British loyalists to claim a central role in the nation’s economic life.5 The secretary for foreign affairs and his wife assembled a large h ­ ouse­hold in a newly built home on Broadway. The 1790 census rec­ords a ­house­hold of seventeen, including five enslaved ­people. Clarinda, sold when John’s ­father was still alive, was likely repurchased as some point ­after Jay’s return from Eu­ rope to become a member of the New York ­house­hold. Enslaved ­people secured the Jay’s comfortable well-­being and helped them to entertain the city’s elite. The Jays ­were hardly unusual as a slaveholding ­house­hold in the city: more than one-­quarter of merchant h ­ ouse­holds held slaves, and slaveholding correlated with wealth. Owning slaves remained an integral part of life in the extended Jay f­amily as well. His elder ­brother Peter held nine slaves at the Rye estate who passed to him in their ­father’s ­will. His ­sister Anna, his ­brother Frederick, and their nephew Peter Jay Munro all owned enslaved ­people.6 ­After returning to the United States, Joh Jay continued to feel a sense of obligation ­toward certain vulnerable p­ eople associated with the f­amily network. His account book refers to payments made and moneys “laid out for old negroes.” Old Plato and Zilpha had both been manumitted by John’s f­ ather as the f­ amily attempted to cope with war­time financial difficulties. T ­ hose for which Jay took a financial responsibility may not have found stable residences; Jay recorded payments to his ­brother Peter and to Eliza Gedney for boarding and l­ater looking ­after the health of an ailing Moll. In 1786, Jay paid a G. Van Gelder for expenses related to Plato and Zilpha and in 1790 made a payment to Primus, perhaps a ­free Black man, “for boarding Old Plat.” In Old Plato’s case, responsibility extended beyond the end of his life, as Jay’s account book in late 1791 and early 1792 rec­ords payments for the former slave’s coffin, for “Liquors at his Funeral,” and for the gravedigger. Although the expenses incurred by Old Plato’s burial w ­ ere not large, John made good on the assurance he had expressed from France that he would look ­after the slave in reward for loyal ser­vice to his ­father. Supporting el­derly or incapacitated slaves involved other members of the ­family as well. John paid his ­brother Frederick, now living in New York, ₤30 for supporting Mary, likely in accordance with their ­father’s ­will. Their ­brother Peter received payments in 1789, 1790, and 1791 for the board of their deceased ­father’s slave Susan. ­There is no reason to believe that the quality of life for

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Plato, Moll, Zilpha, Mary, and Susan was pleasant; the payments suggest that they ­were in poor health. John’s obligation to them meshed with his obligation to his ­brothers to share in the financial support of slaves and former slaves, rather than abandoning them to an even unhappier fate.7 Jay believed in keeping ­those he deemed loyal in his orbit. Parts of the country that John Jay came back to in the mid-1780s had taken more systematic steps to phase out slavery than reflected in his paternalism and personal manumission plans for Benoit. By 1784, Quaker activism and revolutionary libertarian ideology working in informal concert had even produced concrete results. Two New ­England states, Connecticut and Rhode Island, passed gradual abolition statutes in that year, which like Pennsylvania’s 1780 law, offered freedom to the ­children of female slaves on reaching a prescribed adult age. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society renewed its operation ­after a war­time hiatus. The previous year, the chief justice of Mas­sa­chu­setts’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled that slavery contradicted the princi­ples of the state’s new constitution, and Mary­land banned slave imports, following ­Virginia’s war­time lead. In 1782, ­Virginia passed a law legalizing private manumissions of adult slaves.8 Six months ­after his return to Amer­ic­ a, Jay joined the newly formed New-­ York Manumission Society at its second meeting, held in February 1785, and immediately accepted a leadership role. Quaker antislavery leaders understood that a broader campaign against slavery in New York would have to draw support from prominent non-­Quakers. The sect’s commitment to pacifism and neutrality during the Revolutionary War had alienated many of their neighbors. The new society drew leading po­liti­cal Manhattan figures such as Alexander Hamilton, Melancton Smith, and Alexander McDougall. William Livingston, from New Jersey but with strong New York City ties, also became a member. The society installed Jay as chairman of the 1785 meeting at which the group formally a­ dopted its rules; by the next meeting, Jay would assume the title of president, thus lending his prestige and his expertise to the cause. Two years l­ater, in 1787, Franklin—­then an el­derly man of dwindling energies but still of g­ reat fame—­became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Jay, almost four de­cades Franklin’s ju­nior, was very much in the prime of his personal and public life and was not a mere figurehead.9 He would not only offer significant benefits to the organ­ization but also incur meaningful costs to himself through his association with the society. The NYMS’s organ­izing princi­ples ­were consistent with the critique of slavery Jay had articulated in his 1780 letter to Egbert Benson and in Benoit’s manumission document. The preamble to its rules stated the princi­ple that “as ­free Citizens and Christians” members had an obligation not only to show

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“Compassion” t­oward slaves suffering “Injustice” but also must “endeavour, by lawful ways and means, to enable them to Share, equally with us, in that civil and religious Liberty with which an indulgent Providence has blessed ­these States; and to which ­these, our Brethren are, by nature, as much entitled as ourselves.” Black freedom and national liberty w ­ ere two sides of the same coin. In a March 24 letter to Pennsylvania po­liti­cal activist and abolitionist Dr.  Benjamin Rush, Jay expressed himself in similar terms, anticipating shortly “the Time . . . ​when all our Inhabitants of e­ very Color and Denomination s­ hall be ­free, and equal partakers of our po­liti­cal Liberty.” With freedom from bondage came full citizenship. Such a vision of antislavery thus transcended the practice of personal benevolence and fell in line with the development of a republican nation.10 Jay believed that the work of the NYMS promoted divinely sanctioned equality. In a draft passage of an October 10, 1786, letter to the society’s trea­ surer, the Quaker John Murray Jr., that Jay subsequently deleted, he wrote, “What acts of public or private Justice and Philanthropy, can occasion more pleasing Emotions . . . ​than such, as tend to restore the oppressed to their natu­ ral Rights”; he further noted that slavery forced ­people to ­labor “at the plea­ sure of Persons, who ­were not created more ­free, more rational, more immortal, nor with more extensive Rights and Privileges than they ­were!” Although he kept t­hese par­tic­u­lar thoughts to himself, the contrast with the con­temporary reflections of Thomas Jefferson is dramatic. In Notes on the State of ­Virginia, completed in 1785, Jefferson clothed his antislavery expressions in forebodings of an apocalyptic race war. For the New Yorker, God’s endorsement of racial justice promised a much more redemptive trajectory.11 Egalitarian and libertarian visions notwithstanding, the NYMS also gave voice to a paternalism with which Jay would have felt at ease. What­ever they might become, a­ ctual slaves, in the society’s view, w ­ ere weak and needed o ­ thers to speak for them. Thus, in the same founding document, NYMS proclaimed itself ready to protect and speak for the slave “Destitute of Friends and of knowledge, struggling with Poverty and accustomed to submission.” Piety made it easier not only to accept slaveholders as members but also to elevate a slaveholding John Jay to the presidency of the organ­ization. Indeed, the Society bent over backwards to accommodate its slaveholding members like Jay, declining to adopt a timetable for manumission supported by Alexander Hamilton. Change would take time and advocates with power. The NYMS placed ­g reat faith in the good intentions and honesty of its slaveholding members.12 Despite the prominence of some of its members, Jay and the Manumission Society faced stiff re­sis­tance to even initiating the pro­cess of gradual abolition, let alone equal citizenship. A 1786 census recorded more than 18,000

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slaves in the state. The 1785 rebuff of a Pennsylvania-­style gradual emancipation bill that would have started the pro­cess of freeing the ­children of slave ­mothers, while obligating t­ hose same ­children to more than two de­cades of ser­vice to their m ­ others’ masters, revealed how much work the NYMS had still to do. Although it petitioned the New York legislature on the bill’s behalf, racism and proslavery legislative muscle prevailed.13 Assemblymen in the lower ­house attempted to throw up roadblocks by proposing bans on Black office holding and voting, severe limitations on Black jury ser­vice and court testimony, and stiff fines on both parties to a marriage between a Black and white person. The prohibition of African American voting rights stayed in the final bill, triggering a veto by the Council of Revision, which included Jay’s old friend and ­future rival Robert R. Livingston. Support for gradual abolition proved remarkably thin in the end, with a core of proslavery legislators from Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Ulster County gaining additional support from around the state to kill the bill entirely. The 1785 legislative session, however, was not a total loss for abolitionists. The legislature banned the importation of slaves, not only internationally but also from other states; substantial fines w ­ ere authorized for violating this statue and enslaved ­people transported to New York illegally received their freedom. The legislature also somewhat liberalized rules governing private manumission, removing the colonial-­era indemnity that former ­owners had to pay to local officials to guarantee that a freed person would not become a public charge. This indemnity had made private manumissions extremely rare. The new rules specified that a freed slave must be younger than fifty years old and that local officials certify the potential self-­sufficiency of the newly ­free person. New York’s lawmakers w ­ ere crawling, not marching, t­ oward the goal of translating revolutionary princi­ples into antislavery laws.14 Jay put an optimistic face on the gradual emancipation bill’s failure. Challenged in a letter from antislavery En­glish dissenting minister and writer Richard Price to explain why all Americans did not embrace a gradual program of Black liberation, Jay defended his country with philosophical realism. He conceded that the continued practice of slavery is “very inconsistant,” but such injustice was to be expected in a world where “the Wise and the Good never form the Majority” in their strug­gle against “­union of the wicked & the weak.” As if steeling himself for a prolonged strug­gle, Jay opined, “All that the best Men can do is to persevere in ­doing their Duty to their Country . . . ​being neither elated by Success however g­ reat nor discouraged by Disappointments however frequent or mortifying.” Difficult, potentially frustrating work lay ahead.15 Jay and his fellow NYMS members defended the rights of Blacks legally entitled to or already enjoying the status of a ­free person. A letter Jay received in

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February 1786 from South Carolina Quaker Richard Lushington illustrated why the NYMS deemed it crucial that New York pass a law against exporting slaves out of the state. Hearing that Jay was “a friend to the distress’d of whatsoever colour” who are in “bondage,” Lushington informed Jay that a f­ree Black man named George Morris from New York had been put up for sale in Charleston to the “highest bidder.” Lushington believed that Morris had been kidnapped. He also urged action more generally against “so villainous a practice.”16 Jay affirmed Lushington’s antislavery princi­ples and acted on the Quaker’s concerns by forwarding the case to the NYMS. An excerpt of Lushington’s letter found its way into the pages of one of the city’s newspapers. The story put New Yorkers, kidnappers and other­wise, on notice. The New-­York Packet stated that, even before the letter arrived, “some gentlemen . . . ​investigated the ­matter” and induced the authorities to make two arrests. “­There is no doubt,” read the commentary, “but such miscreants, as have been accessary to this violation of the laws of God and the laws of man, ­will shortly meet with their just deserts” and expressed the hope that the public would mobilize to combat this widespread kidnapping prob­lem. For his part, Jay confirmed to Lushington that he had correctly identified a kindred spirit and ally, not just on behalf of the kidnapped but also of enslaved Blacks more generally. “It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished,” wrote Jay. “The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity . . . ​loudly call upon them to emancipate t­ hese unhappy ­people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to o ­ thers, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.”17 Unlike his Quaker allies, however, Jay and some of his NYMS colleagues continued to act in just such an inconsistent manner. During Jay’s tenure as president, the NYMS moved forward to curtail the previously almost absolute prerogatives of slaveowners. The NYMS also worked to convince the state legislature to ban the exportation of slaves out of state. As a 1786 petition—­signed by Jay, vari­ous Livingstons, including brother-­in-­law Brockholst, and many other prominent men—­stated, selling slaves out of state was a moral outrage. Such slaves ­were treated “like ­Cattle, and other articles of Commerce.” The practice broke apart families and exposed ­free Blacks to kidnapping. The petition labeled exportation as “a Commerce so repugnant to Humanity and so Inconsistent with the Liberality and justice which should distinguish a ­free and enlightened ­People.” Coupling the previous ban on importation with a ban on commercial exportation of slaves would limit the property rights of slaveholders, including ­those in the Manumission Society. A ban on exportation also would give slaves and their allies more leverage to sue for freedom when such laws w ­ ere inevitably v­ iolated. In 1788, the NYMS achieved its goal. The £100 fine for violating

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the new export provision fell not on masters but on buyers, “­factor[s],” and “agent[s]” facilitating such trades, thus protecting slaveholders. The provision, moreover, was part of a law reaffirming the domestic slave code that kept in place most other colonial-­era features of bondage.18 Shortly ­after the slave export ban became law, Jay again pursued the issue of illegal enslavement. Jay informed his NYMS colleagues of the need to intervene in the case of two ­people likely to have been wrongly transported to the French island of Martinique: he hoped that contacting the French governor ­there would resolve ­matters, especially if NYMS contacts in Georgia or South Carolina could be found to take responsibility for the returned parties. Jay and two prominent non-­Quaker po­liti­cal allies in the Manumission Society—­ Alexander Hamilton and Egbert Benson—­also ­were appointed in May 1788 as an ad hoc committee charged with formulating a policy on ­whether Blacks entitled to their freedom u ­ nder a state law liberating slaves seized during the war by state authorities as part of confiscated loyalist estates should actually be given their freedom.19 During Jay’s tenure, the society also founded a school for Black c­ hildren, ­free and enslaved. By training a ­f uture generation of Black New Yorkers for productive lives, NYMS benefactors hoped to dispel prejudice. They also sought to extend the organ­ization’s supervisory influence over the morals and public deportment of Black residents of New York City more generally.20 Jay served on a committee designated to receive donations for the organ­ ization’s efforts and as its liaison to broader Atlantic antislavery networks. For this task, Jay, also the nation’s chief foreign affairs official informed prominent men abroad—­such as the pioneering British antislavery advocate Thomas Clarkson and the French champion of American in­de­pen­dence Marquis de Lafayette—­ that they ­were honorary members of the society. Such honors affirmed that the NYMS was engaged in a transatlantic cause of humanitarian significance, even as it worked to reduce the scope of domestic slavery in a single state. Thus, while acting locally, the organ­ization, according to the correspondence committee, viewed its mission in universal terms: “We see with plea­sure that the minds of Men are becoming daily more enlightened, and that a Liberality of sentiment begins to prevail, which ­will admit the Claims of Africans to a rank among rational Beings and to the natu­ral Rights of Mankind.”21 Black freedom, in fact, did become much less exceptional in post–­war New York. Runaways and t­ hose who claimed liberty in exchange for military ser­ vice added to the ranks of the ­free. The withdrawal of Quakers from slaveholding, the state legislature’s decision in 1786 to ­free slaves confiscated from British loyalists, the many slaves who w ­ ere manumitted to cut f­ amily costs during the war, and the decisions of a small number of slaveholders to reward

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good be­hav­ior or to act on libertarian princi­ples all contributed to the trend. Approximately one-­third—­more than a thousand ­people in total—of New York City’s substantial Black population w ­ ere ­free in 1790. One in five African Americans in Westchester County was ­free.22 The extended Jay ­family participated in ­these trends, alert to manumission’s moral and utilitarian possibilities. In New Jersey, Sally Jay’s f­ ather William Livingston apparently became so taken with the princi­ple of emancipation that he may have freed the last two of his slaves in the mid-1780s. Several years l­ater, Sally’s ­brother Brockholst took a more calculated tack, purchasing an adult slave named John Lott in 1795 with the agreement that he would manumit him seven years ­later or a year sooner in exchange for good be­hav­ior.23 John’s older ­sister, Anna Maricka Jay, who lived in Rye, also made manumission plans. On her death in 1791, she freed Hannah and any of Hannah’s ­children not already f­ree. She specified that her executors, who included John, “give to my servant Hannah” several items for her comfort: “one feather bed with a bolster and two pillows four strong sheets four pillow cases and four blankets and also ten pounds worth of new wearing apparel such as they may think most proper and purposefull.”24 ­These actions put Anna well ahead of her famous ­brother.

Managing Jay’s philanthropic work influenced how he thought about his responsibilities as secretary for foreign affairs during the Confederation period. In this job, Jay experienced firsthand the effects of the nation’s po­liti­cal dysfunction. He was working on behalf of a government whose Congress strug­gled to form a quorum, let alone to raise revenue to fund a military or even provide Jay with a proper staff. He represented a collection of states determined, it seemed, to act in their own narrowly conceived interests, rather than together in the national interest.25 Slavery, as it happened, posed an obstacle to achieving one of Secretary Jay’s most basic aims: seeing the 1783 treaty with Britain fully implemented. The British, American slaveholders asserted, had failed to honor Article 7’s prohibition against transporting formerly enslaved men, ­women, and c­ hildren out of the country. At first, Jay did not question the legitimacy of the slaveholders’ complaints. He dutifully attempted to demonstrate the dimensions of Britain’s infractions. He began the arduous pro­cess of assembling and disseminating the necessary documents, starting with a formal request to George Washington himself, now a private citizen, to supply Congress with the rec­ords the retired

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general had assembled. As time passed, however. the prob­lem looked very dif­ fer­ent to national officials like Jay and Ambassador to ­Great Britain John Adams than to state officials and the slaveholders’ points of view.26 Three days ­after Jay penned his private, near-­ecstatic thoughts on God’s approval of the NYMS mission to “raise” Blacks to their just equality, he issued a report to the Continental Congress that frankly critiqued the nation’s failure to implement key provisions of the 1783 peace treaty with G ­ reat Britain. His unsparing analy­sis of the United States’ responsibility for delaying the implementation of the 1783 Treaty of Paris detailed specific state laws and actions designed to thwart the rights of British creditors to collect debts and for Americans to launch forbidden reprisals against former British loyalists.27 ­Toward the end of Jay’s October 1786 report to the Continental Congress, he clipped the wings of the indignant notion that British violations of the treaty provision forbidding the seizing and carry­ing off of Americans slaves justified ongoing US violations. In the pro­cess, he made arguments about treating ­human beings as property that acknowledged African American liberty as a relevant consideration of international law and openly criticized color prejudice. His views on the treaty provisions relating to slavery that he himself had helped negotiate had evolved. At first, Jay conveyed that he took the ­matter of compensation seriously. “­There is no doubt,” wrote Jay, that the British failed to adhere to this part of the treaty. But he also insisted on analytical precision in assessing US grievances, in the pro­cess paring down their scope. The secretary asserted that ­there ­were “three classes” of Blacks to consider. The first category comprised slaves swept up in the course of the war “as booty.” The treaty did not apply to this group, ­because property seized during war­time as booty properly belonged to the “captors.” Two other groups of Blacks, however, Jay regarded as subject to the treaty’s jurisdiction, with their removal triggering legitimate American claims. Blacks living as slaves within British lines, but who ­were the property of Americans could not legally be evacuated without their o ­ wners’ consent. More importantly, Jay argued, Blacks who left their masters for British lines based on “proclamations and promises of freedom” remained the property of their American masters. The British, in evacuating this third group, v­ iolated the terms of the treaty. By Jay’s initial logic, only white British choices, not Black American agency, extinguished the status of Black p­ eople as white American property. If the British chose to make l­egal persons of the h ­ uman property forcibly seized as booty, they could; if slaves chose to avail themselves of the British promise of freedom, that choice, according to Jay, had no l­egal force ­under the treaty.28 Then Jay turned the ­tables. He had come to regard British actions with regard to the last two groups of evacuated slaves in a “less unfavourable” light,

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admitting that “higher motives” now led him “to say unpop­u­lar ­things” on this subject. Without drawing further attention to the fact, he placed antislavery princi­ples, developed as an officer in the Manumission Society, onto the scales of national policy. Imagine, Jay prompted his readers, a war in which France promised freedom to Americans held in captivity by Algiers. What, asked Jay, if France then returned ­those Americans to Algerian slavery ­after concluding a peace treaty? Jay wondered, “Is t­ here any other difference between” British actions and hy­po­thet­i­cal French actions “than this . . . ​that the American slaves at Algiers are white ­people, whereas the African slaves at New York w ­ ere black ­people?” In asking about skin color, Jay left no doubt as to his own answer.29 Jay called “cruelly perfidious” the notion of returning p­ eople who had relied on British promises of liberation “to the severities” of slavery. If they w ­ ere to be compensated for the loss of their slaves, Jay insisted that Americans abandon their self-­righteousness and retreat from the moral high ground. While admitting that Americans had a right to “full value,” he also insisted that a person’s freedom was priceless. The property claims of slave ­owners did not have the same moral standing as the quest for personal liberty. An accounting of monetary value did not render slavery any less cruel, and even if it w ­ ere pos­si­ble now to return t­ hese men and w ­ omen to their masters, that would not be right.30 Denouncing prejudice and inserting his antislavery princi­ples into the nation’s international affairs took some courage. Still, as a practical m ­ atter, Jay had left plenty of room for slavery to accommodate compromise.31 The law of slavery affirmatively written into state laws and international treaties still operated alongside the natu­ral law that ­limited slavery’s jurisdiction. ­Because such written law existed, Jay could defend a pared-­down version of compensation, he could still own and purchase slaves, and he could justify the participation of slaveholders like himself in an abolition society. For Jay, such compromises w ­ ere part and parcel of nation-­building.

Reconstituting The combination of Jay’s familiarity with the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation and the ­great esteem he enjoyed in Washington made him a key player in setting in motion dramatic revisions to the national governing structures. In urging his friend George Washington to write a new charter that would revive the country, the language of freedom almost inevitably suggested itself. T ­ here are “errors in our national Government, which . . . ​threaten to blast the Fruit we expected from our ‘Tree of Liberty,’ ” Jay wrote Washington

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in March 1786, and if “a general Convention” ­were to take place, General Washington should participate.32 New York politics, however, forestalled Jay from participating in the Philadelphia convention. Deep suspicion of the convention’s purposes held by leading New Yorkers, including Governor George Clinton, meant that the state sent a small del­e­ga­tion—­the nationalist Alexander Hamilton flanked by two men, Robert Yates and John Lansing—­jealous to preserve New York state’s ­f uture autonomy. The state senate thwarted Hamilton’s effort to have Jay join an enlarged del­e­ga­tion. Even so, the Philadelphia convention included like-­ minded nationalist colleagues—­not only his fellow NYMS member Hamilton but also Franklin. Jay’s father-­in-­law William Livingston was a member of the New Jersey del­e­ga­tion, and Jay’s po­liti­cal friend and ally Gouverneur Morris joined Pennsylvania’s slate.33 ­These w ­ ere men with whom Jay had worked, who shared Jay’s sensibility on slavery, and whom he trusted on the larger po­ liti­cal questions u ­ nder consideration. The Philadelphia convention was famously a closed-­door affair, the proceedings conducted out of public earshot and delegates tight-­lipped about what went on over the course of the summer. Jay and his NYMS colleagues briefly contemplated trying to nudge the convention “to promote the Attainment of the Objects of this Society.” In August, Jay and two other Manumission Society members drafted an antislavery statement, but the NYMS concluded that the convention “would not take up the Business” and de­cided not to send their memorial. They supposed, rightly and wrongly, that the convention would not concern itself with slavery and abolition. Slavery worked its way into the convention’s business repeatedly, but like the NYMS, delegates who harbored ­antislavery beliefs mostly pulled their punches.34 Jay’s support for writing and then ratifying the US Constitution thus placed him in tragic alliance with the interest of southern slaveholders. That was not his goal, but it was the result. Despite Gouverneur Morris’s efforts to denounce slavery during the proceedings, the convention secured the power of slaveholders and the ­future of slavery in a number of ways. The three-­fifths clause, which Morris strongly criticized to his fellow delegates, significantly enhanced southern repre­sen­ta­tion in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College. The decision to permit the international slave trade at least ­until 1808 meant that southerners could continue to add to this po­liti­cal advantage by violating “the most sacred laws of humanity” for another two de­cades. The final document obligated states that abolished slavery to return fugitives from slave states to bondage. In addition, it required all states to participate in the suppression of domestic insurrections, among which, it went unstated, might include slave rebellions.35

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To be sure, subsequent generations of abolitionists, including allies of John’s son William, found ways to read the Constitution using an antislavery lens. The framers studiously avoided the words slave and slavery, an indication of the desire not to sully a national charter many delegates hoped would endure long ­after slavery had dis­appeared. And the Constitution did not make slavery a national institution, but rather one confined to ­those states that chose to maintain their own slave codes. Just as Hamilton and Jay’s NYMS colleagues sought to weaken slavery in New York by limiting the institution to the state’s borders, perhaps slavery’s containment might be a first step ­toward elimination.36 Yet, in part to resolve sectional disputes caused by the diplomacy of Foreign Secretary John Jay, the Constitutional Convention incorporated an additional compromise that helped secured slavery’s southwestern expansion for the next two generations. To gain access to trade with Spain, Jay had ceded the right of US citizens to navigate the Mississippi River south of the Ohio River for thirty years. Southerners inside and outside the convention found such a concession unacceptable, ­because it restrained their plans to expand westward by taking advantage of the ­g reat aquatic highway. Evidence points to coordination between the convention and the Continental Congress to fix the prob­lem, with tremendous consequences for slavery’s ­future. Congress, meeting just ninety miles up the coast in New York City, enacted the Northwest Ordinance that same summer. Famously, the 1787 statue banned slavery in t­ hese territories north of the Ohio River. Yet slavery in the vast territory to the South was not regulated, and the ordinance included a fugitive slave clause protecting the recovery of southern slaves fleeing across the Ohio. Meanwhile, the draf­ters of the Constitution ensured that the Jay-­ Gardoqui Treaty would never go into effect by providing that the new US Senate had to approve treaties by a two-­thirds majority. Ensuring that the unpop­u­lar treaty with Spain would never go into effect thus played a vital role in cementing a slavery ban in one part of the country, while ensuring southern support for the Constitution and encouraging the South’s ability to expand slavery westward in the f­ uture.37 Jay, of course, had not intended such an outcome. Yet his w ­ holehearted support for ratification of the Constitution obliged him to accept the full package of compromises on slavery and sectional power that his colleagues had worked out in Philadelphia. In advocating for the US Constitution, Jay remained largely ­silent on slavery, even though some New York Antifederalists identified circumlocutions on the subject as a vulnerability. “A Countryman from Dutchess County” saw in the document’s elliptical language regarding slavery as “Cloaks . . . ​to cover” the framer’s “Wickedness.” In the famed Federalist Papers, written by Jay, Hamilton, and James Madison to secure ratification in New York, the two local

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men left it to the Virginian Madison to answer Antifederalist critiques of the Constitution’s approach to slavery. Madison, writing as Publius, alternately deployed opaque language, complex rationalizations, and disingenuous optimism to defend the varying ways the proposed national charter incorporated slavery. In Jay’s more modest contributions to the Federalist Papers, he came closest to invoking slavery directly in Federalist No. 3, when he noted that a stronger nation would more successfully win “compensations” from international negotiating partners than a weak “confederacy,” perhaps a reference to Britain’s evacuation of slaves.38 Whereas the threat of po­liti­cal slavery had punctuated his revolutionary rhe­ toric a de­cade e­ arlier, Jay deployed the language of freedom-­preserving unity during the constitutional ratification debate. In his highly influential, anonymously published An Address to the P­ eople of the State of New-­York, On the Subject of the Constitution, Jay warned in 1787 that the “seeds of discord” threatened to “poison our gardens and our fields.” Wise men had done the best that could be expected in framing a new government; where they could not agree, ­these wise men reached compromise. Sounding an appeal that Lincoln would transform into poetry in the Gettysburg Address seventy-­five years l­ater, Jay wrote, “Let us also be mindful that the cause of freedom greatly depends on the use we make of the singular opportunities we enjoy . . . ​for if the event should prove, that the ­people of this country ­either cannot or ­will not govern themselves, who ­will hereafter be advocates” for republicanism. In making this argument, however, the freedom and self-­government of African Americans dropped from view.39 The job of Jay and his fellow Federalists at New York’s ratifying convention, held in Poughkeepsie between June 17 and July 26, 1788, was to overcome the still strong reservations about the Constitution. Technically, the charter could go into effect without New York, ­because a week ­after the convention opened, word came that New Hampshire became the requisite ninth state to ratify it. News of V ­ irginia’s ratification followed. Still, the growing and geo­g raph­i­cally pivotal New York State was essential to the ­future of the republic; the Constitution’s New York opponents committed to having their say. Slavery entered the debate in regard to congressional repre­sen­ta­tion. Melancton Smith, a Manumission Society member, regarded the three-­fifths clause as “absurd” and “utterly repugnant.” He also viewed the ratio of congressman to population as so inadequate that it paved the way ­toward “a government for slaves.” Hamilton, in contrast, not only defended the “spirit of accommodation” as essential to securing the ­union but also went further: he defended the three-­fifths clause, much as Madison had, as a way of ensuring that both property and p­ eople received repre­sen­ta­tion. New York, ­after all, qualified voters based on property holding. In the end, the list of proposed amendments

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that the convention drew up to make the ultimate decision to ratify more palatable included none that applied to the slavery-­related clauses, not even the three-­fifths clause.40 Jay and Hamilton had gotten their constitutional victory. En­glish abolitionist Granville Sharp’s 1788 rebuke to the NYMS over the Constitution showed that criticism could not be dismissed as opportunistic Antifederalist rhe­toric. As Sharp indicated, “The declarations of the American Congress so frequently repeated” during the war for in­de­pen­dence had led him to expect more. Meanwhile, as Sharp informed Jay and his colleagues, abolitionists in ­England continued to mobilize their petition drive to force the government t­ here to take action against the slave trade. The empire appeared to be outdoing its former North American colonies in hastening slavery’s demise. For his defense against Sharp’s jibes, Jay reached for an earthy, if ungainly, meta­phor. The American compared the pro­g ress of antislavery opinion to the leavening of bread, in which a small amount of yeast only slowly works its way through a vast quantity of meal. Antislavery men like Jay could only play the part of attentive bakers, vigilantly watching “the natu­ral operations of truth” without futilely trying to rush the pro­cess. Such imagery was at once optimistic and pessimistic. The bread was rising—or at least it would rise—­but only very slowly over an extended period. Even at the state level, pro­g ress would be gradual. For as Jay explained, so many “legislators . . . ​are proprietors of slaves” with deep-­seated “prejudices” that “a sudden and total stop to this species of oppression is not to be expected.”41 ­Whether he regarded himself as one of ­those afflicted by prejudice, he was a proprietor of slaves and knew well enough the very deliberate pace his own habits and comforts imposed on the pro­cess of manumission. In the waning months of the Confederation period, Jay actually protected the interests of slaveholders at the national and international level. While still serving as secretary for foreign affairs, Jay sided with Georgia on the m ­ atter of slaves r­ unning away to Spanish East Florida, where the possibilities for forging new lives as ­free ­people had drawn southern slaves from the time of the Revolutionary War. The Spanish governor t­ here caught the runaways but did not feel he had l­egal authorization to return them to their Georgia masters. Jay expressed to the Continental Congress his opinion that the United States should seek a treaty with Spain stating explic­itly that each country would return runaway slaves to the other; in the meantime, he indicated that he could write to Spain requesting that their colonial officials do so as a diplomatic courtesy. He also conveyed his views to both the Spanish ambassador and the US representative in Madrid. His stance indicated how l­ ittle he credited the intentions of fleeing African Americans in his analy­sis. In 1786, he had denied that US masters had any claim

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to slaves seized as war booty. In the pre­sent instance, slaves crossing to Spanish territory ­were advancing their own claims to freedom. Contrary to his previous arguments about the violation of rights entailed by the reenslavement of captured slaves, Jay called h ­ ere for putting p­ eople who took action to obtain their liberty back into bondage. In essence, Jay applied the logic of the new fugitive slave clause to the southern border.42 Jay’s understanding of governmental jurisdiction over slavery—­leaving the states f­ ree to protect the interest of property holders but limiting the national government’s ability to secure freedom—­served neither the interests of African Americans nor ­those of their white allies. At one level, by 1788 the Manumission Society’s effort to isolate slavery in New York through importation and exportation bans had succeeded in limiting the ­f uture scope of the institution in that state. In that same year, however, the ratification of a new national Constitution, with ­great effort by Jay and Hamilton, offered the promise of national unity and prosperity, while raising barriers to effective nationalist critiques of slavery. The implications of the compromise made in Philadelphia between regions and by antislavery Federalists with themselves would hamper the efforts of abolitionists for de­cades, indeed, for generations to come.43

Circulating With the creation of the new federal government structure, John Jay remained as committed as ever to public ser­vice. In 1789, President Washington selected Jay as the inaugural chief justice of the newly established US Supreme Court. This appointment prompted Jay to resign from the New-­York Manumission Society in 1789. It is not clear why he resigned from the organ­ization. As a new institution with an uncertain mandate, the Supreme Court and its role in law and politics w ­ ere not yet specified. Despite his belief that emancipation would remain a state, not a national, concern, he may have sought to preempt any assertion of judicial bias in cases that came before the Court involving slavery and abolition.44 Even though he had seen no such conflict of interest between presiding over the NYMS while overseeing the nation’s foreign relations and presiding over an antislavery society, perhaps Jay was acting with an abundance of prudence, as well as setting a pre­ce­dent for f­uture justices to clear the decks of advocacy commitments. He did not, however, divest himself of his slaves to guard against any conflict of interest created by his being a slaveholder. Indeed, access to slave l­ abor made some of the disruptions of his new position more palatable for the Jays, even as it complicated the lives of the enslaved.

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In May 1790, with the help of his nephew Peter Jay Munro, John acquired Peet from Morgan Lewis. Munro recommended and negotiated the deal for his ­uncle, having first to convince not only John but also his Aunt Sally Jay, who thought the price of ₤80 too high and expressed a preference for hiring a servant instead. John Jay fi­nally de­cided he wanted Peet for his personal ser­ vice when he rode cir­cuit as a federal trial judge. Jay viewed this travel as the most onerous and undesirable aspect of Supreme Court duty.45 Jay understood full well that Peet suffered personal hardships when traveling and that, as an enslaved person, Peet was embedded in networks of friendship and f­ amily at home. While riding cir­cuit in 1791, Jay forwarded detailed instructions to his son Peter Augustus, which highlighted the interconnections between vari­ous African Americans in the Jay ­family’s New York City orbit: Peet has written a Letter to Mr. King, which it seems is the name of a black man (Servant belonging to old Mr. Lewis, but who lives with his wife a ­free w ­ oman in Nassau Street). He requests me to enclose this Letter to you. He requests also that you ­will be so kind as to send it to King immediately by Yaff, or by Clarinda’s Husband Pompey, both of whom know where King lives. Direct the one whom you may send to tell King that Peet has written two Letters to him, but recd. no answer. Yaff and Clarinda ­were Jay ­family slaves who ­were familiar with King, a man enslaved by Peet’s former master with whom he anxiously sought to stay in touch. Jay may have felt a ­little guilty—or at least responsible—­for being the proximate cause of Peet’s difficulties in maintaining his ties to King. Thus, he instructed his adolescent son: “If neither Yaff nor Pompey can go, it would be good natured in you to leave this Letter at Mr. Lewis’s House.” But rather than betray ambivalence about their power to Peter Augustus, John turned his request into an occasion to instruct his son about the obligations that this hierarchy of masters and men conferred on the Jays: “Providence has placed t­ hese Persons in Stations below us. They are Servants, but they are Men; and Kindness to Inferiors more strongly indicates Magnanimity than Meanness.” This comment subtly substituted the language of class for the language of race, in the pro­cess communicating to his son that this inherently exploitive situation was an opportunity for rectitude. But, of course, Peet, Yaff, and King w ­ ere slaves, and slavery only widened the gulf of in­equality that separated John Jay and Peet.46 Her husband’s absence also drove home for Sally how reliant she was on her servants’ compliance. ­After the birth of William in 1789 and Sarah Louisa in 1792, John and Sally’s ­house­hold swelled to five ­children. The young and

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growing ­family no doubt added to the work of men and w ­ omen like Yaff, ­Maria, Essex, David, Benny, and Clarinda—­enslaved ­people who served the ­family during this era. Sally did not relish the role of managing the complex ­house­hold. In 1790, perhaps remembering the trou­ble that befell her Pa­ri­sian home when Abbe and the French servant w ­ oman Louissan feuded, Sally wrote to John in Boston: “A week has elapsed since your departure & the servants have not yet given one occasion for the smallest dissatisfaction.” In the spring of 1792, Sally, soon a­ fter the birth of Sarah Louisa, shared with John, who was again on cir­cuit in New ­England, a broader reflection: “Our domestic concerns have never been conducted with so much fa­cil­i­ty as at pre­ sent. Indeed, it is incredible how much our tranquility depends upon our servants.”47 But however vulnerable to disrupted tranquility that she felt, her slaves w ­ ere even more so. Clarinda acutely suffered the vagaries of slave life. Her husband Pompey was not the property of the Jays and so did not live with her. Clarinda nonetheless had at least two ­children. In late 1792, her youn­gest child died of the whooping cough that had broken out in the ­house­hold. The bacterially spread illness also struck the white Jay ­children but not fatally. Perhaps Clarinda’s child fell victim to poor nourishment, a drafty room, a feeble physical makeup, or just bad luck. Who consoled the grieving ­mother and how is also not something that the letters between the Jays allow us to know.48 The only trace that slavery left on Chief Justice Jay’s judicial writings suggest his understanding that the institution that continued to provide his ­family comfort was a troubling anomaly in a republican system. A philosophical aside in the 1793 case Chisholm v. Georgia registered his belief that African American bondage contradicted the fundamental precepts of the nation’s laws. The case itself concerned ­whether the Supreme Court had jurisdiction when a citizen of South Carolina sued the government of Georgia. In the chief justice’s view, when combined with the bedrock princi­ple of “equal liberty” and “equal justice,” the right of an individual to sue states before a national court became essential. The ­people ­were “sovereigns” without being “subjects,” a very dif­fer­ent situation from the “feudal ideas” of Eu­ro­pean jurisprudence in which sovereignty ultimately resided with the “prince.” Into this formulation of “sovereigns without subjects” Jay parenthetically dropped an exception—­“­unless the African slaves among us” could be labeled subjects. Slavery thus stood out as the exception that proved the rule. Black bondage was a feudal outcropping in a landscape of ­legal equality among citizens, a location where “justice without re­spect of persons” gave ground to the conditional “privileges” granted by princes to subjects. The experiences of Clarinda, Peet, and other slaves in his h ­ ouse­hold bore out the nature 49 and the costs of t­ hose privileges.

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Campaigning As Jay discovered the year before he wrote the Chisolm opinion, some of his fellow New Yorkers w ­ ere far from ready to accept the notion that slavery was an atavistic aristocratic privilege and viewed his prior antislavery work with the NYMS with suspicion. His po­liti­cal friends in New York convinced the Chief Justice to run for governor in 1792. They believed that a man of Jay’s stature could take down long-­time governor George Clinton. Clinton, a prominent Antifederalist during the ratification strug­gle, had a reputation as a po­liti­cal populist, and he drew his support from ordinary farmers and artisans.50 Despite his prestige and public ser­vice, Jay’s connections to the state’s large landholders made him vulnerable to being portrayed as an out-­of-­touch candidate who favored the interest of enslaved African Americans over common white p­ eople. Hudson Valley supporter John C. Dongan advised Jay months ahead of the election that his opponents “mislead the ignorant and unwary. . . . ​exaggerat[ing] and paint[ing] in the most lively colors” Jay’s role in the Manumission Society. Jay, rumor had it, would “rob ­every Dutchman of the property he possesses the most near his heart . . . ​his Slaves.” Moreover, Jay reputedly demanded that ­these same yeoman provide the ­children of slaves with an education that surpassed what was available to the farmers’ own c­ hildren. Dongan wanted Jay to tamp down such misrepre­sen­ta­tion and to soothe fears in the rural electorate.51 Although Jay’s response to Dongan noted that he had resigned from the NYMS when he became chief justice, he defended the princi­ples of the New York City organ­ization he once headed: “To promote by virtuous means the existence of the blessings of liberty, to protect a poor and friendless race of men, their wives and c­ hildren from the snares and vio­lence of men-­stealers, to provide instructions for ­children who . . . ​­will now become useful members of society.” ­These goals, insisted Jay, ­were “objects and cares of which no man has reason to be ashamed, and for which no man o ­ ught to be censured.” The NYMS did not advocate the expropriation of slave property but embraced Black freedom and advancement as worthy, indeed necessary, goals. Jay also affirmed the philosophical princi­ple under­lying such beliefs: “In my opinion, ­every man of e­ very color and description has a natu­ral right to freedom.” He did not make common cause with slaveholding voters by identifying himself as one of them, though he did concede that both “justice due to their master” and attention “to the ­actual state of society” meant that slavery’s end had to be “gradual.” ­After the fashion of the time and his own sense of propriety, Jay was standing for office, but not personally campaigning for it. He did not see any reason to gloss over such a moderate yet committed position on emancipation.52 He was not willing to back down from his princi­ples.

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The New-­York Journal, a New York City newspaper, exposed the ways in which Jay’s views on slavery and his elite standing weakened his candidacy. An ­imagined dialogue between two farmers, David and Abraham, in the heavi­ly Dutch Ulster County where slaveholding was common, probed the appeal of the Jay and Clinton candidacies, casting a shadow on each. David warned Abraham not to be deceived by Jay’s elite proponents: “You know” that Jay “is for making the negroes ­free . . . ​that they may mix their blood with white ­people’s blood, and so make the w ­ hole country bastards and out-­laws.” Unfazed, Abraham responded that ridding themselves of slaves might be for the better, ­because “negroes w ­ ere generally thieves, ­idiots and squanderers.” Then addressing the issue of elite support for emancipation, Abraham stated, “­Great folks, who puzzle their heads so much about our liberty, ­ought certainly to live better in the world than we farmers, who . . . ​­ought to work our farms ourselves.” Although the dialogue poked at both campaigns, it made the weaknesses of the Jayites more apparent. Clintonians might be attempting to stir up fears of immediate abolition and racial mixing out of all proportion to real­ ity, the dialogue suggested, but ­those fears existed and could make a difference at the polls.53 Jay’s talk of natu­ral rights and the f­ uture contributions of Blacks to society did not impress t­ hese characters, David and Abraham, concerned as they w ­ ere with race mixing and making a living. Given the razor-­thin margin of Clinton’s victory, anti-­Jay race-­baiting may well have helped turn the election. Five of the six counties with the largest proportion of African Americans supported Governor Clinton, four of t­ hese by more than 64 ­percent of the vote. Jay, by contrast, enjoyed substantial victories in counties containing smaller proportions of slaves, where pos­si­ble emancipation or race mixing posed less of a threat. Jay also carried Manhattan; despite a relatively high proportion of African Americans, slaveholders ­there often w ­ ere members of the mercantile class from which Jay drew heavy support, and the Manumission Society’s a­ ctual character was better known. The election turned in the end on the success of Clinton’s supporters contesting the ballots of pro-­Jay Otsego County based on procedural violations.54 Despite the gulf between Jay’s antislavery views and his continuing use of slave ­labor, his abolitionist goals had damaged his candidacy. In such a po­liti­cal and racial climate, abolitionism had a long way to go.

Compensating The chief justice longed for a more local post, but his allies in the Washington administration had other ideas. In the years since Jay’s failed attempt to

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become New York’s governor, partisan divisions had grown. The Jay–­Clinton divide was reflected at the national level by a growing partisan breach between Federalists, identified with the Washington administration’s Hamilton-­designed taxation and banking policies, and Republican dissenters with deep reservations about both the design and implementation of t­ hose policies. Foreign relations exacerbated this divide. The United States had a variety of grievances with Britain. T ­ hese included interference with US ships on the high seas, the impressment of American sailors into the British Navy, and the exclusion from the British West Indies of US merchant ships. Secretary of the Trea­sury Hamilton, nonetheless, wished to preserve a trading relationship, no m ­ atter how unequal, with the Atlantic’s most dynamic economy. He and Washington viewed war with Britain as ill-­conceived and dangerous. The Federalists, moreover, found Republican support of the French Revolution to be an appalling dalliance with potentially dangerous radicalism. ­There w ­ ere many issues to negotiate with the British, all with the one goal of achieving a secure peace. Washington and Hamilton viewed Jay as the ideal person to send to London, notwithstanding the fact that he already held a position in a separate branch of government. Jay would be finishing the work that he, Franklin, Adams, and Laurens pursued in the early 1780s and that Jay had then overseen as the chief foreign affairs officer during the confederation period. Republicans, for their part, took a dim view of the Jay mission. They considered him as far too pro-­English, as witnessed by his previous critiques of US treaty violations. Moreover, Jay’s appointment raised questions about the separation of powers; a treaty concluded by Jay, once ratified by the Senate, would carry the force of law—­the law that Jay as chief justice might then find himself interpreting. But Washington trusted Jay, who had much experience in high-­stakes diplomacy. Accompanying John ­were John Trumbull, serving as his administrative secretary, and Peet, the enslaved man who traveled with the chief justice on the cir­cuit. Eighteen-­year-­old Peter Augustus, recently graduated from Columbia (it was named King’s College when John had attended) joined the group as his ­father’s personal secretary. The party embarked aboard the Ohio on May 12, 1794, arriving in ­England early the next month.55 On the issue of compensation for African American Revolutionary War refugees as on most other issues during this vital diplomatic mission, Jay’s actions confirmed Republican suspicions. Indeed, in the conflict between antislavery princi­ples and treaty-­based property rights, Jay moved decisively ­toward the abolitionist side. In the second paragraph of a lengthy report to Secretary of State Edmund Randolph regarding negotiations, Jay indicated that “informal conversations” with the British went on “with g­ reat fairness.” But his counterpart Lord Grenville, as Jay detailed, had a strong case to make against

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compensation. In this view, the formerly enslaved p­ eople who ran to their lines during the Revolutionary War ­were no longer American property but rather British, and therefore no violation of the treaty had occurred. The British representative argued that slaves who came ­under the promise of liberty could not be handed over without making the treaty “Odious.” Seizing on this word, Jay deployed the language of the Somerset decision, in which Lord Mansfield had indicated that an “odious” interpretation of the law only applied when demanded by explicit positive law language. By implication, if the language of the treaty was ambiguous, a non-­odious interpretation inoffensive to the natu­ral law of freedom should apply. By ­those lights, Article 7 only promised that the British would not make any additional seizures of American property during the 1783 evacuation. Jay at first did not concede the point, presenting the arguments “which I once made to Congress on the Subject” as to why the British owed financial compensation in lieu of returning the ­people themselves. “On this point,” meaning compensation, “we could not agree,” Jay reported. Having claimed that he tried to uphold the American end of the argument, Jay dropped a small bombshell into his September 1794 report to the US secretary of state: “I confess” wrote Jay, that his British counterpart’s “Construction of that Article has made an impression upon my Mind, & induced me to suspect that my former opinion on that Head may not be well founded.” The British, Jay informed the Virginian Randolph, had it right; the Americans, including Jay himself, had it wrong. The British at the end of the war not only had rightly protected the natu­ral rights of the former slaves but they had also legitimately come into possession of the runaways. Therefore, demands for compensation had no force.56 Perhaps Jay intended to signal that t­here was ­little point in pushing the runaway slave compensation issue. Yet, the secretary of state’s strong negative reaction suggests that Jay had crossed a dangerous ideological and po­liti­cal line in giving so much credence to the logic of British antislavery. Indeed, Jay had done just that. In two separate letters in December 1794, the Virginian warned Jay against bowing to British arguments on the slave compensation issue. In a letter of December 3, Randolph wrote, “I am extremely afraid, that the reasoning about the negroes ­will not be satisfactory.”57 In a much longer commentary twelve days ­later, Randolph explained why he found Jay’s approach so displeasing. Significantly, Randolph not only rejected Grenville’s logic but also implicitly repudiated much of Jay’s original 1786 case that compensation constituted an appropriate compromise.

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From Randolph’s perspective, Jay had illustrated the danger to slaveholders of the slippery slope of applying any sort of freedom princi­ple to slaves—­ and for not thinking racially. According to the secretary of state, ­there was no reason that the rules for the return of property should be any dif­fer­ent when applied to ­human slaves than to other physical items that ­were carried off. If anything, it should be more obvious that “Negroes” belonged to Americans, ­because unlike other property, “they carried an infallible mark.” In other words, Black-­skinned ­people ­were manifestly American property. This remark distinguished Randolph’s guiding assumption from that of Jay, who in his 1786 report had stated his view that the former slave’s humanity was the crucial feature to consider in sorting out the compensation issue. Randolph was ready to fight Grenville’s—­and Jay’s—­Mansfieldian premise about slavery’s essential wrongness.58 According to Randolph, the mere fact that British law did not allow slavery on its home soil could not make it “odious”—­and therefore arguments that flowed from that assumption bore no weight. He briefly conceded that ­there might be a prob­lem if slaves had been given their liberty and then had it taken away. But no manumission, no grant of liberty, had ever occurred on American soil: “The War only presented the chance of liberation,” but he argued, the slaves held by the British had never ceased to be anything but runaway property. Although the exchange between Randolph and Jay was between one American slaveholder and another, Randolph did not address Jay in t­hese terms. The secretary of state perceived Jay as a diplomat who was all too soft on the issue of Black freedom, willingly conceding claims for monetary compensation by giving quarter to antislavery-­tinged British arguments. The secretary urged Jay to take his arguments seriously, in part for broadly po­liti­cal reasons, suggesting that the diplomat “be . . . ​sensible of the anxiety of many parts of the United States upon this subject.”59 Jay did not care for Randolph’s letter or his arguments. Jay’s antislavery beliefs made it easier for him to drop the slave evacuation issue from his agenda for pragmatic reasons. Although Jay did not say as much in his February 1795 reply, the Virginian’s views on the compensation issue and other aspects of the negotiation w ­ ere moot even before Randolph had written about them in December: Grenville and Jay had by mid-­November signed the treaty that would forever be known in this country as “Jay’s Treaty.” Still, Jay attempted to assuage Randolph, reminding him that a “Bargain” could only be struck by two willing parties. Jay found no common ground with Grenville on “the Negroes.” “Was that a good Reason for breaking up the negotiation?” he asked. Jay counseled that Randolph and, implicitly, other Americans consider the

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treaty in toto. Compensation came in the form of other clauses of the treaty favorable to the United States.60 Jay’s views on slavery and international law had advanced considerably since the 1780s. As a treaty negotiator in Paris, he supported the princi­ple that the British should not depart the United States with African Americans once held as slaves. As secretary for foreign affairs, he argued that escaping former slaves deserved their freedom and their former masters’ monetary compensation. Now, he regarded the arguments for compensation weak and not worth pursuing. En­glish ­legal assumptions about slavery’s moral stench w ­ ere, he believed, a more appropriate basis for international law than American racial prejudices.61 Jay’s encounters in E ­ ngland deepened his connections to British abolitionism, likely fortifying his conviction that compensation demands should not stand in the way of his negotiations. Shortly ­after his arrival in E ­ ngland, Jay dined with Samuel Hoare, the Quaker banker whose son, Samuel Hoare Jr., had been a founding member of or­ga­nized abolitionism among En­glish Quakers and between En­glish Quakers and non-­Quakers. Jay also made the friendly acquaintance of the prominent politician and conservative assailant of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke. W ­ hether Jay ever discussed slavery with ­these men we do not know. Yet the well-­informed Jay surely knew of Hoare’s and Burke’s connections to British antislavery; indeed, in 1788, Jay had extended an honorary membership in the NYMS to Hoare Jr.62 Jay also befriended William Wilberforce, Parliament’s g­ reat champion of the campaign to end the British slave trade. In January 1795, Wilberforce forwarded copies of a report on the Sierra Leone colonial proj­ect to Jay. If the American familiarized himself with the launching by British abolitionists of a ­free Black colony on the coast of West Africa, Jay may have found it ironic. Some of the very men and w ­ omen whose evacuation as freed p­ eople by the British to Nova Scotia had prompted American demands for compensation had by then moved to the Sierra Leone colony. A de­cade ­later, Wilberforce recalled “the plea­sure we derived from your Society.”63 Jay’s encounter with such prominent opponents of slavery could only have confirmed his own philosophical opposition to the institution. Even as Jay’s critique of proslavery beliefs gained conceptual clarity, he continued to be a slaveholder while in ­England. When he accompanied Jay to ­England, Peet left ­behind a wife, just as Abbe, a de­cade before, had left ­behind a husband.64 Moreover, Jay also once again ­violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the law of his host country: had Peet run away, he would have been in exactly in the same position as James Somerset, whose freedom Lord Mansfield established in a decision in which he declared slavery “odious.”

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Although Peet did not test authority or the law as Somerset famously did in 1772 and Abbe, more obscurely and tragically, had done in 1783, this American slave’s Eu­ro­pean sojourn nonetheless underscored how much overseas slavery could undermine a person’s happiness and dignity. In August 1794, John Jay wrote Sally that “Peet begins at times to wish himself Home again. The novelty is a good deal over.” But rather than dwell on Peet’s unhappiness, Jay sentimentalized the ­family bonds that he ­imagined lovingly enveloped both ­free and enslaved alike at their Manhattan home: “I wish we ­were all entering the Street Door and you and the ­Children and Servants ­running to meet us. God grant that his wish may be realized.”65 In this letter, the connection between Peet’s homesickness and slavery ran through John’s self-­image of benevolent patriarchy. Jay, however, did not completely compartmentalize his personal responsibilities from the international ­legal princi­ples governing Black freedom that he debated with Lord Grenville. In September 1794, the day a­ fter he admitted to Randolph that American slaveholders might not have any right to compensation for runaway slaves, Jay wrote to his nephew Peter Jay Munro, expressing his unshakable commitment to his parents’ former slave Old Mary. Like the former slaves in the treaty negotiations, Old Mary’s story stretched back to the war, when she was already an invalid. John instructed Munro on the ethical imperative, fearing that not all his ­family members could be trusted to discharge their duty to her. Jay wrote, “I am anxious to be informed on that Head; for if she should suffer I should be hurt and mortified.” Seizing the opportunity, as he did with his own ­children, to extend a moral lesson, Jay made the point that “the Claims of Humanity however must always be primary objects of attention.” Old Mary’s claim was not an abstract one: “She has been so good to my F ­ ather and ­Mother, and to their c­ hildren. & for so long a course of years been a faithful ready and affectionate servant, that in my opinion she has” put “us all ­under obligations which her subsequent faults and Errors can never cancel.” He instructed Munro to pay for “what­ever her necessities may require”—­and to charge his u ­ ncle for the expenses incurred.66 Clearly Jay wanted to think of the master–­slave relationship, at least in his ­house­hold, as ah ­ uman one governed by ethical rules as opposed to mere property rights. As long as the Jays owned slaves, such expressions of faithfulness and ­family unity necessarily ran afoul of the ­will of slaves and the authority of masters. The Jay h ­ ouse­hold in New York was not, in fact, happy and obedient. A young slave named Plato became so disruptive that Sally Jay resolved to bind him out to another New York City f­ amily for six years at a rate of ₤5 per year, with the Jays having an option to take him back if his new employers no longer wanted him. Sally’s ­handling of the Plato situation won the approval of her ­family

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members then in London. Writing to his m ­ other from E ­ ngland, Peter Augustus Jay, beginning to imagine himself in the role of an adult head of ­house­hold and therefore as a master, approved: “Among our domestic concerns, I think the removal of Plato from the ­family a most happy event. He wd. have become more & more troublesome as he increased in ability for mischief.” And to his ­sister he wrote of the young Plato, “That he should have given Mama much trou­ble does not surprise me, I only won­der how she obtained so good terms as t­ hose on which she parted with him.” Two weeks ­later, John added his own words of sympathy and approval.67 Disruptive slaves ­were not to be tolerated, though a reassignment of his ser­vice to where he had worked before was, all t­ hings considered, fairly mild punishment. At any rate, John, Sally, and Peter Augustus concurred that, absent obedience, they should secure compensation and the harmony of the ­house­hold. Even for the loyal slave, petty indignities could not be avoided—­perhaps more so abroad than at home. Like Abbe in Paris, Peet became the object of scorn from a locally hired white servant. It turned out that the Black American slave had wanted to see the lions h ­ oused at the Tower of London “& complained exceedingly of his having too ­little time” to do so. William, a white servant, played on Peet’s credulity by concocting a story that the lions ­were washed each month at London Bridge: “This was told with so grave a countenance that Pete believed e­ very word. . . . ​But being sadly laughed at by a person he met & to whom he imported the object of his journey, he returned so much displeased & mortified,” reported Peter Augustus to his s­ ister Nancy, who added, “& he is still . . . ​tormented by the other Servants of the ­house.” No won­der that, as John noted from London the following spring, “Peet prefers New York to London, & is anxious to be at home again.”68 The public prob­ lems and personal paradoxes of slavery would travel back with the Jays across the Atlantic.

Debating Postponing his return from ­England so he could sail on calmer springtime seas, Jay arrived home on May 28, 1795. He returned in time to be buffeted by po­ liti­cal crosswinds that landed him in a new position of power but made him the subject of partisan invective (see figure 3). Prior to his return, Jay’s Federalist po­liti­cal friends in New York, with his approval, mobilized voters to elect him governor over Robert Yates, Republican incumbent George Clinton having declined to run again. Jay exchanged national office for a state one, his latest in an unbroken chain of impor­tant po­liti­cal positions.69

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Figure 3.  John Jay. Raphaelle and Rembrandt Peale. C. 1795. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Mary­land Historical Society, Item ID #1857.2.4

Opponents of the treaty ­were not deferential to any of his high offices. They viewed the treaty Jay negotiated as having sold out Amer­i­ca’s interests by accepting an insulting subordination to British power. The terms governing trade between the m ­ other country and its former colonies ­were unequal, they asserted, and the British did not give way on respecting US ships on the high seas and honoring US neutrality. Jay had headed off war, secured British withdrawal from frontier posts, clarified some outstanding border questions, and bargained for US merchants to gain ­limited access to the British West Indies and increased access to the East Indies, but from the perspective of prideful anti-­British and pro-­French Republicans, that was hardly enough. For his alleged

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betrayal, Jay was mocked in poetry and his effigy burned in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Public protests w ­ ere common in vari­ous cities; in New York, Alexander Hamilton even received a blow to the head as he prepared to deliver public remarks in defense of the treaty. Jay’s failure to secure any compensation for the evacuated former slaves did not help his cause.70 The treaty’s detractors in New York made clear that silence on slave compensation was a national affront. Jay’s former friend and now rival Robert R. Livingston, writing as “Cato” in New York City’s Argus, took aim at this alleged betrayal of American interests in the second and third installment of his anti-­ treaty essays. Without any trace of irony, Cato complained at length about the denial of “the personal liberty of our citizens” through the practice of British impressment of American sailors, while also taking Jay to task for failing to obtain compensation for slaves whose freedom the British helped secure at the end of the Revolutionary War. Calculating a British debt on this score of ₤1.7 million, Livingston noted, “What makes this omission the more extraordinary” was the extensive documentation that Jay had at his disposal (and which, he might have added, Jay originally helped compile) and the fact that Amer­ic­ a had for so long sought redress. A commentary on the treaty by Decius, appearing in the same Republican newspaper, reviewed the history of the British evacuation of former slaves and hoped-­for compensation before complaining, “Yet this compensation . . . ​is formally abandoned in a manner as direct, unequivocal, and avowed, as that in which the infraction was committed, and that too in a moment when all Amer­i­ca believed that Mr. Jay was sent to demand justice for this, among other grievances.” Cato and Decius each cited Jefferson as an authority on the right, now forsaken, of Americans to compensation.71 Jay left it to o ­ thers to defend his diplomacy publicly. He found the popu­lar and partisan melee distasteful. Alexander Hamilton, who resigned from the cabinet in early 1795, had no such qualms.72 When Hamilton, the treaty’s most vociferous advocate, turned to the issue of compensation, he embraced the same Mansfield-­inspired antislavery logic that Jay had himself echoed when describing why he had yielded the point. Writing a series of newspaper essays ­under the pseudonyms Camillus and Philo Camillus. Hamilton asserted that depriving former slaves of their freedom was a far greater moral offense than enticing slaves away from their masters. The African Americans who escaped to within British lines did so on the promise of freedom and then actually received their freedom. Echoing the Somerset decision’s and Lord Grenville’s opposition to reenslavement, Hamilton stated that, once being ­free, “to fall again ­under the yoke of their masters and into slavery is as odious and immoral a ­thing as can be conceived.” As a result, Hamilton claimed, “The general interests of humanity conspire with the

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obligations which G ­ reat Britain had contracted t­ owards the Negroes to repel” a “construction of the Treaty” implying the reenslavement of ­free p­ eople when an alternative interpretation was available. Hamilton also emphasized the practicality of Jay’s original decision to drop the issue of compensation. Camillus asked confrontationally, “Is t­ here anyone who ­will be rash enough to affirm that he [Jay] ­ought to have broken off the negotiation on account of the difficulty about the negroes? Yes! ­there are men who are thus inconsiderate and intemperate! But w ­ ill a sober reflecting ­people ratify their sentence?”73 Hamilton articulated an unabashed, natu­ral rights antislavery argument in defense of the Jay Treaty. Hamilton was sincere in ­these beliefs. But he also viewed ­these antislavery arguments as po­liti­cally persuasive, at least to a New York audience. Slavery, he sensed perhaps, was losing some of its grip on the po­liti­cal imagination of some northerners.74 George Washington, who signed and supported the implementation of the treaty, had a dif­fer­ent perspective on the politics of slavery. Continuing southern po­liti­cal resentments over implementation of the treaty cemented Washington’s decision to wait ­until he was no longer president to proceed further with private emancipation plans that he had begun to secretly contemplate.75 The politics of slavery refracted in dif­fer­ent ways through dif­fer­ent lenses—­ personal, regional, national, and international. Nation-­building sometimes produced almost paralyzing caution. But for New York’s new governor, John Jay, who for years had regarded slavery as philosophically indefensible, the path forward—­despite personal and partisan pitfalls—­was more clearly lit than ever.76

C h a p te r 5

Mastering Paradox

“Is not ­every one that keeps slaves that are Negroes continually stealing?” This pointed query, appearing in a letter of March 8, 1796, deliberately crossed lines. The writer was in his early twenties; the recipient was fifty. The questioner was a tradesman, the person being asked a statesman. The author was Black, the reader white—­and a slaveholder. For ­these and other reasons, the question could not have been more pertinent. William Hamilton did not write Governor John Jay frivolously or forlornly.1 That January, the New York state legislature had, for the first time in several years, considered a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery. The New-­York Manumission Society renewed its commitment to advocating for such legislation while, in cooperation with New York City’s African American population, also pursued actions on behalf of men and ­women enslaved in violation of the state’s postwar laws regulating bondage. The governor himself was no ordinary slaveholder and no ordinary politician. Jay had participated in the founding of the Manumission Society, an organ­ization that other Jay f­ amily members supported. While holding some of the highest offices in the new nation, John Jay challenged the interests of slaveholders. His moral critique of slavery had begun, however haltingly, to translate into action. Or, at least, so William Hamilton hoped. The dispatch began with overwrought courteousness—­“Be pleased to ­pardon my presumption in presuming to take the liberty of thus writing to you”—­while echoing the sentimental expressions favored by white newspaper 10 2

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editors who included antislavery poetry in their pages. Near the beginning of the letter, Hamilton wrote, “I cannot help shedding a s­ ilent tear at the miserable misfortunes” of the enslaved. L ­ ater, he turned to verse to place his stern accusation of theft in a philosophical light, quoting British poet William Cowper: Is ­there as ye sometimes tell us Is ­there one who reigns on high Does he bid them buy & sell us Speaking from the throne [in] the sky. The young man’s statement—­“how falsely & contradictory do the Americans speak when this land[,] a land of Liberty & equality . . . ​abounds with slavery & oppression”—­might have resonated with Jay, who fifteen years e­ arlier had remarked on slaveholding Amer­ic­ a’s “impious prayers” for liberty. But Hamilton had not written Governor Jay to berate him. He sought the governor’s help based, presumably, on Jay’s antislavery reputation. Explained the correspondent, “The Intent on my writing you was this: to know ­whether ­there can be no mea­sures taken for the recovery of the objects of pity?” That Jay would “plead the cause of the poor & needy” was not an unrealistic wish. Still, Hamilton pressed Jay hard. The letter made no concessions to slave owner­ ship or prejudice, placing all sympathetic and moral weight on the slave’s side of the scale. Jay may not have written Hamilton back.2 But in an impor­tant sense, Jay’s public events and private actions over the next several years constituted his answer. That answer was filled with contradictions—­self-­interest jostling with princi­ples, public policy with po­liti­cal caution, habit with education, kindness with callousness. Although his ongoing commerce as a slaveholder in the stolen lives of ­others continued, Governor John Jay presided over a state shifting from a regime of permanent inheritable slavery to one of gradual but inexorable emancipation.3 John Jay, during his governorship and subsequent retirement from public office, preferred not to take his antislavery cues from African Americans. But during the last de­cade of the eigh­teenth ­century and the first de­cade of the nineteenth ­century, other members of the Jay ­family absorbed and even acted on ideas about freedom not unlike Hamilton’s. In 1796, William Hamilton had taken aim at a realistic target, anticipating something of the dawning age.

Governing the ­Family John Jay presided over a rapidly growing state and a rapidly growing f­amily when he became governor in 1796. He was admired in both spheres. Although

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the satisfactions of ­family might have leavened the intense contentiousness of the era’s politics, h ­ ouse­hold affairs w ­ ere not without difficulties and even tragedies. Still, John could consider himself blessed by a combination of wealth, status, and ­family love that few of his contemporaries could match. Socialized to care about education, reputation, self-­discipline, and, not least of all, his ­family, he would be ­shaped by the experiences of the 1790s as the landscape of slavery shifted ­toward an the era of gradual emancipation. Following John’s return from the London treaty mission, Peter Augustus Jay, the ­family’s oldest child, prepared to follow his ­father into the l­egal profession while also wading into New York’s churning po­liti­cal ­waters. In a May 1796 letter, Peter sought to impress his f­ ather about his own budding Federalist activism among the young elite men of New York City. Like John, Peter favored the pen over the sword, expressing concern at the impulse to or­ga­nize militias, w ­ hether supporting or opposing the Adams administration. Still, he felt compelled to join one. In contrast to the discord of politics, the maturing Peter, who trained with his cousin Peter Jay Munro, ­imagined the practice of law as harmonizing. “Defend[ing] the Rights & Interests of e­ very class & individual” would at once safeguard the property of the rich and defend the freedom, dignity, and security of every­one ­else. He construed the law as the reformer’s and civilizer’s creed.4 His ­father’s moderate values and temperament guided Peter Augustus, and John Jay judged his eldest son Peter, at age twenty-­three, to be at least a qualified success: “Few f­athers have more valuable or numerous Reasons to be pleased with a Son.” Still, John called attention to “a Tendency in your Disposition to musing & consequently to Procrastination” that could erode focus and resolve if unchecked. ­There ­were practical reasons for the f­ ather to continue to mold his son’s habits. As the oldest son, Peter, in addition to his professional and po­liti­cal pursuits, would be asked to take on responsibilities for helping manage ­family business affairs, including oversight of the f­amily’s slaves.5 For Peter Augustus’s younger ­sisters, public reputation mattered, even if gender precluded professions or po­liti­cal ­careers. The two older girls, Maria and Nancy, born in Eu­rope, and the youn­gest child, Sarah Louisa (known as Sally), born in New York in 1792, received educations designed to produce refinement, good judgment, and religious commitment. A letter John wrote to the ten-­year old Maria and nine-­year old Nancy reveals not only their ­father’s paternal sweetness but also his didactic bent. To Maria, John wrote, “The more Pro­g ress you make in acquiring useful accomplishments, and amiable Manners, the more you ­will do Honor to yourself & to your Parents.” He wanted his ­daughter to understand that love was something she earned: “You know

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that the Merit of my ­children is the only Rule by which my affection for them ­will ever be mea­sured; and I please myself in the Expectation that I s­ hall have Reason to love them all exceedingly.” Yet he kept the bar for purposeful moral development high: “Virtue and Religion must be the corner Stones; & if with ­these you connect useful Knowledge, mildness of Temper, & Prudence and good Manners, you ­will . . . ​have ­g reat Reason to expect Happiness ­here” and in the afterlife. As the girls grew older and pursued additional formal education, the f­ ather dispensed similar advice even more sternly. The statesman instructed thirteen-­year-­old Maria, “Be cautious never to write what it would give you uneasiness to see published.” Maria’s taste for education convinced her parents to send her to the Moravian Young Ladies’ Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where her ­sister Nancy ­later joined her.6 The birth of a second son, the fourth of five ­children who would survive infancy, added to the delight and responsibilities of the ­house­hold, whose primary location remained Manhattan u ­ ntil ­after the state capital moved to Albany in 1797. The young boy soon impressed the ­family with his temperament. Sally Jay wrote from New York that the eighteen-­month-­old was “a sweet ­little solace . . . ​in his Dr. [dear] F ­ ather’s absence.” She found “Our l­ittle Wil [sic] has plead so irresistably to be taken on my lap that he has gained his point, & tho’ by his caresses he interrupts me continually yet I cannot find in my heart to check him.” As William approached age three, his charms remained undiminished. His ­mother reported, “­Will is all vivacity.” William also seemed to share his ­mother’s admiration for the oft-­traveling chief justice. Sarah wrote to John in Boston, “You are the prevailing subject of his prattle. I believe he dreamt the other night that you had returned, for when he awoke he insisted upon your being at home, nor would he be convinced of the contrary u ­ ntil I carryed him in your room.” William aimed to please a f­ather with high expectations. At age five when the chief justice departed for London in 1794 to negotiate a commercial treaty with Britain, “William asked if I did not think I might venture to tell you that he is a very good boy,” which his ­mother then verified, calling him “a lovely child that interests ones feelings & promises much.”7 During his childhood, William developed a strong personality and close familial bonds, especially to his younger ­sister Sally. A lovely pastel portrait, painted when the ­brother and ­sister ­were approximately seven and four, clearly shows that William’s warm attachment to his f­ amily extended to his younger ­sister, their relationship thus preserved not only in words (see figure 4). Sarah Livingston Jay holds her ­daughter around the waist with one arm, while extending a bird’s nest to the young William, who is sitting in the crook of a tree. William appears to be making a point with his upraised arm and fin­ger, while

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Figure 4.  Sarah Livingston Jay and ­Children. 1789 c. Pastel on paper. By James Sharples (1751–1811) JJ.1987.9. John Jay Homestead State Historic Site, Katonah, N.Y., New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

his ­sister feeds a bird some berries and fixes the artist with a steady, bemused gaze. In 1799, when William was just shy of ten and the ­family lived in Albany, their m ­ other described an incident that calls attention to the boy’s precociously caring nature. A spat prompted ­little Sally to question her ­brother’s love. In response, William dug up two peach trees from his part of the garden and replanted them in Sally’s plot. The proud ­mother reported to her husband that William’s “Countenance glow[ed] with benevolence” and commented,

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“I did not know which most to admire his generosity, or her grateful sensibility & Candid humility which led her to confess her error & acknowledge his superiority.”8 Although he derived joy from his c­ hildren’s affectionate bonds, John also provided a counterbalance of paternal restraint. In 1792, when William was not yet three and Maria ten, John wrote to his ­daughter, “Give ­little Wm. A kiss for me,” but then warned of too much sisterly indulgence: “I know you love him dearly, but take care not to humour him in any T ­ hing improper. The sooner he learns to bear being denied, what he o ­ ught not to have, the better.” According to the ­father, the child’s f­ uture character was at stake. He did not want to raise his son to be a tyrant or his ­daughter to be a flatterer. John wanted to head off “a Habit of expecting that all his Caprices and Passions are to be indulged.” Inculcating self-­disciplined purposefulness in all his c­ hildren and tempering abundance with self-­control to forestall indulgence and idleness w ­ ere governing princi­ples of John Jay’s parenting. As he grew up, William remained anxious for paternal endorsement of his character. In 1800, John concluded a letter from New York to his wife Sally with this request: “Tell Wm. That I am much disposed to take his word for his being a fine and a good Boy; and that I hope to find on my Return that he has not formed that opinion too hastily.” The love and admiration his ­children felt for him allowed John to keep his expectations high.9 William received his formal education in Albany. Beginning at age eight, he studied u ­ nder Rev. Thomas Ellison, an En­glishman who operated a preparatory school. At Ellison’s school, William met his lifelong friend, the ­f uture novelist James Fenimore Cooper. The boys undertook classical studies and the rigorous observance of Anglican ritual. Presumably they ­were also exposed to Ellison’s archconservative po­liti­cal views, including contempt for Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, as well as admiration for George III. In 1799, as his ­mother sent him back to school from a ­family stay with relatives in Rye, she wrote to her husband, “William goes cheerfully to school. May our fond hopes in him be realized!” In William much was invested.10

Governing the Enslaved Enslaved workers, w ­ hether having served in the f­amily for a time or newly purchased, did much of the cooking, cleaning, heating, and carry­ing that made life comfortable for this wealthy h ­ ouse­hold of well-­mannered, well-­educated, pious ­children. T ­ hese men and ­women ­were also markers of the ­family’s gentility.11 Clarinda, Caesar, Dinah, Phillis, Mary, and ­others also ­were, legally speaking,

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repositories of monetary wealth, although for the Jays, ­owners of land throughout the state, they w ­ ere nowhere near their most valuable assets. For the purposes of new federal taxes, imposed in the autumn of 1798, John Jay took stock of the property that would help secure the economic fortune of his f­amily for generations to come. He opened his inventory by providing a painstaking description of the ­house and land he rented in Albany, noting the total number of win­dows of his dwelling and mea­sur­ing the outbuildings’ dimensions in feet and inches. Five subsequent pages carefully detailed the governor’s holdings in six New York counties, as well as in Vermont and New Jersey. He recorded thousands of acres of upstate land, of Manhattan lots, and tracts in his home county of Westchester. The second item in his property survey was dif­fer­ent—­for it concerned ­people, not real estate: “I have three male and three female slaves—­five of them are with me in this city; and one of them is in the city of New York.” Something compelled the governor to explain his pro­cess and plans regarding this peculiar property, the flow not only into but out of his hands: “I purchase slaves and manumit them at proper ages, and when their faithful ser­vices ­shall have afforded a reasonable Retribution.” In other words, the enslaved had to work off their purchased price to earn their liberty. Jay noted that, for the purposes of the new tax law, slaves ­were “property . . . ​vested in me.” But he also felt compelled to rec­ord that he did not plan to remain vested in them. The enslaved assured his pre­sent comfort but not his long-­term financial security.12 Following through on such self-­defined slaveholding ethics was easier said than done; the costs w ­ ere not as equitably distributed as Jay’s brief statement suggested. As one careful student of slavery and freedom during this period has noted, such arrangements for “self-­purchase” constituted “a long and expensive route to freedom.” Jay may have had confidence in his ability to uphold his side of the bargain and calculate the costs fairly, but it was the ­people he purchased who had to do the work and stay on his good side long enough to complete the bargain.13 Governor Jay’s slave acquisitions perpetuated the casual cruelties of slavery even when accompanied by the prospect of freedom. In February 1797, Jay purchased Dinah, a Black ­woman whom he planned to ­free “­after serving me faithfully a certain Term.” But Dinah had a two-­year-­old. The child’s owner, her previous master, planned to let Dinah have the child. The governor, however, wanted a dedicated servant in Albany, not the preoccupied ­mother of a toddler, whom Jay referred to as “it,” recording no name or gender. Dinah’s ­uncle was Peter Williams Sr., a tobacconist, a f­ree man, and a leader among New York City’s Black Methodists. As John explained to Richard Lawrence, an associate in New York City, Dinah had written Williams in hopes that her

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­ ncle would take care of the child “but recd. no answer.” Wishing to ease her u anxiety, no doubt caused by fear of losing this chance to secure her own child’s freedom though at the price of separation, Jay requested that Lawrence go in search of Williams and convey the message. Explaining himself in the intimate tone of one master to another, Jay stated, “I make no apology for giving you this Trou­ble, ­because ­under similar circumstances I would chearfully do the same t­ hing” for Lawrence.14 Jay portrayed a sad and potentially tragic situation that he created as an act of magnanimity, collegiality, and practicality on his part. The freedom that Williams enjoyed and his niece Dinah’s ­f uture manumission pleased his sense of justice, but during this nascent transition, t­ here was h ­ ouse­hold work to be done. In this case, the governor’s sympathy aligned neatly with his self-­interest. Meanwhile, Dinah’s insecure position left her with l­ittle choice but to rely on the judgment of the power­ful man who had become her master. Jay ended up selling Dinah and her son to a man named Inman, with the stipulation that he eventually f­ ree them. This decision would have dire consequences.15 The Jays clearly reserved the right to make judgments and arrangements as they wished about enslaved families. Clarinda, it seems, was allowed to bring her six-­year-­old d­ aughter Zilpah when the ­house­hold moved to Albany. But sympathy for a person with a longtime connection to the Jays only went so far: Clarinda had to leave b­ ehind a husband.16 A slave named Caesar further exposed the limits of Governor Jay’s patience and princi­ples. Caesar first appears in the ­family correspondence in January 1797 as a slave “as yet pleased and attentive” in the ­family’s New York City residence.17 This state of affairs did not last. ­After being moved to the Albany ­house­hold, Caesar made himself so unpleasant t­ here that Governor Jay sent him back to his son Peter in New York City. “Caesar’s conduct ­here has been improper—in constant ill Humour and indisposed to work—­noisy and grumbling,” which the governor feared the neighbors might observe. As with Abbe in France, Jay could not figure out “any Princi­ple” that could be the source of Caesar’s poor attitude, given how well disposed the f­amily had been to him; the only pos­si­ble explanation could be the bad influence of some other person. The frustrations of being a slave, even amid talk of liberty and emancipation, did not strike John as a sufficient “Princi­ple” for such recalcitrance. Caesar thus presented the governor with a conundrum. He was apparently too old for corporeal punishment to do any good, “and my Situation forbids any Experiments of that kind,” a suggestive phrase that likely referred to John Jay’s status as a public figure favoring gradual emancipation. Or perhaps the governor simply did not want to be perceived as a person who could not command re­spect from his servants. ­Either way, Jay conveyed his out-­of-­sight,

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out–­of-­mind disciplinary method to his son Peter, commenting, “I think it better to get rid of Servants who give Trou­ble, rather than to take harsh mea­ sures to reclaim them.” John Jay solved his prob­lem by passing Caesar on to his son, the aspiring attorney. Peter, his ­father instructed, “must have a Servant,” by which the governor meant a slave. W ­ hether that slave be Caesar or someone ­else was Peter’s decision; if Peter found Caesar to be too much trou­ble, then he should “sell him, and with the money buy another.” Even though the governor wished to see the institution of slavery wind down, John was training Peter to be a master, telling his son, “I set no Price b­ ecause you are to treat him and do . . . ​ with him as your own.” Still, the elder Jay made it clear he wanted to receive updates from Peter.18 The same month that his trou­bles with Caesar came to a head, the governor exercised his prerogatives to show kind restraint and exact harsh discipline on behalf of other slave masters in the state. In each case, he made the prob­ lem go away, just as he had advised Peter. On October 11, 1797, Jay requested that the secretary of state issue a ­pardon for an enslaved man named Tom a­ fter a month of imprisonment in Rensselaer County for ­grand larceny. Two weeks ­later he issued a p­ ardon for an enslaved ­woman named Hester Combs that may have proven worse than the original punishment. Jay conditioned his release of Combs from six months of hard ­labor on her master e­ ither permanently sending her out of state or being subject to a substantial fine if he did not comply. Jay, in essence, incentivized Combs’s owner to perpetuate her enslavement out of state, perhaps in the South. The ­pardon was a dubious work-­around of New York’s slave law revisions allowing the exportation of slaves only when a court deemed it necessary. More tellingly, the arrangement ­violated the spirit of the New-­York Manumission Society’s goal of sealing the borders to the import or the export of slaves. Governor Jay in this instance gave official sanction to his personal impulse—­expressed in frustration over Caesar—to make difficult slaves go away.19 For his part, Caesar returned to New York City, a place that he likely preferred to Albany. He may have realized that ­there w ­ ere worse fates than working for the Jays or bouncing back and forth between Albany and Manhattan. Shortly ­after Caesar’s arrival in New York City, Peter wrote his s­ ister Maria that the slave “begged he might not be sold.” As Peter studied for the bar examination in New York City, Caesar for the time being remained in his ser­vice.20 A month a­ fter washing his hands of Caesar by making him Peter’s responsibility, John Jay reflected on the recent death of Mary, “the last of our old ­Family servants.” Unable to resist further instructing his son in the ethics of

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slave owner­ship, Jay considered care for Mary a familial obligation. Although he wished he had known sooner that she was sick, John wrote, “It is a consolation however to reflect, that you found her comfortably circumstanced as to accommodations; and that she had not been without medical aid.” He continued, “The attention paid to her by Mr. [Peter Jay] Munro, Dr. Chandler and yourself gives me g­ reat satisfaction.” Although alluding to “Indiscretions & consequent Trou­bles of her latter Years,” perhaps a reference to her alcohol consumption, Jay cast the ­family’s relationship to Mary in the language of reciprocal obligation: “Few servants and few Families deserved better of each other than they did—so greatly does right conduct on the one side, tend to produce it on the other.”21 He wanted the ­family’s notion of generosity to continue into the next generation. Meanwhile Caesar de­cided he did not want to wait around to see if he would earn any beneficence. Caesar ran away sometime in 1798 and became a sailor. He was not the last slave prior to the passage of the gradual emancipation law to test the Jays’ patience, princi­ples, and sense of mastery. In January 1799, even as a gradual emancipation bill began to make its way through the state legislature, the governor considered how best to ­handle difficulties with a slave named Phillis. Writing Peter Augustus from Albany, the governor advised against freeing Phillis in the short run: “I think with your mama that to liberate her immediately would be of evil Example to the o ­ thers, considering what her Be­hav­ior has been.” Instead, John suggested selling the difficult slave—­with the provision that she be manumitted within two years by her new master. Although suggesting a sale price to Peter, John seemed more interested in making an example of Phillis. Neither he nor Sally presumably wished a repeat of the depressing episode with Abbe or the irritating one with Caesar. The objective Jay stated to his son Peter was a practical one: he did not want to be stuck supporting Phillis for the rest of her life, as “­there is l­ ittle prospect of her being good for much, considering her Habits.” ­There would be no shortcuts to eventual freedom, he wished to convey. What­ever his intent, a year-­ and-­a-­half ­later, Phillis was still working for the ­family; Sally mentioned her to Peter in a letter requesting “coarse thick cotton” to make blouses “for the wenches.”22 Surprisingly, Caesar too would remain attached to the Jays, and they to him, by virtue of the unequal bargain of benevolent master and loyal slave. A ship Caesar worked on had sailed to Cap Francois in St. Domingue and thus right into the heart of the war between the French colony’s former slaves and waves of Eu­ro­pe­ans who sought to subdue and reenslave them. In February 1800, Caesar reported to the Jays via another Black man that he had been seized “&

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is now a Drummer in Toussaint’s Army” where, Peter relayed to his ­father, “He is very ill used, & extremely desirous to return to me.” Governor Jay responded from Albany with “pity” and thought that providing the American consulate in St. Domingue with “an application supported by proper Documents, might . . . ​be made with some prospect of success.”23 Once returned to the mainland, Caesar remained with the Jay ­family for de­cades to come. Judith Livingston Watkins, Sally Jay’s s­ ister and John’s sister-­in-­law, illustrated how reluctant white New Yorkers w ­ ere to let go of the prerogatives of slavery even as the po­liti­cal, demographic, and ideological landscapes shifted in their state. Judith wished to transport the slaveholder’s gentility to the New York frontier, where the institution barely existed and had ­little support. She complained to Sally about the difficulties of properly raising a ­daughter in the Fin­ger Lakes region in the western part of the state where her husband had moved their f­amily in 1798. Too many chores prevented her d­ aughter Susan from having sufficient time to read. Thus, Judith made a special request: “For the more effectual establishment of my Comfort & for the par­tic­u­lar advantage it ­will be to Susan I do earnestly request & entreat Mr. Jay that he ­will be good enough” to buy “a negro girl” she knew of from Schenectady and send her westward. A girl, she thought, would be better than an older slave w ­ oman who would adjust poorly to the primitive environment. Judith recognized, however, that she might be putting Governor Jay in an awkward position with the request, presumably b­ ecause of his status as a prominent antislavery figure. She suggested to Sally that, “to prevent any further investigation,” the bill of sale be put in the name of another s­ ister, who had brought her a “wench” previously. Though acknowledging shifting norms and her brother-­in-­law’s need to keep up po­liti­cal appearances, Judith hoped that her personal predicament would take priority over scruples. ­Whether John Jay demurred to or even knew about the request is not known, but Watkins clearly equated the availability of Black ­labor with social status. Two years ­later, in August 1800, she remarked that the anticipated arrival of mi­grants from Pennsylvania and Mary­land “­will introduce a more polished Society”; one of the mi­g rants, she noted, bought 20,000 acres of land and “­will bring seventy blacks with him.” She also mentioned, perhaps jealously, the “Mary­land gentlemen” visiting the previous summer to appraise the land “hansomly . . . ​Attended by Black Servants.”24 Judith was clearly guided by the deeply ingrained notion of racialized servitude as a key marker of wealth and status. Given the per­sis­tence of such assumptions, eliminating slavery in New York would be no small task—­either before or a­ fter gradual abolition became the law of the land.

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Acts and Laws In January 1796, the New York State Assembly took up a gradual abolition bill for the first time in several years. With calls for compensation to slave o ­ wners complicating the proceedings, the legislators declined to move forward. William Hamilton, who wrote the governor in March two months ­later, could have reasonably concluded that Jay had not invested his energy and prestige in advancing the cause of emancipation that winter. Indeed, John Jay’s remarks to the State Assembly in early January covered such topics as improving the fortification of the port of New York City, clarifying jurisdiction over appointments to state government, and increasing judicial salaries to attract more qualified jurists—­but said nothing about abolition. De­cades ­later, William Jay explained his f­ather’s reticence as po­liti­cally judicious. According to William, who as an adult years l­ater may well have discussed t­ hese ­matters with his f­ ather, the governor did not wish to make gradual abolition a partisan issue between Federalists and Republicans; inserting abolition into this contentious po­liti­cal context might have bolstered opposition to the mea­sure. Instead of taking the lead himself, Jay, according to his son, encouraged New York City representative James Watson to tender a bill in the State Assembly, where it floundered. The failure of the proposed legislation was not without positive effect, however; it attracted the public’s renewed attention to this crucial issue.25 Governor Jay’s caution did not prevent him, however, from steering into other churning po­liti­cal w ­ aters. His 1796 gubernatorial address drew the public’s notice to white refugees from St. Domingue fleeing from civil war and rebellion to the United States. Without describing ­these refugees as slave ­owners or mentioning the slave insurrection, the governor instructed the legislature, “The situation of t­ hese unfortunate p­ eople still continues to be truly distressing” and should stimulate “our compassion” as “real objects of charity.” Jay’s solicitousness concerning destitute French arrivals was not fleeting, even though humane concern mixed with financial apprehension. ­Later that same year, Jay reported to the legislature on state funds spent to support “the French refugees from St. Domingo” whose “fate” he found “peculiar as well as distressing.”26 As Governor Jay continued to maintain a low profile on gradual abolition, ­others—­including members of his own f­ amily—­stepped up to rally public opinion against slavery and to enforce existing antislavery statutes. The New-­ York Manumission Society played a crucial role in connecting Black re­sis­tance and white activism. Peter Jay Munro followed his U ­ ncle John’s (and Frederick Jay’s) footsteps by joining the organ­ization in 1791. Munro, now a ­lawyer, was no longer the callow youth who accompanied John Jay to Eu­rope during the

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Revolutionary War and had poked fun when the ­family servants mourned ­Abbe’s death. In May 1798, Munro introduced another aspiring attorney to the Manumission Society, none other than the governor’s son Peter Augustus Jay.27 If he felt constrained to stay above the debate over slavery’s f­uture, John Jay placed no such constraints on other ­family members, including his dutiful eldest son. The NYMS base of operations remained in and around Manhattan, though the organ­ization’s leadership understood that the confrontation with slavery took place at the state and, ultimately, the national levels. Munro’s colleagues selected him to be one of the society’s three delegates to the first meeting in Philadelphia of the newly founded national convention of state abolition socie­ ties. The American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery’s emphasis on citizenship complemented the NYMS’s own efforts. In the view of white abolitionists, slavery created an environment in which neither subordinated slaves nor despotic masters developed properly as responsible citizens, whereas gradual emancipation provided a path for advancing the benefits of citizenship across the color line. As a member of the NYMS committee charged with suppressing vice in New York City’s Black community, Munro would have understood the link between improving African American social environments and combating slavery itself. Munro and his ­uncle Frederick Jay also subscribed to NYMS’s signature initiative for shaping Black be­hav­ior and showcasing Black intellectual equality—­the African F ­ ree School. In 1796, Munro served on a committee or­ga­nized to acquire a new property for the school; the society hoped to raise funds for this proj­ect by selling a Manhattan lot donated by Frederick Jay.28 Munro put his l­egal skills to work helping monitor violations of state laws designed to protect Black p­ eople ­under certain conditions. For example, Munro pursued the case of a man named Dick whose assailants took him straight from prison onto a ship where, had a city watchman not heard a cry of “murder,” he presumably would have been sold out of state. Munro also won freedom for a w ­ oman in Westchester County named Lucy Garrett whose m ­ other was purported to have been a f­ ree Native American. NYMS members came to value Munro’s expertise in wrongful enslavement cases; he may have earned a reputation among African Americans as well. Standing Committee minutes include a letter to Munro from a f­ ree ­woman who feared that her d­ aughter had become ensnared as a slave. During the late 1790s, even as the state legislature repeatedly took up the possibility of a gradual emancipation law, dozens of African Americans obtained their freedom by bringing to the NYMS testimony of reneged manumissions, transportation across state lines in violation of the state’s postwar slave law reforms, and Native American or white ma-

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ternal lineage that invalidated enslavement. Manumission Society members like Munro matched their skills to Black-­sourced evidence to create leverage for freedom. Even without a gradual emancipation statute, existing state laws gave enslaved p­ eople, with the help of white reformers, enhanced powers to weaken the slaveholder’s grip.29 African Americans took additional initiatives to undermine slavery’s l­egal and moral foundation. ­Free Black community leader Peter Williams Sr., with whom Governor Jay was familiar, established a Methodist church; other African Americans obtained municipal funds for a burial ground. The incidence of Black runaways in New York City and its surrounding areas also spiked in the 1790s. The more f­ ree Blacks who congregated in the burgeoning port city, the more difficult it became to capture runaways, to distinguish slave from ­free, and to imagine slavery as the inevitable fate of Black New Yorkers. Such re­sis­ tance also raised the cost for slaveholders forced to expend time and money on retrieval efforts, instead of extracting more l­ abor.30 In some ways, William Hamilton, by writing his 1796 letter to Governor Jay, represented the emerging assertiveness of emancipated and self-­emancipated Black New Yorkers. Jay’s reformer, journalist, and publishing friends grew bolder and more impatient with the slow pace of change, despite their discomfort with some of ­these forms of African American self-­assertion. At a special meeting in late November 1795, the NYMS determined that the time had arrived to renew their effort to urge the state legislature to take up a gradual abolition bill. Longtime Jay friend Egbert Benson, whom Jay had urged years before to pursue an abolition law, was on the committee charged with advocating for the bill. A 1795 NYMS initiative to try to persuade newspaper publishers to ban advertisements for runaway slaves failed. Even so, the state’s newspapers continued to publish a variety of items that placed slavery and even racism on the defensive. The sort of antislavery poetry that William Hamilton quoted in his letter to Governor John Jay in which i­magined Black speakers eloquently articulated their plight was often found in the New York press. Governor Jay’s sympathies for French refugees from St. Domingue notwithstanding, t­ here was even a turn, especially in Federalist papers, ­toward portraying the insurrection and its leading general Toussaint L’Ouverture in a favorable light. On the other side of the po­liti­cal coin, in 1797 no less a figure than George Washington came ­under fire as a slaveholder in a Republican newspaper.31 The NYMS sponsored orations in 1797 and 1798 that the organ­ization published to highlight the need for pro­gress ­toward abolition. Presbyterian minister Samuel Miller labeled the continuance of American slavery a “humiliating tale.” He debunked arguments about the inherent inferiority of Blacks and noted the institution’s deleterious social effects on whites, encouraging “haughtiness, a

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spirit of domination,” and “the seeds of social weakness and disorder.” Physician Elihu H. Smith’s critique of legislative inaction in 1798 was blisteringly direct: “You, yes you, Legislators of this Commonwealth, you foster and protect it [slavery] h ­ ere! . . . ​It is you who sanction, you who uphold the crime.”32 Even though legislative efforts to pass a gradual emancipation law repeatedly stalled, po­liti­cal geography increasingly favored the antislavery forces. In 1796, the state reapportioned its legislature to account for northward and westward expansion. As a consequence, the core regions of slavery’s support in the state—­the Hudson River Valley, Staten Island, and Long Island—­lost legislative influence. In frontier regions, slavery, as the governor’s sister-­in-­law Judith noticed, scarcely had taken hold. Representatives from t­ hese newer regions of the state had ­little po­liti­cal reason to fend off gradual abolition and even less incentive to support direct compensation of slaveholders from state coffers for the loss of their slaves. Making the state responsible, as opposed to local authorities, for the cost of upkeep for the formerly enslaved who became paupers also had ­little appeal to p­ eople from counties with few slaves. Thus, representatives from the western and northern parts of the state became reliable partners with the large and now solidly antislavery representatives from Manhattan. The ability of slavery’s defenders to erect barriers to a decisive vote on gradual emancipation weakened. In the years since gradual emancipation’s defeat in 1785, many New Yorkers had come to think of slavery more as a southern institution than as one integral to their own economy and society. Meanwhile, abolition’s proponents had paired the language of citizenship with freedom effectively enough that, should a bill pass, Governor Jay and his colleagues on the Council of Revision would not be asked to stomach clauses denying f­ ree Blacks the right to vote or serve as jurors.33 Perhaps John Jay had acted wisely in not identifying himself too closely with the effort to win a gradual emancipation law. Partisan vitriol was reaching a crescendo in the late 1790s. A quasi-­war with France, the Federalist-­dominated US Congress’s passage of Alien and Sedition Acts designed to suppress Republican opposition, and the Republican response of claiming that the states could judge federal laws to be unconstitutional fueled division. Remarkably, on March 29, 1799, the “Act for the gradual abolition of Slavery,” passed the New York State Assembly with bipartisan support.34 In the biography of his ­father, written more than three de­cades ­after passage of the law formally commencing the gradual abolition of slavery in New York, William Jay commented, “Prob­ably no mea­sure of his administration afforded” John Jay “such unfeigned plea­sure, and certainly none was more propitious to the morals, resources, and happiness of the State over which he

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presided.”35 The modulated founding f­ ather and pioneer American opponent of slavery had ­every reason to be satisfied with the statute. In accordance with the belief John Jay had expressed as far back as the Revolutionary War—­that enslavement was an unnatural status for a h ­ uman being—­the law declared e­ very child of a slave ­mother born ­after July 4, 1799, to “be deemed and adjudged to be born f­ ree.” This bold statement linked the law to the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence’s egalitarian creed. A series of qualifications written into the law, however, l­imited its scope and delayed the timing of freedom, echoing models of gradual emancipation in other northern states. In New York, free-­born male c­ hildren of slaves owed twenty-­eight years of ser­vice to their m ­ others’ masters, and female c­ hildren owed twenty-­five years. Such an indenture bound another generation of African American New Yorkers to servitude well into adulthood during an era where life could be short, especially for the ill-­housed and ill-­clothed enslaved. Modest protection against masters’ manipulating their slaves’ ages was provided in detailed rules for registering the birth of each child of an enslaved m ­ other, with fees and fines encouraging compliance. The law also provided for a mechanism by which masters could renounce their rights to their slaves’ c­ hildren, at which point the ­children would be treated as “paupers” to be bound out like orphans or abandoned ­children. (The ­family taking them in would receive a monthly state subsidy.) Fi­nally, the law granted masters the immediate, unconditional right to f­ ree their own slaves.36 The law mirrored aspects of John Jay’s slaveholding credo since his days as a diplomat in France: the f­uture freed person’s ­labor would compensate for the costs of owner­ship, with the master exercising some freedom when the incon­ve­niences of caring for ­children arose. Indeed, the law provided far more protection for the interests of white masters than for the new class of f­ree ­people that it created.37 Some of the law’s more liberal features w ­ ere expressed implicitly by what the act did not say. It did not impose any limitations—­such as age or the freed person’s ability to support him-­or herself—on the rights of masters to privately ­free their own slaves. It did not set up a color-­coded system of second-­class citizenship. F ­ ree Black males could vote, serve, as jurors, and testify in court on the same terms as white males. ­Under the state constitution that Jay himself had helped write, property—­not color or prior status—­would delimit the exercise of the franchise as long as Federalist princi­ ples ruled the day. If his official position—­and perhaps his status as a slaveholder—­kept him from expressing what he thought was the larger meaning of the 1799 act, Jay’s contemporaries who inherited the mantle of abolitionist leadership from him

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­ ere not so constrained. New Yorkers reporting to the annual American Conw vention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery in 1800 summarized their state’s achievement—­anticipating a time “not far distant” when slavery would end in the state and “the blessings of civil and religious liberty ­will be equally extended to all.” Jay, even before he became founding president of the NYMS, had expressed his belief in h ­ uman equality, though as a master he also delayed the implementation of steps t­ oward that equality. The law ushered in a new era that would change the manner in which New Yorkers, including Jay f­ amily members and Jay ­family slaves, understood and experienced this paradoxical balance.38

Transitions John Jay retired from the governorship in 1801 ­after a quarter-­century of continuous public ser­vice and amid the declining fortunes of the Federalist Party. For the remainder of his long life, he would respond to the institution of slavery and to enslaved p­ eople as a slaveholder and as a private citizen. Before his second term ended, however, he signed off on additional slavery-­related legislation that confirmed New York’s commitment to slavery’s demise as a methodical pro­cess governed by state regulation. A law approved during Jay’s final year in office established public funding for a key feature of the NYMS agenda: education. The new statute required the City of New York to disperse in equal shares the remainder of funds raised for schools through previous statutes. U ­ nder the 1801 law’s provisions, the African F ­ ree School explic­itly shared the same l­egal and financial status with schools run by Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, and other churches. Each school was to receive one-­eleventh of the funds in the New York City Common Council’s possession as an endowment, using the interest to educate poor ­children. Thus, the state confirmed its support of the thriving school founded when John Jay was still a leading member of the Manumission Society. The education statute advanced Black equality and trained a generation of f­ ree Black community leaders.39 Jay and the Council of Revision also approved “An Act concerning slaves and servants,” which attempted to protect Black New Yorkers and the state’s taxpayers from some of the unintended consequences of gradual emancipation. Whereas the 1799 law placed no restrictions on private manumission, the 1801 law reaffirmed legislation from the 1780s making former masters financially responsible for any slave freed ­after the age of fifty who became a public burden. The state also affixed tighter regulations on masters moving into the

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state with slaves. Henceforth a slave owner arriving in New York had to file paperwork ­under oath that the slave had been his or her property for a full year prior to arrival in the state. Failure to register a slave ­under this provision would lead to that slave’s freedom. The law reaffirmed the illegality of bringing a slave into the state for the purposes of making a sale. In addition, u ­ nder the 1801 statute, the state explic­itly expanded anti-­export rules to cover ­children born ­after July 4, 1799. The anti-­export clause made every­one involved in such transactions—­buyers, sellers, and brokers—­liable to a criminal fine of $250, with the victimized “slave or servant” becoming f­ree. Although this statute governing servitude affirmed many aspects of slavery, such as banning unauthorized commerce with slaves or aiding runaways, it further insinuated state regulation into the ways that masters conducted the business of slavery. At the same time, the law highlighted ongoing assumptions that whites, including manumitting masters, would seek to abuse the conditions established ­under the new gradual emancipation regime.40 The new law addressed, at least on paper, concerns that the NYMS identified ­after gradual emancipation went into effect. Freeing the c­ hildren of slave ­mothers at birth without giving their parents effective control over t­hese ­children created an incentive for ­human trafficking. Slavery’s slow demise in New York heightened the temptation to cash in through interstate sales of African Americans. In May 1800, the society recorded in its minutes “that a Practice has become pretty general to Ship Negroes from this to the Southern States” and from t­ here to the West Indies. Subsequently, the NYMS petitioned the state legislature, reporting that c­ hildren who w ­ ere no longer slaves by the terms of the gradual abolition law, as well as ­free Blacks, “have been sacrificed to . . . ​rapacious” activity. The society also indicated that the ban, in place since 1785, on selling slaves from other states in New York had produced the unintended consequence of p­ eople from out of state indenturing their slaves, then manumitting them as paupers “burthensome to the public.”41 Peter Jay Munro and Peter Augustus Jay, as NYMS l­egal counselors during this first de­cade of gradual abolition, could see how greedy and abusive whites threatened Black freedom and personal safety. During this transitional period, even ­those recently freed Blacks who assumed that their privately arranged manumissions w ­ ere valid needed advocates. ­These interventions did not always go well for ­those held in slavery. In March 1800, for example, a Brooklyn constable Barnet Newkirk arrested Rose Fussell on behalf of a person who claimed her as a slave, even though she had been freed by the w ­ ill of her ­mother’s master. Newkirk publicly assaulted Rose Fussell. As bystanders attempted to intervene, Joseph King, a local shoemaker, charged in to pry Fussell from the porch to which she clung to protect herself. Another NYMS

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member consulted Munro on this case, which dragged on for months before reaching an ambiguous conclusion. The NYMS dropped its suit against the abusive Newkirk and King, with the society agreeing to compensate the two men for their l­egal fees. Fussell, meanwhile, would have to pay off two debts, one to the man who paid her alleged owner and the other to the society itself for the costs of the suit. For her physical and ­mental trauma, Fussell would have to work as a servant for two years and then forfeit money she herself had inherited from her ­father Pompey’s estate.42 Despite the complications and liabilities entailed by the ­legal defense of ­free ­peoples’ rights, Peter Jay Munro and his colleagues confronted whites who ­violated New York’s laws or made dubious claims. In 1801, he advised that the Manumission Society sue Thomas Sanders on behalf of Peter Joseph, an East Indian boy who had served aboard a US naval ship; Sanders had withheld the wages due to Joseph, thus treating him as a slave. That same year his colleagues sought his help in the case of girl born in New York City to a m ­ other who had been given permission by her Duchess County master to come t­ here to work for wages ­toward her freedom. In 1802 Munro did work on behalf of Abram Ennals, from Mary­land, who was manumitted in Pennsylvania but claimed as property by a North Carolina man.43 Peter Augustus Jay consulted on the case of the Young Ralph, a ship in the city’s harbor that members of the NYMS strongly suspected of engaging in the slave trade between Senegal and the Danish Ca­rib­bean. Jay recommended filing suit ­under federal law prohibiting US citizens and ­others living in the United States from servicing the foreign slave trade. By partnering with federal officials, the society would, if successful, get a share of the steep fines on the alleged perpetrators.44 In a world of porous bound­aries, legalized slavery, and complicated arrangements between masters and servants, ­lawyers like Munro and Jay w ­ ere crucial resources to the NYMS and ­people of color seeking to secure their freedom. French West Indian refugees fleeing servile insurrection created a threat to freedom that prompted NYMS intervention. John Jay as governor had expressed sympathy for white refugees, but Munro and his colleagues grew concerned about the former slaves whom t­ hese men and w ­ omen brought with them from St. Domingue. The ­legal issues ­were international in scope; the danger to individuals was acute. In August  1801, a group of Blacks originally from the area around Port-­au-­Prince but now in New York informed members of the Standing Committee of a plot to transport them to Savannah for sale as slaves. ­Because this group of ­people had been in St. Domingue at the time that French officials declared an end to slavery in the colony, the Frenchmen who brought them to New York and now tried to sell them ­were violat-

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ing the former slaves’ rights. Munro investigated the case and went to the police magistrate on the former slaves’ behalf. He felt strongly that the NYMS should litigate the case to set a clear ­legal pre­ce­dent: “That all black ­People held by Frenchmen and actually within the jurisdiction of the french Government at the time of the passing the decree ­were freemen.” He and Alexander Hamilton joined James Robertson in forming a committee to develop “a mode of procedure for the Standing Committee, in re­spect to Blacks held as slaves by French Emigrants in this City.”45 Implementing such princi­ples, even with high-­ level attention, proved easier said than done. The controversial Volunbrun case that heightened concerns about the machination of French emigrés ended with the NYMS retreating into inaction and several slaves still in the custody of their French mistress.46 For Peter Jay Munro and Peter Augusuts Jay, the fraught nature of the transition from slavery to freedom also struck close to home. In December 1807, Munro reported to the Manumission Society that the adult son of a female servant in his h ­ ouse­hold narrowly avoided winding up in the New Orleans slave market. Fortunately, the boat transporting him ran aground off the coast of New Jersey, where the man jumped ship, only to be thrown in jail.47 In January 1808, Peter Augustus Jay even found himself d­ oing the sort of fact checking of his ­father’s actions that members of the Manumission Society sometimes pursued to c­ ounter the malign intentions of white would-be masters. In 1808, Dinah, whom John Jay acquired in 1797 while governor, sought out Peter ­because she needed help freeing her child. Peter reported the following to John: Inman, the man to whom John Jay had sold ­mother and child for a supposedly “­limited time” and who, John had allegedly promised was to pay her a “sum of money” upon her manumission had instead sold them to two separate masters, one in Utica, New York and the other in Attica, New York. Dinah had received her freedom from the new master. She did not, however, receive her promised payment while “her Child is still held as a slave.” Peter promised Dinah that he would pursue the m ­ atter with his ­father and, if the facts checked out, would intervene.48 Although he had not ­violated any laws in selling Dinah and her child, John had left them exposed to the sorts of abuses that Peter Jay Munro and Peter Augustus knew all too well. Fortunately, or so Dinah and prob­ably Peter Augustus hoped, John Jay could act as a power­f ul ally to redeem the situation. John responded to Dinah’s pain with detachment. He wrote his son, “I do not recollect that Dinah was to have money at the Expiration of her Term.” Then he put his trust in the slippery character Inman to resolve the m ­ atter, telling Peter, “My Bill of Sale wh. I presume her late master w ­ ill have, ­will ascertain the Bargain.” John made no mention of the plight of Dinah’s child.

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Had the welfare of the child been impor­tant to him, John would have issued instructions or encouragement to Peter, as he did on so many other m ­ atters financial, po­liti­cal, and familial. Instead, John provided his son with minimal leverage in pursuing the m ­ atter—no word of honor or strong recollection from the still influential founder and former governor and no expression of grave concern ­were forthcoming. In 1797, John had wanted to render Dinah’s child invisible by pawning her off on a relative and l­ ater actually selling her. In 1808, the child still remained invisible to John. The call to conscience and memory from his son stimulated nothing more from John than a tacit affirmation that he had in fact played a role in freeing Dinah.49 Clearly, the retired governor had not turned against manumission as a practice, but he deflected real responsibility and disengaged from the ongoing work of abolitionism, in contrast with his nephew and his eldest son. For example, in 1805, when his old Manumission Society colleague John Murray Jr. was soliciting funds for the African F ­ ree School, John responded with a churlish lecture on how to put the school on a more secure footing and on the importance of separating Black students from their parents by providing them apprenticeships and domestic ser­vice opportunities in white h ­ ouse­holds. In 1809, the elder Jay deflected politely the effort of British parliamentary antislavery activist William Wilberforce to enlist him in Anglo-­American efforts to suppress the slave trade.50 In his personal approach to manumission, as his response to Peter Augustus’s inquiry about Dinah and her child indicated, John adhered to the letter of his agreements, self-­assured that the ­legal pro­cess defined the extent of his obligations. Meanwhile, his eldest son and his nephew served in an organ­ization compelled to police slavery’s narrowing bound­aries on behalf of slaves and former slaves just like Dinah. The NYMS pressed on. Experience helped develop the organ­ization’s legislative agenda. Clearly, unscrupulous whites would not restrain themselves from skirting laws limiting the scope of slavery and the latitude of slaveholders. With Peter Jay Munro’s participation, the NYMS in 1807 developed specific proposals to tighten the regulations for taking enslaved ­people and indentured servants out of the state and in 1809 for bringing the enslaved into the state. Revisions to the state’s slavery laws in 1807 and in 1810, the year Munro became president of the NYMS, incorporated ­these proposals. For members of the organ­ization, volunteering to extend freedom and attack prejudice was a personal commitment. As an 1805 address delivered at the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery asserted, “­Every individual sacrifice, to humanity and virtue, w ­ ill be placed to our credit in the rec­ords of our lives.”51

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Slavery, Education, and Ambition During this period of transition, fifteen-­year-­old William Jay, the member of the f­ amily who eventually would have far more to say about slavery than any of the other Jays, entered Yale College. In his college years in New Haven, from 1804 to 1807, the sensitive and intellectually ambitious boy assembled building blocks for his emerging worldview. The college sought to instill the ethical architecture and polemical skills of a distinctively New E ­ ngland institution into students from around the fledgling country. Although the adult William Jay would credit his ­father for schooling him in antislavery views, Yale and its dynamic president Timothy Dwight contributed significantly to the ­f uture moralistic pugnacity and strong regional identity that would characterize his ­f uture abolitionism.52 By sending his second son to New ­England for college, John Jay had no more removed William from slavery’s influence in shaping elite northern culture than had he attended Columbia, his f­ather’s and ­brother’s alma mater. Still, ­going to Puritan Yale rather than quasi-­Anglican Columbia served to diversify William’s cultural perspective while reinforcing his essential values. Like other Anglo-­American colleges, slavery put its impress on Yale’s early years, a legacy that ­shaped the institution in William’s time and well beyond. The college, founded in 1701, cultivated benefactors in ­England, the West Indies, and New E ­ ngland with ties to Atlantic slavery and recruited students from slaveholding families. It derived income from the Rhode Island slave plantation gifted by Bishop George Berkeley, who also left the school part of his library. Trustees and faculty owned slaves, as did the prominent eighteenth-­century president Thomas Clapp. Ezra Stiles, when he became president of Yale during the Revolutionary War, freed a slave he had purchased previously when serving as a minster in Rhode Island. Stiles ­later went on to found and lead a Connecticut antislavery society. Path-­breaking nineteenth-­century Yale scientist Benjamin Silliman had financed his own undergraduate education t­here through his ­mother’s sale of two ­family slaves and, in the words of one historian, “freely ­violated” the terms of Connecticut’s 1784 gradual emancipation law.53 Lessons learned about slavery at such a college could hardly be s­ imple, let alone radical. When William arrived in 1804 at Yale, the third oldest college in the United States was firmly in the hands of Dr. Timothy Dwight. Dwight was a formidable intellectual who infused the college with his ambition. Dwight’s politics w ­ ere distinctly conservative. As the ­bearer of a dissenting Puritan religious tradition and strong patriot credentials, he was armed with tools to critique

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the demo­cratic turn heralded by the ascent of the Republicans and Thomas Jefferson. Dwight took seriously the moral regulation of the Christian republic that his gradu­ates, more likely to be l­ awyers than ministers, w ­ ere meant to lead. By the time William Jay arrived, Dwight had almost doubled the size of the student body. A collection of more than 200 boys attended the school at the turn of the nineteenth ­century.54 In New Haven, young William Jay spent significant time with white southerners for the first time in his life. Of the sixty-­one Yale se­niors who began their capstone year with Jay in 1806, nine ­were from the South. John C. Calhoun graduated in 1804 shortly before Jay formally matriculated, so the two may never have met. Yet Jay knew and befriended another South Carolinian, Thomas Grimké, older ­brother of the f­uture abolitionists and feminists Angelina and Sarah Grimké. Jay’s role as a member and officer in the student literary society, B ­ rothers in Unity, would have exposed him to southern students as well.55 Dwight’s moral pedagogy for northerners and southerners alike required an appraisal of slavery and emancipation. His lectures played off William Paley’s 1785 The Princi­ples of Moral and Po­liti­cal Philosophy, the text in his se­nior course on moral philosophy. Paley’s comments on slavery, which make up a brief chapter in his vast treatise, ­were unequivocally negative, while his embrace of gradual abolition is of a piece with his cautious, paternalistic approach to hierarchies of class, age, and gender. According to Paley, an Anglican minister from Yorkshire, ­England, the prime responsibility of parents was to “endeavour to preserve their ­children in the class in which they are born.”56 If, in Paley’s understanding, class relations ­were in some sense natu­ral, permanent and inheritable bondage was not. Paley viewed the African slave trade to the Amer­ic­ as as wholly illegitimate—­from enslavement in Africa, to the breakup of families that ensued, to the laws in Amer­ic­ a that ­were “the most merciless and tyrannical that ever w ­ ere tolerated upon the face of the earth.” He even forecast a “­g reat revolution in the Western world” following which “we ­will won­der if a country that did this was fit for empire.” This so-­called revolution unfolded as Christian consciousness among the power­f ul, not re­ sis­tance by the enslaved. Immediate abolition would lead to war, pitting slaves against masters: “The truth is, the emancipation of slaves should be gradual; and carried on by provisions of law, and u ­ nder the protection of civil government.” For Paley, gradual emancipation fit safely into a narrative of Chris­tian­ ity acting as a solvent to ancient institutions, so that the gospel’s “advance” would mean slavery’s final demise.57 William Jay, reading ­these passages, might have concluded that the a­ ctual course taken in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, his native New York, and, as of 1804, New Jersey dovetailed with

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Paley’s combination of sharp moral critique and practical patience. Paley’s view, moreover, fit neatly with his ­father’s and the NYMS’s expectations for emancipation. William Jay and his fellow students would have been able to detect, from his actions and lectures, both President Dwight’s dislike of slavery and his paternalistic view of African Americans. Dwight was a member of a Connecticut anti-­ slavery society and had once purchased a Black w ­ oman with the plan to f­ree her a­ fter she worked off the purchase price, and was no doubt pleased when his young college charges attended the funeral of a Black sweeper employed at Yale. He also supported a New Haven school teaching literacy to local Black ­children. Dwight’s poetry foreshadowed a mistrust of southern cultural values and New E ­ ngland chauvinism that would intensify in his ­later work.58 In his remarks to Yale students, Dwight mixed hostility to slavery with environmentalist assumptions about race and paternalistic ideas about class. In a lecture given the year ­after William Jay’s graduation, Dwight noted the “monstrous iniquities practiced by the Eu­ro­pe­ans in the slave trade” and the high death rates the trade produced. He praised William Wilberforce for bringing this prob­lem before Parliament. Dwight echoed Paley’s assertion that “the Spirit of Chris­tian­ity” was antislavery, even if opposition to slavery was not named or promoted by early Christians. Dwight’s suggestion that Black skin might not be a permanent condition, but rather would dis­appear over time, was a corollary to his general belief that differences in ­human complexion ­were environmental rather than inherent. Yet Dwight’s illustration of the flawed concept of implied consent through the anecdote of a New ­England servant named Caesar (which marked him as a Black character) who took pears from a pear tree b­ ecause the tree did not express any objections. The story evinces New ­England’s folk racism. Voicing a paternalistic sentiment, Dwight spoke as well of the challenge that masters faced “regulat[ing] the moral conduct of servants.”59 To sharpen their arguments and inculcate Dwight’s and Yale’s version of right thinking, William and his fellow students practiced debating key historical, moral, and public policy propositions—­including a few that related to slavery. By posing a series of brief questions—­Should immigration be encouraged? Should ­there be state support of clergy?—­Dwight attempted to make moral philosophy a useful guide for civic as well as philosophical questions. Student socie­ties also debated similar propositions. From year to year, a series of propositions ­were put before students by Dwight and within the meetings of socie­ ties such as B ­ rothers in Unity.60 Two recurring questions, one about policy and the other about the meaning of American history, spoke directly to the issue of slavery in a fashion that,

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on balance, blunted rather than stoked moral outrage. In debates, the question ­whether the discovery of Amer­i­ca was “beneficial to the world” was affirmed positively. Dwight did observe, according to a student’s notes, that it was a “difficult” question, with the slave trade the “most impor­tant objection.”61 A detailed account from the 1802–3 school year rec­ords the estimate (wildly low by modern scholarly standards) that 100,000 Africans and 100,000 Indians died as a result of the discovery; yet this tragedy allegedly was more than made up for by Eu­rope’s doubling in population and the improvements in science and medical skills that made the world a better, happier place.62 Yet, when it came to determining what, if anything, was to be done about the legacy of the slave trade, gradualism, compromise, and even racism reigned. The side arguing against a swift end to slavery was the presumptive winner when debating variants of the topic of immediate emancipation of the enslaved in the United States. The wrongs of the slave trade w ­ ere evident and Black slaves w ­ ere the equals of at least some Eu­ro­pean whites, but t­ hose observations did not dictate immediate emancipation. An 1801 student debate indicates that immediate abolition was not taken seriously by many students. The anti-­immediate argument raised the specter of “idleness & dissipations” and stoked the fear that freed slaves would wage war against whites. As proof of Black martial strength, the student noted African American military efforts on behalf of the British during the Revolution. Conceding that the slave trade was “dreadfully wrong” and noting that recolonizing freed p­ eople elsewhere was entirely impractical, this debater regarded it as simply too dangerous to regard immediate abolition as “justice.” More strikingly, the student charged with affirming immediate abolition refused to sustain his side, saying “policy & expediency forbid” emancipation and then raised the unwelcome possibility of miscegenation as the consequence of freedom.63 The way slavery was talked about at Yale left plenty of room for moral complacency. In the opening years of the nineteenth ­century, a Yale student—­even one convinced of the slave trade’s catastrophic implications—­could assume a position of moral and po­liti­cal complacency at peace with Paley’s, Dwight’s, and the northern state’s gradualist approach to emancipation and even the southern status quo.64 William Jay’s own college statement about the ­future said nothing about slavery. William’s nine-­part treatise “On the Profession of Lawyering,” ran through the first volume of the student-­edited Literary Cabinet like a straight arrow.65 William set himself the task of defending the honor and the necessity of the oft “abuse[d]” ­legal profession, carry­ing forward his ­father’s and Dr. Dwight’s faith in traditional institutions and social arrangements. William took the position that civilization required laws, laws required courts, and

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courts required l­ awyers. L ­ awyers served as society’s equalizers: without them, “How should the honest farmer or mechanic . . . ​defend himself against the encroachments of t­ hose, whom avarice has rendered both crafty and unfeeling?” Thus, l­awyers, who defend all t­ hose accused of criminal wrongdoing and represent all ­those whose property interests are at risk, ensure that the law neither “bend[s] to the overgrown influence of the ­g reat, [n]or fall[s] down” to “the mad ravings of the populace.” Such skilled men w ­ ere ideally suited to fill the ranks of “statesmen.” Federalist ­g reats such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Rufus King, and John Jay were his exemplars.66 The essay illustrates the seventeen-­year-­old William’s budding worldview. For the son of John Jay, finishing his training at a redoubt of New ­England Federalism in the wake of the reviled Jeffersonian ascendancy, it was virtually instinctual for William to take the position that ordinary, untrained p­ eople could not be trusted to govern themselves. The republic needed sober, well-­ trained men like himself to come to its rescue.67

Mixed Blessings ­ oward the end of his 1796 letter that began this chapter, William Hamilton T asked John Jay a series of sharp questions about slavery. The carpenter challenged the governor: “Is it not high time that the scandal of this country should be taken away that it might be called a f­ree nation . . . ​is it not time that negroes should be f­ ree[?]” ­Hadn’t the time arrived “that the threatening of heaven should be taken away” by ending slavery? Hamilton was not debating specific policies or history—­whether slavery should end gradually or immediately, with or without compensation for slave masters, and what was the relationship between bondage in New York and in the nation. Yet he conveyed a princi­ple of emancipation much more directly than President Dwight or his Yale debaters would, and he did so with the clear conviction of where God stood. He articulated a key precept of immediate abolitionism a generation before any Jay or virtually any other white abolitionist would do so: slavery must end. Hamilton presumably knew how emancipation actually occurred in places like New York—­through the precise outlines of gradualism negotiated in the po­ liti­cal corridors of power. That is why it made sense to him to write the governor, founding f­ ather, and former president of the New-­York Manumission Society—­a symbol of the nation who held at least some of the levers of po­ liti­cal power. But before the governor could do anything substantive, Hamilton sought Jay’s moral agreement, which his divine threat against the United States dramatized.

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Ultimately, however, Hamilton opted for blessings over curses. At its close, the letter pivoted t­ oward an image of brighter ­f uture for the country: “May kind heaven smile upon this nation incline them to do unto all men as they would all men should unto them.” The letter to Governor Jay then concluded with an invocation: “May Negroes be manumitted may heaven diffuse its choiset blessings on your head may you open your mouth & jud[g]e righ­teously & plead the cause of the poor & needy [and] may your ­family be blessed from above.”68 On balance, within the confines of their own ­house­holds, the Jays as masters experienced slavery as more blessing than curse—or, if not a blessing, then instrumental to securing the blessing that their wealth made pos­si­ble. The reward for a quarter-­century of unremitting public ser­vice that ended in 1801 with the close of his second term as governor was for John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay to retire to an impressively expanded ­house located on inherited land in Bedford, New York, about two dozen miles north of John’s boyhood home on Long Island Sound. And, of course, a ­house for the Jays was not a home without men and w ­ omen to look a­ fter them. Sarah took comfort when ­matters went well with her servants, enslaved or other­wise, remarking in a March 2, 1802, letter to John, “No servts. could have behaved better than ours have done.” Sadly, the mistress of the Bedford home would not be able to count her blessings much longer, as three months l­ater, Sarah passed away following “a short & severe illness.” John expressed his misfortune several months ­later with his customary understated equanimity in the draft of a letter intended for po­liti­cal ally Rufus King: “My Expectations from Retiremt. have not been disappointed, and had Mrs. Jay continued with me, I should deem this the most agreeable part of my Life.” Still, no doubt thinking of his ­children and his comfortable home, he wrote, “Many Blessings yet remain and I enjoy them.”69 Just as John did not experience retirement quite the way he had anticipated, health prob­lems kept William from successfully launching the life he expected on his graduation from college. He went to train with a Federalist attorney in Albany, and based on what he learned his ­brother Peter expressed confidence that William was on his way to “becoming master of his profession.” But eye prob­lems plagued William. On August 19, 1809, the twenty-­year-­old wrote his ­father planning his permanent relocation to the Bedford home, “bidding adieu to pursuits from which, from my childhood I had anticipated plea­sure and honor.” William, born to wealth and social stature, was fortunate that despite his ailment he had such a hospitable place from which to chart a new life course.70

C h a p te r 6

Sharing the Flame

“This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror,” wrote Thomas Jefferson as he contemplated the po­liti­cal crisis touched off by Missouri’s application in 1819 for admission to the Union. The patriarch of Monticello feared that the “self-­ government and happiness” forged by the revolutionary generation was “to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons.” The former US president worried that partisan northern obstruction of Missouri’s entrance as a slave state would rend the nation.1 John Jay and his sons also heard the crisis bells but sought to safeguard a very dif­fer­ent version of the found­ers’ legacy. The founding ­father, who had remained s­ ilent on national po­liti­cal affairs for many years, released a letter criticizing slavery’s spread as a violation of the American Revolution’s enduring princi­ples. Peter Augustus Jay, a recent president of the New-­York Manumission Society, continued to carry the ­family’s po­liti­cal and antislavery banner by addressing a gathering of two thousand strong in New York City opposing the addition of a new slave state. William Jay, now a county judge and reformer living in his ­father’s Westchester County ­house, also recognized the danger, referring to the spread of slavery as a “plague” and subsequently decrying in his diary the unconstitutionality of the prospective state’s plan to bar the entrance of ­free Blacks.2 Po­liti­cal flames in Congress did not incite terror in the Jays, but Missouri stoked fires in three men who represented the past, pre­sent, 129

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and ­f uture of the ­family’s antislavery legacy. Meanwhile, events in the Empire State and at home reflected entanglements that ­shaped b­ attles over slavery and racial equality to the end of the patriarch’s life and beyond.

Domestic Order and Disorder John Jay spent his last two de­cades surrounded by f­ amily and ­people devoted to his comfort. The eight hundred acres at Bedford contained orchards, wheat fields, and Merino sheep, and the h ­ ouse­hold included three generations of Jays (see figure 5). William had married Augusta McVickar, the ­daughter of a New York City merchant, three years ­after scuttling his apprenticeship as an attorney and returning home. The ­couple had five ­children, four girls and a boy, between 1813 and 1823. John expanded the three-­story home to make room for the growing ­family. William invested himself in the sprawling farm’s operations and also began to involve himself in reform ­causes at the local and the national level. Their older ­sister Nancy, unmarried, took on managerial responsibilities. Widowed eldest ­sister Maria Jay Banyer lived in Albany, maintaining close ties. Younger ­sister Sally lived with Maria, though she also spent time in Bedford and New York City. Peter Augustus Jay worked as an attorney in New York City, while John’s older b­ rother Blind Peter remained ensconced on the Rye estate their f­ ather had established in the 1740s; the 1810 census recorded six enslaved p­ eople in his ­house­hold.3 The number of enslaved ­people in the Bedford ­house­hold dwindled to two. Yet, mastery remained a puzzle that John Jay could only partially solve. Slavery’s long l­ egal twilight during the gradual emancipation era complicated conflicts between enslavers and enslaved and across generations. In the fall of 1809, John banished the teenage Zilpah from his h ­ ouse­hold ­after she became pregnant, selling her to his sister-­in-­law Judith Livingston Watkins for a projected period of several years. Judith had relocated from the western part of the state and now resided in New York City with her adult son. Clarinda, Zilpah’s ­mother who was born as a slave to John’s ­father Peter, remained b­ ehind in Bedford; ­whether she took some comfort from knowing Zilpah’s new mistress, the ache of parental helplessness was strong.4 John likely experienced a very dif­fer­ent mix of emotions. He may have been angry at Zilpah’s perceived moral lapse. But given his desire a de­cade before to send away Dinah’s child, it is also fair to say that Jay did not welcome his slaves’ attention being diverted from waiting on the Jay f­ amily. John’s reverential ­children may not have openly objected to their ­father’s decision; it is noteworthy that the ­house­hold sought a replacement for Zilpah, with Nancy Jay

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Figure 5.  Jay (Homestead) 1810 c. Printed illustration. From Homes of American Statesmen William S. Thayer. John Jay Homestead State Historic Site, Katonah, N.Y., New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

wanting “to get a ­little Girl,” denoting the category into which she placed the teenage Zilpah in her mind and perhaps wanting to socialize a new generation of servants. As with the biblical Zilpah of Genesis, masters passed around servants to suit their own needs. For Clarinda, of course, no substitution could fill the void created by her own child’s forced departure.5 Clarinda looked for a way to undo what John Jay had done. Zilpah’s child died—­a tragedy that Clarinda tried unsuccessfully to turn into an opportunity. As John recounted, a­ fter the news reached Bedford, “Clarinda became importunate for her return to us. the answr. she recd. was in the negative, and in de­ cided terms.” Then in the spring of 1811, with the departure from the Bedford

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­ ouse­hold of a servant named Rosanna, Clarinda tried again. In a letter to Peter h Augustus, written in a tone at once emphatic and willfully reserved, John described Clarinda’s effort to engineer the return of her ­daughter: “On the g­ oing away of Roasanna, she renewed her solicitations that we should take Zilpha [sic] to supply her place. she was alone—­Zilpha was the only child she had left. she had been deprived of the ­others & &.”6 Clarinda took considerable psychological, emotional, and even material risks in confronting her master. She was a slave and, as far as she knew in 1811, would always be a slave. She had been enmeshed with the Jay ­family since birth; her relationships with the ­family ­were among the most enduring she had ever known. She had been named Zilpah a­ fter an older Jay f­amily slave, who if not Clarinda’s a­ ctual ­mother, had played a mothering role. Banishment or even punishment would have deeply disrupted her modest circumstances. Consciously or subconsciously, Clarinda may have suspected that the Jays would not punish or dispatch her for speaking so bluntly. But no enslaved person could know that for sure. Through a combination of calculation and defiance, she stated her case. It was a case that frankly demanded that her masters face up to the sufferings and traumas of slavery. She had her own f­amily, an in­de­pen­dent set of emotional attachments that mattered deeply to her. She was a m ­ other with but one remaining child. Cruel fate, which her master recorded with the emotional distancing technique of “& &”, had denied her the opportunity to enjoy life with her other c­ hildren. Although John refused to dwell on the details of every­thing that was wrong about Clarinda’s life, he acknowledged the legitimacy of her claim. He informed his son Peter of his response to Clarinda’s petition: “­These Considerations have weight, and your s­ ister & myself concur in opinion that she should be gratified, provided (as they promise) Zilpa [sic] should behave in a satisfactory manner, of which however ­there are doubts. we have concluded to make the Experiment, and therefore must give you the Trou­ble of managing the Business.” Thus, like the British Parliament in 1766 repealing the Stamp Act but asserting its constitutional dominion through the Declaratory Act, John granted Clarinda’s wish while asserting his own continued sovereignty. John explained to his son exactly what procedures had to be followed to bring Zilpah back to Bedford. He no longer owned Zilpah, so John sought instead “to hire her by the month as long as she ­shall behave tolerable well.” It was the Watkins ­family, her ­legal masters, not Zilpah who received her meager wage of $3 per month. Jay also offered to cover the cost of her clothing. John also made it clear that it was he, not Clarinda and Zilpah, who exercised choice

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in this ­matter. As John wrote his son, “We are told of a black ­woman ­here who would prob­ably answer our purpose, & is willing to come, but as Clarinda behaved well, and is distressed at the Idea of living separate from her ­Daughter, we ­shall postpone engaging any person ­until we hear from you.” His ­handling of Zilpah’s case, in John’s mind, expressed magnanimity, not any l­egal obligation or personal need; it was not like the cases his son or his nephew dealt with on behalf of the NYMS in which Black men and ­women gained their ­actual freedom. Within the bound­aries of New York’s emancipation regime, John Jay believed that slaves remained slaves, and masters remained masters.7 A simmering crisis on his older b­ rother Peter’s Rye estate, however, forced the patriarchal gradualist John Jay to realize that the rules of slavery ­were changing faster than the law required. Seventy-­seven-­year-­old Blind Peter was losing control. In April 1811, several days before John announced that he would accede to Clarinda’s wish to bring Zilpah back to Bedford, Peter Augustus reported that the enslaved on the Rye estate had “become more & more ungovernable.” Four months ­later, Peter Augustus analyzed the situation in Rye with remarkable candor to his ­sister Maria: “­Uncle cannot perceive that it is necessary to treat Slaves at the pre­sent day in a Manner dif­fer­ent from that they ­were accustomed to fifty Years ago.”8 Peter Augustus did not specify what sort of treatment ­Uncle Peter fruitlessly attempted, but a vast gulf separated the world into which the elder Peter was born and raised and that of his final years. When U ­ ncle Peter was growing up, slaves arrived from Africa and the West Indies in Manhattan’s harbor; now the sale of slaves into and out of the state was restricted, and the gradual emancipation pro­cess had become a fixture of the ­legal landscape. When ­Uncle Peter was seven, authorities had burned slaves at the stake for an alleged plot to seize New York City. Now his nephew Peter Augustus was a ­legal counselor for the Manumission Society that prosecuted masters for cruelty to their slaves and lobbied for revisions to the law to further protect slaves from abusive masters.9 ­Those enslaved in Rye may have consciously thought about such changes, or they may have just taken advantage of the weakening grip of a blind man well into his eighth de­cade. Managing the master–­slave relationship in 1811 required a certain deftness and flexibility that took into account, if not for moral reasons than for practical ones, the narrowing par­ameters of slave owner­ship and the personalities of the individual slaves. Caesar and Peet had considerable leverage. When John Jay visited his b­ rother, he conveyed the constraints of the par­ tic­ul­ar situation in practical terms as they discussed men whom John knew well from their e­ arlier ser­vice to him. No sooner had John’s carriage pulled

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up to the h ­ ouse than his b­ rother inquired about “parting with Peet.” John acknowledged the benefit of disposing of troublesome servants but could not advise such a course. John cautioned against dispatching Peet, a man who had so many useful skills. Peet should e­ ither “be kept satisfied” or allowed to select another master. John also advised his ­brother to encourage Caesar ­toward continued cooperativeness by offering him wages. This was a modern strategy of financial incentives of which Peter was dubious, but John was doubtful that “a new set” of servants could be found to satisfy his ­brother. The year before, in 1810, Caesar had killed a man: he fatally struck a vagrant traveler who became obstreperous on being denied lodging at the Rye estate. Despite its grim outcome, this act of vio­lence was also one of loyalty. That is how Peter Augustus seemed to view the incident. In ­earlier times, it may also have been seen as dangerously erratic—­a cause for sale to a far-­away location. But now, John coaxed his ­brother into paying Caesar as a means of keeping him happy. Or perhaps John simply understood that in an era where law and custom conspired to shrink the pool of slaves in New York, the mercurial Caesar was, for his b­ rother, better than no slave at all. John summed up his visit by noting, “The ­whole of the Business is perplexing, and I fear ­will become more so.”10 The situation of Caesar and Peet changed less than two years l­ater when their master Peter Jay died. In accordance with his w ­ ill, written many years before, his ­widow Mary Duyckinck Jay inherited his slaves and therefore the delicate negotiation for their loyalty. Peet seized on the death of his master to request his freedom from the widowed Mary. As Peter Augustus reported to John, “He behaves very well but is extremely anxious to have his Liberty.” Mary was willing to negotiate. Not wanting to forfeit his ser­vice and ­under no l­ egal compulsion to fulfill Peet’s request, the ­widow was inclined “to manumit him & to pay him a reasonable sum” annually, “provided he ­will remain with her during her life.” Before acting, however, she consulted John Jay, who, with his ­brother’s passing, owned their ­father’s Rye property.11 On December 27, 1813, Mary Duyckinck Jay granted Peet, whose name was recorded by local authorities as Peter Johnson, his freedom. Peter Johnson’s demand was short of a revolutionary seizure of freedom, and Mary’s action was well short of a principled renunciation of slavery itself. The end result, nonetheless, was freedom willingly granted to a person who willfully asserted his desire for liberty. To assert his new identity, Peet became Peter, casting aside the diminutive and misspelled version of his former master’s name. Johnson is more ambiguous—an ordinary En­glish surname that, intentionally or not, echoed the first name of the extended Jay ­family’s patriarch.12

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Yet, even as times changed, the Jays still practiced their customary paternalism. In 1813, Nancy brought Clarinda with her to visit ­family and friends in Rye ­because Clarinda’s s­ ister Mary “had passed the winter ­there.” Without further comment, John noted to his youn­gest ­daughter Sally that Mary and Clarinda “had not seen each other for a ­g reat many years.”13 Having benefited from a world in which the Jays w ­ ere ­free to divide f­ amily members, at least in this one brief instance the Jays could bring them together too. In the Bedford ­house­hold, John Jay, with the help of his sons, forged long-­ term ser­vice arrangements as alternatives to slavery. Most of the servants who passed through the farm during this era ­were ­free and sometimes white. Coaxing lower-­class Manhattanites up to the country for ser­vice roles could be challenging. In 1813, John bought, presumably on an indenture contract, an African American boy named Chester, whose f­ ather, Chester Tilliston, worked as a f­ ree man on the Bedford property. That same year, William located in New York City a twenty-­year-­old immigrant named Joseph Cusno from Sicily who came with strong references. The new servant was to receive $10 a month or $100 year, but what may have made him particularly appealing to William was his willingness “to do what­ever you please.” Curiously, William identified Cusno as “a Mulatto Man,” perhaps trying to fit the servant’s unusual backstory into a more customary frame or perhaps just describing the man’s dark features. Be that as it may, Cusno entered into a relationship unlike any of the African Americans in the ­house­hold. Serving as the ­family waiter—­viewed as a more skilled role than that performed by female h ­ ouse servants—­Cusno carved out his own domestic space, receiving a loan from John to purchase a nearby stone ­house.14 The indenture of the “­free black Boy” Jack Pine, through an agreement with his ­father Caesar Pine, also bespoke a ­labor market and racial order in flux, with John’s contribution to Jack’s well-­being the subject of explicit negotiation. The six-­year arrangement reached between John Jay and Caesar Pine included John’s pledge to provide Jack with schooling and $25 in discharge wages. The acquisition of Jack Pine was not an extension of slaveholding by other means: Jay acted in loco parentis. As indicated by a letter he wrote to Caesar Pine more than three-­and-­a-­half years into Jack’s indenture, the boy’s ­actual ­father retained influence over Jack’s situation. Jay reported to Caesar Pine that Jack “has in general behaved as well as could be reasonably expected from a Boy of his age.” Jay also acceded to the ­father’s request that the boy remain “­until he ­shall be of age.” To implement that plan with l­egal precision, John asked that Caesar inform him “exactly how old” Jack was. He also assured Pine that Jack’s educational and religious development would continue to be part of

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the deal and praised Caesar for talking to his son about some “misconduct at New York.”15 Under­lying Jay’s responsible and respectful language to Mr.  Pine lay the stark inequalities of life during the gradual emancipation era. In Jay’s Westchester County, as elsewhere in New York State, Black ­family members frequently lived apart from one another. An increasing number of white h ­ ouse­holds included f­ ree Black servants. Some, like Zilpah, stayed in ­house­holds ­after manumission. O ­ thers, like Jack Pine, served indentures. One statistic that changed surprisingly ­little was the percentage of ­free Blacks who lived in ­free Black-­ headed h ­ ouse­holds. For the southern six counties of New York State, this percentage only increased from 57.9 ­percent to 59.9 ­percent from 1800 to 1820. In Westchester County, the rate of ­free Blacks living in Black-­headed h ­ ouse­holds remained below 50 ­percent for this same period. Often, husbands and wives, parents and c­ hildren, lived separately to meet white l­ abor demands and b­ ecause of the dearth of black opportunity and resources. And although it is true that Jay did bring Zilpah and Clarinda back together, as well as Chester Tilliston and his son (but not their wife and ­mother), the availability of Black ­children for indenture reflected a skewed ­labor market during an era where apprenticeship and indentured servitude had gone into decline in the broader economy. Moreover, the gradual emancipation ­legal regime, by extending the obligations of ­free offspring to serve their ­mother’s masters into adulthood, normalized the notion of indentured Black l­abor and ­family separation.16 Freedom’s opportunities and limitations continued to register in Jack Pine’s life. In January 1824, three years ­after the end of his initial indenture, Jack signed on to work for John Jay at a rate of $80 a year, with Jack responsible for his own expenses. ­Whether he agreed to work again for the Jays ­because he lacked better options or ­because he found it to be a relatively good situation, Jack Pine soon changed his mind. Five months ­later, Jack left John’s employ, moving elsewhere in Westchester County to be with his m ­ other.17 Jack Pine, born ­free in the nineteenth ­century, lived in a world of greater choice than that of Clarinda, Caesar, Peter Johnson, or Zilpah. Nonetheless, structures of in­equality s­ haped the lives of all Black New Yorkers.

Setting Limits Amid a changing ­labor market and shifting social norms, the NYMS mounted an effort in the 1810s to end slavery in the state, as well as to close egregious l­ egal loopholes. The NYMS continued to pursue ­legal cases on behalf of individual African Americans illegally held in slavery and to formally register manumis-

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sions.18 By late 1811, the society also determined to lobby the state legislature for the “general abolition of slavery.” During this era, Peter Jay Munro and Peter Augustus Jay each did stints as president of the NYMS (Munro, 1810–11; Jay, 1816). The NYMS had a well-­placed ally in Governor Daniel D. Tompkins. The Republican, who served as the state’s chief executive from 1807–17, was an NYMS member. In 1812, Tompkins announced as a priority an accelerated timetable for emancipation. Although over the next five years, the state assembly proved willing to lower the effective age of emancipation for the ­children of enslaved ­mothers, the state senate did not concur.19 During this period, the Jay cousins had a chance to participate directly in the legislative pro­cess; Peter Jay Munro represented Westchester County in 1815, and Peter Augustus Jay represented New York City in 1816. Neither man could have been heartened by what they saw in Albany. In 1811 and 1813, Republican legislators sought to make it more difficult for ­free African Americans, who generally supported Federalist candidates, to vote. ­Under the 1811 “Act to prevent frauds and perjuries at elections, and to prevent slaves from voting,” Black men had to prove their status as f­ ree ­people, obtaining the necessary paperwork for a fee and facing stiff penalties if the certification was successfully challenged on Election Day. In 1815, Munro found himself on the losing side of this ongoing ­battle. Republicans enacted a law targeting Black voting rights in New York City, where tightly contested elections could turn on African American votes. The new statute imposed a series of fees and registration requirements to affirm a prospective Black voter’s freedom, to verify sufficient property holdings to meet state franchise requirements, and to prove residency.20 When Peter Augustus Jay came to Albany in January 1816, he had his work cut out for him. He sought to reverse the anti-­Black voting rights tide and to reform the laws governing slavery. Jay proposed a reformulation of the law governing slaves and the ­children of slaves still obligated to serve ­under the gradual abolition formula. One provision of Jay’s bill extended to African American servants the same ­legal rights as apprentices to bring their masters to court when ­those masters w ­ ere alleged to have ­violated state laws governing their conduct. This provision would not have been without consequence: the most power­ful lever the NYMS had in providing l­egal aid to African Americans was holding masters to the letter of the law. This bill also included the requirement that masters provide ­those African Americans serving masters ­until adulthood receive a modicum of schooling and literacy training; failing to do so would lower the age at which the servant became fully ­free. The assembly initially rejected the provision, but by narrow majorities reinstated the clause and passed the bill. The state senate, however, buried the reform mea­sure.21

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Peter Augustus Jay’s attempt to repeal the blatantly discriminatory 1815 law applying special rules to African American voters in New York City did not get nearly as far. This time it was the assembly’s turn to delay action. Peter Augustus’s efforts did not go unnoticed in the press, however, but not always in a good way. One newspaper reprinted a Republican representative’s rumors of voter fraud, in which Black men ­were allegedly being brought from New Jersey to vote in New York City; the representative compared Black voters to “dogs” who did the bidding of their “former master[s]” at the polls.”22 Jay had not won the day, but he had clearly raised the ire of Republicans. During the frustrating 1816 session, Peter Augustus garnered one small victory. The previous year, the Yonkers Overseers of the Poor had won dispensation from the state to recoup expenses for two aged former slaves, who had been freed by statute ­after being confiscated from loyalist Frederick Philipse during the American Revolution. The paltry sum of $3 per month provided by the state in such cases did not come close to the ­actual cost of their maintenance. ­After being put on a committee to entertain the renewed petition for additional state support, Jay successfully advanced a bill to cover the full costs of subsidizing the dwindling number of former slaves who had received their freedom by confiscation.23 Peter Augustus thus applied to state law the support of el­derly slaves that was a point of pride in the f­amily’s personal practice. Peter Augustus de­cided not to run for the legislature in 1817. Broader po­ liti­cal conditions, however, fi­nally produced victory for the idea that New York State should set a specific date for slavery’s formal end. His successor as president of the NYMS, Cadwallader D. Colden, released a statement for the new year affirming that the time was right for “the consummation of their ­g reat object, the final abolition of slavery in this state.” Colden expressed his trust that the legislature could work out the details but insisted that “an atonement for long injustice” posed no danger or economic risk to the state. The previous fall, Governor Tompkins had been elected vice president of the United States ­under James Monroe. As Tompkins prepared to leave Albany for his new post in February 1817, he appealed for action. The legislature responded favorably. The March 31 law declared all slaves ­free as of July 4, 1827. The law also shortened the mandatory period of ser­vice for ­children born to enslaved ­mothers to twenty-­one years. Despite incorporating the symbolism of In­de­pen­dence Day, the law was hardly revolutionary: the youn­gest slaves completely liberated by the act, ­those born just before the 1799 gradual abolition law went into effect, would be twenty-­eight at the time of their manumission. O ­ thers would remain in ser­vice for years to come, subject to the risk of abuse, illegal transport, and just plain exploitation. Even so, New York vaulted ahead of all

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states with gradual emancipation regimes by affixing a terminal date for legalized slavery.24 Peter Augustus Jay operated u ­ nder no illusion that the work of abolitionists was done with enactment of New York’s 1817 law. Almost all of the core functions of the NYMS remained vital—­providing education to Black c­ hildren, enforcing state laws, and combating the illegal transportation and sale of slaves out of state. But the spirit of the new law converged with the f­amily’s relationships to its remaining slaves. John Jay’s h ­ andling of Zilpah’s manumission hints that he was following the pro­g ress of the 1817 bill while reaffirming his personal gradual emancipation ethic of calibrating what loyal slaves and masters owed one another. In March 1817, John recalled that Zilpah was fast approaching her twenty-­fifth birthday and that the original terms of her sale to his sister-­in-­law called for Zilpah’s freedom at age twenty-­five. He asked Peter Augustus to inform Mrs. Watkins of the impending transition and to pay Zilpah’s wages to her owner one final time. “Zilpha [sic] ­will then be f­ree, and we s­ hall engage her in our Ser­vice at the same wages”—­wages that ­were a fraction of ­those offered to his waiter Joseph Cusno a few years before. John accurately assumed that he would retain Zilpah’s ser­vice ­because she and Clarinda would not wish to part. But beyond that, his plan expressed continued faith in the moral efficacy not only of his own actions but also of the gradual emancipation regime itself. Twenty-­five was the age at which female slaves covered by the 1799 gradual abolition law received their ­legal discharge from ser­vice to their ­mother’s masters. Zilpah, having been born prior to July 4, 1799, was not subject to that law. Jay acted of his own volition, not by l­egal compulsion, to privately apply the 1799 formula to her. The new law that the state legislature was hammering out would not have freed Zilpah for another ten years. That Jay had likely misestimated Zilpah’s a­ ctual age underscores his eagerness to follow the gradual emancipation formula in her case.25 A change in l­ egal status did not make master–­servant relationships any less fraught. In March 1818, approximately a year a­ fter Zilpah became f­ ree, Nancy Jay reported to her older ­sister Maria Jay Banyer that “Zilpha [sic] wishes” their younger s­ ister Sally “was home with all her heart.” Nancy understood that Zilpah was not merely expressing fondness or currying f­ avor. For Nancy wrote with some puzzlement, “What is the reason I do not know, but” Zilpah “does much better u ­ nder her [Sally’s] directions than mine.”26 Even a­ fter many years, servants and masters remained strangers to one another. When Sally died only a few weeks ­later, it was not only her blood relatives who felt the sting. How, when, and why Clarinda achieved her freedom is far more opaque. At some point between 1810 and 1820, Clarinda’s status changed from slave

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to ­free according to the federal census. She had labored far too long for John to claim that she had to pay back her purchase price. She was also considerably older than the gradual emancipation formula that Jay applied to Zilpah. Perhaps John made a s­ ilent or merely verbal adjustment to her status. Clarinda would for the rest of her life serve the f­amily and be a reminder of the ­family’s slaveholding past.27 During this period, some of Peter’s fellow gradual abolitionist wavered on Black rights to citizenship. In December 1818, Peter served as one of New York’s delegates to a special meeting of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race. Peter chaired a committee considering how the organ­ization might lobby Congress to deploy diplomatic leverage inducing Spain and its American colonies to renounce the African slave trade. He also served on another committee charged with considering ­whether the group should embrace an emerging initiative supported by the some of the nation’s leading public figures to colonize f­ ree Blacks from the United States on the west coast of Africa. Peter Augustus Jay refused to merge the campaign to eradicate slavery in the United States with the notion that the only f­uture for f­ree Black p­ eople lay on the other side of the ocean. The Jay-­chaired committee on diplomacy with Spain recommended that Congress impress on the newly in­de­pen­dent nations of the hemi­sphere that they could not fight for their own liberty while depriving through the slave trade “men . . . ​entitled to the same rights as they.” The committee on colonization, having sampled pro-­colonizationist ideas, took note of the criticisms leveled at colonization by African Americans. It stated that “they have not been able to discern . . . ​any t­hing friendly to the abolition of slavery in the United States” from this new movement. It also calculated that the cost of transporting the current ­free Black population of the United States to Africa would be exorbitant. All evidence also suggested that conditions in Africa ­were utterly inhospitable for a colony. Domestically, colonization would thwart the “certain pro­g ress of t­ hose princi­ples, which, if uninterrupted, ­will produce their universal emancipation.” F ­ ree Blacks in the slave states would become the targeted victims of colonization, marginalized and bullied to leave the country. Peter Augustus and his colleagues convinced the convention to include a strong rebuke of colonizationism in the Circular Address distributed to member manumission socie­ties. The remarks condescendingly expressed doubts about the preparation of African Americans for self-­governance and took an agnostic stance on emigration to Haiti being “encouraged by the government ­there.” But overall the convention clung to optimistic assumptions that slavery and racism w ­ ere in retreat.28

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Missouri Calling The Missouri Crisis tested assumptions about the relationship between the American Revolution and the slow-­but-­steady antislavery approach. In February 1819 Congressman James Tallmadge Jr., from Duchess County, New York, tried to incorporate the gradual emancipation formula into national policy and in so ­doing touched off a national crisis. Rather than admit Missouri with a constitution that allowed for slavery, Tallmadge proposed banning slave importation and freeing slaves born in the new state at age twenty-­five. This attempt to phase out slavery in the new states to be carved out of the Louisiana Purchase touched off a heated po­liti­cal stalemate. Starting in late summer, abolitionists and other opponents of slavery’s expansion from Mary­land to Maine sought to demonstrate public support for restricting slavery in Missouri and to stiffen the resolve of their representatives in advance of the next meeting of Congress.29 Peter Augustus Jay joined the anti-­Missouri fray in New York City. On November 16, 1819, he addressed the controversy at a packed meeting chaired by his father-­in-­law and early member of the NYMS, Matthew Clarkson. Congress, Peter Augustus told the gathering of two thousand, had the necessary authority to block the extension of slavery and to make support of this goal a condition for admitting new states. He also discussed “in a feeling manner, the cruelties of slavery” and “the evils which would ultimately result to this country if not prohibited.” Jay successfully motioned for the meeting to approve a set of resolutions emphatically opposing the admission of Missouri as a slave state and taking a strong position against the institution of slavery more generally. The preamble labeled “the existence of slavery in the United States . . . ​ a g­ reat po­liti­cal as well as moral evil.” The federal government ­ought “to prohibit the admission of slavery into any state or territory hereafter to be formed or admitted into the Union.”30 At virtually the same moment that Peter helped mobilize opposition to slavery in Missouri, his ­father inserted himself into the debate. On November 17, John Jay penned a letter to Elias Boudinot in response to an antislavery circular produced in New Jersey e­ arlier in the month. He surely anticipated that Boudinot, a former Federalist congressman and cofounder of the American Bible Society, would make this letter public.31 ­After a long silence on most po­ liti­cal subjects including slavery, Jay felt compelled to make his own position plain. Slavery “­ought not to be introduced nor permitted in any of the new states, and . . . ​­ought to be gradually diminished and fi­nally abolished in all of them,” declared the retired founder. To bolster his stance, the former chief justice of the US weighed in on the constitutionality of Congress’s imposition of antislavery conditions on

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Missouri’s admission. He read the slave trade clause of the US Constitution as denying Congress the power to interfere with the “migration and Importation” of slaves into “existing States” prior to 1808. According to Jay, Congress retained the power to prevent the importation of slaves into new states at any time. He argued that, a­ fter 1808, congressional regulation of the spread of slavery applied to all states “­whether new or old.” The retired nationalist asserted the primacy of the federal government to blunt the spread of slavery and implied congressional authority to ban the interstate slave trade as well. John Jay’s critique of slavery also emphasized the egalitarianism implications of American in­de­pen­dence. He explained why Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution used the phrase “such Persons” instead of “Slaves” when describing the importation of ­people: slavery was “Tolerat[ed]” at the time despite “its Discordancy with the Princi­ples of the Revolution.” Nonetheless, the institution was known to be “repugnant” to the values ennunciated in the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence. Jay then copied directly into his letter the famous phrases from the Declaration’s preamble: “We hold t­ hese Truths to be self evident—­that All Men are created equal—­that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unaleienable Rights—­that among them are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The egalitarian spirit of the revolution and opposition to Missouri’s admission as a slave state ­were then one and the same.32 The seventy-­four-­year-­old Jay’s brief published remarks on Missouri leant support to northern congressmen, senators, and state legislators already digging their heels in against their southern opponents. Although one of Jay’s Federalist contemporaries Rufus King played a key role in the US Senate fight against slavery in Missouri, having a figure of Jay’s even greater stature cast aside his typical reticence made a strong statement. The publishers of a thirty-­ five-­page pamphlet of anti-­Missouri speeches rushed to append the Jay–­ Boudinot correspondence to the back of their publication u ­ nder the heading, “The following letter contains the opinion of that ­great Civilian John Jay on the Constitutional authority of Congress . . .” The New-­England Galaxy & Masonic Magazine opted for the more understated heading “Letter from the Venerable John Jay.” Newspapers in Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, and New Jersey also republished part or all of Jay’s letter.33 John Jay wrapped the mantle of the American Revolution around the anti-­ extension cause in a way that few other men could. He was a highly placed witness to the founding era and a constitutional expert. With his own state’s and his ­house­hold’s course fixed on a path ­toward final abolition, the New Yorker regarded gradual emancipation as a safe, effective, and replicable means of achieving the broader goal of ending American slavery.34

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Missouri also kindled the antislavery fire of William Jay. In 1819, William shared his own opposition to “the extension of slavery” in a letter to Boudinot, with whom he had collaborated on the establishment of the American Bible Society. The son expressed himself in more colorfully unrestrained and more religious tones than his f­ather: “If our country is ever to be redeemed from the curse of slavery the pre­sent Congress must stand between the living and the dead and stay the plague.” It was not the laws of the country but ­those of God that slavery’s expansion v­ iolated. The peril was both practical and moral. Once planted in the West, slavery would be difficult to eradicate, “poisoning the feelings of humanity” and undermining “civil society.” This letter was the first written evidence of his opposition to slavery. William’s understanding of the stakes in Missouri expressed apocalyptic tones not found in his ­father’s constitutional analy­sis of the prob­lem. In a private letter, however, written in December 1819 to anti-­extension pamphleteer Daniel Raymond, John stated clearly that t­here was no way to expand slavery “without d­ oing vio­lence” to the nation’s “princi­ples” and “depressing” its “power and prosperity.” The Missouri question was a subject ­father and son surely discussed at their shared Bedford home.35 The objections of the Jays and New Yorkers of vari­ous partisan stripes came to naught. Congress struck a deal to admit Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a ­free state. The compromise also established the 36° 30’ latitude as the northern boundary to slavery in ­f uture states carved from the Louisiana Purchase. Most New York congressmen opposed the Missouri Compromise.36 The question of f­ ree Black civil rights extended the Missouri Crisis despite this congressional deal. As William noted in his private diary’s 1820 installment on the year’s po­liti­cal events, Missouri produced a state constitution that defiantly added racial discrimination on top of slavery. He commented, “As if to insult the advocates of the rights of man & to burlesque all profession of liberty & equality so liberally made by the southern slave holders,” Missouri’s “constitution renders it penal for a ­free negro, to enter the State.” He also observed, “This prohibition, being in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees to citizens of the several states, equal rights, with the citizens of t­ hose states in which they may happen to reside.” Despite overwhelming opposition in his home state of New York, in 1821 another compromise eked through Congress, fig-­leaf language requiring Missouri to agree to abide by the US Constitution.37 The Missouri Crisis exposed the degree to which regional assumptions about the pro­gress of antislavery w ­ ere misplaced. In the mind of all three Jays, to oppose slavery in Missouri was to stand for the country’s interests and princi­ples.

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Yet the re­sis­tance of southerners in Congress to ­those notions and the compromises that ensued indicated that the nation’s viability did not depend on extending the princi­ples of the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence nor on disseminating the northern gradual emancipation model. Indeed, the Missouri Crisis revealed that preserving the republic, at least for the time being, depended on forsaking ­these princi­ples.38 Po­liti­cal upheaval in New York would soon show that the Jay ­family’s assumptions about gradualism’s pro­gress ­toward equal citizenship w ­ ere not supported at home ­either.

Peter Augustus Jay’s Constitutional Crisis For more than two months in 1821, some of the state’s leading politicians and jurists met in Albany to rewrite John Jay’s 1777 New York State constitution—­ and in the pro­cess to define the racial bound­aries of New York’s emerging democracy. Peter Augustus Jay, who was designated to eventually assume title of the ­family’s Rye property, and Peter Jay Munro served as two of the three delegates from Westchester County. The cousins took dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal routes to the convention. Munro had recently declared the Federalists moribund and aligned with the Bucktails, Martin Van Buren’s ascendant faction determined to break the po­liti­cal dominance of his Republican rival, Governor DeWitt Clinton. His cousin Peter Augustus Jay, by contrast, was a member of the shrinking remnant of New York Federalism courted by Clinton. Indeed, Clinton had become Jay’s po­liti­cal patron. The governor had assisted Jay to become recorder for the City of New York in 1819, a job that involved overseeing tax assessments. Jay, however, was removed from office in the spring of 1821, a casualty of po­liti­cal infighting and the state’s complicated system of making public appointments.39 Peter Augustus arrived in Albany in late August for a convention dominated by anti-­Clinton Bucktail delegates. Van Buren’s Bucktails set about to expand the electorate and sweep away anomalous provisions that they believed weakened legislative authority and concentrated power in a small number of hands.40 Jay hewed to a more conservative philosophy suspicious of expanding the franchise by diluting property-­holding standards. He had no patience, however, for using a race as a tool for defining who should vote and who should not. Nothing that Peter Augustus observed during the initial weeks of the convention made him optimistic about what it would accomplish. On September 12, the convention received an appeal from ­free Black men in New York City that the new constitution protect them from the kinds of procedural road-

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blocks to Black voting that previous state legislatures had enacted. Through his long ser­vice to the NYMS, Jay had become familiar with the petitioners, and he moved that their position be considered. At the same time, the committee on voting rights presented their plan to restrict voting to white men only, part of a larger proposed overhaul of voter eligibility.41 A week ­later, on September 19, the convention debated the committee’s full report, which eliminated property-­holding thresholds set by the 1777 state constitution at one level for general assembly elections and at a significantly higher level for gubernatorial and state senatorial elections. The proposed new standard approached universal suffrage for adult males. ­Under the new schema, taxpayers of even the most modest means, members of the militia, and ­those who worked on the public roads instead of paying taxes would become enfranchised.42 The committee si­mul­ta­neously proposed to bar all Black men from voting. Proponents of a glaring racial exception to vastly expanded male suffrage justified their proposal in avowedly racist terms. Committee member John Z. Ross of Genesee County, in the far western section of the state, argued that “civil government” need not be bound by doctrines of “natu­ral equality.” In Ross’s words, Blacks ­were “a peculiar p­ eople, incapable . . . ​of exercising that privilege [of voting] with any sort of discretion, prudence, or in­de­pen­dence.” On practical grounds, Ross feared that allowing African Americans to vote in New York “would serve to invite that kind of population to this state, an occurrence which I should most sincerely deplore.”43 Biding his time while ­others spoke, Jay then ­rose from his desk in the second row of the right wing of the chamber to denounce the proposed denial of voting rights to African Americans. Jay rebutted a variety of aspersions directed at Blacks. He noted that the widely understood mandate of the convention was to expand suffrage, not restrict it before asking, “What crime have” African Americans “committed for which they are to be punished?” He reminded his colleagues that less than a year before the convention, the state legislature overwhelmingly encouraged its congressional del­e­ga­tion to reject the admission of Missouri as a slave state; legislators had deemed unacceptable the violation of the federal Constitution’s “privileges and immunities” clause by Missouri’s provision to deny the right of f­ ree Black citizens to move ­there. New York now proposed to violate the princi­ple. The language ­under consideration would mean that ­free Blacks from Pennsylvania with the right to vote would lose the franchise on relocating to New York. If New York put the racial bar in place “you w ­ ill hear a shout of triumph and a hiss of scorn from the southern part of the ­union, which I confess ­will mortify me—­I ­shall shrink at the sound, b­ ecause I fear it ­will be deserved.”

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Jay confronted the racist defense of disfranchisement head-on. Natu­ral inferiority, he asserted, was a “universally exploded” concept. Jay did concede the existence of behavioral differences between ­free Blacks and whites, but he attributed them entirely to the malign influences of slavery, and he assured the convention that “this state of t­ hings is fast passing away.” Jay noted, “Schools have been opened for them, and . . . ​in ­these schools ­there is discovered a thirst for instruction, and a pro­g ress in learning, seldom to be seen in the other schools of the state.” He also minimized the practical threat of Black voters. To protect against what? Jay conceded that if he ­were a southerner he would not support “an immediate and universal emancipation” ­because of its presumed danger. By contrast, New York’s black population remained static, even as the white population soared. Disfranchisement would represent a gratuitous fulfillment of “an unreasonable prejudice” at the price of sullying the New York constitution “with a provision odious and unjust.”44 The next day, Jay once again marshaled his evidence in ­favor of Black rights. He dismissed the analogies to other groups barred from voting u ­ nder certain circumstances. Clergy could resign from their posts at w ­ ill, while “the disability of the black man is to be annexed to his blood, is never to be removed, and is to be inseparable from him and his posterity to the latest generation.” Indians legally belonged to their own “in­de­pen­dent nations,” not to the general citizenry, and, as such, did not enjoy the franchise; even so, Jay pointed out, an individual Indian could be naturalized as a citizen just like a Eu­ro­pean immigrant. Black ­people, thus, bore the brunt of a unique discrimination. Proponents of denying voting rights to ­free Blacks in New York argued from a false premise about slavery’s southern trajectory: “I am told, sir,” he declared, “that the southern states are about to emancipate their slaves, and that we ­shall then be overrun by an emigration of ­free blacks. . . . ​Happy should I be, sir, if this intelligence ­were confirmed.” The harsh real­ity, commented Jay, was that “southern planters w ­ ere adopting mea­sures to rivet more firmly the fetters of slavery, but never that they w ­ ere beginning to break them.” The South had laws to forbid the preaching of Chris­tian­ity, the spreading of literacy, and the manumission of slaves. Jay now feared that his fellow convention delegates wished to rivet the fetters of prejudice more tightly to Black New Yorkers as well. Jay attacked the attempt to rewrite the franchise rules as based on prejudice instead of “reason.” He summarized his opponents’ argument: “I ­will not eat with you, nor associate with you, b­ ecause you are black; therefore I ­will disfranchise you. I despise you, not ­because you are vicious, but merely ­because I have an insuperable prejudice against you;—­therefore I ­will condemn you, and your

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innocent posterity, to live forever as aliens in your native land.” Jay could not believe that the convention would defy the princi­ple of “natu­ral equality of all men, merely to gratify odious, and I hope, temporary prejudices.”45 His attempt to block the worst excesses of racialized democracy ­were at least temporarily successful. Following Jay’s remarks, the convention removed the word “white” from the draft provision defining voter eligibility by a 63–59 margin. His cousin Peter Jay Munro, who remained ­silent during the debates, joined this narrow majority, as did a substantial number of Bucktail Republicans and several Federalist delegates.46 Jay’s victory on voting rights made him no less gloomy—­with good reason, as it turned out. He preferred not only to keep racially exclusive language out of the constitution but also to keep in the old property-­holding standards for voting rights. The Bucktail majority, however, had come to bury that remnant of the colonial and revolutionary era. On October 3, he informed his ­father, “In the convention t­ here is manifestly a jacobinical party. They have de­ cided in f­ avor of universal suffrage.”47 He remained loyal to a bygone Federalist po­liti­cal order, in which Black men with ­little or no property should have no more or no less opportunity than whites with ­little or no property. His opponents, in contrast, sought to make white skin the functional equivalent of property owner­ship. T ­ hese delegates refined their approach rather than abandoning the quest to color-­code the franchise. The revised constitutional language introduced to the convention on October 4 affixed a property-­ holding requirement on Black males of $250 freehold property, even as the convention prepared to drop any such standard for white voters. The new clause prompted a new round of race-­baiting. A ­ fter Olney Briggs of Schoharie County called on October 6 for the convention to revive the much more clear-­cut whites-­only voting standard, Jay spoke out once more in more personal terms that brought the country’s historical legacy and religion directly into the conversation.48 Sounding annoyed, even weary, Jay responded to the renewed assault on Black rights. His brief, graceful remarks invoked the responsibilities of ­fathers and sons. He wished to know on what basis delegate Briggs assailed African Americans: “It was true they ­were now in some mea­sure a degraded race; but how came they so? Was it not by our fault, and the fault of our ­fathers? And ­because they had been degraded, the gentleman from Schoharie was for visiting the sins of the f­athers upon the c­ hildren.” Jay detected “too much pride of democracy” in the attempt of whites to elbow Blacks aside from a position of equality. Turning from earthly politics to heavenly justice, Jay asserted, “However we may scorn, and insult, and trample upon this unfortunate race now, the day was fast approaching when we must lie down with them in that

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narrow bed appointed for all the living.” In death, all lay in the ground, and “the servant is f­ ree from his master.” He then intoned, “We are all the offspring of one common ­Father, and redeemed by one common Saviour—­that gates of paradise are open alike to the bond and the ­free.” He labeled Brigg’s proposal “repulsive.”49 Jay’s rhe­toric conveyed a fundamental refusal to repudiate racial equality and expressed a desire to apportion fairly the responsibility for the condition of Black New Yorkers. Jay anticipated that African American degradation would be perpetuated by Black c­ hildren in an environment of discrimination. Yet Peter faced up to white culpability by pointedly asking of this degradation, “Was it not our fault, and the fault of our f­athers?” He accepted guilt and responsibility for what men like his ­father had done by perpetuating slavery. God, the F ­ ather, recognized none of t­ hese man-­made racial distinctions, the kind that racial barriers to voting tried to make permanent. Such provisions ­were contemptible in this life and the next. White man’s democracy, in the final analy­sis, expressed immoral, ungodly arrogance. Peter’s f­ather had grasped this conundrum himself four de­cades ­earlier when he criticized a slaveholding country’s “impious prayers” for liberty. Having read Peter’s speech in the newspaper, John Jay commented in a letter to his son, “In my opinion [it] does you Credit.”50 ­These brief words offered a paternal blessing to Peter’s critique and his cause, tacitly accepting the premise that his own generation had not done enough. At the Albany convention, Peter not only bore the futile burden of defending his ­father’s fading constitutional and social order but he also strove to compensate for the racial legacy that order had bequeathed to con­temporary New York. At the 1821 convention, however, the Jays’ version of piety did not reign. Briggs, in withdrawing his motion to resurrect a straightforward whites-­only standard, sneered at Jay’s high-­mindedness: “He would ask that honourable gentleman w ­ hether he would consent to lie down, in life, in the same feather bed with a negro?” and “­whether it would elevate a monkey or a baboon to allow them to vote?” Martin Van Buren less crudely justified the princi­ple of discrimination; he claimed the $250 property-­holding requirements for Blacks “held out inducements to industry.” A 2:1 majority favored plowing ­under the old 1777 property standards for whites while using property holding as a way of minimizing the number of Black voters. In a series of votes on suffrage, Jay and Munro found themselves in the minority each time. The gambit of Republicans like Van Buren had been to expand suffrage while punishing the Federalist-­leaning Black constituency.51 Peter Augustus Jay found himself much less isolated on the question of ­whether to use the New York constitution to lock in the 1817 emancipation

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law or even to accelerate its goal of ending slavery. James Tallmadge, who as a congressman had sparked the Missouri Crisis debate only a few years before, argued that the 1817 law, ­because it still permitted virtual owner­ship of the ­children of slaves well into the 1840s, should be amended constitutionally to terminate slavery completely by 1827. Some delegates responded hostilely to any mea­sure that would accelerate Black freedom, while ­others worried that the constitution should remain ­silent on slavery, lest the document embarrass ­f uture generations. More than two-­thirds of the delegates, including Jay and the ­silent Munro, voted against the attempt to include antislavery princi­ples in the constitution. What­ever “sins” the “­fathers” had committed, for the Jay cousins, gradualism was not one of them. They preferred to let the emancipation pro­cess follow its already prescribed statutory course.52 For Jay, the convention had been a jarring confirmation that his views and temperament had no place in con­temporary electoral politics. On November 8, 1821, just two days before the convention closed, Peter wrote his wife Mary, “I have been almost daily in hope of getting away from this place. . . . ​ my po­liti­cal life is ended.” The delegates approved the constitution by an overwhelming 98–9 vote, Jay joining the tiny minority. His cousin Peter Jay Munro, who had allied with anti-­Clinton Republicans the year before, voted with the majority, declining to offer symbolic opposition to the new era of white man’s democracy.53 He had ­little time to wallow in defeat. Only sixteen days ­after the close of the convention, he joined the com­pany of his fellow abolitionists at a New York City session of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Even in this venue, Peter found himself called on to beat back racially exclusionary sentiments, as once again the national organ­ization took up the question of establishing a faraway African American colony. As part of a five-­man committee, Jay reaffirmed the convention’s 1818 rejection of African colonization. The committee found the barriers to such a plan “insurmountable.” It also rejected the notion of sending freed p­ eople to a colony in western territory belonging to the United States. B ­ ecause the Black colonists, according to the report, lacked the benefits of “education” necessary to govern such a colony, their lives would hardly be better in the m ­ iddle of Indian country. Sovereignty issues also undermined such a plan ­because, according to the committee, the colony e­ ither must become a US state or a separate country. Sounding a Jeffersonian note, the committee ­imagined rivalry with neighboring white territories producing “bloodshed” and even “servile war” ­because such a colony would attract “runaway slaves.” The committee insisted that working t­ oward ending slavery itself was the nation’s most appropriate course. The report was accepted by the convention.54

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The organ­ization remained committed to a national program of gradual emancipation. The convention issued “A Plan for the General Emancipation of Slaves” that expressed the Jays’ long-­standing gradualist assumptions. It explic­ itly rejected a sudden and complete liberation of slaves while acknowledging the “im­mense debt” that the nation owed African Americans. Accordingly, the convention ­imagined making southern slaves into serfs with “an interest in the land they cultivate” during a period long enough to “fit” them “for the enjoyment and exercise of rational liberty.” C ­ hildren would be educated; no one could be sold out of the county where they lived. Though the convention again did not rule out Haiti as a destination for resettlement, its bedrock position was that a northern-­style gradual emancipation regime would be the best method for the nation to patiently undo the proverbial Gordian knot of slavery. In articulating this plan, the delegates did not fully accept the lessons of the Missouri Crisis or the Albany constitutional convention: slavery’s southern defenders had no interest in any emancipation plans, nor did northern politicians have any interest in equal citizenship or racial uplift.55 Despite the evidence, the delegates clung to a vision of gradual social transformation whose limitations in the North ­were already becoming alarmingly apparent.

William’s Quests Politics and philanthropy created their share of frustrations and challenges for Peter Augustus Jay. Nonetheless, he had a successful corporate ­legal practice in New York City and a roster of ­causes to absorb his energies during the 1810s and 1820s. He was a pillar of the establishment even if he was now estranged from electoral politics.56 Living in his ­father’s h ­ ouse with his growing f­ amily, William’s path to making his own public mark was less certain, although not without possibility. In 1816, he joined with Peter Augustus in helping launch the American Bible Society (ABS). To John Jay’s sons and to John Jay himself, the mass distribution of the holy scripture was a tool for national and even global transformation. William successfully made a motion to the ABS Board of Man­ag­ers that e­ very clergyman in the country be asked to promote the organ­ization from their pulpits. With New York poised to become the London of Amer­i­ca, a national organ­ization to disseminate the scriptures run by laymen with management and business skills was needed. William contemplated an enterprise “well suited for a ­g reat society, embracing all ranks and denominations, and extending its care . . . ​over the ­whole ­union.” A national moral prob­lem required a nationally or­ga­nized solution.57

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Still, doubts about his moral worthiness plagued John Jay’s younger son. On Christmas Day 1817, William reflected, “Few families have so much cause for gratitude to the giver of all good as this, & we are bound to remember that from t­ hose to whom much has been given, much ­will be required.” Six days ­later on New Years’ Eve, he more gloomily indicated in his diary that he had accomplished l­ittle in his first twenty-­nine years.58 ­Family tragedy added to the burden. Less than five months a­ fter his New Year’s Eve reflection on his meager contributions, his younger ­sister Sally died at the age of twenty-­six, perhaps of a ruptured appendix. William took her death hard, recording, “I live in constant expectation of death.”59 Making sense of his own life had grown at once more difficult and more urgent. He felt the need to address h ­ uman suffering in acute spiritual terms. Two weeks ­after Sally’s death, William paid a visit to a destitute local Black ­family. Four ­children, one of whom was crippled, and two adults lived in one tiny room, with rags covering the glassless win­dows. William spoke of religion with Dick, the bedridden f­ ather, who was stricken with consumption, readying the poor man to meet his maker. Jay exclaimed to his diary, “Who has made me to differ from this miserable object!” He vowed to repay God for his own good fortune “by my constant endeavour, to do what ever my conscience tells me, is pleasing to him.” Dick’s plight drove home to Jay his own authority and autonomy to act as a redeemer, rather than to suffer as a victim. He could and must strive on behalf of o ­ thers, even as he learned from their suffering about the vagaries of fate.60 If he ­stopped to think that the destitute Black f­ amily’s condition was embedded in a longer history of ongoing racial injustices in this era of gradual emancipation, he did not say. William found a focal point for his moral energies when, soon ­after his ­sister’s death, he returned to his l­egal vocation by becoming a Westchester County judge in the spring of 1818. He benefited from the ­favor of Governor Clinton, much as his older ­brother had. Governor Clinton ­later elevated him to chief judge in the county in 1820. Jay regarded his judicial ser­vice in moral and spiritual rather than po­liti­cal terms. As he reflected in his diary, being on the bench “puts it in my power to do much good, by an impartial administration of Justice & it tends in some degree to increase personal influence; & this influence properly exerted may produce beneficial results”—­among ­these “the opportunities this office may afford me, of honouring my Maker, & commending his religion to my fellow men.”61 The bench, however, was not a pulpit. William got a firsthand, eye-­opening look at ­human depravity that confirmed the importance of moral reform. In June 1819, he described in his diary another judge’s conviction of a defendant accused of lacing a man’s flour at the mill with arsenic. At the pronouncement

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of the verdict, the guilty man displayed “one of the most frightful countenances I have ever beheld—­despair, rage & malignity w ­ ere strongly depictured in his features.” Equally disturbing, his judicial colleague’s remarks when sentencing the man to fourteen years in prison brought the courtroom audience to tears but evoked no reaction from the condemned man. A year-­and-­a-­half ­later, William tried a case in North Salem that caught his par­tic­u­lar attention ­because it perverted his strong sense of paternal moral probity. One party to a landlord–­tenant dispute induced his own son to perjure himself and had lined up other c­ hildren to similarly perjure themselves. “Greatly shocked,” he recorded in his diary. “If anything can add to the detestable depravity of this man, of this ­Father, thus the corruptor of his ­children, it is that he is a professing christian, & an officer of a baptist church in North Salem!”62 In William’s moral universe the only ­thing worse than a failure to execute paternal responsibilities was the failure to live up to Christian ones, lessons he would apply ­later in his blistering critique of southern slavery. The Westchester County Court did not deal lightly with crimes against property. A conviction for petty larceny could send a man to prison for five months, g­ rand larceny or robbery to the state prison for several years and even a de­cade of hard l­abor. Such punishments indicate the distinction authorities made between judicially enforced coerced ­labor, which was deemed legitimate, and the permanent bound servitude that William would increasingly regard as the height of immorality. Hard l­abor punished a man’s actions, slavery a man’s lineage—­the difference between justice and injustice.63 Ser­vice on the bench did not absorb all his moral—or moralistic—­energies. William also displayed a zest for religious politics. To his ­children’s plea­sure, the el­derly John Jay succeeded Elias Boudinot as president of the ABS in 1821.64 While the founding ­father may have been a superb unifying symbol and occasional spokesman for a group seeking to bind together disparate denominations for the ­g rand purpose of Bible distribution, New York’s Episcopal bishop John Henry Hobart objected to the distribution of unannotated Bibles by a nondenominational organ­ization. In 1823, William and the bishop entered into a nasty pamphlet war. Criticism from a leading official of the Jay f­amily’s own denomination brought out the filio-­pietistic warrior in William. The tenacity with which he defended his f­ ather’s role in the ABS indicated both the sort of zeal the younger son increasingly brought to moral reform and the central role his ­father played in his own moral identity. William, writing u ­ nder the pseudonym “A Churchman,” granted his own bishop no quarter. The birth of the ABS from the ashes of the War of 1812 and the unpre­ce­dented cooperation in this work by “expiring saints” like John Jay provided evidence of God’s approval. Moreover, for

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William, empirical evidence told the successful tale: ­there ­were 300 North American affiliates of the ABS and translations of the Bible into more than 130 languages and dialects. Thus, wrote William, while lay Episcopalians took the lead in this holy work, Hobart’s re­sis­tance produced “Schism, unkindness, mutual reproaches, and unholy passions.” William insisted that, in contrast, his ­father invested his well-­earned prestige in this noble religious endeavor.65 William’s dogged religious reform advocacy went beyond such polemics. In 1827, he wrote a prize-­winning essay on Sabbath observance that coupled his Christian ecumenicalism with his desire for the “peace and good order of society” that he and his colleagues sought to enforce from the bench. The benefits of Sabbath observance as a means for diffusing morality widely w ­ ere clear: “A periodical cessation from ­labour had permitted all classes of society regularly to assem­ble for religious worship and instruction.”66 Piety preempted punishment in this world and the next.

Antislavery Redirection Some injustices required po­liti­cal intervention that went far beyond piety or punishment. During this period, William for the first time publicly invested his reform energies in combating slavery on the national stage. Exposure to Frenchmen Henri Gregoire’s critique of racism and En­glish Quaker’s Elizabeth Heyrich call for immediate abolition may have deepened William’s dislike of slavery during the 1820s. But the plight of a Westchester County man prompted to William’s action. In July 1826, Gilbert Horton, a f­ ree Black sailor was arrested near the Washington, D.C., wharves by a justice of the peace who presumed him to be a fugitive slave and had him thrown in jail.67 When William Jay got wind of Horton’s plight, he or­ga­nized a public meeting to petition DeWitt Clinton, urging the governor to contact federal officials. At the behest of Jay’s committee, Clinton sent an emphatic letter to President John Quincy Adams asserting that what­ever laws Horton was held ­under did not apply to a ­free citizen of New York State and demanding Horton’s release. Adams reported to Clinton that Horton had already been released by Washington, D.C., officials. Jay assumed that this action was taken in anticipation of presidential pressure on the unfortunate inmate’s behalf.68 The Horton case had a ­ripple effect. The seizing of Horton on the wharves of Georgetown raised questions not just about how the nation’s capital administered its fugitive slave laws but also about w ­ hether t­ here should be slavery in Washington, D.C., at all. Several petitions poured into Congress from Pennsylvania calling for abolition in the nation’s capital, along with petitions

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from the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, North Carolina, Mary­land, and the District of Columbia itself.69 William Jay enthusiastically supported D.C. abolition. He anticipated that Westchester County’s petition for abolition in the capital city “­will prob­ably cause an explosion, but I have no doubt that the ultimate result w ­ ill be good.”70 ­Because Congress might ignore mere petitions, Jay enlisted New York’s po­ liti­cal leaders in the cause of abolishing slavery in the nation’s capital. In January 1828, he wrote New York state senator Walker Todd urging that New York’s state legislators instruct their US senators to support abolition in the capital. Jay laid out the justification for such a step in clear terms. He first asserted the constitutionality of congressional action: Congress had “unrestricted” authority to govern the capital city. It was no dif­fer­ent for a congressman to vote for abolition in Washington, D.C., than for a Westchester County assemblyman to do the same in New York. Jay described the laws governing slavery in Washington as “savage in the extreme, & far more fit for the meridian of Constantinople, than for that of the capital of a g­ reat christian republic.” Drawing and quartering slaves found guilty of murder in that faraway capital was barbaric; in the United States, a ­free person might lose his liberty for something so trivial as “Jail fees!” That slave traders marched coffles of slaves past the US Capitol was a shocking contradiction of the rhe­toric of liberty pronounced in the halls of Congress. Despite his moral abhorrence of slavery, Jay still remained satisfied with the classic gradualist formula. In his letter to State Senator Todd, Jay cited a petition proposing an emancipation law for Washington, D.C., that would make ­children born ­after July 4, 1828 “­free at the age of 25 years,” along with a repeal of the statue holding accused runaways liable for jail fees and a ban on slave markets in the nation’s capital. The petition Jay quoted to Todd, nonetheless, conceded the right of congressmen to bring their slaves in and out of the district.71 William Jay’s conception of reform in 1826 had not yet caught up with his moral outrage. He moved from defending a single man to supporting an emancipation formula that did not even go as far as the 1817 New York law that established July 4, 1827, as the date all slaves would be f­ ree. He was still living in his ­father’s world in which slaves became former slaves and masters became former masters only with the passage of time. Still, William’s desire for the federal government to act against slavery in one ten-­mile by ten-­mile district expressed a fundamental abolitionist precept. Just as John Jay’s 1819 letter on the Missouri Crisis asserted the federal government’s authority to ban slavery from its territories and regulate the move-

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ment of slaves, William and his fellow activists on the D.C. question operated on the assumption that slaveholders could claim no special protections ­under the Constitution outside of states where the laws explic­itly protected the institution. Lord Mansfield’s Somerset formulation about the difference between natu­ral and positive law lived on in a new nation and in a new age.72

Last Rites Even at life’s end, race, hierarchy, obligation, and memory defined the transition from slavery to freedom in the Jay ­family. At the Jay ­family property in Rye, emancipation came three years ahead of the state’s formal emancipation of all slaves on July 4, 1827. In 1823, Peter Augustus, who had recently assumed from his f­ather formal owner­ship of the Rye estate, witnessed a w ­ ill written by his ­uncle’s ­widow Mary D. Jay that stated, “I direct that my slaves be duly manumitted and I bequeath to Caesar and Sylvia fifty dollars each.” (The 1820 US Census lists three enslaved p­ eople in the ­house­hold.) Mary died the next year. The $50 gifts to Caesar and Sylvia w ­ ere dwarfed by the $500 gifts she bestowed on two of her nieces. In her mind, what she owed her Black servants was not the same as what she wished her own blood relatives to have.73 Yet she projected an obligation to their ­f uture, in accordance with her brother-­in-­ law John Jay’s long-­standing notions of racialized propriety and loyalty. John Jay’s solicitude for select former slaves persisted late into his own life as well. In a November 1824 letter to Peter Augustus, John issued very specific ­orders regarding Mary, Clarinda’s ­sister. In a tone that indicated he expected to be obeyed, John wrote, “I . . . ​desire you when ­here to have Old Mary comfortably provided for in e­ very Re­spect at my Expense” while she lived out her life as a boarder with someone named Selvy. The elder Jay continued, “As she is a poor w ­ oman she w ­ ill doubtless require frequent payments. Monthly ones may therefore be proper.”74 The portrait of life at Bedford recorded by an 1826 visitor was of pleasant, even idyllic ease for the aging founder. In a diary entry from July of that year, attorney Henry Van Der Lyn described John Jay rising from his “large arm chair” on the piazza to welcome his guests into the parlor. Although he “looks thin & infirm . . . ​his memory hearing & understanding” ­were all good. A servant brought him a pipe, from which he took one drag. The property and the com­pany exuded permanence and well-­established gentility. A stone school­ house was ­going up ­behind the “Mansion” where the ­house­hold’s Jay grandchildren ­were to be educated. William was away when Van Der Lyn visited;

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nevertheless, “the Ladies in their successful efforts to entertain us by their diversified & agreeable conversation, evinced that unaffected address which is only acquired by an early intercourse with the best society.” Van Der Lyn left the Jay h ­ ouse in the after­noon, too soon to witness the twice-­daily ritual of John leading the h ­ ouse­hold, including the servants, in prayer. The long-­retired statesman lived in enviable circumstances.75 Despite his f­amily’s and his servants’ attentions, John’s final years w ­ ere a strug­gle, as his physical decline became more acute. In March 1827, a­ fter providing Peter with a detailed description of their ­father’s afflictions, William commented, “We have been all too actively engaged in ministering to our beloved parent to dwell much on the event which we fear is approaching.” Yet even though a doctor told William that his ­father’s prospects w ­ ere “hopeless,” John continued to show resiliency in the face of infirmity.76 To the end, John Jay also continued to think of ser­vice in racialized ways, even as he adjusted to the latest methods of recruitment. In March 1828, William wrote Peter’s son John Clarkson Jay in New York City, “Your Grand­father desires me to request to you, to call on Mr. Paton, who keeps the intelligence office in the New York Institution, Chamber Street, & inquire ­whether he can immediately send us a coloured ­woman of good character who can cook, & ­will assist in ironing.” David Paton and his wife directed the operations of the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestics, the organ­ization referred to in that letter and founded in 1825 as a clearing­house for upright servants. It sought to stimulate loyal ser­vice through personal vetting and by offering Bibles, tracts, and monetary rewards. This mix of material and moral incentives attempted to replicate institutionally the ties forged across time by the Jays to certain servants and slaves—­including Clarinda and Zilpah, who remained with John Jay to the end.77 Well into his six-­page last ­will and testament, dictated on April 18, 1829, John Jay stated, “Clarinda has for a long course of years been in my ser­vice. She was born in my ­fathers f­ amily. She is to[o] far advanced in years to be long able to provide for herself. The proportion of my estate given to my son William induces me to commit her to his care to be by him comfortably maintained during her life.” To his “domestics” more generally, Jay offered praise for their “good w ­ ill and fidelity” and “recommend[ed] them to my c­ hildren for such kind offices as may occasionally be indicated by circumstances and Chris­tian­ity.”78 He trusted his survivors, including William, who inherited the Bedford home and farm, would know what to do. Less than a month ­later, on May 14, 1829, John Jay died. Barely able to talk, with thoughts of his maker, he was surrounded by f­ amily in his Bedford home. Three years before, Thomas Jefferson, whose famous words about equality

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Jay had quoted during the Missouri Crisis, had died. The nation that the New Yorker and the Virginian had done so much to found was expanding eco­nom­ ically and territorially, accompanied by new demo­cratic visions, expectations for spiritual reformations, and the existence of slavery.79 Neither emancipation in the North, nor personal charity, nor compromise in Washington, nor veneration of the found­ers’ legacy, however, could quell the fire bells.

Pa rt Tw o

Abolitionism

C h a p te r 7

Joining Forces

­ nder the unassuming header “Hon. William U Jay,” William Lloyd Garrison’s Boston-­based radical abolitionist newspaper The Liberator announced on June 29, 1833, “that this highly distinguished gentleman, the worthy son of the illustrious john jay, has avowed himself a de­cided abolitionist.” It continued: “The taunting appellation of ‘fanatics’ and ‘madmen’ has no longer power to injure us.” The Liberator engaged in more than a bit of hyperbolic artifice in its introduction to a letter Judge Jay had originally written to another antislavery newspaper. Placing “John Jay” and “abolitionist” in all capital letters, separated by a mere five words, tendentiously drafted the deceased founding ­father and gradualist into the movement for the immediate abolition of slavery. That William Jay joined a list of respectable opponents to slavery, moreover, would hardly end the taunts that mass emancipation of enslaved African Americans was a dangerously unhinged notion. And even though William’s letter used the words “we,” “us,” and “our” to describe ­those who favored an immediate end to slavery, his logic and language made careful distinctions and offered cautionary advice about how to proceed. He did not yet cast his allegiance with any or­ga­nized group.1 William Jay, for the time being, was making deliberate judgments. Over the next two years, events and relationships would impel him to join forces with the so-­called fanatics. The stately home of John Jay, where

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two formerly enslaved ­women still lived and worked, became an improbable but undeniable redoubt of radical abolitionism.

Movement One can hardly blame The Liberator for celebrating their new ally William Jay or for drawing attention to his famous founding f­ather. During the years in which national events and militant voices ­were catalyzing the emergence of a new kind of abolitionist movement, William sought to build a literary monument to his beloved ­father’s memory. Through a lengthy and comprehensive 1833 biography of John Jay, William attempted to provide a nation in need of instruction with an exemplary life. Consisting of a 463-­page narrative volume and a similarly sized second volume of documents, the biography required of William a considerable investment of time and emotional energy.2 Andrew Jackson’s rise on a wave of partisan demo­cratic energy and populist nationalism provided a moral foil for William’s reconstruction of his f­ ather’s ­career. In the final pages of the narrative, he commented that his ­father withdrew from public life before the vulgar new era: “His long retirement had exempted him from all participation in the conflicts and animosities of modern parties.” William summarized the founding ­father’s virtue: “Much as he loved his country, he spurned the princi­ple implied in the sentiment—­‘Our country, right or wrong.’ ” In William Jay’s construction of his ­father’s character, the willingness to prize moral judgment over amoral rallying cries marked John Jay’s historical and con­temporary singularity.3 In accounting for his f­ ather’s rec­ord with regard to slavery, William discussed John’s gradualism with equanimity and even a hint of pride. He cast his ­father as part of a small group of “zealous pioneers” who w ­ ere “far in advance of public opinion” in identifying slavery as an unjust institution. The gradual emancipation law passed during his governorship “afforded” John Jay “unfeigned plea­sure.” Enslaved members of the Jay h ­ ouse­hold played no part in the narrative beyond William’s uncritical remark: “As ­free servants became more common, he was gradually relieved from the necessity of purchasing slaves; and the two last which he manumitted he retained for many years in his ­family, at the customary wages.” William’s treatment of his ­father’s rec­ ord on slavery barely foreshadowed the starker notions he had begun to contemplate as he worked on the biography.4 By the early 1830s, William Jay had come to understand southern slavery as not only wrong but also dangerous. A month a­ fter Garrison began publishing The Liberator in January 1831, William’s cousin-­by-­marriage Theodore



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Sedgwick II delivered a lecture The Practicability of the Abolition of Slavery that questioned the racist assumptions on which the defense of slavery rested and argued that a more humane ­free ­labor system would promote greater prosperity. In response, William wrote Sedgwick that it was “wise policy” for the South “immediately to emancipate their slaves”; indeed, if not granted, the enslaved would “wrest it by force from their masters.” The national po­liti­cal crisis provoked by South Carolina’s attempt to nullify the federal tariff laws of 1828 and 1832 deepened such views. In December 1832, he wrote his old school friend, the celebrated novelist James Fenimore Cooper, that if the South insisted on making northerners their “enemies,” war would follow, during which “the Slaves ­will assert their rights.” The desire of the enslaved themselves for liberty was natu­ral; as he put it to Cooper, “What think you—­are ­these Slaves to be the only portion of the ­human race that are for ever to be denied the rights of humanity?”5 In May 1833, William publicly announced his support for immediate abolitionism in a letter to the recently founded New York abolitionist newspaper The Emancipator. His logic was both evangelical and lawyerly. Victory could only come by “convert[ing]” potential allies through “the exhibition of truth.” Americans with good intentions but debilitating fears should know that antislavery views w ­ ere gaining ground internationally. In the face of constitutional limits, the only place the federal government could liberate any enslaved ­people was in Washington, D.C. Thus, he argued, “moral interference” with slavery, meaning the right to “exhort slaveholders to liberate their slaves,” was essential. Fortunately, abolitionists had “facts in abundance” to mount their campaign. When reprinting William’s letter several weeks ­later, The Liberator proclaimed, “The Christian world is rousing from its slumbers.”6 Jay’s willingness to align with the emerging immediatist movement, however, only went so far. William worried about the direction in which Garrison was taking the movement. The same week that The Liberator reprinted his letter, William privately advised Arthur Tappan, the wealthy New York businessman and evangelical reformer, to check Garrison’s New E ­ ngland radicals by forming a New York abolitionist society on more moderate lines. William believed that the New En­glanders placed too ­great an emphasis on racial egalitarianism. Combating slavery and bestowing po­liti­cal rights, he argued, should not be mixed together, nor should white abolitionists so openly collaborate with Black abolitionists. William also counseled against n ­ eedless contention with advocates of colonizing f­ ree ­people of color outside the United States, even though he believed that such a program did not advance abolition.7 When immediatists gathered in Philadelphia that December to create a national organ­ization, William declined to attend. Although the new American

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Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) honored Jay’s conviction that the US Constitution provided no room for the federal government to abolish slavery within existing states, the organ­ization did not mince words about its radical goals. A passionately worded Declaration of Sentiments authored by Garrison called on abolitionists “to overthrow the most execrable system of slavery that has ever been witnessed upon earth” and “to deliver our land from its deadliest curse.” The work of the abolitionists not only addressed what the found­ers had left “incomplete” but also abolitionism’s ultimate “results . . . ​transcends theirs as moral truth does physical force.” The organ­ization incorporated interracial cooperation into its structure. Headquartered in New York City, the AAS executive committee included African Americans Samuel Cornish and Theodore S. Wright. Arthur Tappan served as president.8 Five months l­ater, in May 1834, the AAS held its first annual meeting in New York City, close enough to his Westchester home that William Lloyd Garrison himself anticipated that William Jay would be speaking as part of the proceedings. William once again chose to stay away. The Trea­sur­er’s Report issued for the meeting, however, listed Jay as having contributed $50 to the organ­ization, a fact that Jay had intended originally to remain private.9 Headquartering the interracial AAS in New York City may have removed the organ­ization from the direct control of New E ­ ngland radicals, but that was a distinction without a difference to hostile white New Yorkers. For three days in July 1834, African Americans and leading white abolitionists found themselves ­under siege by New York City, their property, their institutions, their physical security threatened by white mobs. Egged on in the pages of William L. Stone’s Commercial Advertiser and James Watson Webb’s Courier and Enquirer, groups of whites ransacked the home of AAS founder Lewis Tappan, Arthur’s ­brother and business partner. A mob destroyed the interior of the Presbyterian church of Henry Ludlow, an abolitionist minister. It also targeted the church and home of Rev. Samuel Cox, who had recently embraced the abolitionist cause and had suggested from his pulpit that Christ was a person of color. A group of young men, including Columbia College student John Jay II, defended the home of Rev. Cox’s ­brother, Dr. Abraham L. Cox, a board member of the AAS. They also sought to protect the ware­house of AAS president Arthur Tappan.10 One thousand ­people surged on the Bowery Theater to disrupt a per­for­mance by En­glish actor Edwin Forrest. The En­glishman quelled the mob by singing the patriotic standard “Yankee Doodle” and the blackface minstrel favorite “Zip Coon.” The mob directed especial brutality ­toward African Americans. The African Baptist Church and an African American school came ­under attack. St. Philip’s African Episcopal Church, where Black abolitionist Peter Williams Jr. presided,



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was leveled. In Five Points, the rowdy and rough neighborhood inhabited and patronized by both whites and Blacks, white mobs beset Black homes while leaving white homes unmolested. Hundreds of African Americans hastily left their homes in fear. Black businesses also drew the ire of rioters. A ­ fter the mayor fi­nally called out the militia to face down the rioters, calm returned, leaving, all told, six churches and sixty homes damaged. The cause of the riots was at once clear and contested. Urban rioting was not uncommon in this era, nor was harassment of African American New Yorkers. At the same time, Black institution-­building in Manhattan and the emergence of an interracial movement for the immediate abolition of slavery caused widespread alarm. White editors Stone and Webb, who supported American Colonization Society efforts to send f­ree Blacks to Africa, and working-­class whites who feared Black advancement and racial amalgamation, seized on signs of Black self-­assertion and white cooperation. Rumors that the white minister Ludlow and the Black minister Williams had performed interracial marriage ceremonies served as a provocation. So too did the fact that Black activist Samuel Cornish and Lewis Tappan shared a pew in Cox’s church on a recent Sunday. Confrontations over public meetings of abolitionists and a disturbance over ­whether a Black civic meeting or a white ­music society had properly reserved the Chatham Street Chapel further riled resentment. Members of the city’s merchant class feared that abolitionism threatened to undermine trade with the South. Workers in the riotous mobs took offense at Black aspirations of social equality, as well as the support ­those aspirations received from some prominent white New Yorkers. Thousands of angry whites ultimately poured into Manhattan’s streets to violently demonstrate their dis­plea­sure with Black liberties.11 Responding to the news of the riots, some members of the Jay ­house­hold in Bedford even blamed the abolitionists. John Jay II’s older ­sister Maria and his ­mother Augusta, clearly concerned for young John’s safety, expressed their dis­ plea­sure with the abolitionists. Maria wrote, “It is a ­great pity good p­ eople expose themselves to such insults by their impudence & indiscretion.” Augusta Jay went further: “I hope you ­will be quiet on the subject—­Although you may agree with abolitionists in princi­ple, I would when necessary express that opinion modestly but by no means defend their measures—or take any part in them—­ They appear to wish to incite all the angry feelings of the opposite party.” Indeed, she accused the abolitionists of “act[ing] as much from perverseness as benevolence.” Augusta and Maria voiced a negative view of the new wave of abolitionist organ­izations that was not uncommon in respectable society.12 That critical interpretation of the abolitionist role in the riots, however, would not hold for long in William’s Bedford home. The reformer and reputable

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judge had begun to see antislavery and disorder through dif­fer­ent eyes, with a vision more akin to that of his son John on the frontlines in New York City than to that of his wife Augusta and ­daughter Maria. The ­house­hold was about to become fully abolitionized.

Son in the City William Jay’s abolitionism drew strength and substance from his precocious son John Jay II, who during the July 1834 riots staked out a defensive position on the frontlines. To follow young John into the New York City of his college years is to see how iconoclastic the cause of immediate abolitionism was for an elite ­family like the Jays. To watch the founding ­father’s namesake acting on his own f­ ather’s antislavery opinions is to begin to appreciate the familial intimacy located at the core of the Jays’ burgeoning commitment to the radical abolitionist movement.13 John Jay II had already cast his lot with the radical cause of or­ga­nized immediate abolitionism movement by May 1834, becoming a charter member of the New-­York Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society (hereafter Young Men’s AntiSlavery Society). This group, which proclaimed itself to be an auxiliary of the AAS, was part of a wave of young ­people’s organ­izations inspired by the Garrisonian break with colonization and its repudiation of gradualism. At the Oneida Institute in upstate New York, Lane Seminary in Ohio, and Amherst College in Mas­ sa­ chu­ setts, students embraced immediatism. In language ­borrowed, tweaked, reordered, and quoted by t­ hese groups, the New Yorkers ­proclaimed an uncompromising and comprehensive commitment to “the ­immediate emancipation of the ­whole colored race, the emancipation of the slave from the oppression of the master, the emancipation of the ­free colored man from the oppression of public sentiment, and the elevation of both, to an intellectual, moral, and po­liti­cal equality with the whites.” Such language placed the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society’s aspirations at the vanguard of the radical movement, embracing not only moral suasion (“Truth and truth only ­shall be the weapon of our warfare”) but also racial egalitarianism.14 Unlike his abolitionist contemporaries at other schools, John Jay II had to venture alone beyond his college to find like-­minded radicals. Columbia, his revered grand­father’s alma mater, was not a place to find support for abolitionist views inside or outside the classroom. ­There is scant evidence that the classics-­heavy curriculum sustained much if any consideration of the ethics or politics of slavery, though it is pos­si­ble that William Paley’s critique of slavery and endorsement of gradual emancipation w ­ ere invoked. Rev. John



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McVickar, moral philosophy professor and John II’s ­uncle, held antislavery views, but ­there is no indication he incorporated his critique into his lectures. Much to the disgust of African-­American New Yorkers, the college’s president from 1829–42, William Alexander Durer, was also the president of the Colonization Society of New York City. Columbia College did not admit any Black students to its small, wealthy white student body during John II’s years. The only other antebellum abolitionist to gradu­ate from Columbia was John’s second cousin Theodore Sedgwick III, who graduated three years before John arrived.15 Well aware of his attentive parents’ interests in his moral and intellectual development, John explored his broader surroundings and gravitated ­toward abolitionism. He sometimes sent home notes about sermons he attended.16 He was aware of his f­ather’s burgeoning interest in abolitionism, having been instructed to check the status of his ­father’s Emancipator subscription and to send along a book on slavery he had ordered. Signaling that t­here was more to his moral education than Columbia provided, his ­father instructed him to buy for himself a published compendium of Dr. Dwight’s decisions at Yale. John did not ignore social life at Columbia, but this small Manhattan school could not contain his energies or his interests. His landlord was the e­ arlier mentioned Abraham Cox, a medical doctor and Tappan ally on the board of the AAS, as well as the founding president of the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society. When Jay helped defend Dr.  Cox’s home against rioters, he expressed his commitment to the larger moral life he was carving out for himself in New York City.17 John Jay II early on was socialized to think of his life with an enlarged sense of public moral purpose, which the intensifying debates between colonizationists and abolitionists in the city heightened. A condolence letter that he received ­after his grand­father’s death, lectured the twelve-­year-­old, “I am much mistaken if Providence has not produced this mortal event, just at the time when the faculties of your mind are ripe for expansion, and thereby give you leave to derive the more valuable advantages from the consideration of the life of Governor Jay. . . . ​This legacy to you is of im­mense value!” Several years ­later, his m ­ other wrote the young college student, “Do not cease to thank God who made you the descendant of such a man.”18 ­Great expectations evoked by his famous name and youthful energy spurred John Jay II to keep pace and even exceed his f­ ather’s growing abolitionist commitment. Far from being cowed by the riots, the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society doubled down on its ambition to spread abolitionism throughout the city and far beyond. T ­ oward the end of 1834, the organ­ization published a sprawling pamphlet explaining the rationale for immediatism. It took a nationalist perspective while highlighting aspects of New York’s history. A ­ fter the almost ritualistic

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opening invocation of the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence’s egalitarian preamble, the authors insisted that “no hy­poc­risy lurked in” the found­ers who produced ­those words. They called out John Jay, Rufus King, and Alexander Hamilton as exemplary anti-­slavery New Yorkers. Focusing on the pre­sent, the pamphlet proclaimed that ­because “slavery is a national evil,” it “requires to some extent a national remedy,” and the US Congress should intervene against the interstate slave trade. To expose the “illusion” of gradualism, the authors looked both to the North and South, in effect picking apart the found­ers’ preferred methods. New York’s long delay in emancipating slaves left them vulnerable to sale southward: “In this view of the subject the boasted scheme of gradualism is no more than a hollow pretence of philanthropy, made by slave-­dealers.” They frankly asked, “What real difficulty would have been encountered by New-­York if she had manumitted her slaves in 1799, that was not experienced in 1827,” when slavery legally ended and thousands received their freedom at a single time? Making such a question urgent was the fact that, while the nation dithered, risking disunion, the size of the slave population in the South continued to shoot up. The gradually emancipating North had set a bad moral and a bad practical pre­ce­dent.19 By signing on to such rhe­toric, John Jay II drew a sharp line between his own and his grand­father’s abolitionism. Even so, another aspect of the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society program did carry forward an e­ arlier generation’s focus on education. The organ­ization joined an initiative to provide instruction for African American adults in the eve­ning, as well as helping to set up Sunday schools and Bible classes. The Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society night school took place at the Phoenix Society, an organ­ization prompting Black education and advancement established by Black clergy, including Samuel Cornish and Peter Williams. T ­ hese young men partnered with leading African Americans in a way that went beyond the moral stewardship model of the NYMS’s African ­Free School.20 Thus, John Jay II defied the conventions of college and class. For his ­father William, although he was only observing the riots from Bedford, the summer’s anti-­abolitionist upheaval lingered. That autumn Henry Ludlow, minister of one of the ransacked churches, sought to bolster William Jay’s support for the movement. Ostensibly, Ludlow wanted the judge’s help with preparing a new petition against slavery in the nation’s capital, but the scope of Ludlow’s appeal was broader. “The cause dear Sir in which we are engaged is one which w ­ ill inevitably triumph. The late mobs, to whose vio­lence, the room in which I am now writing can testify, have only seemed to strengthen my attachment to it,” wrote the abolitionist minister. Ludlow reached further back in time to secure Jay’s support: “The earliest Association



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of my lisping infancy are [sic] intimately connected with the name of your now gloried Sire.” Appreciating Ludlow’s familial flattery, Jay nonetheless stiffly lectured the minister about the need for the abolitionist movement to strictly adhere to the U.S. Constitution. Then the judge warmed to Ludlow’s offer of abolitionist “fraternity” over the wreckage of the summer riots. Referring to abolitionism as “our cause,” Jay proclaimed, “No hope or expectation of conciliating our enemies should ever induce us to conceal or surrender any of our fundamental princi­ples. The vio­lence to which you allude, was intended to intimidate us; if it fails in effecting this object, it ­will not prob­ably be repeated.”21 The two men now shared a common resolve. Within the next year, William formally joined forces with the American Anti-Slavery Society, becoming a member of its racially integrated executive board. He also consented to his election as president of the New York State Anti-­Slavery Society, citing the mob vio­lence as a motivating ­factor. In the wake of the 1834 riots, he no longer viewed colonizationists as relatively harmless. William perceived the line between slavery’s critics and slavery’s apologists as more clearly drawn than ever before and the rights of o ­ thers, no m ­ atter how unpop­u­lar, as linked to his own. As William stated in 1835 to the g­ rand jury investigating the conspiracy against the hapless religious zealot Matthias, the self-­proclaimed prophet who established a patriarchal, sexually unconventional compound in Westchester County, “No man in society is safe . . . ​if freedom of speech means only the right of speaking what the lawless and violent may please to approve.”22 William thus joined his son John in identifying unmistakably with the unpop­u­lar cause of radical abolitionism.

An Inquiry with Only One Answer As he prepared to formally support the AAS, William Jay embraced the new organ­ization’s disdain for colonization and became more open to racial equality. His disgust with the notion that expatriation could serve as a substitute for emancipation became the organ­izing feature of the book that articulated his full-­blown commitment to immediatism. At more than two hundred pages, Jay’s 1835 book Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, and American Anti-­Slavery Socie­ties advanced a new phase in the forty-­ five-­year-­old’s ­career as a writer, reformer, and polemicist. William’s book exposed the deceptive, racist strategy of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which Jay had come to understand as strengthening rather than weakening American slavery. Historically, that had not been an obvious conclusion. Key Black leaders, such as shipping magnate Paul

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Cuffee and African Episcopal Methodist Church found­ers Daniel Coker and Richard Allen w ­ ere drawn to the notion that the cause of African-­American freedom might be served by establishing colonies in West Africa for former slaves and ­free Blacks. Yet most northern ­free Blacks overwhelmingly rejected the notion that they belonged in Africa, not the United States, the country of their birth. As a result, colonization would largely be administered by elite whites with l­ittle interest in Black popu­lar opinion.23 In publishing his denunciation of colonizationism, William expanded on his own doubts about the proj­ect while following in the footsteps of other leading figures in the abolition movement. In 1829, Jay had declined an invitation to attend the convention of the New York state’s colonization society stating, “I confess I entertain no hope, that the efforts of the Am. Col. Socty. w ­ ill promote any direct & sensible diminution of the number of Slaves in our Country.” Three years ­later, William Lloyd Garrison published his Thoughts on African Colonization in 1832. David Ruggles, a leading African-­American New York City antislavery activist, published two pamphlets skewering the racist presumptions on which colonizationists continued to rely, contemptuous of the mob vio­lence that such sentiments had helped inspire.24 Jay was likely influenced by Ruggles. While titling his 1835 abolitionist treatise an Inquiry, Jay brooked not even the slightest compromise with colonizationists and rejected any notion that ­there was a moral ­middle ground on the subject of slavery. Slavery, he announced, was “a heinous sin” in and of itself “and, like ­every other sin, ­ought to be immediately abandoned.” Yet slavery in the South was growing not shrinking. Enacting the epigraph he selected from John Milton—­“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely, according to my conscience”—­ Jay emancipated himself from caution and intimidation.25 To William, the ACS’s fixation on libeling ­free Blacks revealed the organ­ ization’s under­lying lack of interest in emancipation. Jay deployed extensive quotation of ACS lit­er­a­ture to demonstrate his charge “that THE SOCIETY DISCOURAGES ALL ATTEMPTS TO IMPROVE THE CONDITION OF THE ­FREE BLACKS” to advance its expatriation agenda. William noted that the New York branch of the ACS lobbied the state legislature to strictly enforce the virtual disfranchisement of 1821 and was “not contented with giving their sanction to past acts of injustice.”26 William sardonically criticized colonizationists for their role in fomenting anti-­Black laws in Connecticut in response to efforts by Prudence Crandall and ­others to make education available to African Americans. He noted that if Black students ­were to be run out of town based on vagrancy laws, then the same logic should be applied to (white) Yale students. But the question that weighed most heavi­ly against ­those who shared the worldview of colonization-



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ists was this: “Why a ­free black man cannot be a citizen, ­because another black man is a slave?” William concluded that the ACS program combined a lack of realism with a vicious spirit: the ACS would never succeed in convincing f­ree Blacks to move en masse to Africa, and yet sought to magnify the exclusions and “persecuting spirit” that perpetuated their “degraded” condition.27 William dismissed the alleged goals of colonizationism: to implant a Black American colony on the western coast of Africa as a means of combating the slave trade, spreading civilization to Africa, and initiating the decline of American slavery. He noted that, if the ACS r­eally wanted to abolish the illegal slave trade, then abolishing slavery was the much more direct route. How ­people that the colonizationists held in such contempt could spread Chris­tian­ ity to the ­people of Africa remained equally unclear to Jay. The true missionary spirit should have guided white Americans to approach Black Americans “with Christian kindness”; then “instead of being nuisances, [they] would have been valued and useful citizens.”28 William disputed the central colonizationist premise that a successful Liberian colony would erode southern slavery, except perhaps at an insufferably glacial pace that at best would take “centuries.” Jay asserted that it would be far more efficacious to ask southern slaveholders to apply the assertion of equality stated plainly in the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence than to expect that a successful Liberian experiment would cause them to renounce their ­human property. Meanwhile, more slaves w ­ ere born in the South e­ very five-­and-­a-­half days than had thus far been freed and sent to Africa. He also took note that Madison, Clay, and George Washington’s nephew, members of the ACS all, had not freed their own slaves. In real­ity, Jay found that “no desire exists at the South to get rid of slavery.”29 William embraced moral suasion as the abolitionists’ principal weapon against slavery, but he drew on historical evidence to argue that eliminating slavery could not be achieved by mass voluntarism on the part of slaveholders. Ultimately, the law—in the form of individual state laws—­would have to mandate emancipation, forcing the unwilling slaveholder to give up his property. Indeed, Jay asserted, “In no country in the world, in ancient or modern times, has slavery been abolished by the unan­i­mous consent of slave holders.” Emancipations in New E ­ ngland, the mid-­Atlantic, and South Amer­i­ca all demonstrated the importance of l­egal intervention. While Kentucky declined to end slavery for its 12,000 slaves in 1790, “New-­York could liberate ten thousand in one day in 1827,” proving that immediate abolition was in fact a l­egal choice pos­si­ble for reformers to advocate and legislators to make.30 History, however, created some unacknowledged paradoxes in William’s argument. This insistence on ­legal coercion forced him to mock some of the

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very terms he used to explain his own ­father’s approach to emancipation. Colonizationists, Jay argued, abetted slaveholders who claimed that freeing slaves would be inhumane, presumably ­because of an alleged inability of Blacks to function in freedom. Jay thundered, “Thus do we find the w ­ hole system of American slavery justified on the tyrant’s plea, necessity.” Ironically, in The Life of John Jay, William had explained his ­father’s gradual approach to the transition away from slavery in terms of “necessity.” Presumably the difference for William was that his ­father did not seek to pass slaveholding onto his c­ hildren, pursuing an exit strategy rather than one of indefinite delay. Thus, he avoided the guilt that Ruggles had argued in his pamphlet increased when one generation received slaves—­the moral equivalent of stolen goods—­from the previous generation.31 Ultimately, the conviction that the ACS was “AN ANTI-­ABOLITIONIST ASSOCIATION” with an utter lack of interest in actually ending slavery hardened Jay’s adverse judgment of colonizationism. Summoning another cause he held dear, Jay suggested that the ACS was like a temperance society that looked ­after the needs of liquor sellers even as it condemned drink. Gazing backward, William found that chronology clinched his point—­and made it personal. The ACS had, he wrote, condemned abolitionist socie­ties in 1828, even before Garrison, Tappan, and other had launched the new breed of immediatist organ­ izations. In other words, the ACS had attacked “The Abolition Socie­ties . . . ​ founded by JAY and FRANKLIN, and which advocated gradual emancipation.” Colonizationists crushed the hope of pro­gress fostered by subsequent gradualists. As for the new strain of abolitionist, they found themselves ­under assault, colonizationists having forged an unholy alliance between the legally ordered tyranny of southern slavery and the extra-­legal disorder of the northern streets. “[T]he war now waging between Abolitionists and Colonizationists,” to William, was an expression of unchecked “infidel” mobocracy.32 William’s confrontation with slavery at this critical juncture in the 1830s took the form of a test of faith, with the rejection of colonization offering a form of salvation. Summarizing the first half of his Inquiry, he deployed second-­person language with direct first-­person implications: “If that Society leads to the degradation and oppression of the poor colored man—if it resists ­every effort to ­free the slave—if it misleads the conscience of the slave holder, you are bound, your God requires you to oppose it, not in secret, but before the world.” Then, sharpening the edge of his ­brother Peter’s 1821 argument against disfranchisement in which he reminded delegates to the New York constitutional convention that masters and servants went to the same heaven, William ­imagined a heavenly trial: “Soon ­will you stand at the judgment seat



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of Christ; ­there ­will you meet the ­free negro, the slave, and the master—­take care lest they all appear as witnesses against you.”33 And yet, having searched his conscience and identified a ­g reat evil, William Jay had to face the same question that reformers and revolutionaries throughout history have faced: What is to be done? In his l­ater years, John Jay had viewed the American Bible Society as an agent of millennial pro­g ress, one of the tokens of which was the abolition of the slave trade and the missionary spread of Chris­tian­ity. If the ACS represented a perversion of the antislavery and missionary impulses, then William would have to explain how and why the American Anti-­Slavery Society was the proper agent of change. More broadly, he would have to explain why the gradualism that had served his ­father’s generation and his home region well enough had to be replaced with a program of immediate abolition.34 Despite the reservations he previously expressed about Garrisonianism, William first offered an uncompromising embrace of the AAS platform. He quoted approvingly the group’s unequivocal opposition to “a system which classes with the beasts of the field . . . ​an intelligent and accountable being,” a system that contravened all normal princi­ples of law and due pro­cess. Jay also touted the “ultimate elevation of the black population to an equality with the white, in civil and religious privileges,” along with abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself.35 Jay moved ­toward racial egalitarianism as he gravitated t­ oward the AAS. The judge recognized that modern abolitionists had attracted charges of being fanatics, incendiaries, even suborners of treason. Jay deflected the charge of fanat­i­cism by stating that abolitionists now sought the same object as a varied list of heroes, from Protestant divines Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley to British parliamentarians William Wilberforce and Edmund Burke, and to New World in­de­pen­dence visionaries Thomas Jefferson and Simon Bolivar. He knew, however, that the charge of fanat­i­cism had less to do with the historical com­pany than the social com­pany whom abolitionists kept. Jay exonerated white abolitionists from the charge of promoting interracial marriage while parsing what the abolitionist goal of equality ­really meant. The well-­heeled Jay asserted that abolitionists sought an equality for Blacks that mea­sured up to but did not surpass that of lower-­class whites. In other words, according to William, no white need “associate” with Blacks, but the right of African Americans to work, vote, learn and serve their own “happiness” should not be impeded. If such a goal was fanatical in 1835, William wrote, then it was not seen as such when his f­ather expressed the same sentiment in the 1780s. Still, as William understood, many respectable p­ eople, including colonizationist,

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blamed the recent riots in New York City not on the rioters but rather on the abolitionist themselves. To this charge, abolitionists rightly “plead NOT GUILTY.”36 A favorable view of abolitionism, however, had to rest on the efficacy of its program, not just an assertion of its innocence regarding the recent riots. William offered a combination of conservative princi­ples, godly justice, and historical experience to make his case that abolition could take place safely. Emancipation, he assured his audience, granted liberty, not license, b­ ecause it “does not necessarily contemplate any relaxation of the restraints of government or morality; any admission of po­liti­cal rights, or improper exemption from compulsory l­abor.” In other words, one could be an immediate abolitionist without being an immediate egalitarian, and certainly without renouncing the l­egal and cultural restraint that Jay the judge, Jay the Federalist scion, and Jay the temperance advocate held to be the pillars of social stability. Meanwhile, the “divine economy” should allay white fears of post-­emancipation racial reprisals, for God did not “permit any community to be destroyed, merely ­because it had ceased to do evil.” Thus, Jay reversed the argument made by Jefferson a half-­century before, when he wrote in Notes on the State of V ­ irginia, that the prospect of Black revenge made emancipation contingent on expatriation of former slaves.37 William did not simply make promises; he appealed to the history of Black responses to emancipation in the West Indies to illustrate the safety of immediate abolition in the United States. The Haitian Revolution was seemingly the most violent episode in abolition’s recent history. Yet William joined a line of immediatists stretching back to Elizabeth Heyrick to articulate his own considered case for abolition’s safety. The mishandling of the citizenship claims of ­free Blacks, not slave restiveness, had caused order to disintegrate in the French colony of St. Domingue. When French authorities emancipated the slaves to fend off British designs on the colony, chaos did not ensue. Without any of the plans and preparation that slavery’s apologist always insisted must precede emancipation, 600,000 freed ­people had remained orderly ­under Toussaint L’Ouverture’s rule, even as war waged all around them. Playing down the in­de­pen­dent role of the mass of plantation slaves in the St. Domingue wars of liberation, William was able to celebrate “a glorious demonstration of the perfect safety of immediate and unconditional emancipation.”38 To ­those who pointed to in­de­pen­dent Haiti’s alleged shortcomings, Jay responded that the Black republic would have been much better off if not “compelled” to fight for its freedom in wars against the British and French. ­These wars of freedom dispelled erroneous aspersions of Black idleness. In-



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deed, William asserted, had they been whites fighting against outside powers for their freedom, the ­people of St. Domingue would have been hailed as heroes by “the civilized world.” The experience of the British West Indies also proved the safety of immediate emancipation. Former slaves endured pre-­emancipation apprenticeship with “meekness, patience, and forbearance, utterly without parallel” in some islands, while in ­others, where abolition occurred immediately as abolitionist preferred, all went smoothly.39 William’s West Indian f­ree ­people ­were compliant and patient enough to be portrayed as safe, but not so lacking in initiative as to support colonizationist arguments that Black p­ eople in the Amer­ic­ as could not make proper use of their freedom. William’s cagey approach to Black emancipatory agency in the West Indies gave way to more forthright assertions of Black revolutionary potential in the final chapter of the Inquiry titled “Danger of continued Slavery.” Jay informed his readers that “the ­whole history of slavery is a history of the strug­gles of the oppressed to recover their liberty.” One had only to look at rebellions in Jamaica, insurrections in New York in 1712 and 1741, and the recent Nat Turner insurrection to perceive this truth. The South perched precariously on a “volcano” and would do well to look into the abyss before refusing the advice pressed on them by abolitionists, the general public, and even foreign nations who might threaten to boycott slave-­produced staples. While southern slaveholders dithered in self-­pity, “their slaves ­will be multiplying with a fearful rapidity, and becoming each day more conscious of their own strength; and ­unless their fetters are loosened, they ­will inevitably be BURST.”40 Unlike Jefferson or his colonizationist disciples, Jay was convinced that the danger of insurrection could not be eliminated by colonization or relief of the demographic pressure valve through the diffusion of slavery westward across the continent. Emancipation itself was the only morally legitimate and practically efficacious safety valve. For Jay, moreover, Black vio­lence could only be the product of Black slavery, not Black freedom. To make his case for the AAS, Jay had to address a challenging paradox: Why was the gradual abolition of slavery in northern states, especially his native New York, not appropriate for the southern slave states? In New York, Jay explained, the whites demographically dwarfed Blacks, so that ­there was no fear that the emergence of a ­free Black population would inspire vio­lence from or social upheaval amongst ­those still enslaved. In the South, where “nearly all the laborers are slaves, where ­every ­free black is regarded as a nuisance and an incendiary,” gradualism would never be tolerated. Immediate abolition was the more practical option. As for compensation, New York’s 1827 pre­ce­dent,

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as well as ­those in Mexico and South Amer­ic­ a, showed that it was not necessary; in addition, governments had a right to “suppress practices injurious to society.” William significantly strengthened his objection to compensation in a paragraph added to the second edition of Inquiry also published in 1835. He labeled compensation “MORALLY IMPOSSIBLE” and called “absurd” the notion that the “­free States” would offer up a billion dollars to slaveholders or that the slaveholding citizens would raise the money to, in essence, pay themselves.41 The economics of immediate emancipation, in Jay’s reckoning, was far more elegant than any gradual scheme or British-­style buyout of West Indian slaveowners. In Jay’s projected southern ­future, echoing Theodore Sedgwick’s 1831 lecture, former slaveowners would pay their former slaves. Given the dependent condition of ex-­slave, Jay suggested that a newly freed man would likely stay put, “negotiate[ing] with his late master.” H ­ ere the change might be gradual but it would lead inexorably to an “improve[d]” Black population in an improved society. In the short run, “­there ­will be a charm in the very name of wages, which ­will make the pittance he receives, appear a trea­sure in his eyes.” A harmony of interest between employer and employee would develop through a ­free wage economy, laws of “supply and demand” would take over, “and justice be done both to the planter and his laborers.” William ­here expounded the ­free ­labor argument that would emerge as the watchword of Republican antislavery ideology two de­cades ­later. In making this case, Jay sounded far more sanguine about the morality-­inducing properties of the marketplace than he did when he doled out punishments to unruly wage earners as a Westchester County judge. For William, liberty and license ­were quite dif­fer­ent, with the law safeguarding the former by policing the latter.42 William Jay’s first antislavery book firmly embedded him in the immediate abolition movement. He had cast his lot with ­those who rejected a reform strategy predicated on inherent racial in­equality and the accommodation of slaveholders. The book went through three American editions in 1835. John Morrison, the editor of an 1835 London imprint of Jay’s Inquiry, wrote, “The views of Judge Jay are, in substance, ­those of the American Anti-­Slavery Society . . . ​who have ­adopted the noble sentiments expressed by Mr. Jay in this volume.” Further illustrating the new Jay–­AAS alignment, the En­glish edition included an introduction by Samuel H. Cox, the Presbyterian minister whose church and home w ­ ere attacked by the anti-­abolitionist mob in 1834.43 William’s comfortable rural home would from this time forward be the seat of an abolitionist enterprise of state, national, and even international renown (see figure 6).



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Figure 6.  William Jay, 1838–1839. Oil on canvas. By Daniel Huntington (1816–1906). JJ.1958.304. John Jay Homestead Historic Site, Katonah, N.Y., Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

The Uncolonized Jay had to make himself an expert on colonizationism to write his book. But before starting to write it, he already knew something, or thought he did, about the uncolonized: f­ ree African Americans, who rather than departing or being banished to a faraway shore, worked humbly for a modest wage. He headed a ­house­hold where ­people who had once been the slaves of his ­father remained a functional part of the ­family’s material well-­being and sense of order. His servants thus left their own trace on William Jay’s manifesto and the ­family’s

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broader commitment. Zilpah and Clarinda embodied a form of permanence and per­sis­tence, the opposite of exile. Their ­humble positions also represented the seeming permanency of class hierarchy, making the transition from slavery to freedom look like something quite dif­fer­ent from a revolutionary act. Clarinda and Zilpah catered to the needs of the well-­to-do ­family that included six ­children, five girls and one boy (two other ­children died in infancy). The two ­women also entered the affective lives of the Jays, especially for William’s wife Augusta. Her attachment to the servants reflected gendered roles, with the w ­ oman of the ­house bearing more direct responsibility for the details of day-­to-­day ­house­hold management. As a person of g­ reat empathy and as a ­woman, she may have identified more directly with Clarinda and Zilpah than did her husband. Mrs. Jay made a point of including references to her servants in her correspondence, cognizant not only of what she wanted them to do for the ­family but also of what they meant to the f­ amily. She instructed her ­children in ­house­hold management as well as manners. During a summer beach visit to Rockaway, Long Island, Augusta asked fifteen-­year-­old Maria, who remained at the Bedford ­house, to make certain ­house­hold preparations, praising her d­ aughter as “an excellent h ­ ouse­keeper.” Augusta also asked Maria to convey “remembrance . . . ​to all the servants.” She conveyed par­tic­u­lar wishes for Clarinda’s continued health.44 Augusta wanted her ­children to feel and express the same solicitude for the servants that she expressed and felt. When Maria departed Bedford shortly ­after Augusta’s return, the m ­ other chided her ­daughter, “You forgot to bid Clarinda goodbye wh[ic]h hurt her, therefore mention her in your letter.” She wrote her son John at school, “Clarinda makes constant inquiries about you & was much gratified by your remembrance of her,” and then reported, “She has been unusually well this winter.” A year ­later, Augusta asked her son “if any one had mentioned to you Clarinda is well & often inquires about you.”45 Caring about Clarinda was a way for the Jays to register their humane goodness, while the servant’s emotional ties to them strengthened the already tight affective circle that this very close-­knit ­family cultivated. The once troublesome Zilpah was also ensconced in the ­family’s extended affective circle in the early 1830s. She was, to the Jays, a figure of condescension though not contempt, whom they perceived as needy, even dependent. In October 1833, Augusta reported to her son John that Zilpah “in sweeping off your shed, which was a voluntary piece of work on her part, brought me a shilling as a part of your property.”46 Augusta conveyed to her son, and confirmed to herself, that Zilpah felt a special devotion to the f­amily, expressed through her hard work and honesty.



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The reduced size of Zilpah’s universe could be contrasted to the expanded world of the Jay c­ hildren, with governesses to teach the girls French and trips to the city to broaden their experience. Zilpah could seem like a bit of country bumpkin to the Jay offspring. For example, William and Augusta’s oldest child Anna, then in her late teens, described in a letter in 1832 on a trip to New York City that included Zilpah. According to Anna, Zilpah was stunned by the urban hustle and bustle: wrote Anna, it was “quite amusing to hear her remarks; she asked Eliza [Anna’s nine-­year-­old ­sister] if the ­people in New York walked all day long.” This anecdote suggests Zilpah’s isolation as an adult, for ­after her banishment in her teenage years from the Jay’s Bedford home, she had lived in New York City. Twenty years l­ater, if the anecdote is accurate, Zilpah found the booming metropolis to be a strange and threatening place. As her employers portrayed her, Zilpah was a friendly member of the f­ amily staff, whose limitations w ­ ere blithely tolerated, but who had few options other than to retain her lowly position.47 William Jay’s letters emphasized the management and recruitment of ­house­hold help and the allocation of h ­ ouse­hold resources, rather than emotional attachment. In his son, John Jay II, William sought to develop the habit of class authority and business acumen. As would be the case in any f­amily business including antislavery business, John II’s presence in New York City was an asset when securing staff for the Bedford h ­ ouse­hold. The ­family suddenly found itself without a cook in 1834. William wrote to his son to go immediately to the employment agency to secure one, specifically a white one, at $8 a month. Perhaps to motivate his son to act quickly, he added that his ­mother had begun the spring h ­ ouse cleaning “& the departure of the cook embarrasses her.” A ­ fter that, William immediately added, John should bring the latest editions of The Liberator when next he came to the country home. John was his ­father’s eyes and ears in the city for po­liti­cal as well as domestic purposes.48 Two years ­later, in 1836, William requested that the nineteen-­year-­old John make a more direct intervention on the ­family’s behalf. William had hired a Black man named Mathias Day to travel up from New York to serve as a waiter at Bedford. When the man failed to show up as expected, William instructed John to investigate, giving details that illustrate the material and spatial economy of class in which the Jays and their servants operated. John was to go to the basement apartment where Day or, at least, Day’s wife boarded. ­There he was to find out from Mrs. Day “what has become of her husband.” If Day was not planning to come to Bedford, then John was to proceed to the employment agency and negotiate for a waiter, offering a wage as high as $14 a month.49 Although William did not intend John to threaten or compel Day to

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come work at Bedford, the presumption was that his son, a wealthy white student, should confront a w ­ oman in her modest home in search of information; furthermore, separating husband from wife for the purposes of paid domestic ser­vice was nothing unusual. Such ­were the prerogatives of the wealthy. Their role as abolitionists did not disrupt power and privilege. Although the Jays at times identified their servants by race, they clearly had no compunction against—­indeed seemed to have preferred—­a biracial staff of w ­ omen and men. Within that gendered ser­vice economy, a male waiter, Black or white, might command a substantially higher wage than a white female cook. In any event, Day did not join the h ­ ouse­hold; two weeks l­ater, William’s d­ aughter Eliza recorded that a “good looking white man” had joined the staff. That waiter, however, did not last long. Several months l­ater, William relayed ­orders for John to seek out through advertisement or employment agents the “best you can black or white” to come to Bedford as a waiter. This time William refined his search strategy, saying he would like to start the new person at $12 per month with the promise of a $1 raise if the waiter remained six months.50 The Jays and their servants did not experience emancipation as a radically disorienting break from the past, just as William assured readers of his Inquiry that even in the South it need not be. In William’s book, slaveholders sat precariously on a volcano of potential insurrection. He contemplated this volatile southern landscape from a much gentler, settled hill. ­People of his class had prospered not suffered. T ­ oward the end of his Inquiry, he wrote of southern slaveholders, “By rejecting Abolition, they reject all the rich and varied blessings in morals, in security, in po­liti­cal power and wealth.”51

­Fathers and Sons It was William Jay’s public charges, not his private ­house­hold circumstances, that alarmed critics. They scarcely knew or cared ­whether John Jay’s heirs retained any of their former slaves as servants, let alone how ­these servants ­were treated or how they regarded their condition. What colonizationists viewed as dangerous, and not a ­little bizarre, was that William Jay, a man of conservative po­liti­cal princi­ples and possessed of a name rooted deeply in the nation’s founding, had come out so forcefully against them and in ­favor of their radical opponents. The colonizationist countered William Jay at his most vulnerable point: the link between the po­liti­cally perspicacious ­father and the irascibly moralistic son. To that point, William L. Stone, in his role as editor of the Commercial



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Advertiser, wrote, “Never did we expect to meet with such a book, from the pen” of John Jay’s son and biographer. “And such a son!—­a man of high po­liti­ cal and moral worth—of scholarship and sound integrity.” The urge to advocate immediate abolition was a sickness—­“a contagion . . . ​like the cholera. . . . ​ whomsoever, this spirit of immediate and unconditional abolitionism fastens itself, it drives reason from her empire.”52 For ­people of Stone’s mindset, the respectable William Jay did not dispel the notion of abolitionists as diseased fanatics; instead, Jay’s infection proved the virulence of the outbreak. The editors of the African Repository, the official organ of the American Colonization Society, ­were sufficiently disturbed by the appearance of Jay’s Inquiry that they published a response based solely on excerpts picked up in the abolitionist press. U ­ nder the title, “Judge Jay Against Colonization,” the Repository commented, “The advocates of instant and uncompromising abolition feel or affect a plea­sure almost amounting to rapture” at the publication of Jay’s book— in other words, the symptoms of religious extremism. Mixing disdain for their radical rivals with concern over immediate abolition’s new and well-­respected advocate, the editors observed, “This gentleman is so favorably known to the Public for his piety and philanthropy, and as the Biographer of his ­father, the illustrious JOHN JAY, that the appearance of a controversial work from his pen . . . ​ could not fail to find eulogists among ­those whose par­tic­u­lar partialities and antipathies he has undertaken to defend.” William’s reputation and lineage, combined with the apparent weight of his pro-­immediatist argument, threatened to bring a marginal cause into the mainstream. Thus, the charges leveled by William against the ACS had to be answered: “What­ever Judge Jay utters is undoubtedly uttered conscientiously; but the extracts referred to make it equally clear that he can carry the right of arguing ‘freely’ to an extent which some reasoners, less ostentatious about their consciences, might deem to be licentious.” In other words, abolitionism’s corrupting powers had turned the self-­righteous Jay into a promoter of vice.53 The aggressive and lengthy response of respected New York City physician David M. R ­ eese, in an 1835 book, showed how threatening colonizationists found his critique and how exposed William had become personally to attack by entering the fray so emphatically. ­Reese, a native Mary­lander, attempted not only to defend colonization systematically against William’s Inquiry, but also to undermine the name and reputation of its author. ­Reese had experience defending the ACS from abolitionist critiques, having published a widely distributed critique of the AAS’s first annual meeting.54 William Jay offered an irresistible target in an escalating ad hominin war, ­battles over reputation sharpening the strug­gle over policy. His impressive patrimony was undeniable. The son’s own status and social standing, however,

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might be questioned, especially if William Jay could be impugned for distorting his ­father’s moderate rec­ord so that he could make common cause with the imbalanced fanatics leading the AAS. R ­ eese wrote his book in the form of letters to Jay and published it with a h ­ ouse that produced an edition of William Jay’s biography The Life of John Jay. ­Going on the offense immediately, the front ­matter contained endorsements by vari­ous ministers, including one who addressed the reputation issue head-­on: according to John Breckinridge, William Jay “­under an imposing name, has said more disengenuous, sophistical, and yet dangerous ­things, than I had supposed it pos­si­ble . . . ​by so honest, so good, and so sensible a man.” Respectability and credibility provided the context in which the issues between colonizationists and abolitionists, between ­Reese and Jay, ­were to be hashed out in the 120 pages that followed.55 ­Reese’s preface addressed the standing of the Inquiry’s author, adopting a patronizing tone that quickly shaded into insult. The doctor claimed that arguments in Jay’s book ­were so impotent that if not for “the magic of his name upon its title page” which might dupe the unsophisticated reader, it might be better to ignore Inquiry in the American Colonization and American Anti-­Slavery Socie­ties. Seeking to account for how William Jay, a man of quality, had veered so dangerously off course, ­Reese explained that Jay allowed himself to fall in with “zealots” who “perverted his own mind, so that, on this par­tic­u­lar subject, he has become disqualified for sober thinking.” Asked ­Reese, “­Under what other influence save that of pure fanat­i­cism could an intelligent, virtuous, and respectable citizen” get so off track? ­Reese sought to wrest from Jay the power to interpret the famous John Jay’s legacy. The proof of William Jay’s fanatical delusion, according to ­Reese, was that this “good man” had twisted and distorted John Jay’s ideas about abolition to support “the scheme of immediate abolition.” According to ­Reese, John Jay’s own writings indicated the founder was an “unwavering advocate” of gradual emancipation. To further demonstrate William Jay’s pattern of historical delusion, ­Reese also noted that he had similarly mangled Thomas Jefferson’s views on racial separation and gradualism in a “palpably perverted” fashion. Not content to launch personal bromides at Jay, ­Reese, in his preface also tauntingly argued that the Garrisonians had inflated f­ ree Black self-­regard to the point that a once-­humble ­people expected “social equality in ­every relation” with whites and had begun to spurn their true friends the colonizationists. False Black pride, R ­ eese claimed, had caused the antiabolitionist rioters to turn on African American New Yorkers. ­Reese threw down the gauntlet, mocking Jay’s judgment and questioning his very fitness to carry forward honorably the historical mantle of his own ­father. ­Reese’s jibes, moreover, struck



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at the very notion that Jay’s cause promoted the order, stability, and Christian morality that the Westchester County judge claimed to value.56 ­Reese drove a wedge between ­father and son by juxtaposing William Jay’s biography of John Jay with William Jay’s Inquiry. ­Reese’s letters sought to prove that the American Anti-­Slavery Society was “anti-­American in its very nature.” By implication, William Jay, through his support of the AAS, had forfeited the patriotic inheritance to which he laid claim through the authorship of John Jay’s biography. With false generosity, R ­ eese indicated that William Jay was entitled to what­ever views he held on slavery. But R ­ eese asserted an obligation to “the American ­people” not to allow John’s “distinguished name” to be misappropriated and to make the choice clear “between the contrary sentiments of the f­ ather and the son.”57 Citing specific page numbers from the 1833 biography, the doctor emphasized repeatedly that the elder Jay was an avowed gradualist. In expressing early support for gradual emancipation in New York, in founding a society that promoted manumission and the improvement of Blacks over time through education, in owning slaves some of whom he freed ­after extracting several years of ser­vice, John Jay established his rec­ord of moderation. According to R ­ eese, the ACS was the appropriate heir to John Jay’s practices and beliefs. ­Reese sought to diminish, indeed to belittle, William Jay. He charged that William should “be ashamed of your attempted analogy between” the early gradualist groups and the American Anti-­Slavery Society and its insistence on “instant abolition.” William’s own analy­sis of his ­father’s actions, ­Reese pointed out, made allowance for the “necessity” of owning slaves ­until alternative sources of ­labor fully matured, a necessity that William disparaged when claimed by southern slaveholders. Moreover, ­Reese contrasted John’s modulated rhe­toric, his patience for incremental change, and his realistic appreciation of slavery’s importance in parts of the nation, with the blunt “sentiments, language, and spirit of his son.” Delivering the coup de grace, the colonizationist asked “Which is entitled to the greater confidence,—­the late John Jay, chief justice in the Supreme Court of the United States, or—­William Jay, associate judge of Westchester County Court!”58 ­Reese attempted to portray William Jay as confused and, ultimately, inconsequential: he had failed to live up to the achievements of his ­father. In an argument that unintentionally undermined its own logic, ­Reese claimed agreement with William Jay that the traditional gradualist socie­ties had failed to have any impact on southern slavery. ­Reese argued that it was with the growth and increased effectiveness of the ACS that proslavery southerners began to express alarm and heap abuse on the old gradualist groups. Only then

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did colonizationists feel the need to criticize abolitionists, so as to dissociate their image from any dangerous implications. Yet ­Reese insisted that the true insult was William Jay’s yoking old and new abolitionists together as part of a common cause. In a provocative reference to miscegenation, the doctor charged that such a false ­union was worse than “an amalgamation of colors.”59 ­Reese’s final letter attacked Jay’s patriotism and his courage, further attempting to sever the historical power that his name carried for the abolitionist movement. In response to Jay’s assertion that international opposition to American slavery would in time bring ­g reat pressure to bear on the United States, R ­ eese vigorously waved the flag of anti-­British patriotism. The doctor directly evoked the American Revolution against Jay and his fellow radicals: “­There is too much of the spirit of ‘76 and of old John Jay yet lingering among our countrymen, to withhold the expression of their indignation, at the insult which the repetition of such language conveys.”60 Having questioned Jay’s commitment to national sovereignty, he then questioned his fortitude. If Jay truly believed that Christian duty compelled him to preach against slavery, then he should “GO into the south.” In a footnote at the bottom of the page, ­Reese mocked William “quietly sitting in his study in Bedford, West Chester County, New-­York, and writing an anti-­slavery book.” William and his abolitionist brethren w ­ ere, R ­ eese indicated, paper tigers, missionaries afraid to face the dangers of their mission. If they cared about the souls of the slaves they would travel South to convert them. ­Reese thus mocked the fanatics for not being fanatical enough. Abolitionists should, the doctor implied, jump from the frying pan of their riot-­inducing northern reputation into the fire of the militant proslavery South.61 ­Reese’s argument featured almost every­thing that William Jay did not like about colonizationism. The doctor deployed race-­baiting; he blamed abolitionist for riots perpetrated against them; he si­mul­ta­neously claimed abolition as a goal and disavowed abolitionism as an organ­izing princi­ple; he promoted moderation and politeness as the most impor­tant Christian virtues; and he sought to accommodate the fears of southern slaveholders. Yet what outraged Jay most ­were the stark distinctions ­Reese drew between ­father and son. ­Reese had touched a very sensitive nerve. He had revealed the psychological and reputational risks of abolitionism for the living Jays. William Jay and other members of the f­ amily could not help but notice not only the insults but also the attempt to undermine their respectability by separating the f­ amily from its intensely valued claim to the legacy of John Jay. John Jay II felt conflicted about how he should approach the public attack on his f­ ather’s reputation. From New York City, he sent an excerpt of R ­ eese’s book that had been printed in The Spectator, the semiweekly edition of Wil-



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liam L. Stone’s Commercial Advertiser. The young abolitionist betrayed his anxiety and his anger to his ­mother Augusta in a letter accompanying the excerpt. At first, he planned to enclose the entire inflammatory volume, but played down the seriousness of the m ­ atter, commenting that R ­ eese’s letters “amused me very much.” Then, John did not sound so amused. “I am surprised to see so many respectable names approving of & praising the book,” he informed his ­mother. “The book is just such as one would suppose would be written by a man ignorant & vulgar self conceited & unprincipled.” In a postscript, John de­cided not to send ­Reese’s book at all, supposing that his ­father already had a copy. Clearly, the college student had been rattled.62 Two days ­later, William wrote his son expressing his frustration with the newspaper clipping. The excerpt “so grossly misrepresented your grand­father’s opinions, that I thought it my duty to answer it. & I accordingly addressed a letter to Mr. Stone.” Yet William cautioned his son against betraying too much interest in the controversy, even as he instructed young John to forward the newspaper if his letter appeared. Dispensing advice to his son that was as much meant for himself, William wrote, “The less you say about R ­ eese in conversation the better. If you appear vexed, it w ­ ill be so far a triumph to his friends.”63 Peter Augustus Jay, who knew well his younger ­brother’s sensitivity about his writing prowess and his capacity for prolonged rhetorical combat, counseled him against taking ­Reese’s bait. William agreed that he should henceforth ignore ­Reese’s “dishonest” book, though he had felt compelled to correct the rec­ord about their f­ather. He asserted, “My book must, & w ­ ill speak for itself, & its fate ­will not depend ­either on Dr. ­Reese or any replies that may be made to him.” He then added, with an author’s pride, “I understand it is selling rapidly.”64 William Jay attempted to calibrate his response to ­Reese’s public Letters, ­because the psychological stakes ­were high. He was, ­after all, his ­father’s biographer, living in his f­ ather’s ­house and writing from his f­ ather’s study. The son needed to feel armed with his ­father’s morals, ethics, and reputation, but William’s embrace of the new abolitionist movement made him vulnerable. ­Reese and ­others, their snide condescension notwithstanding, had made a plausible distinction between the evidence presented in the biography and the argument Jay made in his Inquiry. His ­father’s abolitionism had been both cautious and protective of his personal and his class’s interests. The colonizationists had a point. William Jay, in embracing the American Anti-­Slavery Society, made a bold departure from his ­father’s legacy. At the same time, William Jay had reason to be angry with R ­ eese’s implication that the delusional son had veered ­toward ideological patricide. ­Reese emphasized means, William Jay ends. ­Reese took gradualism to be John Jay’s most

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impor­tant commitment with regard to slavery; William Jay viewed abolitionism itself as his ­father’s legacy. For William, his ­father’s belief that slavery should end and his willingness to take steps to advance that goal had l­ittle in common with colonizationist policies that protected slavery and showed contempt for any version of African American equality based on the found­ers’ egalitarian creed. William’s exchange of gradualism for immediatism had much to do with intention and pro­g ress. He believed that colonizationists had no intention of forcing southern slaveholders to confront ­either the moral or practical danger of perpetuating their slaveholding regime. Even if, as R ­ eese suggested, the first wave of northern abolition socie­ties rarely challenged or posed much of a threat to southern slaveholding interests, men like John Jay had seen northern abolition achieve its goals. Moreover, John Jay, late in his life, anticipated moral and spiritual advancement, such as Britain’s withdrawal from the international slave trade and the global spread of the Christian gospel, portending the millennium. History progressed ­toward God’s truth.65 It fell to William Jay to connect the dots between the abolition of the slave trade, the campaigns for moral reform including the spread of Chris­tian­ity, and the campaign to abolish slavery nationally. Just as Jay had no intention of conceding that he had turned his back on his ­father’s legacy, neither did he intend to back down from the larger fight over abolitionism or from defending specific observations that contributed to his broader argument. The devil, William implied, was in the details. Thus, William could not resist continuing to express his disagreements directly with his colonizationist interlocutors. In January 1836, he privately quibbled with R ­ eese over the precise terms of emancipation in Mexico. L ­ ater that same year, he wrote William L. Stone a letter defending his criticisms of the editor for playing a role in precipitating the 1834 anti-­abolitionist and race riots. William mocked Stone’s claim that the editor had not even been in town at the moment of the riots, quipping, I “truly wish you had also been absent when a g­ reat many other editorials w ­ ere written”; he also bemoaned Stone’s defection from the cause of abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C. Sanctimoniously acknowledging that their “paths [­were] greatly divergent from each other,” Jay suggested at kingdom come that he and Stone would learn whose route was the righ­teous one.66 William Jay’s negative appraisal of colonizationism, however, brought out more than pedantry and spiritual self-­satisfaction: it was based on his understanding that American prejudice was the obstacle to American pro­g ress. Rev. Turner of the Young Men’s Colonization Society sought support from Jay for a college in Liberia to train African American missionaries. Jay articulated to Turner where the colonizationist diverged from the reasonable, as well as the righ­teous, path. Jay regarded spreading the gospel to Africa as a fine idea. But the



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colonizationists’ hostility to abolitionism and racial prejudices betrayed them. African American education should take place “in the land of their birth,” not in Africa. Racism, as shown by recent experiences to thwart Connecticut initiatives for Black education, not impracticality, was the real obstacle to domestic education. Declared Jay, “I cannot sympathize with that philanthropy which delights in calling Africa the native land of thousands & hundreds of thousands of our citizens whose ancestors for many generations drew their first breath in the same country as ourselves.”67 North and South, much work lay ahead to transform the lives of the uncolonized and the enslaved. What­ever barbs skeptics might hurl their way, William Jay and John Jay II readied themselves to make the Jay name synonymous not only with the founding of the nation but also with national abolition. John’s 1836 speech to the Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society assessed the landscape: opponents ­were “numerous & strong”; “Lynch law & mob vio­lence” continued to menace. The Columbia College student called for “unflinching firmness” from “­every abolitionist to conquer the difficulties in his path.”68 Even without the verve of youth, his f­ ather Judge William Jay shared the same energy and commitment as the son who carried forward the revered founding f­ather’s name and, therefore, his legacy.

Alone However annoyed William Jay might become at the taunting aspersions of his critics, however perilously close to the mark they might sometimes strike, he had ample networks of support to fall back on: his siblings, a wife, and ­children all could be counted on to applaud his abolitionism. Wealth and servants sustained his comfort. A network of abolitionist readers, editors, officers, activists, and philanthropists shared William Jay’s core commitment to emancipation and would, when necessary, gamely debate him on princi­ples, strategies, and tactics in their shared, albeit fractious, crusade. In his attacks on slavery and racism, as in his personal life, William Jay was not alone and never would be. Not so his servant Zilpah. In March 1837, her ­mother Clarinda died. The ­daughter faced a ­future without relatives and hardly any friends. Jay f­ amily letters commenting on Clarinda’s death balanced pity with perspective. Writing his ­sister Maria in ­England, William first shared his acerbic comments on Amer­ i­ca’s twin afflictions of runaway economic growth and runaway democracy before turning to domestic affairs. Clarinda’s death, he reported “was attended with very ­little suffering.” Her mind apparently had gone before her body. Zilpah herself, however, clearly suffered, “seem[ing] very much grieved by the

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loss of her m ­ other.” The sad real­ity now was her isolation. In William’s words, “She has no relations left & scarcely any associate”; according to his s­ister ­Maria Jay Banyer, Zilpah had “no relative to love or to take an interest in her welfare.” The Jays and Zilpah understood that they w ­ ere neither f­amily nor friends, no m ­ atter how deeply intertwined w ­ ere their lives. For Zilpah, the psychological blow of Clarinda’s death manifested itself immediately in a fashion that William Jay found puzzling: “She positively refuses to sleep any longer in the white room, the room in which her m ­ other died. ­Whether this arose from a feeling of superstition or merely from painful association I do not know.” He nonetheless felt obliged to accommodate his longtime servant: “The result has been that she has a bed in the same chamber with the white maid, & takes her place in the kitchen with the other servants.”69 Zilpah was not the first f­ amily servant disturbed by the presence of death. More than a half-­century ­earlier in France, Abbe’s less timely, less natu­ral passing had provoked ghostly fears in t­hose serving the Jay h ­ ouse­hold. Zilpah’s reaction was dif­fer­ent: she did not say she saw an apparition—­just that she did not want to sleep so near her m ­ other’s deathbed. Her request suggested that she sought a modicum of distance and of control to contemplate her grief. William could not quite see where Zilpah was coming from, even though, as a confirmed radical American abolitionist, he now wrestled with his f­ather’s legacy, but he agreed to her request. More than most leading northern white abolitionists, William Jay had direct experience with the personal, prosaic real­ity of slavery. Without leaving his home, he could directly observe, through Zilpah, the institution’s melancholy aftermath. An unbridgeable gulf between master and slave, employer and servant, writer and subject nonetheless remained. He let Zilpah move rooms without understanding her. Was her request motivated by superstition? Painful association? The need to sleep within the sound of another h ­ uman being’s living breath? Zilpah grieved as a ­daughter, as a person left ­behind. Alone.70

C h a p te r 8

A Conservative on the Inside

Righ­teousness came with risk, prosperity with peril. The movement for immediate emancipation had momentum and the Lord on its side, William Jay wrote in an 1836 letter to Garrisonian Samuel J. May, praising abolitionists for their extraordinary purity and “disinterested[ness].” Commented Jay, “Persecution has lifted them, & helped to render them meet” to do God’s work. But in declining an invitation to attend the annual meeting of the New ­England Anti-­Slavery Society, Jay also warned that “temptation” large and small would test a movement that Jay forecasted, inaccurately, would be widely popu­lar. Abolitionists, predicted Jay, “are about to be tried with prosperity. H ­ uman applause ­will soon await them. Their numbers ­will give them po­liti­cal importance, & demagogue and politicians ­will strive to make them their tools.” The forces of democracy, in other words, might pull the emancipationists from their calling. The siren song of popularity might divert them from their moral mission. Despite joining the leadership of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, Jay remained suspicious of the Garrisonians’ radical exuberance. Suggesting the need to emphasize honesty over popularity, Jay critiqued the language of the New ­England Anti-­Slavery Society’s (NEAS) call for its upcoming convention. The judge queried, “It is very fervid & eloquent, but is it strictly & literally true?” Specifically, Jay chided the NEAS for claiming that its southern opponents wished to enslave northern working-­class whites. Betraying his own 189

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conservative instincts, Jay pointed out that a mere preference for property-­ holding requirements over universal suffrage hardly made one an advocate of white slavery. Jay lectured May, “In my opinion duty, & of course policy require that neither our zeal nor our indignation should be permitted to betray us into the use of stronger language than truth & candor ­will justify.”1 Jay’s attention to detail and accuracy was not merely an excuse to restrict the radical scope of abolitionist rhe­toric. As he wrote elsewhere, “The cause of abolition is supported by . . . ​such an inexhaustible store of facts” that t­ here should never be an incentive to deploy “falsehood,” which in any case would unnecessarily create “a new obstacle to the triumph of justice and humanity.”2 Getting the story straight was an essential feature of his abolitionist activism. During the 1830s, William Jay, with the support of his son John, made signal contributions to the abolitionist movement. He expanded his movement contacts. He developed a fuller understanding of the role of racial in­equality in sustaining slavery and a clearer sense of how Black voices could advance emancipation. He staked out a position for himself as a writer, editor, historian, and ­legal expert. He explored w ­ hether abolitionists could advance their interests in the arena of electoral politics. All the while, William preserved his autonomy as a hawk for factual details, while insisting on his vision of constitutional literalism and his own sense of how moral persuasion should work. Abolitionists, just like slaveholders, should not be allowed to diverge from the limits imposed by the US Constitution or, in the case of AAS members, from the words of their own 1833 charter. Thus, even as Jay found himself on a collision course with the Garrisonians, he became ever more intensely invested in the fundamental goal of ending American slavery.

On Board William Jay took on formal orga­nizational responsibilities and embedded himself in abolitionist networks. His name, his reputation, his proximity to New York City, and his ties to the Tappan ­brothers facilitated the pro­cess. Jay served a term as president of the New-­York Anti-­Slavery society. He also joined the AAS’s racially integrated board as foreign secretary. The growth of the abolitionist movement and an aggressive campaign to circulate antislavery lit­er­a­ture in the South garnered the AAS many enemies and detractors. Jay’s ­legal scruples found expression in the board’s denial of “gross misrepre­sen­ta­tions” that the AAS agenda somehow threatened the “constitutional rights of the South.” Indeed, the board’s September 1835 statement, which included Jay’s name, reiterated that abolition could only occur



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through the actions of the states, not congressional fiat; that the organ­ization did not support violent slave insurrections; and that educating and protecting the rights of Black ­people ­were not precursors to interracial marriage. At the same time, the board’s commitment to moral suasion led it to affirm that ­free speech was absolutely critical to the antislavery cause. Spreading the abolitionist argument, the board asserted, would not promote the nation’s “dissolution” but rather avert it by speeding slavery’s end.3 The abolitionists’ insistence on making themselves heard even attracted criticism from the president of the United States, prompting the AAS board to fire back. The AAS Executive Committee issued a statement in late 1835 responding to President Andrew Jackson’s denunciation of the circulation of antislavery lit­er­a­ture in the South and his approving words for northern opponents of abolitionism. While claiming nonpartisan motives, Jay and his colleagues leveled charges against the president consistent with t­ hose articulated by Jackson’s growing co­ali­tion of Whig opponents. The AAS officers charged Jackson for “assum[ing] a power not belonging to your office.” More to the point, they accused Jackson of leveling false accusations in suggesting that circulating abolitionist appeals in the South would encourage conspiracies among southern slaves and f­ree Blacks against whites. The removal of abolitionist tracts from the mail, according to the board, provided the South “worthless protection . . . ​by the most unblushing and dangerous usurpation of which any public officer has been guilty since the organ­ization of our federal government.”4 Jay and his colleagues had taken on the nation’s most power­ ful politician to defend their right to advance morally persuasive arguments where they ­were needed most. Jay took an active role in crafting the AAS’s message. The board’s lengthy address to the American p­ eople in the summer of 1836 was largely his handi­ work. The statement came from a place of urgency. As national politicians took mea­sures to silence the abolitionist message, he wrote Tappan, “For myself, I begin to be seriously alarmed at the pro­g ress of tyranny & the corruption of our public men. Nothing in my opinion can now restore the love for constitutional liberty, but the anti-­slavery agitation. Hence the vast importance of harmony & forbearance among abolitionists.”5 The address made clear that ­those who harassed opponents of slavery and muzzled congressional debate on slavery trammeled the Constitution. In 1836, the House of Representatives passed a rule that tabled all antislavery petitions as a ­matter of course. Squelching the right of petition flagrantly ­violated the First Amendment. In so ­doing, the House abdicated its own core responsibilities: “Search the annals of legislation, and you ­will find no pre­ce­dent for such a profligate act [of] tyranny, exercised by a majority over their fellow legislators,

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nor for such an impudent contempt of the rights of the ­People.” U ­ nder ­these rules, congressman could not address even the most violent horrors: “The negro may be bound alive to the stake in front of the capitol . . . ​his shrieks may resound through the representative hall . . . ​but no vote may rebuke the abomination.” Even in calling for Americans to flood the House with petitions as a way of resisting the effort at “tranquilizing the public mind,” the address insisted that the issues raised by the gag rule transcended the issue of abolition. Denial of the right to petition threatened ­every American’s rights; it threatened to make e­ very American a slave.6 Abolitionists had ignited a b­ attle for the soul of American politics, as well as for the liberty of African Americans. In private and public correspondence, Jay articulated a purposeful commitment to the moral imperatives of abolitionism and the ethical nuances that he felt should guide abolitionists. In a February 1836 letter to Joel Doolittle that found its way into the annual report of the Vermont Anti-­Slavery Society, Jay rejected the notion that abolitionists withdraw from the public fray u ­ ntil conditions ­were “more favorable.” As economic ties between North and South grew more extensive, more northerners became allied with the slaveholding interest even as the southern slave population continued to grow. Jay asked, “What is to be gained by delay?” Action meant “the exhibition of truth” as a way of inducing slaveowners to renounce the sinful practice. W ­ ere abolitionists to exchange an emphasis on religiously inspired princi­ples for an emphasis on po­liti­cal elections, “the consequences would prob­ably be disastrous to the cause of h ­ uman rights, and to the welfare of our common country.”7 Amid the backlash against or­ga­nized abolitionism, Jay reflected on the nature and sources of public morality and immorality. In a letter to Rev. Oliver Whetmore that found its way into print in the fall of 1836, Jay urged continued abolitionist resolve based on conservative princi­ples. Jay asserted, “Our ­g reat cap­i­tal­ists are speculating, not merely in land and banks, but also in the liberties of the ­people.” Recalling the recent string of anti-­abolitionist vio­lence in Boston; New York City; Utica, New York; and Cincinnati, Jay observed that the fomenters of “anarchy and vio­lence” ­were men of wealth who sought to muzzle the advocates of freedom to safeguard their business relationships with the South. Such a strategy stood the logic of social class on its head. “The po­ liti­cal influence of wealth was” supposed to be “conservative,” with the rich usually inclined to ­favor “law and order.” Jay, who as a judge enforced law and order in the face of much less violent disturbances, warned, “It cannot be, it is not in h ­ uman nature, that judges, and l­ awyers, and rich merchants, w ­ ill long enjoy the exclusive privilege of trampling upon the laws.” Raising the stakes to biblical proportions, Jay predicted, “­These men are sowing the wind, and they ­will reap the whirlwind,” b­ ecause riotous be­hav­ior, once legitimized,



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would turn its full fury not against “the ­humble abolitionist, but the lofty possesor of power and fortune, who ­will first be levelled by the blast.” Members of the elite w ­ ere playing with fire—­a fire that could burn down society.8 As he wrote to Benjamin Lundy and other officers of the venerable Pennsylvania Abolition Society, faith in the morality of t­ hose institutions had proven false: “Unfortunately . . . ​the assaults on the plainest & most essential princi­ ples of republicanism which have marked the pre­sent strug­gle has [sic] with scarcely an exception, been instigated by men of superior intelligence and education.” And, if cap­i­tal­ists had proven inadequate to the task of protecting liberty, so too had educators and editors. Newspapers, rather than impart “lessons in morals, in ­human rights, & in constitutional freedom,” had instead spread “malignant falsehoods & atrocious doctrines relative to abolitionists.”9 Yet as much as he expressed scorn for corruptions of politics and money, Jay believed ­there ­were pragmatic limits to what abolitionists had to require of themselves. Calls to boycott slave-­labor products dated to before the rise of immediate abolitionism in Amer­i­ca. Jay, however, was dubious of initiatives to limit consumption to goods produced by f­ ree workers.10 In a long letter to Gerrit Smith, a wealthy upstate New York landowner who was assuming an increasingly prominent role in the abolitionist movement, Jay dissected the efficacy of abolitionists’ boycotts of southern agricultural products. If buying anything made of slave-­labor-­produced cotton was morally wrong, then merchants like the Tappans who sold anything to southern slaveholders would be wrong as well. So too would printing the Bible on paper made of this cotton. To be sure, such steps might demonstrate abolitionist “sincerity.” Jay wondered, however, if, instead, abstaining from slave products would reinforce the image of abolitionists as “fanatics.” Operating ­under the premise that abolitionists aimed to persuade southerners to abandon slaveholding, he thought charges of fanat­i­cism would only lead ­others to have “less re­spect . . . ​for our opinions.” Meanwhile, no northerner of modest means would be able to afford clothing made exclusively of flax, wool, or other fibers. Printing an abolitionist newspaper on linen instead of cotton would similarly drive the price up and undermine the effort to spread their message. Mill workers in Lowell who lost their jobs to a cotton boycott would be irate. Moral suasion should be allowed to do its work without abolitionists making threats to disrupt the economy. The use of ­labor products, in Jay’s view, should remain a choice for individual abolitionists to make, not an or­ga­nized expression of the movement. In any event Jay did not believe that a mere 100,000 abolitionists would have much impact on a cotton market that operated on a global scale. Jay noted that Christians had to engage the material world, in this case the cap­i­tal­ist world of trade, even as they challenged an

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institution deeply implicated in the getting and spending that Christians undertook.11 Despite his sharp criticism of the grasping moral myopia of cap­it­al­ist elites, Jay sought to redeem or at least morally regulate them, rather than destroy the social order. He also wanted the movement to maintain a tight, unifying focus. Working with Smith and o ­ thers, Jay explored ave­nues for moving minds, hearts, and souls that pointed to the specific narratives and experiences of African Americans as key to advancing the antislavery campaign.

The Cabinet of Freedom Through the short-­lived antislavery series, The Cabinet of Freedom (1836–37), Jay participated in the development of antislavery print culture as the immediatist movement surged. Much as Garrisonian Maria Weston Chapman would edit book-­length annuals as a complement to The Liberator, Jay, Smith, and Rev. George Bush teamed up with evangelical publisher John S. Taylor to launch the Cabinet of Freedom. At the suggestion of Lewis Tappan, the series was to be a long-­form vehicle for assailing US slavery. In assembling their texts, Jay and his colleagues made an impor­tant contribution by featuring Black-­authored narratives of southern slavery in antislavery print culture. A ­ fter beginning the series by reclaiming from the colonizationists the Thomas Clarkson classic, The History of the Rise, Pro­gress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-­ Trade, Jay seized on A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man as an energizing way to bring the immediacy of slavery’s cruelties and sinfulness to the attention of northern readers. Although one of Jay’s less-­ appreciated contributions to the antislavery movement, the Cabinet of Freedom sheds new light on his thinking as an antislavery public intellectual.12 The decision to launch the Cabinet series reflected a belief that the obstacles placed by slavery’s apologists and defenders in abolition’s path could be overcome by informed discourse. At its inception in early 1836, the Cabinet of Freedom series announced itself as an attempt to enrich the crucial and unavoidable national debate on slavery by making thoughtful new and classic commentaries on the subject available to the public “in a cheap but neat form.” The series fit abolitionism into the broader evangelical reform discourse of the day. Its publisher John S. Taylor, a self-­described “Theological and Sunday School Bookseller,” also offered such ecumenical titles as Hints to Parents on the Early Religious Education of ­Children, tracts from Sabbath and Sunday School socie­ties, and sermons by the preeminent evangelical preacher of the day Charles G. Finney.13



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The panel that chose texts for the Cabinet of Freedom—­Jay, Smith, and Bush—­ embodied a convergence of experiences and expertise. Like Jay, Smith was a privileged son of New York landholding wealth but of more recent and more spectacular dimensions. Gerrit’s ­father Peter Smith parlayed a fur-­trading partnership with John Jacob Astor and marriage into a branch of the Livingston ­family into owner­ship of well over a half-­million acres of land. Like Jay, Gerrit Smith also had learned about slavery firsthand, through the enslaved p­ eople who worked for his ­father. Smith followed a conventional reformist path of support for Sunday School, Bible and tract distribution, and temperance ­toward participation in Black-­related ­causes, specifically Black religious training and colonization. Much as for William Jay, the trauma of mob vio­lence helped crystallize for Smith the importance of embracing the American Anti-­Slavery Society. In October 1835, Smith and his wife Ann attended, as observers, the state’s first antislavery society meeting in Utica, New York. A ­ fter an unruly mob swarmed into the Presbyterian church where the conventioneers ­were meeting, a horrified Smith offered his own home in Peterboro as an alternative site. He would soon become an ardent abolitionist and a leading figure in the New-­ York Anti-­Slavery Society, succeeding Jay as president of that organ­ization.14 George Bush’s name lent further literary and intellectual weight to the Cabinet of Freedom. Bush put himself through college at Dartmouth by teaching school, a­ fter which he trained to be a Presbyterian minister at Prince­ton Theological Seminary. Following a four-­year stint as a missionary in Indiana, he returned east. His budding reputation as a scholar led to a professorial post in Hebrew and Oriental Lit­er­a­ture at New York University. Bridging the worlds of scholarship and reform, he also took a post overseeing the press of the American Bible Society, a cause near to Jay’s heart. By 1836, Bush himself had published on a wide variety of religious subjects, including the life of Mohammed for the Harpers’ F ­ amily Library series, a commentary on the Book of Psalms, and a Hebrew grammar textbook. Bush enjoyed a close relationship with many of New York City’s booksellers, who valued his discernment. Bush, a scholar of biblical lit­er­a­ture, complemented the two philanthropist-­abolitionists. The Cabinet of Freedom would contain intellectual substance beyond the latest polemics.15 The se­lection of Clarkson’s massive 1808 narrative of the crusade to end the British slave trade for the first book in the Cabinet of Freedom series forged an explicit link between Britain’s withdrawal from the international slave trade and the current campaign against US slavery. The Cabinet edition did not leave to chance that readers would grasp the moral of the lengthy British drama and its relevance to “the pre­sent moment” in American history. An advertisement

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inserted in the first installment of the serial declared that the British strug­ gle  had pitted “strength of selfishness” against “the still greater strength of Christian truth, zeal, and perseverance” and asserted that “the same g­ reat princi­ples . . . ​are employed in assailing and defending American slavery” now. The advertisement also noted that in 1809 Congress passed a resolution acknowledging that the Library of Congress had received from an early antislavery organ­ization a copy of Clarkson’s history. A previous generation of po­liti­cal leaders, the point was made, had shown an openness to abolitionist thinking that the pre­sent one lacked. The current US Congress, the advertisement noted, turned a blind eye ­toward the domestic interstate slave trade that was “in many re­spects, scarcely less atrocious than” the reviled international slave trade.16 The Cabinet of Freedom thus preempted any attempt to separate, as Dr. David M. ­Reese had in his critique of William Jay, an e­ arlier generation of gradualists from the current generation of abolitionists. In reviving Clarkson’s text, the Cabinet of Freedom attempted to reclaim him from the colonizationists. American presses had only published Clarkson sporadically since his work’s first appearance in the United States. The most recent edition was an 1830 two-­volume abridgment published in Augusta, Maine, that earned an endorsement from the ACS and included a lengthy appendix describing the success of colonization in Sierra Leone and Liberia.17 Even though Clarkson himself had yet to renounce colonization, the Cabinet’s new edition of his work symbolically placed him in the American abolitionist camp. The imposition of the gag rule in Washington, D.C., at the time that the Cabinet’s serialized edition came off the presses, moreover, created a power­ful contrast between Clarkson’s frank, forceful British parliamentarians and their American counter­parts.18 Clarkson’s narrative attested to the persuasive power of publicly and painstakingly presenting antislavery evidence. Clarkson reflected, “By entering into a patient discussion of the merits of the question; by bringing evidence upon it; by reasoning upon that evidence night a­ fter night, and year a­ fter year, and thus disputing the ground inch by inch, the abolition of the Slave-­trade stands upon a rock, upon which it never can be shaken.” His prolonged effort to place and keep the issue of the slave trade before the British public and his commitment to compiling empirical evidence even in the face of physical threats made the British activist an exemplary figure for an American abolitionist audience.19 Clarkson’s approach to abolition, however, left scant room for the slave trade’s or slavery’s Black victims to speak or act on their own behalf. The British abolitionist’s vision of the Black man as a suffering, subordinated, largely ­silent partner made a direct impression in The Cabinet of Freedom. The frontis-



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piece of the bound editions of the serials featured the names of Jay, Bush, and Smith in stylized script and beneath that a rendition of a classic British antislavery icon—­the half-­naked kneeling slave u ­ nder the motto, “Am I Not a Man and a ­Brother”—­that had been originally approved by Clarkson and his abolitionist colleagues in 1787 (see figure 7). In the version presented at the front of the Cabinet of Freedom volumes, the enslaved man, gazing up with manacled hands in prayer, possessed a soft, almost angelic, even feminine look. The presence of the names of the editorial board above the supplicant reinforced the notion that freedom depended on deliverance not just by God-­in-­heaven but also by the white abolitionists d­ oing God’s work.20 A man and a b­ rother—­yes—­but not a power­ful or self-­liberating one. William Jay convinced his colleagues to take the Cabinet of Freedom in a dramatic new direction: in the next volume, an African American man would tell his own story. Charles Ball’s account of his life in bondage and strug­gle for freedom placed the series on the cutting edge. For the next quarter-­century, the personal narratives of t­ hose who escaped to freedom became a central feature of the abolitionist argument. Although slave narratives had played a role in Anglo-­American antislavery movements before the mid-1830s, Ball’s popu­lar, oft-­reprinted account was an early instance of the more secularly oriented exposé sponsored by immediate abolitionists. By bringing out an edition of Ball’s story (originally published by Pennsylvania attorney Isaac Fisher) u ­ nder the Cabinet of Freedom imprint with a new editors’ introduction, Jay expanded his own field of vision while attempting to do the same for the reading public.21 When considering what should be the second book in the Cabinet series, Jay became taken with the idea of republishing the account of a con­temporary Black man who had lived long enough to tell the tale of his re­sis­tance to southern slavery. He urged on Smith an exciting discovery: Charles Ball’s narrative. Jay was impressed with the immediacy that Ball’s memoir brought to the subject: “Its interest is that of a first rate romance. it is admirably written, & makes you almost as familiar with Southern Slavery & plantations, as if you ­were an overseer.” That Jay i­magined the reader as “an overseer,” not a slave, shows the limits of his racial imagination and betrays his sense of the intended audience. He ­imagined white readers viewing the text through the eyes of white, not Black, actors. This stance placed the onus of moral guilt on the reader, ­because clearly Ball was the tragic protagonist of his life’s drama.22 Jay recognized and had a ready response to the question of authorship. He indicated to Smith that the book was actually composed “by a man of letters” ­because “it abounds with wise reflections which come awkwardly from a poor slave.” Jay, nonetheless, believed the “facts” to be true and to belong to the slave himself. He urged Smith to consider welcoming the Ball memoir into their

Figure 7.  Cabinet of Freedom frontispiece. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.



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series. Jay suggested that Ball’s story should have an introduction testifying to the narrative’s “credibility.” Anticipating the publication practice of prominent white abolitionists adding prefatory endorsements to the autobiographies of the formerly enslaved, Jay provided an introduction to frame the subsequent narrative for readers, though in this case the editorial introduction was unsigned.23 The introduction to the Ball memoir highlighted Jay’s broader concern with moral order and disorder in the republic. He editorialized that the plantation constituted a miniature imperial fiefdom not subject to the correctives that “public opinion” provided in ­free society more generally. Meanwhile, slave codes “paralyz[ed] the moral sense”—­precisely the opposite effect that laws should have. Indeed, closely reflecting Judge Jay’s abhorrence of mob rule and extralegal vio­lence, the introduction described the southern public’s interventions on behalf of slavery as exhibiting unrestrained bloodthirstiness. It shared a series of newspaper accounts of white crowds enforcing lynch law by immolating the Black targets of their rage. The introduction also attested that Ball was a real person who in fact dictated the story of his life. Yet Jay did not mention that he edited the original version of the book, excising not only some material he found unlikely but also some content with sexual implication that he thought might upset female readers. Even with t­hese interventions, Jay aimed to make more widely available a very lengthy text that detailed a long life of suffering and spoke to the current po­liti­cal moment.24 Indeed, Ball’s life story bridged the era of Clarkson and the era of Garrison, the era of the Atlantic slave trade and that of the US internal slave trade. The effects of the slave trade, both foreign and domestic, ­were integral to Ball’s story from beginning to end. In recounting his late eighteenth-­century youth in Mary­land, Ball vividly described the sale of his m ­ other and his siblings to a slave trader. Ball was left with the permanent image of his m ­ other being beaten by her Georgia trader-­owner as she desperately sought to remain with her young son. ­Later wrenched from his own wife and ­children, Ball recalled wakefully lying in chains, thinking “of my grand­father, and of the long nights I had passed with him, listening to his narratives of the scenes through which he had passed in Africa.”25 The 500-­plus-­page narrative of injustices and one man’s per­sis­tent efforts to escape spoke to one of the aspects of slavery that the socially conservative William Jay found particularly objectionable. ­Virginia’s sons and ­daughters of privilege, white “gentlemen and ladies by birthright,” frivolously rode around the countryside or “visit[ed] their neighbours’ h ­ ouses”; meanwhile, their ­fathers fought off creditors, “the evil tyranny of old customs” preventing any “honest and honourable industry” being engaged in by the rising generation

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of whites.26 Southern elites w ­ ere incapable of exercising the responsible leadership that the Jays felt their wealth and lineage demanded. The eco­nom­ically retrograde institution of slavery had taught them to trea­sure a life of ease, rather than develop the moral and material means of stewardship. Ball’s travels through the South revealed southern society’s characteristics that ­were antithetical to northern visions of religion-­inspired reform and secular order. Slavery profaned the Sabbath: Sundays, according to Ball’s account, had become a time for slaves to earn a l­ittle money and for masters to extract a ­little extra l­abor. O ­ wners actively sought to discourage slaves from Christian worship, ­because “they fear that the slaves, by attending meetings, and listening to the preachers, may imbibe with the morality they teach, the notions of equality and liberty, contained in the gospel.” Denied literacy, the gospel, and Sabbath observance, slaves made do with “the grossest and most abject superstition.” For abolitionist guided by their Christian faith, as Jay insisted they should be, such spiritual deprivations ­were anathema. Meanwhile, lawlessness prevailed. One of Ball’s masters lost his life in a duel. Enslaved ­people suffered violent punishments outside an or­ga­nized court system. Slavery made a mockery of the nation’s symbolic core; for example, a July 4 In­de­ pen­dence Day after­noon was capped off by a slave auction. At one point, Ball was marched past the White House, occupied at the time by abolitionist bête noir Andrew Jackson.27 Despite his perseverance and ultimate escape, Ball’s story was marked by deteriorations in morality and circumstance. In 1830, ­after escaping from his master two de­cades ­earlier, his former mistress’s ­brother seized Ball while he worked on his own truck farm outside of Baltimore. Returned to Georgia, Ball saw that nothing had improved ­there in the years since he had escaped: the lack of clothing was more obvious than before, whereas the skin and hair of the fieldhands betrayed inadequate protein in the diets of the enslaved. Although Ball ultimately found a way to escape a final time and return to his Mary­land home, he discovered his farm occupied by a white man and learned that his wife and c­ hildren had “passed into hopeless bondage, and w ­ ere gone forever beyond my reach.” Ball’s narrative ends in Pennsylvania, where, with “a broken heart,” he was destined to live out his years in an unspecified location, still “fearful” that even as an old man his former masters might seek to reclaim him.28 ­There could be no happy ending for an African American made to live as a fugitive in a slaveholding nation. William Jay took ­g reat pride in spreading Ball’s story, and indeed it gained a wide and long-­lasting reputation among abolitionists. He bristled at the accusation that the narrative might not be true. In a letter to his friend and AAS colleague Lewis Tappan, Jay confidently asserted, “The cause of abolition was



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supported by such a superabundance of truth, such an inexhaustable store of facts that abolitionists had no inducement to call falsehood to their aid.” For that reason, Jay disdained enlisting fictional portrayals of slavery in the cause. He proclaimed, “As to Charles Ball, we have brought him before the public, not as the hero of a novel but as a witness.” The Emancipator concurred with this judgment, a notice in the New York paper calling the Cabinet of Freedom edition of Ball’s narrative “the best book we know of ” to start a conversation about abolitionist princi­ples.29 The se­lection of Ball’s saga was an inspired choice that reflected some of Jay’s par­tic­u­lar animosities t­ oward southern slavery and also broader transformations in the abolitionist strug­gle. No one knew at the time how long the House and Senate gag rules would remain in effect. Widening the arena of public opinion thus acquired tremendous urgency in the mid-1830s. Midcentury white abolitionists sought to turn the entire North into a courtroom in which the public judged slavery based largely on testimony, in the form of the narratives of escaped slaves, of southern abuses.30 Moreover, the Charles Ball proj­ect expressed Jay’s expanding vision of the role that African Americans played in forging their own freedom and how he and his son might contribute to that strug­gle.

Vigilance William Jay’s involvement with African Americans battling for freedom extended well beyond the printed page and his abolitionist committee work during this period. In late 1836, William Jay sought out the assistance of activist David Ruggles in response to the apprehension and transportation to the South of Peter Lee, who had been living as a ­free person in Westchester County. Ruggles was the moving force b­ ehind the Committee of Vigilance, an organ­ization dedicated to defending the Black population of New York City from predatory kidnappers. The seizure of Peter Lee in Rye ignited William’s outrage.31 Twenty days ­after New York City officials seized Lee, Jay wrote a respectful letter to Ruggles seeking his help in gathering information on the case: “I think the facts in the case of the black man Peter lately kidnapped . . . ​may if well established be used in a manner that ­will conduce to the ­future safety of ­people of color.” Jay saw an opportunity for a humanitarian intervention that could leverage his ­legal prominence and set a pre­ce­dent that would have wider effects. He wrote, “First I want proof of his freedom if to be obtained, & if not, then of the length of his residence at the North—­proof of his having h ­ ere a wife & ­children & proof of all the particulars of his abduction.” Jay recognized

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that Ruggles had already done work on Peter’s behalf and wished to be sensitive, not wanting to take advantage of Ruggles’s efforts: “I am told that you have interested yourself in his case. . . . ​If you can furnish me with the requisite affidavits, I ­will be much obliged to you, & ­will moreover defray any expense you may be at in procuring them, not exceeding ten dollars.”32 Jay felt comfortable enough about the case to denounce publicly the actions of New York City law enforcement officers, which ultimately put him into conflict with the mayor and even the governor. Jay convened a public meeting on December 20. This gathering led to a letter to Mayor Lawrence and the naming of Constable Tobias Boudinot and Marshal Daniel D. Nash as two of the men responsible for snatching an ostensibly ­free man and sending him into slavery without any sort of procedural safeguards. For this “outrage on decency and humanity,” the meeting demanded the mayor fire Boudinot and Nash. The letter outlined for the mayor and the reading public why the seizure of Lee was so egregious. A man being “handcuffed” and “gagged” on the Sabbath constituted a threat to the “peace and good order of ­every community.” The governor’s warrant, issued three years before for “seventeen colored persons,” invited abuse, given how much money slaves sold for in the southern slave market. Such loose connections between warrants and the ­actual persons seized created a “tremendous calamity to the weak and unprotected.” As Jay documented for the mayor, anybody, white or Black, could be labeled a slave and see their freedom end in a slave sale u ­ nder ­these conditions.33 Judge Jay had identified in the Peter Lee case an opportunity for indicting slavery and racism as threats to civil liberty that implicated northern governments in the evils of southern slavery. As with his denunciations of colonization, Jay’s trading on his good name left him vulnerable to attack and drew him further into the fray. An article in the Albany Argus leapt to the defense of Governor Marcy’s original warrant against the group of seventeen who allegedly stole a boat in the South and sailed it to New York. The article also lashed out against the kind of “rabid abolitionist” who allegedly wanted the governor to ignore his obligation to return criminals who crossed state lines just b­ ecause they w ­ ere “colored persons.” The Argus indicated that William Jay should have known better, given that Governor John Jay had issued interstate criminal warrants too.34 William fired back at the Argus’s attempt to portray him as a fanatic in contrast to his ­father. “I have no desire to disclaim the fanat­i­cism of believing, that e­ very ­human being is entitled to justice, what­ever may be the color of his skin,” William wrote. He conceded that Governor Marcy had executed his duties in issuing the warrant. But William also insisted that such fugitive warrants provided a ready means for “the practice of seizing as such, colored men



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in our cities & villages & hurrying them off to the South without any proof of their identity.” Moreover, “the warrant in the case of Lee was executed” in a fashion that “was harsh & unfeeling & very disgraceful.” Just as the 1826 Horton case had induced Judge Jay to think more systematically about slavery in the nation’s capital, the Lee case had highlighted the need to think more intensively about the law and practice of fugitive slave rendition.35 Frontline activist David Ruggles suffered far worse than newspaper ridicule. Daniel Nash invaded his home in the m ­ iddle of the night, hoping to seize Ruggles and sell him into slavery. (Nash sought to punish Ruggles for exposing another kidnapping scheme.) The undaunted Ruggles raised awareness of the vital role of the Vigilance Committee. He or­ga­nized a gathering at the First Colored Presbyterian Church to mark the group’s first year in operation, drawing attention to Peter Lee’s wife and two ­children who w ­ ere in attendance, as 36 ­were Jay’s close allies, the Tappan ­brothers. As Jay discovered, African American activists in New York ­were exposed to dangers that could produce internecine conflict. Samuel Cornish, the pioneering Black newspaper editor and AAS executive committee member, had to shut down The Colored American ­because of a libel suit prompted by its coverage of actions taken by Ruggles’s Vigilance Committee. The committee had intervened on behalf of three Africans transported through the port of New York on their way to southern slavery. The notice the Vigilance Committee printed in the Colored American identified a Black man named John Russell as conspiring to get the Africans on a New Orleans-­bound ship—­a charge Russell successfully contested. Cornish blamed Ruggles for the situation. His printing operations ­were within days of being seized by the sheriff ­because he had insufficient funds to pay the libel judgment. Cornish sought out Jay, writing him in early November 1838: “Any sum you ­will have the goodness to give to help me out of this difficulty w ­ ill be thankfully received and ever encumbered.” Jay joined the Tappans, Gerrit Smith, and o ­ thers in helping cover the Colored American’s debt. The price to Black abolitionists was high nonetheless. The relationship between Cornish and Ruggles subsequently collapsed.37

Questioning Politics The internal politics of abolitionism could be fraught, but collaborative relationships ­shaped not only published materials and the protection of fugitives but also electoral politics in the 1830s. The Peter Lee case demonstrated that who held office mattered. Governor Marcy’s open-­ended warrant for the

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arrest of Black fugitives had the potential to transform a New Yorker living in freedom into southern chattel. In 1838, Jay once again teamed up with Gerrit Smith, this time to explore how abolitionists might tip the Empire State’s gubernatorial elections in a more favorable direction. Jay and Smith, representing the New York Anti-­Slavery Society (NYAS), sought to ensure that the state’s gubernatorial candidates would publicly share their views on slavery-­related issues. The duo crafted three specific questions for the candidates: 1. Did they support trial by jury for ­those accused of being fugitive slaves? 2. Did they ­favor eliminating all ­legal provisions that used color to unequally delineate the constitutional rights of New Yorkers? 3. Did they want to abolish the ­legal provision that allowed slaveholders to bring their h ­ uman property into New York for up to nine months without violating the prohibition against importing slaves into the state? Jay had developed his own line of l­egal analy­sis regarding the first query. He drew a sharp distinction between the federal constitutional princi­ple that a state had an obligation to return fugitives and the individual state’s right to legislate its own procedures and proofs for adjudicating w ­ hether an individual was a fugitive subject to reenslavement. The US Congress had, in Jay’s view, no right to make the specific rules. The second query reflected Jay’s growing interest in how racism in the North factored into the strug­gle against slavery. The third query involved closing an explicit loophole in New York State law governing slavery and emancipation.38 The candidates’ questionnaire scrupulously sought to avoid crossing into partisan electioneering. In their letter accompanying the survey, Jay and Smith claimed a “deep and rapidly increasing interest felt . . . ​by a very large portion of our electors” in slavery-­related issues and emphasized the “non-­partisan” nature of the inquiry. They indicated that the NYAS just wanted information, not a pledge. Jay had insisted on this last point, believing that it would be inappropriate to seek a promise from a ­f uture officeholder and that d­ oing so would make it less likely that a candidate would respond at all.39 The attempt to draw candidates out in this fashion produced uneven results. The Whig candidate for lieutenant governor Luther Bradish was the first to reply, which Smith sought to promptly disseminate before the election and which ultimately led to the publication of a pamphlet on the exchange. Smith believed Bradish’s reply to be fully satisfactory. Indeed, Bradish took a strong stance on the right to trial by jury and the princi­ple that ­every New Yorker “is



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to be presumed ­free ­until he is proven to be other­wise”; Bradish also asserted that the loophole permitting slaveholders to bring slaves temporarily into the state was “liable to ­g reat abuse.” Viewing New York’s obligation to the slaveholding South as ­limited to no more than ac­cep­tance of existing constitutional compromises, Bradish even stated a moral obligation to critique slavery and persuade ­others against it. On the issue of racial equality within New York, the candidate alluded to Peter Augustus Jay’s anti-­disfranchisement position at the 1821 state constitutional convention. Bradish proclaimed the state’s racially discriminatory voting rights provisions “an anomaly entirely at war with the above Demo­cratic princi­ple.” Jay and Smith had garnered the considered attention of a major party candidate and even induced him to articulate pro-­ abolitionist princi­ples.40 William H. Seward, the up-­and-­coming Whig who had outmaneuvered Bradish to claim the top of the gubernatorial ticket, provided a much less satisfactory response to the inquiry. Seward ignored Jay’s personal plea to prioritize “­human rights” over the quest for electoral victory. The gubernatorial candidate had intended to ignore the survey, but once Bradish responded, he felt obligated to do so. Seward questioned w ­ hether the abolitionists had even addressed ­matters impor­tant to “the po­liti­cal creed” of most voters. Nonetheless, he too affirmed the princi­ple that alleged southern fugitives should receive jury ­trials to determine their status. However, he indicated that he had no interest in repealing the state constitution’s racial double standard for determining the right to vote. He also saw no merit in repealing the sojourn loophole that allowed masters to keep their ­human property in New York for up to nine months. Seward suggested that this was an issue of hospitality, rather than ­human rights. Demo­cratic incumbent William Marcy, who had previously used part of his annual message to criticize abolitionists, did not even concede that accused fugitives from slavery should receive a jury trial.41 Although the abolitionists got answers to their questions, their survey tactic failed to demonstrate their power or influence. The NYAS and AAS took the position that abolitionists should only vote for Bradish, the one candidate who stood with them. But Bradish’s responses cost him more voters hostile to abolitionists than Seward’s answers lost abolitionist ones. Smith, who had taken a hard line on abolitionists, only voting for t­ hose allied with the movement’s princi­ples, was despondent that so many abolitionists had apparently voted for Seward, despite his unacceptable answers. Even so, Bradish won his bid to become lieutenant governor, his open avowal of African American rights notwithstanding.42 For twenty-­one-­year-­old John Jay II, now preparing to become an attorney, the exposure of abolitionism’s weak po­liti­cal hand inflamed his righ­teous

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passion. He observed “that the abolitionists w ­ ere never less beloved, less respected or less fared than at pre­sent.” He felt the Whigs had betrayed the abolitionists ­after the election, with Whig editors heaping scorn on them now that the votes had safely been counted in their ­favor. The younger Jay contended, however, that the abolitionists had no choice but to ask hard questions of candidates. John also denounced abolitionists who considered Seward as “the least of two Evils.” He invoked from Ecclesiastes the ancient reassurance of the momentarily defeated: “The ­battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift.”43

Constitutional Conflict At the time of its foray into New York electoral politics, or­ga­nized abolitionism risked not only exposing itself to scorn from outside the movement but also to disabling conflict from within. Judge Jay found himself moving ­toward the center of a controversy he would very much have preferred to avoid. At issue was w ­ hether the AAS should continue to endorse and act according to the princi­ple that the US Constitution left the authority to abolish slavery to individual states. Jay held tight to this princi­ple, explic­itly articulated in the AAS’s own constitution, even as more expansive views of what the AAS might demand of the national government and support for more provocative tactics for making t­ hose demands gained traction. The debate opened a tear in the orga­nizational fabric of the national movement likely to grow beyond repair. Pressure to revisit the issue of congressional authority over slavery came from two sources: New York abolitionist Alvan Stewart and New E ­ ngland Garrisonians. Stewart asserted that slavery itself was unconstitutional b­ ecause the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution stated that a person could not be denied freedom without due pro­cess. In other words, the federal government did have jurisdiction over slavery. The Utica l­awyer claimed that, u ­ nless a slaveholder obtained an indictment against a person claimed as property, pursued a trial, and won a judgment, owner­ship was invalid. Congress could pass a law clarifying that all persons held as slaves without proof of due pro­cess ­were ­free. Garrisonians in Mas­sa­chu­setts, meanwhile, had started suggesting that the US Supreme Court might rule slavery unconstitutional.44 Jay girded for a showdown with Stewart at the upcoming AAS annual meeting. Jay brooked no tolerance for the notion that t­ here was room for disagreement about the US Constitution within the organ­ization. He saw his own position as just as fundamental to AAS princi­ples as not allowing slaveholders, gradualists, and colonizationists into the organ­ization or, at the other end



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of the spectrum, advocates of slave rebellion. Absent fixed princi­ples, the AAS risked “dissolution.” Putting ­matters in personal terms, Jay wrote in a private (meaning, not to be published) letter to Joshua Leavitt: “Many of us have taken an Oath to support the Constitution of the U.S.” Participating in an organ­ ization that supported what Jay regarded as Stewart’s deeply flawed constitutional reasoning would put him at odds with his judicial obligations. Similarly, Stewart’s doctrine involved asking congressmen to violate their oaths, which was a “sin.”45 Jay’s desire to stem the radical tide sent him to the AAS annual meeting for the first time in three years. As anticipated, Stewart moved to strike the clause from the AAS constitution that acknowledged that slave states had sole legislative jurisdiction over emancipation. ­After Jay and Stewart debated the proposition, Garrison ­later reported to his wife Helen, “I think Jay had the best of the argument.”46 Jay regarded Stewart’s contentions as historically ill informed, po­liti­cally naïve, and destructive to the rule of law, the abolitionist cause, and the nation itself. Combining erudition and contempt, Jay mocked the notion that Stewart had found a fundamental antislavery princi­ple embedded in the Magna Carta and the US Constitution that lay undetected u ­ ntil the 1830s. The Bill of Rights, including the Fifth Amendment’s due pro­cess clause, Jay contended, was designed to limit the national government’s power, not expand it by giving it the authority to declare slavery illegal throughout the country. The first federal Congress had not endorsed the Fifth Amendment in order to nullify the three-­fifths compromise. The judge also eviscerated the notion that due pro­cess was synonymous with convening g­ rand juries, as Stewart seemed to suggest. If so, then US civil courts and any number of state court actions would suddenly become invalid, a point of no small significance to a sitting member of the judiciary. Stewart’s narrow view of due pro­cess, like his broad view of congressional power, led to disorder. Militias, for instance, could no longer suppress mobs. The wreckage of Stewart’s aggrandizing of federal power, Jay predicted, would redound to the abolitionist movement itself. The proponents of the hated gag rule ­were already abusing the constitutional goal of “domestic tranquility” by silencing the right to petition. Slaveholders and their northern allies could claim that the “general welfare” required prosecuting abolitionists themselves, as indeed an anti-­abolitionist from Zanesville, Ohio, had already proposed. Abolitionists had far more to lose than gain by expansive constitutional interpretations. But even if somehow abolitionists did persuade Congress that it had the power to end slavery, the slave states would leave the Union, war would follow, and “if slavery perish, it w ­ ill perish only in a deluge

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of blood.” Prophecy aside, the Stewart doctrine represented to Jay a betrayal. Abolitionists again and again, on both the state and national levels, had insisted that they recognized that only the states themselves could execute emancipation. On this pledge rested the movement’s reputation. Asked what would happen if the abolitionists ­were to renege, Jay responded, “Who can trust us—­who ­ought to trust us?” Seizing po­liti­cal power should, in Jay’s formulation, never be allowed to replace sincere and religiously sanctioned moral persuasion. Trust mattered.47 Jay and his supporters won at best a pyrrhic victory. Stewart won forty-­six votes for his resolution, and ­those opposed numbered thirty-­eight. But since amending the AAS constitution required a two-­thirds majority, the motion failed. Garrison wrote that “the leading abolitionists” ­were “equally divided.” Jay had some impor­tant allies, including Garrison’s close associate Wendell Philips and Emancipator editor Joshua Leavitt. Perhaps recognizing that a dramatic repositioning of the AAS with regard to the US Constitution would have fractured the organ­ization, Garrison commented, “I am glad, on the ­whole,” that Stewart did not carry the day. Even so, abolitionist Theodore Weld heard that the Jay–­Stewart dispute had engendered “a good deal of bad blood” at the AAS business meeting. Jay had gone into the meeting contemplating resignation from the society and did in fact relinquish his position as corresponding secretary.48 His vision of moral suasion and constitutional analy­sis was clearly losing ground. The passage of time only strengthened Jay’s sense that he had lost his place within the AAS and its New York subsidiaries. In his view, slavery could be abolished without burdening the movement with novel constitutional doctrines or a quest for moral purity in all ­things. That living in society u ­ nder a system of laws sometimes entailed compromise, even moral compromises, in no way, he believed, should impinge on the abolitionists’ ability to fight slavery with determination and sincerity. Only picking unnecessary fights with each other could do that. He felt that performing official tasks for national or state organ­ izations would make him a hypocrite or expose his ideas to ridicule. By late 1838, Jay’s dismay and anger at the AAS grew as Stewart’s position gained ground. Jay also feared that abolition was becoming “a pack­horse to carry forth into the world some favorite notion having no legitimate connection with the Anti Slavery cause,” such as extreme views against alcohol consumption. The unity of the movement was dissolving, its energies dissipating.49 William Jay eschewed a false front but not the larger cause. He responded to a request to chair the Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society’s meeting by sharply refusing it. Stewart’s pernicious doctrine had caused ­people like William Jay to endure “insult & ridicule.” Though William would “ever regard it as a duty & a



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privilege” to work in the larger cause, he would rather not attend meetings where his presence might stoke distracting controversy. Conflict, however, hardly disabled William Jay’s commitment. In truth, he much preferred the pen to the rostrum. Indeed, Judge Jay found in his dispute over the Constitution motivation to pursue with ­great vigor his antislavery research and writing.50

Sins of Federalism William Jay’s 1839 book A View of the Action of the Federal Government in Behalf of Slavery began with the arresting assertion, “Our F ­ athers in forming the Federal Constitution entered into a guilty compromise on the subject of Slavery, and heavi­ly is their sin now visited upon their c­ hildren.” The statement served both as a direct shot at Alvan Stewart and his followers and as a personal confession. Abolitionists should not treat the Fifth Amendment like a backdoor leading to an antislavery version of the federal charter. The book’s epigraph, taken from the Constitution’s preamble—­“We, the ­People of the United States, do ordain and establish this Constitution”—­also made the point that abolitionists and all Americans had to own up to their sin. In starting the book with “Our ­Fathers,” the writer—­whose repute as an abolitionist rested in no small part on his status as progeny of one of the Constitution’s Federalist defenders—­ was acknowledging the burden of a sin he himself specifically bore. He detailed the ways that the “guilty compromise” had ­shaped federal policy, foreign and domestic, across the subsequent four de­cades. The compromise, novel interpretations notwithstanding, was set in stone. Articulating all that the United States had to answer for might produce better abolitionist answers. As the nearly 200 pages of research that followed exposed government officials regularly made the choice to enact proslavery laws and procedures. Abolitionists should convince their fellow citizens to reverse ­these laws, ­these po­liti­cal choices, by putting pressure on the slaveholding regions that they had never felt before. Understanding the “facts”—­the difference between constitutional limits and egregious policies—­could set the enslaved ­free from bondage and Amer­i­ca ­free from sin.51 The data w ­ ere grim. Yet by putting in one place such a well-­informed cata­ log of federal policy, Jay created a guidebook to issues on which antislavery politicians and l­awyers could make their stands. He had not given up entirely on the AAS ­either. His terms with the publisher John S. Taylor, with whom he had worked on The Cabinet of Freedom, included allowing the AAS to purchase two thousand copies at cost.52 The assembled examples on all the ways the federal government had advanced slaveholding interests at home and abroad ­were

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meant to be as troubling as they w ­ ere instructive. The Constitution’s three-­ fifths compromise had created po­liti­cal advantages for slaveholding states that they exploited relentlessly and effectively throughout the federal government, in the halls of Congress, in presidential campaigns, in diplomacy, and in executive branch administration. Southern slaveholders used their constitutionally assisted leverage to engage in po­liti­cal “intimidation”—­manifested through threats to leave the Union and denunciations of abolitionists. Enhanced southern power caused presidential candidates to adjust “their ideas on the subject of ­human rights . . . ​to the meridian of the slave region.” The dominoes that fell to undue southern influence included the Missouri Compromise, which “deliberately surrendered to all the cruelties and abominations” of slavery vast territories and the ongoing permission to make the nation’s capital “the g­ reat slave mart of the North American continent.” The 1792 law barring Blacks from militia ser­vice, a product of an improperly proportioned Congress, Jay found “repugnant to the princi­ples both of the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence and the Constitution.”53 The fugitive slave clause of the Constitution also paved the way for all sorts of subsequent maleficence. In 1793, Congress crafted a federal statute that denied to accused runaways the constitutional princi­ple of trial by jury and interposed federal authority over the means by which fugitives might be returned, when such ­matters properly belonged to the states to determine. The United States lowered its standing in the world by pressing demands for the return of runaways with foreign governments, according to Jay; he derided our “republican ambassadors . . . ​bear[ing] to foreign courts the wailings of our government for the escape of ­human property.” Relations with ­Great Britain in par­tic­u­lar, Jay claimed, ­were distorted by the US government’s unhealthy preoccupation with the return of slaves who successfully sought asylum with the British during the War of 1812.54 The United States’ withdrawal from the international slave trade masked the federal government’s sanction of an internal slave trade that reproduced the horrors of the condemned African commerce. Jay found “gross hy­poc­risy and duplicity” in documenting the lax enforcement of the international slave trade ban and the efforts of the US government to avoid cooperation with other nations. On the domestic front, Jay insisted that the same commerce clause that gave the federal government authority to ban participation in the international slave trade could be deployed domestically to stop a trade that, he amply documented, even victimized Americans who ­were actually white. ­Here, the Constitution could be regarded less as a “guilty compromise” causing a moral prob­lem and more as an untapped resource for forging an anti-



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slavery constitutionalism. Like his AAS rivals, then, Jay looked for ways to deploy the US Constitution against slavery.55 In Jay’s book, the poison born of moral compromise spread in e­ very direction. Proslavery sentiments made the United States hostile to the emancipating instincts of other neighboring nations; his own country scorned former Spanish colonies as “being drunk with liberty” simply ­because they acted on “the princi­ples of h ­ uman rights, professed in our declaration of in­de­pen­dence.” It was ­little surprise then that, for three de­cades and counting, the United States had refused to recognize or place trade on a normal footing with Haiti, a nation founded by former slaves fighting for their liberty. Shamefully, the US government even abetted the tyrannical Napoleon’s “vengeance” when France sought to reconquer the Black republic. Subsequently, northern politicians prioritized “southern votes” over Haitian commerce, as the United States maintained a policy of shunning recognition of that nation. Jay suspected that the ready recognition of the Republic of Texas would pave the way for incorporating that huge slaveholding territory into the republic. Writing in 1839, Jay sardonically noted that one need not have “the gift of prophecy” to anticipate that the United States would contrive to launch a war with Mexico to secure “the dominion of the whip” throughout the continent.56 The insidious effects on domestic institutions and princi­ples under­lying consistent proslavery activities, Jay observed, hollowed out the rights fundamental to the constitutional order itself. Southern postmasters worked to rid the southern mails of antislavery lit­er­a­ture; northern congressmen who acquiesced in slaveholder demands to gag consideration of antislavery petitions colluded to foil the princi­ples of a federally protected freedom of press and debate. Late in the book, Jay enumerated fourteen specific ways in which the national government policies had aided and abetted slavery that w ­ ere not constitutionally required and that ­were, therefore reversible at the behest of “the ­people of the United States.”57 Dubious readings of the Constitutions w ­ ere not, in his view, necessary. Jay’s exposé of the federal government anticipated the Slave Power arguments that in time would become a galvanizing concept within antislavery politics, but at the time of its writing, View also embodied an ethos that blended historical empiricism with idealism. Once southern slavery lost the unwarranted support of the federal government, Jay predicted, conditions would still be such that the South would have far more to lose than to gain by seceding. The nation would have found its moral footing from which pro­g ress flowed. Moral suasion, then remained at the core of his vision for the abolitionist movement.58

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Jay felt buoyed by his book and the success that the first edition enjoyed, even though he was ­under no illusion that the View would reverse the radical tide within the AAS. In a March 1839 letter to Rev. Thomas Pyne, whose antislavery views had led him to leave his ministry in New York and return to ­England, Jay offered the case for abolitionist optimism. Echoing his findings from the View of slaveholders’ po­liti­cal domination of American politics, Jay found reason to compare the American antislavery movement favorably to its British counter­parts. Against far greater and more dangerous opposition, the Americans had achieved g­ reat strides in a scant amount of time. Jay claimed to Pyne, “We have effected a g­ reat change in public opinion at the north. Multitudes have joined us. . . . ​You ­were 30 years assaulting the slave trade, before you demolished it, & about 30 more attacking Slavery before you fi­nally conquered it. We have been at work only 7 years; & as yet have no reason to doubt our ultimate success.”59 Sales of the first print run of 2,500 w ­ ere so brisk that Jay moved quickly to finish a second, revised edition. Lewis Tappan encouraged him to do so with word of Jay’s View of the Action of the Federal Government circulating among the elite vacationers of Saratoga Springs, who included a congressman, a US senator, and even President Martin Van Buren. Jay eagerly conducted research and sought to check sources to add new stories. Nevertheless, he declined a request for a new edition of his first book, Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, and American Anti-­Slavery Socie­ties, ­because he did not wish to air his grievances with the AAS in its current condition. Jay’s relation to the AAS was precarious. Although the AAS published the second edition of View of the Action of the Federal Government, Jay made sure to retain the copyright, presumably so that ­future publication of the work would not be at the mercy of any orga­nizational rifts.60 The preface to the new edition set high stakes. Jay described slavery as “a perfidious, encroaching ­enemy, that must ­either conquer or be conquered.” Abolitionists would wage this war on the grounds of “public opinion,” a force “as fickle as it is power­f ul.” Jay offered as inspiration a condensed version of the quarter-­century strug­gle to abolish the British slave trade, the predicate for emancipation in the West Indies three de­cades ­later. Yet, in his introductory remarks, the analog to the end of the slave trade was small bore: emancipation of six thousand slaves in the District of Columbia. This imbalance between rhe­toric and plan perhaps reflected the precariousness of the divide over constitutional powers. Even so, the second edition did expand the enumerated list of federal actions that advanced slaveholding interests from 14 to 21. And Jay thickened this antislavery guide to federal policy, including a sub-



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stantial chapter on the Seminole War and information on the undue dominance of pro-­slavery federal officers. As he stated in the final line of his new preface, the ultimate goal remained lofty: to “restore the Federal Government to its legitimate functions, of establishing justice and securing the blessings of liberty.”61 Readers of A View of the Action of the Federal Government on Behalf of Slavery found the book useful, even inspiring. In February 1840, Rev. Samuel H. Cox wrote Jay, “I have meditated, as I read its statements, with won­der, grief, & joy!” certain that “the verdicts of history” would be on Jay’s side. That same month, Emancipator editor Joshua Leavitt reported having shipped fifty copies of Jay’s View to Washington, D.C., with hopes of further distribution of the work in Congress. The following year, Salmon P. Chase, an up-­and-­coming Ohio antislavery ­lawyer and politician, recorded reading Jay’s book on the same day that he gave a speech excoriating Congress’s unconstitutional gag rule and calling for the end to slavery and the slave trade in the nation’s capital.62 It was a place to start. Jay’s zealous antislavery argument provided moral persuasion with a stiff empirical, l­egal backbone. The spurious issue resulting from the “sins of the ­fathers” could only be defeated if clearly identified. W ­ hether abolitionist readers agreed with his constitutional arguments, Jay himself had begun to sense that he might more effectively operate as an abolitionist f­ree from some of the strange po­liti­cal bedfellows he had acquired when he joined the AAS.

C h a p te r 9

Breaking Ranks

“Miss Kelley herself favoured the meeting with her own views, which did not exactly Coincide with ­those of St Paul, in a tone of voice resembling a Scream,” reported John Jay II to his ­father in May 1840. Not quite twenty-­two years old, the young abolitionist described a momentous event—­the seating of a ­woman on the business committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society—by mixing biblical patriarchalism with secular misogyny. His ­father would have reflexively recognized the reference to 1 Corinthians 14:34 enjoining ­women from speaking in church. At the same time, John’s derisive reference to Abby Kelley’s allegedly shrill tone conveyed that she did not possess a suitable voice for public—­meaning men’s—­business. The son was playing to the ­father’s notions about female modesty. ­Father and son thus affirmed the legitimacy of the Jay ­family’s gender norms. On the same day that Kelley and the Garrisonians took their stance on sexual equality, William Jay’s closest abolitionist peers broke from the American Anti-­Slavery Society. He immediately followed.1 The male Jays’ response to the public rift over ­women’s place within abolitionism reflects revealing aspects of gender relationships within the ­family. ­These relationships helped define the Jays’ identities as abolitionists and philanthropists. William’s opposition to connecting abolitionism to feminism was rooted in a conception of f­amily life that left l­ittle room for recognizing the denial of ­women’s rights. ­Family life for the Jays of Bedford blended patriar21 4



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chal assumptions, the ease of significant inherited material wealth, a commitment to Christian piety, and abundant domestic affection. As an only son, John Jay II was the designated heir responsible for carry­ing on the ­family’s famous name. Even so, the female Jays of Bedford, William’s wife Augusta and their five ­daughters, as well as William’s two older s­ isters, played a role in sustaining the Jay ­family’s collective commitment to abolitionism and other social reforms. For male and female Jays, one generation conveyed gendered and class-­conditioned expectations to the next. Abolitionism’s “­woman question”—­whether ­women should participate in the cause on equal footing with men as an expression of feminist princi­ple—­ redirected and fragmented William’s antislavery institutional networks. However peaceful life in Bedford was for William Jay, the splintering of abolitionist ranks created significance turbulence for him and the antislavery movement. It made William Jay certain of the necessity of leaving the AAS. But the masculine world of Jacksonian electoral politics that beckoned many male abolitionists disaffected with the Garrisonians, with the lack of pro­g ress against slavery, or with both, troubled Judge Jay personally and ideologically. He neither craved electoral competition nor expected that abolitionism would substantially advance its goals in this po­liti­cal milieu. Still, in the face of defeat within the AAS, retreating from the antislavery cause into the domestic sphere was not an option. He and his f­ amily pressed on.

Exceptions William Jay knew perfectly well that w ­ omen played a critical role in the history of the immediate abolition movement. He cited the En­glish Quaker Elizabeth Heyrich’s 1820s pamphlet on immediate abolition as an impor­tant influence on his thinking about emancipation. The harassment of Prudence Crandall ­after her attempt to educate Black girls in Canterbury, Connecticut, in 1833 had drawn William Jay ­toward the abolitionist movement. In fact, he devoted several pages of his Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, and American Anti-­Slavery Socie­ties to the Crandall case. Yet he cast the Crandall story in socially traditional, paternalistic terms. The unmarried Crandall, “a lady of irreproachable character,” played the conventional role of schoolteacher. She was “an unprotected female” facing, along with her young Black students, the ­legal bullying of local officials and colonizationists. She merited protection.2 The heightened public activism of ­women in the immediatist movement posed a more direct challenge to William’s paternalism. S­ isters Sarah and

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Angelina Grimké, who dramatically distanced themselves from their wealthy South Carolina slaveholding f­amily by moving north and becoming Quakers, played a particularly prominent role in the movement. They became the AAS’s first female agents in late 1836. Large crowds of men and w ­ omen came to hear them speak. They helped spark a dramatic increase in AAS membership.3 William’s exchange of letters with Angelina Grimké in early 1837 reveal his ambivalence about the role ­women should play within the abolitionist movement. Jay was no stranger to the Grimké ­family, having attended Yale with Angelina’s ­brother Thomas, who several years ­earlier had sent his old college friend a translation of the antislavery pamphlet by the Frenchman, Abbé Henri Grégoire. A unique combination of religion, regional origin, and social class permitted, in William’s view, the Grimké ­sisters to pursue their case against slavery so publicly. William informed Angelina, “As a general rule, I think public addresses from females inexpedient, & inconsistent with the reserve which is at once the ornament & the safeguard of your sex.” But their Quaker identity had created a loophole. The Society of Friends, William noted, “recognized public female teachers; & many of its female members feel it a religious obligation to preach in public.” Since the Quakers combined modesty with public preaching, William regarded Angelina’s approach as less alarming. By a similar logic, the judge viewed slavery and abolition as a suitable topic for the Grimkés’ public speech; abolition was a religious issue, and for no religious group more so than the Quakers. Speaking out on slavery was an extension of the Grimkés’ obligations.4 William Jay also recognized that Angelina Grimké brought an impor­tant attribute to the slavery debate that few other p­ eople, men or w ­ omen, possessed: her insider’s knowledge of southern slavery. Jay noted, “We of the North are constantly assured that we do not, & cannot understand this subject.” Without acknowledging himself as a kind of slavery insider, Jay expressed his scorn for “our opponents . . . ​[who] insist that to the initiated alone belongs the right of discussing the sublime merits of the system.” But as his letter to Grimké implied, such criticisms of northern abolitionists w ­ ere effective in blunting the case against slavery. That is why she had “the right & perhaps consequently the duty” to speak out against slavery: “Your competency as a witness can be questioned by none.” Like Charles Ball, Grimké was the sort of reliable voice required to advance the cause. Class and social reputation also played a role in justifying making an exception for Grimké. As Jay, who understood the power of his own last name, wrote Angelina, “The name you bear, & your religious profession & standing guaranty your credibility.” As a result, she had ­g reat potential “to deliver your testimony with perpiscuity & force.” Thus, Jay proclaimed, “Why then should”



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her testimony “be withheld.” Jay sealed his approval with an invitation to visit his Bedford farm at any time.5 In this instance, he found a way to rationalize his discomfort with public female activism. Jay’s understanding of sex and gender occluded his ability to recognize ­women’s oppression as a separate cause, let alone one related to emancipation of southern slaves. In 1837, when he wrote his letter to Angelina Grimké, however, he underestimated the specific radical trajectory of her and her ­sister’s abolitionism. Sarah Grimké would soon publish in book form Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of ­Woman, ­under the imprint of Garrison’s publishing partner Isaac Knapp: it called for ­women to “arise in all the majesty of moral power . . . ​and plant themselves, side by side, on the platform of h ­ uman rights, with man.” The Grimké ­sisters embedded in their assault on slavery an attack on patriarchy and sexual in­equality that did not claim special exemptions for Quaker w ­ omen but rather united the plight of all ­women, Black and white.6 The traditional norms and rules maintained in William Jay’s h ­ ouse­hold indicate why the expansive role w ­ omen carved out for themselves in the wider abolitionist movement accelerated William’s disillusionment with the Garrisonians.

Rules William Jay’s inheritance of his ­father’s h ­ ouse­hold and his curation of his ­father’s legacy fortified his patriarchal orientation; ongoing experience s­ haped and tempered ­these attitudes. Just as his stern approach to ruling from the bench and his skepticism about mass democracy helped define his understanding of social reform, so too did his relationships with female ­family members. ­Women in the Jay h ­ ouse­hold did not simply follow o ­ rders or obey unreflectively. Reflecting aspects of emerging separate spheres of gender ideology, William understood w ­ omen as privately supporting men’s public roles—­mindfully developing their moral and intellectual identities to support but not to usurp or contravene men’s public pursuits.7 William’s marital advice to his d­ aughter Anna articulated some of his central ideas about gender. He hoped his ­daughter Anna would through her actions fulfill her duties as a wife, a Christian, and the ­bearer of the ­family tradition. As Anna prepared to move to Mary­land with Reverend Louis Balch in 1839, William indicated that her role was not to be passive but rather conscientiously supportive. As a minister’s wife, Anna’s activities ­were not ­limited to the domestic sphere but rather blended public and private responsibilities. William instructed, “Be a helpmeet to your Husband, in the church as well as

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in the h ­ ouse. Strengthen & enforce by your example the precepts he delivers from the pulpit. Cultivate the good ­will of his parishioners & lend him aid in executing his vari­ous plans of benevolence & piety.” She should manage the ­house­hold in such a way as to support Rev. Balch’s mission and status. Anna’s “frugality” would greatly lessen her husband’s money worries the marketplace concerns that preoccupied other men. The ­couple then could show the generosity ­toward ­others as befit a minister’s ­family. “Your happiness is now identified with your Husband & you cannot promote his, without advancing your own. Thus the reward of duty” lies “in its discharge.” Anna and Louis’s spheres ­were neither separate nor identical; rather the wife’s nested in and dutifully contributed to the husband’s.8 Through properly modulated conduct, Anna would honor both her Jay heritage and the “Heavenly F ­ ather.” Thus, when she moved away with her husband, Anna did not leave ­behind her own ­family history, handed down through the generations from f­ ather to son, and, in her case, from f­ ather to d­ aughter. William prefaced his advice by first observing that no ­family had “more cause to trust in the God of their F ­ athers than our f­ amily.” God had rewarded t­ hese descendants of “popish persecution” who held steadfast: “For successive generations, have our parents been blessed with the comforts of this life, & the hopes of a better.” If Anna played her part correctly, then such good fortune would continue. In the iconoclastic fashion that had led William to fight many ­battles against his own Episcopal Church’s hierarchy, the ­father also warned the ­daughter not to conflate the church with the gospel or the “ministry” with core beliefs. His d­ aughter, even as wife of a minister, should value conscience over command, though presumably a good marriage would obviate the need to make any such choices in her personal life.9 William still expected that Anna would maintain a sense of racial justice even though her marriage obligations relocated her to a slave state. A November 1840 letter expounded didactically on the report of the funeral of Rev. Peter Williams Jr., New York’s pioneering Black Episcopal minister and advocate of Black equality. That his fellow clergymen treated Williams so much better in death than they had in life was, commented Judge Jay, a sign of the “triumph of abolition princi­ples & influence” and a marker of the church’s deep hy­poc­risy. Recounted William Jay, Rev. Williams’s color had barred him from ordination for years, and even so, he and his parish w ­ ere never granted admission into the Episcopal Church’s official councils. Peter Williams’s story was an object lesson in the importance of challenging the existing order with her ­father’s unapologetic abolitionist values.10 ­There w ­ ere, however, distinctly gendered limits to Judge Jay’s support for flouting social conventions. Having derided racial discrimination in one para-



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graph, William embraced a narrow view of the roles that ­women might perform in public, in tones both puritanical and coarsely sexist. In response to Anna’s inquiry as to what he thought of the Austrian ballet dancer Fanny Elssler’s donation to the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, Mas­sa­chu­ setts, William labeled Essler an “impudent Hussey” and a “foreign vagabond” who came to the United States to make money “by publicly exhibiting herself.” His prudish distaste conveyed his restricted view of female propriety. He found a foreigner’s gift to be inappropriate for this distinctly American monument, especially one commemorating a ­battle fought by Puritan men notable for “their high toned morality,” who, he joked, would likely “send girls like Fanny” to jail.11 If his ­daughter had any doubt about the difference between crossing bound­aries based on race and crossing ­those based on sex, she could have none a­ fter her ­father’s response. For William Jay, the ­woman question and the color question existed on separate planes.

Expectations If, while coming of age, Anna had paid attention to her own ­mother’s example, then her f­ather’s letters w ­ ere mere reminders of her prescribed role of serving as a demure and pious wife who invested in the ­family’s philanthropic and historic callings.12 Augusta Jay did not seek a public role in the abolition movement. She exhibited tremendous devotion to her c­ hildren, her husband, and, while he was alive, to her father-­in-­law John Jay. She read religious and secular lit­er­a­ture, as well as abolitionist writings, while immersing herself in her Christian faith. Augusta kept careful track of the health of her ­family, worrying over any signs of danger or discomfort. Her prosperous circumstances could do only so much to protect her from the pains and risks of childbirth or the devastation of losing infant ­children.13 The mutual love of William and Augusta existed in a setting in which William had inherited the mantle of ­family authority over the ­house­hold from his f­ ather. Although William’s responsibilities as a judge and activist did at times take him out of the home, the Bedford estate was not a separate ­women’s sphere. Their privileged lives did not conform to the emerging middle-­class pattern of husbands deriving their livelihood and social identity striving in a working world defined by the values of the marketplace and wives overseeing the feminine domestic sphere governed by emotional nurturance, morality, and religion. Considerable ­family wealth and personal choices embedded the pious William within the home. ­There, as his nineteenth-­century biographer described, William spent his days reading and writing in his book-­lined

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study, taking breaks to survey the farm, and participating with ­family members and servants in twice-­daily prayers.14 Nonetheless, as a county judge, a writer, a social reformer, and as a Jay, William was a public figure. His wife was not. Augusta served as the kind of “helpmeet” that William counseled Anna to be, one who supported the ­family’s greater purpose in the world. Through marriage and experience, Augusta indeed became personally invested in the f­ amily’s historical legacy. She revered the memory of her father-­ in-­law with whom she had shared a home. A letter written to her son at college revealed her overlapping dedication to the founding ­father, to her son John, and to her husband William. In the spring of 1835, Augusta, having finished reading her husband’s biography of John Jay, exclaimed in a letter to John II, “My love for the Jay f­amily increases the more I read & think of Papa’s character—­how just! & how kind!” She was even moved to make a historical judgment that comported with the Federalist historical ethos of the ­family, proclaiming that Jay and George Washington belonged “in the foremost rank of worthies if ­those of all ages & nations could be compared together.” As a m ­ other, Augusta’s judgment had a pedagogical purpose: she wanted John to work hard at college. Thus, she exhorted her eighteen-­year-­old son, “Dear John endeavour to imitate” your grand­father. Lest her son dismiss her words as excessively emotional, Augusta admitted, “I come warm from the subject—­but my deliberate feelings are the same.” In other words, her head validated what her heart felt.15 She and William consciously paid tribute to the Jay ­family in the names they chose for their c­ hildren. In addition to naming John for William’s ­father, they named a d­ aughter Sarah ­after William’s ­mother and two ­daughters ­after William’s s­ isters. William and Augusta also passed on their own names to their youn­gest ­children. Augusta was very much alive to the pre­sent, not only the past, understanding that greatness flowed from morally directed action on the issues of the day—­including the abolition of slavery. She did not rely on her husband’s word alone to reach her own judgments; instead, she filtered her own reading through her finely honed religious sensibilities. At the time of the 1834 New York City riots, Augusta still thought of abolitionists as trouble-­making provocateurs but adapted her views to embrace the movement. In an 1836 letter, she wrote John, “I have read of the Anti-­slavery meeting—­I am more fully convinced than ever that Abolitionists are right.” She then stated approvingly, “I am glad you are interested in the cause.” Abolitionism was “truth & justice,” making it “a sin to be indifferent to it.”16 Augusta knew that some ­women had become impor­tant public voices of abolitionism. She and William, however, cannot be described as joining the



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ranks of “activist ­couples” prominent in the history of the movement. In April 1837, William relayed to John that his ­mother would like some copies of a publication by one of the Grimké ­sisters, which suggests that Augusta wished to share it with o ­ thers.17 But she did not establish a prominent separate identity as an abolitionist. Immediate abolitionism in and of itself was a radical cultural stance in the context of mid-­nineteenth-­century American society, but neither Augusta nor her husband wished to construe it as such. In response to John’s plans to marry Eleanor Kingsland Field in 1836, Augusta counseled, “Having chosen your companion you have now to determine your course, & from all your early impressions & pre­sent advantages, I hope it may be the narrow & the safe one.” In Augusta’s mind, being an abolitionist was not inconsistent with following a narrow and safe course of action; this was in contrast to the popu­lar view of abolitionists in both the North and South in the mid-1830s. The note William added to Augusta’s congratulatory letter underscored this Jay habit of mind ­toward abolitionism and the duty of one generation to the next in pursuing this course: the judge offered stilted congratulations on the engagement before dispatching instructions to stop by the New York Anti-­Slavery Society office in Manhattan to pay his Emancipator newspaper subscription and acquire other slavery-­related publications.18 Augusta Jay pursued a broad array of readings and interests, secular as well as religious. She broadened her intellectual horizons without undermining her gendered expectations of her own and her ­children’s responsibilities. She made reference in her correspondence to reading William Words­worth, Walter Scott, and Lord Byron, as well as longtime f­amily friend James Fenimore Cooper. She also pursued an interest in religious lit­er­a­ture, reading the works of the late seventeenth-­and early eighteenth-­century Welsh Presbyterian writer William Henry and the early nineteenth-­century Anglican missionary Henry Martyn. She reported reading Scottish history and once informed her son that she wished she knew more about natu­ral history, suggesting to John that he might share his knowledge with her.19 As a parent, Augusta enforced and elevated standards. She carried on the ­family tradition of using letter writing as a pedagogical tool—­handwriting being considered a manifestation of character. She chided her ­daughter Maria for not dating her letters and warned John against “acquir[ing] incurably slovenly habits” by inattention to his writing. Her c­ hildren needed to be cultured as well as disciplined, which, for her d­ aughters, included training in m ­ usic, drawing, and French. At one point the Jays hired a governess from the Hartford school of Catherine Beecher, oldest d­ aughter of the prominent New

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­ ngland divine Lyman Beecher and herself a leading educational authority. E Augusta readied her girls not for work but rather to take their place as members of a cultured elite in which they would become companionable wives.20 Augusta Jay’s own participation in moral reform movements fulfilled her perceived spiritual need to embrace “eternal ­things.” She participated in local Bible and missionary socie­ties, ­causes in keeping with Jay ­family tradition and her own religious promptings. Augusta served at one point as a man­ag­er of the local Tract Society. She and William hosted a Sunday School on their farm grounds. Augusta embraced the importance of encouraging religion among not only her own c­ hildren but also t­ hose not so well provided for spiritually or materially. As she noted in a letter to her son, Sunday School teaching “is to be our vocation h ­ ere” ­because “Providence seems to have placed so many poor ­children before us, as if to give us an opportunity to express our gratitude for the blessings we have received, & it is a privilege to be employed in the moral renovation even of one ­human being.” The princi­ple of saving souls one by one could be applied in her own neighborhood or on the other side of the world; in 1845, she reported that her missionary society had pledged funds to support a child in China.21 Much like her husband, Augusta did not interrogate the material reasons why her ­family occupied a place in society that allowed them to dispense moral and material aid near and far. Her understanding of charity and hardship was top-­down and, though sincere, not inconveniencing. In the winter of 1838, amid the economic displacement caused by the financial panic of the previous year, she commented, “It is fortunate for the poor that the weather is so mild, on account of fuel, ­there is a general complaint of want of employment.” She urged her husband to “plan some improvements to furnish them with work, they must be assisted in some way, & if they can be through the exercise of their own industry, so much the better.” Her own f­ amily’s Spanish dancing lessons and reading of Lorenzo de Medici, nonetheless, continued apace.22 Augusta Jay’s concern for the education, moral health, and physical well-­ being of her c­ hildren indicate her deep commitment to her role as a ­mother. In a letter to her son on hearing the news that his wife was pregnant, Augusta encouragingly stated, “I have nothing but love & dutiful behaviour to remember from my c­ hildren & have long thought myself one of the happiest m ­ others that God ever blessed.” She hoped that her daughter-­in-­law Ella would experience the same good fortune. Augusta experienced ­great satisfaction as a m ­ other, and her ­children admired her. Disagreements among her ­children as to how many grand­daughters should bear her name ­were in a way a tribute to her influence.23



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For Augusta, parenthood also meant that she was no stranger to excruciating loss. The death of William and Augusta’s unnamed d­ aughter in 1826 and nine-­month-­old son William in 1829 increased the c­ ouple’s reliance on faith to recover from personal tragedy. In 1827, she wrote to her own ­mother that “anxiety . . . ​must be ­g reat when our ­children are in circumstances where our care & foresight can be of no avail, how comforting to believe & dwell on the thought that they have a ­Father in Heaven.” Yet the comforts of religion, Augusta well understood, did not come easy or without pain. She confessed that knowing of her babies’ heavenly destination was not always enough for her: “I often think of this, but I have not the full comfort of it, ­because my faith is weak.”24 Augusta expressed g­ reat concern over the spiritual well-­being of her living ­children. Her ­daughter’s visit to New York City in 1830 prompted Augusta to instruct Maria about priorities: “The fashion, & the splendour of the city ­will almost bewilder your ­little head,” so the girl was to remain mindful “that ­those ­things which are of g­ reat esteem in the sight of men are of l­ittle account in the sight of God.” Augusta exposed her ­children to the finer ­things in life but also cautioned against making too much of them. Good Friday that year prompted Augusta to remind Maria that death could come at any time, and in case her d­ aughter missed the point, the letter’s postscript urged her to take care in prayer and reading the Bible. The second anniversary of l­ittle Willie’s death prompted this painful observation to John: “It was a solemn call to me, for you know how I loved him, & I hope it was also, young as you w ­ ere a call 25 to you Dear John to prepare to join him ­there.” William Jay also experienced the long-­lasting emotional trauma of losing ­children. Almost two years a­ fter their son Willie died, William observed how much he enjoyed having his brother-­in-­law’s ­children visit Bedford: as William held his nephew, he “perpetually thought of my sweet Willie, & I hugged him to my breast, with almost a ­father’s fondness” before reporting that “Augusta I think continues to gain.” They shared a burden.26 William and Augusta forged a devoted marriage, an impression that rare written effusions between husband and wife confirm. In 1833, William wrote her affectionately from Saratoga Springs: “No place is like home, nor any kindness, so delightful to my heart as that of my dear wife.” In 1840, their marriage now twenty-­eight years old, Augusta wrote William ­after attending the funeral of the wife of their longtime servant Joseph Cusno: “Think of me a ­g reat deal & love me very much as I ­will you ever.”27 William derived from Augusta the loving companionship that ratified his own deeply felt sense of social and religious propriety.

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Augusta’s demeanor, her hopes, and her expectations avoided the deep breach in convention that Garrison and his female allies seemed to portend. She sustained, indeed embraced, the sort of “female modesty & decorum” that her husband saw as being threatened by ­women joining the formal leadership of the AAS. Augusta Jay did not seek the sort of equality in the private or the public sphere that her husband proclaimed to be contrary to “domestic order & happiness” and to the scripture (see figure 8). Although her world was not

Figure 8.  Augusta McVickar Jay, 1845 c. Oil on canvas. By Edward West (1788–1857). JJ.1958.301. John Jay Homestead Historic Site, Katonah, N.Y., Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.



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entirely circumscribed by home and c­ hildren, she operated within gendered bound­aries that reaffirmed the domestic sphere as the primary locus for married ­women’s activities.28 The female-­heavy composition of the Jay ­family, in Augusta’s view, raised the stakes for its males, who carried forward the ­family reputation. In 1832, mindful of the loss of her second son, Augusta took comfort in the prospects of her fifteen-­year-­old son John, admitting quite frankly, “You are a sort of magnet to us, being the only ­Brother & Son. Dear Willie having soon attained his rest—we all turn to you with g­ reat affection, & you Dear John I trust w ­ ill never disappoint us.” Tragedy thus may have contributed to John’s sense of self-­ importance. So too did coincidence. John Jay II and his wife Eleanor had four ­daughters but only one son, named William. This pattern, only one male Jay in successive generations of their branch of the ­family tree, meant to Augusta that “an additional obligation rests on the stronger sex to excel in all goodness that their name may not be cut off from the earth.” Augusta Jay understood her son and John’s son as bearing a par­tic­u­lar historical burden.29 God would judge all her progeny’s souls, but in this world, in the strug­gle for emancipation, males should make the history.

The Split The split precipitated by the seating of Abby Kelley on the AAS business committee had been coming for some time; part of a larger constellation of grievances. As Jay and his allies further defined their positions within the antislavery movement, so too did the radicals. To Garrison and some of his followers, constitutions and laws might, in fact, be beside the point. The Mas­sa­chu­setts radicals had started to articulate a theory of nonre­sis­tance. This worldview posited a theory of pacifism that renounced not only vio­lence but also the notion that governments had the right to compel anyone to do anything. Only moral conscience defined one’s obligations. B ­ ecause government authority was rooted in coercion, activists should abstain from the electoral sphere. Garrison and his allies saw themselves as advancing democracy by repudiating the coercions of law and state to create a more inclusive, morally directed public sphere. The Garrisonians, however, did not insist on formally fusing nonre­sis­tance and or­ ga­nized abolitionism.30 On the question of ­women’s rights, however, the Garrisonians, ­were more insistent. Some of Garrison’s closest Mas­sa­chu­setts allies and most able supporters, including Kelley and Maria Weston Chapman, ­were w ­ omen. The

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Grimké ­sisters’ frank feminism and their appearances before audiences made up of males and females emboldened other ­women to defy convention. The 1839 AAS annual meeting granted ­women the right to vote as delegates.31 From William Jay’s perspective, the abolitionist movement was now freighted with wrong-­headed ideas that undermined the AAS’s ability to attract public support. The ­woman question laid bare the limits of his tolerance for the intellectual experimentation of the Garrisonians. Due to the AAS’s “unwarrantable attempt to alter the relative social conditions of the female sex,” Jay asked for a public acknowl­edgment that his $1,000 donation was for the distribution of Theodore Weld’s Slavery as It Is and was not a general contribution to the organ­ization. Using what he saw as the twin follies of “the rights of ­Women” and calls for an abolitionist po­liti­cal party to explain the diminishing sway of the AAS, Jay expressed his doubts “that anti Slavery Socie­ties” ­were to be God’s “chosen instruments” for combating the evil of slavery.32 The month before the fateful 1840 AAS meeting that elected Kelley to the business committee, Jay spelled out his disillusionment in a letter turning down an invitation to address the Connecticut branch of the AAS. The organ­ization, he wrote, no longer possessed a “singleness of purpose.” By denying the significance of laws, nonresisters kicked over one pillar of or­ga­nized antislavery, the demand for laws against the slave trade and slavery in the District of Columbia. Judge Jay noted that, without statutes, abolitionists could not even defend “the poor colored men, his wife & c­ hildren from the merciless kidnappers.” In suggesting that it might be time to form a new antislavery organ­ization, he cast himself as a purist, rejecting feminism, radical social ideas, and the formation of an antislavery po­liti­cal party.33 The 1840 AAS Convention unfolded as William Jay, who did not attend, suspected. In a crowded New York City church, packed, in John Jay II’s words, with an “abundance of w ­ omen white & black,” Lewis Tappan decried the elevation of Kelley as “contrary to usage of civilized Soct.” The next day, Tappan formed a new organ­ization, the American and Foreign Anti-­Slavery Society (AFAS), rather than remain in the AAS; in anticipation of its formation, Tappan had already drafted AFAS’s foundational princi­ples.34 William joined the executive board of the AFAS, as did white allies such as Gerrit Smith, S. W. Benedict, and Joshua Leavitt, along with two African American former colleagues on the AAS board, Theodore S. Wright and Samuel Cornish. The preamble of the new organ­ization’s constitution denounced slavery and “the prejudice against color” as sinful and contained stances that reflected Jay’s sensibility. In a shot against nonre­sis­tance, the AFAS “recognize[d] the existence of h ­ uman government” and the appropriateness of abolitionists voting, though not forming a separate po­liti­cal party. The organ­ization



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made the dissemination of “accurate information” regarding slavery an explicit priority. The constitution also included plans for a ­Women’s Auxiliary. Interestingly, given Jay’s previously expressed skepticism of cutting off trade with slaveholders, the AFAS favored “as far as practicable” f­ ree rather than slave-­produced commodities. True to its origins, the new organ­ization focused its radicalism solely on abolition and antiracism.35 John Jay II assisted the Tappanites while naively hoping not to antagonize the Garrisonians. The Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society took over responsibility for publishing the Emancipator, which had recently been taken out of the AAS’s hands. The younger Jay was the point person in the complex negotiations, hoping that by remaining in the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society, the newspaper would occupy “neutral” ground in the AAS–­AFAS split. John’s role in the transfer, however, earned him the mistrust of Garrisonians for years to come.36 William Jay made clear his disgust with the embrace of ­women’s equality entailed by Kelley’s and Garrison’s triumph—­declaring it as the reason that he wished his name “erase[d]” from AAS “rolls.” In a letter to AAS recording secretary James Caleb Jackson, published in the Emancipator, the judge frankly denounced the practice of elevating w ­ omen within the society and the princi­ ples of sexual equality that the practice implied. Jay rolled out the slippery slope of ungodly social developments. He proclaimed that the AAS was being “used . . . ​for advancing the doctrine of equality of the Sexes, in all the relations of life.” The very method was scandalous: “married ­women, without their husbands, ­were associated with men in the Executive Committee . . . ​ whose meetings have hitherto been & ­will prob­ably continue to be both frequent & private.” Jay made his preference for Victorian propriety into a po­liti­cal statement. William also objected that the new AAS sought to foist its sexual egalitarianism onto the international abolitionist stage. The Garrisonians not only dispatched a female representative to the upcoming world convention in London but also resolved the following: “It trusts that the convention ­will fully & practically recognize in its organ­ization & movements, the equal brotherhood of the entire h ­ uman ­family, without distinction of color, Sex or clime.” Jay trotted out his all-­purpose call for the AAS to hew to its chartered purpose of fighting slavery, but made no attempt to suppress his under­lying contempt for ­women’s rights: “How ever grievous some w ­ omen may find the yoke imposed upon them by the opinions usually entertained on the subject of female modesty & decorum, that is not the yoke which abolitionists associated to break.” The ­whole tenor of claims for w ­ omen’s rights within the organ­ization alarmingly portended more sweeping changes—­women ministers, ­women

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voters, and ­women’s equality within marriage. None of ­these forms of equality, the judge asserted, had the least bit to do with the abolition of slavery; such demands undermined “domestic order & happiness” and ­violated “the precepts of the Gospel.” Jay had not signed his name to such an agenda.37 Jay’s reputation, prestige, and blunt critique required a direct and vigorous response from his former colleagues. The National Anti-­Slavery Standard (NASS), edited by Lydia Maria Child assisted by her husband David Lee Child, republished Jay’s letter, followed by almost a full column’s-­length rebuttal. Jay, his critics argued, had misstated the nature of the AAS’s actions and their implications. The AAS had simply “refused to disfranchise a large proportion of its members” or to turn away ­people in no way excluded according to the AAS constitution. The newspaper’s response to Jay dismissed the notion that the AAS had taken a position on the rights of ­women in society as voters, wives, or candidates for the ministry and showed l­ittle patience for concerns about ­women and men meeting b­ ehind closed doors at board meetings. According to the NASS commentary, it was Jay who had unnecessarily harmed the reputation of abolitionism by using his good name to denigrate the AAS. The “enemies” of abolition would seize on Jay’s reputation to validate his falsehoods. But something bigger was at stake—­the pursuit of “­free inquiry.” The Garrisonians would not be cowed by Jay’s prominence: “The interposition of g­ reat and venerated names ­will pre­sent no barrier to its investigations. Even that of our respected fellow citizen, Judge Jay, though it may give currency to calumny, can obtain for it no credibility among the true and in­de­pen­dent friends of ­human freedom.” Having once proudly claimed the Jay name, William Jay’s accusations left the radicals no choice but to disclaim the authority that derived from it, linking Jay to “the ‘patriarchal’ tree of despotism” associated with slaveholders.38 The Garrisonian defense of an abolitionist movement that welcomed the full participation of w ­ omen was decidedly more progressive and laudable than the position of Lewis Tappan, William Jay, and their allies. Ironically, given Jay’s insistence on adherence to both the constitutions of both the AAS and the United States, the Garrisonians ­were the more faithful adherents to the AAS constitution on the ­woman question, given that it defined members as “any person” (not “any man”) who subscribed to its princi­ples. Garrison’s effort to achieve procedural fairness for w ­ omen need not have been interpreted as such a broad assault on gender norms. Jay and his allies, in some sense, chose to make the debate over female participation in the AAS into the ­woman question. In d­ oing so, they engineered their own defeat and, thus, their exit from a unified national antislavery organ­ization. Put another way, the controversy over seating female officers gave the Tappanites an excuse, a proverbial last



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straw, to do what they already wanted to do—to sever ties with the Garrisonians. Garrison’s contempt for or­ga­nized religious institutions and his nonre­ sis­tance ideology struck many mainstream abolitionists, including Jay, as disturbingly radical and as alarmingly counterproductive.39

Schism, Skepticism, and Politics In repudiating cultural radicalism, the logical move for some of Jay’s fellow dissenters was t­ oward the exclusively male sphere of parties, elections, and voting. Electoral politics became an appealing alternative to the impracticality of an open-­ended radical crusade for what seemed an increasingly implausible southern moral conversion. Even before the split with the AAS, however, William Jay hesitated to embrace that move to politics. He observed, in late 1839, that some abolitionists had traded in “moral suasion” for the possibility of “a third po­liti­cal party.” Thus, “money which ­ought to be spent in enlightening the consciences of slaveholders, is fruitlessly squandered in electioneering; & the rights of the Slaves seem in many instances to be forgotten by their professed friends.”40 He viewed the urge among abolitionists to or­ga­nize themselves into a po­liti­cal party as a twin folly to Garrisonian radicalism. ­After breaking from the AAS and venting his dis­plea­sure with its sexual politics, William became more ­eager to move forward than to look back. Jay’s advice to Tappan on the new AFAS was to steer clear of the diversions of intramural abolitionist politics or the temptations of electoral politics. In private he spoke condescendingly t­ oward the AAS but in public urged a “prudent conciliating course, avoiding the whims & follies & extravagances of our brethren, without rebuking them.” Jay advised that Tappan should hold management of the new organ­ization closely and keep in mind that “Mr. Garrison with his ­women, & our own abolition friends with their nominations, are ­doing more to injure & retard the anti Slavery cause than all the politicians in the land.” Jay wished to steer a m ­ iddle course that did not waste energy on internecine rivalries or party building. ­Doing so, however, was easier said than done. His own son publicly argued in an 1839 address that abolitionists should make their votes count. Some concluded that the best place for abolitionists to cast their ballots was, therefore, not for Whigs or Demo­crats but for members of a separate abolitionist party.41 William’s objection to a third party ­were tactical and strategic, rather than moral or ideological. He saw value in petitioning legislators and attempting to influence elections. Indeed, early in 1840, he authored a fiery address condemning the congressional gag rule as a gross violation of the fundamental

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constitutional right of petition; he optimistically forecasted that “public opinion” was eroding the support for the gag among northern congressional del­ e­ga­tions.42 If Jay w ­ ere correct that abolitionists w ­ ere already making their voices heard in the corridors of power, then launching their own party would be counterproductive. Alvan Stewart, Jay’s rival in the debate over the constitutionality of abolishing slavery in southern states, reached the opposite conclusion. In 1839, the Utica l­awyer and New York Anti-­Slavery Society stalwart, began rallying support for a third party as a better place to invest abolitionist energies than moral suasion. Fueling the nascent third-­party alternative was, on the one hand, the divisions clearly growing within the AAS and, on the other, a belief that the Whigs and the Demo­crats ­were not about to nominate presidential candidates meriting the support of antislavery voters. The third-­party movement, which enjoyed par­tic­u­lar strength in western New York State where evangelical and reform movements w ­ ere especially fervid, netted the support of Gerrit Smith by November. Some in the antislavery camp, however, ­eager to see the defeat of Demo­cratic presidential incumbent Martin Van Buren, tried to convince themselves that Whig standard-­bearer William Henry Harrison was suitable. Ohio antislavery editor Gamaliel Bailey even provided Harrison with a copy of William Jay’s A View of the Action of the Federal Government in Behalf of Slavery. However, Harrison’s antislavery credentials ­were weak enough and the per­sis­tence of the third-­party advocates strong enough that in April 1840, the new party, which had yet to adopt a name, nominated AAS officer James G. Birney for president.43 Gerrit Smith sought to convince his colleague William Jay to join the new party’s ranks, even proposing that the judge run for governor of New York. ­Doing so would mean r­ unning against William H. Seward, whose answers to their survey on African American rights two years before had been unsatisfactory. Smith pressed the case for a third party on Jay: “Whilst American slavery exists, our National po­liti­cal parties ­will be . . . ​proslavery parties,” meaning “that abolitionists cannot therefore vote consistently for the candidates of each party.” Abolitionists had to run their own iron-­clad antislavery candidates like Jay as symbols of their resolve. Smith labeled such a run “a very g­ reat ser­vice to our holy cause.”44 Jay, however, saw the role of electoral politics in advancing the cause very differently than did Smith. Jay replied to the suggestion that he make a symbolic run for governor with an extended critique of abolitionist electioneering. He viewed the nature of voter decision making and the current disor­ga­nized state of abolitionism as antithetical to the formation of an abolitionist party. In his view, voters did not choose whom to vote for in the abstract but rather



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selected “the best who can be elected”; if perfection w ­ ere the object, no one would vote at all, and, if ­every man voted only for the person whom each perceived as the best candidate, voters would never form co­ali­tions. Jay articulated a hard-­headed, practical approach to abolitionist voting based on an understanding of politics as compromise in a way that religion and morality ­were not. ­There ­were clearly situations, he believed, in which the professed abolitionist would not be the best candidate, e­ ither ­because the office did not require a position on that issue or ­because the abolitionist might divert votes from the better major-­party candidate. ­Here he ­imagined a hy­po­ thet­i­cal scenario in which John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun ran in the same district. Would abolitionists prefer to throw the election to the virulently proslavery Calhoun by voting for their own antislavery candidate rather than the laudable Adams, even though the latter was not affiliated with an abolitionist organ­ization? Even more to the point, Jay did not see the abolitionist movement as sufficiently unified to wield meaningful po­liti­cal strength. Instead, he favored the approach he and Smith had taken in 1838, questioning candidates and withholding their votes accordingly. In that election, according to Jay, abolitionists had not quite played their cards right when it came to actually casting their ballots, but they might have done so.45 Seward’s ­actual rec­ord once in office lent credence to the notion that a good mainstream politician might actually be persuaded to advance parts of the abolitionist agenda. The governor rebuffed demands by the governor of V ­ irginia that white New York sailors who abetted the escape northward of a V ­ irginia slave be extradited southward. The New Yorker claimed that only the violation of laws “universal” to “all civilized countries” should be respected in such interstate cases. Moreover, the Whig-­dominated state legislature passed a personal liberty law guaranteeing accused fugitive slaves a jury trial—­one of the three issues that Smith and Jay had pressed on the candidates for governor in 1838. In Jay’s letter to Smith spurning the idea of becoming a gubernatorial candidate, the judge referred to this legislation as “the Glorious & blessed Jury law.” Seward also had announced his commitment to Black education in New York.46 At the state level, at least, Jay saw hope for movement t­oward abolitionist priorities. Jay also showed no enthusiasm for the new antislavery party’s nomination of a presidential candidate. Although James G. Birney and William Jay held each other in fine regard, Jay anticipated that Birney’s presidential run was doomed to do more harm than good. In September 1840, Jay forecast that Birney was likely to get so few votes that abolitionists would look “contemptible in the eyes of politicians, & perhaps in their own.” As Jay noted to Tappan, abolitionists “have hitherto talked loud & thus acquired some importance.” With their own

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electoral effort underway, “I expect we s­hall exhibit our real weakness & become the scoff of all parties.”47 Jay’s prediction about the elections of 1840 hit close to the mark. Birney garnered less than seven thousand votes nationally. This comprised 0.3 ­percent of the total votes cast in an election in which the winner, Harrison, garnered more than 1.2 million votes. The dreadful economy and the Harrison campaign’s mastery of vapid but effective electioneering forestalled the hastily assembled Birney ticket’s impact. Meanwhile, the Whigs, whose northern representatives seemed more likely to oppose the gag rule than their Demo­ cratic counter­parts, achieved majorities in both ­houses of Congress. At the state level, Seward again ran with Bradish in 1840. The emerging antislavery ally gained reelection, but by a much smaller margin than in 1838, taking his home state by far fewer votes than did presidential candidate Harrison. Gerrit Smith, who himself ended up taking on the role of third-­party gubernatorial candidate in New York, did not accomplish much more than Birney had nationally; he garnered 0.6 ­percent of the votes cast. The Liberty Party had exposed abolitionism’s electoral weaknesses.48 The surge of interest in politics among non-­Garrisonian abolitionists and the weak initial results of t­ hose efforts exposed William Jay’s dilemma. A belief in antislavery moral suasion, Jay recognized, was a belief in the power of public opinion. It was an idealistic stance. Elections also w ­ ere an exercise in rallying public opinion, but on this subject Jay’s views ran from pragmatic to cynical. He was highly skeptical of the ability of demo­cratic politics to produce virtuous results. Yet elections ­were the primary place where public opinion was regularly registered. He found himself caught not only between the Garrisonian dismissal of voting and po­liti­cal abolitionists’ attraction to electoral politics but also between his hopes that spreading the truth about slavery would work and his fears that the nation’s po­liti­cal culture would drown out such appeals.49 His own analy­sis of the Whig victory in 1840 emphasized his skepticism of the ability of politics to promote substantive change. Harrison, scion of the ­Virginia slaveholding aristocracy and former territorial governor of Indiana, had posed as a cider-­drinking, log-­cabin-­living frontiersman to drive consummate po­liti­cal insider Martin Van Buren from the White House. The Jay ­family’s low regard for Van Buren, who had played a key role in dismantling John Jay’s original New York State constitution and whose views on race and slavery ­were highly suspect, had to make the electoral results somewhat satisfying. As Jay wrote in a December 1840 letter, a “po­liti­cal tornado” had “swept over the country prostrating the demo­cratic party, & raising in the whirlwind the multidudinous and discordant ele­ments, which constitute the modern



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‘Whigs.’ The ­People have expressed their w ­ ill & the Log Cabin candidate is President of the U. States . . . ! how far it w ­ ill advance the interests of the Country time w ­ ill shew.” He, however, did not expect the Demo­crats to be chastened by their defeat: the party would explain its loss away as the product of “the ­People” having been “deceived or defrauded, or taken by surprise” and would be taking aim at the Whig’s tenuous hold on the electorate soon enough. William put l­ittle faith in the constant motion of demo­cratic politics or the “whirl” of con­temporary culture.50 Withdrawal from public b­ attle into the private sphere of home and f­ amily was not an option for William. The fight against slavery continued, moreover, to be a manly exercise in defending the Jay f­amily’s good name. In 1841 the Harper and B ­ rothers publishing firm brought out a biography of founding ­father John Jay designed to reach younger readers. William was galled that the author, Henry Renwick, contrasted John Jay’s commitment to gradual emancipation in New York unfavorably with current abolitionists’ aggressive national opposition to the institution. Jay took personal offense, labeling ­these remarks “a sort of half-­concealed, irresponsible charge, that the son of John Jay, and t­ hose who act with him, are ­doing what his f­ ather forbore to do.” Jay wrote, “­There is as ­little truth as ­there is manliness in the insinuation.” In the concluding paragraph of his assault on Renwick, which took up two newspaper columns, William stated, “I would, indeed, be recreant to honor and to duty could I witness the sordid sacrifice of one of the brightest features of my ­father’s character on the altar of slavery, and refrain from protesting against the obscene rite.”51 His own notions of masculinity, honor, and historic responsibility ­were bound up in the ongoing fight for abolition. In that fight, internal divisions among abolitionists sometimes faded into the background. Although Jay originally submitted his critique of Renwick’s book to a New York City newspaper, Garrison’s Liberator republished William’s critique not only of the author but also of a northern publisher that habitually catered to southern proslavery sensitivities. The implacability of their opponents sustained affinities among abolitionists that ran as deep as their divisions.

C h a p te r 1 0

The Condition of ­Free P ­ eople of Color

William Jay’s neighbors judged him as harshly from the bar as he judged them from the bench. The patrician reformer, it seemed, had become a contemptible race traitor. Or so abolitionist David Lee Child discovered in November 1841 when he spent the eve­ning in Jay’s hometown of Bedford. ­There the temperate Child found himself forced to take “refuge from rain and hunger” in an inn that served alcohol. The presence of rum became the least of his concerns, when he stumbled into a conversation about William Jay. “He came near being rid upon a rail,” said one patron. Knowing Jay to be “one of our most excellent and useful anti-­slavery writers,” Child felt compelled to inquire why someone would want to attempt such a ­thing. “For making a speech at an abolition meeting in the Court House,” reported Child’s rough-­hewn interlocutor. Child asked, “Had he not a right to speak upon the subject of slavery?” “Yes; and we had a right to ­ride him on a rail.” Trying to instruct the man on f­ree speech, Child soon found himself receiving a sobering lesson on racism. He asked the man, “I have heard you speaking for some time on that subject; do you think it gives me a right to ­ride you on a rail.” “No.” 23 4

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“Why not?” “­Because niggers are not the same as us.” “How do they differ?” “They aint the same color.” “­There are no two nations, and scarcely two individuals, in the world of precisely the same color; yet all are of the ­human species.” “May be so; but as for ­these lazy, black rascals, I know they are not the same.” But, lectured Child, “If they are lazy, so are whites. They love and hate, like whites; only they do not hate their brethren on account of complexion. They waste their time, and mispend their money, like whites. They break their promises, lie, steal, and get drunk, like whites.” About to take a drink, “the proud champion of caste,” as Child termed the man, seemed momentarily stymied, but then regained his composure, reporting that during Jay’s court­house abolitionist speech, the audience chanted, “N***** baby!” “What did they mean by that?” “Oh, he had a dead baby, as black as ink, sent him for a pre­sent, in a mahogany box.” “I see nothing discreditable to him in that; or very witty in t­ hose who sent it.” “No; but then it was a good joke upon him for this nigger business.” The moral of the story, reported Child to readers of the National Anti-­Slavery Standard (NASS), was all too clear: “How vast the work not only of establishing liberty for the slave, but of preserving it for the ­free. Let ­every friend of the slave and of man, renew and redouble his zeal.”1 Child’s dispatch contained many meanings. Only the year before, the National Anti-­Slavery Standard, edited by his wife Lydia Marie Child, had excoriated William Jay over the w ­ oman question. Yet in the publication’s pages, David Lee Child acknowledged the tremendous value of Jay’s writings to the movement. Child’s account also bristled with class enmity—­the crude, ignorant pub patron juxtaposed to the sensible editor and talented author.2 But the horrifying image of a dead Black baby delivered as a crude racist prank drew the starkest lines. ­Whether an a­ ctual infant or an effigy, the contents of the miniature casket did not target Jay alone. How might Zilpah have responded if she learned about the contents of the box sent to Jay’s Bedford home? If word spread to the community of f­ree African Americans in Bedford, they would have taken the incident as a blunt warning about racial power and the l­imited ability of the town’s most famous resident to protect them.3 This incident made clear that the South was not the only place where white citizens viewed the spreading of abolitionist ideas as a dangerous transgression.

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As William Jay had come to understand, racism sustained injustice throughout the country. Indeed, in 1839, even as divisions within or­ga­nized abolition moved ­toward open schism, Jay authored an anonymous pamphlet titled On the Condition of the F­ ree ­People of Color in the United States that articulated his starkest critique of racism to date. Following directly on the heels of his book on proslavery federal government policies, Jay’s analy­sis made clear that laws and customs of racial degradation practiced in northern states w ­ ere as indefensible as national proslavery policies. When writing about race, he did not parse the differences among vari­ous types of abolitionists as he did when writing about the constitutional limits on what antislavery advocates could legitimately demand. If he was even partially motivated to leave his name off the essay out of fear of being associated with such forthright antiracist views, his ideas, as Child’s report indicated, w ­ ere no secret. William Jay’s growing sense of obligation to combat racism vitally informed his attitudes and fueled his abolitionism for the next two de­cades. His movement t­ oward a more actively egalitarian stance on race was propelled by three interlocking ­factors: his own developing assessment of American society and the needs of the abolition movement, his son John Jay II’s commitment to antiracist advocacy, and the determined acts of re­sis­tance by Black ­people themselves. This third reason was the most impor­tant one, to a large degree driving the first two. Interacting with Samuel Cornish and David Ruggles, and observing Rev. Peter Williams Jr.’s strug­gles helped pave the way. Alexander Crummell’s ­battles within the Episcopal Church and the shipboard heroism of Cinqué, Madison Washington, and their fellow rebels provided unfolding substance and purpose to William’s and John’s devastating critiques of racial caste. From a bishop’s office to federal courtrooms to slave ships, Black re­sis­ tance and per­sis­tence spurred the Jays, f­ ather and son, to open up new fronts in the f­amily’s ­battle against slavery.4 Men with insiders’ credentials agitated for outsiders who threatened the racial status quo. By ­doing so, the Jays challenged ­people far more power­f ul than William’s racist Bedford neighbor.

Church and State Just as John Jay II had joined the ranks of or­ga­nized abolitionism before his ­father, the son laid the groundwork for William’s critique of institutionally engrained racism. In February 1839, John, still only twenty-­one years old, addressed the New York Anti-­Slavery Society on slavery and the Episcopal Church. Subsequently published as a brief pamphlet, this public critique of the ­family’s ancestral religious home foreshadowed the internal insurgency

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against racism that John II would lead for years to come. Less directly but no less importantly, Thoughts on the Duty of the Episcopal Church, in Relation to Slavery castigated the church’s American hierarchy for its failure to take a stand against Black bondage and identified the spiritual wreckage that resulted. From the praise the Episcopal clergy heaped on the United States, “a stranger would scarcely have ­imagined . . . ​that t­ here existed in this nation nearly three millions of ­people . . . ​who have never entered the walls of a school, nor learnt the coming of Christ, and know not the sound of the church-­going bell, and whom in some states it is death to teach that Bible.” By contrast the abysmal rec­ord of American clergy, En­glish churchmen had heroically stood up for the emancipation of enslaved ­people in the Ca­rib­bean colonies. The American Episcopalian Church, observed this scion of one of the church’s most prominent families, “has not merely remained a mute and careless spectator of this ­g reat conflict of truth and justice with hy­poc­risy and cruelty, but her very priests and deacons may be seen ministering at the altar of slavery.”5 By itself, his Condition of the F­ ree ­People of Color provides evidence of William Jay’s developing thoughts during this same time period—­but its greater value is as a gateway into the Jays’ expanding antislavery universe and the allies and enemies generated t­ here. William Jay’s pamphlet on northern racism, Condition of the F­ ree ­People of Color, published in the autumn of 1839, prefaced a mostly secular list of ten “oppressions” perpetrated “by law or the customs of society” against f­ ree Blacks with digs at some old rivals and some religious observations. Prejudice, stated Jay, “is derogatory to the character of that God whom we are told is love.” He found it a curious claim, then, that “our heavenly ­Father has implanted a princi­ple of hatred, repulsion and alienation between certain portions of his ­family on earth.” Colonizationists served once again as Jay’s foil. He noted that differences in color led abolitionists “to discard the prejudice” and colonizationists “to banish” prejudice’s “victims.”6 With sharp distinctions drawn between Godly love and ­human prejudice, Jay assembled a bill of v­ iolated rights, a Decalogue of republican commandments desecrated in the North: voting rights, freedom of movement, petitioning, military ser­vice, equal access to courts, secular education, religious education, earning a living, avoiding enslavement, and public accommodations. Jay’s pamphlet identified the right to vote, to move freely about the country, to file petitions, to serve in the military, and to walk the streets without the fear of being kidnapped as aspects of citizenship denied to f­ ree Blacks in northern states. Tellingly, Jay listed “General Exclusion from the Elective Franchise” first in his Condition of the F­ ree P­ eople of Color. In 1833, Jay had claimed that the elective franchise did not even follow from emancipation. By placing voting rights at the head of his list six years ­later, he was inching ­toward

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an acknowl­edgment that the lack of equal access to the ballot compromised freedom. Still, he remained a po­liti­cal conservative. He objected only to the fact that most northern states excluded Black voters based on their color: “­Were this exclusion founded on the want of property, or any other qualification deemed essential to the judicious exercise of the franchise, it would afford no just cause of complaint; but it is founded solely on the color of the skin, and is therefore irrational and unjust.” Even so, in the existing po­liti­cal culture where pandering politicians catered to the “good w ­ ill” of their voters, Jay recognized that excluding Black men from the franchise denied them demo­ cratic leverage and undermined the conditions of African American life.7 Northern states contrived to undermine Black citizenship in other ways that ­violated constitutional logic and threatened h ­ uman dignity. The “Denial of the Right of Locomotion,” “Denial of the Right of Petition,” and “Exclusion from the Army and Militia” encoded northern white prejudices in law while imposing meaningful hardships. The “privileges and immunities” clause of the US Constitution was grossly mocked by f­ ree and slave states alike: Black citizens did not always carry their rights from one state to another. Southern attempts to wall themselves off from the supposedly dangerous influence of f­ ree Blacks meant that “a citizen of New York, with a dark skin” could not “visit a ­dying child” in the South “without subjecting himself to l­egal penalties.” Northern states, especially Ohio, Jay argued, also trampled on the notion that American citizens could transport their “privileges and immunities” across state lines. Ohio’s 1807 law required Black mi­g rants to post a substantial bond to move into the state, a clear attempt to prevent migration altogether. This provision left Black residents of the state vulnerable to deportation and threatened whites who employed or even showed kindness to a Black “fellow-­ countryman.” Ohio also singled itself out for violating a governmental princi­ple so basic—­the right to petition—­that even a despot might be perplexed. The Ohio legislature expressly denied Blacks and mulattoes this right, apparently ­because they had already been denied the right to vote.8 Jay disposed of the prohibition of Blacks from military ser­vice by observing that the US government “is prob­ably the only one in the world that forbids a portion of its subjects to participate in the national defence” based on skin color. He astutely observed, “To declare a certain class of the community unworthy to bear arms in defence of their native country, is necessarily to consign that class to general contempt.”9 The federal government willfully joined with the states in which militias w ­ ere or­ga­nized in eroding Black citizenship and heaping scorn on African Americans. “Liability to Be Seized, and Treated as Slaves,” meanwhile, was a violation that had long been a serious concern not only for William Jay but also for his

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older relatives Peter Augustus Jay and Peter Jay Munro who had preceded him in the antislavery cause. The seizure in Washington, D.C., of Westchester County resident Gilbert Horton had launched William’s own antislavery ­career. In his pamphlet on ­free Blacks in the North, William alluded to the seizure of Peter Lee as a fugitive in Westchester County. The economics of the domestic slave trade threatened freedom and undermined the administration of justice in places where the law had proclaimed slavery itself illegal. Jay sarcastically noted, “An able-­bodied colored man sells in the southern market for from eight hundred to a thousand dollars; of course he is worth stealing.”10 Yet the confluence of courage, planning, and princi­ple, in the right circumstances, might transform stolen lives into symbols of freedom, if not ­under state law than u ­ nder national, international, and natu­ral law.

La Amistad “No colored man can be a judge, juror, or constable. ­Were the talents and acquirements of a Mansfield or a Marshall veiled in a sable skin, they would be excluded from the bench of the humblest court in the American republic,” wrote William Jay at the beginning of the fifth item on his list of ­violated rights. As a judge, the ill effects of prejudice in the courtroom w ­ ere readily recognizable to Jay. In court, the southern states once again found a kindred spirit in the legislature of Ohio, which by statute excluded Blacks from testifying in any case involving white parties. Ohio may have been unique among northern states for barring Blacks from being witnesses “however well established . . . ​ his character for intelligence and veracity.” If Ohio went further in this regard than other northern states, the fact remained that a Black man might possess the abilities of the greatest of En­glish and American jurists and still not be allowed to join the bench.11 As events soon proved, although denied the opportunity to produce a Mansfield or Marshall, the enslaved through their re­sis­tance did produce a Henry and a Washington, transforming Jay’s elegant words on the absurdities of courtroom prejudice into public dramas about the efficacy of the law and the sovereignty of justice.12 The actions of a group of West Africans off the coast of Cuba in early July 1839 made the administration of justice a major abolitionist priority on the national stage. Illegally transported to Cuba from a carefully hidden slave-­trading fa­cil­i­ty in Lomboko on the coast of Africa, a group of fifty-­three Africans ­were then transferred to a smaller vessel, La Amistad, for shipment from Havana to a Cuban sugar plantation approximately 300 miles to the east. On board, the captors denied the Africans adequate ­water and

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subjected them to brutal beatings. The captives worried that they would l­ ater be killed and eaten. A Mende named Cinqué and three comrades led a rebellion on ship a­fter freeing themselves and the other captives from their chains. The Africans overpowered the crew in a bloody ­battle. The rebels spared their two putative o ­ wners, Pedro Montes and José Ruiz. Lacking knowledge of sailing or navigation, the Africans controlled the ship but not its course. Montes eventually steered ­toward the US coast. Desperately looking for supplies along the Long Island, New York, coast in late August, the African mutineers drew the attention of US naval patrols. Lieutenant Thomas Gedney, of the USS Washington, apprehended the ship and its passengers, bringing them to shore in New London, Connecticut. Soon, the mutineers found themselves clapped into a New Haven prison, while vari­ous parties, including their Spanish ­owners and the Americans, who claimed rights of salvage for recovering the Africans, sought to convince the courts that the central issues involved property rather than ­human rights.13 Judge Jay took a keen interest in the complicated proceedings, offering advice, public encouragement, and money in support of Lewis Tappan’s commitment of abolitionist resources to the case. His September 7, 1839, letter to his friend, expressing moral outrage and an easy command of the larger international l­egal context, quickly found its way into The Emancipator. Although the alleged justification for imprisoning the Africans was a pos­si­ble trial for “piracy and murder,” Jay labeled their Spanish ­owners, Montes and Ruiz, as the real “villains,” quoting the fact that “­children between the ages of 7 and 12” ­were among their cargo illegally imported from Africa. Such activity v­ iolated a treaty between Spain and Britain intended to help stamp out the international slave trade. According to Jay, as recently as 1838, several Spanish ships with the mere intent of participating in the illegal slave trade had been apprehended. Moreover, the Queen of Spain had ordered the colonial Cuban navy to enforce the ban. Jay, in an attempt to bolster Tappan’s commitment to the cause, observed that Ruiz and Montes “well knew” that theirs was an illegal cargo and that the slaves w ­ ere therefore “entitled to their freedom,” making the two Spaniards “guilty of an act of atrocious wickedness” that made them “felons” in their own courts. Instead, the two men audaciously sought redress in the US courts. The Amistad case demonstrated on the public stage the racism that William Jay highlighted in his broader assessment of northern Black life in Condition of ­Free ­People of Color. As he wrote to Tappan, despite the fact that “our authorities” had t­ hese facts at their disposal, they imprisoned “thirty individuals for an act which but for the color of their skin, would be generally regarded as most heroic and praiseworthy.” Drawing on an analogy that reached back to the late eighteenth-­century arguments made by his ­father and ­others, Wil-

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liam Jay asked, “What would be the feeling and conduct of this nation had an American crew captured and sold as slaves by a Barbary corsair” been held in London as pirates and murderers? It went without saying that whites and Blacks defending their rights ­were not judged by the same standard. Jay’s extensive knowledge of the national government’s rec­ord on slavery-­related issues led him to believe that the Africans’ interest in pressing grievances against “their kidnappers” would not receive priority on US soil, though “common decency and justice” dictated other­wise.14 John Jay II, for his part, sought to yoke the Amistad story to the American Revolution and the Romantic literary tradition. In announcing a monetary donation to the cause, John invoked both Patrick Henry’s defiant pronouncement, “Give me liberty or give me death,” and the Declaration of In­de­pen­ dence; he also quoted En­glish poet Robert Southey’s 1791 sonnet on a violent slave rebellion: “­Every true-­hearted American” could embrace a “choice of untutored barbarians” to fight for their freedom in John’s g­ rand, albeit condescending, analy­sis. John was not alone in connecting the Africans to a romanticized revolutionary heritage. A newspaper extra distributed by New York’s Sun, offered a chest-up drawing of “Joseph Cinquez,” showing “the brave Congolese Chief ” in a s­imple tunic-­like shirt meeting the reader’s gaze with a calm assurance (see figure 9). The drawing accompanied the Mende hero’s speech to his newly liberated comrades ­after seizing control of the Amistad: “­Brothers we have done that which we purposed, our hands are now clean, for we have Striven to regain the precious heritage we received from our ­fathers.” The Amistad rebels had reenergized the abolitionists’ claim to their ­fathers’ revolutionary legacy.15 The revolutionary legacy, as it turned out, played more than merely a symbolic role in helping t­hese Africans win their freedom. Among the ongoing contributions William Jay made to the Amistad case was helping lure another founding ­father’s son, John Quincy Adams, to take up the cause. Jay admired the former US president, who in his current role as a congressman, was engaged in a determined b­ attle to undermine the so-­called gag rule against abolitionist petitions. William’s 1839 letter in the Emancipator offering his initial analy­sis of the case had piqued Adams’s “deep interest.” In a personal letter to Jay, the former president echoed Jay’s thought that far from being “Pirates and Murderers” the Africans had “vindicated their own right of liberty by executing the Justice of Heaven.” Adams shared with Jay the news that President Van Buren’s administration stood ready to return the Africans to Spanish custody. Yet Adams also remained hopeful that the Amistad rebels would fare well in the court of law and that Van Buren would rethink his contemptible plans to return them to Cuba. Adams’s expression to Jay of his opinions of

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Figure 9.  Amistad uprising hero Joseph Cinqué, as portrayed in an extra produced by a New York City newspaper. Letter of Joshua Leavitt to William Jay, September 10, 1839, John Jay Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

the case may well have prompted Jay confidante Lewis Tappan to successfully recruit Adams to take up the Amistad case more publicly.16 Jay, like Tappan, was ­eager for the case to receive wide publicity in both the abolitionist and mainstream press. To his mind, the under­lying facts ­were clear, and only biases in the executive and judicial branches prevented the logic of t­hose facts from prevailing. Federal District Court judge Andrew Judson ruled in January that the Amistad rebels ­were not slaves and therefore Ruiz and Montes could not claim them. But his narrowly cast decision did not declare any broader antislavery princi­ples; indeed, he ordered the one non-­

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African-­born slave back to Cuba, and the rest the Van Buren administration was to ship back to Africa, while awarding salvage rights to the US Navy lieutenant Gedney. The Spaniards and the administration appealed the lower court decision, resulting in many more tense months for the Africans’ supporters and many more months of imprisonment for the Africans.17 Jay urged Tappan in the fall of 1840 to push forward on the issue of bail. Denial would “be cruel & unconstitutional.” Setting the Africans f­ree while the appellate phase of the case went forward would make it “difficult to seize ­these men hereafter . . . ​to punish on a Spanish scaffold.” Returning to this point three weeks ­later, Jay emphasized that the continued imprisonment of the Black c­ hildren who had been among the Amistad cargo was particularly unjust. In the same letter, Jay gleefully observed that the conjunction of the Amistad case and the election had spread the abolitionist message into unlikely precincts, “our incendiary publications” appearing “through the ­whole length of the Slave region.”18 ­There was other good news. To Jay’s ­g reat plea­sure, Lewis Tappan fi­nally prevailed on Adams to join the ­legal team that would press the cause of the Africans before the US Supreme Court. In the meantime, Adams explic­itly drew on William Jay’s investigative work when raising doubts in the US House of Representatives about the Van Buren administration’s h ­ andling of the ­matter. Proclaiming to his House colleagues that “­there was not a more honorable man in the United States” than William Jay and noting that the New York judge “was the son of one of the greatest patriots of our Revolution,” Adams quoted Jay’s charges at length. Someone, it seemed, had translated the language of the Cuban shipping document referring to the Amistad cargo as “ladinos”—­that is, Africans imported to Cuba before the ban on transatlantic slave importations—­and as “sound negroes.” B ­ ecause ­there was, asserted Jay, other evidence that this h ­ uman cargo had recently arrived from Africa, such a mistranslation might be regarded as a way of covering up prevarications on the part of a Cuban official and of Ruiz. Jay’s analy­sis, in which he raised the possibility of US government “fraud,” helped Adams put the administration on notice that Congress was watching its actions carefully.19 The Amistad case served the abolitionist movement well in the court of public opinion, but as every­one involved knew full well, the fate of the heroic and long-­suffering captives ultimately rested with the Supreme Court justices. Jay expressed his apprehensions to Tappan as the Amistad ­legal team, headed by Adams and Roger Baldwin, the grand­son of a signatory to the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence, readied themselves. Jay believed that freeing the captives outright “would be a triumph” but worried about a colonizationist-­style compromise that would order their transportation to Africa. Jay’s advice then was

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that “our l­awyers should simply urge the court to grant them liberty.” Tappan, as his instructions to the ­lawyers indicate, concurred with Jay.20 The US Supreme Court, in a decision delivered on March 9, 1841, found, as Jay had insisted from the beginning, that the Amistad Africans had never legally been slaves and, therefore, that they must be set f­ree. The decision, written by Justice Joseph Story of Mas­sa­chu­setts, vindicated their right to defend themselves. ­There was no reason why they should suffer further imprisonment.21 The resolution of the Amistad case provided an exception to the rule of the discriminatory administration of justice described in Jay’s On the Condition of the ­Free ­People of Color. The circumstances w ­ ere extraordinary in ways that maximized the public drama of the situation without necessarily reversing the tide of discrimination that Jay had detailed in his pamphlet on northern racism. To be sure, Justice Story’s decision validated f­ ree Black court testimony; indeed, without the testimony and depositions of the Africans, their case could not have been made.22 The right to testify and the right to petition, as Jay argued in his pamphlet, w ­ ere bulwarks against despotism and for freedom. Yet, even though Cinqué and his colleagues became heroic revolutionary figures, this hardly made it more likely that a dark-­skinned Mansfield or Marshall would ascend to the judicial bench in Ohio or New York. The Amistad Africans also struck a blow against illegal kidnapping, but ­under a set of conditions that did not set a pre­ce­dent that would do anything to protect northern ­people of color. The US Constitution’s fugitive slave and domestic insurrection clauses did not apply in this instance. Nonetheless, Jay could take satisfaction in having helped the Africans attain their freedom, his l­egal acumen and reputation supporting Adams and other colleagues in their po­liti­cal and judicial strategies. The case, moreover, created sympathy for the antislavery cause and demonstrated that when Blacks did receive a full hearing before the bar their appeals for justice might be recognized. The return to Africa of t­ hose who survived the lengthy ordeal also reflected the support African Americans brought to the Amistad cause and the anti-­colonizationist sensibility that abolitionists, like Jay, shared with them. Minister J.W.C. Pennington, who had escaped slavery himself, along with other Black abolitionists founded the Union Missionary Society in August 1841 to support Christian outreach in Africa in conjunction with the return of the former captives. The Society sought to head off any association with colonizationism, an activity which expressed the same sort of racial exclusion for which Jay himself had developed so much contempt.23 The Amistad saga demonstrated that the administration of justice was not irredeemably flawed nor was interracial collaboration impossible, even in a republic in the thrall of racism.

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The Creole The shipboard rebellion of Madison Washington and his fellow American slaves in October 1841 once again drew William Jay into the po­liti­cal and racial fray. The actions of the federal government to try to get their hands on the Black rebels who seized The Creole offered Jay an opportunity to write, in effect, a barbed postscript to his two 1839 publications and to extend the lessons on natu­ral and international laws articulated in the Amistad case. However poorly the North administered law and nurtured Black achievement, Jay refused to let Daniel Webster, the Whig secretary of state and nationalist hero, rewrite the princi­ples of justice for the sake of po­liti­cal expedience. When the slaves aboard The Creole sailed into the Bahamas as f­ree p­ eople, they dramatically tested the meaning of British West Indian emancipation for Anglo-­American relations. Slaves being shipped from Richmond to New Orleans seized control of the vessel and sailed for the Bahamas, a British colony covered by the British Empire’s recently passed emancipation laws. Madison Washington masterminded the mutiny. On learning of the ship’s arrival, British authorities initially sought to secure The Creole and all its Blacks on the ship, but ended up only detaining the nineteen implicated in the uprising. Well over one hundred other enslaved p­ eople aboard The Creole soon went ­free. Black Bahamians in boats approached The Creole and brought the men and w ­ omen ashore, not as cargo but as ­free ­people. The nineteen men identified as mutineers ­were imprisoned.24 The controversy precipitated by the slaves aboard The Creole was the inverted mirror image of that of La Amistad. In this latest act of re­sis­tance, American slaves sought to avail themselves of foreign laws, and their American o ­ wners and the US government appealed for redress, thus playing the role of Ruiz, Montes, and the Spanish consul. As in the Amistad case the federal government asserted the material interests and l­egal claims of masters over the moral claims of the enslaved. Jay once again valorized the rights of Black rebels over the interests of white property holders and the governments that attempted to protect ­those interests. Jay counseled the British not to accede to US demands for recompense. Joseph Sturge, a British antislavery activist, who met Jay on a tour of the United States, saw to it that Jay’s analy­sis made its way into the British press. Jay’s January 1842 letter to Sturge established a clear demarcation between Black and white, obligation and self-­interest. Jay noted that the slaves had prosecuted the shipboard rebellion “humanely,” killing only one of twelve whites and taking care of the wounded. In a not-­so-­subtle contrast, American “slaveholders are in ­great wrath, and mean, if pos­si­ble, to terrify your government into a surrender” of the rebels.

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Jay submitted that international law did not obligate the British to take any action to restore the mutineers to US authorities. Indeed, the United States had declined to return two Irishmen and a Canadian murderer to the British, as well as denying Spain’s requests in the Amistad affair. Absent an extradition treaty for accused murderers, no wrong could be claimed. Jay boldly exported his contempt for some of his own countrymen and encouraged a foreign power to resist any demands made on their behalf. He asked, “If you cannot surrender” the Creole mutineers “as murders, can you as fugitive slaves?” With twelve thousand African American runaways in Canada, the answer to this question had significant consequences. Jay reminded his British readers that the United States had previously tried to induce them to sign a treaty that would return ­these runaway slaves. The ­legal and moral imperatives, according to Jay, ­were no dif­fer­ent in the Creole case: “The claim we [Americans] ­shall prefer for the surrender of the Creole negroes is as contrary to international law, as it is to the law of God.” If British officials “­will listen to the dictates of justice, humanity, and national honor,” they would resist American claims fueled by “slave holders . . . ​thirsting for the blood of ­these negroes.”25 He contrasted Black restraint to white terrorism, British moral and l­egal sobriety to American selfishness. Jay’s full analy­sis of the case was published in The New-­York American, ­later excerpted in the NASS, and printed as part of a substantial pamphlet. He refuted the proslavery reading of international law that Webster advanced. He argued forcefully that laws and protections for the interests of slaveowners should be construed as narrowly as pos­si­ble and that the right to rebel against servitude should be protected wherever the jurisdiction of slave laws ceased to apply. In Jay’s view, very strict geo­g raph­i­cal lines circumscribed the reach of slaveholder claims. For Jay, the Creole rebellion necessitated the articulation of a clear set of anti­ slavery princi­ples to guide international law. He recognized the Black rebels as the case’s central figures whose actions and motivations should carry significant l­egal weight. Jay viewed it as vital that US citizens “not step beyond the strictest requirements of ” the Constitution, lest they become “a party to the extension of this blighting curse and shame.” The fugitive slave clause of the Constitution held no sway in British territory. Moreover, as Jay emphasized, liberating oneself at sea was even less legally ambiguous than escaping across the border from one dominion to the next. Jay identified “the ­g rand ­mistake of all who have written on the subject is, that they leave entirely out of the question this party” that mattered most—­“the slaves themselves.” Pivoting to the po­liti­cal contract at the heart of republican governance, Jay noted that slaves never consented to the law of slavery but only submitted to it by

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force: “Therefore, when they find themselves or place themselves beyond its jurisdiction, they are no longer subject to that law.”26 The only law that mattered on the high seas was “the universal law of nature.” The decisions made by the Black rebels thus rendered moot ­whether the British officials in the Bahamas acted in an unfriendly fashion t­ oward US interests by allegedly inducing the slaves to disembark. Jay asked, “Is it to be supposed, that without such interference, the slaves would have remained on board the Creole, and gone voluntarily into the hopeless bondage of Louisiana sugar plantations?”27 The men understood full well why and how to act on their desire for freedom. The case threw the laws and administration of justice in the United States into a harsh light, along lines limned out in Jay’s pamphlet on racism in the North. Judge Jay proclaimed, “The law of ­England is the law of Freedom, and it bends neither to Policy nor Power.” Not so, in the United States, specifically South Carolina, which presumed “in contravention of the Constitution of the United States” that e­ very Black person entering its ports be treated “not only as slaves, but as felons” during their ship’s stay. The humanity of slaves, who ­were most as­suredly “like ourselves—­and not bushels of wheat or hogsheads of tobacco,” made it imperative that slave laws extend not one step further than their “local” context. Jay thus helped build a theory of antislavery constitutionalism that made freedom an assumed national and international norm overridden only by laws explic­itly maintaining slavery within strictly local bound­aries.28 Arguments about l­egal theory became arguments about historical memory, specifically the memory of the American Revolution. Jay turned Secretary of State Webster’s famous ability to conjure the narrative of the Revolution against the g­ reat orator. The New Yorker “confess[ed] . . . ​utter amazement” and “unfeigned sorrow” to hear that the New En­glander, who so eloquently cited Bunker Hill and his love for “his own, his native land,” had denounced the Creole rebels as “mutineers and murderers.” Rhetorically linking New E ­ ngland patriots to the Creole rebels as fellow defenders of natu­ral law, Jay took aim at Webster’s reputation as heir to the American Revolution’s libertarian creed.29 Jay would not, however, be allowed to claim ­either the moral high ground or historical memory uncontested. One Webster supporter publicly argued in the pages of the upstate New York Utica Gazette that the pre­sent secretary of state had acted no differently than John Jay had when negotiating the Peace of Paris in the 1780s. That treaty demanded that the British not take with them any American slaves as they evacuated from the United States. The pro-­Webster correspondent also cited subsequent attempts by John Jay in 1794 to secure compensation as pre­ce­dent for the current secretary of state’s claims.

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William Jay’s reply to the Utica Gazette, subsequently reprinted in the National Anti-­Slavery Standard and the Liberator, revealed once again the passion and his vulnerability to any imputation of his f­ ather’s antislavery reputation. Jay assailed the notion that Webster acted on any ­legal, moral, or diplomatic “pre­ce­dent” set by William’s “revered parent.” Such “gross ignorance” could not be allowed to stand. To prove his point, William conducted a historical review designed to render his f­ather morally blameless while further diminishing Webster’s reputation. William dubiously shifted all blame for the language of Article VII of the Treaty of Paris on the removal of Negroes to the “Carolina slaveholder” Henry Laurens. Returning to firmer historical grounds, William informed readers that John Jay declined to “insist on compensation” for Blacks when negotiating the commercial treaty that would bear his name. Reflecting his enhanced concern with racism as the engine of injustice, Jay pivoted from defense of his ­father’s historical rec­ord to an attack on Secretary Webster’s prejudices. “It must be the very doctrine as to shades of complexion,” wrote Jay, that allowed Webster to level the charge of murder against the likes of Madison Washington. ­Were Rus­sian serfs to wash up on the US coast, we would not return them to bondage. More pointedly echoing one of John Jay’s old arguments, William submitted that if Webster’s own son had freed himself from Algerian pirates in like fashion to the Creole rebels, the secretary of state would embrace him. Webster, in adjusting his moral compass, did not deserve to be compared to John Jay.30 Amid the intensifying national politics of race and slavery in the 1840s, Webster’s silver tongue and sterling nationalist reputation served as an inadequate substitute, in William’s view, for the advocacy of first princi­ples. The brave actions of slave Madison Washington, who bore the names of two founding ­fathers, thus helped William Jay, who bore the name of another, to confirm and to refine his commitment to see the law administered in a color-­blind fashion through the courts and in international relations. As he already contended in his On the Condition of the ­Free ­People of Color, “a foolish and wicked prejudice against color” was the e­ nemy of such princi­ples.31

Impediments Alexander Crummell’s 1839 rebellion did not involve weapons, ships, or national governments. The Black New York City native sought to gain admittance to the Episcopal Church’s General Theological Seminary on equal terms to white candidates. In its way, Crummell’s ambition was as unsettling to his church as shipboard rebellion was to US law and diplomacy. His desire for or-

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dination and his willingness to publicly defend his attempt to do so earned him power­f ul enemies and determined friends. Chief among his enemies was New York bishop Benjamin Onderdonk; prominent among his friends ­were John Jay II and William Jay. More than fifty years ­later, Crummell still vividly recalled both the isolation that his frustrating ­battle for admission to the seminary provoked and the generosity he received from the Jays. Crummell remembered feeling “completely at sea; . . . ​the ministry seemed to me a hopeless ­thing.” Crummell went on, “Hardly a churchman, clerical or lay, would touch such a presumptuous Negro, such a disturber of the peace as myself. The anger against me on e­ very side was almost universal and intense.” The two Jays ­were among the only white Episcopalians willing to treat him as something other than a pariah.32 In contrast to their support of shipboard rebels Cinqué and Washington, the Jays’ help given to Crummell was up close and personal. Their involvement in his strug­gle further tutored t­ hese white patricians in the ways of northern racism. The early parts of Crummell’s story informed William’s antiracist decalogue. Yet, allyship with Crummell continued beyond the writing of Condition of the ­Free P­ eople of Color and helped galvanize a long-­term commitment of f­ather and son to rid their church of its most racially prejudicial practices. Some of the most impor­tant “Impediments”—to education, to religious instruction, and to honest industry—­taken up in William’s pamphlet on northern racism were embodied in Crummell’s quest. Education represented for William Jay a flashpoint of American hy­poc­risy and an opportunity for pro­g ress. As he said at the outset of his review of educational discrimination, “No p­ eople have ever professed so deep a conviction of the importance of popu­lar education as ourselves, and no ­people have ever resorted to such cruel expedients to perpetuate abject ignorance.” Jay’s concern was access to educational resources, rather than integration for its own sake. He noted that certain cities already had Black schools: no doubt he had in mind Manhattan’s well-­developed network of African ­Free Schools that had recently been absorbed into the public school system u ­ nder the auspices of his ­brother Peter, then president of the Public School Society of New-­York. In the countryside, however, as Jay recognized, prejudice and a dispersed African American population usually meant that Black ­children got ­little or no education at all. Such discriminatory conditions meant that the higher, socially transforming, levels of education ­were almost entirely closed to ­free ­people of color. Reviewing the “almost insuperable obstacles to the acquisition of a liberal education by colored youth,” he asserted that less than a dozen Blacks had received a college education in the past three de­cades.33 Such conditions he could not abide.

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To illustrate the lengths whites would go to deny Black ­people a chance to study, Jay recounted the fate of an integrated acad­emy in Canaan, New Hampshire. As Jay reported, white residents ­there resolved not only to exclude Blacks from the newly chartered school but also to preemptively ban any attempt to establish a school for Blacks in the town. When the school enrolled a racially mixed population anyway, hundreds of men and their oxen demolished the acad­emy building. Although Jay did not mention Crummell by name, he, as well as fellow New Yorkers and African F ­ ree School alumni Henry Highland Garnet and Thomas Sidney, ­were among the Black students at the New Hampshire acad­emy. Indeed, the abolitionist speeches that the three New Yorkers gave in New Hampshire on the Fourth of July added fuel to the racist fire. Crummell recalled many years l­ ater, “Fourteen black boys with books in their hands set the entire Granite State crazy!” Two months l­ ater, f­ uture civil rights leader Garnet held off an attack on their boarding­house with a r­ ifle. As a parting shot, someone fired artillery at the New Yorkers as they left Canaan for good. (The three subsequently made their way to the progressive Oneida Institute in upstate New York to further their education.)34 Crummell’s clash with the Episcopal hierarchy, as well as the experience of his New York religious mentor, Peter Williams Jr., helped fuel Jay’s entries on “Impediments to Religious Instruction” and “Impediments to Honest Industry.” Williams was surely among t­ hose whom Jay had in mind when he noted, “Colored ministers are occasionally ordained in the dif­fer­ent denominations, but they are kept at a distance by their white brethren in the ministry.” The pioneering Black Episcopalian had suffered a variety of indignities and humiliations as he established his own African American parish of St. Philip’s, only to see it held at arm’s length by the church’s bishop and governing structure. Jay’s 1839 pamphlet cited Crummell’s recently launched strug­gle for admission to the Episcopal seminary as an example of how difficult it was for African Americans in the North to work in “any other than menial occupations.” Jay did not mince words in his section on “Honest Industry” when he wrote, “­There is a conspiracy, embracing all the departments of society, to keep the black man ignorant and poor.”35 Neither William Jay nor his son John found this state of affairs acceptable. Indeed, Crummell’s confrontation with the Episcopal hierarchy gave the Jays, ­father and son, a chance to practice what they preached. John Jay II extended himself as a confidant, adviser, and advocate a­ fter Crummell’s first attempts to gain traction with the seminary and with Bishop Benjamin Onderdonk had gone badly. The bishop resented Crummell’s temerity; rather than taking no for an answer, the candidate had petitioned the seminary’s board of trustees. A committee chaired by Bishop Henry Onder-

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donk of Philadelphia (Benjamin’s ­brother) denied the petition. ­After the board rejected Crummell, Onderdonk called the young man into his study, where the New York bishop proceeded to berate him. Crummell l­ ater recalled that he sat “utterly bewildered” in his garret apartment the day that a white man not much older than he had ascended the staircase to commiserate with him. John Jay II supported Crummell in two related ways: he helped publicize Crummell’s strug­gle against prejudice within the church and encouraged his Black peer’s inclination to remain firm in the face of Onderdonk’s stick-­and-­carrot approach. The bishop demanded that Crummell repudiate his public defenders, while holding out the possibility of special tutorials with members of the faculty as a path to ordination. But, as John reported to a correspondent in ­England, Crummell refused to back down, “display[ing] . . . ​Christian firmness & christian humility through all his t­ rials,” aware of the larger abolitionist enterprise to which he was attached.36 ­Doing his part, William Jay sought to ensure that Crummell receive the education that his steadfast commitment to his calling and his dignity merited. The judge solicited his wealthy abolitionist collaborator Gerrit Smith for moral and financial support of Crummell. Having met with Crummell personally, Jay vouched for the young man’s good character and his “firmness” in the face of unwarranted adversity. Fortunately, commented Jay, “he has been true to himself & his brethren” in the face of tormentors. Crummell also had the support of the Black community. Cornish’s Colored American had exposed his tribulations, and African Americans had already begun raising money for Crummell’s ordination elsewhere.37 William and John Jay helped mobilize a network of financial sponsors and character references for Crummell as he traveled to New ­England to pursue his religious education. He studied at Yale, William Jay’s alma mater. In 1842, Crummell received his ordination in Boston. Crummell’s travails, which w ­ ere far from over, provided further motivation to the Jays to combat racism within the Episcopal Church and society at large (see Figure 10).38

Insult and Outrage In late December 1838, almost a year before William published his pamphlet on racism, the judge received a letter from Athens, Georgia, written by J. J. Flournoy, seeking to disabuse the northern writer of his “misconception . . . ​upon the negro question.” This southern educational reformer and author instructed the abolitionist that the discrepancy between “the distinct Races of mankind” was not merely a m ­ atter of color. Flournoy sought to justify white control of African

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Figure 10.  Alexander Crummell. Harper’s Weekly, April 14, 1866, 237. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Americans by citing the Bible, specifically the sin of Noah’s son Ham against his ­father. Ham, Flournoy reported to Jay, was cursed with “a dark hue” as a sign of his “inferiority.” The ­whole divine reason, asserted the southerner, for being turned Black was “to avoid what you are trying to bring about to our lasting Shame and confusion, Amalgamation! or an interminglement of the races.” The violation of this prohibition produced the “violent men” of places like Spain, South Amer­i­ca, and Turkey. Flournoy argued, that although “colour is not

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the cause” for why “we have the negroes u ­ nder us—­their lot is forever servile constitutionally inferior to us, and the colour is a mark of Heaven upon them, to indicate who are not blessed. In this southern correspondent’s mind, abolitionists like Jay had trivialized the sign of God’s curse and therefore the racial hierarchy by dismissing subordination as a mere product of color prejudice. On the back of this letter, William Jay simply wrote, “not answered.”39 Apparently, he deemed this logic of racial prejudice beneath his contempt. Several months l­ater, in April 1839, William Jay answered a very dif­fer­ent letter from Indiana. Richard Moran, self-­identified as “a quadroon Slave,” wrote Jay in distress. Moran reported that Jeremiah ­Sullivan, a “strong colonizationist,” had become an officer of that state’s abolition society. He hoped that Jay could persuade ­Sullivan to embrace au­then­tic abolitionist princi­ples. In a postscript, Moran apologized for the quality of his writing, “being an ignorant man, and having never went to School but thirteen days in my ­whole life.” Jay responded to the Hoosier’s self-­deprecation by commenting, “Permit me to remark that when ‘a quadroon Slave’ can write letters containing sentiments & expressions like ­those of the letter you have addressed to me, he affords a new & power­f ul proof of the wickedness of Slavery & the duty & policy of emancipation.”40 Jay made clear distinctions in his own mind between indefensible prejudice and liberating evidence. His essay On the Condition of F­ ree ­People of Color provided a brief for all the ways his northern compatriots enforced prejudice over liberty. The final violation in William Jay’s ten-­part indictment of northern racism was “Subjection to Insult and Outrage.” The threats to f­ree p­ eople of color that Jay exposed in this last section and, indeed, throughout his essay on racism ­were far more concrete than Flournoy’s biblical philosophizing about the curse of Ham. The insults borne by f­ ree African Americans ran the gamut from mean to un-­Christian to life threatening and sadistically cruel. On one end of the spectrum, Jay cited the published rules of a New York zoo that only Black domestic servants actively attending to their white employers might enter the grounds. The money of a ­free Black simply ­eager to see the exhibits was not good enough for this menagerie. The value that northern whites placed on separation was, to Jay’s mind, extraordinary. He cited the example of a Presbyterian graveyard in Philadelphia that sought to encourage white p­ eople to purchase cemetery plots by promising to exclude Blacks and capitally punished criminals from burial t­ here. As Jay remarked, “Even death, the g­ reat leveller, is not permitted to obliterate, among Christians, the distinction of caste.” His choice of the term “caste” was not accidental. Jay believed that American Christians had perverted their faith by perpetuating a system of distinctions akin to what he regarded as the absurd superstitions of the Hindus of India.

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On the other end of the spectrum, the baseless “indignities” born of color-­ coded social ranking could be fatal. Jay reported that a Black clergyman’s wife died ­after being subjected to the ele­ments overnight on a steamship: Black ­people ­were not allowed in the cabins. From ordinary expressions of “contempt” it was, in Jay’s estimation, a short step to the kinds of urban riots that forced Black p­ eople to flee from their destruction. From a Philadelphia newspaper, Jay quoted a gruesome detail of a rampage through African American homes: “­there was a corpse, which was thrown from the coffin, and in another a dead infant was taken out of the bed, and cast on the floor, the ­mother being at the same time barbarously treated.”41 William Jay may have written “not answered” on Flournoy’s letter explaining the God-­g iven necessity of racism. But, in a sense, William Jay’s essay and, even more so, his Black-­resistance-­inspired activism of the late 1830s and early 1840s provided his answer. The extraordinary expressions of equality by the likes of Cinqué, Madison Washington, and Alexander Crummell exposed basic patterns of vio­lence, discrimination, and cruelty that mocked concepts of liberty throughout the northern states. The impediments, denials, and exclusions might be worse in some places than in ­others, but the mentality and experience of prejudice w ­ ere pervasive. In the introduction to Condition of the ­Free P­ eople of Color, William cautioned that “some zealous advocates of emancipation have flattered themselves that, could the prejudice be destroyed, negro slavery would fall with it.” History and current circumstances belied that ­simple formula: the classical empires of the Mediterranean practiced slavery without race, whereas in the South, light-­ skinned females commanded higher not lower prices. Still, abolitionism would never triumph while racism’s virulence went uncontested in the North.42 Through their encounters with Black re­sis­tance, the Jays fortified their belief that—in God’s kingdom as in man’s—­the distinction between the superstition of racial prejudice and the truth of universal humanity was absolute.

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Soul and Nation

For a person who had just lost his older ­brother, Peter Augustus, and who had been fired from a government office he held for a quarter-­century, William Jay expressed remarkable optimism in the spring of 1843. His ­brother’s death, he could put in spiritual and historical perspective. And he wore his removal from the bench as a badge of honor: Judge Jay felt quite certain that his views on slavery had caused New York governor William  C. Bouck to lower the boom. Northern Demo­crats like Bouck stood “ever ready and ­eager to barter the welfare, honor, and freedom of ” their region to garner “Southern votes.” Indeed, his opponents had done him a ­favor, he wrote: “Against this system [of slavery] I have contended, as did my ­father before me; and the leisure Governor Bouck has given me ­shall be faithfully devoted to the prosecution of the warfare.”1 Jay’s spirits continued to rise that spring. In a letter to Ohio antislavery attorney Salmon P. Chase, the New Yorker expressed confidence that the war against slavery was progressing well. Moreover, Jay was pleased to find another Episcopalian, the nephew of an Ohio bishop in fact, who might join the often lonely fight for Black equality within the church. Together they could douse the flames of racism that burned such a gaping hole in the moral vestments of their denomination. More broadly, Jay sensed that abolitionists now had the opportunity to build “public sentiment” on behalf of their cause. Setting aside his usual skepticism of electoral politics, Jay anticipated a bright f­ uture for the 255

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Liberty Party. Jay proclaimed to Chase, “On the ­whole in my opinion nothing but the annexation of Texas can long postpone the overthrow of slavery.”2 Less than two years ­later, Jay found his hopes crumbling. In March 1845, Jay wrote Chase, “Slavery has broken out of the enclosure within which we would certainly have hunted her to death.” The Liberty Party was in shambles. The annexation of Texas demonstrated the power of slaveholding interests. The subsequent drumbeat for war with Mexico would challenge Jay’s notion held only a few years ­earlier that “we live in an age of moral won­ders” leading to the spread of peace. So ­little pro­g ress had been made against the proslavery leanings of the Episcopalian hierarchy that William ­later pled with Chase not to leave the New Yorker virtually alone as a prominent white abolitionist within the church’s walls.3 The turbulence of the 1840s prompted William Jay to peer ever more deeply into the character of the national experiment. Annexation of Texas and war with Mexico called into question the entire national proj­ect to which the Jay name and identity w ­ ere tied. Meanwhile, the role American churches played in the perpetuation of slavery and the defense of racism undermined their moral standing. Jay openly considered disunion, as events forced him to engage with ideas associated with the Garrisonian wing of the movement from which he had separated: abolition might necessitate letting go of the Union and walking out of the church. Renouncing religious affiliation and calling for the dissolution of the United States could be similar gestures of moral purification and high princi­ple. Yet Jay recoiled against the impulse to come out of the church even as he contemplated the merits of po­liti­cal disunion.4 Far from destroying their fighting spirit, however, national instability induced William Jay and his New York attorney son John Jay II to venture more deeply into both church politics and po­liti­cal abolitionism. They took personal and public aim at their church’s hierarchy. The Jays also more readily defended the value of antislavery po­liti­cal parties and cultivated relationships with rising po­liti­cal stars—­Mas­sa­chu­setts’s Charles Sumner, in addition to Ohio’s Chase—in hopes of finding a way forward.5 For William, removal from the bench and increased po­liti­cal engagement made him even more intellectually daring. A military campaign fought to advance the interests of slaveholders compounded the nation’s wrongs, yet William became no less convinced that princi­ples of peace and abolitionism remained compatible. The Mexican War, which Jay eviscerated in his well-­ circulated book, A Review of the ­Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War, raised profound questions about the relationship between public opinion and moral leadership. ­These questions ­were impor­tant to resolve ­because on the answers hung the ­f uture of both slavery and the republic. Public opinion pro-

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vided a leaky hull for the ship of state sailing through the perilous w ­ aters of 1840s American democracy. But without public opinion, ­there was no ship of state to sail at all.

Requiem for a Reformer Peter Augustus Jay’s death on February 20, 1843, served as a reminder that servitude and ser­vice, slavery and race, remained at the heart of the Jay identity, even in the more cautious branch of the ­family headed by the older of John Jay’s two sons. Prominent white ­legal colleagues and leading Black New Yorkers marked the passing of the well-­connected corporate attorney and philanthropist who had stuck with the New-­York Manumission Society long ­after it had drifted to the margins of antislavery activism. A week a­ fter his death, a group of Black admirers convened at the Philomathean Hall, where African Americans met to discuss intellectual and po­liti­cal issues, to commemorate his life. The gathering produced a resolution noting Peter Augustus Jay’s “early and unremitted exertions in the Manumission Society,” as well as “his interest in our educational and religious advancement.” The resolution labeled him “a benefactor of our despised race.” Boston Crummell was among ­those selected to convey the resolution to Peter’s f­amily, apparently not placing any blame on the trustee of the General Theological Seminary for his son Alexander’s travails. Peter Augustus had been an old school elite patron of New York’s African Americans, who had not made the transition to the more provocative brand of abolitionist advocacy. Nonetheless, this patrician’s years of ser­vice to the NYMS, his role as a legislative advocate, and his heroic defense of Black voting rights at the Constitutional Convention of 1821 earned the re­spect of Black New Yorkers.6 In passing along their condolences to Peter’s ­family, ­these African American citizens also implicitly reminded the next generation of Jays that their obligations of charity and justice continued. In death, Peter Augustus Jay made a personal gesture in keeping with the ­family’s long-­standing paternalism t­ oward select former bondspeople. His w ­ ill, written less than a year before he died, included a stipulation to “give to Caesar Valentine, a black man long a servant in my ­family an annuity of forty eight dollars a year during his life.” Peter further sought to maintain this multigenerational chain of obligation by stating, “I request my c­ hildren not to let him suffer if through age or infirmity he should be unable to support himself with comfort.” A $48 annuity was neither a ­great nor a trivial sum. He granted another long-­time employee, Giles Green, $250 in outright cash. Depending on how long Caesar lived, his annuity might add up to a few hundred dollars as

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well. Caesar, however, had no direct control over his inheritance, no ability to pass along anything other than what he might save to anyone ­else. The obligation and the payments to Caesar may not have lasted long. ­There is no rec­ ord of C. Valentine in Westchester County in the 1850 census, nor did the ­house­hold of John Clarkson Jay, Peter’s son who inherited the Rye estate, contain anyone who resembled his description.7 Peter’s request that his ­children collectively look ­after Caesar’s well-­being as he aged carried forward a f­ amily tradition inculcated by his f­ ather John Jay. Slavery had not become an abstraction or a distant evil but rather remained an ongoing legacy. History required personal accountings based on long-­ standing hierarchical and ethical assumptions. William Jay marked Peter’s passing by making a gift that threaded together ­family, slavery, and his b­ rother’s commitment to the preservation of New York’s history. One of Peter’s civic proj­ects had been the New-­York Historical Society. Peter had presided over the organ­ization, helped secure it a permanent home, and donated to its collections. A month a­ fter his b­ rother’s death William transferred to the Historical Society four thousand pages of recent parliamentary documents on the slave trade and slavery. In transmitting the documents to the Historical Society, William could not resist driving home his own views on abolition. His missive accompanying the documents celebrated the success of emancipation in the West Indies, seeing it as proof that immediate abolitionism was far superior to gradual abolition.8 As he pressed on with his own life’s work, William wanted his b­ rother’s elite former colleagues to take heed that the ­family’s abolitionist commitments lived on.

War and Peace Like his older ­brother Peter Augustus, William Jay had never been content to focus his reform energies solely on slavery. In the early 1840s, William opened a new chapter in his activist c­ areer by embracing the cause of international peace. Peace advocacy held an almost natu­ral attraction to William. He was the son of one of the founding era’s foremost diplomats, he was a skeptic of war dating at least as far back as the 1812 clash with G ­ reat Britain, and he was a critic of dueling on moral grounds. The judge’s l­egal expertise and the diplomatic controversies stirred by the Amistad and ­later the Creole affairs may have further prompted him to pursue this interest. Antislavery and peace advocacy had long shared transatlantic networks into which Jay tapped. By 1842, Jay was not only an officer in the American Peace Society (APS) but also the author

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of War and Peace: The Evils of the First and a Plan for Preserving the Last, a treatise on how to end war between nations. Peace advocacy complemented, rather than diverted, Jay from his antislavery work. Indeed, similar assumptions guided Jay’s approach to both peace and abolition. He sought to foster moral transformation outside of corrupted government structures without denying that states legitimately constituted the ongoing framework of law and society. In confronting the prob­lem of war and peace, he wrestled with the same paradoxes presented to him as an abolitionist in the 1840s regarding the necessity and the folly of relying on public opinion. The success of British abolitionism made advancement t­ oward a peaceful international system seem more plausible. British abolitionists had won without “armies” or bloodshed; “solely by the exhibition of truth,” a “glorious triumph of humanity” came to pass.9 Personal contacts with British reformers helped draw Jay into peace advocacy. Jay and Anglican minister Thomas Pyne, who would become a leading British peace promoter, had a cordial relationship and mutual reform interests. Pyne channeled publications relating to peace to Jay, explaining in July 1839 that “they who are devoted heart & fortune to the abolition of slavery must necessarily be friends of Peace.” Jay, in a December 1839 letter seeking to enlist Pyne in the strug­gle against racism in the Episcopal Church, affirmed, “It is the part of true patriotism to avoid not invite the horrors of war.” When Quaker and prominent En­glish reformer Joseph Sturge visited Bedford in May 1841, William shared a manuscript he had written, “On the Folly and Evils of War,” in which he proposed the use of arbitration agreements between nations. The En­glishman regarded Jay’s proposal as “beautifully s­ imple, and of easy application.” Sturge returned to E ­ ngland determined to make Jay’s idea a centerpiece of a growing and more or­ga­nized movement. A revised version of the full argument would find a publisher in New York and, with Sturge’s help, in London in 1842, the same year William became a vice president of the APS.10 By becoming active in the APS, Jay once again planted himself on the opposite side of a schism with the Garrisonians and implicitly sought to reclaim another epochal goal, the abolition of war, from the anti-­institutionalism of more radical activists. The Garrisonian-­minded advocates of pacifism had already defected from the APS in 1838, so Jay was not saddled with the need to ­battle them internally. Jay rejected the nonre­sis­tance creed both in his abolitionism and his peace advocacy. To Judge Jay’s mind, the personal “right of self-­defence,” the need to arrest criminals and pirates, and the “right indispensable to the very existence of civil government of enforcing obedience to the

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laws” need not be argued. The path to world peace lay in fostering a new set of relationships between states that possessed domestic authority.11 Jay envisioned a sort of virtuous domino theory, with the United States knocking over the props of war by entering into treaties to resolve all conflicts through arbitration, rather than fighting. As nations gradually signed on to agreements with one another, the momentum would build for the creation of an international court. All of “Christendom,” perhaps Eu­rope first but South Amer­i­ca as well, would be drawn into a peaceful “alliance” with the United States. Over time, the threads of bilateral agreements for peaceful arbitration would become a web of international conflict resolution that would banish war.12 Some of Jay’s arguments against war paralleled objections to slavery and the slave trade. War ripped families apart and exposed young men to vice. Militarism, like slavery and proslavery politics, undermined republics, ­because “war is in its nature adverse to po­liti­cal freedom,” it “strengthen[s] arbitrary power,” and it encourages “malignant passions” as well as “fraud and crime.”13 In essence, militarism combined features of the gag rule, Andrew Jackson’s denunciation of abolitionist publicity, and the anti-­abolitionist mobs of northern cities—­all of which Jay despised. The existence of slavery complicated what Sturge had called Jay’s “beautifully ­simple” plan. Slavery illustrated why politicians could not be trusted: slaveholding interests threatened to light the fire of war, and slave re­sis­tance brought nations into conflict. Abolishing war required abolishing slavery. Jay proclaimed in his peace treatise that the United States stood poised for the “glory of teaching to mankind the blessings of peace and the means of securing them,” but elsewhere in his essay, he showed that the nation’s divisions placed this ­f uture citadel of peace at odds with itself. Slavery discredited his own government, as Jay pointed out: “Perhaps the most sublimated wickedness and baseness in degree” at the moment are “practised in the city of Washington” where Black p­ eople merely suspected as runaways w ­ ere jailed and then sold “to pay their jail fees!!” The alleged honor of the country and its flag induced the US government to undermine the British-­led transatlantic alliance against the slave trade by refusing to allow its ships to be searched, in effect making it pos­si­ble for illegal slavers from any country to gain protection by flying the Stars and Stripes. Jay scornfully commented, “Such is national honor, the safeguard of nations, and, for the maintenance of which, national slaughter is indispensable!”14 The Creole rebellion provided another example of how slavery drew the United States ­toward war rather than peace. “Millions” of slavery’s American defenders rattled sabers over British “oppression” when the return of the for-

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merly enslaved cargo was not forthcoming. Jay even ­imagined an American strike on the British West Indies bringing a liberating Black army from the Ca­ rib­bean to the South, “kindling a conflagration” of devastating proportions.15 Slavery was clearly at odds with peacemaking. As with abolitionism, Jay’s skepticism about demo­cratic culture stood in tension with his hope that it would force the hand of government to pursue more moral policies. Jay’s proposal for abolishing all international warfare centered on the negotiation of diplomats functioning in a system of states. Ordinary ­people, Jay believed, had to hold their leaders’ feet to the fire to ensure they would comply with their treaty obligations. In the current age, “the pro­ gress of education and the power of the press, enables ­every individual to sit in judgment on the conduct of his rulers.” The ­people’s voice would complement the evolving world system’s desire to enforce international agreements. War, like the slave trade and the trade in strong drink, would therefore be driven from the world by “voluntary associations, the pulpit, and the press.”16 Moral individuals working together would redirect the state—­with the power of moral suasion transforming the international order in a way that had, to date, failed in terms of slavery. Jay’s essay on slavery made a splash in Britain but drew criticism at home in the United States. The London Peace Society produced four thousand copies of War and Peace for the 1842 Conference of the Friends of Peace. In contrast, the Boston Quarterly Review, a pro-­Democratic Party journal, dismissed Jay’s effort with undisguised condescension and contempt. Jay should be seen as “much better fitted for the moon than for the earth.” Anyone who preached such doctrines when the nation was ­under risk of war, “why, up with him to the lamp-­ post” to be hung like a “traitor.” “It is better to fight, to kill or be killed on the battle-­field, than to live and die a slave,” claimed the reviewer without irony— in essence, confirming Jay’s belief that peace reform and slavery w ­ ere at odds.17 Like his embrace of immediatism, his pursuit of world peace forced William Jay to implicitly challenge his ­father’s more conventional legacy. Indeed, in some ways, his peace advocacy challenged his f­ather’s assumptions about the world more than his abolitionism did. John Jay had argued well into retirement for the l­egal and practical necessity of “just” war. William Jay also was well aware that the American Revolution had embedded the defense of war in the American psyche. Seeing no way around this conundrum, William frankly admitted the death, destruction, degraded morals, and even “despotic” powers of “our ­fathers,” before making the argument that the colonies could have purchased their freedom at a much lower price than what that which the Revolutionary War had imposed on them.18 A commitment to moral reform had once again made this conservative man a radical thinker.

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Caste, Convention, and Come-­Outerism The hierarchy of the Protestant Episcopal Church would have dearly loved if the Jays had been more radical, renouncing their affiliation, and coming out of the church entirely. Instead, William and John II continued to belong while loudly and disruptively insisting that racism and slavery needed to be excised from the church. The Jays, part of a tiny minority of abolitionist leaders connected to the Episcopal Church, would not forget, forgive, or leave. In refusing to come out of their church, the Jays conducted a lonely but loud fight over its soul. No two white p­ eople did more to implicate the Episcopal Church for its racial sins that William Jay and John Jay II.19 In the 1840s, William Jay deployed increasingly inflammatory rhe­toric. An 1843 letter titled “Reply to a Letter from a Clergymen of the Episcopal Church” and published in NASS declared, “The southern conscience is diseased by self-­ interest, by habit, by example, and by” bad ministers. Jay directly addressed one of the standard canards against emancipation offered by slavery’s defenders—­ intermarriage or so-­called amalgamation: “If white ­fathers, ­mothers, ­brothers, and ­sisters prefer such marriages, I know no law of God that forbids them to gratify their eccentric tastes.” He went on, “But surely,” fear of racial mixing “is a strange reason for keeping millions of ­human beings in bondage” ­until the end of time, especially given the prevalence of the practice ­under slavery itself.20 Rather than retreat from the racially charged rhe­toric that anti-­abolitionists had long deployed, he turned that rhe­toric back against his church to mock distinctions of color. Still rankled by Alexander Crummell’s ill treatment, John Jay II engaged in criticism of the church that also grew more sweeping and intense over time. In 1843, writing as “A Churchman,” the young attorney published a fifty-­one-­ page pamphlet titled Caste and Slavery in the American Church that amplified the ­family’s concerns. “­Every act of clerical inconsistency, ­every crouching to an unholy prejudice, ­will be apt to reflect their own dishonor upon the Church at large,” wrote John. Status did not elevate racism. ­Whether espoused by “a lawless gang of shirtless ruffians” or prestigious clergy, “prejudice against colour” required denunciation. Once admitted into the church, the caste princi­ ple locked arms with the chattel princi­ple, making it permissible to purchase slaves to sustain charitable proj­ects while leaving t­hose slaves languishing in spiritual ignorance. The church’s subordination to slavery thus made “divine truth and eternal princi­ple” seem “chamelion-­like.” The church had much work to do to “vindicate the purity of our Holy Faith.”21 Discrimination against St. Philip’s, an African American parish in Manhattan, by New York State’s Episcopal Diocese gave John Jay II a specific cause to

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fight for in his effort to “vindicate” the ­family faith. New York City’s first Black Episcopal church had a long, paradox-­ridden history with the church hierarchy. African American Episcopalians first started worshipping separately from Trinity Church in 1809. It took a de­cade for Black worshippers to secure funding for their own church building, recognition as a separate parish, and approval from the Episcopal Church to set in motion the ordination of a priest, Peter Williams Jr. He would not receive formal ordination u ­ ntil 1826. The autonomy of St.  Philip’s parish, however, came at a price. New York bishop John Henry Hobart exchanged his patronage for a promise from Williams that the Black parish would never seek to participate in the state’s diocesan convention. St. Philip’s developed its practices along High Church lines favored by New York’s Episcopal bishops rather than the less liturgically august, less clerically deferential Low Church views favored by the Jays. St. Philip’s historic alliance with New York’s bishops made it wrenching for members of the congregation to bear witness to the indignities of discrimination within the Episcopal Church. T ­ oward the end of his life, Williams began to reconsider the parish’s exclusion from diocesan repre­sen­ta­tion. Black churchmen, however, did not contest this prob­lem in earnest ­until well ­after Peter Williams Jr. passed away in 1840.22 John Jay II made the first dramatic public attempt to force the issue of inclusion at the New York Episcopal Church’s 1844 annual diocesan meeting. From the floor, he moved that the committee charged with admitting new parishes probe why St. Philip’s did not have a place at the convention. He made this motion using the most inflammatory term pos­si­ble, labeling the exclusion of St. Philip’s as “a state of schism.” In other words, the arrangement was not an oversight but a division that in essence sinfully destroyed the spiritual unity of the Episcopal Church. Bishop Benjamin Onderdonk, the presiding officer, dismissed the motion as not following proper procedure.23 Stymied at the convention, Jay took advantage of Onderdonk’s personal vulnerability to undermine the bishop’s authority by stoking the flames of sexual scandal. According to Bishop Onderdonk, John Jay and a colleague from South Carolina trolled for testimony of rumored sexual misconduct and fed what they found to his ­eager clerical rivals in autumn 1844. A leading supporter of High Church views sympathetic to the Catholic-­sounding Oxford movement tracts produced by members of the En­glish church, Onderdonk had his enemies. He therefore claimed that false or misleading accusations of his penchant for fondling churchwomen served as a stalking ­horse for religious opinions that some of his colleagues viewed with disfavor. Be that as it may, the 330-­page published transcript of the December trial conducted by the Episcopal Church detailed the bishop’s serial groping of unsuspecting ­women. His peers ruled

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11–6 that the charges of inappropriate sexual advances had merit. In a 9–8 vote, the bishops also approved an open-­ended suspension for the wayward cleric.24 John Jay reveled in his role as part of the team that had laid Bishop Onderdonk low, but New York’s African Amer­i­ca Episcopalians ­were divided over ­whether his suspension advanced their cause. The official response of the St. Philip’s vestry to Onderdonk’s precarious situation was one of sympathy: ­because “we do not know aught of the truth of the charges,” the vestrymen expressed “profound and overwhelming grief ” that at least for the moment they would lose “the public ser­vices of our shepherd.” The vestry evoked their own dignity and striving for equality by extending Christian charity to the bishop, perhaps hoping to secure ­f uture support from Onderdonk should his suspension be lifted.25 Other Black Episcopalians forthrightly seized on the opportunity to define Onderdonk’s humiliation as a blow for racial justice. In a letter by “a colored episcopalian” printed in NASS argued that once Onderdonk became a bishop he ceased to be a friend of St. Philip’s, undermining Peter Williams Jr., rejecting Alexander Crummell, and now unfairly attacking the illustrious John Jay II. The Onderdonk ­brothers, former Philadelphia bishop Henry Onderdonk and Benjamin, would “go down to all ­future times as deep, inveterate, determined negro haters.”26 A group of thirty-­three Black New Yorkers, including Boston Crummell, signed their own published letter rejecting the notion that Jay’s intervention on St. Philip’s behalf was unwanted and stating how pleased they w ­ ere that Jay had joined them in the fight against “Caste in the Church.” They “hail[ed] the glorious fact of a young man of your name and character, your advantages and prospects, closing your ears to the enticements of popularity, and calmly choosing the almost deserted pathway of philanthropy and freedom”; furthermore, they paid tribute to the Jay f­ amily’s antislavery lineage. Connecting the dots between Onderdonk’s fall, Jay’s pedigreed antislavery advocacy, and agitation for equal rights within the church made more sense to t­hese African Americans than currying the suspended bishop’s ­favor. Jay’s accompanying response published in the NASS warmed to the praise and the opportunity to connect dots of his own. Soaring above Onderdonk’s sordid sins, the young white ­lawyer sermonized on the way forward for African Americans. He sided with t­ hose African Americans who favored confrontation with the church hierarchy over conciliation as part of a broader strategy to combat racism. Not only the church but also “scientific pretenders endeavor to prove by the aid of philosophy, that you are irrevocably destined to an inferior position.” Complacency in the face of such religious and scientific libel would make African Americans “involuntary apologists and abettors of the

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wrongs” they suffered. “The duty rests upon you to vindicate the dignity of your race and the honor of your Creator; to disprove the bold slander,” declared Jay. His Black partners, however, should fight on, knowing that “the ­g reat and the good” w ­ ere on their side.27 Jay, however, failed to convince St. Philip’s or the Episcopal Diocese of New York to fully back his confrontational approach to Onderdonk or to approve racial integration of the convention. In preparation for the 1845 diocesan convention, St. Philip’s vestry instructed a del­e­ga­tion to apply for admission. The vestry, however, also voted 7–1 that t­ hese representatives should oppose calls to turn Onderdonk’s suspension into a full resignation; Jay, for his part, sought to beat back any attempt to rehabilitate Onderdonk.28 The 1846 New York convention ­adopted a bureaucratic approach, rather than pure stonewalling, to deal with St. Philip’s renewed application: it empaneled a five-­man committee to report on the subject of Black churches. Two documents emerged, a majority report backed by three men defending the racial status quo and a minority report endorsed by two recommending that the convention cease to use color to justify St. Philip’s unusual separation from the main body of the church. The majority report repudiated Jay’s antiracist position. ­Because the “intelligent, refined, and elevated” diocesan representatives did not socially mingle with the “ignorant, coarse and debased,” they should not suffer “amalgamation of such discordant materials” in their religious deliberations.29 The ­battles against Onderdonk and on behalf of St. Philip’s ­were nested in a larger national and international strug­gle for the soul of their church. In 1846, William charged that the Episcopal Church “virtually suppressed” the En­glish bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce’s lengthy A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Amer­i­ca ­because it included passages critical of slavery and racism. William also aggressively denounced North Carolina bishop Silliman Ives in a December 1846 essay, ­after Ives dared to contradict the En­glish bishop’s critique of the American church. Jay regarded any spiritual offices that southern slaveholders offered their bondspeople worse than inadequate. What good ­were Good Friday or Easter ser­vices to a slave who could be sold the next day? What inspiration could slaves draw from a religion in which their marriages did not count and they ­were treated as inferior beings required to ­labor for ­others? The Episcopal Church, William Jay worried, had ceded the moral high ground with “pastoral admonitions against dancing, and sermons in abundance in ­favor of ­human bondage.”30 While Jay cared deeply about the ­battle for the soul of the Episcopal Church, he was also troubled by the collateral damage to the moral health of society at large. Religious hy­poc­risy over slavery and race, asserted Jay, empowered

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free-­thinking anti-­Christian radicals to make their bid for the public’s approval. Such “infidel philanthropy” based on “wild abstract po­liti­cal theories” would foster “anarchy and misery.” The monstrosity of slavery thus threatened to unravel the entire social fabric of both the North and South. Come-­outerism and even renunciation of religion entirely ­were clear and pre­sent dangers posed by his church’s continued failings.31 The intensity of the Jays’ activism within the Episcopal Church expressed, particularly for William, a need to square social conservatism and ­family identity with antislavery politics and antiracist beliefs. William revealed his personal motivations for remaining attached to such a flawed religious institution in an unusually frank six-­and-­a-­half-­page letter to Salmon Chase in May 1846. The rising Ohio politician had expressed doubt as to w ­ hether he could remain an Episcopalian given the church’s abysmal rec­ord on questions of race and slavery. Jay expressed how his own commitment to the church was akin to that of marriage: “I still love her from my heart, b­ ecause I believe that . . . ​she is the most pure and scriptural church in Christendom.” A break with the church was, for Jay, a form of personal infidelity, an act of unfaithfulness. To persuade Chase not to leave the Episcopal Church, the New Yorker disputed the very notion that ­there ­were any “proslavery churches” to come out of. No church, and certainly not the Episcopal Church, required “a profession of faith in the lawfulness of ­human bondage.” What the come-­outers advocated, charged Jay, was something that never did nor could ever exist: a “pure church.” Such perfectionism was bound to turn in on itself, b­ ecause sins other than slaveholding would still abound. The demand for “a perfect church” would lead to the end of all “public worship,” producing rather than undermining religious infidelity. One could denounce or boycott a “heretical” proslavery minister. Yet a minister who simply remained s­ ilent on slavery was unoffending, especially to a committed abolitionist who had no “need” to hear what he already knew.32 Ultimately, Jay implied that the come-­outers had every­thing backward. “Paradoxical as it may seem, the corruptions endangering our church” explain “why we should not desert her.” The Episcopal Church played a power­ful role in American life. An abolitionist walkout would ensure that the church’s “influence” would be all to the bad. Abolitionists in the church ensured that its message would be “broken & discordant,” not uniformly proslavery, and kept alive the possibility of turning ­toward a more righ­teous path. By contrast, “the slave holders would rejoice” if men like Jay and Chase left. Jay exhorted, “Let us . . . ​strive valiantly for the truth, giving our Bishops & Clergy no peace while they side with the oppressor.”

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Thus, Jay opted for voice over exit. He desired to perpetuate the faith of his ­father, much as he appreciated the faith of his son, who paid his tribute by investing so much of his own energy in challenging the church hierarchy over racism.33

Partisan Politics and the Specter of Disunion Intensifying ­battles against slavery and racism in the Episcopal Church during the mid-1840s took place alongside a series of po­liti­cal events that challenged the Jays, especially William, to find a fixed perspective on the nation’s ­f uture viability and to define their po­liti­cal obligations. The Jays sensed more deeply than ever that the politics of slavery threatened the survival of the nation with which the f­amily identified so deeply. Thus, even as the Jays got drawn into the po­liti­cal fights within their church, antislavery politics became almost impossible to resist. William articulated clearly his complete aversion to come-­ outerism in religion, but he could not so readily dismiss its po­liti­cal analog, disunionism. Ironically, William became less skeptical of the importance of electoral politics b­ ecause the survival of the nation seemed perilously dependent on po­liti­cal events.34 Meanwhile, John, living in New York City, cast about for new alliances to give the Jay antislavery creed a practical footing. Dismissal from his judicial post by Demo­cratic governor Bouck provided William Jay with an opportunity to travel abroad and to broadly contemplate his country’s prospects for surviving slavery-­driven politics. On November 1, 1843, William, his wife Augusta, and their ­daughters Maria and Augusta embarked aboard the Victoria on a trip that would take them to Eu­rope and the ­Middle East.35 He sensed that he was leaving a nation at a crossroads. In letters to Gerrit Smith written before his departure, Jay strug­gled to mute his combustible po­liti­cal analy­sis. He noted the current congressional agitation for Texas statehood; Jay wrote Smith, now a leading figure in the Liberty Party, that he would advocate “dissolution” of the Union in such an event. Conversely, if, through effective po­liti­cal organ­izing, including a concerted effort to make the major potential presidential candidates declare in advance their position on annexation, statehood for Texas ­were stymied, “the fate of slavery ­will be sealed” and the republic saved. Having declared himself so openly to his well-­connected abolitionist colleague, Jay soon thought the better of it. Ten days ­later, on October 31, when he was about to embark on his voyage, Jay dashed off a request that, if Smith wished to publish his letter, he leave off Jay’s name and some of his “reasons”

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for calling for po­liti­cal action. Jay did not wish to taint the Liberty Party or his own reputation with the sort of po­liti­cally schismatic views advocated by Garrison and his band of ultraradicals.36 The view from atop the ­g reat Egyptian pyramid of Giza on January 23, 1844, led William to ­counter his own apocalyptic musings with po­liti­cal determination. In a letter to Smith that made its way into the American abolitionist press five months ­later, Jay contemplated “a land for forty centuries cursed with Slavery.” Nature and history testified to God’s “wrath”—­the desert sands sweeping over Egypt’s “magnificent structures” while the nation’s “energies have been crushed by foreign rulers; and her inhabitants wasted by pestilence.” But as he looked homeward from his perch, the abolitionist former judge affirmed that “while trembling for my country I h ­ ere devote myself anew to the cause of American Abolition.”37 Three weeks ­later, on the same sheet of paper, Jay continued his observations to Smith, also published ­later in the abolitionist press, on what American slavery politics looked like from abroad. Writing from Malta, Jay observed that neither American slavery nor American freedom fared well when compared to conditions in the Mediterranean. Jay judged southern Christian slaveholders to be crueler than Muslim M ­ iddle Eastern ones. Jay acerbically explained that “the Turks have among them no Bishops and Clergy . . . ​teaching them that Slavery is a divine institution” and noted that Islamic religious institutions did not practice a caste system to screen out color-­coded undesirables. Moreover, “lynch law” did not prevail in the ­Middle East to teach lessons to slaves and abolitionists. Jay thought Egypt as safe as “a New E ­ ngland village.” Travel, Jay indicated, had not dulled his edge or his determination. The fifty-­ four-­year-­old now felt “years younger.” He proclaimed himself ready “to mingle once more in the mighty host which is now battling in the cause of ­human rights.” He also congratulated Smith on the Liberty Party’s pro­g ress in New York. Upon reading a published version of William Jay’s overseas observations, rising Mas­sa­chu­setts public intellectual Charles Sumner wrote to John Jay II, “I rejoice that he has found new incentives. . . . ​The leisure with which he is blessed ­will ripen with fruits of transcendant good.”38 In response to the expression of southern territorial ambitions that took place while his parents w ­ ere abroad, John Jay II stepped up his own po­liti­cal activism. Successive secretaries of state, John C. Calhoun and Abel Upshur tried to engineer Texas’s admission to the Union via a treaty. This treaty approach set a high bar, requiring approval by two-­thirds of the US Senate. John enlisted the venerable Albert Gallatin, who had served both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as secretary of the trea­sury, in the anti-­Texas cause, seeking to publicize the eighty-­three-­year-­old statesman’s views as widely as

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pos­si­ble. In the face of this crisis, the Jay f­ amily’s anti-­Jeffersonian bias melted away; the aged Gallatin served as the next best ­thing to a founding ­father in rebuking the Tyler administration’s attempt to bring Texas into the Union.39 By the time William returned to Amer­i­ca, the fate of Texas was bound up in the 1844 presidential contest. The failure of the Calhoun–­Upshur gambit to bring Texas into the Union via a treaty served as a backdrop for an election with enormous consequences. Demo­crat James Polk avowed his commitment to territorial expansion, which would include finding some way to admit Texas to the Union as a slave state. The Whig nominee Henry Clay opposed annexation and the war with Mexico that would likely ensue.40 William Jay, keeping faith with his promise made from the Mediterranean— to jump back into the abolitionist cause—­focused his efforts on swaying the views of Whig vice presidential nominee Theodore Frelinghuysen. The New Jersey senator had a reputation as a religiously motivated moral reformer. Jay published an open letter to Frelinghuysen attempting to show that a mainstream politician with his moral commitments could in fact embrace abolitionist princi­ples. Jay argued that ­because neither the American Anti-­Slavery Society’s constitution nor the Liberty Party advocated that the federal government could preempt state laws allowing slavery, the reformer should not use that excuse for eschewing abolitionism. Frelinghuysen had stood up for temperance, Bible distribution, Sabbath observance, and foreign missions. Christians would therefore like to know, wrote Jay, “on what princi­ples of ethics, or what precepts of the Gospel of Christ, you oppose the abolition of slavery.” Jay suspected that Frelinghuysen was at heart far closer to the kind of person who might someday proclaim, “I am an abolitionist, and thank God I am,” than he was to being a proslavery apologist. Although this line of attack against the Whig vice presidential candidate would not transform that ticket into an antislavery one, Jay made his point that Christian and antislavery politics should be morally aligned. By that logic, the Liberty Party, an avowed antislavery party, might also be made to seem less radical to reform-­minded evangelicals.41 Indeed, Jay emphatically embraced the Liberty Party in 1844, ­running for a congressional seat in Westchester County u ­ nder the party’s banner. This was a turnabout from his previous re­sis­tance to attempts to press him into this sort of symbolic run for office. As he explained to Gerrit Smith a year ­earlier, “My life is devoted to the slave not for office”; self-­confessed as being “a very indifferent public speaker,” he wished to make a difference with his “pen,” not public appearances. Jay entered into the 1844 congressional campaign with studied modesty and realistically low expectations.42 The fortunes of the Liberty Party in the election of 1844 provoked a conflicted response from Jay. The results in New York and nationally exposed the

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conundrum that he and his Liberty Party associates faced. As Jay knew would be the case, he was not elected. At the presidential level, his home county remained a Demo­cratic one. The Liberty Party’s appeal elsewhere in the state, however, had a decisive impact on the presidential results. With thirty-­six electoral college votes at stake in New York, the Liberty Party candidate James G. Birney’s 3.25 ­percent of the vote in the exceptionally close Empire State tally tipped this large Electoral College prize from the Whigs to the Demo­crat. Six of Birney’s largest county vote totals nationally w ­ ere in New York, where some formerly Whig counties produced weak pluralities in ­favor of the Demo­cratic Polk. With Polk’s victory in New York came the White House.43 Jay sought to justify the Liberty Party’s uncompromised rejection of the major party candidates that had created the conditions for Polk’s hazardous victory. In a letter to Mas­sa­chu­setts Liberty Party state convention delegates, Jay defended the Liberty Party run as necessary, even though it abetted a looming disaster. He argued that a vote for Clay would have been just as “faithless to our avowed princi­ples” as a vote for Polk. Clay’s demerits included his owner­ ship of many slaves, his role in brokering the admission of slave states Missouri and Arkansas into the Union, his “repeatedly avowed hostility to emancipation, ­whether gradual or immediate,” and his membership in the American Colonization Society. The Demo­crat Polk, for his part, lacked even the advantage of Clay’s extensive rec­ord of public ser­vice and represented a party wholly subservient to the Slave Power. In contrast to such flawed parties, the Liberty Party stood on “princi­ple”—­and not merely as a “­little knot of fanatics.” By tipping an election, the Liberty Party now stood “before the ­whole nation in a prominent and imposing attitude,” commanding attention.44 Yet Jay conceded that t­ here was no getting around the dire results likely to follow from Polk’s Liberty Party-­enabled victory: the nation faced “calamity.” Demo­crats would surely do as their southern leaders demanded. They would support annexation of Texas “with the same childlike submission that they heretofore opened their jaws to receive the gag”—­a vivid adaptation of the commonly meta­phor for congressional rules against receiving antislavery petitions. Now “horrors” awaited. The humanitarian disaster of an intensifying interstate slave trade would be accompanied by the po­liti­cal disaster of Texas slaveholders benefiting from the US Constitution’s three-­fifths clause to swell the slaveholding interest in Congress. “Cotton, sugar, and h ­ uman flesh” would determine all US policies thereafter. Jay’s electoral analy­sis portended a vision of national moral collapse.45 The next shoe that dropped, the annexation of Texas, pushed Jay to publicly proclaim his readiness to usher in that national po­liti­cal collapse. Just before handing the executive branch over to President-­Elect Polk, President

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Tyler and his allies steered around the two-­thirds Senate majority required to approve a treaty with Texas that would make the in­de­pen­dent nation a US state. Instead, Texas entered the Union by a joint resolution approved by majorities of both h ­ ouses of Congress. U ­ nder the heading “Annexation of Texas-­ Duties of the North,” the National Ant-­Slavery Standard published Jay’s disunion manifesto, which blended constitutional analy­sis with prophesy and sectional retaliation.46 The most impor­tant fact for Jay was that the joint resolution method was “a clear, deliberate, fraudulent, wicked, and irremediable violation of the Constitution.” By circumventing the treaty pro­cess required to acquire territory from a foreign country, the Republic of Texas, the US government opted for “treason,” pursuing a legislative strategy that delivered a “wound . . . ​ to the Constitution [that] is utterly incurable.” The result of unconstitutional annexation, as Jay had predicted privately, was the transformation of the Constitution into an instrument to spread slavery throughout the Amer­i­cas. For all the document’s flawed legacies, as delineated in his own View of the Action of the Federal Government, this change profoundly undermined any hope of prodding the nation to abandon the institution. The North could no longer serve as a bulwark “against the cruelties and arrogance of the slaveholders” while slavery expanded. As the numbers of slaveholders inevitably grew, southerners would no longer need the po­liti­cal assistance of northern Demo­crats. The South by itself would have the votes to quash dissent, to make slaves of ­free ­people of color, and to ignore due pro­cess. Given the alacrity with which the slaveholding interest shunted aside the Constitution’s provisions and its presumptive neutrality on slavery in order to annex Texas, it was far more likely, in Jay’s estimation, that southerners would spread slavery northward than that northerners would engineer its national demise. Jay couched disunion as the most peaceful alternative, but barely so. The Union, Jay thought, would break up sooner or ­later ­under t­ hese new conditions. He urged that the non-­slaveholding states leave peaceably rather than through the civil war that would become inevitable if the sections remained together ­under a “mutilated” Constitution. Yet Jay’s proposed responses to the annexation of Texas seemed calculated to produce anything but an “amicable dissolution.” B ­ ecause the constitutional bargain that both protected slavery and ­limited its national footprint no longer existed, he pointed out, “We are left at liberty, unrestrained by any constitutional provisions or acts of Congress, to war upon Slavery by ­every pos­si­ble means not forbidden by the law of God.” This meant that northerners no longer had to abide by the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, which mandated that ­free states return runaway slaves. Even more provocatively (and long before Lincoln’s eye-­for-­an-­eye response to the execution of Black federal soldiers during the Civil War) Jay called for

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hostage taking. Whenever southern states kidnapped f­ree Black northerners and made them slaves, northerners should seize whites from t­ hose southern states u ­ ntil the wrongfully enslaved Blacks received “liberation and full compensation.” If Jay had come over to the Garrison camp of disunion, his logic did not adhere to the Garrisonian philosophy of nonre­sis­tance.47 The case for a radical renegotiation of the American proj­ect gained much of its gravitas from Jay’s ­family legacy. Henry Bowditch, a Mas­sa­chu­setts abolitionist, shared his ostensibly private letter from Jay with a Boston newspaper, which the NASS reprinted. He introduced Jay’s essay by linking William to the found­ers, referring to the judge as “the well-­known son of a well-­known sire, John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States—­the friend and adviser of Washington.” William’s essay may have sounded more like Tom Paine’s Common Sense than his f­ather’s contributions to the Federalist Papers, but his paternal ties to the founding and the Constitution implied that he had not reached his conclusions without careful consideration.48 Despite Jay’s power­f ul rhe­toric, his deep ambivalence about endorsing disunionism subsequently played out both in public and in private. He wavered over how hopeless he considered the pre­sent circumstances to be. William wrote Chase that he felt obligated, when Bowditch solicited a reaction to Jay on annexation, to tell the truth about his position. Yet two months ­later, NASS printed a letter that Jay wrote to Chase suggesting that all was not lost and placing his hopes in moderate mea­sures: “Prob­ably the freedom, happiness, and continuance of our Union ­will depend on the events of the next twelve months.” Jay encouraged “discretion and firmness becoming men who feel that the dearest interests of themselves and their posterity are in jeopardy” as opposed to “intemperate declamation and impracticable resolves.” Even so, the following month, Jay wrote a letter to Chase criticizing the logic by which the Ohio ­lawyer and abolitionist attempted to put the onus on the South for splitting up the country. In the wake of annexation, Jay insisted that any attempt to construe the Constitution as an antislavery document had become “practically impossible so long as the Union s­ hall continue.” Jay’s self-­described “gloomy” analy­sis was that “Liberty, or any other party” would not succeed in stripping the “power” of t­ hose who held slaves and that “the American Union w ­ ill become more & more a mighty instrument of oppression corruption & ­human misery.” By the end of this letter, however, William seemed to have talked himself into a more resolute pose, expressed by a piquant meta­ phor: “Infidels & Demagogues, like dead fish, float with the stream—­let us breast the current, & bravely strug­gle for our country & our God.”49 Despite his ambivalence, Jay’s expectations for disunion w ­ ere sincere and difficult for him to shake. His letters to British abolitionist icon Thomas Clark-

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son, whom Jay had met during his recent trip overseas, struck somber notes. In February 1846, Jay dampened the aged Clarkson’s prediction of slavery’s ultimate demise by citing the power of the Texas annexation to extend the institution with still more “conquests.” The best the American offered was that in the long run slavery “may exhaust itself—­that the slaves ­will become so numerous as to be both dangerous & unprofitable.” Six months ­later, with the US–­Mexico war underway, Jay indicated that he and Clarkson’s mutual attachment to the cause of peace had suffered another blow. What­ever slavery’s long-­run ­f uture, Jay’s was pessimistic about the f­ uture of the United States: “I have l­ittle faith in the permanence of the pre­sent Union,” even though he admitted that “­there are no indications of its speedy dissolution.” On the bright side, one of the d­ rivers of dissolution was a strengthened northern antislavery moral resolve. Jay reported to Clarkson, “At the north Anti-­Slavery feeling is consistently gaining strength, & particularly in the Churches.” Still, he wrote, “The American Republic ­under its pre­sent organ­ ization is devoted to the protection, extension, & perpetuity of ­human bondage.” William predicted to Clarkson “that our sins w ­ ill find us out, that as a nation we ­shall receive the punishment so richly merited.”50 Ancient Egypt’s demise might yet prove prophetic, with the nation buried u ­ nder the sands of iniquity.

Mexico That in the immediate term it was Mexico, not the United States, that suffered a national cataclysm did not comfort William Jay in the least. The Polk administration contrived to provoke hostilities along Texas’s disputed southern border to launch a war of conquest in May 1846. As the nation was sacrificing its reputation and honor by brutally invading Mexico to fulfill territorial ambitions stoked in part by slaveholding interests, northern politicians who supported the war had to justify their position. Mas­sa­chu­setts congressman Robert C. Winthrop tried to appropriate revered founding f­ ather John Jay to rationalize his own support for the ongoing war, citing the elder Jay’s grudging ac­cep­tance of the War of 1812. In response, William Jay once again felt compelled to defend the Jay ­family’s historic honor and reputation. He rhetorically thrashed Winthrop for defending an unjust cause, explaining in a published letter that Winthrop’s analogy was deeply flawed. John Jay had recognized the need to defend the young nation against the world’s foremost military power. By contrast, the United States was battering a very weak Mexican Army for the transparent motives

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of grabbing land and extending slavery. Asserted William, the found­er’s “reverence for truth, his sense of moral obligation, his habitual remembrance of his accountability to his Maker, would have led him, u ­ nder existing circumstances, to take a path widely diverging from” Winthrop’s. History provided no cover for a politician unwilling to stand up against injustice.51 As the Jays well knew, the Mexican War generated possibilities for po­liti­cal innovation, as well as moral fecklessness. Distant battlefield victories portended acquisition of huge amounts of territory in the West, not just an expanded Texas but also the Mexican frontier provinces of New Mexico and California. In August 1846, two days a­ fter Jay had recorded his disunionist prognostication for Clarkson, Pennsylvania Demo­cratic congressman David Wilmot sought to attach a proviso to a war-­f unding bill banning slavery from any territories ultimately acquired through the war with Mexico. Congressional representatives responded to Wilmot’s proposal on regional rather than party lines. ­Under such conditions, abolitionists might find themselves with new po­ liti­cal allies from the northern ranks of the Demo­cratic and Whig Parties.52 William Jay took a pragmatic view of the Wilmot controversy. He hoped that Whigs, less enamored of the war to begin with, would oppose both the acquisition of territory and the proviso preventing the spread of slavery to any new territories. That proviso could then function as a bargaining chip, “rendering the ratification of a treaty dismembering Mexico more difficult.”53 Presumably such a stance could force Demo­crats who wanted Mexican land to accept the bar to slavery’s expansion. The dramatically shuffled northern po­liti­cal deck also created more space for an antislavery party to operate. Jay insisted to Gerrit Smith that clarity of purpose should distinguish the Liberty Party from the mainstream parties as it sought to seize the moment. For party members to dicker over issues like capital punishment, the tariff, or infrastructure would divert focus from the “crime of crimes which curse our land.” In addition, Jay argued, defectors from the Demo­cratic and Whig Parties would be driven away by extraneous talk about issues on which ­these mainstream parties had already staked out their positions.54 William Jay and John Jay II both showed special enthusiasm for the ascendant po­liti­cal star of Charles Sumner, whose reputation as a speaker, writer, peace advocate, and, more recently, a critic of Mas­sa­chu­setts congressman Winthrop made him an appealing ally. On hearing that Sumner had declined to run for Congress in 1846, John wrote Sumner that it was only a m ­ atter of time “before your voice may be heard in our national councils, in vindication of ­those glorious princi­ples of right which you have so nobly maintained in your own New E ­ ngland.” Although Sumner chose not to run in 1848, he was,

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along with Chase, a person who not only respected the Jays’ po­liti­cal perspective but also someone who might someday be able to represent their views in the national arena. Indeed, in late 1848, John cited word of Sumner’s potential candidacy for congress in the next round of elections as proof that “high princi­ples & masculine virtue, united by learning honor & eloquence, yet exist among us.”55 The emergence of the new ­Free Soil Party during the 1848 election cycle prompted William Jay to think like a po­liti­cal pragmatist and to shift his po­ liti­cal hopes away from the now-­fading Liberty Party. The first ­Free Soil convention at Buffalo in August drew thousands, including Jay allies Sumner, Salmon Chase, and Joshua Leavitt. The party was a co­ali­tion devoted to stopping the westward expansion of slavery. Despite its disregard for Black equality and the nomination of abolitionist bête noir former president Martin Van Buren as its presidential candidate, Jay saw real possibilities that the F ­ ree Soil Party would strengthen the hand of antislavery in the North.56 In mid-­September William described the new po­liti­cal scene to John Jay II with unusual exuberance: “The Old parties are greatly disor­ga­nized & exhibit very ­little zeal,” while abolitionists had almost entirely lined up b­ ehind the F ­ ree Soil Party. Tellingly, Jay did not even mention the fragmenting Liberty Party, even though his friend Gerrit Smith was the presidential nominee of the purist faction insisting on racial equality and abolition. With steady pro­gress for the ­Free Soil Party in New York, Mas­sa­chu­setts, Ohio, and even in several slave states, the gentleman farmer observed, “The seed the abolitionists have [sic] been scattering for years is suddenly germinating & exhibiting vigorous growth.” It was the ­Free Soil alliance that had provided the much-­needed fertilizer. What­ ever the ultimate limitations of Van Buren’s antislavery commitments and his vote tallies, the F ­ ree Soil ticket might push the policies of the winning presidential candidate in an “anti Slavery” direction. By October, the judge’s confidence grew, as he informed John Jay II’s wife Eleanor that Van Buren’s F ­ ree Soil ticket possibly could “carry several States” and judged the party so “formidable” that “before long” it would “be predominant in the northern states.”57 Such projections about the ­Free Soil Party’s influence, however, landed well wide of the mark. Far from carry­ing numerous states, Van Buren only managed to finish second, a distant one at that, in two states: New York and Mas­ sa­chu­setts. He did not earn a single Electoral College vote. Still, the percentage of the national popu­lar vote for the antislavery party jumped dramatically from the previous election—10 ­percent as compared to just over 2 ­percent. Jay’s Westchester County polled Whig for the first time. Meanwhile, throughout the North, the old Liberty Party faded to the point of disappearance. Although the policy plans of the victorious Whig candidate and southern slaveholder

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Zachary Taylor ­were deliberately obscure at the time of the election, the candidate from the party that was more friendly to moral reform won. The F ­ ree Soil party had not seized the f­ uture, but a new form of antislavery politics had emerged that warranted the abolitionist Jays’ attention.58

­Causes and Consequences For William Jay, accounting for the ravages of the Mexican War was a far more compelling proj­ect than the shifting fates of po­liti­cal parties. For him, the war was an urgently revealing moral travesty. His 1849 magnum opus, A Review of the ­Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War, married his passions for peace and abolitionism. Jay, who became president of the American Peace Society in 1848, paid for the initial printing himself and gave the original ste­reo­type plates to the organ­ization. The society raised funds to distribute Jay’s book for ­free, including to members of Congress and northern state legislators. Within a year the APS had disseminated 17,000 copies of Jay’s ripping indictment of the war, an indictment that served as a prism through which to view the afflictions of the entire US body politic.59 The proj­ect also allowed him to articulate a new definition of patriotism that reconfigured the found­ers’ legacy for the pre­sent era. Over more than three hundred pages, ­Causes and Consequences provided a detailed narrative analy­sis of the path to war, reflected on h ­ uman nature in war­time, and contemplated the moral limits on the demands that a nation should place on its citizens. The book not only exposed the self-­interested po­ liti­cal manipulations of slaveholders and the fecklessness of national politicians but also criticized the moral premises of democracy itself. Jay did not celebrate personal acts of civil disobedience along the lines of Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay on a night spent in a Concord, Mas­sa­chu­setts, jail for refusing to pay taxes that w ­ ere allegedly levied to support an immoral war. But like Thoreau, Jay elevated personal moral autonomy above the dictates of the state and the wisdom of po­liti­cal crowds. Jay’s version of the individual defying the popu­lar ­will was explic­itly biblical: “He who admits the authority of the Bible ­will not readily acknowledge that what­ever is ‘highly esteemed among men’ must be right, nor that what is unpop­u­lar is, of course, wrong.” In God’s court “no majority, however g­ reat, can be pleaded in justification of crime, or in mitigation of punishment.”60 The gulf between conventional definitions of demo­ cratic pro­cesses and just ends, for both the former Westchester judge and the one-­time Concord prisoner, was equally vast. Each found in the proslavery mili-

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tary venture a means of questioning w ­ hether the entire American enterprise was a ­mistake based on a deluded, self-­important conception of itself. As in most of his major works, Jay prosecuted his case with an intense exhumation of the facts. His review began with several chapters describing a multiyear march to war driven by a desire to expand slavery and aggrandize the po­liti­cal power of the South. Caught between the emancipated North and Mexico, which also abolished slavery, the slaveholding South sought to reverse the tide by prying loose Texas. During the Texas revolt from Mexican rule, the United States ignored the long-­established princi­ple of staying out of foreign conflicts. The Jackson administration, Jay asserted, sought a variety of flimsy pretexts to provoke conflict with Mexico on the heels of the breakaway republic’s in­de­pen­dence. The plan all along was to find a way to annex Texas, which quickly legalized slavery and established ties with “the breeding States” in the United States. Feeling countervailing pressure from southern slaveholders and northern opponents of annexation, the Van Buren administration opted for a policy of “harassing negotiation” with Mexico over vari­ous financial claims, using any pretext to keep hostilities between the two countries simmering. Meanwhile, southern slaveholders openly salivated over the prospect of seizing Mexican territory including California. Jay quoted at length a V ­ irginia congressman’s 1842 remarks for their revealing emphasis: “slavery should pour itself abroad without restraint.” With southerners “stimulated to a ravenous ferocity” ­after the annexation of Texas, the Polk administration pursued its implacable policy to “bully,” “bribe,” and ultimately invade its way into “dismember[ing]” Mexico.61 Perhaps even more dismaying was the failure of a po­liti­cal opposition in Washington to coalesce against Polk’s declaration of war. The tough old trial judge found it “melancholy and humiliating” that Congress showed “a disregard of evidence, which no court of judicature in our land would dare to manifest in consigning to the penitentiary a man charged with petit larceny. . . . ​ Thus was a system of ­human butchery commenced without argument.” The crime, of course, was not petit larceny, the “war differ[ing] from murder and robbery only in the stupendous enormity and extent of the crime.” The alleged weakness of the victim underscored the gravity of the crime. Amer­ic­ a’s po­liti­ cal culture ensured that even t­ hose who knew the war to be wrong would support the effort anyway. US voters, “ever fascinated with military glory,” would exact a price on any Whig who declined to join the Demo­crats in pursuing the unjust conquest of foreign lands on a scale surpassing even Napoleon.62 In taking up the consequences of the Mexican War in the final 130 pages of his book, Jay launched a broader critique of militarism and American

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nationalism. He sought to detach military heroism from patriotism, denying that Amer­i­ca’s demo­cratic culture made its warriors any less cruel. Jay insisted that denouncing the nation’s immoral actions was a moral imperative and suggested that the survival of the Union was not inevitable. At a time when the nation celebrated the fulfillment of its manifest destiny, spanning from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, Jay’s assessment of his country’s character bit hard. He asserted that officers commanded their men to do terrible ­things, such as cruelly shelling civilian w ­ omen and ­children at Vera Cruz or ordering the killing of Mexicans who w ­ ere not engaged in b­ attle but in merely disrupting American supply lines.63 If the morality of American officers was blinkered, the class-­conscious Jay believed the soldiers’ morality was worse. His guiding presumption was that military ser­vice degraded rather than elevated character. Jay’s elitism came through loud and clear on this point: “The ­g reat mass of all armies, it is well known, is collected from the ignorant, reckless and vicious.” What military life did was concentrate such troubling individuals in one place where their “vicious propensities” spread.64 Indeed, Jay anticipated that the nation would pay a grave po­liti­cal price for its sins, merging the classic republicanism of the Revolutionary Era with nineteenth-­century fears of the Slave Power to make his point. The president’s claim of a “royal prerogative” of warmaking was aggrandized by the acquisition of huge territories where his rule held sway. A p­ eople once suspicious of a large military as a threat to freedom now celebrated that military. Proponents of war “intimidate the opponents” with the threat of “popu­lar vio­lence,” a sure sign of freedom’s decline. The ­f uture was, in this context, grimly predictable. He projected “thirteen large slave States” might emerge, “sufficient to give the slave power an entire control of the Federal Government.”65 Rather than wallow in pessimistic projections, however, Jay clambered for higher ground in the closing chapters. He articulated philosophical princi­ples and concrete steps to move the nation and even the world away from further calamity. Echoing his Life of John Jay, in which he portrayed his ­father as a classical statesman of unerring moral wisdom, William draped his chapter on “Patriotism” in an example from ancient Greece as a way to skewer the unthinking modern sentiment, “Our country right or wrong.” In modern as in ancient times, “the purest patriotism,” William indicated, was ­doing right, not multiplying a republic’s power. Citizens, Jay urged, must not suspend moral judgment and follow blindly. Having denounced his nation’s actions and cast the harshest aspersions on the character of its leaders and even its ­people, Jay articulated the moral sphere in which true patriots might still operate. Ministers, Sunday School teachers, and other “­humble Christian men and w ­ omen”—­not

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politicians—­led the way to public good. The Whig Party may have let the country down badly, but Whiggish impulses of Christian reform might yet rehabilitate the notion of love of country.66 The multiple editions of Jay’s widely distributed book garnered high praise from a spectrum of reform and antislavery publications. Although Jay did not heal the breach among antislavery forces, his expansive analy­sis addressed a shared desire to elevate the stakes of the war and its aftermath above ordinary wrangling. The New York Tribune, edited by f­ree soil-­oriented Whig Horace Greeley, noted Jay’s “reputation” as “a clear and vigorous writer” and judged the current work to be another success, emphasizing “Eternal Justice in the midst of party clamour and military hallucination.” In June 1849, The Liberator hailed the third edition of ­Causes and Consequences. Praising its meticulousness, the unsigned editorial concluded with a flourish, “May fifty editions of it be exhausted in less time than the war which it so powerfully condemns was prosecuted.” National Era, the Washington, D.C.-­based po­liti­cal antislavery newspaper edited by Salmon Chase’s close associate from Ohio, Gamaliel Bailey, paid tribute to Jay’s oeuvre. The paper labeled the former judge “one of the best writers of the day,” noting that his work “never appears before the Public without having entirely mastered the subject” at hand. ­Causes and Consequences was judged by the reviewer to be “prob­ably the best production of his pen.” A reviewer in the Literary Union of Syracuse, New York, who noted that the book was already in its fourth edition, expressed hope that Jay’s book would “exert a controlling influence for good” in the looming strug­gle between f­ree soil and slavery expansionists over the status of the territories seized from Mexico.67 Even before the reviews w ­ ere in for ­Causes and Consequences, Jay felt compelled to press on with his pen to ensure that the reaction against slaveholder expansionism took hold. His 1849 pamphlet Address to the Inhabitants of New Mexico and California, on the Omission by Congress to Provide Them with Territorial Governments, and the Social and Po­liti­cal Evils of Slavery accused the “slave power” of holding self-­government in the new territories hostage to their desire to extend h ­ uman bondage. In hyperbolic language once again hearkening back to Revolutionary Era rhe­toric, Jay accused the federal government of making slaves of the inhabitants of ­these territories by appointing federal officials over them, rather than letting the territories or­ga­nize their own governments. New Mexicans and Californians ­were treated like “the negro slaves of South Carolina” and made into a “servile race.” A ­ fter his preface, which was directed specifically to Westerners, Jay recycled verbatim the arguments he had advanced in his unsigned 1843 pamphlet Address to the Non-­Slaveholders of the South on the Social and Po­liti­cal Evils of Slavery. Jay offered quantitative and anecdotal evidence to demonstrate that the population of ­free states grew

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faster than slave states; that literacy rates ­were higher in the ­free North than the slave South; that ­free states exhibited more economic dynamism; and that southern aristocrats ruled their society for their own economic benefit, to the detriment of white non-­slaveholders.68 Addressing Californians and New Mexicans directly in his the pamphlet’s conclusion, Jay explic­itly prioritized conscience over u ­ nion, advising westerners that keeping slavery out of their territory carried more benefits than becoming part of the United States. Although patriots and Christians would fight to keep slavery out of the newly acquired lands, Jay commented, “If you cannot be ­free, happy, and virtuous in ­union with us, be f­ ree, happy, and virtuous ­under a government of your own . . . ​tolerate no servile caste, kept in ignorance and degradation to minister to the power and wealth of an oppressive aristocracy.” If Westerners stood firm in their antislavery convictions, they would find many o ­ thers to stand with them. As Jay put it, “Be true to yourselves, and your northern friends ­will be true to you.”69 He rejected any sort of manifest destiny that granted territorial growth priority over the containment of slavery.

The Adams Paradox Among the conundrums that William Jay—­and indeed the entire fractious and fractured abolitionist movement—­strug­gled with was the appropriate relationship between the corruptions of partisan demo­cratic politics and morally guided action. How, when, and in what ways could a just cause depend on public opinion or on constitutional and electoral procedures? Even the strug­gle against racial caste in the Episcopal Church challenged the Jays to find the proper balance between effective action and moral integrity within a carefully constructed constitutional order. Racism, slavery, and war, each in its own way, heightened tensions between engagement and withdrawal, ­union and disunion. Jay looked to the life of John Quincy Adams for a way forward. The penultimate, and by far the longest chapter of ­Causes and Consequences profiled the recently deceased former president, son of one of the few founding ­fathers who exceeded John Jay in revolutionary stature. William Jay’s sketch was a gem. As one reviewer proclaimed, “The chapter on J. Q. Adams is alone worth the price of the w ­ hole book twice over.” The grounds for eulogizing John Quincy Adams w ­ ere threefold: the Mas­ sa­chu­setts congressman opposed the war, he died just weeks ­after the signing of the treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo formally ended the war by confirming the dramatic expansion of US territory, and he embodied Jay’s alternative vi-

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sion of true patriotism. The author claimed that Adams’s life story provided “sanction for almost ­every moral and po­liti­cal sentiment maintained in t­ hese pages.” The Mas­sa­chu­setts congressman expressed his love for the country in a fashion that defied the expectations and mores of the pre­sent age. Unlike the age’s archetype of demo­cratic glory, Andrew Jackson, or his current standin, President Zachary Taylor, “no military halo encircled his brow.” Adams served well as the hero in an antiwar book teeming with scoundrels.70 Jay recounted Adams’s ­later years as a congressional gadfly specializing in tormenting his proslavery colleagues and subverting the infamous gag rule against recognizing antislavery petitions. According to Jay, Adams deployed disunion to brilliant rhetorical effect in 1842 when the congressman brought before his colleagues a petition using the very words of the South Carolina nullification campaign of the early 1830s. His southern rivals in response drew up a resolution to have Adams expelled from the House. According to Jay, it was “preposterous to maintain that a ­union formed by consent of the partners, cannot by the same consent be severed.” For his part, Adams used his expulsion trial to speak in the House of the manifest harm that slavery had caused the nation, thus entering into the congressional rec­ord the very subject that the gag rule was designed to suppress. Disunion was logically defensible but, in Adams’s hands, became even more valuable as a tool to interrogate the relationship between freedom and slavery and as a club with which to face down a congressional mob.71 Adams also exemplified how high princi­ple could sustain effective antislavery tactics. Something remarkable happened as a result of Adams’s expulsion trial: he went from being reviled to being revered. In Jay’s estimation, by the time Adams died, the former president’s standing “had reached an elevation never surpassed by that of any man on the American Continent, with the single exception of washington.” The moral of Adams’s ascent to the patriotic pantheon had profound and paradoxical meanings for American politics. Adams embraced “integrity” over the pursuit of popularity, “scorning and defying public opinion . . . ​to his last breath.” Jay explained that the reason he devoted so much space to Adams was that the deceased hero “illustrate[s] some ­great truths” on which the book rested, particularly “the utter worthlessness of public opinion as a standard of right and wrong.” Moreover, Jay proclaimed that if Adams was a patriot, then all definitions of patriotism in common use w ­ ere bogus. For Adams advocated against Amer­i­ca in international disputes, he criticized Amer­i­ca’s war, and held firm to his antislavery beliefs no ­matter what arrangements the Constitution had made to protect the institution. Adams’s belief that Blacks should enjoy access to the ballot on the same terms as whites exposed “the lying Democracy

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of the day.” Some politicians might, Jay hoped, learn to recalibrate their course, attracting followers by ­doing right—­and not confusing the voice of the ­people with the voice of God.72 John Quincy Adams was, in crucial ways, also like William Jay himself. Both men lived in a founding f­ ather’s vaunted shadow yet courageously defined life’s most impor­tant work as the strug­gle against slavery—an injustice that the founding generation had manifestly failed to rectify. For all the wrongs Jay’s ­Causes and Consequences sought to expose, writing the book also helped him articulate how and why the fight against the po­liti­cal and moral blight of slavery must continue. As his critique of come-­outerism in the Episcopal Church suggested, ­there was a crucial difference between maintaining one’s personal integrity and refusing to participate in impure, imperfect institutions. Writing to Salmon Chase in May 1849. William distilled for the man recently chosen to represent Ohio in the US Senate the po­liti­cal challenge that lay ahead. Pinning his hopes on Congress, Jay declared, “I am for the Proviso at all ­hazards, & nothing but the Proviso”: a federal ban on the extension of slavery to the new territories. This ban would shift the sectional po­liti­cal equation. For all the moral havoc the Mexican War had brought, it was now the South that seemed to Jay unusually “feeble & divided.” Advised Jay, “­Were they to bind themselves by oath to abandon the u ­ nion ­unless permitted to convert our conquests into a slave region, I would withhold the permission.” In August, Jay publicly voiced a similar confidence in his Address to the Inhabitants of New Mexico and California: “The slave-­holders are losing their influence, and are divided among themselves, while their northern allies, withering ­under the scorn of public opinion, are daily deserting their standard.” It lay in the power of the government and the ­people to press the advantage.73 For at least a few moments in the spring and summer of 1849, po­liti­cal and moral strength appeared to come into precarious alignment—an unjustifiable war unexpectedly serving the cause of justice.

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Uncompromised

On November 16, 1852, William Jay sent his son a $50 check for the aid of eight African Americans from ­Virginia who—­with John Jay II’s l­egal assistance—­had just obtained their freedom. T ­ hese liberated victims of slavery, William felt “are entitled to more from me than the sum I [previously] authorized you to appropriate to them.” The sixty-­three-­year-­old former Westchester County judge trusted the assessment of the thirty-­five-­year-­old New York City attorney, telling his son to apply the money “as you think best.” John’s activism prompted a broader reflection from William: “I bless God my dear Son, that in loving & serving the poor & oppressed, regardless of the scoffs of a vain & wicked world,” John served the Lord. The piety of the ­father’s expression did not mask the pride he took in the son’s abolitionist work.1 John Jay II played a frontline role in ­battles provoked by fugitive slaves. His pro bono courtroom appearances, along with his pugnacious personal style, established his distinct activist identity, for which he earned praise from some and the disgust of o ­ thers.2 As William’s donation suggests, John continued to draw strength from his f­ ather’s approval, even as he forged his own abolitionist name. Meanwhile, William’s ­legal and constitutional expertise propelled his searing pen forward. The former judge’s sense of moral obligation drew him into the Under­g round Railroad and to articulate his own rules of re­sis­tance. The fate of escapees from slavery cut to the core of the Jay ­family’s abolitionist identity. 285

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John and William pursued complementary approaches to the fundamental question of the rights of enslaved ­people who found themselves in the ostensibly ­free state of New York. The slaves’ fugitive status amplified the injustice of the racial caste system that f­ather and son insightfully critiqued. The Jays’ alliance with f­ree African Americans and fugitives complicated their status within New York’s white social elite while promoting rapprochement with abolitionist rivals. As national politicians scrambled to forge po­liti­cal arrangements to hold the imperiled nation together, the Jays acted on a set of princi­ples sharply at odds with t­ hose compromises.3

Reputations and Constituencies To fortify his name as an advocate in the cause of freedom, John Jay II had to overcome a reputation among abolitionists of vari­ous stripes as bumbling. In the midst of internecine abolitionist conflict, Garrisonians harbored a lingering resentment against John for his role in trying to transfer The Emancipator from the control of the American Anti-­Slavery Society to the Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society in the midst of the 1840 schism. In 1844 and 1845, Garrisonian stalwart and National Anti-­Slavery Standard coeditor Edmund Quincy still publicly criticized Jay over this episode. From John’s perspective, the controversy over his ­earlier machinations distracted from the much more urgent ­matter of “regenerating our slave-­cursed country.” He urged his fellow abolitionists to focus on “a clique of Southern masters, who, bringing to the Halls of Congress the spirit and tone of slave-­drivers, play the part of plantation ­overseers to the assembled legislators of this g­ reat ­people.”4 Liberty Party abolitionists also distrusted John Jay II. In 1843, the twenty-­ six-­year-­old ­lawyer found himself accused of lending his ser­vices to a southern w ­ oman traveling with her female slave to New York City. The incident was convoluted. The slaveholder in question was the s­ ister of a business associate of John Jay’s father-­in-­law. Rather than proceed on habeas corpus grounds for the enslaved ­woman’s freedom, John apparently preferred that some other ­lawyer more removed from the situation do so. But believing the w ­ omen to be technically ­free, John also told the slaveholder he would draw up papers to that effect. The slaveholder declined the offer. Some at the Liberty Party convention felt that John’s entanglement in this ­matter could be made to reflect badly on his ­father at a time when William was being considered as a pos­si­ble gubernatorial nominee.5 A public denial of the charge entailed a full-­throated avowal of Joh Jay II’s commitment to fugitives. He wrote, “I have always rejoiced, and always ­will

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rejoice, at ­every opportunity of aiding with food, clothing, money and advice, the self-­emancipated slave, weary and way-­worn in his search for the ‘inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”6 He did not wish the mishandling of one incident to besmirch the f­amily’s reputation. The young man’s overconfidence in his abilities to navigate troubled po­liti­cal ­waters sometimes got the better of him. If John felt put upon when his fellow abolitionists questioned his motives and his competence, he felt ­g reat confidence lecturing to Blacks and whites alike about racial equality. The young man took pride in his iconoclasm and erudition. In 1842, he published an address on emancipation in the West Indies that he had delivered to the Philomathean Society, an African American organ­ization designed to promote intellectual discourse. His words of praise for formerly enslaved West Indians affirmed some aspects of the experience of his New York ­free Black audience, as well as their shared opposition to racism. Liberation wrought profound changes that confounded racialized assumptions: “The old habits and feelings of slavery which seemed to be identified with their very nature, have beyond all expectation, been supplanted by the change to freedom, and the new duties relations and aims, which it brought to light.” Peaceful pro­g ress confounded prejudice.7 In building his case for the efficacy of immediate abolition in the United States, John’s patrician instincts merged with his f­ ree l­abor ideology. Emancipation restored a natu­ral social order. ­Under freedom’s law, the “invisible spiritual links that bind the souls of men in social compact” produced law-­abiding, patriarchal families. In his sunny digest of post-­emancipation West Indian society, a hard-­working “peasantry” demonstrated “the complete success of ­free ­labor” in which men supported wives who had withdrawn from field to home. The respectability-­oriented ­free men at the lecture may have found Jay’s reading of Ca­rib­bean history a reasonable analogy for abolition at home in New York.8 Attacks on racism likely came off as moral grandstanding and hectoring to Joh Jay II’s fellow members of New York City’s white elite. At the New-­York Historical Society’s May  1844 meeting, John Jay tried to prevent the organ­ ization from registering its official thanks to Dr. Jacob Beakley for his paper, “Pro­gress of the Caucasian Race in Science and Civilization.”9 In a critique that found its way into NASS, Jay denounced the harmful po­liti­cal agenda advanced by such racial investigations. Beakley’s ignominious goal was clear to Jay: “to prove that the African was decidedly and irrevocably inferior to the white man, and that this lot was his natu­ral and inevitable destiny.” Scientific, so­cio­log­ic­ al, and historical evidence, Jay contended, belied the racist pseudoscience of the likes of Dr. Beakley and arch defender of southern slavery John C. Calhoun.

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John Jay drew attention to the pioneering African American New York City physician James McCune Smith (a leading member of St. Philip’s Church and a fellow Philomathean Society speaker) to falsify racist claims. He also acidly remarked that during mob vio­lence against African Americans in northern cities “the magistrates sat composedly in their pleasant parlors” contemplating “the beauties of Dr. Beakley’s” concept of white supremacy, “while the unhappy victims of this unholy prejudice, w ­ ere hunted from their homes . . . ​their c­ hildren exposed to hunger and nakedness; their wives and d­ aughters brutally insulted; their ­houses sacked, and their churches burned.”10 The antidote to such horrors, of course, was for men like Jay to leave their own “pleasant parlors” and stand up for the oppressed against their oppressors. John Jay II’s name and ­family connections, coupled with his ­g reat energy, might have garnered him an officer’s role in the New-­York Historical Society and a delegate’s seat at the Episcopal diocesan convention. But his moral convictions, his reputation, his l­egal training, and, not least, his abolitionist legacy required him to forcefully challenge the status quo on behalf of what he thought of as his Black constituency. As his address on the West Indies suggested, emancipation might produce re­spect for law and social order in the long run. In the brutally prejudiced, half-­enslaved United States, the law would have to be put through its paces first. Thus, Jay stepped out from ­behind the lectern to the court­house to further prove his competency and his conviction by testing the bound­aries of fugitive slave law.

The Permeable Boundary For John Jay II, the courtroom served as a stage to demonstrate his commitment to the ­free Black community, to the abolitionist cause, and to his ­family heritage. In some ways, John’s ­legal efforts constituted a provocative public update of the ­legal work that his Peter Augustus Jay and Peter Jay Munro had previously undertaken as ­legal counselors for the New-­York Manumission Society.11 In ­doing so, John Jay II practiced ­legal princi­ples articulated by his f­ ather. In the late 1830s, William indicated that the federal government should operate ­under strict limitations in enforcing federal antislavery law. ­Because the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution left to the states authority not given to the national government, he argued that the return of fugitives was a state ­matter on which congressional legislation had wrongly encroached. The US Supreme Court, however, took a dif­fer­ent view. In the 1842 case Prigg v. Pennsylvania the High Court ruled that the federal government had exclusive au-

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thority over fugitive law. This ruling opened up space for state judges to find that New York authorities had ­little obligation to assist in fugitive rendition.12 William thought that ordinary citizens should have significant discretion to help runaway slaves. In 1843, he expressed dismay when a Cincinnati judge assessed damages against someone helping a fugitive from Kentucky. William worried that now “any act” of “humanity” no ­matter how minor—­food, clothing, pointing out the North Star—­would fall u ­ nder the definition of “harboring or concealing” a runaway. Jay’s comments about aid and comfort ­were not just hy­po­thet­i­cal. British visitor Joseph Sturge had reported in the early 1840s that William garnered information on southern slavery from runaways who visited his home.13 As an attorney, John Jay II deployed ­legal technicalities and tensions between state and federal law to obtain rulings in ­favor of escaping slaves—or at least to buy time for t­ hose slaves to escape by other means. In the fall of 1846, Georgian George Kirk absconded from southern bondage by stowing away on a ship bound for New York City. On discovering the stowaway, Theodore Buckley, the ship’s master, bound the escapee with the intention of bringing him back to Georgia. Louis Napoleon, a Black New York manual laborer and activist, learned of Kirk’s situation, e­ ither ­because he heard Kirk’s screams from the ship docked in New York’s harbor or ­because ­others quickly informed him of his plight. Napoleon filed a habeas corpus request. Interest in Kirk’s case was keen among African American New Yorkers. Two days prior to the habeas corpus hearing, a brief attempt was even made to ­free Kirk forcibly. The day of the hearing, Black New Yorkers thronged the grounds of City Hall awaiting results from the courtroom.14 The judge granted Kirk’s release. Kirk, however, was almost immediately recaptured. Buckley availed himself of a New York law that allowed ship captains to seize stowaway slaves and take them to the city’s mayor to obtain a warrant for transport out of the state. Jay and a colleague contested w ­ hether Buckley had any cause of action at all, given that he was neither the owner of the slave nor acting as an authorized agent of the owner. The case’s technicalities suggested larger princi­ples. According to John, with slavery “wiped” from New York’s statutes, natu­ral rights and common law, both of which favored freedom, ­shaped the law in such cases. Even the US Constitution, Jay claimed, favored alleged fugitives. That document leaned t­ oward “justice,” “liberty,” and the broad extension of privileges and immunity to Americans regardless of color. No concessions or assumptions, even “one jot further than the constitution has already gone,” o ­ ught to be made in slavery’s ­favor. Kirk could not be held a slave even for a week; indeed, he should be presumed to be a New York citizen absent any proof to the contrary.

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The state court’s ruling did not incorporate this full philosophical sweep but did establish firm limitations on the reach of southern slave law and on New York’s l­egal right to support the recovery of fugitives. Judge John W. Edmonds invalidated the New York law ­under which Kirk was recaptured. Holding that federal fugitive slave law took pre­ce­dence over state law, the judge stated that federal law did not confer any power on Buckley to act unilaterally on the own­ er’s behalf. If Buckley could claim such power, Judge Edmonds reasoned, then “anyone who should please” could seize Kirk and sell him without even determining w ­ hether Kirk was a slave.15 Jay not only secured a person’s freedom; he also had weakened the l­egal rights of ­those who would seek to recapture fugitives in New York. He was also well aware that cases like Kirk’s had public relations value, as well as ­legal value, and represented a collaboration between the fugitives, l­awyers, and abolitionists of varying stripes. Writing to Charles Sumner, Jay noted to his surprise that in a city with southern tendencies on slavery, “Public Sympathy for the first time in my recollection was elicited in ­favor of liberty.” Jay credited Kirk for his “unusual energy & perseverance.” A cross-­factional alliance that aided the “intelligent lad” included Garrisonian Francis Jackson, who took Kirk ­under his care in Boston. The case also garnered extensive coverage in the Garrisonian NASS, which between late October 1846 and March 1847 published information on the Kirk case in no less than eleven issues, including Jay’s lengthy disquisition before the court (see Figure 11).16 The case of Joseph ­Belt affirmed the efficacy of contesting fugitive slave cases in state court—at least the cir­cuit court presided over by Judge Edmonds. In late 1848, an attempt to abduct a Black man from New York City and take him southward via Long Island by boat was foiled. With Jay’s ­legal assistance, the alleged fugitive from Mary­land asserted his rights as a US citizen not to be seized and transported “without any pro­cess of law.” Jay argued that ­Belt’s master did not follow the proscribed procedures for fugitive rendition. He also argued that b­ ecause ­Belt asserted his f­ree status, that claim had to be taken seriously. A presumption of freedom preempted the right to detain alleged fugitives in New York. Jay thus turned a case about an alleged fugitive into a narrative of kidnapping. Judge Edmonds ruled that the very fact that a man had been detained by his captors for two days had illegally constituted enslavement. Two days, reasoned Judge Edmonds, was as bad as two years or two de­cades. Edmonds, however, did not assert the power to declare ­Belt a ­free man; he ruled that he should just be ­free from detention, while washing his hands of any responsibility to transfer the case to federal court. The case affirmed f­ ree soil princi­ples and the ability of northern state courts to shirk obligations to make accommodations for the laws of other states.17

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Figure 11.  This cartoon deploys racist imagery in depicting an array of responses to the arrest of George Kirk, whom John Jay II represented in court. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Jay waded into international law in his zeal to narrow the jurisdiction of slavery as much as pos­si­ble in New York and to serve notice that abolitionists could not be thwarted in their desire to ­free the enslaved one way or another. In July 1847, the Brazilian ship Lembranca entered port in Manhattan. On board ­were two men, Jose da Costa and Jose da Roche, and a w ­ oman, Maria da Costa, who had the status of slaves u ­ nder Brazilian law. Learning of this situation, Black antislavery activists William P. Powell and Louis Napoleon sprang into action. Facing a much less sympathetic judge than Judge Edmunds, Jay and his ­legal team strug­gled to gain traction. Judge Daly reversed the first habeas corpus writ, finding that the captain could legitimately reclaim the men as deserters from his crew. (Maria da Costa returned to ship voluntarily and did not retain Jay as counsel.) Jay’s team worked tirelessly to find procedural grounds to keep the case alive long enough to achieve some sort of victory. They sought a new habeas corpus writ from Judge Edmunds to slow ­matters down by having the two men returned to the sheriff ­until a further ruling could be made. Jay took the opportunity to make a forceful case that ­people born in Africa like his clients ­were already the victim of a crime, being kidnapped from

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their distant home. He also argued that New York’s laws and the laws of nature should honor their act of self-­defense, leaving the boat. He noted that once the captain got them back into his power, the men w ­ ere manacled and abused. This treatment rendered absurd any pretense that they ­were crew members skipping out on a legitimate ­labor contract.18 Judge Edmunds, however, proved unobliging; he de­cided that ­there w ­ ere no grounds for reversing the original habeas corpus ruling by Judge Daly. With the prospects of a ­legal victory dimming, abolitionists took ­matters into their own hands, with at least the tacit complicity of their ­lawyer. As Jay made plans to file yet another habeas corpus request with a dif­fer­ent judge and sought to extend the time the slaves w ­ ere ­free of the captain’s custody, the captain de­cided to sell his controversial ­human cargo. He left them in jail for safekeeping while he negotiated the sale, but they w ­ ere spirited away during the night. Jay, appearing in court the next day, denied any hand in their escape but justified the result: the men had remained in jail at the captain’s request, not u ­ nder any “­legal warrant.” In the Brazilian case, unlike the Kirk and ­Belt cases, ­there would be no ­legal pre­ce­dent in the abolitionists’ ­favor. Although the NASS fulminated against the refusal from the bench to give Jay’s l­egal arguments a fair hearing, the paper also celebrated that allegedly unknown allies had thwarted the “piratical Brazilian master” by first conveying the slaves to Boston and from ­there to Haiti, the ­free Black republic.19 By pursuing ­every ­legal delaying tactic he could, Jay had facilitated the actions of a freedom network that operated at the edges of the law. He seemed to relish that role. What­ever doubts Garrisonian abolitionists once had about the younger Jay’s commitment to the cause ­were again dispelled. John Jay II advanced his ­legal and abolitionist reputation to the delight of some but not all. For his fellow ­lawyer and Columbia gradu­ate George Templeton Strong, such activity provoked derision for showboating in a dubious cause. ­After reporting in his diary that he had attended a play called the Greek Slave, Strong quipped, “The same that John Jay is said to have got out a habeas corpus for . . . ​by ­mistake.” In contrast, William Jay could not have been prouder. Writing to his son in August 1847 regarding the Brazilian case, John’s ­father proclaimed, “I congratulate you on the freedom of your clients, & what is of more importance to you personally, on your faithful efforts in their behalf.” The means by which the slaves obtained their freedom, escaping from jail, did not trou­ble the former judge in the least. Not only did he proclaim to his son that “no law of God or of Man was ­violated” but he also fingered racism as guiding the ruling of the judges in the case. He went even further, telling his son, “I am very willing to be an accessary . . . ​to the crime” that led to

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the Brazilians’ freedom. Ending on a personal note, William told John, “I thank God my dear Son for the part you have acted, & pray Him to give you grace to do your duty regardless of popu­lar ­favor or censure.” William thus honored both his son’s l­ egal activities and the more shadowy, extralegal networks that operated alongside them.20 John’s pro bono work inspired his f­ather to further sharpen his thinking about public re­sis­tance to fugitive slave rendition. The former judge acknowledged that, even if an action ­violated the law, peaceful re­sis­tance to enforcement had become a moral imperative. In an October  1847 published letter, William answered the question, How should citizens react to the seizure of a fugitive? Given the choice between sin and law, avoiding sin o ­ ught to take priority, even if that meant accepting the penalty that authorities imposed. William supported helping the fugitive in ­every way pos­si­ble without using vio­lence against ­legal officials. Activists should also demand proof of an alleged fugitive’s identity and put up ­every procedural obstacle to that person’s return to slavery. Kidnapping was kidnapping, no ­matter the color of the victim.21

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 The barely disguised willingness of some northerners to undermine the capture of fugitives made more robust federal legislation a key feature of a ­g rand compromise in Washington, D.C. A sectional crisis erupted over the absorption of western territory acquired from Mexico. Determined to preserve the Union, aging Kentucky senator Henry Clay proposed a set of compromises. Concessions to s­ ettle northern concerns about the spread of slavery included admitting California as a f­ ree state and banning the slave trade in the nation’s capital. Clay also foresaw allowing US citizens in Utah and New Mexico to decide for themselves ­whether to allow slavery. Clay hoped to mollify southerners by proposing that the United States cover the financial debts that Texas accumulated when it was an in­de­pen­dent nation and that the federal government could claim no jurisdiction over the internal US slave trade. Southerners, Clay anticipated, would be greatly pleased by a new, more stringent fugitive slave law that would be harder to undermine.22 William Jay’s public denunciation of the proposed compromise was fueled by his anger that the already hateful system of hunting down fugitives would be made even worse. He mixed scorn and sentiment in an open letter to his congressman. His appeal focused on the animalizing features of slavery, charging that the venerable Kentucky senator treated the capturing of fugitives as a “sport.”23 He asserted, “Of all the game laws in existence,” the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, “which

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regulates the chase of negroes, is the most horrible.” Yet Clay was proposing an even more stringent system to seize African Americans. ­There would be more due pro­cess for recovering a h ­ orse than a ­human being, observed the New Yorker. William Jay pushed further, making provocative arguments about sex and gender. He claimed that the proposed Fugitive Slave Act expressed southern desires to violate Black female bodies, transgressed gendered norms of white ­house­holds, and even reduced white male patriarchs to helpless bystanders. Jay highlighted the fact that southern white men placed a high monetary value on attractive enslaved ­women, conjuring a scenario where a ­free northern ­mother would be punished for protecting her runaway d­ aughter from such lascivious commerce. Then, as if anticipating the deployment of the feminized sentimentality of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin against slave catching, Jay posed this scenario to his congressman: “Suppose this poor girl should find her way to” the congressman’s home, “and in your absence, with bursting heart, ask to be sheltered in your ­house from her pursuers.” Jay asked, “Can you for a single moment admit the possibility, that your wife, the ­mother of your c­ hildren, could, through fear of the law, so unsex herself, as to turn the trembling fugitive into the street, to be caught by the hunters?” He indicated that the sanctity of white men’s private domain would, soon enough, be personally v­ iolated by such laws. He wrote that slave catchers w ­ ill “be roaming through our bed-­rooms and ransacking our closets in search of prey.” The animalization of one p­ eople would lead to the humiliation of another. But no, this would not be allowed to happen! Jay defiantly predicted massive northern re­sis­tance to a tightening of the fugitive regime. Conscience would prevail over compulsion. Jay declared, “Filling our prisons with pious, benevolent, kind-­hearted men and w ­ oman [sic], ­will have ­little effect in suppressing agitation.”24 Although Jay’s antislavery rhe­toric was always vivid and detailed, ­here he politicized the domestic sphere and ­imagined a travesty that conceivably could occur in his own home where fugitives had sought succor. It was not just anyone’s rights, not just anyone’s home, that might be ­violated: it was his rights, his home.25 Jay continued to sound the alarm over the proposed compromise, singling out for attack Mas­sa­chu­setts senator Daniel Webster for criticism. Jay i­magined Webster as a prosecutor helping reclaim a beautiful fugitive slave for her masters. Thus, he reconfigured the revered statesman as a sex trafficker.26 For Jay, the proposed federal revision to fugitive slave law occupied the crossroads between constitutionalism and Chris­tian­ity. He told a meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-­Slavery Society that the Senate bill was “a most

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gross usurpation of power by Congress; a plain, palpable violation of the Constitution, an outrage on the religious and benevolent sensibilities of the community, and a disgrace to our National character.” Should Congress pass a law requiring northern citizens to help return fugitives to slavery, Jay told the group, which was usually cast as the conservative foil to Garrison’s radicals, that the abolitionist movement would face a test: Would p­ eople sacrifice for their princi­ ples or risk eternal damnation by turning in fugitives? Re­sis­tance, asserted Jay, was the path of the religious, in imitation of the disciples, and therefore the only moral choice.27 The fate of individual fugitives at the hands of individual wouldbe captors was a microcosm of the national conflict, the thunder of divine judgment rumbling ominously in the background. Agitation could only slow, not forestall, the Compromise of 1850 and with it the much-­feared intensification of the federal government’s role in the rendition of alleged fugitives. The admission of California as a f­ ree state and the abolition of the slave trade in Washington, D.C., came at a horrendous price. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 provided for the appointment by the federal cir­cuit courts of commissioners to administer the retrieval of fugitive slaves. ­These commissioners received $10 for issuing documents affirming the claim of a master that a person was in fact his or her property and $5 when the commissioner deemed the evidence for the claim insufficient. The incentive to side with the white claimant was clear. Moreover, the accused fugitive could not, ­under the act, testify to contest an alleged master’s claim. Once a commissioner proclaimed a person a fugitive, no other judicial body could interfere or contest the ruling. The law’s severely restricted pro­cess for determining fugitive status was complemented by provisions against public re­sis­tance. ­Under the new law, penalties for preventing the capture and return of fugitives dramatically stiffened. Federal marshals faced fines of $1,000 for refusing to assist in the capture of a person identified by warrant and suffered the same penalty if that person escaped custody. The same section of the law also empowered commissioners to draft ordinary citizens to assist in the seizure of alleged fugitives. Section 7 imposed fines of up to $1,000 and six months in prison on “any person who s­ hall knowingly and willingly obstruct, hinder, or prevent” a slaveholder or authorized person from seizing a runaway or trying to ­free an alleged slave once captured. Any “aid’ direct or indirect and any effort to “harbor or conceal” a runaway triggered the same penalty. The law erected steep barriers to due pro­ cess and to sympathetic northern responses to ­those attempting to escape to freedom.28 The new law posed a direct threat to northern Black communities, which ­were already at the forefront of northern re­sis­tance to slavery and slave catchers.

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Leading New York City community members including George T. Downing, a successful caterer and St.  Philip’s church member, took an active public stance against the law. He and fellow African American activist William P. Powell, also a member of St. Philip’s, wrote William Jay to ask w ­ hether the Fugitive Slave Act was constitutional. Jay penned his response in a letter appearing in the New York Eve­ning Post and reprinted in NASS.29 William favored violating the law nonviolently. He described clearly his personal experience with fugitives: “Some years since, as I was directing a fugitive as to the route to Canada, he told me, to my surprise, that he wished to go to Mas­sa­chu­setts. On asking him why, he said he had heard Mr. Adams say at Washington, that if a slave once got into Mas­sa­chu­setts, ­there ­were not twelve men in the State who would give him up.” The new law, Jay suggested, presented northern ­people of conscience with the same challenge that rulers sought to impose on religious minorities across the centuries. The faithful should remain steadfast: “Let us, with our families, enter the dungeons which Northern politicians have prepared, rather than h ­ azard our souls by rendering obedience to the requirements of this wicked law.” Jay’s constitutional logic was that citizens of any color did not have an obligation to obey the morally illegitimate and unconstitutional demands of an other­wise legitimately constituted government. Black p­ eople, Jay acknowledged, had as much right to defend themselves as white p­ eople, but Jay had grave concerns about plans for organ­izing armed re­sis­tance. He “implore[d]” f­ ree Blacks not to kill kidnappers. Spilling their blood would not blunt the overwhelming force of the law, which would dub the offense murder and then march on with the transfer of the alleged fugitive. Meanwhile, Jay predicted, the proslavery northern press would bend over backward in their “fit of horror and indignation against blood-­thirsty negroes.” Worse still, new calls for “expulsion to Africa” of f­ ree Blacks would pour forth and touch off a pogrom of “armed bands of slave-­catchers roaming through the country, insulting and terrifying our citizens, and picking up negroes at plea­sure.” Jay pleaded, “Leave . . . ​the pistol and the bowie knife to southern ruffians and their northern mercenaries,” so the moral distinctions would remain clear. By so d­ oing, northern public opinion might fi­nally awaken to the horror of the blood of the “innocent.”30 In asking for restraint, Jay was asking for an awful lot. Jay wrote self-­ consciously, “Most deeply do I feel and deplore the wrongs inflicted upon your race,” and in full awareness that Black men faced a horrific threat to their patriarchal role as protector of the home: “With your wives and c­ hildren, you are now placed at the disposal of any villain who is willing to perjure himself for the price you ­will bring in the h ­ uman shambles of the South.” It is hard to

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imagine Downing and Powell accepting without ambivalence the picture of martyrdom that Jay sketched in response to a question about the constitutionality of the law.31 Jay knew that Blacks and whites, including himself, would violate the coercive law. Indeed, Jay’s American and Foreign Anti-­Slavery Society continued to publish a defiant anti-­slave-­catching pro–­Under­g round Railroad response to the law. But in this letter to Downing and Powell, Jay sought to calculate the po­liti­cal price and the concrete dangers of violent re­sis­tance by African Americans. He hoped that the “blood of the innocent” would “rouse the torpid conscience of the north” while posing an existential crisis to an entire society. Powell for one was not willing to martyr himself; he moved with his ­family to Eu­rope for the next de­cade. Still, New York City remained an impor­ tant stop for fugitives. The city, however, did not see the violent rescue attempts in the 1850s that Boston and Syracuse experienced.32 The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 raised for William Jay profound questions about self-­government, social hierarchy, and the rule of law. In the final paragraphs of his letter to Downing and Powell, he strayed from the dilemma of Black re­sis­tance to the social disorder that framed elite northern responses to the law. He surveyed a landscape of agrarian unrest, anti-­rent agitation, and even “socialism.” The landlords, manufacturers, and merchants of the North determined that “an alliance with the aristocracy of the south” could save them. T ­ hese northern elites ­imagined the Fugitive Slave Act as an act of “conservatism” ­because it protected property. To Jay, a landlord with considerable wealth and property, such logic was perverse; it was amoral opportunism posing as conservatism. To wealthy northern supporters of interregional compromise, he posed some sharp questions: “­Will the sight of innocent men seized in our streets, and sent in fetters to till the broad fields of g­ reat land-­owners, increase the reverence felt for land titles? . . . ​Is it true conservatism to obliterate, in the masses, the sense of justice, the feelings of humanity, the distinction between right and wrong?” The Fugitive Slave Act, he implied, dangerously functioned to justify, rather than impede, the majority’s grabbing what­ever power or property they could or passing what­ever laws or taxes they wished, extending “disor­ga­niz­ing theories” that the conservative Jay frankly abhorred. At the same time, slavery and state-­sanctioned kidnapping ­were dreadful substitutes for the “higher law” and the Golden Rule. The manifest injustice of the Fugitive Slave Act would, Jay concluded, release “the flood of spoliation and anarchy” that only “justice, humanity, and the fear of God” could forestall.33 At one level, such philosophical musings in answer to Downing and Powell’s query on behalf of Black New Yorkers may have seemed callously tangential. But it was also a sign of how and why this par­tic­u­lar act of injustice ­toward

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blameless African Americans rankled William Jay—­and how enmeshed his identity as an abolitionist defender had become with his spiritual and historical sense of self. Southern slavery had long seemed to Jay a fraudulent paternalism, a false conservatism rooted in cruelty, lies, and self-­serving color classifications. The hierarchies rooted in property and charity that he preferred would suffer by any association with race-­based southern bondage. The plight of fugitives and ­free Black northerners posed a test that he and his activist son dared not fail—­for the sake of the victims and for their own sense of legitimacy.

Court, Church, and Under­ground John Jay II found that the Fugitive Slave Act posed a significant obstacle to his ongoing efforts to champion the rights of ­people of color in New York. Regarding his repre­sen­ta­tion of Henry Long, a h ­ otel waiter and alleged fugitive from ­Virginia, Jay wrote Charles Sumner in January 1851, “I had hoped & . . . ​ expected to carry it from Court to Court u ­ ntil we got a decision in our favour.” As to ­whether and how to challenge the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, John acknowledged a difference of opinion with his ­father, “to whose judgement I generally defer.” William did not think it a good idea b­ ecause ­doing so would give the US Supreme Court a chance to give its seal of approval to the heinous act. Though John “fear[ed] ­Father is right,” he himself saw value in challenging the act in court, thinking that “we can obtain a favourable decision from some of our State Judges” on the issue of w ­ hether commissioners ­were a permissible substitute for jury ­trials. Such a strategy would “be of material assistance, ­towards correcting public opinion, & provoking a repeal of the act.” In the case on behalf of Henry Long, a constitutional challenge, John acknowledged, would be a ­mistake: the judge, Andrew Judson would certainly reject it. Instead, Jay would have to simply argue that the alleged owner lacked proof that Long was a slave. That tactic failed too. Judge Judson ordered Henry Long returned with his master to ­Virginia.34 Jay and Long had been lucky to even stand before a federal judge. The Fugitive Slave Act was designed to keep such cases out of court entirely; it was constructed to work with more ruthless efficiency. In 1852, while Jay was representing fugitive Horace Preston before a commissioner, a witness on behalf of Preston’s Mary­land owner so objected to Jay’s questioning that he struck him in the face during the hearing. This aggression did not change the result: Preston was returned to bondage. In May 1854, Jay got word that three close relatives of Black New York City minister J. C. W. Pennington w ­ ere seized as

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fugitives and hauled before a commissioner. In Jay’s words, “­After a summary examination without witnesses or counsel on their behalf [they] ­were consigned by the Slave Commission to their claiment to be carried into endless hopeless bondage.” The slave catchers left with Pennington’s ­brother and nephews before Jay could at least a file habeas corpus request to slow down the removal. Although sympathizers raised funds to purchase the freedom of Pennington’s ­brother, the nephews ­were sold before ­there was any chance to redeem them.35 ­There w ­ ere alternatives, however, to making a federal case to aid fugitives. In a m ­ atter that originated months before the passage of the new federal law, Jay’s client James P. Snowden pled guilty to a larceny. Even though the charge was dubious, the former Mary­land slave preferred being committed to state prison than being returned to his master. Thus, Jay and his client turned a “desperate” case into one in which they could fight another day. Two years l­ater, working with African American New York City leaders, Reverends Charles B. Ray and Pennington, Jay applied to the New York governor for clemency, openly stating that the guilty plea had simply been a tactic for Snowden “to escape what he regarded as a much worse fate, that of being returned to Southern Slavery.”36 John Jay continued to pursue other ave­nues of interracial advocacy in the early 1850s. Despite continued opposition, his long-­standing attempt to win recognition for St. Philip’s parish fi­nally bore fruit during this period. In 1850, James McCune Smith’s and John Jay II’s efforts to bring the issue before the Episcopal convention was beaten back on procedural grounds. The following year, Jay unsuccessfully advocated that the Church of the Messiah, a Black congregation where Alexander Crummell had previously served as minister, be allowed to participate in the election of a new bishop. Meanwhile, St. Philip’s laid the groundwork for its new white minister William Morris to make his own pitch to the convention that Black delegates should be seated. Morris also served as rector at the white boys’ Trinity School and thus already could participate in the convention as a cleric. Supporting Morris’s motion at the 1852 convention, Jay sought to link admission explic­itly to the Episcopal Church’s malevolent history of discrimination. He even moved that the convention adopt broad antidiscrimination language in its policy for admitting churches.37 In 1853 “The Colored Church Question” was fi­nally resolved. The Black church won ac­cep­tance decisively, the lay parishes supporting the move 70– 33 and the clergy voting 139–15 in f­ avor. The three Black delegates—­Peter Ray, Henry P. Scott, and Philip Augustus White—­joined the convention immediately. The final stages of St. Philip’s b­ attle for recognition displayed both the advantages and limitations of John Jay II’s aggressive advocacy. Much of the

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credit for the final results belongs to the per­sis­tence of Black churchmen and their minister. Jay’s freelancing assertiveness had the negative impact of stiffening the backs of his opponents at the convention. That the congregation did not issue any sort of thanks to Jay seems to indicate both their frustration and their pride.38 Still, two very dif­fer­ent white reactions make clear that the 1853 resolution was a remarkable symbolic victory that in one way or another connected Black advancement in the Episcopal Church with the voluble Jay. The day ­after the triumph, the conservative Episcopalian diarist George Templeton Strong acidly recorded, “Another Revolution. John Jay’s annual motion carried at last, and the nigger del­e­ga­tion admitted into the Diocesan Convention.” Mocking his fellow l­awyer’s obsession with the cause, Strong commented that Jay would now experience “an unhappy, aching void, as when one’s stomach, liver, and other innards have been dexterously taken out.” The abolitionist-­friendly New York Daily Times understood the event in more generous terms, labeling the convention’s action as “honorable” and “of peculiar interest and importance.” With an implicit nod ­toward Jay, the Times commented, “This result ­will be highly gratifying to t­hose friends of the Colored Churches who have battled manfully for them.” If this sort of statement shared with Strong’s a dismissiveness of what African American Episcopalians had done for themselves, the Times nonetheless signaled that even in t­ hese polarized times orderly interracial pro­gress remained pos­si­ble. The irritating John Jay helped produce a pearl.39 The Episcopal Church was not the only establishment institution whose racial hy­poc­risy John Jay II exposed during this period. Jay vigorously represented James P. Barnett, a medical student at New York City’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, who was dismissed in 1850 a­ fter he was discovered to have mixed racial ancestry. The school prohibited the admission of nonwhites, and Jay pursued the m ­ atter of Barnett’s dismissal in court and via negotiations with the college. The good character and preparation of Barnett having been established before he entered medical school, including his earning a bachelor’s degree, Jay sought to induce the college’s board to let Barnett finish his studies. The medical school dragged its feet for well over a year, eventually indicating that it would confer an honorary degree on Barnett. Jay and his client declined the offer ­because Barnett wanted to resume his medical studies. Jay emphasized the need for the school to “repair the injury done to his feelings” and to assume some monetary costs, ­because Barnett should not have to “permanently” bear the injury of the “mistaken action” of the college. Although one did not need a degree to practice medicine in New York and his client intended to leave the country, Jay believed that a “princi­ple” was at stake. Jay and his client returned to court in April 1853. The judge overruled the orig-

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inal decision in Barnett’s ­favor, upholding the College of Physicians and Surgeons’ racial bar. Barnett finished his medical studies at Dartmouth.40 John Jay II’s most dramatic confrontation with race-­based oppression in the new Fugitive Slave Act era was the Lemmon case, in which the liberty of eight ­people was on the line. As in the Brazilian and Kirk cases, Louis Napoleon’s access to information about the defendants’ situation and his understanding of the law brought John Jay into a dispute that reverberated well beyond the courtroom. The case demonstrated that creative networks of African Americans and whites could not only liberate the enslaved but also could agitate debate and set off alarms in distant corridors of power.41 Juliet and Jonathan Lemmon’s desire to improve their fortunes in Texas provided an opportunity for Black and white abolitionists to spring a l­egal trap. In November 1852, the Lemmons and their eight slaves from western ­Virginia arrived in Manhattan by sea with the intention of then transferring to a ship that would make the much longer voyage around Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico. A Black steward on the Norfolk-­to-­New York leg of their journey working with agents in Manhattan directed the Lemmons and their slaves to overnight lodging on shore. This maneuver gave Napoleon time to file for a writ of habeas corpus. The Lemmons now had to go to court, where ­lawyers Jay and Erastus D. Culver made the case that ­there w ­ ere no ­legal grounds on which eight p­ eople could be held in bondage in the state of New York. The team pointed to an 1841 New York law that removed a prior statutory provision allowing slaveholders to temporarily bring slaves into the other­wise f­ ree state. The US Constitution, the ­lawyers claimed, had no relevance to the current circumstances. Only in the case where the p­ eople in question ­were runaways did federal fugitive law intervene, but the Black ­people traveling in the Lemmons’s custody w ­ ere not fugitives. The implication of ­these arguments was that, like E ­ ngland at the time of the famed Somerset decision, New York should be regarded as entirely f­ ree soil, where the claims of slaveholders had no ­legal force. Judge Elijah Paine ruled in ­favor of the Black Virginians. Emmeline; her ­daughters Amanda and Ann; her two b­ rothers Edward and Lewis; Nancy, who was Emmeline’s niece; and her five-­year-­old twins Edward and Lewis, all gained their freedom.42 As the Lemmons prepared to appeal the verdict to a higher court, an interracial abolitionist network raised funds to resettle and purchase land for the group in the ­free Black Elgin settlement in Ontario, Canada. John Jay worked with the Tappans, Napoleon, Peter Ray, and Minister Pennington on this proj­ ect. Their supporters ­were determined that this group of Virginians’ freedom could not be revoked regardless of f­ uture judicial decisions. The former Lemmon slaves w ­ ere not fugitives, but their path northward and the allies who

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helped them get t­ here ­were part of the same web that assisted t­ hose who ran away from slavery.43 The case lived on. The white ­Virginia ­couple provisionally accepted the offer extended by Judge Paine and a group of New York merchants to purchase the slaves’ freedom—­a gesture mixing charity with a denial of the very ­free soil princi­ples the judge’s ruling seemed to endorse. Backed by ­Virginia state lawmakers, the Lemmons w ­ ere persuaded to press for reversal of Judge Paine’s decision in the higher courts of New York, b­ ecause the sale would only go into effect ­after the appeals pro­cess played out. New York lawmakers responded by funding l­awyers to defend the state’s right to deny southern slaveholders the privilege of bringing their ­human property into the state for even the shortest length of time.44 William Jay did more than cheer on John and wage a war of words: he supported the Under­ground Railroad, helping sustain interracial networks of re­sis­ tance. In September 1854 William wrote the following to Sydney Howard Gay, a white abolitionist editor and a leading figure in New York City’s Under­ground Railroad work: “I have a fugitive who wishes to go to Boston, via Albany. Do give me by return mail, the names of one or more in each place to whom a consignment can be safely made.” Working closely with Louis Napoleon and Philadelphia’s William Still, Gay facilitated the freedom of hundreds. Jay ­here tapped into Gay’s expertise, in the pro­cess committing a federal crime.45 In 1858, the leading Under­g round Railroad figure in Albany, Stephen A. Myers, wrote a letter to John Jay II summarizing his f­ ather’s activity. William had facilitated the pro­cession of fugitives who made their way up the Hudson Valley to seek Myers’s assistance. The African American activist reported that over the past eight-­year period, William sent along “3 from Norfolk Va.[,] 2 from Alexandria[,] 2 from New Orleanes. Last tow he sent me ­were from North Carolina.” He had also donated money to Myers from time to time, joining his son John as a financial supporter of Myers’s work. Myers referred to William as “a true freind to humanity” who “rememered the poor fugitive in defianc of the Law.”46

Class Conflict The Jays’ attacks on slavery and fugitive rendition, as well as their interracial alliances and criticisms of racial exclusion, alienated their social peers. In the view of George Templeton Strong, the Columbia-­educated, Episcopalian attorney, talk of resisting the law by the likes of William Jay was “opening up a crevasse of anarchy.”47 Strong was even more contemptuous of John Jay II’s

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pro bono work on behalf of fugitives. In late December 1850, Strong encountered a crowd of African Americans, “Young Ethiopia” as he termed it, filling the hallways of the court­house while a fugitive case was in session. In his demeaning description, an animated John Jay could be seen “chattering and scratching and fluttering . . . ​like one of his blue namesakes.” Unlike the Jays, Strong had no doubt that it was the “duty” of northern judges to execute the law in slaveowners’ ­favor.48 Other social and intellectual peers also openly expressed their contempt, hitting the Jays where it hurt the most—­their ­family reputation. William’s attacks on Mas­sa­chu­setts icon Daniel Webster drew a reprisal. Halfway through his 119-­page defense of Senator Webster, Mas­sa­chu­setts theologian Moses Stuart ­imagined a portrait of John Jay watching his son condemning the Bay State senator before a meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-­Slavery Society. He pictured the founder “look[ing] down with a mixture of sorrow and of frowning, on a descendant who could exhort his countrymen to disregard and trample u ­ nder foot the Constitution which his f­ ather had so signally helped to establish.” What, Stuart wondered, would John Jay think of how his son “pour[ed] out an unrestrained torrent of vituperation upon Mr. Webster, who has taken up the Constitution where” John Jay had “left it, and stood ever since in the place of the latter as its defender and expounder?” William Jay had, in Stuart’s mournful view, “degrade[d] and villif[ied] his illustrious ancestor” by speaking out so militantly.49 In Rev. Stuart’s view, Moses and Jesus had been gradualists and moderates on the subject of slavery. Much like founding ­father John Jay, Christ “carefully abstained from meddling with ­those ­matters which belonged to the civil power,” and his disciple Paul counseled obedience and honored the slaveholder’s property rights rather than practicing civil disobedience himself. Hot-­ headed abolitionists, by contrast, turned their back on biblical and American history, “excit[ing] slaves in ­every pos­si­ble way to change their condition, at all ­hazards and in all relations . . . ​set[ting] the ­whole country in commotion, to accomplish this.”50 In sum, Stuart regarded the North as blameless when returning slaves, previously respectable men like Jay as deluded fanatics, and Webster as a hero still. William could not let Stuart’s assertions about his ­father or the Bible stand. His published response to Stuart indicated how enmeshed f­amily identity, religion, and fugitive slaves w ­ ere in the identity of the sixty-­one-­year-­old abolitionist. The issue went beyond what he and his fellow northerners should say or how they should vote, directly implicating what they should do as Christians. To repudiate Stuart’s stinging charge that he was a “degenerate offspring” and to rescue his f­ather’s reputation from the “stigma” of being associated with

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the weak-­willed Webster, William dove into the details of John Jay’s abolitionist rec­ord. William found much continuity between the princi­ples of the Manumission Society over which his ­father presided and the current antislavery movement. Across the de­cades a belief in God-­ordained equality between the races persisted, as demonstrated by the NYMS constitution and the pamphlets the organ­ization circulated to national legislators. William wryly remarked that maligning southerners was “hereditary” as well. In the early years of the New York antislavery society, it saw white “idleness and intemperance,” not a warm climate, as the reason the institution existed in the South. William also quoted from the manumission document his f­ ather prepared for Benoit, the boy he purchased in Martinique in 1780: “Whereas the ­children of men are by nature equally ­free, and cannot without injustice be ­either reduced to, or held in slavery,” William emphasizing the word “held” in all caps. Not the slave trade, but slavery itself, had always been his ­father’s moral concern. What had changed, according to William, was the po­liti­cal context in which abolitionists worked: in the early years of the republic, John Jay could avow strong antislavery princi­ples and still ascend to the highest national offices rather than being shunned as a fanatic.51 To vindicate his f­ ather’s abolitionism and piety, as well as his own, William devoted much of his twenty-­page published reply to the under­lying issue of fugitive slaves themselves. Before parsing the theologian’s biblical erudition, William proclaimed, “It is b­ ecause I regard a fugitive f­ ree by the laws of God, that I cannot aid in reducing him to slavery; and b­ ecause I refuse to join you and Mr. Webster in catching runaways” that Stuart heaped his “indignant wrath.” The current fugitive regime did not mirror biblical or historical pre­ ce­dent: “Neither Abolitionists nor their f­ athers ever made a compact that private individuals should hunt slaves; nor would such a compact have been binding on any who regarded its requisitions as sinful.” Having done the “filial duty” of “rescuing my f­ ather’s memory from . . . ​disgrace,” Jay also dismissed the “utter worthlessness” of biblical defenses of US slavery, using the same phrase as in his book on the Mexican War to deride the value of public opinion in judging right and wrong. William finished by giving to Stuart as good as he got, accusing ministers who defended slavery of paving the way for “infidelity” and providing “occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme.” Stuart had done William Jay the f­ avor of charting one of his boldest courses, freedom for fugitives, by his ­father’s still bright star.52 Yet William understood that at some level the storyline about the found­ ers and slavery was far from s­ imple. In an 1851 pamphlet, originally published ­under a pseudonym, Jay interrogated Boston congressman Samuel Eliot over his support of the Fugitive Slave Act. Jay sputtered on the subject of the found­ ers and slavery. He took Eliot to task for arguing that b­ ecause the founding

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f­ athers passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 any criticism of the 1850 law would mean “ ‘denouncing our ­fathers.’ ” Fulminated Jay, “Well, sir, w ­ ere our ­fathers infallible? . . . ​Our ­fathers ­were mostly slaveholders, and yet you, sir, unconsciously denounce both their morality and intelligence, when you affirm the institution of slavery to be ‘wrong and unwise.’ And yet all who presume to find fault with your cruel, unjust, wicked law, are guilty, forsooth, of denouncing their ­fathers!” This outburst captured Jay’s recognition that the ­matter of legacy was not cut and dried. Jay could not shake his sensitivity over the relationship between his f­ather’s and his own antislavery commitments. In 1853, he wrote Gerrit Smith regarding a letter from his maternal grand­father William Livingston seeking to join John Jay’s New-­York Manumission Society; this ­family evidence prompted William to comment to Smith, “I have legitimately inherited my abolitionism,” contrary to the seminary professor Stuart’s aspersion of William as a “degenerate offspring.”53 Smith, of course, was not the one who needed the reassurance. John Jay’s reputation regarding slavery remained a fault line on which shakily rested the reputation of William’s antislavery choices. In 1855, William once again felt compelled to protect his own and his f­ ather’s reputation, this time in response to a biographical profile appearing in a book on the chief justices of the US Supreme Court. In reviewing John Jay’s rec­ord on slavery, author Henry Flanders commented, “He respected the laws.” Flanders continued, “His conscience did not tell him that an institution which he deemed wrong in princi­ple must therefore, without regard to any other consideration, be instantly abolished.”54 In the increasingly raw climate of the 1850s, ­there was no separating the personal, the historical, and the po­liti­cal. William Jay accused Flanders of ignoring evidence of John Jay’s antislavery and antiracist stances. As a result, a false dichotomy between the “fanat­i­cism” of the pre­sent day and the reason of the found­ers emerged. In the current climate, a person of Jay’s views “would be lynched” in the South; in the North, elite men “would deem him vulgar and shun him.” ­After explaining the alleged even-­handedness and consensual nature of his f­ ather’s slave purchases and manumission contracts, William defended his ­father’s gradualism by once again claiming that no one at the time knew yet of the “perfect safety” of immediate emancipation. More tellingly, he excused his ­father’s generation ­because in their “wildest imagination” they did not think that slavery would “grow” and “spread.” Nor, bringing the story up to date, could they imagine Congress passing a law by which “the office of a ­human blood-­hound would be identified with that of a ‘good citizen.’ ”55 Slave law and social custom, not abolitionist commitments, w ­ hether gradualist or immediatist, made moral and reasonable antislavery appear fanatical.

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Counterpunching to defend the f­ amily legacy, however, could not protect the Jays from all the social costs of their per­sis­tent and unapologetically public identification with the cause of African American freedom. Indeed, New York City’s most self-­selective elite men’s organ­ization, the Union Club, rejected John Jay II for membership b­ ecause of his antislavery and antiracist activities. Jay’s campaign on behalf of St. Philip’s Church and his advocacy on behalf of fugitive Henry Long had alienated the five Union Club members who vetoed his admission. In response, someone, prob­ably John himself, had printed a four-­ page flyer of a decorous exchange between John and two sympathetic club members. John and his two correspondents agreed that the club’s fellowship should transcend politics. The published letters all affirmed Jay’s status as a “gentleman.” John did not want his reputation as a true and deserving member of the Manhattan elite to suffer from his being blackballed from the club. In John’s view, his detractors, not he, failed to play by the rules of civility.56 His ­father nonetheless felt the sting of his son’s and his own ostracism by their elite social peers. The events of the early 1850s only heightened his sense that the slave’s cause, though ennobling, was isolating. In December 1850, William wrote a frank assessment of his social experiences to rising antislavery po­liti­cal star Charles Sumner, in whom he and John invested g­ reat hope. William commented, “The truths we advocate are unpalatable to the two extremes of Society.” On the one hand, “We shock the coarse & vulgar prejudices of the rabble,” but on the other, “the upper classes look upon us as impertinent & exceedingly ungenteel, & unfit to move with the higher classes.” He considered neither his po­liti­cal nor his religious opinions radical: “Yet solely on account of my anti slavery efforts, I find myself nearly insulated in Society. This very day I heard that a Lady in my acquaintance had said that she ­every where defended William Jay as a good man, although he is crazy about slavery.” Being an abolitionist had marked his life.57 William Jay’s age and intimate links to the founding lessened, in one poignant instance, his sense of isolation. An expression of support from former New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Joseph Coerten Hornblower prompted Jay to engage in even more open and deep meditations on the relationship between personal history, social class, and his current antislavery obligations. Hornblower reached out to Jay to express support in the debate with Moses Stuart. Re­spect for and trust in Hornblower, who had known his f­ ather, prompted William Jay to frankly assess the strengths and weaknesses of the abolition movement itself. “Few men are more familiar than myself with the characters opinions & mea­sures of the abolitionists from the commencement of the anti-­slavery agitation in 1831, to the pre­sent time,” commented one scion of

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the revolutionary elite to another. “I have witnessed among them much zeal without knowledge, much bad taste, much coarse language, & many errors in judgment,” he confessed. “But I have never known a large body of men acting together with so much disinterestedness, & so much philanthropy, & for a long time so universally influenced by a deep sense of religious duty.” For all their shortcomings, Jay defended abolitionists with whom he diverged, even ­those who had fallen away from or­ga­nized religion. Jay concluded by thanking his correspondent for his sympathetic support at a time when “in fash­ion­ able circles, it is deemed vulgar to talk of the wrongs of the Negro, & many seem to consider gentlemen & abolitionist as antagonistic terms.” Jay’s was the observation of one gentleman to another.58 ­Eager to further involve Hornblower in the fight against the Fugitive Slave Act, Jay felt compelled to summarize his f­ amily’s abolitionist biography first. In a July 1851 letter to his New Jersey correspondent, William identified John Jay as the source of the ­family’s commitment to the antislavery cause: “I early imbibed my ­Father’s hostility to Slavery,” he wrote. Few extrinsic rewards had come of his own “warfare against” slavery: “Out[side] of my own ­family I have recd ­little countenance & support among my friends & acquaintances.” Now his son John Jay II carried forward with the f­ amily’s abolitionist work, but also not without cost. William brought up the Union Club incident: “Last winter some of his friends proposed his admission into a fash­ion­able club, but he was black-­balled avowedly on the ground that he had acted as counsel for a fugitive slave, & that in the Episcopal Convention he had advocated the right of Colored Clergymen & churches to be represented in that body.” Why had William brought all this to Hornblower’s attention? “To show you how grateful my heart is & must be [for] your kind sympathy & approval.” Their legacy could be lonely, even stigmatizing, but it was enduring, Jay suggested.59 Only a few ­people in and around the antislavery movement, Jay felt, could understand the complex relationship of abolitionism to history and social class. A cathartic sense of intimacy set up Jay’s pitch for the continued need for abolitionist stewardship and, hence, for Hornblower’s engagement in the cause. Jay wrote him that while “I fully share in your disappointment & depression which recent events have caused,” the two of them had an obligation to “plant & w ­ ater.” William evoked Elijah, the Hebrew prophet, who did not allow his isolation to become inaction, instead “anoint[ing] a successor” who became the “instrument of divine vengeance.” All of which was to say to Hornblower, “Your work my dear Sir, is not I trust yet done,” any more than William’s was, even if John Jay II was in place as a successor. Jay sought to coax out of the respected New Jersey jurist a letter for the press justifying noncompliance with the Fugitive Slave Act. Absent that, Jay sought to share

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Hornblower’s previous letter expressing the “unconstitutionality” of both the old and new fugitive slave laws. To express discouragement privately to friends was only ­human. Even so, each abolitionist in his own way had a duty to cultivate liberty’s legacy.60 Jay’s appeal worked. Hornblower mailed to Bedford the manuscript of his 1836 New Jersey Supreme Court decision. Jay had the decision published in the New York Eve­ning Post and as a standalone pamphlet for f­ree distribution. Hornblower’s language was indeed stirring fifteen years ­after he originally extended the right of a jury trial ­under New Jersey law to the fugitive Nathan Helmsley: “What, first transport a man out of the state on the charge of his being a slave, and try the truth of the allegation afterwards. . . . ​No, if a person comes into this state, and ­here claims the servitude of a ­human being, ­whether white or black, ­here he must prove his case, and h ­ ere prove it according to law.” No won­der Jay “exclaimed to myself ‘Capital! Capital!’ ” on reading ­these words before rushing the decision into print. H ­ ere was evidence that a jurist could reasonably rule that the federal government did not have a constitutional right to supersede state law in designing slave rendition proceedings. The case then became fodder for a judicial counteroffensive against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.61 Respectable p­ eople could still forge pro­g ress against the hated institution. ­Family legacy and religious mission provided the ultimate validation for William’s advocacy, amid uncertainty and frustration. In June 1851, William praised his niece Elizabeth Clarkson Jay for “in­ter­est­ing yourself in behalf of persons who on account of their complexion, are practically regarded by too many as without the pale of christian sympathy.” God, he believed, judged ­people on this subject, “deem[ing] acts of kindness done to the least of his brethren, as indicative of love for himself,” while negative “treatment of the colored p­ eople ­will not be forgotten by him, at our final account.”62 With such ultimate stakes, concerns over race and class could not be allowed to turn into indifference or despair.

C h a p te r 13

Parting Shots

“It is with heavy foreboding in regard to Kansas that I leave the country,” William Jay wrote to Mas­sa­chu­setts senator Charles Sumner on May 10, 1856, as the New Yorker prepared to sail for ­England for a trip with his wife Augusta and his second youn­gest ­daughter Eliza. “The vio­ lence, insolence, cruelty & injustice springing from slavery are gradually drifting us to anarchy; & anarchy leads to civil war,” he continued. “I think all honest men must be convinced that nothing is gained to freedom by compromise.” Sumner admired William’s writings, while William found in Sumner a politician whose antislavery views accorded unusually well with his own.1 For years, John Jay II had cultivated an even closer connection with Sumner, cajoling the senator to air his antislavery views from the Senate floor, lavishing him with praise, arranging for his speeches to be published, and lobbying him on m ­ atters unrelated to slavery. On May 21, John rushed to celebrate Sumner’s full-­throated verbal assault on the southern character that was precipitated by the crisis in Bleeding Kansas, where proslavery and antislavery forces clashed over the fate of the West and perhaps the nation. Even before seeing the entire two-­day speech, the attorney and po­liti­cal or­ga­nizer sent the senator money to have the remarks printed. John gushed, “God bless you, Dear Sumner for your devotion to truth & Freedom, & your Exposure . . . ​ of the wretched creatures whom an inscrutable Providence permits for a season to misrule our Country.” He felt energized by his friend’s fierce rhe­toric.2 309

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The day a­ fter John penned his laudatory letter, on May 22, slavery’s anarchic vio­lence literally rained brutally down on Senator Sumner’s head. South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks struck Sumner repeatedly with a cane while he sat defenseless at his desk on the Senate floor. ­After extricating himself from his chair, the bloodied and unconscious Sumner collapsed into the arms of colleagues who rushed to the scene.3 Although at first not realizing the severity of Sumner’s injuries, John instantly understood the po­liti­cal opportunity that the assault on Sumner presented. On May 23, ­after extending his “deepest sympathy . . . ​in the martyrdom you are suffering,” Jay reported to the senator that he was already mobilizing prominent Wall Street men to demand the House of Representatives expel Brooks. On May 27, Jay suggested to Sumner that the southern press’s unapologetic response to the outrage “must work a revolution” in the North. The New York l­ awyer hoped that Brooks’s attack on Sumner would at last prompt even the most conservative men to overcome their commercially driven southern sympathies to fi­nally support the antislavery cause. Meanwhile, John’s wife Eleanor urged Sumner to come recuperate at the ­family’s Westchester County estate, where he could enjoy rural ease and the com­pany of “one of your most attached friends.” Sympathy for his ally Sumner did not prevent Jay, along with many other participants in northern antislavery politics, from seeing the assault as a potential tipping point in the strug­gle against the Slave Power.4 For William Jay, who carried letters of introduction from Charles Sumner to ­England, reports from the United States—­proslavery partisans sacked Lawrence, Kansas, the day before Sumner’s caning—­confirmed his forebodings. He wrote his s­ ister and ­daughter, “The po­liti­cal news from home is humiliating, & indicates coming outrage & civil war.” The abolitionist heritage of his hosts abroad provided some respite from the unfolding disaster in the States. ­Later that summer, he returned to a country in which, even though Sumner’s health continued to suffer, Congressman Brooks remained a southern hero. Even as an abolitionist who had seemingly seen and heard it all, the sixty-­seven-­ year-­old Jay found that this “extinction of the moral sense in the Slaveholding community . . . ​surprises and alarms me.” The upcoming presidential election, he wrote his son might “seal the doom of our country.”5 Navigating partisan and sectional politics in the 1850s became as necessary as it was perilous. The fate of the nation seemed to be bound up with the results of each election as never before. For John, party and alliance building fit well with his vision of an expansive nation that could both honor its past and secure its ­future by abolishing slavery. William, while supportive of a more fully or­ga­nized ­free soil and antislavery politics, devoted much of his waning energies in an at-



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tempt to vanquish the proslavery culture that continued to threaten religious and benevolent institutions. He found himself anticipating the nation’s catastrophic demise more than its triumphant growth. Moreover, in a f­ ather–­son alliance that would last beyond William’s final breath, John and William used the 1850s to make the Jay name both a monument to and a force for unwavering opposition to the interests of slaveholders. Both men also sought to minimize past divisions in the antislavery movement. In their last years together, William served that abolitionist cause as a social critic and John as an institution builder. Both men, as the nation neared collapse, followed William’s advice to Sumner that compromise with slavery could not advance freedom.

National Vistas During the 1850s, John Jay II did not act like a man who thought the nation was doomed. Indeed, two ­causes he committed himself to outside the orbit of antislavery politics promoted a vision of a nation seeking to enhance its international prestige and self-­confidence. The New York attorney had a long-­ standing interest in copyright law. He sought to create reciprocal protections for British and US authors as a way of shoring up the domestic publishing industry and the profitability of authorship. Although his aim may have been to serve a burgeoning Manhattan business community, his argument expressed a vision of national greatness. The United States needed to cultivate its authors ­because ­these men (his rhe­toric was gendered) ­were responsible “for the dissemination, the exposition, and the maintenance of our country’s princi­ ples and institutions, which, with her rapidly increasing power and extent, are daily becoming more and more the objects of jealousy and misrepre­sen­ta­tion in foreign lands.” His lobbying efforts expressed a cultural manifest destiny.6 Nothing that happened during the ensuing de­cade of sectional crisis dampened John Jay’s enthusiasm for another nationally and internationally oriented initiative: the American Geo­graph­i­cal and Statistical Society. This group, incorporated in 1852 and based in New York City, sought to facilitate the nation’s economic development and international trade. It compiled maps, assembled reliable data on the production and resources of the United States and foreign powers, and advocated for establishing internationally uniform weights and mea­sures. Jay served as trustee, corresponding secretary, and advocate. His name and po­liti­cal connections, including to Sumner, made him an asset to the organ­ization.7 John Jay II’s 1858 address to the organ­ization confidently forecast a United States feeding the rest of the world. Armed with data “marked by mathematical

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accuracy, and possessing almost the certainty of moral truth,” the government could address urban poverty to facilitate “national prosperity.” Implicit in his cele­bration of growth was the victory of a f­ree ­labor system in the nation’s western territories, which, in his vision, ­were critical to increasing the material and moral glory of the United States. He did not have to explic­itly mix his antislavery activities and his championing of the statistical science of development: where one foot marched the other would follow: his nationalism and his abolitionism complementary proj­ects. His notion of a geo­g raph­ i­cally expansive nation powered by an expanding ­free ­labor economy suited him well for the Republican Party that rapidly emerged in the 1850s.8 John attended vigorously to building new antislavery po­liti­cal infrastructures during the 1850s, slavery remaining at the center not only of American politics but also of his m ­ ental universe. The continuing fallout from the Compromise of 1850 called into question the survival of the current party system. The Whigs’ lackluster presidential campaign in 1852 exposed its acute weakness, while sectional divisions peeled away some of the Demo­cratic Party’s northern supporters. In 1853, John joined national figures like Ohio’s Senator Salmon P. Chase and New Hampshire’s Senator John P. Hale in trying to forge a new party. Jay concentrated his energies on his home state, writing Sumner in September 1853 ­after attending a convention in Syracuse, “Both the old parties are distracted & doubtful, & now is the time for the F ­ ree Democracy to 9 strike their first blow in New York.” To advance in the nation’s leading city the movement for a new national party, John founded the F ­ ree Demo­cratic League of the City & County of New York (FDL). In that endeavor, he had the active support of his f­ ather. Both men made strong financial commitments to the FDL. Preliminary meetings for the FDL met in John’s office, and John served as the organ­ization’s first president, chairing most of its meetings during late 1853 and early 1854.10 The New York City FDL constitution defined the urgency of the current moment, expressed the antislavery princi­ples that would subsequently become the pillars of the Republican Party, and offered planks designed to attract former Whigs and former Demo­crats. The incipient party responded to a dire state of affairs: the “slave-­power” dominated the national government with the purpose “to extend, nationalize, and encourage Slavery”—with the assistance of “two slave-­power parties.” The FDL offered to reclaim the founding princi­ples of the nation—­equality, justice, and liberty—as expressed in the preambles to the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence and the US Constitution. The guiding ­legal princi­ple of the organ­ization was summed up in this slogan—­ “Freedom National. Slavery Sectional”—­the title of Charles Sumner’s 1852 contribution to a Senate debate over a proposed repeal of the Fugitive Slave



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Act. The “freedom national” princi­ple was that slavery could exist only where the par­tic­ul­ar laws of an individual state recognized it, but that everywhere ­else liberty reigned and slavery should expect no protection. According to this logic, Congress should use its antislavery authority wherever constitutional to do so.11 What direct acts against slavery Congress should take, the FDL constitution did not spell out, other than that the Fugitive Slave Act should be repealed and its constitutionality litigated in the courts. The FDL was a plenary for a new f­ ree soil party hoping to open up space between the two dominant but hemorrhaging ones. The FDL staked out a racially progressive stance while also borrowing nonslavery-­related values from both the Whigs and the Demo­crats. In terms that expressed the Jays’ now unequivocal hostility to racial exclusion, the organ­ ization’s constitution pledged, “Any citizen, without regard to color or condition of life” could apply for membership in the FDL and once duly elected would enjoy equal “privileges” within the organ­ization. The November 7 minutes reported a plan to meet with “Coloured voters.” T ­ hose minutes also took a strong stance in f­avor of slaves ­running away from masters and seeking to elude federal marshals. The FDL constitution took Whig-­style positions in support of “internal improvements” and “general education” alongside Democratic-­sounding calls for a smaller government and openness to foreign immigration. The FDL also sought to legitimize its seemingly radical leanings on slavery by linking itself to the founding era. The October 31, 1853, meeting moved to have John prepare a history of the New-­York Manumission Society, which bore the distinctive marks of the Jays’ values and historical identity.12 Even so, hints of ideological and personal fissures within the FDL emerged from the early proceedings. Henry Dawson, one of its most active founding members, objected to nominating William Jay and ­others for judgeships, ostensibly ­because judicial offices w ­ ere “too impor­tant a character to be made a reward for po­liti­cal partizanship.” Although Dawson wished the Fugitive Slave Act repealed, he also watered down the FDL’s rhe­toric. The original proposed language of its constitution, on which John Jay and Dawson had worked, included a clause targeting slavery “in e­ very state and Territory as a system that has no valid sanction in h ­ uman legislation.” At Dawson’s urging, this language was deleted. Dawson also successfully advocated for the use of the word “Federal” rather than “National” to describe the US government, a concession to the primacy of decentralizing states’ rights princi­ples. Ironically, Dawson played the role of constitutional purist that William had once played in the American Anti-­Slavery Society (AAS), insisting that no federal power to act against slavery in the states be stated or implied.13 John Jay, for his part, wished

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to forge an antislavery po­liti­cal consensus that matched the ideological militancy of slavery’s defenders, without conceding any ground on the belief that abolitionism was a creed fully in keeping with the nation’s past traditions and its ­f uture greatness.

The Tabernacle of Higher Law Even as the Jays sought to assem­ble a coherent antislavery po­liti­cal organ­ ization out of the mismatched parts of the old party system, opportunities arose to synchronize or at least synthesize their abolitionist message with old movement rivals. Garrisonian Sydney Howard Gay not only publicized John’s pro bono ­legal work on behalf of freedom-­seeking African Americans but he also personally held the attorney in high regard. Gay wrote Maria Weston Chapman, one of Garrison’s staunchest Mas­sa­chu­setts Brahmin allies, that the younger Jay was “my loyal anti-­slavery advisor whenever I need one” and “he likes and re­spects us.” John regarded Gay similarly as a valuable contact and a person with whom he could work when their opinions aligned.14 William gave his public imprimatur to a live-­and-­let-­live approach to the old abolitionist schisms when invited in 1853 to an anniversary meeting of the AAS. Though politely declining to attend, he affirmed his solidarity with the shared cause: “I am always ready and happy to co-­operate with all my Anti-­Slavery friends in their opposition to Slavery, however much I may differ from them on other subjects.” He expressed unreserved enthusiasm for the fact that AAS had persevered. The society’s bravery prompted an expression of high-­minded solidarity: “May you enjoy in your meeting the rights of American citizens; but should lawless vio­lence disperse you as before, assem­ble again.”15 In the winter of 1853–54, John Jay took his place in a weekly speakers’ series at Manhattan’s Broadway Tabernacle. Joining antislavery politicians John P. Hale and Joshua Giddings in the series w ­ ere leading lights of New E ­ ngland antislavery radicalism, Wendell Phillips, Rev. Theodore Parker, and William Lloyd Garrison. African American abolitionist C. Lenox Redmond and feminist Lucy Stone also took their turns. So too did some of the most prominent public figures in the country: phi­los­o­pher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, renowned Brooklyn evangelist Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, and New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. The New York Anti-­Slavery Society, an affiliate of the American Anti-­Slavery Society that William had left on princi­ple more than a de­cade before, sponsored the Tuesday night series.16 For his January 10, 1854, speech, John elected to root some of his more radical formulations of po­liti­cal antislavery in an inspirational history of the found-



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ing ­fathers’ approach to slavery. Although not the only speaker in the series to invoke the founding ­fathers, Jay was especially suited to conjure the spirit of abolitionists past—­because of his name and his historical research—to appeal to antislavery audiences across old divides and to mobilize the public to action. For this occasion, Jay used his ­Free Demo­cratic League assignment of writing a short history of the New-­York Manumission Society as an opportunity to advocate for the core princi­ple of po­liti­cal abolitionism—­“that Freedom is national, and Slavery sectional”—­and that no further ground should be conceded to slaveholders.17 Jay’s history lesson transmitted his personal antislavery pedigree to the nation as a w ­ hole. Early in the talk he disavowed any intent to pre­sent his grand­ father’s well-­known antislavery views; yet lineage—­his and all the New Yorkers speaking—­was crucial to his purpose. According to the handwritten version of his remarks, the audience would “recognize in ­these early abolitionists your ­Fathers and Grandsires of New York,” fighters of the Revolutionary War and found­ers of the nation “who by restoring liberty and justice to the enslaved Africans of this State, Secured for ever the greatness and prosperity of this our own Commonwealth.” In New York, Jay claimed, the abolition of slavery completed the work of the American Revolution. In a somewhat clumsy adaptation of the cross-­class appeal of 1850s antislavery politics, Jay made sure to highlight that New York’s original abolitionist organ­ization included not only “luminaries” but also “the brewers, the watchmakers, the cabinet-­makers, the shoe­makers” of that e­ arlier era. For further demo­cratic coloring, Jay invoked Jefferson.18 John also endorsed some of the arguments that his ­father liked to make about the deeper continuity of abolitionism beneath the surface of superficial differences. In his notes, John explained the ­earlier generation’s preference for gradual mea­sures: “The safety of immediate emancipation had not then been demonstrated” by emancipation in the West Indies. The found­ers in good faith, therefore, thought preliminary steps “proper and essential.” Yet the commitment and even some of the methods of abolitionism, he claimed, remained the same. The version of his talk excerpted in the NASS argued that the founding generation pursued a broad range of antislavery actions; state manumission socie­ties coalesced into a national convention while “purify[ing] and humaniz[ing] public opinion” through pamphlets and preaching. Jay highlighted the kind of activism, denounced as incendiary by slaveholders and their defenders in the pre­sent moment, undertaken by the founding generation: petitioning, undermining the capture of fugitives by discouraging the placement in newspapers of advertisements about runaways, and cultivating alliances with foreign foes of slavery. Its goal was to “render the traffic in slaves

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odious and difficult, and property in slaves precarious.” Jay informed his audience that the early NYMS predicated a petition to the state legislature on the notion that slavery existed based on man-­made law alone: God’s law only recognizes freedom. This, according to Jay, was “the higher law” princi­ple on which antislavery agitation rested still.19 Jay used the final portion of his remarks to solder his story of the found­ ers’ antislavery agenda to his version of the ­Free Demo­crats’ agenda. Demo­ cratic law and higher law should fuse, with “a just ­people, reaffirming and enforcing the laws of God” through antislavery politics. What Benjamin Franklin demanded in 1790 with regard to the international slave trade—­action “to the very verge of the power vested in you”—­current antislavery advocates “should reiterate, ­until, reverberating in tones of thunder from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” If, Jay argued, Congress did all it could against slavery, then the hated institution would “wither and die.” The very first blow, in an implicit nod to the origins of William Jay’s antislavery activism, should be struck against slavery in the nation’s capital itself. Even if the federal government had to purchase the freedom of the slaves ­there, the price of this antislavery victory would be well worth it.20 Through his name and his analy­sis, John Jay cleverly connected the three generations of antislavery organ­izing to the mass antislavery politics of the 1850s. For Jay, invoking “higher law” was not a call to ignore entirely the way the Constitution still shielded slavery in the states from direct federal intervention. Nonetheless, the phrase conveyed that antislavery politics justified an implacable re­sis­tance to slaveholding interests. In his draft notes for the speech, Jay grandly stated, “The spirit of Truth and Freedom has commenced anew that warfare against American despotism which is destined never to cease ­until through the wide extent of our mighty empire the sun” only shined on liberty. He yoked to the slow and steady antislavery activism of his relatives’ Manumission Society the belligerent urgency of the Revolutionary War and the morally uncompromising rhe­toric of modern abolitionism.21 Events would not cool his passion.

Kansas Senators Sumner and Chase—­Jay’s antislavery allies in Washington, D.C.—­ complimented him on his speech, but what they ­really needed Jay to do was to continue party building and to find ways to mobilize demonstrations of public opposition to the expansion of slavery. In January  1854, Ohio senator Salmon P. Chase wrote John Jay from Washington, D.C., urging the New York



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l­ awyer to continue developing the In­de­pen­dent Demo­crats, for without a new po­liti­cal party “our American Experiment” was in grave danger. The senators ­were gearing up for a titanic po­liti­cal ­battle over ­whether the Missouri Compromise line would apply to the Kansas and Nebraska territories or ­whether the f­ uture plains states would be open to slavery. Sumner not only urged Jay to help or­ga­nize petition drives to ensure that his colleagues felt the heat of public opinion but also instructed Jay about the par­tic­u­lar content of t­hose petitions. John enthusiastically threw himself into the task. In mid-­January, Jay optimistically reported to Sumner on his ability to garner the signatures of “leading merchants & Bank Presidents” that “can be increased in­def­initely” to support maintaining the Missouri Compromise line in Kansas and Nebraska.22 Defeat in Washington only deepened Jay’s commitment to po­liti­cal organ­ izing. The Missouri Compromise line did not hold, making a mockery of Jay’s notion that Congress would do all in its power to fight slavery. Stephen A. Douglas’s Kansas-­Nebraska Act, which made its way through Congress in early 1854, applied the doctrine of popu­lar sovereignty to ­these territories: slaveholders and ­those not owning slaves would compete to determine slavery’s permissibility. Yet defeat in Washington only deepened Jay’s commitment to po­liti­cal organ­ izing: he joined the executive committee of a group planning a statewide convention to mobilize against what they regarded as a betrayal of the ­Free States to placate the interests of the Slave Power. Proposed agenda items included the calling of a national antislavery convention, mobilization for the fall 1854 elections, permanently restoring the Missouri Compromise line, and, more vaguely confrontational, “the absolute and complete release of the p­ eople of the F ­ ree States from any participation in or responsibility for” slavery’s “longer existence.”23 Jay and his colleagues viewed the prob­lem of slavery as a face-­off between regional sections addressed through po­liti­cal and electoral mobilization. William Jay also kept his own eye on Kansas politics in 1854, but with less emphasis on electoral judgments than divine ones. William counseled his longtime friend Gerrit Smith, who had won election to Congress, that if the repeal of the Missouri Compromise came up for debate, Smith could articulate the “higher objections against the bill” and “invoke the divine wrath against a guilty nation.” During his short tenure as a congressman, Smith warned his colleagues during debate of the Kansas-­Nebraska bill of the dire, bloody, long-­ term consequences of failing to act to end slavery. In a published letter that September, William pronounced northern congressmen who voted for the Kansas-­Nebraska Act more guilty “in the sight of God” than “most of the thieves and burglars in our penitentiaries.”24 Although ­these men would not be locked up, of course, John Jay’s insurgent ­Free Demo­cratic Party sought to replace as many apostates as pos­si­ble in the upcoming midterm election.

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As the fall 1854 elections approached, John joined John P. Hale and Hiram Barney in producing a broadside to draw New York voters to the new po­liti­ cal party. The collaboration fused radicalism and respectability, abolitionist activism and electoral politics. Hale, the former New Hampshire Demo­cratic congressman who pioneered antislavery fusion politics when he got himself selected as US senator in 1847, served as the ­Free Soil Party’s presidential candidate in 1852. Barney, a well-­connected New York City attorney, was the son-­ in-­law of the venerable evangelical abolitionist Lewis Tappan.25 Together with Jay, they sought to rally support for the F ­ ree Demo­crats from well beyond the ranks of committed abolitionists. Sweeping references to the found­ers bolstered populist-­tinged po­liti­cal analy­sis that reflected Hale’s roots far more than Jay’s or Barney’s. The triumvirate proclaimed that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise would “swindle the ­free laborers of the North, East and West, out of a territory ten times larger than New York.” They denounced the “slaveholding oligarchy” designed to represent property, not working p­ eople. Jay’s sensibility was nonetheless evident. The broadside argued that V ­ irginia’s plan to challenge the Lemmon case was part of an effort to make New York City a regular trans-­shipping port for the slave trade. The southern states, in its reading, perverted the nation’s geographic destiny. The Kansas-­Nebraska Act cleared “the way . . . ​for making Amer­i­ca a g­ reat slave empire.” With the Whigs’ disintegration, the lines, claimed the Hale-­Barney-­Jay broadside, could now be drawn clearly between “the party of faith and freedom, and the party of repudiation and slavery.” Two dif­fer­ent visions of American empire competed as the nation expanded westward. The new law, the writers suggested, also perverted the nation’s revolutionary heritage. They alluded to the fact that Stephen Arnold Douglas bore the same name as the infamous traitor Benedict Arnold. The ­battle ahead was worthy of the revolutionary past, the broadside calling on voters to “act in the spirt of your ­fathers” by “driv[ing] back its southern bounds the mean tyranny that . . . ​seeks to lord it over the ­free citizens of ­free states.” If northerners rallied to the F ­ ree Demo­crats’ standard, “then freedom, honor, faith, w ­ ill become, as of old, the moving princi­ples of our republic.” As a F ­ ree Demo­crat, Jay participated in a populist appeal that also reflected his ­legal and historical concerns. Ordinary voters could look to the founding f­ athers’ virtues and to their own interests in combating the scourge of slavery’s expansion.26 ­There was no talk of guilty compromises struck by slaveholding found­ers in this version of the usable past. The results of the 1854 election reflected the disordered state of politics in New York and nationally. An upsurge of anti-­Catholic nativism combined with



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the acute vulnerabilities of the Whigs and the Demo­crats to muddy the po­ liti­cal w ­ aters. In the Empire State, the nativist Know Nothing Party elected or contributed to the success of eleven congressional candidates. The Whigs won both ­houses of the state legislature and the governorship, but the adoption of Know Nothing stances on immigration and temperance meant that the party was neither strong nor unified. In other states, most notably Mas­sa­chu­setts, the Know Nothings surged. Although many northern Know Nothings disliked slavery, their party was in no way against slavery—­and did not adhere to the passions or the policies outlined by Jay, Hale, and Barney. The election badly damaged northern Demo­crats, who suffered an almost 80 ­percent reduction of their ranks in the US House of Representatives. Voters punished ­those who supported the Kansas-­Nebraska Act and its popu­lar sovereignty formula. The ­Free Democrats—or the Republicans, as the coalescing northern antislavery party was starting to be called—­did not emerge clearly as the leading new party, but congressmen who held the ­free soil views of a growing Republican co­ali­tion made up a significant portion of the newly elected Congress.27 ­Going forward from the 1854 election, John and William supported efforts to elect strong antislavery candidates. John’s connections to national figures like Chase and Sumner, as well as abolitionist bona fides served his effort to build the Republicans into a genuine antislavery po­liti­cal party in New York. He saw the Republicans as playing the long game, telling Sumner in March 1856, “I fear t­ here is l­ittle room for hope in the coming Presidential Election, but I have huge hopes for the ­f uture.”28 John expressed his hopes fully and publicly as the 1856 election approached, linking the practical urgency of turning out the vote for the Republican Party to the g­ rand legacy of the nation’s founding. He spoke in Bedford, where he was having a ­house built for his f­ amily of five c­ hildren within sight of his parents’ home. His remarks ­were slated for mass reprinting through the auspices of Republican newspaper editor Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. John saturated this address with references to the American Revolution, as well as to ­fathers and sons. “Amer­i­ca ­Free—­Or American Slave” vigorously reworked the national and ­family narrative into one of po­liti­cal hope by passing over his own ­father for a highly idealized version of his grand­father John Jay’s generation of patriots. Jay sought to connect a romantic vision of local blood, soil, and lineage to an antislavery nation’s current crisis, despite Westchester County’s long history as a Demo­cratic stronghold. The speech flatteringly claimed that “no spot in Amer­ic­a has more” historical “associations than this, our native county of Westchester.” In the fateful year of 1776, patriot and loyalist armies squared off ­there. Novelist James Fenimore Cooper had, John remarked, written of “brutal

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deeds” carried out by warring factions in Westchester, making the county the pre­de­ces­sor to Bleeding Kansas. The presence of loyalist bands notwithstanding, John insisted that “in the patriotism of the farmers of Westchester, ­there was no neutrality”; they squelched the traitorous plans of Benedict Arnold, whose conspiracy now found its match in the deeds of the Slave Power. John relied on historical sleights of hand to forge a connection between the American Revolution and the Kansas crisis that the election was meant to resolve. The “repeal of the Missouri Compromise” provided the latest outrage; John labeled the agreement “an honorable” one “binding upon the sons as upon the f­ athers,” ignoring the fact that his grand­father, in one of his final po­ liti­cal gestures, spoke out against the admission of Missouri as a slave state. By contrast, without mentioning the first John Jay by name, John II invoked the “­g reat princi­ples as ­those for which our ­fathers fought” in the Revolution and then quoted John Jay’s address to G ­ reat Britain, which “sound[s] like a voice from the dead—­the voice of the F ­ athers to their Sons.” The mantle passed from the original John Jay battling against po­liti­cal slavery to John Jay II campaigning for antislavery votes. William’s skepticism of democracy found no place in this torch passing. John II’s proposition that the fate of freedom rested in the hands of the individual voter, just as once the nation’s in­de­pen­ dence rested in the musket-­carrying hands of Westchester farmers, expressed the populist tilt of his po­liti­cal rhe­toric. A fighting spirit needed to prevail at the ballot box and beyond. As Westchester’s patriot sons voted, so too would northern mi­g rants, “in whose veins flows the blood of the Pilgrims and the Huguenots,” in the b­ attle for Kansas.29 John’s talk of blood and revolutionary heritage served as a way to respond to the Republicans’ Know Nothing rivals. Some of that party’s prejudices might even serve Republican purposes. The responses to foreigners pouring into the country ­were e­ ither to open up the West to diffuse their influence or to watch ­these newcomers pile up in the East where they would “interfere with the employment and the wages of our citizens.” The larger point was that a party with no real policy on slavery, the Know Nothings, and a proslavery party, Buchanan’s Demo­crats, ­were unpalatable alternatives to the Republicans, who would bring back “the princi­ples of Washington” and bring a permanent end “to the extension of slavery.”30 Prejudice against immigrants was not wrong, just beside the point if the revolutionary spirit was to be harnessed to the central issue of the day. The new revolution might not have come just yet, but Jay described its arc. The results of the 1856 election ­were mixed, though Jay located in them signs of ­f uture victory. While Sumner continued to languish in ill health, John



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sought to buoy his friend’s spirits with his analy­sis of the presidential election. John expressed no surprise that southern apologist James Buchanan, a Pennsylvania Demo­crat, won. But he projected g­ reat enthusiasm for the Republicans’ per­for­mance. Presidential candidate James  C. Frémont swept New ­England, while, as Jay stated with ­g reat pride, “New York stands where the Empire State should stand.” He also proclaimed, “The news from Michigan & Illinois is glorious”; Frémont won the former and lost the latter by less than 10,000 votes. Jay drew further encouragement from the fact that some northern Demo­crats promised in their campaigns to oppose the spread of slavery. Jay might even have found good news in Westchester County. In the three-­ way race, the Demo­crats won the county by a mere plurality in contrast to that party’s 1852 majority.31 Although William understood that elections and activism mattered, he almost reflexively described the challenge of slavery’s expansion as a religious prob­lem with a religious solution. In response to an 1855 appeal to help ­settle antislavery northerners in Kansas, he wrote Theodore Dwight Jr. that he saw no hope that the ­battle against slavery would be won as long as ministers continued to defend the institution and “pander to the ­great sin of the Nation.” All the same, he said he would contribute money if a new fund­rais­ing effort commenced. Writing to Senator Sumner in March 1856, William cast widely the blame for the nation’s predicament: “We are wrestling not merely with spiritual wickedness, & the teachers & professors of a corrupt cotton chris­tian­ity, but against falsehood hy­poc­risy po­liti­cal profligacy, a rotten democracy, cruelty, & selfishness in e­ very form in which the ingenuity & malice of the Devil can embody it.” Even so, the key to his “faith in our ultimate triumph” still lay in the church: “As soon as the North ceases to ­tremble before the Slave divines, the non-­slaveholders of the South ­will proclaim their in­de­pen­dence & insist on freedom of speech & the press.” Once achieved, “the doom of slavery is sealed.”32 A virtuous antislavery cycle in the South awaited true religion. Still, he could not help but fear that he was coming to the end of his days in a nation laboring ­under God’s curse. Two months before the 1856 election, William forecast to John that a Buchanan victory would not only destroy the nation but also “render us the basest of Republics as Egypt was, ‘the basest of Kingdoms.’ ”33 John whittled his historical perspective to a sharp point to sketch out his antislavery vision for the continent; William, in contrast, painted with a broad biblical brush. For the elder Jay taking on scripture and the institutions that purported to spread its message became essential late-­life work. He did not refrain from making enemies within his church, his social class, or the Benevolent Empire.

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The Benevolent Empire and the Bible The New York-­based Benevolent Empire’s accommodation of slaveholder sensibilities exhausted William Jay’s patience in the 1850s. This network of national reform organ­izations had for de­cades sought to broadly disseminate Protestant Chris­tian­ity, sobriety, and self-­control, values that the Jays held dear. William publicized his withdrawal of financial support for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the American Tract Society in early 1853. He could not countenance missionary work among Native American tribes that practiced slavery, especially absent an effort to impress on ­these converts the anti-­Christian nature of slavery. In transferring his support from the American Board to Lewis Tappan’s American Missionary Association, Jay asked, “Why prefer preaching the gospel ­under a gag, to preaching it with perfect freedom to other Indians who hold no slaves?” Meanwhile, the American Bible Society, a Jay-­family cause from its inception, had drifted into the slaveholder’s camp. Southern Blacks somehow fell outside the organ­ization’s purpose of maximum Bible distribution, while ABS administrators tolerated the notion that the Bible sanctioned slavery and employed proslavery speakers.34 Jay’s 1853 denunciation of the American Tract Society, where his generosity had earned him the status of “Life Director,” expressed the rawness of his disillusionment with organ­izations charged with broadly disseminating Christian values. In his public letter to its corresponding secretary, which occupied almost five columns on NASS’s front page, Jay asserted that “a g­ iant . . . ​all-­ pervading sin” shadowed the land, and yet the American Tract Society refused “to recognize even the existence of this sin!” Evangelicals might disagree on alcohol consumption, dancing, and travel on the Sabbath, but the Tract Society took a position against ­those vices, whereas a “black man” who was turned into “a beast of burden” drew silence. Slaveholders received more deference than “advocates of moderate drinking” in the Tract Society’s calculations. Far from eschewing partisan politics, the organ­ization urged its members to vote against anti-­temperance politicians. Slavery, by contrast, inspired the American Tract Society only to fear losing the financial patronage of southern slaveholders. Jay wondered why the existence of “half a million of ­little black heathen” ­children unable to read the Bible did not concern the Tract Society. He was certain that such hy­poc­risy among religious reformers fueled the spread of atheism and morally un­regu­ la­ted demo­cratic excess.35 Biblical interpretation itself was a crucial ground on which to combat American slavery’s corrupting tendencies. With full confidence in his ability to interpret scripture without ministerial supervision, Jay strove in his 1854



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pamphlet, An Examination of the Mosaic Laws of Servitude, to remove a major proslavery prop by proving that servitude among the Israelites ­under the laws delivered at Sinai did not function as a pre­ce­dent or a justification for the South’s iniquity. The judge first established the centrality of the chattel princi­ ple to the American institution, much as Black New York minister and former slave J. W. C. Pennington had. If southerners followed in the footsteps of the ancient Hebrews, then the Pentateuch would yield evidence of the Jewish servant being treated as “a ­thing, a vendible commodity”—­property subject to division and transfer like objects or animals and receiving no compensation. In the absence of ­human “chattelhood” in the Mosaic law, the ready use of the word “slave” in En­glish translations from the Hebrew had to be abandoned as “arbitrary and prejudiced.”36 Jay’s reading relentlessly placed the Mosaic law of servitude in the most favorable pos­si­ble light to undermine con­temporary religious defenders of slavery. Taking a closer look at biblical servitude itself, Jay found that southern slavery did not follow Mosaic l­egal pre­ce­dents. In the Bible, servants had agency: they sold themselves to par­tic­u­lar masters, who could not then sell them to ­others. Such a system made servitude at once a contractual relationship between master and servant and one in which the servant could truly claim paternal protection. Crucially, Mosaic servitude provided for the inclusion of servants in religious rites; to Jay, one of the most disturbing facets of southern slavery was the systematic denial to millions of access to religious understanding. Jay also argued that Jewish law allowed slaves to earn their freedom in the face of abuse. Another pointed contrast discovered in Jay’s exegesis was that authorities ­were “forbidden to surrender the fugitive” from a foreign land. In other words, unlike the North, Judaea was “a refuge.” The concept that at fifty-­year intervals every­one held to ser­vice was freed of their obligation had absolutely no analog in an American institution that transferred slave status from generation to generation in perpetuity. Indeed, Jay pointedly asked, “If Jewish servitude be, as is impiously contended, the warrant and model of American slavery, where is the American Jubilee?”37 Like a good ­lawyer, moreover, Jay came armed with an alternative argument in case his depiction of Mosaic servitude proved unconvincing. Even if God had given permission for ancient Jews to practice slavery, that permission did not transfer automatically to other p­ eople in other places, including the American South. Observed Jay, that would be as absurd as applying all the kosher laws to con­temporary society or capitally punishing Sabbath breakers.38 Jay’s mid-1850s biblical commentary further solidified his dismissal of the self-­serving American exceptionalism so readily proclaimed by many of his fellow citizens, including his own son. Neither his study of the Bible nor of

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American history sustained the notion of inherent American greatness based in part on universal liberality. In a lengthy letter to Rev. E. C. Wines, author of a tome titled The Hebrew Republic, Jay specifically critiqued his fellow scholar’s misplaced cele­bration of American freedom, predicated at least in part on the Congregational minister’s misunderstanding of slavery in both biblical and con­ temporary society. At this late date in his life, Jay showed no patience for his nation’s self-­ declared greatness. Jay’s letter to Wines disputed the reverend’s claims of the “universal” ac­cep­tance in Amer­i­ca of “justice & l­ egal equity.” With “­every seventh man . . . ​held as a beast of burden . . . ​his wife & c­ hildren sold like c­ attle in the Market,” what was universal in American consciousness was “money,” Jay provocatively asserted in his letter to Wines. Jay also drew Wines’s attention to the fact that “complexion” defined who ruled in Amer­i­ca, citing South Carolina’s powerless Black majority as an example. Wines similarly misstated the pervasiveness of religious instruction in the United States, given that southern laws against slave literacy denied millions the Bible. Indeed, ­there ­were even state laws that “a ­free ­woman of color” could be whipped “for teaching her own ­free child to read!”39 What­ever hope the po­liti­cal efforts of Sumner, Smith, and John Jay II might offer, the United States as a redeemer nation empowered through democracy to surpass biblical models seemed a dangerous illusion to William. William Jay’s biblical concerns did not dull his lifelong habit of challenging his own church: his ­family’s prominence was used once again as a weapon for cracking the façade of conservative institutional self-­regard. In 1855, William provoked a public dispute with Trinity Church, the lower Manhattan m ­ other parish of New York Episcopalianism and of the Jay f­ amily itself, for allegedly hoarding and misusing its wealth. Trinity’s pastor William Berrian wondered how Jay could abuse “the memory of his venerated ­father” and his “pure and honored b­ rother” by attacking the church. Yet, as Jay told his old friend Gerrit Smith, he believed himself to be “true to my anti-­slavery faith” by critiquing the church, which exhibited a “proslavery conservatism” that undermined rather than bolstered re­spect for property. He believed that both conservatism and Chris­tian­ity, unmoored from moral purpose, would strug­gle to survive in this demo­cratic age: so-­called popu­lar sovereignty, w ­ hether in Kansas or in New York, would not protect anyone’s rights. Jay embraced the role as speaker of truth to the power­f ul.40 The next year, in one of the final published pamphlets of his life, Jay continued to denounce the American Tract Society, in the pro­cess demonstrating that his hostility to religious and secular racism had only hardened in response to the proslavery militancy of the 1850s. In an eloquent exposition of the ab-



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olitionist biblical creed that Blacks and whites w ­ ere of “one blood,” Jay wrote, “Another wound which the proslavery spirit inflicts on Chris­tian­ity is the forgetfulness it induces, that negroes are of the same nature with that assumed by the Son of God when he was made flesh.” Yet he grounded this religious reflection in the concrete harm that racism imposed not only in the South but also in the northern headquarters of the Benevolent Empire itself. Thus, he observed, “No negro is permitted in New York to earn his bread by sweeping the streets, or taking a license to drive a cart; and that, however weary and feeble he may be, he is rudely driven from many of our public conveyances.” The city’s medical school, alluding to his son John’s l­egal suit on behalf of James P. Barnett, closed itself off as well to Blacks. American Christians raised funds to send missionaries to India, and yet American racism legitimated Hindu-­style caste practices in its leading city. In February 1857, the sixty-­seven-­ year-­old Jay called once again for “the spell” of racism to be broken.41

Last Rights The next month, in March 1857, the United States Supreme Court granted the spell of racism its ­legal imprimatur. A 7–2 majority decision in Scott v. Sanford held that the Missouri slave Dred Scott could not base a claim for his freedom on the fact that his master had taken him to live for several years in the Wisconsin Territory and Illinois; the national government had already banned slavery in ­those areas by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. By finding that Scott’s master had the right to travel and live with his slaves in ­free territory, the decision erased the Missouri Compromise line, which prohibited the institution north of the 36° 30’ latitude in territories acquired through the Louisiana Purchase. The decision imperiled a core princi­ple of American abolitionism—­ that the federal government had the right to ban slavery in territories ­under national jurisdiction. But Chief Justice Roger Taney, writing for the majority, went further than merely undermining the f­ree soil princi­ple that also constituted a fundamental tenet of the Republican Party. He denied to Scott and all other African Americans the right to sue in federal court. Indeed, he infamously stated that Black ­people had no rights that white ­people had to re­spect. Moreover, he cited the history of the American Revolution and the early republic as the justification for his sweeping assertion of Black noncitizenship.42 John Jay II responded to the Dred Scott decision in a variety of ways. Its implications for f­ uture clients and ongoing litigation in New York ­were ominous. He worried that, if given the opportunity, the Taney Court would next rule that states could not interfere with masters who brought their slaves into ­free states,

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a decision that would lead to stopping the appeals pro­cess in the Lemmon case. Ten days ­after Taney’s ruling, Jay suggested to Senator William H. Seward that New York clarify its laws to hold that enslaved persons became ­free as soon as they entered the state and that anyone trying to get around the law committed a “felony.” Although such l­egal revisions would not eliminate the possibility of the kind of Supreme Court ruling that Jay feared, it would brighten the l­egal line against slavery and would constitute a strong po­liti­cal statement.43 John did not rule out the possibility that the Dred Scott decision might redound to the po­liti­cal advantage of Republicans. The “disfranchising all of our coloured Citizens” cut against the grain of his abolitionism, his ­legal work, and his agitation within the Episcopal Church. Yet as he wrote Charles Sumner in April, “The Dred Scott decision is aiding the cause it was intended to subvert.” Jay reported on signs of pushback against the decision in Ohio and New York and the spread of f­ ree ­labor princi­ples in Missouri and even V ­ irginia. The Supreme Court ruling had dire implications but was hardly the end of the strug­gle.44 Slavery’s opponents turned to the first John Jay to draw a stark contrast between the current chief justice’s opinion on slavery and the first chief justice’s views. John Jay’s 1819 letter to Elias Boudinot opposing the admission of Missouri as a slave state first was reprinted in a Philadelphia newspaper and then picked up by both the Liberator and the NASS. The editorial introduction to the reprinted letter attested to Jay’s patriotic status as “one of the very purest, noblest and wisest of the ­fathers,” as well as “the intimate personal friend and trusted confidential adviser of Washington.” The letter showed that Jay’s belief in the power of Congress to regulate the migration of slaves into federal territories contradicted Taney’s ruling. Jay’s 1819 letter also suggested that the US Constitution avoided using the word “slaves” ­because of slavery’s “discordancy with the princi­ples of the Revolution,” with Jay then quoting the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence’s famous words on self-­evident equality to prove the point. Given Taney’s denial that Blacks in the United States ­were ever or ever could be rights-­bearing citizens, his critics underscored a crucial discrepancy with the nation’s founding princi­ples. Deploying the Jay–­Boudinot letter as “a precious relic of the venerable past” comported well with John Jay II’s own desire to root the po­liti­cal case against slavery in historic and nationalist soil.45 The Dred Scott decision came in the midst of a very difficult time for the Jay ­family. William and Augusta’s trip to E ­ ngland the previous spring and summer with their ­daughter Eliza to secure her a husband had taxed Augusta’s health. She endured much pain; even the administration of morphine did not ease her suffering. Adding to the f­ amily’s woes, William’s two remaining s­ isters passed away in November 1856. Augusta followed them in death on April 26,



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1857. William purchased a gravestone of Italian marble for his pious, modest wife, who had been a loving if not an equal partner and a devoted m ­ other.46 Coping with his sorrow, his own poor health, and what he sensed was his own imminent demise, William nonetheless registered the dire direction that politics had taken in the wake of the Dred Scott decision. Writing his old friend Gerrit Smith in August 1857, Judge Jay excoriated the Demo­crat who “must not only virtually adopt the motto . . . ​‘Sumner & Kansas, let them bleed,’ but he must also profess to receive as truths C. J. Taney’s historical falsehoods, & his diabolical inferences.” The Dred Scott decision increased his forebodings that the nation was headed for a biblical reckoning. The weight of mortality pressing on him, William accelerated his ongoing efforts to put the f­amily’s financial affairs in order. In October 1857, his health waning, he wrote his son, “My time is prob­ably short & I wish to discharge ­every duty relating to ­either world.”47 Although he never finished a full analy­sis of the Dred Scott case, among the duties William sought to discharge w ­ ere the need to address the decision’s constitutional impact, to set the rec­ord straight about its historical origins, and to assess the broader forces of disunity it unleashed on the po­liti­cal landscape. In the end, nothing beyond f­amily and salvation itself cut closer to his core than slavery’s implications for the past, pre­sent, and ­f uture of the nation. In a public letter to Garrison and ­others mobilizing a disunion campaign written in September 1857, Jay pronounced his verdict on this topic of “deep and painful interest.” Was the Union itself a “curse,” and if so, what should good men do? To white southerners and to northerners, the Union, by sustaining slavery, was a moral curse; for “the millions among us of African descent” f­ree and enslaved, the Union was the cause of their suffering. A ­ fter offering details on the ways in which preserving the Union to placate the South made liars and hypocrites of politicians and clergy alike, Jay offered his gospel of national salvation. It was undeniably true that leaders of church and state had “surrendered their consciences to the seduction of Union” and that the Union exercised “an immoral influence,” but splitting the nation in two was not necessary. If northerners “cease[d] to idolize the Union” by treating preservation as an end unto itself, the Slave Power’s leverage would dis­appear. If northerners ­stopped fearing the consequences of alienating the South po­liti­cally or eco­ nom­ically, better consequences would ensue—­and “when this day arrives, the Union w ­ ill be converted from a curse into to a blessing.” Righ­teousness, in short, would save the Union. Wickedness, in the form of “extending and perpetuating injustice and cruelty,” was by far the more dangerous path.48 Neither ­union nor disunion was the ultimate object; thus, fixating on disunion was beside the point—at best, it was a means to an end, not the end

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itself. Many years before, William had concluded that his f­ather’s core commitment to placing conscience before country was the key to that patriot’s greatness. Although his own conscience had led William forward through a quarter-­century of slavery-­related confrontations far more direct and jarring than ­those his f­ather took on, his f­ather’s standards remained central to his own. Indeed, the Taney Court had only made the f­ amily legacy loom larger.49 If the Union w ­ ere to survive, ­either Justice Taney’s version of history or William Jay’s version had to prevail. That elemental fact comes through in William’s March 1858 letter to Francis Lieber. Judge Jay ostensibly wrote Lieber to provide some historical information that the Columbia professor and prominent l­ egal theorist had requested regarding the late eighteenth-­century roots of Black citizenship. Accusing Justice Taney of “audacious mendacity,” Jay’s nine pages of notes documented that at the time of the founding, f­ ree Blacks ­were not only citizens but also exercised t­ hose rights with the express approval of the nation’s found­ers. William paid close attention to chronology. Jefferson recorded his antislavery observations in Notes on the State of V ­ irginia before the composition of the US Constitution. The Articles of Confederation referred to “­free citizens” and “­free inhabitants,” not to white ones in one place, and to “white & other ­free citizens” in another place. ­Free Blacks had the right to vote u ­ nder the 1777 New York State constitution, whose main author was John Jay. New York and Pennsylvania hosted antislavery organ­izations “presided over by Franklin & Jay” before the 1787 Constitutional Convention. All ­these facts belied the notion that the found­ers never ­imagined African Americans as citizens. Three times in his letter to Lieber, William cited with page numbers his own Life of Jay. He did so to document that John Jay believed Black ­people to be naturally ­free and equal—­and that he was advocating slavery’s end. Inserting a ­little bit of his own personal history in his notes, William also recalled the 1826 instance in which the governor of New York sought to ­free Gilbert Horton “as ‘a citizen of this State’ ” who was being held as a fugitive.50 For William, the Dred Scott case did not come down to “John Jay versus Roger B. Taney” as NASS titled its reprint of his f­ ather’s letter on the Missouri Crisis: It was John Jay or Roger B. Taney. Only one version of history could be true—­ his ­family’s version. But that story divided the nation as much as the one told by Taney. William never completed his larger proj­ect on Dred Scott, ­dying at home on October 14, 1858, just nine days ­after his ­daughter Eliza’s wedding. He had worked purposefully to get his personal affairs in order, and when the long-­ anticipated end came, his son reported that William succumbed peacefully.51 In planning for his death, however, William also sought to ensure that his de-



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fiant role in the ­battle against slavery would continue and that his ­family’s controversial account of history would be told.

Making Memory At some point in the 1850s, William Jay hit on a novel idea. As Arthur Tappan recalled, his longtime abolitionist colleague brought his w ­ ill to Tappan’s New York City office to be witnessed. Jay proclaimed, “I have made one bequest differently from any that has ever been made before I think. I have given $500 for fugitive slaves.” By the time Jay signed his final w ­ ill and testament on April 14, 1858, that sum had doubled to $1,000. The ninth clause of the w ­ ill proclaimed, “I bequeath to my son one Thousand dollars in Trust to be applied by him at his discretion in promoting the safety & comfort of fugitive slaves.” The gift would continue his own and his son’s good works on behalf of fugitives. The sum was vastly larger than the checks William and o ­ thers of his antislavery ilk ­were used to writing.52 The bequest itself brazenly defied federal law and southern slavery. The $1,000 figure was not only generous but also symbolic, equaling the size of the fine that the Fugitive Slave Act could impose on anyone abetting a fugitive. In death, William sought to spark controversy. And as throughout his abolitionist c­ areer, his contemporaries greeted his action with a mix of praise, condemnation, and puzzled silence. William may well have been right that few if any had ever provided for fugitive slaves in the manner that, when ­dying, he chose. NASS printed the ninth clause of his w ­ ill. The New-­York Daily Tribune stated, “The bequest is prob­ably the first of its kind in the country.” It openly v­ iolated federal law, expressed uncompromising antislavery princi­ples, and endorsed his son’s litigation practices against the hated law. Someone writing ­under the pseudonym “A Republican” wrote to the editors of the Tribune that it “has inspired o ­ thers 53 to imitate his devoted efforts in behalf of fugitive slaves.” Such a contagion of liberty and lawbreaking was exactly what southern slaveholders feared most. In New Orleans, the Daily Picayune viewed Jay’s ­will as a power­f ul symbol but read his life in the harsh light of false prophesy. The southern paper proclaimed the gift legally “void.” ­Were Jay’s heirs to contest this illegal clause in court, it would be nullified, opined the Picayune. But, of course, the ­will’s main beneficiaries, the piece predicted, would support this “flagrant and ostentatious contempt” of the nation’s laws. Jay’s bequest was “one of the most noticeable examples yet given of that Northern fanat­i­cism, which clothes itself with the designation of the ‘higher law,’ putting individual opinions and judgment above laws and constitution.” The financial legacy

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that founding f­ ather John Jay left his son funded not a wise man but a fool—­a dangerous fool. Lost in “abstractions and books,” William Jay “heated himself into the fanatical belief that he had a mission to interpret the law of morals.” Jay, whom the article labeled as both “honest” and “deluded,” became “a visionary enthusiast, a disturber of the peace and rights of o ­ thers, and a deliberate and ostentatious law-­breaker.” He would have been proud to attract such passionate scorn as a fitting eulogy from the heart of the slaveholding South.54 By contrast, Frederick Douglass, the ­g reat abolitionist activist and editor, described William Jay’s bequest in almost mythically heroic language. The famous orator asserted that Jay’s ­will held “a lesson to our country and the world” and referred to it as a “sacred document” that “stands alone, I think, in the history of American philanthropy.” Quoting the fugitive bequest directly, the former fugitive observed, “­Here is not only a thoughtful concern for the most needy of all the poor of this land, but a burning protest and a sublime prophecy.” What­ever the Fugitive Slave Act’s apologists might say, Douglass predicted that Jay’s provision for fugitive slaves “­will be regarded as the crowning act, the most glorious climax to a ­g reat and benevolent life.” Douglass delivered ­these and many other kind words on May 12, 1859, before a substantial, mostly African American audience in Manhattan; he also shared his lengthy remarks on William Jay in print with the readers of the Frederick Douglass Paper and Douglass’ Monthly.55 That Frederick Douglass so ardently eulogized William Jay was the result of careful planning, not accident: it was part of an effort to ensure that William Jay’s and, therefore, the Jay f­amily’s story not be reabsorbed into less threatening religious, philanthropic, and historical narratives. John Jay II felt profoundly the loss of his “ever constant & loving friend, my faithful Counselor & guide.” Abolitionism had deepened and helped define their close relationship. John’s black-­trimmed mourning note to Sumner not only conveyed William’s warm feelings for the senator and antislavery martyr but also reported that, on the day of his f­ ather’s passing, news of the Republican Party’s electoral success in the Midwest “called forth his last expression of thankfulness.”56 For John, the b­ attle against slavery was an unbreakable bond between ­father and son. The danger that William’s life would be recast as about something other than abolitionism was real. Friends and social peers still treated William’s antislavery as an embarrassment best mentioned obliquely. Condolers tended to speak in generalities about William’s ­causes and made note of civil disagreements. As one wrote, “­Those who differed from him in opinion and in his peculiar schemes of philanthropy never doubted . . . ​[his] holy motives.” His



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piety and devotion to the church stood out, along with “elevated princi­ples” and an interest in “­g reat public questions.”57 To be sure, correspondents broadly praised his morals and may have thought calling attention to specific issues inappropriate to the occasion. But it is noteworthy that in the fourteen pages of “Recollections” set down by Rev. John McVickar, William Jay’s brother-­in-­law did not mention slavery or abolition. McVickar instead highlighted William’s “zeal & fearlessness” and the “clear sighted, Stern integrity of a Religious mind.” He praised Jay as a good landlord and a determined opponent of the unlicensed sale of alcohol. McVickar singled out William’s work on the issue of peace. William Jay’s antislavery remained for some an enigma better talked around than talked about.58 Public notices of his death had a harder time ignoring William’s abolitionism. Some newspapers included abolitionism on a list of William’s c­ auses without significant commentary.59 Horace Greely’s staunchly antislavery, pro-­ Republican New York Daily Tribune, in contrast, accented antislavery as the crucial biographical fact. That paper’s initial notice of William’s death stated baldly, “Judge Jay inherited his f­ ather’s strong abhorrence of chattel Slavery.” Crediting the former chief justice as the most impor­tant figure in abolishing slavery in New York, the paper predicted “to Judge William Jay, the son, the ­f uture w ­ ill give the credit of having been one of the earliest advocates of the modern Antis-­Slavery movement which at this moment influences so radically the politics, the religion, and the philanthropy of his country.” The death notice concluded, “How ­g reat was the good he did ­will, perhaps, be better recognized when a generation ­shall have followed him.” The Tribune’s coverage of his funeral recorded that “­children that had shared his ready smile [and] negroes he had succored and taught . . . ​all followed the hearse” on this beautiful autumn day.60 And yet for many, William’s zeal for the c­ auses of emancipation and equality remained problematic even in death. The New-­York Historical Society offered a tribute studiously devoid of the controversial topic. A Demo­cratic Party newspaper in Westchester County confined itself to praising his judicial efficiency and even-­handedness. A resolution from the county’s ­lawyers paired praise of his work on the bench with a nonspecific salute to “his hatred of oppression and wrong, by or upon whomsoever afflicted.” A month and a half ­after his death, the African Repository, the magazine of the American Colonization Society, briefly honored the man “so long known by his writing on Peace and other subjects,” but added parenthetically “though greatly mistaken as we believe in regard to African Colonization.” The Episcopal newspaper, the Protestant Churchman, included a resolution from the officers of Jay’s Bedford church praising his devotion to church affairs. As a roundup of brief tributes

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to William Jay stated, “And thus is the memory of a good man honored,” content to grind up the memory of a sharp-­minded critic and neighbor into easily digested mush.61 ­Others knew better. The Church of the Messiah in New York City lost no time proclaiming William Jay’s contribution to racial justice. The congregation of Black Episcopalians resolved, “That in the death of so eminent a person, the community has lost one of its brightest ornaments . . . ​and the oppressed, the downtrodden, and the enslaved,—­one of their sincerest friends, and ablest advocates.” In fitting homage to William, the tribute pivoted to advocacy: “That we sincerely and devoutly hope and pray, that his example in opposition to the anti-­Christian institution of slavery, w ­ ill be initiated by o ­ thers, ­until our entire Country ­shall practically carry out the princi­ple recorded in our American Declaration of In­de­pen­dence, namely, ‘that all men are born equal, and are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ” Confident that they understood Jay’s legacy, the African American parishioners submitted their resolutions to the Protestant Churchman, which the Episcopalian paper declined to print.62 John Jay II shared with ­these New Yorkers the conviction that abolitionism lay at the center of his f­ ather’s story. John’s priority of highlighting his f­ ather’s antislavery advocacy made him cool to the public eulogy planned by the Tappan ­brothers u ­ nder the auspices of the American Peace Society. Frederick Douglass, the nation’s most famous former fugitive slave and Black antislavery activist, occupied pride of place in celebrating the life of William Jay before an African American audience. John was thrilled that Douglass, who had crossed paths with William but was not an intimate, agreed to take on the proj­ ect. John shared excerpts from William’s personal letters with Douglass and offered to let the abolitionists peruse a scrapbook of his ­father’s newspaper writings. Wrote John five weeks before the eulogy, “A tribute to his memory from one who has tasted as you have the bitterness of Slavery ­will come from the heart and have a power and beauty peculiarly its own. The appointment seems to me touching and appropriate & it is by his ­family warmly appreciated.” James McCune Smith, the Black abolitionist and one of the St. Philip’s vestryman who fought the diocese for the parish’s inclusion, was on the committee that issued the invitation to Douglass’s speech.63 The racial politics of the occasion was deployed by Douglass to brilliant effect. The former fugitive exclaimed as much as asked, “Who but the slave should lament, when the champion of the slave has fallen! Who but the black man should weep, when the black man’s friend is no more!” William Jay’s memory belonged to African Americans, Douglass contended: “Who should rise to vindicate, honor, and bless the memory of William Jay, if the colored



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p­ eople of this State and country may not properly do so?” Douglass effectively asserted the princi­ple of racial equality through interracial reciprocity. To pay tribute to a white man did not entail deference or subordination. Black ­people had a distinctive right to define the historical memory of William Jay, indeed to rescue that memory from the misapprehension or incomprehension of whites themselves. Jay’s story was irreducibly a story about Black liberty. In one of the most apt phrases ever written about William Jay, Douglass declared, “In the g­ reat cause of universal freedom his name was a tower of strength, and his pen a two edged sword.” This statement placed emphasis on two crucial attributes of the retiring former judge: his writing and his heritage. T ­ here was no denying that Jay had conducted his b­ attles against slavery not primarily as a speaker or a politician, but as a talented, indefatigable author and correspondent. Nor would anyone, including William Jay himself, gainsay the fact that his last name magnified the significance of every­thing he said, wrote, and did regarding slavery. While giving William’s famous parent his due—­for his patriotism and his abolitionism—­Douglass’s tribute portrayed William residing in no man’s shadow, his true peers being the British antislavery heroes Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce.64 Douglass sought to document that William embraced the essential features of the abolitionist creed long before “modern Abolitionism” as such existed, quoting correspondence as early as 1819. Thus, he identified Jay as one of the earliest members of his generation to denounce the spread of slavery westward, an early advocate for the immediate end of slavery in the District of Columbia, and “among the first at the North to get his own eyes open” about the evils of African colonization—­the last point being a significant exaggeration. Given Douglass’s rift with Garrison, the delayed timing of William’s entry in the American Anti-­Slavery Society was not part of his tribute. Commented Douglass, “Mr. Jay was remarkable for his ­g reat readiness. He wrote precisely at the right time.—­No ­g reat occasion escaped him. He was ready for e­ very emergency.” William wielded his passionate yet precise pen in public and in private through crisis ­after slavery-­induced crisis. Near the end of Douglass’s eulogy, the former slave vaulted William Jay silently past the complicated case of his slaveholding ­father John Jay to compare him favorably to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. The owner­ship of slaves made ­these found­ers useful to the defenders of slavery and to t­ hose like Chief Justice Taney who denied that African Americans had any rights. “Their anti-­slavery declarations,” observed Douglass, “are less potent for good than their pro-­slavery examples have been made for evil.” Not so William Jay: “From a careful survey of the life and works of Mr. Jay, no fear need be entertained” that his actions would contradict his words. He was no slaveholder. Douglass

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continued with an ornate meta­phor, “If he had faults, they w ­ ere to his w ­ hole character, like the spots on the resplendent orb of day, not to be seen by the ordinary means of vision.” Quietly bringing his rousing speech to an end, the former fugitive subtly gestured t­oward Jay’s unusual bequest of $1,000: “He has taught us how to live; he has taught us how to die.”65 The Douglass eulogy, which cast William as a moral titan in the history of abolitionism, thrilled John Jay II. He purchased 200 copies of the speech in pamphlet form. If Douglass erred on the side of hagiography, that was ­because he believed that both the times and the occasion called for a full-­throated cele­ bration of a life that connected the founding to the pre­sent moment of sectional crisis and at the same time transcended the moral limitations of the found­ers.66 At no point in American history could it have been clearer how much work the f­ athers had left their descendants to do.

Resting Places William Jay did not die spotless, of course. Most of his last ­will and testament emphasized the worldly concerns of a rich man. He had property to preserve and distribute, with generational privilege flowing generously to his heirs. Mindful of maintaining ­family history and a male line of succession, William bequeathed to his son his own and John Jay’s papers and a substantial holding of books on slavery, along with the Bedford ­house and grounds.67 A codicil that William added to the ­will on May 15, 1858, provided subtle proof that, although he did not hold slaves as did the nation’s found­ers, the slaveholding legacy of the Jay ­family continued to the end of his life and beyond. William wished Zilpah Montgomery and Joseph Cusno to each receive a $100 annuity for the remainder of their lives. But William went further and explained why: “Zilpha has lived in my own and my f­athers ­family for more than sixty years. And Joseph more than forty.” William made no mention of Zilpah’s color or previous condition. T ­ hese “faithful honest domestics” he wished to “be interred in my burial plot in the Bedford churchyard . . . ​with proper grave stones” provided.68 ­Whether Frederick Douglass noticed this provision and, if so, ­whether he knew that this ­woman had been a slave in the Jay ­house­hold before her manumission by John Jay de­cades before, he silently passed over this story in his cele­bration of William’s virtuous life and death. This codicil nonetheless spoke to the fact that the Jay f­ amily’s entanglement with slavery and race had a private, personal dimension that endured alongside public b­ attles. Cusno, the Sicilian immigrant who was sometimes labeled as a mulatto, had benefited from John Jay’s largesse before. Zilpah’s connec-



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tion to the ­family, however, had deeper roots, her personal history more troubled and troubling. Zilpah’s ­mother Clarinda and another Zilpah, for whom she was presumably named, belonged to the f­amily at the time of the Revolutionary War. In the early nineteenth c­ entury, John banished the younger Zilpah from the h ­ ouse­hold for a time a­ fter she got pregnant. With this codicil, another generation born in servitude received testamentary acknowl­edgment of their loyalty to another generation of d­ ying Jay men. Yet ­legal emancipation had not produced a legacy of in­de­pen­dence—­Zilpah had never learned to read.69 The insistent rejection of colonization in the judge’s early abolitionist writings had blossomed over time into a rancorous disgust for the prejudices that sustained racial caste as a fact of northern life. William likely saw Joseph’s and Zilpah’s final resting place among the Jays not only as a ­simple expression of decency but also as a subtle but firm repudiation of racist graveyard taboos.70 Zilpah may have seen the promise as no less than her due for a life lived in ser­vice and at the margins of the Jay’s privileged world—or as her best option for a decent burial. At the very least, rather than worrying about being sold at her master’s death, like millions of her nineteenth-­century African American contemporaries, she had secured a modest income for her old age.

C h a p te r 1 4

Civil Wars

John Jay II embodied the words of “Why We Resist, and What We Resist,” printed in the pages of a leading southern journal during the secession crisis. In February 1861, De Bow’s Review paired a sermon by a secessionist New Orleans minister with a speech delivered by the New York Republican on the eve of the fateful 1860 election. With the aid of incendiary subheadings inserted by the editors, Jay indicted President-­Elect Lincoln and himself as zealots e­ ager to inflict their shared abolitionist agenda. Jay’s plan of action was made clear to the readership of De Bow’s: ­today’s Republican voters w ­ ere the spawn of Garrison’s American Anti-­Slavery Society. ­Under the editor’s sarcastic label “the millenium to come with abraham lincoln,” Jay declared that the slave states would lose their access to what the abolitionist referred to as the “fertile fields” of the West u ­ nder the new homesteading law. A reor­ga­nized Supreme Court and federal cir­cuits would reduce southern influence. What De Bow’s termed the “tender mercies of the abolition wolf t­ oward the southern lamb” included the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the banning of the domestic slave trade. Jay unabashedly advised that, “instead of harping on dissolution,” the slave states should take the initiative “to prepare for the abolition of slavery.” The editors’ contemptuous racism did not prevent them from being right in a fundamental way: Republican victory in 1860 portended sweeping transformations. Southern institutions and national policies would never be the 33 6



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same again, and De Bow’s race-­baiting editors found l­ittle to like about Jay’s version of the f­ uture. They caricaturized Jay’s vision of a federal government committed to improving the lot of “colored ­people at home and abroad” with the crude subhead “wooly-­headed ministers from hayti and liberia to be entertained at the white-­house.”1 Abolitionist John Jay’s anticipation of Republican victory provided a ready canvas onto which secessionists could paint their harsh scorn while expressing their deep dread. Secession and war portended profound change in the North as well. In the course of time, New York City’s social elite would find a place of honor for the abolitionist outlier John Jay II. Yet in 1860, diarist George Templeton Strong, sometimes mistaken on the streets of New York City for John Jay, ­imagined himself kidnapped as “a damned abolitionist emissary” and hung from a southern tree as the embodiment of danger posed to the po­liti­cal and racial order.2 Four years l­ater, the a­ ctual John Jay sat in the gallery in the US Congress as a representative of New York City’s patriotic elite to witness the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution ending slavery in the soon-­ to-be reconstituted nation. John Jay desperately wanted to serve his country and his cause during the Civil War. The brutal conflict presented an opportunity to gloriously fuse the two strands of his ­family’s narrative—­the founding of a ­great nation and the fight against slavery—­that over the previous several de­cades had often perilously diverged. His ­father the abolitionist had scorned the motto, “My country right or wrong.” The ascendancy of the ­family’s abolitionist values allowed the son to imagine that such a choice no longer existed. With the election of Lincoln and the coming of war, Jay believed that his moment had arrived. He had the financial resources, the time, and the energy for public ser­vice and po­ liti­cal work. He had an established reputation as an abolitionist and as a Republican activist. He had one of the country’s g­ reat names linking the past revolution to the revolution in American life now underway. He even had a son, William Jay II, who embodied through military ser­vice the ­family’s commitments. But perhaps most promisingly, he had long-­standing connections to two of the most power­ful Republican officials in Washington, D.C.: Charles Sumner and Salmon P. Chase. For John Jay the Civil War took place on four distinct, yet overlapping, planes. He experienced the war as a worried parent of a young officer close enough to key war sites to provide access to events and insights. He experienced the war as an abolitionist with a strong desire to see that the war permanently destroy American slavery—­and was ready to give advice on how to make that so. He experienced the war as a would-be Republican expert on diplomacy and international law who assumed that his friends in government

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would place him in an appropriate ambassadorial role. And he experienced the war as the ­imagined inheritor of the Jay mantle of leadership among his neighbors, hoping to act as a conduit for patronage between the national, state, and local levels of the Republican Party. Despite the ultimate triumph of his ideals, the Civil War often thwarted the indefatigable John Jay. He expected to be more than an impassioned witness to history. He wanted office and influence, but his friends declined to come through, leaving him twisting in the wind. Often, he articulated clear-­ sighted explanations of what had to happen to ensure the permanent freedom of millions of African Americans, but o ­ thers made t­hose decisions on their own timetables. Ultimately, however, through strengthened ties to New York City elites and his own relentless efforts, Jay was able to lay claim to a piece of emancipation’s triumph. The war years tested and transformed John Jay II, as they did the nation.

Succession and Secession During the two years a­ fter his f­ ather’s death, John Jay’s abolitionist pugnacity remained unchecked even as he strengthened abolitionist alliances, Black and white. Taking up his ­father’s late-­life cause, he sought to dilute the power of slavery within Benevolent Empire organ­izations by lobbying for legislation to allow more p­ eople to vote on m ­ atters of corporate governance. Inside the Episcopal Church, with the support of Black Episcopalian abolitionist Dr. James McCune Smith, Jay agitated fruitlessly for the Episcopal bishop of New York to issue a pastoral letter denouncing alleged participation by Manhattan ships in the illegal trading of enslaved African slaves to southern ports. With his ­father’s bequest at his disposal, John remained connected to the Under­g round Railroad network. At the beginning of 1860, Albany’s Stephen Myers reported a surge in fugitives over the past three years. At year’s end, Myers informed Jay that the spike continued, before adding that he had recently named a grand­son William John Jay Myers in tribute to the ­family.3 John also became the third-­generation proprietor of the ­family’s hillside estate and farm, to which he would soon affix the ­g rand name the “Jay Homestead.” In June  1859, Bedford also witnessed the expansion of the Jay’s abolitionist ­family circle. His eldest d­ aughter Eleanor Jay married Henry Grafton Chapman, the son of the formidable Boston Garrisonian Maria Weston Chapman. The wedding embodied the rapprochement between the Jays and the most radical wing of the abolitionist movement.4



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As heartening as such personal and activist connections ­were, the US Supreme Court and partisan politics would determine the fate of John’s abolitionist goals. Jay continued to worry greatly about Chief Justice Taney Court further expanding the rights of southern slaveholders. Meanwhile, Jay’s national contacts provided him with opportunities to extend his own influence. He maintained a close relationship with the Sumner. During the senator’s prolonged recovery from his caning, Sumner stayed in touch with Jay and relied on his friend to help book him a stateroom for his voyages to Eu­rope. In their frequent letters, Sumner addressed Jay as a trusted friend and shared his doubts about how and w ­ hether to resume his public ­career.5 John and Chase trusted each other as friends and as allies. In a February 1858 letter to Ohio Governor Chase, Jay sized up potential Republican candidates for 1860, including John C. Frémont and William Henry Seward. The New Yorker concluded with the none-­too-­subtle flattery, “I know no State more likely to furnish us our next President than Ohio.”6 As the presidential election grew closer, Jay did not appear to have the Republican’s ultimate nominee, Abraham Lincoln, in view. In an October 1859 letter to Sumner, Jay expressed confidence in the party’s presidential prospects: “The impression I think gains ground that the Republicans ­will elect the next president, but who that man is to be is more a question than sure.” Jay then mentioned a variety of contenders, among them Chase, Seward, Nathaniel Banks of Mas­sa­chu­setts, and Ben Wade of Ohio. At the party’s convention in Chicago six months l­ater in May 1860, however, Illinois’s Lincoln outmaneuvered his competitors to claim the presidential nomination.7 In June 1860, when Sumner spoke from the Senate floor for the first time since the infamous assault, one of his goals was to cultivate Jay’s avid support for renewing the attack on the Slave Power even as a fateful election approached. The occasion was a provocative bill to admit Kansas as a ­free state. Sumner titled his speech “The Barbarism of Slavery.” Describing in a letter to Jay his preparations for delivering the four-­hour antislavery vituperation, Sumner wrote, “I felt encouraged whenever I thought of your ­father,” and went on, “I think of him constantly.”8 Some Republicans did not view Sumner’s ­going on the sectional offensive as helpful for Lincoln’s candidacy. Jay, however, praised the speech for “giving a vigour to the cause, & a definiteness to the opinion of the north”; he also sent $25 to aid in the printing of the speech for wide distribution. Then, informing his friend of a new Chapman–­Jay grand­son, Jay revealed how closely he associated the personal and the po­liti­cal: “It is in viewing such a scene that one can realize something of the ‘Barbarism of slavery’ when it lays its accursed

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fin­ger upon the ­mother & her ­children, & changes ­every God given blessing into despair.” The friends shared a belief that the Republicans should not conciliate as they strove for northern votes and national power.9 John Jay’s election-­eve speech, subsequently excerpted in De Bow’s, presented his neighbors with his vision that the imminent Republican victory would allow the nation to realize its highest purposes. He cast himself as a local farmer with a continental vista. T ­ here was, he noted, nothing unusual about “friends and neighbors” gathering to discuss breeds of ­cattle or “the latest experiments in agricultural science.” This presidential election, however, required more than the usual friendly rivalry of farmers at a county fair. The day’s address required the audience to take on the “responsibility” of “citizens” of a vast country that stood at a crossroads. More than forty pages long in pamphlet form, Jay’s remarks ­were far more pedantic history than folksy stump speech. He recounted de­cades of crises, confrontations, controversies, and crises over slavery. In making the case that the Republican Party embodied the nation’s founding princi­ples and incorporated the most impor­tant abolitionist princi­ples and policy goals, Jay barely expressed an interest in Lincoln’s personal narrative and traits. The candidate’s fitness belonged to history. Lincoln’s replacement of James Buchanan in the White House was the culmination of a “systematic movement to restore the Government to its ancient landmarks, which, a­ fter earnest and persevering efforts for more than a quarter of a c­ entury, are now about to be crowned with so ­g reat success.” A Republican victory at the polls “­will declare in a voice of thunder that the negro is a man.” The many prerogatives claimed by the slave states would melt away; the Supreme Court would be revamped to more accurately reflect the nationwide distribution of the population; the northern tier of slave states would commence emancipation. Meanwhile, fears of disunion ­were misplaced. “Cool headed” southerners would prevail ­because secession would only hasten, ­under far less orderly conditions, slavery’s destruction. Jay concluded with a vision of interregional and interracial harmony: “North and South, East and West, white and black, ­free and slave” brought together ­under the unified national banner of the nation’s founding beliefs.10 The 1860 election results validated Jay’s confidence that Lincoln would win. Abraham Lincoln won the fractured four-­way national race by carry­ing the electoral votes of ­every northern state, including New York. Westchester County was another ­matter. The Jay Homestead sat in a Demo­cratic stronghold. A majority of Westchester voters (54.4 ­percent) cast their votes for Stephen A. Douglas and gave the northern Demo­crat his twelfth highest number



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of votes of any county in the country. The election went even worse in Manhattan; Jay’s other base, where Douglass received 65.2 ­percent of the vote.11 In the wake of the election, Jay joined the camp of Republicans who opposed compromise, even as states in the Deep South began to secede. His letters to Sumner during the long months between Lincoln’s election and his presidential inauguration encouraged the senator’s own instinct that any concessions would embolden rather than weaken secessionism. Even as prominent po­liti­cal figures such as Sumner’s friend Mas­sa­chu­setts congressman Charles Francis Adams and Lincoln’s choice for secretary of state, William H. Seward, looked to conciliate, Jay was emphatic that the party stick to its antislavery princi­ples. On December 31, Jay wrote Sumner, “Our moral prestige ­will be destroyed in an instant” and “the party ­will be demoralized & the p­ eople who created it ­will be betrayed,” should they not remain strong. Writing to Jay from the senate chamber, Sumner conveyed his own distress about t­ hose, including Lincoln, who might waver.12 Although Jay had no doubt that preserving the Union could never be worth “selling out the liberties of the African race on this continent,” he counseled that consolidating northern support meant emphasizing nationalism, not antislavery sentiments, in public utterances. The key to success, Jay urged, was to hold out against compromise through Lincoln’s inauguration, which he attended on March 4. Jay had to feel some satisfaction that Sumner’s and his desire to forestall compromise had won out, even as the new president’s speech attempted to squelch all notions that he supported emancipation.13 The war came anyway—­changing every­thing—­and yet, from John Jay’s perspective, changing not nearly enough and not nearly fast enough.

Frontlines Unlike most sons of New York City’s upper class, William Jay II went to war. And once in uniform, William not only sought to stay at war but also to get closer to b­ attle. The first decision, to volunteer for ser­vice, the twenty-­year-­ old Columbia College gradu­ate made with his parents’ active support. The second, to witness combat firsthand, required wearing down his wary ­mother and ­father. As a Jay, William forged new ground. The namesake of his abolitionist grand­father, who had been an internationally recognized peace advocate and lifelong skeptic of the military, became the ­family’s first man in arms. Although not a ­simple extension of his f­ ather’s abolitionism, William’s war­time experience combined key ele­ments of f­ amily history: patriotism, privilege, and

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antislavery commitments.14 Young William did not dwell on the subject, but he understood explic­itly that fighting to end slavery went hand in glove with that patriotism. His son’s war­time ser­vice raised the personal and emotional stakes of the Civil War for John Jay II while giving the relentless abolitionist firsthand glimpses of what African American self-­emancipation could look like. A “sense of duty” led William to the military, but his ­father played an active role in channeling that duty t­ oward an assignment that was prestigious, comfortable, and safe. John found a position for William as an assistant to General John Ellis Wool. Wool, a New Yorker from upstate Troy, was one of the US Army’s most se­nior ­career generals at the time the Civil War started. A Demo­crat, the seventy-­seven-­year-­old Wool first remained deeply committed to the Union as the nation disintegrated. The el­derly general helped oversee security at Lincoln’s inauguration and then headed to New York City to mobilize military supplies In August, ­after Wool was given command of the Department of ­Virginia and stationed at Fortress Monroe, John and William set about Washington, D.C., lobbying to secure William a commission to serve as one of his officers.15 By the time William arrived to serve as an officer, Fortress Monroe had already played a crucial role in shaping war­time policy t­ oward slavery. Located near the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay at the mouth of the James River, the strategic federal outpost drew runaway slaves to Union Army lines. General Benjamin Butler took possession of t­hese African Americans as contraband of war. As Blacks turned up at the fort and other Union positions, the pressure mounted on the Lincoln administration to clarify the military’s policy and the ­legal status of the fugitives. The result, the First Confiscation Act, which the president signed on August 6, 1861, invalidated any right that masters participating in the rebellion might claim to runaway slaves laboring on behalf of the southern military effort. How anyone would validate that a refugee had or had not been put to work on behalf of the southern military effort was an ambiguity that neither fugitives nor Union soldiers nor the War Department felt compelled to clear up.16 William recorded the presence of African Americans at Fortress Monroe in a breezy, casual, and condescending fashion. In October, he reported that he and some other officers employed full-­time “a contraband ­here for $8 a month,” who supplied them with seafood. The following April, he derived a bit of patronizing mirth from describing a dinner party he threw where “a venerable negress” had to keep washing the ­limited supply of flatware and “overcome I suppose e­ ither by her arduous l­abours or by a b­ ottle of wine that she stole” did not return to ser­vice.17



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William’s situation and experiences at Fortress Monroe reinforced rather than challenged his class and racial status. A servant from Bedford named Philip traveled southward to work for William and in the mess hall in which William, General Wool, and other officers dined. Another arrival at Fortress Monroe was George Cousino, an army enlistee. George was the grand­son of the longtime Jay ­family servant and recipient of ­family ­favor Joseph Cusno. William claimed that he was taking no responsibility for George’s well-­being but did at least keep his eye out for him.18 Privileged though he was, William had no doubt that the abolition of slavery was an essential feature of the cause in which he had enlisted. Prompted by his ­father’s contribution to a newspaper from home and to events in Missouri, in October 1861 William shared an unusually long po­liti­cal outburst. He declared, “­Every one who is true to the Union now must be an abolitionist. . . . ​ For since Slavery is the cause of the w ­ hole war it must be gotten rid of to secure tranquility.” Crushing the rebellion meant crushing slavery. William critiqued what he perceived to be the Lincoln administration’s misguided desire to “conciliate the South.” Southern hatred made that impossible. He advocated remorseless war long before that became the Union Army’s standard practice: “I would burn & devastate this infernal country till they gave in.” Delving deeper into politics, the young captain denounced the Lincoln administration for reversing General John C. Frémont’s policy in Missouri of offering freedom to the slaves of secessionist masters, calling Lincoln’s actions “contemptible.” Nurtured on abolitionism and with the impatient certitude of youth, William’s pro-­emancipation stance went beyond narrow military or po­liti­cal calculation. He wanted all slaves ­free, concluding, “Long before this” Lincoln “should in my opinion have liberated ­every slave in the country no ­matter how loyal his master might be.”19 Abolition remained a shared f­ amily faith that ran deeper than attachment to a po­liti­cal party or a president. William increasingly chafed against his parents’ desire that he spend the war with General Wool ­doing routine work removed from military action. Given the protected nature of his duties, William quickly soured on his position; serving away from the action had begun to sap his pride. He referred to Fortress Monroe as the “dullest hole” and as “this absurd fort,” begging his f­ather to use his connections in Washington to secure him a new commission. As William wrote, “If I had to remain I could no longer even make a pretense of being engaged in the war for preservation of Union & the destruction of Slavery.” He felt that he had a responsibility to advance the f­amily’s historic and moral ­causes. His parents had the opposite priority. John feared that Wool might retire, freeing William to seek more dangerous assignments. So, in November 1861, he wrote President Lincoln’s personal secretary John Milton Hay

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asking that the el­derly Wool be rewarded for his laudable “ability & energy” through permanent promotion to major general.20 William eventually got what he wanted, a place closer to the battlefront, as an officer with the Army of the Potomac. Before the ­Battle of Gettysburg, General George ­Meade assigned Jay to General George Sykes, a West Point gradu­ate and ­career army officer, who was leading the Fifth Corps. Sykes played a role in the securing of L ­ ittle Round Top during that impor­tant Union victory. William remained with Sykes for several more months, growing quite fond of him. In March 1864, the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the Army of the Potomac led to Sykes’s relocation in Kansas. A disappointed William suspected, rightly or wrongly, that Sykes’s personal association with former general George McClellan, the infuriatingly cautious leader in the field who ­later ran against Lincoln as the Demo­cratic nominee for president, was the cause of his transfer. William wound up back with General George ­Meade’s Army of the Potomac staff as the campaign in V ­ irginia ground on. Military experience fueled the young man’s impatience with politics.21

War Aims His son’s posting at Fortress Monroe provided John Jay II with a chance to assess in person ideas about African American military ser­vice that had been on his mind from the first months of the war. Existing law stood in the way of African American ser­vice, he noted in the summer of 1861, and should be revised. In July, Jay suggested to Sumner that Congress pass a law giving the president the flexibility to authorize field commanders to ­free local slaves and enlist them in military ser­vice, “whenever in their judgment the successful prosecution of the war against the rebels, or the safety & welfare of the country ­shall require such a step.” He articulated clearly the doctrine of military emancipation, the notion that in times of war the nation’s leaders had a right to ­free slaves out of necessity.22 A visit to Fortress Monroe l­ater in the summer of 1861 led Jay to briefly waver in his support for Black enlistment before recovering his confidence in the essential efficacy of such a policy. On September 10, 1861, he wrote Senator Sumner that the large numbers of former slaves at the fortress would breed contempt among the white soldiers and, in an uncharacteristic remark, suggested that the refugees might be sent to Haiti. Two days ­later, however, he reported to Sumner conversations at Fortress Monroe in which Union officers who had begun military drills with the refugees “seemed clear upon the point that the sooner we began to arrange them on our side the better.” On Sep-



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tember 26, John, as did his son in uniform, reacted negatively to Lincoln’s reversal of General Frémont’s unilateral emancipation mea­sures in Missouri. A month l­ater, Jay wrote Sumner that “the time is [at] hand for the enrollment of thousands of blacks f­ ree & slave in our army if we” want “to conquer the rebellion.”23 In ­these early months of the war, Jay distinguished between emancipationist strategy and tactics, viewing the concept of “military necessity” as a way to gain approval for Black liberation from a public that remained highly skeptical of abolitionists and abolitionism. A broad spectrum of northerners, including President Lincoln, would not approve of emancipation for mere moral reasons. Emphasizing necessity, Jay aligned himself with mainstream congressional Republicans as they worked their way ­toward passing the First Confiscation Act.24 Jay attempted to reimagine himself as a practical po­liti­cal figure rather than a pugnacious, even inflammatory, l­awyer and public advocate. For both public safety and public relations reasons, he worried about the American Anti-­ Slavery Society holding its 1861 annual meeting in Manhattan. Abolitionists, he thought, must learn the virtues of circumspection. In July 1861, Jay counseled a correspondent against overt abolitionist agitation. The war itself was “more power­f ul than all the conventions we could assem­ble” but only if the northerners rallied as one: if p­ eople thought that war aimed at emancipation, rather than u ­ nion, “the Government ­will find it difficult to procure e­ ither men or money, to the extent it can ­today command them.” The war would then teach northern soldiers and civilians that slavery bore the blame for the conflict. Abolitionists would do well to remain “watchful & prepared to speak,” but as a practical ­matter it would be the abolitionists’ old foes preaching “necessity,” not activists preaching philanthropy, who would do the work. The war, Jay clearly believed, offered not only practical tools for freeing ­actual slaves but also opportunities for propaganda and persuasion. Abolitionist grandstanding would, he believed, only undermine their goals.25 Jay’s self-­casting as a savvy pragmatist fit uneasily into his personal mix of reputation, temperament, and ambition. Radical Republicans wanted far more than the First Confiscation Act delivered. Charles Sumner urged Jay to visit Washington “at once to press upon the Prest. the duty of Emancipation; in order to save the country.” Sumner went on, “Somebody should see the Presdt ­every day, to exhibit to him this supreme duty.” When Jay actually did visit with Lincoln, however, the New Yorker found himself only “touching lightly on” the “slavery question,” perhaps b­ ecause he was a bit star-­struck and ­because he wanted to make a good impression to facilitate a pos­si­ble diplomatic appointment.26

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When in the public arena, Jay’s natu­ral instincts to seize the historical and moral high ground ­were hard to shed. In the draft of a letter to the New York City’s Herald newspaper, Jay offered an elaborate denial that his presence at a recent public meeting on war policy indicated that, to quote the Herald, “Our Abolition incendiaries [are] at it again.” Try as he might to deny that he now eschewed traditional antislavery agitation and to offer up “military necessity” as a nation-­saving endeavor, his identification of the South with “absolute barbarism” and “semi-­civilization” made him sound very much like the abolitionist he still was. So too did his support for African American military ser­vice. Reviving the spirit of 1776 and 1815, he proclaimed, “If voluntary enlistments slacken at the North, stout arms now employed against us, await but the word to fight for the Union . . . ​as did the blacks in the Revolution and the ­battle of New Orleans.” Indeed, the abolitionists had been right all along, as Jay pointed out: For three de­cades they had “sounded the note of warning against t­hose gradual encroachments of the Slave power on the liberties of the Country, which have culminated in rebellion.”27 Looking to history, Jay worked to find a pragmatic voice during the first year of the war. In November 1861, in response to Sumner’s urging, Jay worked on a memo to Secretary of War Simon Cameron on “Enlistment of slaves in the Army” that hearkened back to the American Revolution. He argued that the alternative to putting slaves ­under arms for the Union was a violent slave insurrection in the South. Such a “cruel & bloody” uprising would be hard for federal troops to put down and would create “sympathy for the rebels” enduring the attacks of their lawless former bondsmen. Jay invoked as pre­ce­dent for slave enlistment the Laurens Plan to enroll thousands of South Carolina slaves in the war against the British. To prove the point, John Jay II cited the endorsement of the plan that Alexander Hamilton sent to Continental Congress president John Jay. Thus, the Republican Civil War operative sought to make the case that emancipation and military necessity shared a revolutionary lineage that paralleled his own.28 As the war approached the end of its first year and then entered its second, Jay continued to think about how to secure emancipation. Jay supported Sumner’s revival of the thesis that, on rebelling, the slave states reverted to territorial status. In that case, the federal government now had the authority to ban slavery in ­those places. Jay welcomed the prospect of a second more aggressive Confiscation Act making its way through Congress.29 Jay argued that social order among the emancipated would serve the larger goal of social justice. In January 1862, he wrote Sumner, “It seems to me all impor­tant that the negroes should be placed ­under control the instant they



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are emancipated . . . ​it ­will help us im­mensely ­towards universal emancipation if the country can see that its practical effects wherever it is tried is to develop the industrial faculties of the freed slaves, & assist in the rapid procurement of cotton.” Amid the chaos of war­time, order had, in his mind, to be put at the ser­vice of liberty.30 ­There was no mistaking that African Americans, ­whether enslaved in the South or ­free in the North, represented a potent force for achieving their own freedom. ­After another visit to his son at Fortress Monroe, Jay passed along to Sumner something he gleaned in conversation with one of General Wool’s officers. A col­on ­ el related his el­derly Black servant’s observation that southern slaves had not fomented a general insurrection yet ­because they expected the war would ­free them; the servant said, however, that if the war ended without emancipation, a rebellion would ensue. To emphasize the hidden resources of the enslaved population, Jay passed along word of how swiftly southern slaves communicated with one another across the region, a message from Florida apparently able to make its way to V ­ irginia in a mere eight days. Directing the potential power of mass re­sis­tance by mustering hundreds of thousands of African Americans into the Union Army was one of Jay’s key objectives.31 Jay also prodded Sumner on civil rights, each positive step the federal government took begging for another. The banning of slavery in Washington, D.C., and extension of diplomatic recognition to Liberia prompted Jay to seek legislation to explic­itly extend citizenship to f­ree ­people of color and to suggest that “our legislative acts & official ­orders should ignore all difference of race or . . . ​between whites & blacks, & as far as pos­si­ble recognize the latter as citizens.” ­Because of the war, some of the earliest abolitionist dreams of the Jay f­ amily w ­ ere coming to fruition even as momentum built for even more dramatic changes.32 By making use of his long-­standing ties to New York City’s African American leaders, Jay hoped to mobilize northern Blacks for military ser­vice, so that their enlistment would become a vital tool to secure emancipation nationwide. In early July  1862, he wrote Robert Hamilton, editor of the Weekly Anglo-­ African, in anticipation of congressional action on Black military ser­vice. More than six de­cades ­earlier, Robert Hamilton’s ­father William had written Governor John Jay urging him to take action to abolish slavery in New York. Now John Jay II, a subscriber to the Anglo-­African, was making a request of Hamilton. Jay wanted the newspaper to insert “in a prominent place” in “successive” issues a call for Black volunteers. With northern enlistments lagging, Black volunteers would create an opportunity well worth seizing to “assist in dissipating

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prejudice & creating a kindly feeling of re­spect for your p­ eople.” Jay requested that his own name not be part of the call for enlistment and encouraged Hamilton to edit the announcement in any way he wished. Nonetheless, the editor credited Jay for the militant words he used in the a­ ctual advertisement: “To arms! . . . ​be ready promptly to meet the call of our common country.”33 Even as Jay urged that lawmakers and African Americans institute military emancipation, the former fugitive slave ­lawyer could not shake the fear that the Supreme Court could stop all pro­g ress in its tracks. Even before the war, Jay wanted to see the Taney-­led Supreme Court reformed to prevent additional proslavery judicial decisions. As Congress negotiated vari­ous proposals for extending federal power to confiscate and emancipate, Jay tried to sound the alarm among Republican insiders on what he regarded as this fundamental judicial danger. As he wrote Senator Lyman Trumbull from Illinois, the threat in Jay’s mind that freedom-­favoring laws could be “swept away” was real. Jay wrote Sumner on June  12, 1862: “­Until the Supreme Court is reor­ga­nized I feel anxious about the safety of the slaves who have come to our lines, & I would like to see their freedom secured beyond all question.”34 Fearing that the Lincoln administration had overlooked its responsibility to reform the Court that had perpetrated the Dred Scott abomination only a few years ­earlier, Jay wrote letters to Attorney General Edward Bates and Secretary of State Seward highlighting the danger. The prospect of a decision as consequential as the Dred Scott ruling would thwart “the Emancipation proj­ ect of the President” and Congress. Given the Supreme Court’s prestige, Demo­crats would respond to such a decision by rallying to “overthrow” the Lincoln administration. Jay advised adding new justices to outnumber the untrustworthy Taney and his allies. Betraying no attachment to judicial in­de­ pen­dence or checks and balances, Jay bluntly urged the attorney general to help “secure beyond all contingency a perfect concurrence & harmony between the executive Legislative and judicial branches of Government.”35 Pro­ gress must not be undone by overconfidence and neglect. By the summer of 1862, Jay foresaw that a sweeping emancipation at the direction of the president had become necessary. His letter of July 4 to Sumner claimed that military setbacks and diplomatic dangers had reached the point at which “all the means authorized by the law of war”—­meaning mass emancipation—­would attract the support of even old-­line conservatives for the sake of the country. Jay wondered ­whether the impending confiscation bill would be enough or ­whether a presidential proclamation would need to follow. As anticipation of just such a presidential action grew in the antislavery ranks, Jay wrote Sumner in August, “Slavery ­will die & the nation & Freedom



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­ ill live, & the price paid for t­ hese blessing ­will be the blood of our sons and w a large part of the national wealth we have acquired while consenting to the oppression of the blacks.” (Lincoln’s magisterial Second Inaugural Address in 1865 would poetically echo this view.) Correctly assuming that the president was waiting for greater military success before taking the next bold emancipatory step, Jay indicated that, rather than denouncing Lincoln, the wiser course was to stand in his corner and “not throw away our influence over him, & give him up to our opponents.” The moment of liberation and maximal antislavery influence was at hand.36 And yet when Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September, ­after the Union Army’s stunningly bloody success at Antietam, Jay expressed all sorts of po­liti­cal concerns. His worries had l­ittle to do with the details of Lincoln’s document, which promised to ­free all slaves in any Confederate state or part of a state that did not renounce rebellion by January 1, 1863. From his seat in Westchester County, New York, the dangers of resurgence of “pro-­slavery Democracy” had Jay calling for suppressing “treasonable presses” and for troops to be at the ready to crush an internal northern rebellion. Despite this aggressive stance, Jay also wished that President Lincoln had more clearly articulated emancipation as a “military necessity” in order to stave off attacks on the preliminary proclamation in the crucial upcoming midterm elections. In Jay’s view, branding the president’s plan as abolitionist could only hurt him po­liti­cally.37 When January 1, 1863, came and President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation itself, freeing all slaves in rebel-­held territory and welcoming slaves into the military (though not explic­itly in combat roles), John Jay almost immediately started looking ahead. Writing Sumner from New York City, where Jay recorded “a g­ rand cele­bration” by African Americans, Jay urged that Congress pass a law affirming Lincoln’s mea­sure as a way of guarding against an adverse Supreme Court ruling against the president’s action. He not only renewed his call for arming freed ­people but also suggested, “The act of Congress sustaining the Emancipation policy should secure to ­every slave a few acres”; he believed that land reform would ensure greater social calm in the end. He also looked ahead to the amending of the Constitution, including the po­liti­cal need to declare Blacks as citizens.38 For the moment, in early 1863, the psychological and po­liti­cal roller coaster of John Jay’s Civil War was on an upswing. The fates of slavery and the Union, however, ­were not the only engines of his angst. He did not want his war­time role to be ­limited to informal adviser and occasional lobbyist. Like his son, he too wanted to serve.

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Diplomatic Dreams Seeking to follow in his grand­father’s foreign policy and diplomatic footsteps, John Jay II envisioned himself representing his nation in crisis on the world stage. He identified Eu­ro­pean diplomacy as a crucial front in the strug­gle between North and South. As he awaited word of an appointment to an ambassadorship, Jay made sure that his contacts in Washington knew what he was thinking. ­Those contacts ­were seemingly ideal. Sumner became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, working closely with President Lincoln himself. William H. Seward became secretary of state; the former senator from New York, though not a close po­liti­cal ally, was no stranger to Jay. Chase served as secretary of the trea­sury. Personal ties, Republican Party ser­ vice, and wise counsel, John assumed, would bring him his just reward. Even before the Fort Sumter crisis culminated in the outbreak of war, Jay sought to influence Sumner’s thinking on foreign policy. Jay was particularly ­eager that the United States negotiate a treaty for the suppression of the African slave trade with Britain and other Eu­ro­pean powers. His hope was to outflank the rebel Confederacy morally and practically. A new slave trade treaty would indicate the antislavery leanings of the Lincoln administration, highlight the rebels’ proslavery character, and potentially lead to the harassment of southern vessels by permitting foreign inspections. Jay also recommended revising tariffs in order to lessen the South’s advantage over the North as a major trading power with Eu­rope. Jay subsequently suggested to Sumner that the US Navy seize southern cotton and export the crucial commodity to ­England directly. Jay considered it vital that Eu­ro­pe­ans understand that the Confederacy was motivated by a desire to protect slavery. That way, antislavery public opinion overseas would make it difficult for politicians to extend recognition to the Confederacy as a way of weakening the United States.39 Jay did not confine his foreign policy analy­sis to Sumner. In a lengthy letter to Chase that he marked confidential, Jay wrote about the need for the president to make a public statement that clarified the real cause of division between North and South or at least highlighted the abuse by the Confederacy of southerners loyal to the Union. He went on to bemoan the fact that southern emissaries to Eu­rope seemed to be d­ oing a better job than the US representatives, indicating that some ambassadors lacked the language skills to do their jobs properly. He pressed on Chase, as he had Sumner, the importance of forestalling “interference” from Eu­ro­pean powers.40 Getting diplomacy right mattered. So too did getting a diplomatic posting. Sumner’s significant influence on Lincoln regarding foreign appointments did not produce a diplomatic place-



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ment for Jay early on, but the New Yorker remained undeterred. Sumner continued to stoke Jay’s hopes, saying he had spoken very highly of his friend to President Lincoln, who “I am sure . . . ​regards you with ­favor.” Even so, Sumner admitted to Jay that he had not effectively managed his New York friend’s bid for an overseas post. Sumner felt a greater obligation to support Mas­sa­ chu­setts’s John Lathrop Motley for the Vienna ambassadorship; meanwhile Secretary of State Seward, a fellow New Yorker, appeared to be unsupportive of Jay’s quest. Essentially, in a game of diplomatic musical chairs, Jay lost. Still, wrote Sumner, “­Really, you deserve any t­hing & ­every ­thing, & I told the Presd. & Seward that you did.” When Jay visited the president himself, Lincoln managed to flatter his visitor about his qualifications for a federal post, without delivering the goods. That Jay’s best would-be advocate was from Mas­sa­chu­setts, with his own constituents to look ­after, and not Seward from New York, may have reduced Jay’s traction. Sumner’s growing hostility ­toward Secretary of State Seward could not have helped Jay’s cause ­either.41 Yet the per­sis­tent Jay made sure to highlight his acumen and his overseas connections to Seward. Jay urged the secretary of state to expend greater resources on winning the overseas b­ attle for Eu­ro­pean public opinion. Jay also passed along to Seward what he saw as helpful analy­sis from his own Eu­ro­ pean contacts. On October 17, 1861 he wrote a multipoint memo to Seward on the merits of a slave trade suppression treaty. Moral and diplomatic imperatives aligned. Seward’s responses to Jay’s communiques ­were more perfunctory than personal, but, in any case, the United States reached a new anti-­slave-­ trade accord with G ­ reat Britain. On April 24, 1862, Sumner successfully stage managed the Senate’s unan­i­mous ratification of the treaty.42 John tried to keep his disappointment and frustration over the lack of a diplomatic post in check in his dealings with Sumner. His affection for Sumner was genuine, and having such a prominent ear to hear his policy opinions was invaluable. His wife Eleanor’s letters to Sumner reveal how the passage of time spent on the diplomatic sidelines troubled her husband. She frankly raised pos­ si­ble openings in Spain and Rus­sia with the senator and even suggested that a failure to appoint John might suggest that President Lincoln “has some personal enmity to Mr Jay.” Eleanor was quite direct in insisting that her husband’s qualifications and his long ser­vice to the Republican Party and the antislavery cause should induce Sumner to exert himself. As she told the senator, “His Friends think he is entitled to something.”43 By late 1863, John’s feelings about being repeatedly passed over for an ambassadorship bubbled over into anger at Sumner. Jay’s December letter to Sumner demanded some sort of closure—­either he should be given a post, or ­there should be an end to the charade that he might get one. The routine of

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being mentioned for but nor receiving a post had grown publicly humiliating. Po­liti­cal rivals in Westchester County, wrote John, “have attempted to lessen my personal & po­liti­cal influence by shewing that the administration had not regard my princi­ples or my ser­vices as entitled to consideration.” Jay stated that Secretary of State Seward was not the obstacle. To make a point about loyalty, Jay told Sumner he had recently found a note from Seward to William Jay proclaiming his debt to the Jays and their devotion to liberty. Would that Sumner had connected liberty and friendship, rather than leaving his friend exposed and embarrassed.44 An April 1864 letter John wrote but chose not to send to Sumner expressed in even rawer terms his hurt and betrayal—­and how tied up ­those feelings ­were with f­amily history. Proclaiming himself as having “as much to do with the organ­ization of the Republican party as any man in the Country,” Jay resigned himself to the fact that he would never serve the Lincoln administration. He now wished to secure federal funding to support the editing of founding ­father John Jay’s papers, the current war making the work of the found­ers all the more relevant. But he feared that Sumner might undercut him again. Feeling sorry for himself, John penned his true feelings: “If I have not been permitted by my friends who enjoy the highest offices ­under the gov. to share their triumph it was not ­because I . . . ​failed them in our life long contest.”45 He had been a loyal and true advocate for the antislavery cause. Jay saw the war as a completion of the abolitionist mission. Sumner, Chase, and o ­ thers shared t­ hose goals but did not deliver him his reward. John’s anger, to be sure, had many sources. Vanity, ego, and ­family history made him covet the prestige of an ambassadorship. His sense of entitlement stemmed from both his ser­vice to the Republican and antislavery ­causes and his belief that his Jay lineage embodied the connection between the American Revolution and the Civil War. He also desperately wanted to serve the twin ­causes he fervently believed had become one: emancipation and national salvation. Local politics exacerbated his sense of abandonment. John Jay II expected that his neighbors would re­spect him and even rally to him. Instead, they reviled him.

Homefront John Jay came home to Westchester County as the wrong messenger with the wrong message. The skills and reputation he had gained as an abolitionist ­lawyer and an antiracist church agitator with a high regard for his f­ amily’s history alienated his rural neighbors. The Civil War, rather than legitimizing



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abolitionism and the Under­g round Railroad in this Demo­cratic county, only underscored how dif­fer­ent John’s views ­were from t­ hose of his neighbors. The years spent away making his ­career in New York City made it difficult for him to navigate the local po­liti­cal terrain. In southern New York, w ­ hether Manhattan or Westchester County, the war within the war did not often reward Republicans of Jay’s abolitionist stripe. His contacts in Washington, D.C., seemed to understand the local landscape better than Jay himself did. While awaiting the call to diplomatic ser­vice, he fought poorly a losing ­battle to redeem his ­family’s abolitionist legacy in Westchester County. From his perspective, the Republican Party had negligently rewarded its enemies and left its friends to suffer the abuse of northern agents of the Slave Power. To his neighbors, Republicans as well as Demo­crats, John Jay was an imperious interloper claiming a social authority neither earned nor granted. Jay at some level understood that remaking local politics to conform to his national vision would not be easy. Jay reported to Sumner in March 1861, before the war had commenced, that a group of Demo­crats meeting in New Rochelle “openly ­adopted as its platform the Constitution of the Southern Confederacy.” Such attitudes ­were symptomatic of a broad subversive challenge that the new Republican administration needed to answer promptly and decisively.46 John and Eleanor Jay sought to take seriously the role of elite leadership. Not surprisingly, he joined the local committee to or­ga­nize an army unit. The Union Defense Committee helped provision local enlistees. For her part, Eleanor Jay invited local w ­ omen to come to the Jay Homestead to help make ban­dages for the troops. Other activities struck more discordant notes. John had a nose for controversy. His July 4, 1861, speech titled “The G ­ reat Conspiracy” attempted to educate his neighbors that the Civil War laid bare a long-­ standing plot by the Slave Power to undermine the ­g reat nation and subvert the freedom-­embracing princi­ples of the found­ers.47 This message was not one that o ­ thers necessarily wanted to hear. For Westchester Demo­crats, the out­spoken Jay’s prewar abolitionism made him an easy target, readily grouped with more infamous antislavery advocates. In a speech given ­after the war was underway, former Demo­cratic congressman John B. Haskin emphasized that the conflict was about u ­ nion and only ­union. Haskins’s visit to Fortress Monroe revealed that contraband slaves ­were not ready for freedom. He reminded his audience that abolitionists had denounced the US Constitution, contemptuously referred to Jay’s “ephemeral ­legal notoriety” as a l­awyer for fugitive slaves, and proclaimed, to shouts of approval, that loyal southerners with whom the North should make common cause should not be allowed to think “that Garrison, and Phillips, and Jay are the exponents of the Northern ­people.”48

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Jay’s Bedford remained a tough place for abolitionists even to give public speeches. In the spring of 1862, NASS carried a description of a crowd of roughnecks harassing an antislavery meeting with racial epithets and curses.49 In this environment, Jay proved to be far more of a lightning rod than consensus builder. For Jay, an excruciating b­ attle over Republican patronage in his own backyard took place at the post office. Westchester might be a Demo­cratic stronghold, but the federal government appointed local postmasters, making the post office a crossroads of national and local politics. Jay vigorously sought to exercise his influence in this arena, only to discover in the pro­cess that he was not even the local Republican with the strongest hand in the patronage game. Jay managed to use his influence to have the Katonah post office taken away from the auspices of a Demo­crat who conducted his government ser­vice from a place where the civil servant also sold liquor. However, the intervention of pro-­Union Demo­cratic congressman Edward Haight and Republican judge and former Lincoln Electoral College delegate Henry Robertson led to the removal of the postmaster sponsored by Jay. John Jay openly objected to this maneuver and privately tried to work his connections to the postmaster general and even to the president himself. In a March 27, 1862, speech about the postmaster controversy, Jay could not resist mixing f­ amily pride with abolitionist bravado: “The Jay Homestead was—­and is—as I trust it ­will always remain till the last bondman has dropped his fetters—­a resting place for the fugitive from slavery.” Such language hardly curried ­favor with neighbors angered by how his f­ ather had used his last w ­ ill and testament to flaunt the ­family’s support for fugitive slaves. Even so, Jay grew increasingly distraught as he not only failed to save the job of his favored postmaster but also no longer could trust that his own mail would not be tampered with at the local post office. Jay found it mind-­boggling that the administration catered to p­ eople who so brazenly opposed pro-­emancipation Republican policies. The personal abuse that resulted was humiliating. Trea­sury Secretary Salmon Chase explained to Jay the po­liti­cal exigencies that led the Lincoln administration to work with Congressman Haight and indicated that ­after the coming elections the patronage situation might be resolved to Jay’s ­favor, temporarily soothing Jay’s feelings.50 In an October 30, 1862, preelection speech delivered in southern Westchester County, Jay presented himself as a pro-­Lincoln nationalist, willing to make peace with northern po­liti­cal rivals for the greater cause of u ­ nion. Jay expressed support for Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation without making abolition his dominant theme. To be sure, Jay lambasted Demo­ cratic gubernatorial candidate Horatio Seymour, who, he claimed, catered to



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southern slaveholders and would have the North sue for a degrading peace. Overall, however, the speech emphasized loyalty to the nation, which meant making common cause with u ­ nionist Demo­crats whom Jay privately despised, resented, and feared. Sumner, who in his reelection campaign in Mas­sa­chu­ setts had emphasized emancipation, told Jay he found the speech “admirable” and once again affirmed his intent to help Jay secure an administration post.51 The results of the midterm election w ­ ere depressing. Republican setbacks fueled Jay’s conviction that the party had lost its way not only in Westchester but also nationally. Seymour became governor of New York, carry­ing Westchester County with more than 58 ­percent of the vote. Nationally, the Demo­ crats enjoyed gains in Indiana and Illinois as well.52 In the wake of the election, John Jay’s po­liti­cal rivals sought to make clear in an excruciatingly personal fashion that the abolitionist Jays had no claim to po­liti­cal, moral, or historical authority in the county. A move was launched in the Westchester County Board of Supervisors to remove the portrait of the late William Jay from the White Plains court­house where he had served from 1818 to 1843. John had donated the painting at the request of the county bar association a­ fter his f­ ather’s death. A few short years l­ ater, in December 1862, John had to scramble to avoid insult to his ­father’s memory. The ostensible reason for the proposed removal was the receipt from the county bar of a portrait of former Demo­cratic governor and vice president Daniel D. Tompkins. Suspecting that the plan had to do instead with his own and his ­father’s abolitionism, John was quick to point out in his lengthy letter to the Board of Supervisors that Tompkins himself had played a crucial role in ending slavery in New York. John anticipated that the Westchester County Bar as a w ­ hole would not approve of perpetuating “po­liti­cal partisanship beyond the grave, or of venting the malignity t­oward the living in insults to the dead.” A petition reached the Board of Supervisors suggesting that, despite William Jay’s divisive abolitionism, the judge had exhibited many laudable personal qualities and served a lengthy, praiseworthy tenure on the bench. A week ­after the original resolution to return the William Jay portrait, the board reversed itself by a vote of 12–9. For Jay, the humiliating portrait controversy was impossible to separate from issues of local patronage and suspected pro-­Confederacy conspiracies in New York and the North more generally.53 Signs of the Slave Power’s northern resurgence seemed to be everywhere in 1863, even in the local Episcopal parish where his f­ amily had long exercised ­great influence. Jay continued to agitate on race-­related issues in the New York diocesan convention during the early war years. Jay also spoke out against the rector of the Episcopal parish in nearby Rye for alleged Confederate sympathies. Such activities proved too much for some of his fellow church ­fathers

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and Rev. Edward Boggs, the rector of Bedford’s St. Matthew’s Church. A move was made to have Jay removed from the vestry and as a delegate representing the parish at the convention. This was a direct, personal slap at Jay and his ­family’s local prestige as the first ­family of St. Matthew’s.54 John Jay’s response revealed not only how beleaguered he felt in his own backyard but also how passionately he clung to his core identity as an antislavery crusader. He penned and printed a thirty-­seven-­page response to Rev. Boggs and the vestry, followed by a fifteen-­page “preface” in reply to Boggs’s public remarks on Jay’s comments. Jay’s emotional investment was high in defending his prerogatives and the war in which, he reminded the vestry, his “only son” fought. He connected two of his opponents in the parish church to the erstwhile plan to remove the William Jay court­house portrait and also relitigated the post office controversy. The current travesty in the church was a manifestation of the bloodthirsty “Slave-­power” and an echo in war­time of Judge Jay’s removal from the bench two de­cades before at the behest of pro-­ southern Demo­crats.55 He asserted that he would not be silenced on slavery; nor would he be cowed by accusations that he felt himself entitled by ­family name to power within the church. He drew attention to the formerly enslaved themselves: “Thousands of that unhappy race, rightly freed by the rebellion from traitorous masters, who turned their strength against the Government, are being baptized with fire and blood citizens of our Republic, for whose preservation they are ready to die, even before they have begun to live.” Through their manifest courageousness, ­these Black soldiers had earned “the immortal gratitude of the American ­people,” while beginning “to solve the ­g reat prob­lems of the age—­the duration of slavery; the dignity and destiny of their race, and its relation to the world at large.” This unfolding achievement would secure “the onward pro­g ress, in the path of empire, civilization, freedom, and Chris­ tian­ity, of the American Republic.” Yet the internal threat of subversion, Jay noted in July 1863, was all too real, with victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg compromised still by “Northern renegades” and the South’s “reverend allies in Northern pulpits.”56 Frustrated by his inability to wield wider po­liti­cal influence, concerned about the safety of his son, and buffeted by the ups and downs of emancipation policy and warfront news, Jay placed his local travails on the biggest pos­ si­ble historic stage. Given how poorly he continued to get on with his rural neighbors, however, John Jay II was very fortunate that he had not severed his ties to Manhattan, where embattled ­unionist elites could band together.57 In war­time New York City, Jay would forge deep connections to friends in need.



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Riot, Rancor, and Redemption In November 1862, Frederick Law Olmstead invoked John Jay II as an archetypal member of a club that would draw together New York City’s social elite to sustain the Union in its time of dire need. Olmstead—­author, designer of Central Park, and a leading figure in the US Sanitary Commission—­advised Walcott Gibbs, who would go on to be a founder of the Union League Club (ULC), that “men of good stock, or of notably high character, of ­legal reputation, would be desirable,” with “­those of old colonial names well brought down” particularly desirable. Jay’s former elite nemesis George Templeton Strong was installed to head the new club’s admissions committee, which settled on the name Union League to solidify ties to a group in Philadelphia or­ga­nized along similar lines.58 In the early months of 1863, Strong and a small group of fellow New Yorkers advanced their plans to bring together the city’s commercial and cultural elite in a club devoted to the cause of the Union and the Lincoln administration. The election of antiwar Demo­crat Horatio Seymour as governor of New York had been taken as a troubling sign. If such men wanted their efforts to succeed, they would have to mobilize power and prestige more effectively and self-­consciously. Unbreakable loyalty to the nation struggling to survive secession and war was the group’s fundamental organ­izing princi­ple. Strong envisioned the club preserving the nation while “stimulating[ing] property-­holders and educated men to assert their right to a voice in the conduct of public affairs . . . ​and do a l­ittle something ­toward suppressing the filthy horde of professed politicians . . . ​draining our national life by parasitical suction.” From the beginning, the Union League Club tied suppression of the southern rebellion to the prob­lem of po­liti­cal corruption in the North. Strong’s ­unionism, elitism, and support for emancipation had melded with the views of his one-­ time rival Jay.59 Jay gravitated to the ULC, lending some of the historical credibility that Olmstead ­imagined. Jay also joined the more po­liti­cally minded parallel organ­ ization, the Loyal National League, an ostensibly nonpartisan statewide group coalescing around the preservation of the republic, but which Jay hoped would influence the Republican Party on policy. Jay anticipated that plans for a federally mandated draft to sustain the Union Army through a war with no end in sight would not be easy to implement in New York City. Sustaining patriotic order amid the draft would be a significant test of the city’s, the state’s, and even the nation’s strength in a time of acute crisis.60 New York City failed the test—­confirming Jay’s worst fears. White working-­ class protesters responded to the draft lottery on Monday, July 13, 1863, with

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vio­lence aimed at the draft office. Their focus soon shifted. Mobs, which included large numbers of Irish immigrants, marched on homes and businesses associated with elite Republicans. Rioters also aimed their vicious ire on African Americans. They looted the Colored Orphan Asylum, an institution to which the Jays had been benefactors.61 It then burned to the ground, displacing 237 ­children. Rioters hunted down Black ­people in the streets, lynching and desecrating bodies. The victims included a grand­mother, her d­ aughter, and her grand­son whom they beat to death. Four days of chaos and attacks on African American related properties led Black New Yorkers to flee to the shelter of police headquarters and to outlying wooded areas in New Jersey and Long Island. The city’s Black population fell by one-­fifth in the wake of the riots. The fewer than 10,000 African Americans who remained strug­gled to advance claims for compensation, and authorities did l­ittle to punish the perpetrators. The Draft Riots, with an official death toll of 119 by time order was restored, represented more than a rejection of a draft law that favored the rich at the expense of the working class: it was a stunning breakdown of authority in the nation’s biggest city. Popu­lar white anger was, moreover, not confined to the city. In Westchester County, rioters tore up railroad tracks. William Jay II wrote home from the warfront, passing along advice on how the f­amily might protect the Jay Homestead if it came ­under attack.62 Like the New York City anti-­abolitionist riots of 1834, which John Jay II had experienced at the outset of his abolitionist ­career, the 1863 riots required a rededication of purpose. Much had changed in three de­cades. Immediate emancipation was no longer the distant dream of reformers but rather the official policy of the national government. The murderous New York City upheaval dramatized that racism, class division, and anti-­administration po­liti­cal sentiment posed a combustible threat to that policy. In 1834, Jay stood guard himself against the mob. Three de­cades ­later, he and ­others lobbied Mayor George Opdyke and General John Wool, his son’s former commander now charged with the city’s military defense, to move strongly against the rioters.63 In rallying the city’s elite against disorder, pro-­war and pro-­emancipation men like John Jay expressed interracial humanitarianism, intraclass solidarity, and a redoubled commitment to the Union. Jay joined the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored ­People Suffering from the Late Riots to raise and distribute funds. The riots also struck a blow against the African American institution to which Jay had deep ties: St. Philip’s Church. Jay contributed funds to repairs needed ­after the church served as a barracks for soldiers in the wake of the riots; t­ hese guests had treated their temporary home with disrespect. Meanwhile, the ULC reinforced solidarity among ­unionists who sought out the group’s club­house as a sort of safe haven for the like-­minded.64



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The ULC, to whose executive committee Jay ascended in 1864, had broad ambitions, si­mul­ta­neously asserting the social elite’s role in securing order and the rights of African American citizens. In the short term, ­these dual goals involved pursuing one of Jay’s most cherished war­time aims—­African American ser­vice in the Union Army.65 The ULC played an instrumental role in recruiting Black regiments from New York to join the war effort, an initiative that Jay viewed as essential to achieving emancipation. In the face of Governor Seymour’s recalcitrance, it raised $18,000 for mustering Black troops. The Jays made a point of participating in the pageantry associated with the redemption of the city through the cele­bration of Black military heroism. On March 5, 1864, less than eight months a­ fter the riots, a massive audience witnessed New York’s first regiment of African American troops being presented its official colors at the ULC club­house. In a powerfully symbolic gesture repudiating racism and any notion that African American soldiers represented a threat to ­either white manhood or white womanhood, 135 ­mothers, wives, and ­sisters of ULC members signed an address to the regiment: “The d­ aughters of this g­ reat metropolis” acknowledged their “brave champions in the field” who “they w ­ ill anxiously watch . . . ​glorying in your heroism, ministering to you when wounded and ill, and honoring your martyrdom with benedictions and with tears.” John Jay’s wife, his recently married d­ aughter Mary Jay Schieffelin, and his youn­gest ­daughter Anna, as well as another Miss Jay (perhaps his ­daughter Augusta), numbered among the signatories. The gesture affirmed that abolitionism and racial dignity remained family-­wide commitments.66 The club’s very public role in the raising of t­ hese regiments underscored the privileged position of its members and their families, as private citizens presuming to ritually confer the honor of national ser­vice on men risking death for their own good reasons. The cele­bration of Black military ser­vice by elites at the club­house and other citizens in the streets also represented a power­f ul rejection of the racism that so often prevailed. Leading African American New Yorkers w ­ ere on the rostrum of March 5 at the ceremony honoring the first Black regiment. The New York Herald venomously commented on the white “­daughters of Fifth Ave­nue” extending their blessing to Black soldiers, thereby, from an antislavery perspective, proving the very necessity of such symbolism. Three weeks ­after the event, John Jay himself had the honor of addressing the second African American regiment mustered in a single month with the help of the ULC (see Figure 12). Reversing racism mattered to the ­unionist organ­ization. The private white club challenged the segregation of the city’s railroads, initiating a pro bono suit on behalf of a Black military ­widow who had been removed from a railcar.

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Figure 12.  Black troops at the Union League Club­house, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 26, 1864. Call #499751, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Publicity from the case drove city rail lines to revoke their policies of maintaining segregated cars.67 John Jay must have found it enormously gratifying, indeed vindicating, to see antiracist activism become part of the mission of this signature elite organ­ization. Attracting racist contempt for advocating African American rights had long been a part of the f­amily’s abolitionist experience. But now their class peers w ­ ere in step with the Jays. And yet John Jay was far too energetic, anxious, and cantankerous—­and the Union’s fate far too dependent on yet unresolved military and po­liti­cal events— to bask in redemptive moments. His son remained in the army, the young officer expressing a determination to see the war through to the end. As the Union Army sought some way to pin down General Lee and destroy the rebellion, William dismissed the notion that he had served long enough to justify leaving the war ­behind. Yet his letters conveyed the grimness of a lengthy war that produced huge casualty numbers. He also expressed a low opinion of how the administration in Washington conducted the war and the pressing need for more troops.68



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The 1864 presidential campaign tied Jay into knots but in the end gave him the opportunity to carry the banner for the ULC’s nationalist vision. Lincoln’s reelection was neither a foregone conclusion nor deemed universally desirable among abolitionists, some of whom questioned ­whether Lincoln was sufficiently committed and capable of leading the transition from mass emancipation to permanent, irreversible abolition. Jay’s concerns w ­ ere at once practical and eccentric, as he worried far more about ­whether conservatives would support the Republican ticket than w ­ hether radicals would. He became convinced that declaring that the war was for the express purpose of destroying slavery, as Lincoln wished to do, would precipitate a dangerous hemorrhage in support. Now that the Lincoln campaign had committed itself to Jay’s abolitionist goals, he was curiously reluctant to acknowledge the victory. That Jay should insist on a cautious position on declaring abolition as a war aim struck George Templeton Strong as both ironic and emblematic of Jay’s difficult personality. A more charitable explanation would be that Jay so feared the disastrous implications of a Lincoln defeat that he wished the campaign to play as safe and noncontroversial hand as pos­si­ble. And yet, according to Strong, even a­ fter a vastly improved military situation shored up Lincoln’s reelection bid, Jay continued to won­der ­whether the ULC should back the Republican ticket, a stance Strong attributed to “some inscrutable, mysterious law of his factious nature.”69 His erratic expressions during the presidential campaign notwithstanding, Jay came around to proclaiming the epochal significance of the 1864 election, embracing both nationalism and emancipation. Days before the election, Jay delivered a speech to the Union Campaign Club of East Brooklyn that elevated defeat of the Demo­crats to a historical significance that surpassed that of the American Revolution. Jay claimed that northern voters would not only save the republic but also determine “in large mea­sure the ­f uture of christendom” with their ballots. “The G ­ reat Issue” at stake in the war and therefore the impending election was the global survival of republican government against a phalanx of enemies—­a “­grand conspiracy”—­north and south, foreign and domestic. Invoking at the outset George Washington’s dramatic fog-­shrouded retreat from Brooklyn in 1776 to solemnize the location of his speech, Jay pivoted to the optimistic offensive. On the eve of the election it was not fog but sunshine that marked the nation’s current path—as a ­people enlightened by “­free schools, ­free speech and a ­free press” had overmatched the republic’s enemies. Prosperity spreading to the continent’s interior validated the freedom that Jay claimed as the core identity of the “Imperial Republic.”70 To his preelection Brooklyn audience, Jay avowed abolition—­and Black humanity—as expressions of American freedom. Drawing on the unhealed

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scars of the 1863 draft riots, Jay recalled the “pro-­slavery” northerners who “burned an asylum for colored orphans” and “hung negroes with brutalities never exceeded by a Pa­ri­sian mob” during the French Revolution. By contrast, war­time emancipation had not only proven safe but also contributed “to the glory the prestige, the power and the perpetuity of the American Republic.” The war provided a platform for the formerly enslaved to showcase their own civic devotion: “Their heroism, again and again, has saved the honour of our flag, and the lives of our friends and kinsmen.” The memory of t­ hese deeds would live on, he asserted.71 The blunders of southern slaveholders had, in this telling, unlocked the nation’s destiny. Four years before, on the eve of the 1860 election, Jay portrayed Republican victory as the historic realization of abolitionist history. In 1864, emancipation was the realization of American history. From such heights, his rivals, as well as his own po­liti­cal fears, looked small-­minded. In the wake of Lincoln’s electoral victory, John Jay knew that t­ here remained very specific types of work to be done. When Chief Justice Roger Taney died in October 1864, the bogeyman of a second Dred Scott decision reversing all the war­time gains of emancipation diminished. Jay felt strongly that Lincoln should appoint Salman Chase, who departed from Lincoln’s cabinet that summer, to Taney’s former position on the Supreme Court, which the president ultimately did on December 6.72 With Lincoln’s reelection, Jay also understood clearly what the abolitionist endgame must be—­a Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution abolishing slavery once and for all. As he wrote Sumner on November 21, “I regard this step as the one most impor­tant for us to secure immediately.” Jay publicly shared his broader vision in December at the victory cele­bration at the East Brooklyn Union Campaign Club. The southern rebellion had provided “a more perfect u ­ nion, a more intense nationality, and universal freedom,” while demonstrating “that that Constitution, in its wonderful adaptability, is as well fitted for war as for peace.” In peace, the nation could exchange “­free homesteads” for the soon to be defunct “slave plantations.” “Let the nation be true to itself,” and then the “flag of freedom” would become “the fitting emblem of the Star of Empire.”73 As Union victory approached, Jay had fully merged his nationalism with his abolitionism.

Witness To secure Amer­i­ca’s ­g rand and ­g reat ­f uture in the waning months of the war, the ULC dispatched John Jay to Washington as part of a committee to lobby



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both for the Thirteenth Amendment and for the establishment of a federal bureau for educating and safeguarding the rights of freedmen. This mission became one of witness. Jay and six colleagues ­were pre­sent on the day the House of Representatives approved the constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. Following up on a brief tele­g ram it sent to New York City moments ­after the congressional vote, the committee composed a dramatic and detailed report of the historic congressional vote. The committee’s account bore Jay’s mark: it was a personal history making this moment of collective abolitionist triumph as also one of f­ amily vindication. In surveying the gallery of onlookers, the report delighted at the attendance of foreign diplomats whose alleged plotting to destroy the republic, a Jay fixation, had come to naught. An imaginative reconstruction of the “historic recollections that crowded upon the thoughts of the spectators” included many pivotal moments from the Missouri Compromise to the gag rule to the fiasco of Bleeding Kansas. The audience also “recalled” the 1827 debate over abolition of the slave trade in the nation’s capital, prompted by the attempted sale of a Westchester County f­ ree Black man named Gilbert Horton; the report’s one and only footnote reminded readers that it was “the late Hon. William Jay” who had originally taken up Horton’s cause. The most consistent historical actor through the de­cades and into the Civil War, according to the report, ­were not abolitionists or politicians, but rather “the Slave Power,” whose memory haunted the chamber still. And so it was that the almost unreal moment arrived when the Slave Power was to be vanquished by a congressional vote on an amendment to the Constitution. The final tally, in which enough Demo­crats joined their Republican colleagues to produce the necessary two-­thirds majority, was met first by silence and then by joyful cele­bration: “From floor and galleries burst a simultaneous shout of joy, spontaneous, irrepressible, and uncontrollable,” the ULC representatives recorded. The moment had a special historical intimacy. In the ULC del­e­ga­tion’s telling, Congress had completed the work of the founding ­fathers. The amendment attached the “anti-­slavery views” of “the framers of the Constitution” and thus “brought as it ­were face to face, the past and the pre­sent.”74 Abolition’s vindication helped renew Jay’s sense of his own historic standing and personal embodiment of a noble if disrupted legacy. Yet his po­liti­cal wounds had not healed. Sometime in the spring of 1865, a year ­after shelving his ­bitter letter to Sumner, Jay revisited his personal grievances, penning a new draft reviewing the facts of how the radical Mas­sa­chu­setts senator had allegedly assisted “the pro-­slavery opponents of the Republican party in New York in their per­sis­tent Efforts to exclude me from all recognition.” Jay connected

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the dots between Seward and his allies allegedly helping elect the Copperhead Demo­crat Seymour, the humiliation of the attempted removal of his f­ ather’s court­house portrait, and the prolongation of the war itself. In an effort to justify his paranoia that only made him sound more so, he quoted an 1862 letter from his longtime po­liti­cal friend and now fellow ULC member Hiram Barney. Barney juxtaposed what Jay had “done & suffered for humanity” with “the petty infamous persecution . . . ​from certain men who have been abetted & encouraged in their misconduct by the first administration” embracing “the views which you & your f­ amily have” championed.75 Amid the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, amid the triumph of abolition and the Union, Jay could not shake grievances born of princi­ple and privilege. Still, the fact remained that John Jay II—­unlike his grand­father, his f­ ather, or his ­uncle and unlike e­ arlier generations of enslaved members of the household—­had lived to see t­ hose antislavery princi­ples triumphant. The scion of the founding had been granted the rare privilege of watching a signal moment in the history of abolition unfold before his very eyes. His Civil War commentaries, public and private, had been prescient, impassioned, but paranoid. The conflict allowed him to re­unite a vision of the nation’s ascendant destiny with his ­family’s legacy. At age forty-­eight, he was well positioned to represent a revived class of elite reformers who intended to make a mark on a reconstituted republic now ­free from slavery but still morally obligated to the formerly enslaved. Reconstruction presented an opportunity to assert his leadership anew, to advance racial equality, and to reap the rewards of his own steadfastness.

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Reconstructed

“I think we have hardly begun to appreciate the magnitude and the meaning of the work before us in connection with the Freedmen of the South,” declared John Jay at the beginning of a speech delivered on May 9, 1865. The previous month saw Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and President Lincoln’s assassination in rapid succession, two markers of the dramatically changing historical landscape. Jay attended the president’s funeral in Washington as part of the thirteen-­man Union League Club del­e­ga­tion dispatched from New York. On May 9, he spoke to the inaugural meeting of the American Freedmen’s Aid Union at New York City’s Cooper Union to advocate for the advancement of Black citizenship and the reconstruction of the nation according to the princi­ples of “universal freedom and equal justice.” Five years ­earlier at Cooper Union, Lincoln launched himself ­toward the presidency in an address documenting the antislavery beliefs of the found­ers. Jay embraced the effort to realize his and Lincoln’s version of the founding vision in the wake of the Civil War. As Jay put it to his audience, “The work of our ­Fathers is almost completed.”1 For John Jay, Reconstruction promised to bring the goals of racial justice and national greatness into permanent alignment, with the personal benefit of allowing him to embody and narrate the story. Yet ­after the US centennial came and went, with national liberty and nation-­building rapidly diverged. The class of men Jay represented continued to consolidate their power and cultural 365

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identity during and ­after Reconstruction, even as their willingness to partner with southern Blacks diminished and white supremacy surged. Jay diverted his energy to other perceived crises and contests. He discovered that he could reap the rewards of the nation’s revolutionary history as “the work before us” remained undone. John Jay II’s post–­Civil Wat path illustrates how the magnetic pulls of nationalism and social prestige combined with religious prejudice and self-­ righteous nativism to distance him from his abolitionist inheritance in ways subtle and profound. During Reconstruction and beyond, Jay sought to celebrate the found­ers’ legacy—­but how he viewed that legacy and its responsibilities altered. Glimmerings of a new age obscured what he failed to achieve in the f­ athers’ name (see Figure 13).

The Agenda The speakers who followed John Jay II at the Freedmen’s Aid meeting ­were Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Although members of the American Anti-­Slavery Society rejected Garrison’s motion that it dissolve b­ ecause emancipation had occurred, the real­ity that the former slaves of the South needed allies, assistance, and advocates weighed heavi­ly on Jay and Douglass. The New York Times reported “­g reat applause” when Douglass asserted, “The negro had a claim on the North, not as black men, but as men. A claim for education and to educate the black man was the mission of the Freedmen’s Aid Association.”2 Jay’s address, “Our Duty to the Freedmen,” was no less emphatic that African Americans had a strong claim to the nation’s attention and resources—­ not only b­ ecause of the sufferings of slavery but also b­ ecause of their war­time ser­vice to the Union. He stated, “We must repay in part this injured class the debt which as a ­people we owe them for their long and cruel bondage.” He also asserted that “the colored race” had proven themselves during war, indeed had saved the nation, through their “unwavering loyalty” and “unshrinking bravery.” Anticipating Douglass’s concern that the organ­ization not be merely a vessel for distributing “old clothes,” Jay foregrounded securing Black citizenship as central both to the organ­ization’s and the nation’s agenda: We must protect them in their constitutional rights, furnish them with freeholds, and guard them in their homes; that, with the institution of the f­amily re-­established and the relation of husband and wife and ­mother and child restored, they may taste at last the blessings of Chris-

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Figure 13.  John Jay II, 1867. Oil on canvas. By Daniel Huntington (1816–1906). JJ.1958.299. John Jay Homestead Historic Site, Katonah, N.Y., Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

tian civilization. We must see that school-­houses and churches are scattered throughout the South as in New E ­ ngland and New York; and that education in the trades and arts, education moral, religious and intellectual is brought within the reach of ­every citizen of what­ever shade. Jay was fully cognizant that a postwar humanitarian crisis loomed if northerners did not help supply farm tools and clothing to the formerly enslaved. In this speech, he called attention to the cultural capital necessary to safeguard

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personhood and practice citizenship. He left no doubt that the freed p­ eople themselves ­were up to the task: they w ­ ere “temperate in habit,” “anxious for instruction,” and “apt to learn,” and f­ uture hopes would be well invested in the freed ­people of the South.3 Despite his optimistic projections, Jay’s experience in New York City complicated the notion that the widespread suffering and loss of the Civil War forged “a new tie of sympathy between the colored race and their fellow countrymen.” City officials had sought to prevent African Americans from marching in the funeral pro­cession carry­ing Lincoln’s remains through Manhattan. Yet even from this shameful action, Jay derived hope. A small number of African Americans ultimately did join the pro­cession, prompting the crowd to signal its approval with “hundreds of thousands of handkerchiefs waved like snow flakes at the approach of ­those persecuted men.” But the memory of a dif­fer­ent sort of street politics, the Draft Riots of less than two years before, lingered; old po­liti­cal enmities festered. The “satanic school of theology” that defended slavery still bedev­iled the cause. He drew audience approval for his anti-­Catholic, anti-­immigrant swipes, including a reference to “the devices of Jesuits . . . ​creating in our midst an ecclesiastical despotism ­under the specious cover of religious toleration.” Jay sought to rally an audience that shared his prejudices and his sympathies to believe itself up to the task of Reconstruction. As New York became “the centre of the commercial world,” linked to Eu­rope by a transatlantic telegraph cable and the rest of the continent by a transcontinental railroad, it would with “unity and efficiency” bring the entire nation a system of justice and liberty for all.4 Jay i­magined a postwar Amer­ic­ a in which ele­ments of the old Benevolent Empire of northern reformers would fuse with a reinvigorated commercial and po­liti­cal elite to lead society to new moral heights. As trea­surer of the American Freedmen’s Aid Bureau, Jay committed to help supply the Freedmen’s Bureau with qualified teachers; the organ­ization was guided by Reconstruction princi­ple “that no injustice may be done to a class without being visited upon the w ­ hole nation.” Jay also joined an initiative to work through the Freedmen’s Bureau to inundate the South with printed materials promoting reform.5 Knowing the antebellum history of efforts to squelch the distribution of antislavery materials in the South, Jay and other northern optimists reveled in a reversal of fortune that placed northern reformers in a position to remake the defeated region. W ­ hether abolitionist organ­izations remained operational, abolitionist princi­ples appeared to be at the vanguard of substantive change. Prospects for the nation looked even rosier from abroad. While in Eu­rope on an extended vacation with members of his f­ amily in late 1865, Jay presided

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over a lavish and festive American Thanksgiving cele­bration in Paris in a room festooned with US and French flags. Before a room of approximately three hundred, Jay delivered remarks brimming with confidence. With no hint of the recrimination that would drive a vicious wedge between President Andrew Johnson and Congress, Jay preceded his remarks by reading Johnson’s proclamation declaring December 7, 1865, a Thanksgiving Day. L ­ ater in his remarks, he would toast Johnson, as well as Lincoln and George Washington. The United States, Jay proudly proclaimed, had realized Daniel Webster’s vision of “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable,” implicitly forgiving the now deceased Mas­sa­chu­setts Whig whom William Jay had regarded as a craven compromiser to the interests of slaveholders. The United States could “proceed in the work of reconstruction on the basis of freedom and education,” all the while confident in its military might, its economic power, and its vast assets. Other speakers echoed his confidence in the nation’s rising glory. At midnight, Jay adjourned the meeting.6 Early in the new year, while still in Eu­rope, John Jay received confirmation that, when he spoke on national affairs, he spoke for many other rich and well-­ connected men like himself. On January 11, the Union League Club of New York City elected Jay as its new president. For Jay, the affirmation from his peers was sweet, the vindication of an abolitionist almost totally scorned in the past by Westchester neighbors and Manhattan peers. What better American name in the wake of the Civil War could ­there have been than John Jay to embody the club’s commitments? The founding f­ ather of that name had advocated for the authority of national po­liti­cal institutions; was an early abolitionist; defended property, wealth, and social hierarchy; and established a reputation for moral probity and religious devotion.7 His grand­son assumed the mantle of ­those values. In remarks delivered in Paris in June 1866 and addressed as a letter to the ULC of New York, Jay provided a version of history that flattered the elite membership’s sense of entitlement to direct the course of postwar society. He credited the class of ­people who formed the ULC with providing the Lincoln administration with the backbone and financial wherewithal to survive the initial blow of secession. Subsequently, the club supplied resources to the US Sanitary Commission, encouraged the enlistment of Black soldiers, and “purifying the Northern atmosphere,” displaced “treason” with patriotism in public discourse. During Reconstruction, the club advocated for the new Civil Rights Act that explic­itly extended citizenship to freed p­ eople, thereby “placing the former master and the freedman on an equal footing” and enshrining the princi­ples of the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence in law. In real­ity, the law rested on the shaky ground of a federal judiciary willing to enforce it. Still, for Jay, who only a few years before

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battled against the Fugitive Slave Act, a federal law that set up an apparatus for helping freed ­people challenge discriminatory state laws and practices was a power­ful achievement.8 Jay insisted that equal justice was the cornerstone of a new age. The Civil War confirmed a basic truth: “We cannot trample with impunity on the rights of the blacks, and plead colour or race as an apology for the crime,” ­because “our mutual rights and liberties and interests, however widely separated in appearance, are in real­ity so identified by” God; if “a F ­ ree Government” is to prevail “we must accord ­these blessings equally to them.” The ULC’s responsibilities clearly extended beyond formal abolition, just as William Jay and John Jay II had decried discrimination against ­free ­people of color in the North during the antebellum period.9 Jay also worried about a resurgent Slave Power alliance that could exploit po­liti­cal disorder for malignant purposes. If southern representatives w ­ ere welcomed back to Congress prematurely, Jay warned, the old Demo­cratic co­ali­ tion would reassemble to deny rights to freed p­ eople. Their po­liti­cal power would be swelled ­because the formerly enslaved, even though denied voting rights, would be fully counted t­ oward the southern population. With their renewed po­liti­cal dominance, Demo­crats would repudiate the national war debt or approve compensation for former southern slaveholders for emancipation, with payments coming from the federal trea­sury. T ­ here w ­ ere t­ hose in Eu­rope, he warned, who would be all too happy to benefit from revived American po­liti­cal disarray.10 Jay’s racially progressive and conservative impulses w ­ ere in tension with one another. He envisioned something well short of universal manhood suffrage, with the guiding hand of education a crucial tool to overcome ignorance of both whites and Blacks. Where once Jay had feared that the US Supreme Court would invalidate emancipation, now he hoped that the national tribunal would render moot the debate over Black voting rights by finding that the abolition of slavery made w ­ holesale Black disenfranchisement illegal. Then the states could take up for themselves what Jay regarded as the legitimate pro­cess of defining “residence, intelligence, and taxation or property” as standards for voting. ­Under such standards, Black men would not gain the vote all at once but only “as they prove themselves fit for it.” Jay, imagining a continuous dissipation of racism with the ending of slavery, compared his “conservative” vision of extending Black suffrage to “exaggerated views of the capacity of the race” to instantly qualify to vote. He was confident that a more deliberate pace would still produce liberating results. Educational investment was crucial to advance Blacks and whites to the point where democracy could function safely.11

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This spokesman for the New York elite rooted his analy­sis largely in class rather than race, updating his ­family’s long-­standing suspicion of universal male suffrage and democracy itself. According to Jay, the “ignorance” of southern whites had been crucial to sustaining southern slavery, making southern white voters no less in need of education than Black voters. And the same was true in the North, where Jay reminded his elite fellow clubmen, “We . . . ​know by daily experience the evils that result from the exercise of the suffrage, among a population uninstructed in the ele­ments of American freedom, and unable to read the Constitution and the law of the country.” Only careful planning and “universal education” made a country safe for universal liberty. Radical Reconstruction, therefore, required, in this view, conservative engagement.12 From his Eu­ro­pean perch, Jay indicated that the success of Reconstruction rested in no small part on the ability of the nation’s po­liti­cal and social elites to remain unified. Revealingly, the person whom Jay quoted at greatest length in his letter was former Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, whose conciliatory remarks about recognizing Black rights—­and assertions about the essential loyalty of Black workers—­seemed to have convinced Jay that an entente between northern and southern elites was pos­si­ble. Jay also called on the Union League Club to welcome “Southern gentlemen” into their midst to impress on the visitors their own commitment to equal rights and to cement the “bonds of a common interest and mutual affection” between the regions.13 Jay’s grasp of the po­liti­cal situation back home, however, was flawed. President Johnson was far less committed to Black rights than Jay thought. He believed that Johnson’s trou­bles with Congress ­were driven by personality rather than substance and clung to the notion that a “Union party” still existed that could bind together in peace the war­time co­ali­tion of Republicans and former Demo­crats. The president’s racism and states’ rights beliefs placed him at odds not only with congressional Republicans’ interventionist agenda in the South but also with Jay’s vision that steady pro­gress ­toward racial equality was Reconstruction’s essential and necessary purpose. By the time Jay published a British edition of his letter in October, he gingerly acknowledged in a brief prefatory note that the po­liti­cal situation was much knottier than his June remarks had indicated.14 Radical and old-­line abolitionists could reasonably interpret Jay as endorsing the sort of aggressive federal support for Black advancement that kept abolitionists active even a­ fter the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. In November 1866, two consecutive issues of the NASS, still the official newspaper of the AAS, prominently featured Jay’s commentary on the nation’s po­ liti­cal challenges. Jay had come by his pre­sent “Athenian glory” honestly, as one

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who had suffered the insults of being an abolitionist in profoundly difficult times. His address, according to NASS, rode “the moral wave of Christianized humanity against the pestilential fortresses of a bastard President and cowardly enemies in the masks of friends.” Jay was, in the NASS’s view, “a ­brother who has not forgotten nor forsaken his early love” for abolitionism. He could be forgiven m ­ istakes born of distance from American shores. The bedrock commitment to Black equality that Jay and the ULC embraced, the editor opined, made “their power” and “their influence” a profound force for good.15 At this juncture in Reconstruction, the tensions born of conservative impulses and elitist priorities ­were undercurrents that mattered far less than a united front against the southern subversion of emancipation. Southern states had enacted Black Codes to enforce slavery-­like racial subjugation and had elected unreconstructed former Confederate politicians to high office throughout the region. No one with a sincere, long-­standing commitment to African American liberation could find acceptable the Reconstruction pro­cess directed by President Johnson.16

Intervention and Contention The priorities John Jay laid out in his speeches on Reconstruction become central to Republican policy. But the clock was ticking. As Jay would observe firsthand when he returned to the United States, forging unity in the South and maintaining unity in the North ­were easier to envision than to achieve. The po­liti­cal landscape shifted rapidly t­ oward more aggressive intervention by the federal government to remake southern po­liti­cal life and expand the reach of African American citizenship.17 In 1866 and 1867, Republicans in Congress seized the reins of Reconstruction from President Johnson. The party coalesced around a F ­ ourteenth Amendment that enshrined civil rights princi­ ples in the Constitution. The amendment nationalized citizenship—­putting the final nail in the coffin of the Dred Scott decision—­and guaranteed due pro­ cess and equal protection to all citizens. The amendment also incentivized enfranchisement of Black male voters by reducing a state’s repre­sen­ta­tion in Congress and in the Electoral College by that portion of the population of adult males denied the vote. With white southern regimes digging in their heels during the midterm election season, Republicans in Congress went even further, reimposing military rule in most of the former Confederacy. Ratification of the ­Fourteenth Amendment and new state constitutions enfranchising Black voters became requirements for restoring state sovereignty. The

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expanded emphasis on voting rights was part of a strategy to allow Republican interracial co­ali­tions to gain po­liti­cal traction in the South. If this model of Reconstruction worked, the state Republican Parties would be loyal to the national party and ready to institute reforms in education, invest in economic development, and spread the gospel of ­free ­labor as the key to material pro­ gress and social mobility.18 With the new, more radical phase of Reconstruction underway, the ULC of New York City determined in February 1867 to explore how to exert more influence on “national questions.” President Jay joined a committee of five members who sought to coordinate with branches of the club in Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. By the spring V ­ irginia emerged as a focus of the ULC’s energies. That state’s beleaguered governor, Francis H. Pierpont, prior to the imposition of martial law, had unsuccessfully favored the ratification of the F ­ ourteenth Amendment. Even so, efforts to forge unity between the radical, largely African American faction of the Republican Party and white moderates proved difficult.19 Jay and Union League colleagues from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston traveled to Richmond in June to broker a compromise between ­Virginia’s feuding Republican factions. Jay perceived the split as having to do with “etiquette,” by which he seemed to mean social class, color, pride, and protocol, not “princi­ple.” White ­unionist landowners who, Jay noted in his subsequent report to the New York club, ­were largely from colonial era families, planned to hold their own Republican convention rather than join the party organ­ ization composed mostly of African Americans. Jay himself presided over an eve­ning meeting at the governor’s mansion at which representatives of both groups shared their grievances; it continued past 2 a.m. The radical, Black-­dominated faction felt that they had legitimately or­ga­nized the party and did not wish to, in Jay’s words, “invalidate their own acts” by attending an alternate convention called by the white faction. Nor did the radicals feel they needed white votes to succeed. The leader of the white faction, in contrast, argued that Blacks might succeed for a few election cycles, but that in the long run they would need white support to stave off a return of the Demo­crats to power. Jay tried to put a positive face on this initial meeting, describing it as “characterized by ability and g­ reat earnestness”; the participants “exhibited at times strong personal feeling, the expression of which was, however, tempered by mutual expressions of regard and a formal courtesy.” The next day produced compromise. A joint resolution called Republicans to gather in August for the purpose of “extend[ing] and perfect[ing]” the party, thus acknowledging rather than superseding previous Black reform efforts. The

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August meeting would be held at a Black church in Richmond. That night, the northern delegates attended an impromptu celebratory gathering hosted at the city’s “African church.”20 For John Jay, the visit to Richmond had to have been a heady one. His abolitionist f­ ather William could not imagine even traveling safely to a slave state, let alone presiding over an interracial po­liti­cal meeting in the South. The Richmond encounter embodied a version of John’s long-­standing effort to wed his elite status to the interest of ordinary ­free Blacks. His summary report to the New York ULC doled out praise on both sides of the co­ali­tion. Jay was convinced that “a large body of the most intelligent and substantial landowners of the South” would contribute to “the character and dignity of the party.” Jay also conveyed his confidence in V ­ irginia’s ­free African Americans who displayed “a firm resolve to consent to no compromise of their rights.” He believed that the ­Virginia proceedings set an example for the entire South. In accordance with his own sense of how society functioned best, he found that a re­spect for elites would ensure rather than retard the racial pro­g ress that he observed was already well underway.21 The trip had been a small triumph. His report to New York colleagues was received “with loud demonstrations of applause” when presented at the New York ULC club­house. The group also passed a resolution to raise $1,500 to seed ­Virginia with Union League Clubs. The effort to partner with upper-­class white Virginians contained additional personal meaning for John Jay. His ­daughter Augusta was engaged to Edmund Randolph Robinson, a descendant of an old ­Virginia ­family. “This alliance” of a man with deep southern roots and “the ­daughter of an Abolitionist, who talked Abolitionism twenty years ago” was, according to George Templeton Strong, “an encouraging event.” Regional symbolism notwithstanding, the impending nuptials did not indicate a softening commitment to Black rights. For John Jay, a vital emerging alliance between northern elites, segments of the southern landholding class, and enfranchised ­free Blacks required tactical cooperation, but not a sacrifice of core aims and values.22 The compromise forged in Richmond proved to be somewhat of an illusion. Union League organ­izations in the South, which had already formed before Jay’s brief foray, w ­ ere not clubs for urbane white Republican reformers, but rather dynamos of Black po­liti­cal activism and in some cases interracial po­liti­cal cooperation. The ­Virginia radicals with whom Jay met differed not only in color but also in program from their more conservative rivals and from men like Jay, as they kept alive the hope that Reconstruction would include the re­distribution of plantation land to t­ hose who had always done the work.

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At the new convention brokered by Jay and his colleagues, the radicals emphatically asserted their primacy.23 Radical Reconstruction also tested unity among northern elites. Horace Greeley, the crusading newspaper editor and one of the most famous members of the New York’s ULC, tested the patience of some of his fellow clubmen with his position on the continued imprisonment of Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederate States of Amer­i­ca. Greeley favored amnesty over a punitive approach to former Confederates. In May 1867, he joined a group of northerners, including Gerrit Smith, traveling to Richmond to help post bond for Davis’s release from prison. Some Union Leaguers viewed this intervention as an act of betrayal and demanded that Greeley appear before the club to explain himself. As president, Jay wrote a letter to Greeley inviting him to select a night when the editor could take “the opportunity of being heard on the subject.” Greeley not only declined but also blasted his detractors as “narrow-­ minded blockheads, who would like to be useful to a g­ reat and good cause, but ­don’t know how.” The famous editor dared the club to expel him and defended his forgiving approach to former adversaries. The club backed down.24 In this pressurized atmosphere, disagreements and diverging agendas even crept into meetings memorializing eminent men, as Jay and ­others sought to make past strug­gles serve the needs of the po­liti­cal pre­sent. The deaths in 1867 of two former governors—­John A. King of New York and John A. Andrew of Mas­sa­chu­setts—­elicited remarks about the ongoing work of Reconstruction. King, elected New York’s first Republican governor in the late 1850s, was a natu­ral person for the club and for Jay in par­tic­u­lar to honor. King was not only an early member of the ULC but was also the son of Rufus King, signer of the US Constitution, leading light of New York Federalism, and staunch early opponent of the spread of slavery westward. As the final orator at the July 11 event memorializing King, Jay conferred a biography on King that paralleled his own, labeling him “one of the few men of high social position in New York . . . ​during our long strug­gle” consistently advocating “freedom.” Jay noted that King’s “love of liberty” was “hereditary.”25 The death several months ­later of John Andrew, Mas­sa­chu­setts’s abolitionist war­time governor, gave expression to the tensions that Greeley had brazenly highlighted. Though as governor he had famously or­ga­nized the pioneering African American Mas­sa­chu­setts 54th  Regiment, Andrew had staked out a moderate position on Reconstruction. He opposed the idea of aggressively promoting the enfranchisement of freed p­ eople and shared Greeley’s support for leniency ­toward former Confederates. As the first speaker at the ULC’s tribute to Andrew, Jay struck a belligerent tone. The deceased Andrew now “rests

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from his l­abors, but for us the contest is far from being ended,” Jay declared. The agenda was laden with challenges: “unenlightened” voters burdened the body politic north and south, and some southerners might even stir up a race war. Echoing the anti-­Johnson sentiment boiling over in Republican circles, Jay noted “the defection of a President whom we trusted,” as well as the dangers of resurgent former Copperhead Demo­crats and corrupt Republicans no longer focused on party princi­ples. Andrew’s death, then, should serve as a source of principled renewal for the living.26 The ULC during Jay’s presidency focused intently on Reconstruction politics. The memorial ser­vices for passing politicians reflected on the glorious ­unionist past while provoking commentary on unresolved challenges. Jay himself believed that elites had to beat back opponents and complacency. To that end, in March 1868, Jay’s ULC notified Congress that it supported the impeachment of President Johnson.27 Amid the strains wrought by Reconstruction, the ULC sought to proj­ect self-­confidence as an institution of power and permanency in New York’s social, cultural, and po­liti­cal landscapes. In the spring of 1868, the ULC prepared to move its original club­house in Union Square to spacious new quarters farther uptown. The facilities, which included a restaurant and an art gallery along with an assembly room and a library, helped the club rapidly reverse its recent decline in membership.28 Jay delivered a valedictory address on the occasion of the ULC’s final meeting in its old club­house on March  26. Alongside a repetition of the self-­ congratulatory narrative of national ULC influence, Jay emphasized the club’s local agenda. The ULC had succeeded in wresting such reforms from the New York state legislature as a professional fire department and a board of health. Looking forward, the club would seek to spread education to “the masses of the South” while also battling in New York “the profligacy of a municipality whose system of government is a scheme of plunder.” The tension between revolution—­the US example of abolition was to inspire the death of the feudal system in Europe—­and reform, clipping the wings of popularly elected state and city governments, was palpable in Jay’s speech. His remarks described a class of men navigating the ideological gulf between Black enfranchisement in the South and in New York and a deep suspicion of urban democracy in the North. Men “representing so largely the culture, the commercial energy, the social worth, and material wealth of our city,” by Jay’s reckoning, would ensure that a triumphant past was but a prologue to a successful f­ uture.29 As the ULC prepared to enjoy enhanced material comforts, the reconstruction of national and New York politics along the lines Jay favored seemed still to be flowing t­ oward high tide.

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Burying and Unburying the Past Optimism notwithstanding, the navigation of Civil War memory, Jay learned, could be as tricky and contentious as charting Reconstruction’s ­f uture. In October 1867, New York’s Republican Governor Reuben Fenton appointed Jay to represent New York State on a commission to oversee the National Cemetery to be laid out at Antietam Battlefield. Twelve northern states joined Mary­land in contributing funds. Serving as a trustee for the Antietam National Cemetery, Jay took the responsibility of respectfully burying the war’s dead with the utmost solemnity. The position, as it turned out, was no mere honor.30 In a report to Governor Fenton in December 1867, Jay gave notice of a potential prob­lem—­the inclusion of the Confederate war dead in the cemetery. By the terms of Mary­land’s original incorporation of land for the burial ground, “all who fell” ­were to find a place in the cemetery. Jay, who was trained to take l­egal language seriously, moved that a separate section of the cemetery be reserved for Confederate casualties. The vote of the trustees in support of this motion from vari­ous states carried 7–2. Jay’s inquiries in Washington, D.C., including with General Ulysses S. Grant, revealed that federal funding for this additional proj­ect was unlikely, as ­were contributions from the prostrated southern states. Jay’s suggestion to Governor Fenton was that New York and o ­ thers northern states appropriate the needed funds. Jay’s logic was not only ­legal but also moral and visceral. Properly burying the southern dead would indicate “the humanity and honor” of the victorious North and be an expression of “National character.” At pre­sent, the Confederate dead lay in graves “so shallow that their bones are sometimes disturbed by the ploughshare and the harrow” of the farmers who once again worked the ­battle’s fields. The president of the cemetery commission, Jay reported, had been presented with a severed head. This macabre situation was no way for New York to remember a crucial military success.31 The governor concurred. Yet not every­one saw burying Confederate dead in the same cemetery as the Union dead as an elegant solution, even though the grounds ­were to be watched over by a ­giant monument crowned with the statute of a Union soldier. Jay also felt compelled to ­counter an attempt by Congressman John Covode of Pennsylvania to prevent additional state funding of the National Cemetery b­ ecause of its planned inclusion of Confederate graves.32 Four days a­ fter celebrating the accomplishments of the ULC as it prepared to move uptown, Jay penned a letter to the congressman that exhibited his customary blend of insulted pride, procedural detail, verbal venom, and morally astute po­liti­cal insight. As with ­people he crossed with during the Civil War, Jay’s impulse was to swing hard against his opponent. Covode’s letter demanding of Fenton that

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New York not fund the burial of Confederates was “an assault upon myself and my colleagues.” The congressman had been “strangely disingenuous” and “singularly unjust” in his accusations that the commissioners sought to pay tribute to the Confederate war dead at Antietam. Jay rehearsed the facts. Governor Fenton himself had written a letter to Jay outlining the original purpose of the cemetery to inter the bodies of ­every fallen soldier, without regional qualification. Moreover, two of the states contributing funds, Mary­land and West ­Virginia, had casualties on both sides of the b­ attle. The trustees had not contemplated any sort of monument to the Confederate nation or cause. The states, including Covode’s Pennsylvania, Jay noted, knew the plan’s outlines when they signed on to the proj­ect. No “treachery” by Jay and his fellow trustees, then, could have occurred in resolving to bury the rebel dead.33 Jay’s counterassault on Covode grew cruel and egotistical. The New Yorker acknowledged Covode’s pain at having lost two sons, one of whom suffered the miseries of the Confederacy’s infamous Andersonville prison. Converting sympathy into ammunition, Jay argued that while the congressman’s “clearness” of “vision” had been obscured, the trustees’ clarity could not be. Covode suffered from a “perturbed spirit” and “­mental and moral blindness”; thus, “in the name of patriotism” the congressman “would rob the dead of their rightful graves.” He served as a negative example for the public, who would see from his “anarchy of morals” the dangers of “basing a public policy on private griefs” and “the indulgence of personal vengeance by po­liti­cal leaders.”34 The cemetery was not, Jay felt, a place to ­settle grudges or assuage resentments. Jay, far from making a plea for facile sectional reconciliation, sought to elevate the controversy into a parable about the larger liberating aims of Reconstruction. ­Toward the end of his letter, Jay seized on an affecting detail of Congressman Covode’s story. While the congressman’s son, a col­o­nel in the Union Army, “lay helpless amid the ­dying and the dead, an old colored ­woman brought him w ­ ater to drink while he was d­ ying, and the next day he was buried in her garden.” That Black w ­ oman “was the representative of the ­humble race, upon our treatment of whom, depends in the ­f uture as in the past, the destiny of our country.” The war caused by slavery was over. The strug­gle for Black rights continued. “To make their slavery the corner-­stone of a new empire was the object of the rebellion,” recorded Jay; now Demo­crats schemed to revive “the old system of caste, privilege and aristocracy.” In burying the Confederate dead, Jay had forgiven or forgotten ­little. Slavery and racism remained the central issues of t­ hese times. And so, Jay instructed the still grieving congressman, “Our part is yet to be accomplished, and emulating the devotion of your sons, let us . . . ​complete their work, and reconstruct the na-

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tionality which they cemented with their blood, upon the sure foundation of equal rights, equal laws, equal suffrage and equal justice.”35 Contemplating the Civil War dead in 1868, John Jay saw ­great purpose. Reconstruction would vindicate the sacrifices of ­battle. The treatment of the humblest, symbolized by the el­derly Black ­woman who succored Congressman Covode’s d­ ying son, constituted the means for the living to keep faith with the dead. The combative Jay thus attempted to turn a po­liti­cal dispute into a sermon on the egalitarian goals of Reconstruction. Ultimately, however, only Union dead ­were interred at Antietam National Cemetery. Not enough ­people ­were willing to make the artful distinction Jay envisioned.36 While po­liti­cal opponents attempted to use Governor Fenton’s support of Confederate burial against the New Yorker’s bid to become the Republican nominee for vice president, Jay did not suffer for his role in the dispute.37 Indeed, with the election of Ulysses S. Grant as president, Jay would, at long last, receive his reward for serving his party in war and in peace. The ambassadorship he coveted removed him from the po­liti­cal scene for the next several years during which the Reconstruction that Jay envisioned fell apart.

Fading away in Vienna and Bedford To represent his country abroad, John Jay II was at once an obvious and a curious choice. He had traveled in Eu­rope extensively and shared a name with one of the Revolutionary Era’s preeminent diplomats. Of more immediate relevance, his ser­vice as president of New York City’s ULC deepened his ties to the emerging postwar Republican establishment. With Jay still at the helm, the club enthusiastically embraced Ulysses S. Grant’s presidential candidacy. It saw Grant as representing the opportunity to put the ­bitter divisiveness of the Johnson years in the past and to keep at bay the recovery of the Demo­ cratic Party to full strength.38 Jay had significant downsides as a potential ambassador. His knack for embroiling himself in invective-­filled public disputes was well established. His views on Eu­ro­pean affairs sometimes could be belligerently nationalistic. In March 1869, shortly a­ fter President Grant’s inauguration, Jay composed a letter to General Adam Badeau suggesting that G ­ reat Britain cede Canada to the United States in compensation for damages inflicted by the Alabama, a Confederate warship built in ­England that wreaked havoc during the Civil War. When George Templeton Strong heard that Jay would likely be made ambassador to Austria, he reported to his diary that Jay r­ eally “wanted to be sent to

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London (!), and to assume grave responsibilities, to which he’s quite unequal, though he thinks other­wise.”39 In any event, Jay fi­nally had the right ally in Washington when Hamilton Fish, a prominent New York Republican and ULC member, became the new secretary of state. Eight years a­ fter he first i­magined that he would be Lincoln’s minister to the Hapsburg court, Jay became Grant’s man in Vienna. Jay’s new position conferred the prestige he craved, but the posting took him about as far away from slavery and emancipation as any Eu­ro­pean or American ambassadorship could do: Vienna was the inland capital of a Central Eu­ro­pean empire without significant connections to the Amer­i­cas or to Africa.40 Furthermore, his ser­vice in Vienna lacked the high moral purpose that animated Jay so often in the past and would again in the ­f uture. The dull routine of the job made him feel restless. On August 19, 1870, he reported to his ­daughter Augusta, “My days pass monotonously, one so like another”; he continued, perhaps for dramatic effect, “I am sometimes in danger of losing my reckoning.” The posting, however did provide at least one social benefit: his youn­gest ­daughter Anna married Prus­sian general Hans Lothar von Schweinitz, deepening the f­amily’s ties to the Eu­ro­pean aristocracy that Jay disparaged but also envied.41 A trip back to the United States in 1874 gave him the opportunity to show off his new German son-­in-­law in Washington and at home, as well as to play once more the role of sage and celebrant to his ULC colleagues. Jay sought to strike an upbeat pose during a reception at the club; his notes refer to the group’s “historic & heroic rec­ord” and the “triumph of our princi­ples” in the corridors of power. He forecast pro­g ress in Austria-­Hungary ­toward “constitutional government” while observing with concern developments in New York City. “Eternal vigilance” would be required to secure “liberty & property.” His notes indicate he had only platitudes to share, with ­little to say about deteriorating conditions for freed ­people in the South.42 Back in Vienna, the ambassador got word of the calamitous 1874 midterm elections that confirmed the dramatic weakening of the Republican Party’s power. Amid an economic depression that started the previous year, Demo­ crats trounced Republicans in the North and the South, with governorships changing hands in New York and elsewhere; what had been a 110-­seat Republican majority in the US House of Representatives became a 60-­seat Demo­ cratic majority. With the Republicans staring into the po­liti­cal abyss, Jay leaned on history for support: “What­ever its fate—it ­will live in history as the party that saved the ­union & abolished slavery.” He also knew, however, that slavery’s “evil consequences” still lingered.43

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Although the final acts of Reconstruction would play out ­after Jay retired from his diplomatic post, another era ended while he was in Vienna—­the era that linked the Jay f­amily directly and personally to their slaveholding past. In January 1872, Zilpah Montgomery, the el­derly former slave who had served four generations of Jays, was laid to rest in the Jay f­ amily burial plot in St. Matthew’s Church cemetery in Bedford, New York (see Figure 14). Her ­actual date of birth remained unknown. But by inscribing her age as eighty, the f­amily set in stone the first John Jay’s claim that she was age twenty-­five at the time of her manumission in 1817.44

Figure 14.  Gravestone of Zilpah Montgomery, located in the Jay ­family’s burial plot, St. Matthew’s Church, Bedford, New York. Photo­graph Courtesy of John Stockbridge, Bedford Town Historian.

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In the Westchester countryside, Zilpah was part of a fading generation of marginal w ­ omen and men. The year before Zilpah’s death, a published history of Rye, New York, where the Jay ­family and their slaves first established themselves in the county more than a c­ entury ­earlier, included this retrospective on slavery: Numbers of ­these ­were to be seen in the village and along the streets, at nightfall ­after the day’s l­abor, and on holidays. E ­ very ­family of means had some h ­ umble retainers, once their bond-­servants, and still their dependants. Few of them remain at pre­sent. The Eu­ro­pean laborer has almost completely supplanted the African; and ­whether by death or by removal to other places, they have been reduced to a mere handful. The passage, what­ever its shortcomings as history, captured aspects of Zilpah’s and the Jay’s world a ­little farther north in Bedford. During the final de­cades of Zilpah’s life, Bedford’s Black population hovered around 100 ­people, out of a total town population that by 1870 was just shy of 3,700. That same year more than 400 of the town’s residents w ­ ere foreign born. A transformation at the bottom end of the socioeconomic and cultural hierarchy had occurred in the Jay Homestead as well. Four resident servants listed in the 1860 censuses ­were from Ireland, and in 1870 almost all of the ten non-­Jay residents w ­ ere listed as Irish.45 Demography was not the only ­thing changing for African Americans in New York. The Fifteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1870 overturned New York’s racially restrictive voting standards, but it did not apply to ­women. African Americans in the Hudson River Valley successfully pushed for civil rights legislation and school desegregation. Zilpah was far too old to benefit from such initiatives. She lived and died at the edge of social change.46 Although her final resting place in the Jay ­family burial plot is certain, Zilpah’s relationship to the Jay ­family in her final de­cades is not. The last time she appeared in the federal census as a member of the Jay ­house­hold at Bedford was 1850. At that time, other staff members included three ­women from Ireland between the ages of eigh­teen and thirty, as well as one forty-­year-­old Irish-­ born man. An unpublished history of the Jay ­family slaves, focusing on Zilpah’s ­mother, states without citation, that Zilpah lived at the Jay ­family home ­until her death in 1872.47 That seems plausible, although the $100 annuity that William left Zilpah may have allowed her to live or spend significant time with friends or relations. Her burial in the Jay plot suggests that she remained with the f­amily or quite close to it. Zilpah’s burial concluded a century-­and-­a-­half cycle of Jay domestic slaveholding history.

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American Centennial Jay resigned his diplomatic post in 1875, returning to his country at a time when white supremacists’ attempts to regain control of the South gained ever more traction; yet it was also a fortuitous time for a man ­eager to exalt his f­ amily’s historic legacy. The following year, the nation celebrated its one hundredth anniversary, and New York City’s elite turned to John Jay to lay claim to the Amer­i­ca’s glorious Revolutionary Era past. He obliged with language that bolstered the metropolitan elite’s claim to stewardship over the f­ uture while paying scant attention to Reconstruction or freed ­people. In requesting that Jay commemorate the B ­ attle of Harlem Plains—­the patriot army’s one moment of Manhattan success in the fateful year of 1776—­ the New-­York Historical Society emphasized that Jay’s patrimony made him an ideal orator. John Austin Stevens’s letter on behalf of the planning group stated, “Our eyes naturally turn to you as a representative of old New York.” At the September 16 event, New-­York Historical Society president Frederic DePeyster introduced Jay to the thousands assembled near the site of the b­ attle in upper Manhattan as “a gentleman who worthily upholds the honor of his ancestral name—­the grand­son of that pure, patriotic, and elevated man, the friend of Washington, the first Chief-­Justice of the United States, of whom Webster so beautifully said that when the ermine of justice fell on his shoulders it touched nothing less spotless than itself.”48 Jay laid claim to history as a proud inheritance and as a responsibility to uphold. One newspaper covering the event flatteringly explained, “He is now in the prime of his physical and ­mental powers, and by descent, by wise scholarship, by reverence for historical traditions, and by a rare gift of eloquence, he is peculiarly fitted for the grateful task which devolved upon him.” On such an occasion, he was not so much an abolitionist or a son of an abolitionist as a son of the American Revolution and a keeper of its patriotic flame.49 Amid vivid displays of red, white, and blue, Jay shunted slavery aside even as he sought to connect the Civil War to the Revolutionary War, highlighting the transcendent importance of national, intersectional unity. In the very first paragraph, he noted that the soldiers who fended off the British in b­ attle “represented all sections . . . ​indicating the common ties that have bound us in a common destiny . . . ​recalling the generous thought of Patrick Henry, when he said, ‘I am not a Virginian—­I am an American.’ ”50 The historic memories of bravery on Harlem’s plains and heights that Jay then attempted to evoke derived much of their meaning from a ­f uture made pos­si­ble as much by the Civil War as the Revolutionary War: the more recent conflict “has crowned the accomplishments of our first ­century with the conviction, that neither

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foreign power nor internal strife can reach the life of the Republic.” Rather than engage the collapsing fortunes of African Americans in the South, his rhe­toric declared an implicit victory for the values of equality as part of a portrait of an expansive nation: the United States existed “no longer as a doubtful experiment, but as a fixed fact—­a power of continental bound­aries, of limitless resources, of unmea­sured energy, of schools and churches, and universal freedom, more closely united than ever before on a basis of equal rights and mutual interests, and with no lingering ele­ment of sectional discord to again disturb its harmony.”51 The centennial provided an occasion to wish away rather than confront vital unfinished work. Although Jay had spoken in such ­g rand terms about the national prospect throughout the Civil War era, he no longer tethered t­ hese sentiments explic­itly to a specific program of reconstruction. References to the egalitarian language of the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence and an incorporation of the abolitionists’ favorite antiracial biblical adage that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men” ­were mere ornaments in his speech. The recent strug­gle over “the antagonism of princi­ples and systems” functioned as a purifying thunderstorm, rather than an ongoing call to action.52 His history had become white-­washed. Indeed, when Jay repeatedly invoked race in the speech, he did so as a Eurocentric romantic nationalist rather than as an advocate of African American civil rights. To look to the ­f uture required contemplation of Amer­i­ca’s “ancestors.” And ­those forebears, Jay repeatedly indicated, w ­ ere exclusively Eu­ ro­pean. The martial “stock” of Washington’s troops included Dutch, Huguenot, Swiss, En­glish, and Danish ele­ments, each carry­ing across the Atlantic with them the impress of military heroism from ­battles in centuries past. This racialism led Jay to describe the American colonies as “a mingling of the best blood of Eu­rope.” From “ages of training in the varied schools of Eu­rope, may be traced the course of American culture,” Jay insisted.53 It is not entirely surprising that Jay mea­sured culture by Eu­ro­pean standards; his education, upbringing, and travels w ­ ere conventionally oriented in that direction. But his effacement of Black ­people from his accounting of colonial, revolutionary, and con­temporary Amer­i­ca revealed an almost willful blindness. In prior de­cades, Jay’s po­liti­cal vision gravitated t­ oward racial controversy, as evidenced by his efforts to integrate the Episcopal Church, to assist Black fugitives, to advocate for the enlistment of Black troops in the Union Army, and to forecast a reconstruction predicated on progressive Black empowerment. The centennial cele­ bration evoked dramatically dif­fer­ent priorities. The embodiments of the found­ers who w ­ ere recruited to commemorate the American Revolution offered an ethnically circumscribed and po­liti­cally conservative vision.

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As Jay linked past American accomplishments to current national challenges on a September after­noon before a patriotic assembly of thousands, he presented the unchecked spread of democracy as the greatest threat to the found­ ers’ legacy. Too many ­people voting in too many elections, too much partisan organ­ization—­these developments constituted “radical change” that raised “the gravest questions” on this one hundredth anniversary of the United States. And so Jay’s centennial ­battle cry “call[ed] forth your noblest sons from ­every college and acad­emy, from the bar, the pulpit, and the press” that he likened to Washington’s lieutenants, “to defend our national heights against official corruption.”54 Jay couched his elitism explic­itly in a language of po­liti­cal purity that had malignant implications for Reconstruction. The southward glance of his Harlem speech was down Manhattan Island ­toward corrupt politicians, not ­toward ­Virginia, Alabama, or Texas. Jay’s stance as a public historian expressed a narrowing vision of po­liti­cal participation at the same moment that white redeemers in the South w ­ ere rolling back African American rights in state a­ fter state. He did not repudiate his former commitments, but they cast only the faintest shadow over how the past informed the pre­sent and ­shaped the f­ uture. Jay’s Harlem Heights per­for­mance was no aberration, no mere playing to the day’s crowd. Three months l­ater Jay reprised his role as the New York elite’s historian of the centennial before the alumni association of Columbia College. The event took place in the ULC’s theater. He noted that Columbia alumnus Daniel D. Tompkins had helped end slavery in New York when he served as governor, slaveholding or abolitionism among other gradu­ates went unmentioned. When making reference to the Civil War, Jay left unstated what he might have highlighted a few years before: slavery as a cause, emancipation as an outcome, and equality as a necessary legacy. What did not go unstated ­were Jay’s preoccupations with po­liti­cal corruption and Protestant cultural hegemony. He raised as twin concerns the alleged danger of American education being hijacked by Roman Catholics and atheists, both groups, in his view, that ­were the enemies of true knowledge. As he had expressed in his Harlem Plains address, the b­ attle for the next American ­century depended on elites being invested morally and intellectually in the fight.55

Departure and Arrival When Jay delivered his Harlem Plains oration, another presidential election was less than two months away. Republicans faced a rough test at the polls. During the centennial year, Demo­crats stood poised to complete their comeback as the dominant national party. White supremacist Demo­crats benefiting

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from the violent mobilization of white redeemers, had regained control of most southern states, with Republican governments barely clinging to power in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina. The corruption scandals of the Grant years had damaged the Republicans’ claim to be the party of good government. Poised to become the first Demo­cratic president in sixteen years and to roll back the last remnants of Reconstruction was New York’s governor Samuel Tilden. Tilden had carved out a space for himself in New York politics as a reformer hostile to the corrupt Tammany Hall wing of his own party and favoring fiscal restraint. The commission that Governor Tilden appointed the previous year stole much of the Republicans’ thunder by limiting the scope of demo­cratic power over municipal affairs. Tilden made it known that his support of reform and small government went hand in hand with the full resumption of white power in the South.56 The ULC sought to position itself as a voice of reform within the Republican Party, a commitment to honest government being the only path to retain the White House. In strong language endorsed by the editors of the Republican New York Times, the club’s March resolutions took a stance for honest government, against the state’s own Republican po­liti­cal machine and, by implication, against New York Republican senator Roscoe Conklin. The moral energies that the club had once poured into affirming Black rights as an essential component of a unified nation now emphasized moral rectitude in government operations and the se­lection of a presidential nominee. Yet the ULC had not entirely forgotten other commitments. In May 1876, the club affirmed three princi­ples, the first of which gestured broadly at Black civil rights constitutionally enshrined in the ­Fourteenth Amendment: equality before the law and equal protection. African American citizenship still mattered, at least notionally. The other two ULC resolves w ­ ere for a return to the gold standard and civil ser­vice reform, two crucial tenets of conservatism and Republican governance for the rest of the nineteenth ­century. At the Republican national convention, reformers got their wish, as the party passed up Conkling and nominated Ohioan Rutherford B. Hayes. The Civil War veteran, former congressman, and former governor, however, was also ready to back away from Reconstruction.57 With the election approaching, Jay’s concerns with sectional relations and national unity no longer revolved around racial justice. A letter he drafted in the month before the election emphasized that a Tilden victory would be a disaster for the nation’s financial health. The real southern prob­lem allegedly facing the country was that a Tilden administration would allow southern states to make claims against the government for their war­time losses. Such a

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step would deliver a severe blow to a nation already struggling to pay off its national debt. This “radical change in policy” would undermine the domestic and international credit of the United States. In tarring the Demo­cratic Party as apologists for secession, Jay described the Civil War as originating in a disagreement over the “powers of the National Government in its relation with the states.” Although Jay’s pro-­union stance long had incorporated this logic, such a statement, like his Harlem Plains speech in September, indicated how disentangled Black rights had become from his historical and partisan consciousness. His sense of urgency, when looking southward, was financial, not racial.58 Rutherford Hayes’s historically convoluted victory helped confirm John Jay’s status as a consummate reform-­minded insider even as it also confirmed Reconstruction’s defeat. Although Tilden received a majority of the popu­lar vote, he did not gain the presidency; a fifteen-­man congressionally appointed commission ultimately awarded contested Electoral College votes from three southern states to install the Republican as the victor. The price was steep. Behind-­the-­scenes deal-­making cemented an understanding that the federal government would cease to deploy troops or any other coercive means to enforce the Reconstruction amendments or civil rights laws.59 The new president’s inaugural address couched policy t­oward the South in even-­handed terms designed to soothe consciences, as well as sectional animosity. The Ohioan even spoke of former slaves living “upon an equal footing with their former masters” and the “moral obligation” of the federal government “to employ its constitutional power and influence to establish the rights of the ­people it has emancipated.” Yet Hayes preceded ­these statements with an acknowl­edgment that the time had arrived when “wise, honest, and peaceful local self-­government” had become an “imperative necessity.” The anomaly of a power­ful national government intervening in southern affairs, Hayes implied, had promoted conflict, corruption, and vio­lence—­the same sorts of prob­lems that reform-­minded elites in the ULC associated with northern politics as practiced by their Demo­cratic rivals. The president also emphatically called for civil ser­vice reform that “­shall be thorough, radical, and complete”—­bringing government back to the found­ers’ nonpartisan vision of government ser­vice.60 John Jay placed himself squarely in Hayes’s corner. During his first weeks in office, Hayes quickly delivered South Carolina and Louisiana into white Demo­cratic hands. The ULC affirmed the president’s “policy of conciliation and equal Justice” that “may result in the more perfect ­union and cordial Harmony of all sections and races.” Hayes faced opposition from Senator Conkling and other Republicans to cabinet nominations that passed over stalwart

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Republicans to include a southern Demo­crat David M. Key and reformer Carl Schurz. Yet Jay or­ga­nized a rally in New York City to defend the president’s appointment prerogative.61 The ULC, with Jay resuming the helm for one last year in 1877, acclimated itself to the new era in which sectional reconciliation and civil ser­vice reform took pre­ce­dence over African American rights. President Hayes enlisted Jay directly in the cause of civil ser­vice reform. On April 23, 1877, Hayes placed Jay in charge of a commission to probe the New York customs h ­ ouse, the entry­way to a huge portion of the nation’s imports and a hotbed of patronage for Conkling’s allies. Jay’s committee filed a series of reports whose recommendations caught the eye of Secretary of Trea­ sury John Sherman and even of President Hayes. The task force asserted that the customs ­house provided a variety of opportunities for corruption and a good place for politicians to give jobs to loyalists regardless of their qualifications. Jay and his fellow commissioners claimed that the customs operation had a bloated staff that needed to be reduced by 20 ­percent. Workdays allegedly ­were too short, inspections too lax, and the ac­cep­tance of “gratuities” from importers for expedited ser­vice entirely too common, as w ­ ere m ­ istakes in rec­ord keeping. Federal antibribery law “has become a dead letter.” Jay tailored the vocabulary of abolitionism and nationalism to fit his anti-­ corruption work. The first of the Jay commission’s four reports asserted that “the evils wrought by mismanagement and corruption, can be accomplished only by the emancipation of the ser­vice from partisan control.” To this moralistic language of liberation from evil, the second report added a flourish of Jay’s nationalistic exceptionalism. P ­ eople “at home and abroad” would admire a reformed system that “­will serve as an example of republican excellence and enhance the American pride of country.” Where once he and his ­father had pored over the details of slavery-­related laws, Jay immersed himself in the nitty-­ gritty of customs collection and portside corruption, sentiments of moral regeneration echoing still. President Hayes endorsed the Jay commission’s goals in the dry language of “efficiency” and “a strictly business basis.” The president issued an executive order banning public employees from si­mul­ta­ neously serving as a party official in response to the Jay commission’s first report. Several months ­later, however, when Hayes attempted to make changes in the custom­house leadership, members of his own party in the US Senate delivered an embarrassing defeat to the president’s nominees.62 His bond with the reform-­minded ULC remained strong. In taking on the Conkling machine, Jay once again had challenged established and power­f ul interests. But unlike his antebellum pro bono work and church agitation, he was now cultivating access to power. Jay seized the op-

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portunity to be an insider of high standing. He shared policy and personnel recommendations with the new secretary of state, New Yorker William Evarts, with Secretary of the Trea­sury Ohioan John Sherman, and with Hayes himself. Jay’s New York ULC even scored the ­great prize of hosting President Hayes and Mrs. Hayes for a g­ rand eve­ning ­toward the end of 1877—­with its president, John Jay, playing the role of host.63 Just before 9 p.m. on December 21, 1877, the Honorable John Jay escorted First Lady Lucy Hayes into the Union League Club’s reception room, followed by President Hayes escorting Eleanor Jay. The club spared no expense to brighten the winter solstice night. The Times reported that the club­house was “beautifully decorated throughout,” with flowers and plants seemingly everywhere from entrance hall and staircases to ­tables and chandeliers. The club also assembled an exhibit of almost fifty paintings by American artists, many featuring pastoral and natu­ral scenes of the Northeast, spiced by more exotic fare depicting ­Middle Eastern scenes. A band and “­tables laden with delicacies” added to the splendor. On a flower-­festooned platform, with the Jays at their side, the president and his wife greeted guests, with John Jay presenting each new well-­wisher. Dignitaries in attendance included a slew of generals, clergymen, elected officials, and judges, along with at least two district attorneys, the president of Yale College, the En­glish consul-­general, and financier J. Pierpont Morgan, who was also a member of the Reception Committee. The New York Times lavished attention on the ladies in the receiving party, especially Mrs. Hayes, whose couture took several sentences to describe. Mrs. Jay’s dress drew shorter notice, though the report did comment that her jewelry as “superb.” Overall, the event’s “display of diamonds,” reported the Times, “has never been surpassed.” As festivities began to wind down ­after 11 p.m., carriages crowded the surrounding streets for a half-­mile in ­every direction. The impressive eve­ning that Jay and the ULC gave President and Mrs. Hayes demonstrated that wealth and power could, at least on this one night, command the streets in a city and a nation still riven with conflict.64 That eve­ning, John Jay II was the ultimate insider, the former abolitionist agitator claiming all the prestige that his historic name conveyed.

Native Son As Reconstruction gave way to the Gilded Age, John Jay II threw himself into the culture wars of his time. President of New York State’s Civil Ser­vice

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Commission, president of the American Historical Association, anti-­Catholic nativist crusader, public education advocate—­Jay spent his sixties and seventies battling against forces he viewed as threatening to undermine the country’s foundations. As with the Slave Power, he cast his new opponents as subversives scheming to foist evil on the unprepared and the morally feckless. Unlike his abolitionist days, he conducted his new campaigns secure in his status among the social elite and confident that the Jay ­family was, as it had been in his grand­ father’s time, synonymous with a nationalist vision. The fight against slavery survived more as an analogy for describing high-­stakes moral combat than as an ongoing strug­gle for justice. Presidential elections still coaxed forth the old abolitionist rhetorical flames, even though Jay’s post-­emancipation po­liti­cal passions cut him off from the sort of interracial activism and social risk-­taking that previously propelled him to agitate relentlessly for African American liberty. In advance of the 1880 election, Jay let loose accumulated resentments against secessionists and Demo­ crats to denounce the illegitimate return of elite white po­liti­cal supremacy to the South. Jay, improbably, likened the contest between Republican James Garfield and Demo­crat General Winfield Scott Hancock to the Civil War election pitting President Abraham Lincoln against General George McClellan. In 1884, Jay continued to portray the Demo­cratic Party as tainted by its history and its pre­sent reliance on its southern wing. Despite Demo­cratic candidate and New York governor Grover Cleveland’s reform credentials, a vote for Cleveland meant capitulation to the South’s po­liti­cal vio­lence and chicanery. If Demo­ crats captured the presidency, southerners among them would advance their claim to be compensated for the destruction wrought by the Civil War in their territory while continuing to use po­liti­cal vio­lence as a tool. The nation’s “ ‘­free institutions’ ” allegedly hung in the balance.65 Jay regarded New Hampshire Republican Senator Henry W. Blair’s effort to provide millions of federal dollars for education in the southern states as a means of advancing the work of emancipation. Blair Bill funds w ­ ere to flow in a nondiscriminatory fashion to Black and white schools without the federal government interfering with racial segregation. Jay saw the Blair Bill as addressing an ongoing obligation to African Americans and as a continuation of the b­ attle against slavery: “Emancipation,” he believed, was “but half completed while millions of ­Children with votes awaiting them are left without Education.” In 1888, he hyperbolically compared the Blair Bill to the two most impor­tant abolitionist triumphs—­the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. Despite Jay’s continued faith in the promise of federal educational aid, congressional support for the initiative crested and receded without action.66

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During the 1880s, Jay devoted himself far more steadily and intensively to fighting governmental corruption than to the rights of African Americans. When John Jay received his appointment to New York State’s new Civil Ser­vice Commission in 1883, he gained an official perch from which to play the role of elite warrior for American po­liti­cal values. The bureaucratic nature of the work—­seeking to replace po­liti­cal patronage with written rules, formal applications, and exams—­did not stop Jay from claiming the moral high ground in the rhetorical mode of civil rights agitator he once was. With echoes of the egalitarian princi­ples enshrined in the ­Fourteenth Amendment, Jay lectured one correspondent regarding civil ser­vice rules: “The order of society, and the protection of equal rights of all citizens, depends upon the just and impartial administration of the laws. E ­ very evasion or violation of the laws affects the rights of citizens in some way.” With the election of a new governor threatening his place on the commission, Jay made a self-­aggrandizing analogy: Governor David Bennett Hill in trying to derail civil ser­vice reform would “perhaps be known in history as having played in the abolition of the spoils system, the same . . . ​part which Jeff Davis did ­towards the abolition of slavery.”67 In the Catholic Church, Jay found a foe that he viewed as especially menacing. Jay saw Catholic immigration as providing cover and foot soldiers for what he regarded as the church hierarchy’s plan to replace American liberty with loyalty to a foreign power. That same church hierarchy, Jay argued, undermined the mass public education necessary to maintain democracy. In Jay’s view, it sought to siphon public funds to subsidize Catholic schools teaching the wrong lessons and making a mockery of church–­state separation. He embraced a vision of historical strug­gle premised on nativist bigotry. The church, he claimed in 1879, aimed to take over the country, bringing to scale the “blending of dirt, misgovernment and confiscation” that typified New York City politics. They ­were a “ ‘foreign colony’ . . . ​come to conquer us,” with “Jesuit plans against our liberties becom[ing] more and more developed.”68 In support of his anti-­Catholicism, Jay became an active member of the Evangelical Alliance, serving as president in 1884–85. In 1887, Jay successfully recruited Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong as the organ­ization’s general secretary. By that time, Strong had already published the widely circulated book Our Country: Its Pos­si­ble ­Future and Its Pre­sent Crisis, a blistering nativist treatise that Jay labeled “a clarion call.”69 The b­ attle against slavery continued to serve as an informative historical reference point in Jay’s campaign to preserve his vision of American identity. In 1888, Jay compared the role of the Protestant churches in battling the “monster prob­lems” of the day—­“intemperance, illiteracy, po­liti­cal corruption,

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jesuitism and superstition”—­favorably to “failings and weaknesses which ­were painfully apparent in the ­earlier part of the anti-­slavery conflict.” In other words, Protestant churches had learned their historical lesson.70 John Jay II used his se­lection in 1890 as president of the American Historical Association as an opportunity to advocate for the civic value of academic research that emphasized a northern Eu­ro­pean Protestant-­centered vision of US history. His famous name and lineage leant a historic and nationalist patina to the fledgling professional organ­ization. His address, “The Demand for Education in American History,” argued that historical education should incorporate the advanced methods imported to American universities from Eu­ro­pean ones to act as a bulwark against “civilizations inferior, alien, and hostile to our own” and the “un-­American” influences that new waves of Americans brought to ­these shores. He included the “constitutional emancipation in our own day” and the “latest amendments to our national Constitution” in his sweeping arc of Anglo-­Saxon ­legal development. However, he did not include African Americans among the founding ethnic components of the nation.71 Amid his post-­Reconstruction reform c­ auses and cultural crusades, John Jay II strug­gled to find the appropriate way to rec­ord the f­amily’s abolitionist story even as he worked to further secure a central place for the Jay name in the history of the nation’s founding. In the 1880s, the energetic activist published two substantial studies relating to his grand­father’s landmark diplomacy when negotiating US in­de­pen­dence in Paris. He had a hand in the publication of the four-­volume Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay. He also sought to have some influence over the biography that his nephew, the journalist George Pellew, wrote of John Jay for Houghton Mifflin’s American Statesman series. That book attempted no special insight into the role of slavery and emancipation in the found­er’s story.72 With good reason, John Jay II feared that he would not live long enough to fulfill what he saw as a responsibility to tell his f­ather William’s abolitionist story. Signing a codicil to his Last ­Will and Testament in 1888, three days ­after his seventy-­first birthday, John essentially admitted that his own efforts might come to naught. He set aside money to find “a competent person” to produce volumes on “the life and letters of my ­father”—­speculating that “it may be that the historic value of the material as illustrating a phase of the anti-­slavery strug­gle, the true history of which is still unwritten, ­will in the opinion of the publishers justify its extension to three volumes.”73 Serious injuries suffered in September 1890, when he was hit by a carriage on 42nd Street in Manhattan, served as the last impediment to ­doing this abolitionist biographical work himself. Jay enlisted Bayard Tuckerman, a member of a socially eminent New York and Boston ­family who had an abiding interest

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in Old New York history.74 A New York City publishing ­house brought Tuckerman’s book out in autumn of 1893, the single-­volume William Jay and the Constitutional Movement for the Abolition of Slavery. The infirm John Jay mustered a preface to the study, attempting to define the terms by which William Jay’s life and abolitionism continued to m ­ atter. John Jay II acknowledged that the “pledges” the Union made during the war “to the national discredit” remained “unfulfilled” and gestured ­toward the princi­ples of the now defunct Blair Bill, envisioning federal funds to the states “so as to secure to e­ very child of our coloured citizens the ability to read the Bible and the Constitution, to fulfill his duties and protect his rights.” But “The Lessons for To-­Day” that followed this tepid policy prescription served up a roll call of bygone, almost entirely white, heroes and an abbreviated version of his now familiar rant against subversion and corruption of “American institutions” by “foreigners.”75 The book’s title, with its emphasis on “the Constitutional Movement” to end slavery, signaled its cautious premise. The notion of a “constitutional movement” was an invention designed to portray abolitionism as something other than fundamentally radical. A credulous December 17, 1893, New York Times review of the book fell in line, lauding the contentious and rhetorically aggressive William Jay for his decorum and spirit of fair play that allegedly redeemed abolitionists from the charge of being “a lot of hot-­headed, revolutionary, law-­despising men.”76 John Jay II knew full well that, as abolitionists, he and his f­ather had spread dangerous, disruptive flames in the name of justice. In 1891, he recalled with pride: “For disapproving of Slavery;—­assisting fugitive slaves, and advocating the right of a black Church to a seat in the Episcopal Convention, I was tabooed and black-­balled and called all manner of unpleasant names;—­amalgamationist, disunionist, and what-­not.” For that he, like his f­ ather, could claim fame far beyond the reflected glory of the first John Jay’s role in the nation’s founding.77 On January 12, 1894, John Jay II penned a note to his old po­liti­cal comrade Hiram Barney. “Still on my back” from illness and injury, he admitted that the pain had been bad enough to require morphine. Jay was now nearing his end, which, indeed, came in May. “What changes we have seen while working together,” Jay wrote Barney, “what changes still seem to await our Country.”78 Truer, more tragic words he had never written.

 Epilogue Reckoning

Zachariah Walker died in flames in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Each time he tried to escape the bonfire the mob had erected from wooden fencing, hay, and straw, his tormentors shoved him back. Thousands looked on. ­After Walker fi­nally succumbed, members of the crowd collected parts of his charred remains—­not as evidence of a crime but as mementos. The investigation and t­ rials that followed the gruesome events of August 13, 1911, produced not a single conviction.1 A year l­ ater, John Jay Chapman made his way to Coatesville, Pennsylvania, to, in his own words, “repent.” He did so in a virtually empty room. A friend traveled to be ­there with him. Only two other ­people came to the rented storefront on the eve­ning of August 18, 1912, to hear reflections delivered to mark the anniversary of the unpunished murder of an African American man. Chapman, who hailed from New York’s Hudson Valley, understood the atrocity as anything but “local.” Reading about the Coatesville lynching the year before, he “saw a seldom-­revealed picture of the American heart and of the American nature.” He knew the current, tattered racial context well enough. But “no theories about the race prob­lem, no statistics, no legislation, or mere educational endeavor, can quite meet the lack which that day revealed in the American ­people.” Fearing that he would “forget” the disturbing insights prompted by the Coatesville story, Chapman “became filled” with the notion

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“that I must do something to remember it.” And so to Coatesville, this site of collective “guilt,” he traveled to atone.2 Zachariah Walker’s road to Pennsylvania embraced key features of post-­ Reconstruction American history. He came north from ­Virginia, a state experiencing a vast Black outmigration and that, in 1902, disenfranchised African American voters through provisions of a new state constitution. Walker was not alone in choosing to s­ettle in Coatesville. During the previous de­cade, more than one thousand African Americans from the South had moved to the once rural town that now ­housed two ­g iant steel plants, including the one in which Walker worked. Immigrants from Eu­rope came to Coatesville in similar numbers. Between 1900 and 1910, the native-­born white proportion of the population dropped from more than 87 ­percent to 73 ­percent. The town exemplified Amer­ic­ a’s ongoing industrial transformation and demographic change.3 Walker’s death layered tragedy on tragedy. The night before his brutal public death, he killed a man, a steel mill security agent named Edgar Rice. Walker, ­after leaving a bar on a Saturday eve­ning and ­under the influence, shot his gun in the street above the heads of two Polish immigrants. Rice confronted Walker. In the ensuing scuffle, Walker pulled his gun again and fatally shot the white man, a well-­regarded member of the Coatesville community. Walker scarpered. The next day, a Sunday, members of a nearby volunteer fire department found the fugitive hiding in a tree. When he was discovered and being deeply distraught, Walker tried to shoot himself in the head, wounding rather than killing himself. His pursuers took him to the hospital, where first he underwent surgery before being put in a straitjacket and chained to a bed. ­There he admitted his crime to the police chief, a police officer, and the district attorney. That, however, was not enough for the citizens of Coatesville. A large mob gathered outside the hospital. A dozen or more stormed into the building, destroyed Walker’s bed, and hauled the man, still chained to the bedpost, through a gauntlet of angry white p­ eople and out into the countryside. Approximately five thousand men, ­women, and ­children, some coming from church, witnessed the merciless lynching. Neither Walker’s pleas nor his efforts to escape the flames could save his life.4 Attempts to bring Walker’s murderers to justice failed utterly. Local juries rapidly acquitted each man brought to trial; most of them w ­ ere young men but the defendants also included the police chief and one of his officers, who had, rather than keep the peace, allowed the atrocity to go forward. In May 1912, prosecutors de­cided that further efforts at convictions would be futile and gave up. Uproar over the events in Coatesville spread widely. Black

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and white newspapers printed denunciations. The event attracted the attention of such luminaries as the g­ reat Black scholar, journalist, and civil rights pioneer W. E. B. DuBois and former president Theodore Roo­se­velt. Denizens of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, mostly withdrew into silence.5 John Jay Chapman’s road to Coatesville, in most re­spects, could not have been more dif­fer­ent from Zachariah Walker’s. Admirers have sometimes written about Chapman’s trip t­ here as if it w ­ ere destiny. He was a child of privilege, connected to the elites of New York and of Boston. He earned two degrees from Harvard, wrote on a wide array of topics, and threw himself into the politics of reform in New York City. He participated in vari­ous civic clubs, gave speeches, and published his own small po­liti­cal magazine.6 Chapman used his pen to advance big ideas designed to discomfit his social peers (see Figure 15). Chapman’s 1898 book ­Causes and Consequences assessed corruption in the Gilded Age, moving well beyond machine and street-­level graft. He blamed Amer­ic­ a’s tarnished politics on the money the nation’s corporations shoveled into the system and, ultimately, on a society obsessed with wealth and commerce. The iconoclast denounced partisan loyalty as “superstition.” History and historical analogy flavored his vision and his rhe­toric. The calculating Lincoln should not be the reformers’ model. He advised a more idealistic outsiders’ approach to fighting corruption: “As soon as the reformers give up trying to be statesmen, and perceive that their own function is purely educational, and that they are mere anti-­slavery agitators and person of no account what­ever, they ­will succeed better.” The cultured Chapman ­imagined a new movement “emancipating the small towns throughout the Union, even as commerce was once disfranchising them.”7 ­Behind his urge to smash through the complacency that he thought plagued American democracy was a deep attachment to the ­g reat nineteenth-­century American phi­los­o­pher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Chapman wrote searchingly of Emerson’s ideas about the power of individual conscience. His critical mind ever at work, he exposed his hero’s failings, as well as his wisdom.8 John Jay Chapman’s lineage ­shaped his self-­understanding. Born in the midst of the war that destroyed slavery, his name intertwined two g­ reat abolitionist legacies. His grand­mother, Maria Weston Chapman, was William Lloyd Garrison’s determined Boston collaborator; he was also the direct descendant of John Jay, William Jay, and John Jay II, the last of whom was his grand­father. He had clear memories of both of his abolitionist grandparents. In a 1914 Atlantic Monthly article, he recalled Maria Weston Chapman as a strong and striking w ­ oman who read Shakespeare to her young grandchildren and whose memories of internecine antislavery strug­gles animated her de­cades ­later. In the wake of John Jay II’s death, his grand­son reflected, “The fact is that his

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Figure 15.  John Jay Chapman. Courtesy of ­Century Association Archives Collection, Member Photo­graphs, Volume 8, Leaf 8.

name and the ­family tradition have been controlling ideas with me ever since I can remember.”9 As a young man, Chapman had enjoyed his grand­father’s financial generosity; in turn, John Jay II no doubt appreciated his grand­son’s enthusiasm for urban reform along with their shared animus for the Catholic Church.10 ­Later in life, Chapman would compose a poetic tribute to John Jay II titled “The Grand­ father,” describing in the final lines John Jay II in prayer in the Bedford home of their ancestors—­the formidable man “kneel[ing] where they had kneeled.” John Jay bequeathed to his grand­son his ring “with the f­amily shield and legend.” Chapman knew full well that he walked, prayed, and, indeed, owed his very birth to his abolitionist forebears from New York and New ­England.11 Chapman also suffered—­from cruelties of fate and maladies of mind. As a young man, he intentionally burned his own hand so badly that it could not be saved. He had inflicted this punishment on himself ­after striking an ­imagined

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romantic rival and then realizing that his jealousy was unwarranted. His first wife died in 1897 weeks ­after giving birth to their third child. Shortly ­after the turn of the c­ entury, he suffered a long depression that left him incapacitated and for a time, curtailed his robust literary output. By the time of the Coatesville lynching, however, he had resumed a more active life.12 Zachariah Walker’s gruesome death at the hands of the Pennsylvania mob shook John Jay Chapman during a period when he was thinking more intently about the abolitionist legacy. A massive biography of John Brown by Oswald Garrison Villard, like Chapman, a writer growing from the main trunk of an abolitionist ­family tree, attracted his interest. Chapman contemplated writing a play about Brown, that most radical of antebellum abolitionists. Chapman also turned his attention to William Lloyd Garrison, his efforts ultimately coming to fruition in a book-­length study published in 1913 on the g­ reat antislavery agitator. His Garrison biography included an intriguing consideration of his great-­g randfather William Jay’s abolitionist trajectory.13 John Jay Chapman chose not to draw attention to his abolitionist heritage in his 1912 Coatesville speech, which he advertised in a local newspaper as a Sunday morning prayer meeting. ­There would be “Reading of the Scriptures” and a “Brief address.”14 In that address, Chapman named no names, new or old. His subject was slavery itself—­and all the horror with which slavery imbued the American story. He came to claim guilt, not to absolve himself from it, and to cast his historical gaze backward to long before his grandparents embraced the radical idea of immediate abolitionism, even long before his great-­great-­grandfathers’ pursuit of gradual abolitionism. John Jay Chapman pronounced, “This ­g reat wickedness that happened in Coatesville is not the wickedness of Coatesville nor of-­today. It is the wickedness of all Amer­ic­ a and of three hundred years—­ the wickedness of the slave trade. All of us are tinctured by it. No one place, no special persons are to blame.” Coatesville had given him “a glimpse into the unconscious soul of this country.” The collective unconscious, once identified, demanded collective responsibility.15 His statement, “A nation cannot practice a course of inhuman crime for three hundred years and then suddenly throw off the effects of it,” was an accusation, not an excuse. Americans must transform themselves. The Coatesville atrocity linked the age of sail to the age of the internal combustion engine, the full span of the Jay f­ amily’s engagement with slavery. Authorities in his merchant–­slaveholder ancestors’ Manhattan conducted ­trials before burning Black men at the stake; in Chapman’s age, local churchgoers joined a mob that hurled a Black man into a fire and the courts proved impotent to punish the vigilantes. Chapman described the modern instance: “On

REC KONING 399

the day of the calamity, t­ hose p­ eople in the automobiles came by the hundred and watched the torture, and passers-by came in a ­great multitude and watched it—­and did nothing.” The news then spread to “the w ­ hole country”—­but still nothing changed. Chapman placed the blame broadly and squarely on individuals, himself included: “This w ­ hole m ­ atter has been a historic episode; but it is a part, not only of our national history, but of the personal history of each one of us.”16 Though ­people in this town less than forty miles west of Philadelphia resoundingly ignored him, the prominent writer had other ave­nues for alerting his fellow Americans to deeply unsettling truths. The long-­established po­liti­cal and literary magazine Harper’s Weekly printed a copy of Chapman’s address the next month. He and his editors may have assumed that the kinds of educated readers who would become his audience could recall his heritage easily enough. But the exhilaration Chapman experienced when his piece was reprinted by newspapers and other magazines indicates that his message, not a cele­bration of his abolitionist heritage, was the point. He dared hope for change.17 Several years before, in his essay on Emerson, Chapman assessed the toll that silence had exacted before the emergence of radical abolitionism. “So long as ­there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they are timid on all subjects. They wear an iron crown and talk in whispers. Such social conditions crush and maim the individual, and throughout New E ­ ngland, as throughout the ­whole North, the individual was crushed and maimed.” And yet, as Chapman conceded, Emerson restrained himself far too long ­after ­others spoke out.18 In Coatesville, as elsewhere in the nation, the crushing and maiming w ­ ere literal, not figurative, destroying Black bodies and poisoning white souls just as slavery once had. He could not stay ­silent. And so, he proclaimed to the nearly empty room in 1912, “I say that our need is new life—­and that books and resolutions ­will not save us, but only such disposition in our hearts and souls as ­will enable the new life, love, force, hope, virtue, which surrounds us always, to enter into us.”19 His Jay pre­de­ces­sors had, at their best moments, tried to save the nation with books and resolutions, hearts and souls, contemplating its dissolution and its reunification in light of slavery’s moral evil and emancipation’s cheering prospect. The generations overlapped, engaged with each other as much as with their times. While slavery lived on in the nation—­and while the formerly enslaved remained close to the f­ amily—­neither private manumissions nor state antislavery laws could end the story of the Jay ­family and slavery. John Jay, the founding f­ ather, had straddled the roles of slaveholder and antislavery reformer, ­these contradictions marking his private and public ­careers. But fighting slavery and demanding immediate abolition became the engine of William Jay’s

40 0  E P I LOGUE

and John Jay II’s identities for de­cades. Wrestling with their responsibility, each generation blended patriotism, radicalism, and conservatism, producing a hatred of slavery that, during the ­middle de­cades of the nineteenth ­century, was unyielding. In his years ­after Coatesville, personal tragedy, disturbing prejudices, m ­ ental illness, and willful perversity led John Jay Chapman down ignoble paths.20 But in response to Zachariah Walker’s lynching by the citizens of Coatesville, John Jay Chapman distilled his forebears’ determination to assert universal princi­ ples in the face of horrifying truths. He called for a reckoning with slavery and with what emancipation had left undone. Heroism proved fleeting. Bound to liberty’s chain, history endures.

A ck n o w l­e d gm e n ts

I have benefited from the support of many institutions and individuals. I relish the privilege of saying thank you. DePauw University offered extraordinary support for this proj­ect from beginning to end. Resources in time and money have come in many forms: a Summer Stipend to launch exploratory research, a Fisher Time-­Out and a John  J. and Elizabeth Bowden Baughman Faculty Fellowship to sustain pro­gress, an Asher Fund in the Social Sciences grant to help make a two-­semester sabbatical pos­si­ble, and a Fisher Fellowship to enable a midcycle sabbatical during which I completed and revised the manuscript. In addition, a five-­year appointment as Andrew Wallace Crandall Professor of History provided research funds that facilitated the purchase of books, the acquisition of images, and the summer research assistance of the eagle-­eyed, infinitely enthusiastic Kenneth Decker. Former vice president of academic affairs Anne Harris secured a generous subvention to defray publication costs. Grants from the Professional Development Funds helped cover indexing and other research-­related expenses. Dean of Faculty Bridget Gourley offered guidance on resources, as did Terry Bruner, Ashley Dayhuff, and Becky Wallace in Academic Affairs. The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw twice provided me sabbatical office space and the kind of calming environment writers dream about. Supplementary sabbatical relocation funds facilitated time well spent in Washington, D.C., New York, Connecticut, Mas­sa­chu­setts, and California. DePauw’s global information systems specialist Beth Wilkerson produced maps and the Jay F ­ amily Tree with g­ reat skill. I also benefited from generous external funding. A Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society; an Associate Fellowship from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Re­sis­tance, and Abolition at Yale University; and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship from the Huntington Library each provided month-­long residencies that gave me access to renowned archives, widened my scholarly circle, and helped me articulate the proj­ect’s par­ameters. The dedicated staffs and supporters of the Jay Heritage Center, the New-­York Historical Society, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and, especially, the Rare Book and Manuscript Room in the Butler Library at Columbia University made my research pos­si­ble. The John Jay State Historic Site in Katonah, New York, repeatedly welcomed me to work in their archives and provided copies of crucial materials. Rick Provine, Tiffany Hebb, and the rest of the staff at the Roy O. West Library at DePauw kept the resources flowing to Greencastle, Indiana; in the midst of the pandemic, they kicked it up another notch. I thank the Special

401

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A c k n owl­ e d g m e n ts

Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, for permission to quote from the Gerrit Smith Papers. Three Hills and Cornell University Press have been patient partners as the proj­ ect made its way from proposal to manuscript to book. Michael McGandy is an exceptional editor and advocate. The editorial board at Cornell and the advisory board at Three Hills offered perceptive advice. Clare Kirkpatrick Jones guided the manuscript forward. Brock Schnoke got the marketing conversation underway. Art director Scott Levine produced a striking cover. Karen Laun oversaw production for Cornell. Kate Gibson at Westchester Publishing Ser­vices did heroic work. Gail Naron Chalew carefully copyedited the entire manuscript. Susan Storch expertly produced the index. The commentary of readers and listeners has had a tremendous impact. John Brooke and Graham Russell Gao Hodges read the entire manuscript at an impor­tant stage. Their thoughtful responses added to the many ways they have sustained my scholarship through the years. Other friends and colleagues who helped me get my story straight are Dan Albert, Ken Decker, Jason Duncan, ­Will Getter, Patrick Griffin, Sarah Gronningsater, Robert Gross, Leslie James, Julie Mujic, Louise North, Paul Polgar, Timothy Shannon, Manisha Sinha, Emily Smedra, Carl Smith, Jim Solomon, James Ward, and the late Al Young. Attendees at a variety of seminars, symposiums, and conferences have also made their mark, including at the Columbia’s Legacy: Friends and Enemies in the New Nation conference; two Frederick Douglass bicentennial conferences, one in Paris and one in Indianapolis; a conference at Northwestern University to honor my gradu­ate mentor Timothy H. Breen; the ­Great Lakes Colleges Association Black Studies Conference; the John Jay Homestead Historic Site’s symposium on slavery; the Newberry Seminar in Early American History; the Ohio Seminar in Early American History and Culture; and the Region and Nation in American Histories of Race and Slavery conference at Mt. Vernon. Pride of place belongs to the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, whose annual conferences repeatedly allowed me to talk about the Jays and slavery; a comment by Graham Hodges in Lexington, Kentucky, may very well have started it all. Two faculty research colloquia and a Black Studies-­sponsored talk have allowed me to share pieces of the proj­ect with DePauw colleagues. For their consideration, kindness, and assistance along the way, I thank Arthur Benware, Andrea Cerbie, Marilyn Culler, Eric Foner, Landa Freeman, Heather Iannucci, Isa North, John Stockbridge, Julia Warger, Janet Wedge, and Bethany White. My friends Ted Jacobi and Paul DeGooyer each provided a key late-­breaking f­ avor. Collegiality aided and abetted me at e­ very turn. My now-­retired colleagues Yung-­ chen Chiang, John Dittmer, Mac Dixon-­Fyle, John Schlotterbeck, and Barbara Steinson, as well as Bob Gross, my mentor ­going back to undergraduate days, all have shown me what it means to be in it for the long haul. My current History Department colleagues—­ Tony Andersson, Ryan Bean, Julia Bruggemann, Bob Dewey, Nahyan Fancy, Josh Herr, Aldrin Magaya, Sarah Rowley, and Barbara Whitehead—­broaden my horizons. Hope Sutherlin ensured that my two terms as chair stayed on the rails. Scott Riggle kept me laughing on-­air and off. Writing a book about other ­people’s families, I relied on my own. My cousin Jane Matthews welcomed me into her home for weeks at a time while I did my New York City research. Alan Zheultin and Wendy Botuck also made Manhattan visits a plea­sure,



Ac k n o wl­ e d g m e n ts

403

as did my friends Paul Schwartzberg and Lisa Waldman. Barbara Zheultin assured me of the work’s broader significance. The Fennells of Evanston and the Dunnetts of Naperville have kept food and fun flowing. The Connecticut Gellmans have always been in my corner. Sheila Z. Willer has supported me in ­every way a ­mother can support a son. My wife Monica spreads justice and love. She is what the world needs now—­and I always. This book is dedicated to our c­ hildren Hannah and Ben—­sources of boundless pride and joy.

Appendix

Enslaved and ­Free Black Servants in the House­holds of John Jay and William Jay as Recorded in Federal Census (1790–1850) ENSLAVED

­F REE BLACK SERVANTS

1790 (NYC)

5

0

1800 (Albany)

5

0

1810 (Bedford)

1

4

1820 (Bedford)

5

0

1830 (Bedford)

2

0

1840 (Bedford)

0

0

1850 (Bedford)

1

0

405

N ote s

Abbreviations Used in Notes

­People AH AJ BF CS EKFJ FJ GS GW JJ JJII JJC LT MJB MBJ NJ PJ PAJ PJM RRL SPC SLJ WJ WJII WL WHS WLG

Alexander Hamilton Augusta Jay Benjamin Franklin Charles Sumner Eleanor Kingsland Field Jay Frederick Jay Gerrit Smith George Washington John Jay John Jay II John Jay Chapman Lewis Tappan Maria Jay Banyer Maria Banyer Jay Ann “Nancy” Jay Peter Jay Peter Augustus Jay Peter Jay Monroe Robert R. Livingston Salmon P. Chase Sarah Livingston Jay William Jay (1789–1858) William Jay (1841–1915) William Livingston William Henry Seward William Lloyd Garrison

Published Texts, Archival Collections, and Archives AANYLH Afro-­Americans in New York Life and History AAS American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mas­sa­chu­setts ACPAS The American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race: Minutes, Constitution, Addresses, Memorials, Resolutions, Reports, Committees and Anti-­Slavery Tracts (New York, 1969) 407

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TO PA GE 2

AHR American Historical Review CPP  The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, 4 vols., ed. Henry P. Johnston (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1890–93) CSC Charles Sumner Correspondence, Houghton Library, Harvard University HL Huntington Library, San Marino, California LJ William Jay, Life of John Jay: with Se­lections from his Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers (1833; Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972) JCNY  Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777–1877, ed. David N. Gellman and David Quigley (New York: NYU Press, 2003) JAH Journal of American History JER Journal of the Early Republic JFP Jay ­Family Papers, Columbia University, Rare Books and Manuscripts JJH John Jay Homestead State Historic Site, Katonah, New York JJHx John Jay Homestead (copy provided to author) JJP John Jay Papers, Butler Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Columbia University NASS National Anti-­Slavery Standard NYH New York History NYHS New-­York Historical Society, New York City NYMS Papers of the Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves in New York, NYHS, microfilm and https://­cdm16694​.­contentdm​.­oclc​.­org​/­digital​ /­collection​/­p15052coll5​/­id​/­31512 NYT New York Times PJJ Papers of John Jay—­Online Edition, Columbia University Libraries, https://­dlc​.­library​.­columbia​.­edu​/­jay SL  Selected Letters of John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay: Correspondence by or to the First Chief Justice of the United States and His Wife, ed. Landa M. Freeman, Louise V. North, and Janet M. Wedge (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2005) SP  The Selected Papers of John Jay, ed. Elizabeth M. Nuxoll (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 2010–). SPCPM Salmon P. Chase Papers, Microfilm UP  John Jay: The Making of a Revolutionary: Unpublished Papers 1745–1780, ed. Richard B. Morris (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) WCA Westchester County Archives WJCM  Bayard Tuckerman, William Jay and the Constitutional Movement for the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Dodd, Mead & Com­pany, 1893) WMQ William and Mary Quarterly ∗ When not otherwise specified, Jay correspondence is cited from JJP. Prologue

1. JJ to SLJ, Nov. 10, 1790, SL, 193; the funeral of former Mas­sa­chu­setts governor James Bowdoin occasioned Jay’s reflection on fame; Ellis, Quartet; full-­length biographies of Jay have been scarce, the most recent being Stahr, John Jay. See also, Morris, Seven, 150–88; and Rakove, Revolutionaries.

NOTES TO PA GES 2– 5

409

2. US Constitution, transcription on the National Archives website, https://­www​ .­archives​.­gov​/­founding​-­docs​/­constitution​-­transcript. Finkelman, Slavery and the Found­ ers, and Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution, make two of the strongest arguments on this point, about which ­there is no shortage of scholarly commentary. 3. Wiencek, Master; Gordon-­Reed, Hemingses; Wiencek, Imperfect; Dunbar, Never; Shipler, “Jefferson.” 4. Berlin, Many, includes New E ­ ngland and mid-­Atlantic colonies in his paradigm-­ shaping study. On New E ­ ngland, see Melish, Disowning, and Platt, “ ‘And ­Don’t Forget’ ”; on New York, see Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 118–29. 5. Waldstreicher, Runaway, and “Reading”; Miranda, Hamilton; see contributions to “Symposium on Hamilton” for ways in which scholars are unpacking racial and other historical meanings in Lin-­Manuel Miranda’s cultural landmark of a musical. Ball, “Ambition,” offers a thoughtful appraisal of Hamilton. Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, and Chan, “Alexander Hamilton,” provide positive interpretations of Hamilton’s antislavery commitments; Weston, “Alexander Hamilton,” is more critical; and Serfilippi, “As Odious” uncovers impor­tant new evidence on Hamilton’s slaveholdings. Subsequent chapters of this book cover Hamilton’s and Jay’s impor­tant interactions over slavery. 6. I ­will have occasion to cite from the large and excellent lit­er­a­ture of slavery in New York in the early chapters of this book. Particularly noteworthy in the pre­sent context are Hodges, Root; Foote, Black and White; Lepore, New York; White, Somewhat; and Lydon, “New York.” 7. Douglass’ Monthly, June 1859; “Why We Resist,” De Bow’s Review. 8. Wiencek, Imperfect, 4–6, 339–43, 353–59; Gordon-­Reed and Onuf, “Most Blessed,” 57, 122, 130–32, 135, 148–51; Wiencek, Master, chap. 5. Waldstreicher, Runaway, ix–xv, not incorrectly, notes that to compare found­ers’ rec­ords on slavery is to risk anachronisms—­ all the more reason to take the long view, in his case of Franklin and, in mine, of the Jays; Polgar, Standard-­Bearers, offers a reevaluation of gradual emancipation. 9. Although my approach to a founding ­family and abolition is new, the recent trend ­toward taking the long view of abolitionism can be found in such works as Sinha, Slave’s Cause; Rael, Eighty-­Eight Years; Berlin, Long; and Levine-­Gronningsater, “Delivering Freedom.” 10. ­Family papers are ­housed primarily at Columbia University in New York City and at the John Jay Homestead State Historic Site, in Katonah, New York. The marvelous “The Papers of John Jay” website (https://­dlc​.­library​.­columbia​.­edu​/­jay) contains a vast collection of John Jay documents. The ongoing, expertly edited Selected Papers of John Jay is also an invaluable resource. Even so, a relatively small portion of the ­family’s letters, mostly to and from John Jay, have made it into print. 11. My debt to Horton, “Listening,” for shining a light on the Jay f­ amily slaves and former slaves ­will be made evident throughout the pages of this book. 12. Littlefield, “John Jay,” 132; Morris, John Jay, the Nation, and the Court, 14; Brier, Mr. Jay, 292–95. Full-­length studies of William Jay’s abolitionism are few, far between, and insufficient: see Tuckerman, William Jay; Trendel, William Jay; Budney, William Jay. ­There is no full-­length biography of John Jay II. 13. Pencak, “Salt of the Earth,” comes closest among Jay scholars to conveying the interlocked nature of the ­family’s story; Den Hartog, Patriotism, points in a promising

41 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 8– 17

direction as well; see also, Egerton, Heirs, for a recent intergenerational study of the Adams ­family. 14. Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, and Appleby, Inheriting, originally inspired the intergenerational aspirations for this proj­ect. 15. Adair, “Fame.” 1. Disruptions

1. WJ, LJ,1:3. 2. Based on imputed data from the Voyages database, voyage identification nos. 33743 and 33646, accessed June 1, 2020; Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 119–21; Rawley, Transatlantic Slave Trade, 92; Bosher, “Huguenot Merchants,” 84; Van Ruymbeke, New Babylon, 218. 3. Based on imputed data of the Voyages database, of the estimated 670 slaves who embarked on t­ hese two ships, 113 (almost 17%) would not have survived the two journeys. For brief accountings of the French Jays, see Stahr, John Jay 2, and Morris, UP, 29; Goodfriend, Who Should Rule, 172–97, takes a fresh look at slave–­master interactions, emphasizing the slaves’ perspective. 4. Butler, Huguenots, 13–26; Carlo, Huguenot Refugees, 5–8; Stanwood, “Between Eden and Empire,” 1319, 1322. 5. Stanwood, “Between Eden and Empire,” 1322; WJ, LJ, 5; Butler, Huguenots, 26– 40; see also Bosher, “Huguenot Merchants,” 85, for the dire economic consequences for a Huguenot merchant who did not leave La Rochelle. 6. WJ, LJ, 1:4–5; Butler, Huguenots, 26–27, 49, 50–51, puts the number closer to 1,500; Van Ruymbeke, New Babylon, xv, 35, 38, 203, estimates a higher total of 2,500; Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 6; Stanwood, “Between Eden and Empire,” 1333. 7. Butler, Huguenots, 100–7, 121–26, 204; Van Ruymbeke, ch. 8; Foote, Black and White, 117; Wood, Black Majority. 8. Butler, Huguenots, 91–92, 100; Van Ruymbeke, New Babylon, 217; WJ, LJ, 1:6. 9. Hodges, Root, 7–38, 40–41; Goodfriend, “Souls”; Foote, Black and White, 23–52; Davis, “New York’s Long Black Line,” 42, 44; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 47–63, 369. 10. Stahr, John Jay, 2. On seventeenth-­century New York’s famous diversity, see Kammen, Colonial New York, 37; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 31, and the early chapters more generally; see also Shorto, Island. On imperial politics, see Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution. 11. Vorhees, “Fervent Zeale”; Murrin, “Menacing”: Kammen, Colonial New York, 118–27; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 91–102. 12. Hood, In Pursuit, 11; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 97–101; Butler, Huguenots, 146, 154–56; Morris, UP, 29–30; Howe, “Bayard Treason Trial”; “Bayard Genealogy,” Butler, Huguenots, 186; Hodges, Root, 23; Pellew, John Jay, 1–2; Stahr, John Jay, 2. 13. Bosher,” Huguenot Merchants”; Stanwood, “Between Eden and Empire”; Morris, UP, 29–30; Butler, Huguenots, 153, 180. 14. Stahr, John Jay, 2; Butler, Huguenots, 192–93; Goodfriend, “Social Dimensions,” 259, 262–63; Foote, Black and White, 117–18; Berrian, Facts, 63; Bushman, Refinement, 174; Bulthuis, Four Steeples, 17–19. 15. Cohen, “Elias Neau”; Foote, Black and White, 125–31, 143; Hodges, Root, 55– 63; Bulthuis, Four Steeples, 25–26; Neau to SPG, Oct. 3, 1795, SPG mss., Letters, ser. A

NOTES TO PA GES 17– 20

411

v. 2, no. 124; “A List of Slaves Taught by Mr. Neau since the year 1704, SPG mss., Letters, ser. A, v. 10, 220–223; “A List of Negroes Taught by Mr. Neau,” Dec. 23, 1719, SPG mss., Letters, ser. A, v. 14, pp. 141–3, SPG mss. Collection—­copy provided to author by Bodleian Library, Rhodes House, Oxford, E ­ ngland; David Humphreys et al., Dec. 18, 1722, PJJ, Doc. 07409. 16. Butler, Huguenots, 149–53, 174–75; Butler broadly emphasizes Huguenot motivations as individual and economic; Carlo, Huguenot Refugees, 123, 154; Kruger, “Born to Run,” 90. See Hood, In Pursuit of Privilege, xvii, 16–37, on merchants, wealth, and status in New York City during the colonial period. 17. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 118–23; Morris, UP, 29–30. 18. Voyages database, voyage identification nos. 21045, 36997, 36998, 36999, 37011, 37012, 37013, 37015, and 70201; ­these numbers are approximations, ­because the database designers extrapolate missing data for individual voyages; in this instance, the database includes the same numbers for four separate voyages; for a discussion of this design choice, see Smallwood, review of Eltis, 259–60; Stahr, John Jay, 2. 19. Judd, “Frederick Philipse,” esp. 367–68; Voyages database, voyage identification no. 36999; Foote, Black and White, 64. 20. Neither Augustus nor his son Peter appears in the Voyages database, but as John Jay biographer Stahr, John Jay, 2, suggests, Augustus’s association with Philipse is a strong indication of at least “some extent” of participation in the trade.; Doc. 369, “Negroes Imported into New York, 1715–1765,” in Donnan, Documents, 463, 477, 479, 482, 484; the rec­ord refers to “Peter Vallett” and “Peter Valet,” which is almost surely an anglicized version of Pierre Valette; see also New York Slavery Rec­ords Index. O’Malley, Final Passages, 11, emphasizes that slave trading facilitated other economic opportunities; 46–58, 72, 83–84, 173, 179 describe the likely conditions. 21. I draw on Lydon, “New York,” esp. 377, 378, 380, 381 383, 394. Estimates vary: see Foote, Black and White, 64–70, for dif­fer­ent numbers that tell the same story. Voyages database (accessed June 2, 2020) lists sixty-­one voyages between 1700–75 whose principal disembarkation was New York, with 5,710 enslaved p­ eople disembarked; see also Doonan, Documents, 406–7; O’Malley, Final Passages, 106, 201–2, 241, 377–78; and Kammen, New York, 180–82. 22. Foote, Black and White, 69, 72; Harris, Shadow, 1; Lydon, “New York,” 387–88; on black rural life and l­ abor, see Williams-­Myers, Long Hammering; Hodges, Slavery and Freedom; Hodges, Root, 43–47, 82–83, 107–14; on housing see Kruger, “Born to Run,” 164–65; and for a superb analy­sis of living and health conditions for enslaved urbanites, see Klepp, “Seasoning.” 23. Gellman, Emancipating New York, 17–18; Kruger, “Born to Run,” 70–73. 24. Butler, Huguenots, 175–76; Kammen, New York, 225, Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 148–49; Cohen, “Elias Neau,” 21; Foote, “ ‘Some Hard Usage’ ”; Scott, “New York Slave Insurrection.” 25. Morris, UP, 30; WJ, LJ, 9; Foote, Black and White, 63–64, 87; Judd, “Frederick Philipse,” 354; Mc­Manus, Negro Slavery, 28, 46; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 90; Kruger, “Born to Run,” 150–55. 26. Berrian, Facts, 63. 27. “Negroes Imported into New York,” 490–93, 495–96, 506, and New York Slavery Rec­ords Index; O’Malley, Final Passages, 22, 25, 51, 172, 178, 188–89, 204. The specific

41 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 21– 23

African origins of the small numbers of slaves whom the Jays’ Dolphin venture carried are speculative, based on Voyages database rec­ords for the time period proximate to the ship’s recorded visits to ­these par­tic­u­lar Ca­rib­bean islands. 28. Peter Jay Ledger 1724–68, NYHS; specific slave references appear in 1:7, 46 and 2:12; Wallace and Burrows, Gotham, 120, 126; Stahr, Jay, 1, 3, 5; O’Malley, Final Passages, 11; on 210, O’Malley notes the northern market’s “preference . . . ​for enslaved ­children recently arrived from Africa.” 29. Peter Jay Ledger, 1:25, 2:161; Davis, “New York’s Long Black Line,” 46–47; see Hodges, Root, 107–14, and Foote, Black and White, 73–77, on slave work. 30. Bond, “Shaping,” 65, 72, 75, 77–79, 81–83, 89, 91–92; Hodges, Root, 89, 96; Lepore, New York Burning, 99–100, 137–38, 141, 180–81; Hoffer, ­Great New York Conspiracy, 63–64; Davis, New York Conspiracy, xii–­xiii; Wilder, In the Com­pany, 9–35; see also Goodfriend, Who Should Rule, 172–97. 31. Lepore, New York Burning, and Hoffer, ­Great New York Conspiracy, narrate the chilling contextual details; on the South Carolina rebellion, including connections to the conflict with Spain, see Wood, Black Majority, 296, 303–26; and Smith, Stono. 32. Account synthesized from Hoffer, ­Great New York Conspiracy; Hodges, Root, 91– 98; Lepore, New York Burning. 33. Davis, New York Conspiracy, 217–18. 34. Davis, New York Conspiracy, 223, 258–59, 325; as Lepore, New York Burning, 191– 92, notes in relation to another slave named Othello, shaping testimony to avoid or mitigate punishment was easier said than done. 35. Lepore, New York Burning, Appendix B, 248–59. Historians remain sharply divided on the meaning of the alleged plot’s preemptive suppression and how to interpret the evidence surrounding it, which was derived from the purported movements and testimony of dozens of African Americans like Brash. To this day, t­ here is not a consensus on even the most fundamental question—­whether t­ here r­ eally was a plot at all. For historians like Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-­Headed Hydra, 174–210, and Hodges, Root, 88–99, the plot was real and an example of how a pan-­Atlantic proletariat mobilized to resist the forces of mercantile cap­i­tal­ist empire and racial domination. In sharp contrast, for Foote, Black and White, 159–86, the t­ rials function as a proof text for the ways a “colonialist discourse” enforced subjugation on Black bodies through a manipulation of fears of racial otherness, in the pro­cess ensuring unity among whites other­wise potentially divided along class and ethnic lines. Lepore, New York Burning, xvi–­xvii, xix–xx, 203–4, highlights a con­temporary critic of the t­ rials who deployed the Salem analogy; yet as subsequent notes indicate, Lepore is anything but dismissive of what the story reveals about New Yorkers, Black and white; see also Bond, “Shaping,” 63–65, 64–65n, 68, for judicious assessments of the historiography, the sources on which the historiography relies, and the comparison to Salem. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 159–66, are skeptical of a conspiracy but, like other historians, attempt to extract broader social implications about Black life from the t­rials; Hoffer, ­Great Negro Conspiracy, 4–8, assesses the strength and weaknesses of Horsmanden’s journal, the controversial source on which all accounts one way or another rely; see also Davis, New York Conspiracy, vii–­xx; and Zabin, New York Conspiracy ­Trials. 36. Hoffer, ­Great New York Conspiracy, 62, 64, 69; Davis, New York Conspiracy, 54, 60–63; Horsmanden, New-­York Conspiracy, or a History of the Negro Plot, 264; Bond, “Shaping,” 84.

NOTES TO PA GES 23– 29

413

37. Davis, New York Conspiracy, xii, 117–18, 138, 151, 164, 173; h ­ ere I follow the interpretive lead of Bond, “Shaping”; see also Zabin, Dangerous, 5–6, 57–59, 61, 64–66, 75, as well as chap. 6 for her take on the conspiracy ­trials more broadly. 38. Hoffer, ­Great New York Conspiracy, 3, 165–68, summarizes this perspective; see also Lepore, New York Burning. Davis, New York Conspiracy, ix, xv; Hodges, 93–94, 97, 99. 39. Davis, New York Conspiracy, 324–25. 40. Horsmanden, New-­York Conspiracy, 89–90, 286–87; Hoffer, ­Great New York Conspiracy, 130–51; Lepore, New York Burning, 188. 41. Agreement between Thomas A. Dean and Peter Jay, Sept. 25, 1741, PJJ, Doc. 06632. 42. Davis, “Long Black Line,” 47; Voyages database (accessed June 2, 2020) indicates the following numbers for slave ships whose primary disembarkation point was New York: 1731–40, five ships; 1741–50, five ships; 1751–60, twenty-­two ships; Lydon, “New York,” 377–81; Kruger, “Born to Run,” 83–85; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 167–90; Hood, In Pursuit of Privilege, 7, 25 43. Shonnard and Spooner, History of Westchester, 223; the 1,299 acres Peter Jay obtained via his father-­in-­law did not make him a particularly large landholder compared to the g­ reat landed families of the province or even of Westchester County; see Kim, Landlord, although as Kim shows, 181–83, Peter’s land acquisition occurred during an era when the original Cortlandt Manor was being divided among heirs who themselves ­were selling off significant acreage; Stahr, John Jay, 3–5; Morris, UP, 33. 44. Scharf, History of Westchester County, 1:29–30; Shonnard and Spooner, History of Westchester, 151, 153, 194, 263; Mc­Manus, Negro Slavery, 46; “Census of Slaves, 1755,” in O’Callaghan, Documentary History, 3:852–53, lists twenty-­nine slaves owned by Lewis Morris; Kruger, “Born to Run,” 104–5, 131, 150–55; Davis, “Long Black Line,” 49–50. 45. Rev. Charles W. Baird, D. D. “Rye,” in Scharf, History of Westchester County, 2:666– 67; Baird, Chronicle, 181–83. 46. “Census of Slaves, 1755,” in O’Callaghan, Documentary History, 3:855; Kruger, “Born to Run,” 135–37, 187–88n, makes extrapolated estimates, that, with c­ hildren, on average each Rye ­house­hold contained 3.2 slaves; if that pattern held for the Jays, it might mean that ­there ­were several slave ­children in the ­house­hold; looking at the 1755 census as a w ­ hole, which does not include Albany, New York, and Suffolk Counties, Jay’s recorded owner­ship of eight slaves sticks out as an atypically large figure. 2. Rising Stars

1. JJ to Susanna Philipse Robinson, Mar. 21, 1777, in SP, 1:386–87; for further background on the Robinsons and the Committee for the Detection of Conspiracies, see SP, 1:361–64, 367–69, 371–72; Kammen, “American Revolution,” 140–41, 154, explores other aspects of this revealing episode. 2. The concluding sentence to the penetrating study by Brown, Moral Capital, 462—­“What is truly surprising about British abolitionism is that such a campaign ever should have developed at all”—is applicable to both Jay’s revolutionary leap and the tentative stirrings of antislavery. Classic studies of the ideologies of slavery and race in the Revolutionary Era that make this broad point include Davis, Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 255–342, and Jordan, White over Black, 269–311; John Jay attracts no

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more than cursory treatment in ­these books and in most subsequent commentary on and critiques of the revolutionary rhe­toric of slavery, the exception being Littlefield, “John Jay,” esp. 95, 105. 3. Morris, UP, 1:55. Stahr, John Jay, 13–14; WJ, LJ, 1:14–15. 4. PJ to James Jay, July 3, 1752, UP, 1:35; also PJ to David and John Peloquin, Oct. 24, 1753, UP, 1:36–37; SL, 10–11; SP, 1:3. 5. Carlo, Huguenot Refugees, 62, 64, 65, 69, 82, 88–91, 96–97, 102, 107–9, 123, 160– 65; Bonomi, “John Jay,”12. WJ, LJ, 1:11–12. 6. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 168; Wilder, Ebony & Ivy, 50–53, 59, 60–70, 75, 96, 131–32, 162; Foner, “Columbia,” 1–16; Johnson, Samuel Johnson, 219, 228, 264, 269, 402–3. 7. PJ to James Jay, Nov. 12, 1763, JJHx transcription of original letter held in a private collection; PJ to JJ, n.d., [1764], PJJ, Doc. 07852; Mary is not identified as a slave per se. 8. PJ to JJ, Mar. 26, 1765, UP, 1:70. 9. Knapp, Life of Thomas Eddy, 13, 376–84; Dictionary, 7:359–60, 365–66, 367; Levine-­ Gronningsater, “Delivering Freedom,” 63; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 27–29. 10. Foner, “Columbia and Slavery,” 9–12; Wilder, Ebony & Ivy, 52–53, 60–65, 68, 75; Trans-­Atlantic Slave Trade Database (search, “vessel o ­ wners: Livingston”); Morris, UP, 1:71, 86; Nuxoll, SP, 1:34, 55; Dangerfield, Chancellor, 29, 46–47; JJ to RRL, Apr. 2, 1765; see also JJ to RRL, Oct. 31, 1765; Mar. 4, 1766, 79–81; License to Practice Law, Oct. 26, 1768, SP, 1:35–36, 39–41, 41–43, 56; and JJ to RRL, Apr. 19, 1765, UP, 1:74–7. 11. Stahr, Jay, 19–25, 30; SP, 1:50–55, 70–71. 12. JJ to the Earl of Dartmouth, Mar. 25, 1773, SP, 1:81; see also Morris, UP, 1:86– 88; SP, 1:53–54. 13. JJ to SLJ, Mar. 3, 1776, SL, 36; Nuxoll, SP, 1:82–83; Freeman, North, and Wedge, SL, brilliantly document this relationship. 14. Prince, William Livingston; Dangerfield, Chancellor, 22–23, 35, 39, 74; Stahr, John Jay, 33–35; Morris, UP, 1:135–37; Nuxoll, SP, 1:84–85; Becker, History, 38, 49; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 214–22. For suggestions that had Jay been successful in persuading one of the ­daughters of the loyalist DeLancey ­family to marry him, instead of winning the hand of Sarah Livingston, he would never have attempted, let alone achieved, his subsequent rise to authority and influence within the ranks of the patriotic in­de­ pen­dence movement; see Morris, Seven, 167–68; McCaughey, Stand, Columbia, 47; Stahr, John Jay, 31–32. 15. SLJ to JJ, Nov. 1, 1776, SL, 42; Hodges, Root, 137. 16. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 232–46; Davis, Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. 17. Brown, Moral Capital, 126–51, 161–71. 18. Brown, Moral Capital, 135–36, 138, 140–43, 148, 167–68, and more generally; Jackson Let This Voice; Waldstreicher, “Wheatleyan Moment”; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 36; Sinha, “To ‘cast just obliquy’ on Oppressors,” 152; Nelson, Thomas Paine, 64–65. 19. Brown, Moral Capital, 97–101; Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union, 31–33; Drescher, Abolition, 99–105; Oldham, “New Light”; Krikler, “Zong and the Lord Chief Justice”; Davis, Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 474–501.

NOTES TO PA GES 35– 41

415

20. Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union, 33–40; Drescher, Abolition, 103–5. For more general anx­i­eties about the ­f uture authority of slaveholders and slavery’s morality during the run-up to in­de­pen­dence, see Brown, Moral Capital, 105–14, 134–43; Holton, Forced Found­ers; Carp, Rebels, 143–71, shows how even in South Carolina, patriarchal concerns for maintaining ­family hierarchy and concerns over slavery overlapped. 21. PJ to JJ, Dec. 18, 1775, UP, 1:205; on JJ’s and his friend Robert Livingston’s concerns about disruptions associated with re­sis­tance to the British, see JJ to Alexander McDougall, Dec. 4,1775; RRL to JJ, Dec. 6, 1775, SP, 1:164–67. 22. JJ to John Vardill, May 23, 1774, Sept. 24, 1774, SP, 1:87–89, 94–95; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 217, 221–22; Morris, UP, 136. Morris, “John Jay and the Radical Chic Elite,” in Seven, 150–88, encapsulates the conundrum of how Jay overcame his doubts about in­de­pen­dence and his conservative scruples; see also, Jack Rakove, “Introduction,” to SP, 1:xxv–­xxix; Becker, “John Jay,” 1–12; Klein, “John Jay,” 19–30; Morris, “American Revolution”; Stahr, John Jay, 33–54; Becker, History, 111. 23. [JJ], “Address to the ­People of ­Great Britain,” SP, 1:100–7; Morris, UP, 136–37; Becker, History, 150–51. 24. JJ, Letter from Congress to the “Oppressed Inhabitants of Canada,” May 29, 1775, in SP, 1:116–18; Arendt, On Revolution, esp. 28. 25. JJ to Alexander McDougall, Mar. 13, 1776; see also JJ to Robinson, Mar. 21, 1777, SP, 1:208–9, 387. 26. Nuxoll, SP, 1:320–25; “An Address of the Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York to their Constituents,” Dec. 23, 1776, SP, 1:337, 338, 340. 27. “Address of the Convention,” SP, 1: 337, 340, 341, 342. 28. “Address of the Convention,” SP, 1:346. 29. Brown, Moral Capital, esp. 105–10; taking Jay’s use of enslavement meta­phors seriously thus may help solve the conundrum of what Kammen, “American Revolution,” 153, describes as Jay’s puzzling transition “from moderation to militancy.” 30. Nuxoll, SP, 1:399–403. 31. Journals of the Provincial Congress, 887; Constitution of the State of New-­York, 7–12; Richards, Slave Power, 28–31; Mintz, Gouverneur, 7, 14–15, 76; Adams, Gouverneur Morris, 4, 7, 8–9, 81; Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary, 3, 16–17, 34. 32. Journal of the Provincial Congress, 889, 897; Maier, American Scripture, 146–47, 236–41. 33. Gellman, Emancipating New York, 31, 34–35; Constitution of Vermont, July 18, 1777, http://­avalon​.­law​.­yale​.­edu​/­18th​_­century​/­vt01​.­asp; Jordan, White over Black, 292. 34. JJ to RRL and Governeur Morris, Apr. 29, 1777, SP, 1:413. William Jay claimed that if John Jay had not had to absent himself from the convention, New York would have had “the honour of setting the first example in Amer­i­ca of the voluntary abolition of slavery,” an interpretation perhaps as much informed by William’s emerging antislavery commitments as by historical events; see WJ, LJ, 1:70. 35. Young, Demo­cratic Republicans, 17–22; JCNY, 13, 25–29; Dangerfield, Chancellor, 88–93. Fortunately, although John Jay exercised a g­ reat deal of influence over the crafting of the 1777 constitution, he did not have a stranglehold on the proceedings, especially with regard to the rights of minority factions of New York’s population. Jay failed to convince his fellow delegates, including Morris, to approve a set of proposals

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stigmatizing Catholics. See Morris, UP, 1:392; Dangerfield, Chancellor, 91; Adams, Gouverneur Morris, 82–83; Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary, 33; Mintz, Gouverneur Morris, 75. 36. JJ to RRL and Gouverneur Morris, Apr. 29, 1777, SP, 1:413. 37. Hodges, Root, 139–40, 144–53; Hodges, “Black Revolt”; Foote, Black and White, 210–16; Van Buskirk, Generous, 129–54; SP, 1:305n; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 36–37. Events in New York ­were part of a much larger phenomenon of slaves seizing their freedom and fighting for the British, as narrated dramatically by Schama, Rough Crossings, 8–9, 55–126; and Nash, Forgotten, 22–38. 38. WL to Richard Bache, May 22, 1777; Samuel Hayes to WL, July 16, 1777; David Forman to WL, June 9, 1780, Papers of William Livingston, 1:338, 2:22, 3:423; Hodges, Slavery and Freedom, 96–104. 39. SLJ to JJ, Mar. 23, 1777, SL, 44–45; PJ to JJ and James Jay, Sept. 1, 1779, in UP, 1:631; PJ to James Jay and JJ, Sept. 20, 1779, PJJ, Doc. 07874, which contains summary but not image, and transcription in JJHx files. Claas might be the man named “Massey” recorded as a former John Jay slave evacuated with the British in 1783; see “Inspection Roll of Negroes, Book No. 2,” in Hodges, Black Loyalist Directory, 184. 40. PJ to JJ and Sir James Jay, Sept. 22, 1779, UP, 1:642–43. 41. Laws (1792), 42; Davis, “New York’s Long Black Line,” 55–57; Mc­Manus, Negro Slavery, 199, 200; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 37, 40. 42. JJ to Susan Livingston, Mar. 16, 1778, SL, 54. 43. Journals of the Provincial Congress, 871–72, 904, 941–42; Kruger, “Born to Run,” chapter 11, esp. 640–41, 645–48, 651, 677–87; it was not ­until 1786 that New York’s state legislature passed legislation to f­ ree confiscated loyalist slaves; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 65–66. 44. Samuel Allinson to WL, July 13, 1778. Papers of William Livingston, 2:380–87. 45. WL to Samuel Allinson, July 25, 1778; Allinson to WL, Aug. 12, 1778; WL to Thomas Bradford, June 3, 1780, Papers of William Livingston, 2:403–4, 407–8; 3:413. The modern editors of the Livingston papers found no rec­ord of Livingston’s proposal. 46. Anthony Benezet to JJ, Feb. 2, 1779, SP, 1:581–82; [Benezet], Serious, 11. 47. [Benezet], Serious, 27, 28–31, 37–39. 48. JJ to Anthony Benezet, Mar. 5, 1779, draft attached to letter from Benezet, PJJ, Doc. 05485; Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard, 133. 49. AH to JJ, Mar. 14, 1779, in SP, 1:607–9; SP, 1:478–79, 670; on other uses of piety as a Revolutionary Era theme, see Davis, Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 298. 50. Wiencek, Imperfect, 204, 214–33, quotations, 229, 232. 51. ­Whether Jay read the ­actual text of the law or just learned of its essential features is not known; see An Act for the gradual abolition of slavery, 2, 3. 52. Nuxoll, SP, 1:709–14. 53. JJ to Egbert Benson, Sept. 18, 1780, SP, 2:253. 54. Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard, 109, 129, 134, 212–15, 219, 346–47n; SP, 1:670. 3. Negotiations

1. JJ to PJ, May 23, 1780, in SL, 65, 84; JJ, manumission document for Benoit, Mar. 21, 1784, PJJ, Doc. 07298. On the importance and nature of asymmetrical master–­slave

NOTES TO PA GES 52– 58

417

negotiations within the confines of the chattel princi­ple, see Johnson, Soul by Soul; see also, Morris, “Articulation.” 2. SLJ to Susannah French Livingston, Dec. 12–26, 1779; SLJ to WL, Dec. 30, 1779; SLJ to Peter Jay, Jan. 9, 1780, SL, 68, 71, 73; and ed. notes, 65, 69; see also JJ to BF, Jan. 26, 1780, SP, 2:15–16. 3. SLJ to Susan Livingston, Aug. 28, 1780, SL, 89; Bemis, Diplomacy, 91, 101–4; Stahr, John Jay, 127–44. 4. Letters Being the Whole of the Correspondence; in this volume, John Jay himself elected to publicly expose Littlepage’s attempts to take advantage of Jay’s trust and financial sponsorship so that Littlepage’s public attacks on Jay would not stand up to scrutiny; see Stahr, John Jay, 138, 228–32; and WJ, LJ, 1:204–29. 5. SLJ to William Livingston, June 24, 1781, SL, 107–11; for the Irish servant, see SLJ to Susan Livingston, Aug. 28, 1780, SL, 88. 6. On the birth and death of d­ aughter in Spain, see JJ to WL (draft), July 14, 1780; SLJ to Susan French Livingston, Aug. 28, 1780; WL to SLJ, Jan. 14, 1781; SLJ to WL, June 24, 1781; SL, 86–87, 90–91, 98, 111 (quotation). 7. SLJ to Susannah French Livingston, Aug. 28, 1780; SLJ to WL, Jan. 31, Oct. 14, 1782; SLJ to PJ, Apr. 29, 1782, in SL, 91,117, 118, 122. 8. SLJ to PAJ, July 25, 1781, photocopy of transcription from JJH. 9. JJ to John Adams, Mar. 1783, SP, 3:331. 10. SLJ to Kitty Livingston, May 18, 1781, SL, 106. 11. I use the term “paternalism” in a descriptive more than in a historiographically or theoretically technical sense; nonetheless, I am informed by Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul, and his “Nettlesome,” for commentary on paternalism’s limitations and ironies. For Jay, paternalism was not a strategy for morally digging in on slavery but instead was compatible with his emerging criticisms of the institution; Littlefield, “John Jay,” 123–26, 128, provides useful observations. 12. Kim, “Limits”; FJ to JJ, Apr. 10, 1781, PJJ, Doc. 06327; SP, 3:xxx; Horton, “Listening,” Appendix. 13. JJ to FJ, Mar. 15, 1781, PJJ, Doc. 06326. 14. JJ to Richard Harrison, May 28, 1781, SP, 2:449; JJ to Robert Morris, May 29, 1781; JJ to FJ, Mar. 15, Nov. 19, 1781, PJJ, Docs., 09322, 06326, 06333. 15. JJ to FJ, July 31, 1781, PJJ, Doc. 06328. 16. FJ to JJ (copy), Nov. 18, Dec. 1, 1781, PJJ Doc. 06331; Horton, “Listening,” 1, 8–9, 13, 43, 47–48, 51, 56, is particularly insightful and see 34–52 more generally. 17. JJ to FJ, Apr. 29, 1782, PJJ, Doc. 06336 18. SP, 3, liv; RRL to JJ, May 22, 1782, SP, 2:794; FJ to JJ, Apr. 20, 1782, SP, 2:721–22; JJ to RRL, Aug. 13, 1782; JJ to Egbert Benson, Aug. 26, 1782; JJ to FJ, Oct. 3, 1782, SP, 3:64, 92, 172. 19. SP, 2:783–85; FJ to JJ, Apr. 20, 1782, SP, 2:722; Stahr, John Jay, 190. 20. Peter Jay, ­will and codicils, PJJ Doc. 00374 (original at the Museum of the City of New York); see also “Abstracts of ­Wills,”—­Liber 33, 262–63 (photocopy provided to author from files at JJH); SP, 2:720–21; Morris, UP, 2: 211–12; as Horton, “Listening,” 53–57, makes clear, Peter Jay’s slaveholdings w ­ ere in flux during this period; see FJ to JJ, Aug. 15, 1782, PJJ Doc. 06337, for a further accounting. The identity of Mary in the third codicil is not easy to determine. Although ­others have assumed that the

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Mary in the third codicil is the younger Mary, given the emphasis on health, the older, not the younger, Mary may be the one addressed ­here. 21. JJ to FJ, Oct. 3, 1782 (draft), in SP, 3:172; FJ to JJ (copy), Jan. 26, 1783, PJJ Doc. 06339. Claas may have been the man named “Massey” recorded as a former John Jay slave evacuated with the British in 1783, although the date listed for his arrival with the British does not line up with Claas’s apparent departure (see chapter 2); “Inspection Roll of Negroes, Book No. 2,” in Hodges, Black Loyalist, 184. 22. Walker, “Blacks as American Loyalists,” offers a superbly concise account. 23. JJ to Richard Oswald (draft), Sept. 10, 1782, in Giunta, Emerging Nation, 561. 24. Congressional Resolutions, Sept. 10, 1782; JA to RRL, No. 11, 1782; Richard Oswald to Thomas Townshend, Nov. 15, 1782; Giunta, Emerging Nation, 560, 656, 658– 59; RRL to BF (draft), Sept. 13, 1782, in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 38:102–4, see esp. n8. For overviews of the peace negotiations, see Morris, Witnesses, 76–93; Bemis, Diplomacy, 234; Rakove, Revolutionaries, 276–89. 25. BF to Richard Oswald, Nov. 26, 1782, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 38:350–56; Waldstreicher, Runaway, 221–22; Schama, Rough, 8–9, 55–126; Nash, Forgotten, 22–38. 26. “Preliminary Articles of Peace between the United States and ­Great Britain,” in Giunta, Emerging Nation, 700; John Adams’s Journal, Nov. 30, 1782, in Giunta, Emerging Nation, 692; HL to South Carolina Delegates, Dec.  16, 1782, in Papers of Henry Laurens, 16:79–80, n2. 27. HL to John Lewis Gervais, Aug. 9,1783, Mar. 4, 1784; HL to John Owen, Mar. 4, 1784; HL to Richard Oswald, Aug. 16, 1783, in Papers of Henry Laurens, 16:254–55, 267– 68, 362n, 402–3, 408–10; HL to BF, Apr. 7, 1782, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 37:108–9, n9; Bemis, Diplomacy, 195; Papers of Henry Laurens, 15:620–22. 28. Bemis, Diplomacy, 238, writes the w ­ hole episode off rather cavalierly as a bargain “between two old slave merchants.” 29. Nov. 29, 1782, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 38:375–77, 382n. 30. Adams, Journal, Nov. 30, 1782; BF to RRL, Dec. 5, 1782, in Giunta, Emerging Nation, 692–94, 708–9. 31. JJ to RRL, Dec. 14, 1782, SP, 3:286–87; see also HL to South Carolina delegates, Dec. 16, 1782; HL to James Laurens, Dec. 17, 1782; HL to Thomas Day, Dec. 23, 1782, in Papers of Henry Laurens, 16:79–81, 84, 95. 32. Memorandum of a Conference between GW and Guy Carleton, May 6, 1783; GW to Guy Carleton, May 6, 1783; Guy Carleton to GW, May 12, 1783, in Giunta, Emerging Nation, 848–50, 851–52, 856–57. 33. Hodges, ed., Black Loyalist, 170, 184; RRL to BF, May 9, 1783; Peace Commissioners to Robert Hartley, July 17, 1783; Commissioners to RRL, July 18, 1783, in Giunta, Emerging Nation, 854, 881, 885–86; BF to HL, July 6, 1783, Papers of Henry Laurens, 16:231. Compare the Draft Definitive Treaty (c. Aug. 6, 1783) and the Definitive Treaty ratified by Congress ( Jan. 14, 1784), in Giunta, Emerging Nation, 906–9, 964–67. 34. Charles James Fox to David Hartley, Aug. 9, 1783; Hartley to Fox, Aug. 20, 1783; HL to American Peace Commissioners, Aug. 9, 1783, JA to RRL, Aug. 13, 1783, in Giunta, Emerging Nation, 913–18, 922–23; Foote, Black and White, 217, 226; Kruger, “Born to Run,” 656 estimates as many as 4,000. Wiencek, Imperfect, 253–58; see also Gellman, Emancipating New York, 38–39, for additional information and sources.

NOTES TO PA GES 65– 71

419

35. For hints of Adams’s budding antislavery views, see Works, 2:200, 280, 497–98; 3:280. On Franklin, see Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 19:112–16, 187–88, 269; and Waldstreicher, Runaway. On Laurens, see HL to James Bourdieu, Feb. 6, 1783; HL to William Drayton, Feb. 15, Feb. 23, 1783; HL to John Owen, Apr. 1, 1783, Mar. 4, 1784, in Papers of Henry Laurens, 16:144, 145–46, 155–57, 174, 409; Rakove, Revolutionaries, 198, 205–8, 215–18; and David Duncan Wallace, Life of Henry Laurens, 444–55. 36. For an appraisal of Article VII within the broader context of l­egal pre­ce­dents involving war­time emancipation, see Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, 108–31, and chapter 4 of this book. 37. Young Peter Augustus spent ­these years of separation with Sally’s Livingston relatives in New Jersey and with John’s ­brother and f­ ather; SP, 3:xxx. 38. Horton, “Listening,” introduction and 62–66, tells Abbe’s story as part of a superb effort to uncover the story of all of John Jay’s slaves; I draw inspiration from her example and benefit from her detective work; Littlefield, “John Jay,” 128–30, also writes with insight on this episode. 39. Abbe had played an impor­tant role in assisting Sally Jay with her c­ hildren, e­ arlier in the year helping with the weaning of one of the girls, though Abbe’s health in France had not been good; see SLJ to Susannah French Livingston, Apr. 15, 1783, in SL, 133; SLJ to Kitty Livingston (draft), June 11, 1783, SL, 135. 40. SLJ to JJ, Nov. 6, 1783, SL, 147–48. 41. On French law and slavery, see Boulle, “Racial,” 19–46, quotation 29, 40; and Peabody, “­There Are No Slaves in France”; see also Wiencek, Master, 190. 42. SLJ to JJ, Nov. 6, 1783, SL, 147–48; this incident was not the first time that Franklin had intervened with authorities to help someone recover a slave; see Wald­streicher, Runaway, 222–4. 43. SLJ to JJ, Nov. 6, 1783; PJM to JJ (draft), Nov. 12, 1783, SL, 148–49. 44. Melish, Disowning, 93, 107, comments astutely on how slow whites w ­ ere to give up on the notion of their own authority, even during emancipation. That Jay was negotiating at all anticipates conditions once gradual emancipation would be underway, though in this instance, Abbe held far less leverage; see White, Somewhat, 108–12, 115, 149, 151–52; and Stories, 13–15; Kruger, “Born to Run,” 756–57. 45. JJ to William T ­ emple Franklin, Nov. 11, 1783, SP, 3:513; SLJ to JJ, Nov. 18, 1783, SL, 151. 46. SLJ to JJ, Nov. 6, 1783; JJ to SLJ, Nov. 23, 1783, SL, 148, 153. 47. SLJ to William T ­ emple Franklin, Dec. 7, 1783; SLJ to JJ, Dec. 7, Dec. 11, 1783; PJM to JJ (draft), Dec. 7, 1783, SP, 3:527, 528, 529, 532. 48. JJ to SLJ, Dec. 26, 1783, SP, 3:536–37; see also SP, 3:541n for Peter Jay Munro’s observation that Sally dealt with tragedy with “accustomed fortitude” and with more equanimity than most other p­ eople would have dealt with “like accidents”; and JJ to SLJ, Dec. 8, 10, 20, 1783, PJJ Docs. 08043, 08044, 08045, on inoculations. 49. PJM to JJ (draft), Jan. 4, 1784, SP, 3:541. 50. The general inspiration for this insight is Scott, Domination, esp. chap. 6 on “the arts of po­liti­cal disguise,” including “spirit possession” on 141–42. For a similarly suggestive incident from colonial Amer­i­ca of a slave ghost haunting a h ­ ouse where he was murdered by his master, see Moraley, Infortunate, 83; for another colonial ghost story, see Winiarski, “ ‘Pale.’ ” The lit­er­a­ture on witchcraft and demonic possession in

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TO PAGES 71– 76

New ­England is suggestive as well, esp. the psychologically rich Demos, Entertaining Satan, and Karlsen, Dev­il. 51. JJ to Carmichael, Apr. 24, 1784, PJJ, Doc. 07721. Peabody, “­There Are No Slaves in France,” 135, intriguingly suggests an increase in the number of French masters freeing their slaves in France. JJ, manumission document for Benoit, Mar. 21, 1784, PJJ, Doc. 07298. 52. Stahr, John Jay, 190, 193, 236–39; Littlefield, “John Jay,” 107, 128, 130–32; see also thoughtful remarks by Freeman, North, and Wedge on Jay and slavery and pairing Abbe’s death and Benoit’s manumission document in the appendix to SL, 296–99. Horton, “Listening,” 62; Nuxoll, SP, 3:569n. 53. Matthew Ridley to Catherine Livingston, Mar. 26, 1783, PJJ, Doc. 04691; Klingelhofer, “Matthew Ridley’s Diary”; see also SL, 126; SP, 3:xxxi, 219. 4. Nation-­Building

1. Granville Sharp to the President, Vice President, and Trea­surer of the New-­York Manumission Society, May 1, 1788, SP, 4:707; Jay to En­glish Anti-­Slavery Society, n.d., 1788, CPP, 3:340–44. 2. ­These same four concentric circles informed the experiences of slaves, as well as less famous or po­liti­cally power­f ul Black and white foot soldiers in the abolitionist cause. Davis, Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution and his w ­ hole bookshelf of canonical works are dedicated to a multivalent perspective; see also Brown, Moral Capital; Drescher, Abolition; Rael, Eighty-­Eight Years, see esp. xi, 62, which explic­itly nest his new synthesis of US emancipation in a transatlantic context. Furstenberg, “Atlantic Slavery,” offers a fascinating example of studying a single founding ­father in his cosmopolitan context; Morgan “To Get Quit,” 406, gestures in this direction; Chan, “Alexander Hamilton,” esp. 208, also takes this approach. 3. Littlefield, “John Jay,” 98; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 41, though having far too many fish to fry to focus intensively on the found­ers, nonetheless makes this key point: “The sectional division over slavery belies generalizations of ­either an antislavery revolutionary generation or the equally flattening notion of a proslavery consensus among the found­ers.” Gordon-­Reed and Onuf, Most Blessed, offers a compelling portrait of a founder operating in a very dif­fer­ent regional context; see also, Wiencek, Imperfect and Master; and for biographical studies of found­ers from the mid-­Atlantic that take the subject of slavery seriously, see Waldstreicher, Runaway, and Chernow, Alexander Hamilton. 4. Polgar, “Prob­lem.” 5. SL, 167; SP, 3:584–87; Stahr, John Jay, 197–98; Wallace and Burrows, Gotham, 265–306. 6. SP, 5:73; US Federal Census 1790, Ancestry​.c­ om (website); Horton, “Listening,” 70–73, Appendix; Stahr, John Jay, 223–26; White, Somewhat, 4–14. 7. John Jay’s Account Book, JJHx; “Abstracts of ­Wills,”—­Liber 33, 262–63 (photocopy provided to author from files at JJH). 8. Nash and Soderlund, Freedom; Melish, Disowning; Breen, “Making History”; Wolf, Race, 21–35. 9. Sedgwick Jr., Memoir, 399–401; Waldstreicher, Runaway, xi, 229–31, 235–37.

NOTES TO PA GES 77– 82

421

10. NYMS, 6:3–4, Feb. 4, 1785; JJ to Benjamin Rush, Mar. 24, 1785, SP, 4:72. On the NYMS and its early program and achievements, see Gellman, Emancipating New York, 56–77; Oakes, Freedom, 10–12; Chan, “Alexander Hamilton,” 214–15. 11. JJ to John Murray, Jr., (draft), Oct. 10, 1786, PJJ, Doc. 07283; Jefferson, Notes, 138, 163; Polgar, Standard-­Bearers, 53–54, 103–10, 289, has influenced my thinking about the scope and sincerity of the NYMS’s antislavery commitments and the first movement for emancipation more generally; Littlefield, “John Jay,”121, also notes Jay’s lack of racist presumptions. 12. NYMS, Feb. 4, 1785, Nov. 10, 1785, Feb. 8, 1786, May 1, 1786, Feb. 15, 1787, 6:3– 4, 16, 29–30, 37–38, 40–41, 61; White, Somewhat, 81–4; Harris, In the Shadow, 61–65; Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 210–11, 215, 581; Chan, “Alexander Hamilton,” 223; White, Somewhat, 81–86; Littlefield, “John Jay,” 93, 103, 119; Ball, “Ambition”; for a more critical appraisal of this incident, the NYMS, and Hamilton, see Weston, “Alexander Hamilton”; for evidence of Hamilton’s subsequent slave purchases, see Serfilippi, “As Odious,” 7–9, 16–17. 13. On demographics, see Gellman, Emancipating New York, 40; Davis, “New York’s Long Black Line,” 55–57; Kruger, “Born to Run,” 642–43, 688–89; White, Somewhat, 22–23, 27, 54. NYMS, Feb. 10, 1785, 6:17. 14. Gellman, Emancipating New York, 48–53; NYMS, Aug. 8, 1785, 6:22. 15. Richard Price to JJ, July 9, 1785; JJ to Richard Price (draft), Sept. 27, 1785; SP, 4:134–35, 190–91; White, Somewhat, 82; on Price, see Brown, Moral Capital, 126–28, 149–50, 172, and SP, 3:662n. 16. Richard Lushington to JJ, Feb. 22, 1786, SP, 300–301. 17. New-­York Packet, Mar. 13, 1786; JJ to Lushington, Mar. 15, 1786, CPP, 3:185. 18. Gellman, Emancipating New York, 67–68; NYMS, May 11, Nov. 9, 1786, 6:42–45, 54–55; see also Feb. 8, May 11, 1786; Feb. 15, May 17, 1787; Jan. 26, 1788, 6:37, 39, 41– 42, 60, 66, 91–92; “An Act concerning Slaves,” Laws of the State of New-­York (1788), 75– 78; Oakes, Freedom, 11–2. 19. JJ to committee for manumitting slaves, Feb. 25, 1788, PJJ, Doc. 07303; NYMS, Aug. 10, 1786; Apr. 10, May 17, 1787; May 15, 1788, 6:48, 63, 68, 108. 20. NYMS, Aug. 11, Nov. 10, 1785, May 17, 1787, Nov. 15, 1787, Feb. 21, 1788, 6:24, 26, 66–67, 80–89, 96–97; Harris, In the Shadow, 49, 64–65. 21. On JJ’s correspondence committee work, see NYMS, Feb. 21, Aug. 21, 1788, May 21, 1789, 6:95, 111, 131–32; JJ to Society at Paris for Manumission of Slaves, n.d. 1788, JJ to Lafayette, Sept. 1, 1788, PJJ. Docs. 05842, 07309, 07310; JJ to Thomas Clarkson, Sept. 1, 1788, Papers of Thomas Clarkson, HL. 22. White, Somewhat, 26–30; Kruger, “Born to Run,” 687–91, 725–27, 740, 747, 753–55. 23. Sedgwick Jr., Memoir, 400–401; circumstantially validated by WL to JJ, May 1, 1786, PJJ, Doc. 06893, in which he reports a servant absconding, leaving his ­house­hold without any; Kruger, “Born to Run,” 758. 24. Transcription of the ­will of Anna Maricka Jay, in JJH collection of Jay ­family w ­ ills. 25. Stahr, John Jay, 198–99; Ellis, Quartet, 73–74, 85–87. 26. Charles Thomson to JJ, Apr. 22, 1785; JJ to GW, Aug. 26, 1785, PJJ, Docs. 01627, 01379; JJ to President of Congress, July 3, 1786, SP, 4:357; JA to JJ, May, 25, 1786, in Works of John Adams, 8:394–96.

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TO PAGES 82– 88

27. JJ, Secret Journals, 187–274; Stahr, John Jay, 200–205. 28. JJ, Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Oct. 13, 1786, Secret Journals, 274–77 (emphasis in original). 29. JJ, Secret Journals, 277 (emphasis in original). 30. JJ, Secret Journals, 278; Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, 113–15. 31. Kaminski, “Honor,” 293, 295, 322–33, emphasizes the attitude of “moral statesmanship” (295) that guided Jay while he held this crucial post, as well as how he applied this approach to his response to Article 7 in his report. 32. JJ to GW, Mar. 16, 1786, SP, 4:313, 464–65; Ellis, Quartet, 90–93, 97,107–8, 112–14; Stahr, John Jay, 241–44. 33. Stahr, John Jay, 245–46; Ellis, Quartet, 125; SP, 4:464–65. 34. Beeman, Plain, Honest Men, esp. 83–84; Minutes of the NYMS, Aug. 16 and 17, 1787, SP, 4:538–40. 35. Brookhiser, Gentleman, 3, 32, 34, 83–91, quotation 85; Richards, Slave Power, 28– 34; Mintz, Gouverneur, vii–­viii, 7, 14–15, 76; Adams, Gouverneur Morris, 4, 8–9, 81, 148– 65; Solberg, ed., Constitutional Convention, 213, 215, 278, 285, 300, 303; Finkelman, Slavery, 17–20; see also Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union; and Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution. 36. Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, and Freedom, 2–34, articulate explanations of antislavery constitutionalism; for an interpretation of the Constitution that emphasizes the document’s re­sis­tance to the recognition of slavery u ­ nder federal law, see also Wilentz, No Property; Chan, “Alexander Hamilton,” 219–20. 37. Van Cleve, Slaveholder’s Union, 108, 111–13, 152–66; Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution, 86–88; Waldstreicher, “Too Big.” 38. Quotation from Storing, Complete Anti-­Federalist, 6:50–51; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 87–88; The Federalist Papers, Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, 42, 43, 54, 64, Avalon Proj­ ect; Ellis, Founding, 114–15; Oakes, “Compromising Expedient”; Stahr, John Jay, 249–51. 39. [JJ], Address, esp. 4, 12, 18–19; Stahr, John Jay, 253–54. 40. Maier, Ratification, 317, 320–400; Debates, 18–19, 26. Several days a­ fter the Hamilton–­Smith exchange, Jay mentioned in passing that slaves w ­ ere a type of luxury item the national government might tax—­see SP, 5:6, 28, and more generally 1–12. See also, “Ratification”; Boonshoft, “Doughfaces”; Ball, “Ambition”; and Weston, “Alexander Hamilton.” 41. Granville Sharp to the President, Vice President, and Trea­surer of the New-­York Manumission Society, May 1, 1788, SP, 4:707–9; Jay to En­glish Anti-­Slavery Society, n.d., 1788, CPP, 3:340–44; NYMS, Feb. 21, 1788, 6:92–97. 42. Landers, Atlantic; JJ, Office of Foreign Affairs, Aug. 14, 1788; JJ to William Carmichael, Sept. 9, 1788; JJ to Don Diego de Gardoqui y Arriquibar, Sept. 16, 1788, Gardoqui to Jay, Sept. 19, 1788; JJ to William Carmichael, Oct. 2, 1789; PJJ, Docs. 03734, 02531, 05847, 03740, 02541; Continental Congress, Report on Slaves Who Escaped to Florida, Aug. 26, 1788, in Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 5:205; US Constitution, Art. IV, sec. 2. 43. Van Cleve, Slaveholder’s Union, is particularly forceful on this point; Riley, Slavery, shows how the same pro­cess played out over time for antislavery Demo­cratic Republicans. 44. John Jay to J. C. Dongan, Feb. 27, 1792, SP, 5:361–62; WJ, LJ, 1:235.

NOTES TO PA GES 89– 96

423

45. PJM to JJ, May 5 and May 11, 1790, PJJ, Docs. 00409, 00410; SP, 5:214–30, provides a highly informative account of Jay’s circuit-­riding experience. 46. JJ to PAJ, June 17, 1791, SL, 198 (emphasis in original). 47. SLJ to JJ, April 23, 1790; May 13, 1792, SL, 191, 207. 48. Sally Jay’s letter to her s­ ister Susannah reported this awful death quite perfunctorily. SLJ to Susannah Livingston Symmes, Nov. 12, 1792, JJH transcription of JJP; Klepp, “Seasoning”; Horton, “Listening,” 78–80; see also SLJ to JJ, June 2, 1792, SL, 210. 49. Chisholm v. Georgia, SP, 5:466–77 (emphasis in original); Johnson, “John Jay,” 76– 83; Morris, John Jay, chap. 2. 50. SP, 5:354. 51. Dongan to JJ, Feb. 27, 1792, SP, 5:359–60; see also LJ, 1:284–85. 52. JJ to Dongan, Feb. 27, 1792, SP, 5:361; see also Littlefield, “John Jay,” 96–97, 107. 53. New-­York Journal, April 21, 1792; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 132–35. 54. Alexander Hamilton received a letter that asserted, “I expect our Election is Very Tight. Mr. Jays [sic] being one of the Emancipation Committee operates much against him”—­Josh Mersereau to AH, Apr. 29, 1792, in Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 11:344; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 135; Young, Demo­cratic Republicans, 300–303, 589; Kaminski, George Clinton, 215–27; Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 170–96. 55. Elkins and McKitrick, Age, 375–95; Morris, John Jay, 92–93; Stahr, John Jay, 317, 319–21; SL, 224. 56. JJ to Edmund Randolph, Sept. 13, 1794 (emphasis in original), PJJ, Doc. 04312; Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, 115–18. On Mansfield and the Somerset decision see Brown, Moral Capital, 97–101; Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union, 31–33; Drescher, Abolition, 99–105; Oldham, “New Light”; Krikler, “Zong”; Davis, Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 474–501. 57. Randolph to JJ, Dec. 3, 1794, PJJ, Doc. 00619. 58. Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution, chap. 1, coins the phrase “Mansfieldian moment” and illustrates, 39–56, the long shadow that the decision cast on southern perceptions of what was at stake in national politics; see also Van Cleve, A Slaveholder’s Union, 31–32, 50–56, 170–71. 59. Randolph to JJ, Dec. 15, 1794, PJJ, Doc. 00620. In his ­earlier note, Randolph indicated to Jay that a failure to mention the evacuees at all in the treaty might lead “some quarters of the ­union” to “suppose themselves neglected”; Randolph to JJ, Dec. 3, 1794. 60. JJ to Randolph, Feb. 5, 1795, PJJ, Doc. 04301. 61. Littlefield, “John Jay,” 110–11; Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, 124–30. 62. Stahr, John Jay, 330–31; Davis, Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 25, 115, 174, 234, 235, 237, 347, 358, 362, 405, 426; Brown, Moral Capital, 123, 228–30, 235–36, 255–56, 417, 418, 422, 429, 443n; JJ to Samuel Hoare Jr., Sept. 1, 1788, PJJ, Doc. 07306; see also JJ to Edmund Burke, Dec. 12, 1795, PJJ, Doc.12824, a cordial letter indicating that a pleasant relationship between the two developed during Jay’s stay in E ­ ngland, the subject of this letter being horticulture. 63. Wilberforce to JJ, Jan. 28, Feb. 7, May 11, Aug. 27, 1795; Nov. 7, 1805; see also Feb. 4, 1798, PJJ, Docs. 90434, 09273, 09275, 09274, 09283, 04899; Brown, Moral Capital, 259–330, 333–89; Sidbury, Becoming, 91–129; Davis, Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 25–30, 93, 94, 115, 246, 364, 380. 64. SLJ to JJ, Apr. 22, 1794, SL, 224.

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TO PAGES 97– 103

65. JJ to SLJ, Aug. 16, 1794, SL, 230–31. 66. JJ to PJM, Sept. 14, 1794, PJJ, Doc. 00427. 67. SLJ to Catherine Livingston Ridley, Nov. 25, 1794, JJHx transcription of JJP document; SLJ to JJ, Dec. 5, 1794, SL, 245–47. PAJ to SLJ, Feb. 8, 1795, PJJ, Doc. 10021; PAJ to NJ, Feb. 8, 1795, JJHx transcription; JJ to SLJ, Feb. 22, 1795, Kenneth W. Rendell Inc. website, http://­www​.­kwrendell​.­com​/­full​-­description​.­aspx​?­ItemID​=­20101602, accessed Jan. 25, 2008. 68. PAJ to NJ, Nov. 8, 1794; JJ to SLJ, Mar. 13, 1795, SL, 239–40, 252–53; Stahr, John Jay, 333–34; see also SLJ to JJ, Nov. 11, 1794, SL, 241, where Sally urges John not to attempt a winter voyage home. 69. Stahr, John Jay, 333–34, 339; Young, Demo­cratic Republicans, 308, 429–42, 589. 70. Stahr, John Jay, 335–37; Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 485–90; Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 18:391–92n; Elkins and McKitrick, Age, 407–49; Jay Treaty; Stewart, Opposition, 200–201, 214, 216–19; Argus, July 10, 15, 1795; Sharp, American, 117–27; Estes, “John Jay.” 71. Argus, July 13, 17, 22, 1795 (emphasis in original); Dangerfield, Chancellor, 268–72; Stahr, John Jay, 232, 285–86, 318–19. 72. Estes, “John Jay”; Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 479–81, 488–96. 73. “The Defence No. III,” Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 18:519 (emphasis in original); “The Defence No. V,” Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 19:93; see also “Philo Camillus No. 2,” and “The Defence No. IX, 19:100–5,164; Stahr, 337–38; Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, 118–25; Chan, “Alexander Hamilton,” 222; Estes, “Shaping”; Elkins and McKitrick, Age, 432–36. 74. Hamilton, in his private correspondence with George Washington, also downplayed the worthiness of insisting on compensation: see AH, Remarks on the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 18:414–34; and AH to GW, Sept. 4, 1795, Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 19:236; see also Chernow, Hamilton, 211–16, 295, 395, 485–86, 495. Jay’s brother-­in-­law Brockholst Livingston, a personal and po­liti­cal rival, published as “Cinna” a lengthy refutation of Hamilton’s argument against demands for compensation; see Argus, Aug. 1, 1795; Elkins and McKitrick, Age, 432; Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 18:477n; Stahr, John Jay, 230–32, 285; on slavery and natu­ral rights, see Chan, “Alexander Hamilton,” 210–16; on the changing valence of slavery as an issue in New York po­liti­cal discourse, see Gellman, Emancipating New York, chap. 7. 75. Wiencek, Imperfect, 340–41, and more generally; see also Dunbar, Never Caught; Morgan “To Get Quit”; Twohig, “That Species of Property.” 76. Littlefield, “John Jay,” 98; Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, 124–25; Ellis, Founding ­Brothers, 81–119; Boonshoft, “Doughfaces”; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 41. 5. Mastering Paradox

1. Background information on Hamilton’s early life is sketchy; for a summary of Hamilton’s life see Hodges, “Hamilton, William T.,” 2:144–5; and McNeil, “Hamilton,” 3:1178. 2. William Hamilton to JJ, Mar. 8, 1796, PJJ, Doc. 07312; also published in Monaghan, “Anti-­Slavery Papers,” 491–93; for another approach to this letter, see Littlefield, “John Jay,” 91, 96.

NOTES TO PA GES 103– 111

425

3. Oakes, Freedom National, 10–12, makes a particularly forceful case for the significance of gradual emancipation regimes; see also Polgar, Standard-­Bearers. 4. PAJ to JJ, May 13, 1796; Oct. 24, 1797, PJJ, Docs. 06067, 06058; Peter A. Jay is the presumed author of “To the Law Society,” JJ Ide Col. Bx 3-­Misc. Fld Misc. Man; Den Hartog, Patriotism, 171–73. 5. JJ to PAJ, Jan. 2, 1800, SL, 268–69; Jay, Memorials, 25–34; see also Pencak, “Salt of the Earth,” 247. 6. JJ to MJB and NJ, June 1, 1792, SL, 209; JJ to MJB, Dec. 9, 1794, SL, 247; see also SLJ to MJB, Oct. 21, 1794, SL, 235. Letter-­writing skills w ­ ere stressed by both parents; valuable information about the older Jay ­sisters and childhood education in the ­family can be found in North, “Amiable,” and the informative essay “Education” by Freeman, North, and Wedge in the appendix of SL, 291–93. 7. SLJ to JJ, Jan. 30, 1791, JJ Ide Col. Box 1, Correspondence, 1772–1841; SLJ to JJ, May 6, 1792; Oct. 11, 1794, SL, 206, 234. 8. SLJ to JJ, May 31, 1799, SL, 264; on the bond between the two youn­gest siblings, see North, “Amiable,” 4; and SL, 293. 9. JJ to MJB, May 7, 1792, SL, 207; JJ to SLJ, June 6, 1800, SL, 271. See SLJ to JJ, Oct. 11, 1794, SL, 234, in which Sally remarked to John in London on Maria’s “answering your expectations”; see also SL, 293. 10. Taylor, William Cooper’s Town; as Taylor notes, 168–80, describes James’s ambitious ­father William Cooper as a po­liti­cal ally of Jay and New York’s Federalist elite. WJCM, 1–3, Taylor, Cooper’s Town, 339–40; Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, 44–46; SL, 293; SLJ to JJ, July 21, 1799, SL, 267. 11. White, Somewhat, 34–36, 40–41, 43, 46, 82, on the changing composition and social meaning of slaveholding in New York City. 12. Inventory, November 1798, PJJ, Doc. 09216; Wilentz, Rise, 84. 13. Kruger, “Born to Run,” 756–66, quotation 765. 14. JJ to Richard Lawrence, Feb. 9, 1797, PJJ, Doc. 08969; on Peter Williams Sr., see Hodges, Root, 126, 142, 183, 239. 15. PAJ to JJ, Jan. 21, 1808, PJJ, Doc. 06126. 16. Horton, “Listening,” 78–80, 86–87. 17. PAJ to JJ, Jan. 9, 1797, PJJ, Doc. 06056. 18. JJ to PAJ, Oct. 2, 1797, Jay ­Family Papers, HL; PAJ to MJB, Oct. 8, 1797, typescript excerpted from Columbia University Libraries Manuscript Collections, held at JJHx; Horton, “Listening,” 87–88, on Caesar’s discipline prob­lems, and 73–74, 76–77, 81–84, 87–91, 101–6, 109–10, on John Jay’s slave management and disciplinary style. 19. JJ to Lewis A. Scott, Oct. 11, Oct. 25, 1797, PJJ, Docs. 02839 (original location unknown), 02722 (original held at New York Public Library); Gellman, Emancipating New York, 66–70; Zilversmit, First, 161; Laws of the State of New York, (1792), 1:312. 20. PAJ to MJB, Oct. 8, 1797, JJH typescript of Columbia doc; PJ to JJ, Oct. 24, 1797, PJJ, Doc. 06058. 21. JJ to PAJ, Nov.  2, 1797, PJJ, Doc.11350 (original held at Archivo Historico Nacional—­emphasis in original). 22. JJ to PAJ, Jan. 26, 1799; SLJ to PAJ, June 17, 1800, PJJ, Docs. 09978, 10008 (originals held at JJH).

42 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 112– 117

23. PAJ to JJ, Feb. 22, 1800; JJ to PAJ, Mar. 3, 1800, PJJ, Docs. 11459, 13348; on crossing back and forth between the United States and St. Domingue during this tumultuous era, see White, Encountering, 141. 24. Judith Livingston Watkins to SLJ, Aug. 6, 1798, May 5, 1800, PJJ, Docs. 06393, 08367; the letters ­were posted from “Salubria,” which I am assuming is near Lake Salubria in present-­day Steuben County; see SLJ to Susan Livingston Symmes, Feb. 22, 1797, PJJ, Doc. 06389, which lists Seneca as her destination, which would be farther to the north in the Fin­ger Lakes region. 25. Gellman, Emancipating New York, 165; Journal of the Assembly (1796), 4–7; Pennsylvania Gazette, Jan. 13, 1796; WJ, LJ, 1:390–91. 26. Journal of the Assembly (1796), 6–7; Journal of the Assembly (1797), 6; Pennsylvania Gazette, Jan. 13, 1796; Philadelphia Gazette, Jan. 9, 1796; Albany Gazette, Jan. 15, 1796; JJ to Richard Lawrence, Feb. 9, 1797, PJJ, Doc. 08969. A. White, Encountering, documents the extensive interaction of the U.S. and Haiti during this period and the impact of approximately 20,000 refugees; see esp. 62, 64, 77, 126; see also S. White, Somewhat More In­de­pen­dent, 31–32, 85, 143–45, 155. 27. NYMS, Nov. 20, 1788; Feb. 15, 1791, 6:124, 153; North, “Amiable ­Children,” 7; NYMS, May 15, 1798, 9:10. 28. NYMS, Nov. 19, 1793, 6:183; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 154, 156; Sayre, “Evolution”; Moseley, History, chap. 6; Polgar, Standard-­Bearers, 54, 134–37, 156. NYMS, May 22, 1793, May 17, 1796, 6:179, 229–30; for another instance of Frederick Jay’s involvement with the organ­ization’s activities, see NYMS, Oct. 23, 1792; Apr. 17, May 14, 1793, 7:15, 18, 19. Frederick Jay also hosted a meeting of the NYMS Standing Committee; NYMS, June 3, 1793, 7:20. 29. NYMS, Feb. 19, 1794; Jan. 17, 1797, 6:187, 243; Oct. 9, 1792; July 30, Sept. 10, 1793; Oct. 16, 1794; Nov. 22, 1796; Dec. 28, 1797; Mar. 7[?], 1799, 7:14, 20, 34, 79, 105, 115–16; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 159–60, 162–65; Polgar, Standard-­Bearers, 89, 103–20. 30. Hodges, Root, 173–75, 183–84; Minutes of the Common Council, June 22, 1795, 158– 59; White, Somewhat, 26–27, 114–49; Hodges and Brown, Pretends; Mc­Manus, History, 101–19; Groth, Slavery, 60–65, 71–72; Waldstreicher, “Reading,” 243–72; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 158, 160. 31. NYMS, Nov. 26, 1795; May 17, 1796, 6:217, 228; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 115–27, 140–43, 154–55, 161–62, 165, 167–69. 32. For the orations by Miller and Smith, see Gellman and Quigley, Jim Crow New York, 39–55, quotations, 40, 44, 49; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 154, 156, 159. 33. Gellman, Emancipating New York, 170–71, and the book more generally. 34. On politics and policy, see Sharp, American Politics, chaps. 8–10; Elkins and Mc­ Kittrick, Age of Federalism, chaps. 13–14; Ellis, Founding ­Brothers, 185–201; Wilentz, Rise, 72–89; on the passage of the emancipation law, see Gellman, Emancipating New York, 178; Zilversmit, First, 182–83; Young, Democratic-­Republicans, 529–32. 35. WJ, LJ, 1:408. 36. Laws of the State of New York (1799), 721–23; and Gellman and Quigley, Jim Crow New York, 52–55; on mortality, see Klepp, “Seasoning.” 37. The gradual emancipation formula and the racialized disabilities implicit in laws ­adopted by New York and other northern states have attracted no shortage of schol-

NOTES TO PA GES 118– 121

427

arly criticism: see Melish, Disowning, 68–118, and Harris, In the Shadow, 58, 70–71. For an older economic critique, see Fogel and Engerman, “Philanthropy,” and Goldin, “Economics.” 38. ACPAS, 1:191; Oakes, Freedom National; Polgar, Standard-­Bearers and “To Raise Them,” makes a forceful argument for the impact and progressive trajectory of northern emancipation. 39. Laws of the State of New York (1801), 207–9; NYMS, Vol. 9, May 20, 1800; May 12, 1801, 39, 59; prior legislation providing the context for this reform can be found in Laws of the State of New-­York (1795), 50–53; Laws of the State of New-­York (1797), 71–73; and Laws of the State of New-­York (1799), 834–36. Levine-­Groningsater, “Delivering Freedom,” chap. 3; Harris, In the Shadow, 132. 40. Laws of the State of New York (1887), 5:547–52; Journal of the Assembly (1801), 320– 21; ­these provisions can be compared with their pre­de­ces­sor laws, Laws of the State of New York (1785), 61–63, and Laws of the State of New-­York (1788), 75–78; Polgar, Standard-­ Bearers, 108. 41. NYMS, May 20, Nov. 25, 1800, and Special Meeting, n.d., 9: 40, 48, 49–51. 42. NYMS, Mar. 27, May 18, July 3, Oct. 3, Nov. 20, Dec. 10, 1800; June 2, 1801, 7:154–55, 157, 167, 172, 174, 176, 191. 43. On Sanders case, see NYMS, June 2, June 18, 1801; Jan. 18, 1802, 7:192, 194, 204; on Duchess Country case, see Mar. 24, Apr. 30, 1801; 7:188, 190; for Ennals case, see May (n.d.), June 19, 1802, 7:225, 229; for other examples of Munro’s involvement, see NYMS, Dec. 10, 1799; April 25, 1800; Dec. 9, 1803; Feb. 3, 1804, 7:129, 158–62, 249, 254; Jan. 20, 1801, 9:52; see also Polgar, Standard-­Bearers, 89, 103–20, on how early abolition socie­ties integrated such l­egal work into their mission. 44. NYMS, Jan. 18, 1802, 7:206–8, 9:72–74; “An Act to Prohibit the Carrying on the Slave Trade” and “An Act in Addition to the Act”; the Trans-­Atlantic Slave Trade Data­ base indicates two En­glish ships operating during this era by the name “Young Ralph,” though it is not clear from the individual voyage rec­ords that e­ ither is the same ship as the one mentioned in the NYMS minutes. 45. NYMS, Aug. 28, 1801, 7:197–200; May 20, 1800; Sept. 17, Sept. 23, 1801, 9:40, 66–67, 69. 46. It is also noteworthy that John Jay’s estranged brother-­in-­law Brockholst Livingston represented Madame Volunbrun in her successful effort; see Jones, “Time,” for a detailed investigation of the case; see also NYMS, Jan. 18, 1802, 9:72; Jan. 18, 1802, 7:205. 47. NYMS, Dec. 9, 1807, 10:19. During this period, Munro engaged personally in a halting transition from a world of masters and slaves to a world of employers and servants in which African Americans endured far more tenuous circumstances than their employers. Munro had owned four slaves in 1790. ­Whether for moral or financial reasons, when he needed someone to work in his ­house and stables in 1800, he opted to hire a ­free person rather than acquire a slave. He also manumitted one of his slaves, Candice, in 1803. Munro became president of the NYMS in 1810, several months a­ fter the organ­ization had at last ­adopted a rule restricting membership to non-­slaveholders (see NYMS, Apr. 11, July 11, 1809; Jan. 16, 1810, 9:214, 216, 235). But t­here is some indication that he continued to own at least one slave. The 1814 Mamaroneck town rec­ords in Westchester County show Munro registering the birth of girl named Charlot

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TO PAGES 121– 125

to a ­woman named Nelly. The registering of the ­children of enslaved m ­ others had been a requirement since the 1799 passage of the state’s gradual emancipation law. Perhaps Munro was registering a f­ree Black female servant’s child to ensure that as Charlot grew up ­there would be a clear rec­ord that she was born ­free, although this is mere speculation. His experience as a ­lawyer with the NYMS conveyed the clear message that African Americans’ f­ ree status did not protect them from all sorts of malfeasance; see PJM to JJ, Nov. 30, 1800; JJ to PJM, Dec. 4, 1800, PJJ, Docs. 04055, 00496 (originals in the Museum of the City of New York); Benton, “Slavery in Mamaroneck”; the federal censuses for 1810 and 1820 list Munro’s residence as New York City and registers the presence of only ­free ­people of color in his ­house­hold. 48. PAJ to JJ, Jan. 21, 1808, PJJ, Doc. 06126. 49. JJ to PAJ, Jan. 27, 1808, PJJ, Doc. 90066; Horton, “Listening,” 100–101. 50. John Murray Jr, to JJ, Sept. 2, 1805, PJJ, Doc. 10023; JJ to John Murray Jr., Oct. 18, 1805, PJJ, Doc. 09603; William Wilberforce to JJ, Aug. 1, 1809; Jul. 18, 1810, PJJ, Docs. 09282, 09277; JJ to Wilberforce, Nov. 8, 1809; Oct. 25, 1810, PJJ, Docs. 09281, 09278. 51. NYMS, Apr. 9, 1805; Jan. 13, 1807; Jan. 17, 1809; Jan. 16, 1810, 9:133–37, 165–67, 205–6, 235, 237; Laws of the State of New-­York (1807), 92–93; Public Laws, 32–33; Levine-­ Groningsater, “Delivering Freedom,” 89. Sir James Jay, John’s eldest ­brother, was among the slaveholders in the region who continued to exploit l­egal loopholes exacerbated by the porous border between New York and New Jersey; see Hartog, Trou­ ble, 72–73, and the 1810 US Census. 52. Den Hartog, Patriotism, 186. 53. Den Hartog, Patriotism, 186–87. Yale was not uncharted territory for the f­ amily; William Livingston, Sarah Jay’s f­ather, attended college t­ here, as did other members of the Livingston f­amily; JJ to WJ, Feb. [n.d.], 1803; Stahr, John Jay, 368, 370; on Yale and slavery, see Wilder, Ebony & Ivy, 52, 63–64, 76–77, 95–96, 100, 109, 118, 120–22, 133–34 (quotation), 244. 54. Den Hartog, Patriotism, 64, 187; Kelley, Yale, 115–39; Kingsley, Yale, 1:112–23; Dexter, Sketch, 47–54; Baldwin, Annals, chap. 8; Kafer, “Making”; see also, Dwight, Folly. 55. Kelley, Yale, 138; Kingsley, Yale College, 2:257–58. Cata­logue, 1–2, 8, 36–40; Yale College Commencement Programs (1807) Sterling Library; WJ to Angelina Grimke, Feb. 1, 1837, JJHF; Edward B. Coe, “The Literary Socie­ties,” in Kingsley, Yale College, 1:307–23; B ­ rothers in Unity, Rec­ords Book III; Secretary’s Rec­ords Book III; Minutes of meetings 1803, Apr. 27–­June 26, 1816, Clubs, Socie­ties & Organ­izations, Box 8, File 37, vari­ous dates and pages, Oct. 9, 1804–­April 1, 1807, Archives, Sterling Library. 56. Paley, Princi­ples, 291; see also, 191–94, 279, 284–93. Paley found a positive reception from American college faculty ­because he offered a theologically safe form of utilitarianism, favoring rationality in the ser­vice of ­human happiness without a hint of the radical impulse to unseat God at the head of the universe nor to replace Chris­ tian­ity as the religion that sustained God’s moral purposes; see Smith, “William Paley’s Theological Utilitarianism.” 57. Paley, Princi­ples, 195–98. 58. Cunningham, Timothy Dwight, 316–67, 335–36; Hinks, “Timothy Dwight,” 148– 61, provides the detail on Dwight’s manumission contract and, more broadly, makes the strongest case that can be made for Dwight as an antislavery figure. As a poet, Dwight conveyed a moral impatience with slavery, if perhaps too benign a view of

NOTES TO PA GES 125– 128

429

the conditions of slaves in the North; see Basker, Amazing Grace, xlv, 486–88; Silverman, Timothy Dwight, 51, 69–71, 113–14, 130–36, 152. One student’s 1802–1803 notes rec­ord Dwight’s comments on the “corruption of morals” in V ­ irginia and Maryland—­ Moses Bradford, “Miscellaneous observations made in the recitation room: New Haven, Connecticut, 1802–1803,” Gen MSS File 158, Beinecke Library. 59. David L. Daggett, “Dr. Dwight’s Observations on Paley’s Moral & Po­liti­cal Philosophy,” Yale Lectures Collection, Box 8, Folder 36, Sterling Library; Hezekiah Baldwin, “Notes on Locke” and “Notes on Paley,” 19, 40, 46–47, Yale Lectures Collection, Box 14, Folder 74, Sterling Library; see also “Notes from the instruction given by Dr Dwight to the Se­nior Class in Yale College 1812–1813,” 27–28, Yale Debates and Disputations Collection, Archives, Sterling Library; “ ‘Did All mankind descend from one pair.’ Se­nior Debates of Ralph Emerson in Yale College, 1810–1811,” 26–38, Ralph Emerson Papers Group 199, Box 1, Folder 6, Archives, Sterling Library; Bradford, Miscellaneous observations; on folk racialized anecdotes in New E ­ ngland, see Pierson, Black Yankees, 108–12, 132, 137, 156–57; Jordan, White over Black, 512–41, many years ago brilliantly explored the terrain of environmentalist notions of color in the early republic. 60. Dwight Jr., President Dwight’s Decisions, published his notes of ­these pedagogical proceedings; see Coe “The Literary Socie­ties,” in Kingsley, Yale College, 1:307–23. 61. ­Brothers in Unity Rec­ords Book III; Secretary’s Rec­ords Book III, Aug. 12, 1807; Jessup Couch, Book of disputation. Common place Book, notes, 4, Yale Debates & Disputations Collection, Box 2, Folder 17, Archives, Sterling Library; “Dr. Dwight’s Decisions, 1810–1811,” 7, Ralph Emerson Papers, Box 1, file 5, Archives, Sterling Library; Dwight, President Dwight’s Decisions, 157–65. 62. Bradford, “Miscellaneous observations.” 63. Couch, Book of disputation, 25–27. 64. Ralph Emerson, “On Slavery,” Box 1, file 13; “Did All mankind descend from one pair,” Se­nior Debates of Ralph Emerson in Yale College, 1810–1811, Ralph Emerson Papers, Box 1 fld 6, 13–17. ­Brothers in Unity, Rec­ords, Book III, Feb. 13, 1805, debated immediate abolition and rejected the proposition; William’s first appearance in the society’s rec­ord does not occur u ­ ntil October 9. 65. Dexter, Biographical Sketches, 131, identifies WJ as the author of t­hese essays; for background on the Literary Cabinet, see Franklin Car­ter, “College Magazines,” in Kingsley, Yale College, 1:339–40. 66. Literary Cabinet 1:2, 4, 5, Nov. 29, Dec. 27, 1806; Jan. 10, 1807, 12–13, 28, 30, 37. 67. Literary Cabinet 1:5, Jan. 10, 1807, 35–36; on the Jefferson administration as context for ­these youthful views, see Wilentz, Rise, 130–36. For William’s adult appreciation of his New E ­ ngland experience, Yale, and Dwight, see WJ to Thomas Fessenden, John A. Underwood, Samuel Tindal, Dec. 5, 1840; WJ to JJII, Nov. 2, Nov. 22, 1831; Jan. 20, 1834, JJHF—­family letters; John McVickar to JJII, n.d., Nina Iselin (Tolman) Ms Col, JJHF. 68. Hamilton to JJ, Mar. 8, 1796. 69. SLJ to JJ, Mar. 2, 1802; SLJ to MJB, May 5, 1802; Obituary, June 2, 1802, SL, 280, 282; JJ to Rufus King, Jan. 20, 1803 (draft), SL, 283; Brier, Mr. Jay, 47–51, 55, 57–62; Brier, “Joseph Cusno,” 41–42; Stahr, John Jay, 365–67. 70. PAJ to JJ, Jan. 21,1808; WJ to JJ, May 19, 1808; Mar. 13, Aug. 19, 1809, PJJ, Docs. 06126, 09651, 09653, 09654; WJ to MJB, May 17, 1809, JJP; Brier, Mr. Jay, 64–65; Budney, William Jay, 13–15.

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TO PAGES 129– 136

6. Sharing the Flame

1. Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, Apr. 22, 1820, Works of Thomas Jefferson, 12:158–60; Gordon-­Reed and Onuf, Most Blessed, 7–8, 89, 288, 294; Ellis, American Sphinx, 264–73. 2. National Recorder, Dec. 18, 1819; Eve­ning Post (NYC), Nov. 17, 1819; WJCM, 28; WJ, Diary, Dec. 31, 1820, JJH. 3. Brier, Mr. Jay, 68–78, 200, 217, 239; WJCM, 8–12; Stahr, John Jay, 366–70; North, “Amiable,” 4–5; 1810 US Federal Census, accessed through Ancestry​.­com. 4. See Horton, “Listening,” 101–4, for a version of this story. 5. PAJ to MJB, Oct. 21,1809; Sarah Louisa Jay to JJ, Jan. 15, 1810, PJJ, Docs. 10046, 09245; Genesis 28:24, 30:9; Horton, “Listening,” 103. 6. JJ to PAJ, Apr. 16, 1811, PJJ, Doc. 11518 (emphasis in original). 7. JJ to PAJ, Apr. 16, 1811; JJ to PAJ, May 8, 1811; JJ to PAJ, Mar. 9, 1813; PAJ to JJ, Mar. 12, 1813, PJJ, Docs. 11518, 11519, 11555, 06180. 8. PAJ to JJ, Apr. 5, 1811; PAJ to MJB, Aug. 1, 1811, PJJ, Docs. 06155, 90199. 9. NYMS, Nov. 17, 1807, Jan. 15, 1811, 9:175–76, 268, 271. 10. PAJ to MJB, July 6, 1810; JJ to PAJ, Oct. 24, 1811, PJJ, Docs. 90194, 11525 (emphasis in original). 11. PAJ to JJ, Oct. 22, 1813, PJJ, Doc. 06186; Brier, Mr. Jay, 78; Jay Heritage Center, https://­jayheritagecenter​.­org​/­land​-­ownership​-­residents/ (accessed June 18, 2020). 12. Transcription of Overseers of the Poor rec­ords, Rye, New York, Jan. 14, 1814, copy provided to author by Jay Heritage Society, Rye, New York. On the cultural politics of Revolutionary Era Black naming and renaming, see Nash, “Forging Freedom,” 20–27; and Berlin, Many Thousands, 239–40; White, Somewhat, 192–94; and Kruger, “Born to Run,” 437–47, 911–3, and, more broadly, chapter 14 of this stunningly rich, unpublished study. 13. JJ to Sarah Louisa Jay, May 4, 1813, PJJ, Doc. 06371; Brier, Mr. Jay, 130–32. 14. PAJ to JJ, July 8, July 29, 1808, PJJ. Docs. 06131, 06132; JJ to PAJ, Nov. 28, 1811; Mar. 24, 1812, PJJ, Doc. 11527, 11536; WJ to JJ, Jan. 29, 1813, PJJ, Doc. 09662 (emphasis in original). Horton, “Listening,” 111; see also WJ to JJ, Nov. 22, 1816, PJJ, Doc. 09683, in which WJ located a coachman in NYC for $12.50 per month. Brier, Mr. Jay, 117–23; evidence from Brier, “Joseph Cusno.” According to Brier, the census recorded Cusno and his ­family as mulatto and l­ater as white, while Cusno became a naturalized US citizen in 1834 ­under a federal law that applied exclusively to whites. 15. John Jay Ledger, Mar. 3, 1815, brief transcription in files of JJH; JJ to Caesar Pine, Dec. 28, 1818, PJJ, Doc. 08758 (emphasis in original). 16. Kruger, “Born to Run,” 887–937, see statistics on 857, 897, 908; White, Somewhat, 47–50; Hodges, Root, 175–76, 220–21; Hodges, Slavery and Freedom, 147–70; Harris, In the Shadow, 77, 80, 98–100; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 196–97; Horton, “Listening,” 111; Montgomery, Citizen, 13, 25–27, 32–24; White, Somewhat, 36. On gradualism and racialized norms, see Harris, In the Shadow, 57–58, 71, 115; Melish, Disowning, 69–70, 84–118; and Gigantino, Ragged, 110–14. 17. John Jay Ledgers, brief transcription in files of JJH; see Montgomery, Citizen, 39–42, on the significance of being able to quit in the era of indentured servitude’s decline.

NOTES TO PA GES 137– 141

431

18. NYMS, Vol. 10, covers the Standing Committee’s work for 1807–17; Polgar, Standard-­Bearers, 109–20; Polgar, “Prob­lem of Prejudice.” 19. NYMS, Jan. 16, 1810; Nov. 25, Dec. 16, 1811; Jan. 3, 1812, 9:235, 280, 282, 289– 90; Peter Jay Munro was president during this year, but not at ­these crucial meetings; Zilversmit, First, 211–13; Levine-­Gronningsater, “Delivering Freedom,” 122–32, 254; Journal of the Assembly (1815), 198, 233, 281–82, 291, 295–96, 302, 304; Journal of the Senate (1815), 176, 218–20, 231, 234, 270–73. 20. JCNY, 17–18, 64–66; Polgar, “Whenever,” 2–11; Journal of the Assembly (1815), 3, 359, 420, 466, 469–78; Journal of the Senate (1815), 289, 305–6, 326–28, 330, 333; “An Act to amend an act entitled ‘An act for regulating elections,’ passed March 29, 1813,” Apr. 11, 1815, Laws of the State of New-­York (1815), 146–48; Levine-­Gronningsater, “Delivering Freedom,” 252–53. 21. Journal of the Assembly (1816), 3, 163, 211, 370–71, 382; Journal of the Senate (1816), 229; Levine-­Gronningsater, “Delivering Freedom,” 123–24; “Observation on draft of law concerning Slaves and Servants,” in Elizabeth Clarkson Jay Papers, Manuscripts and Special Collections, New York State Library, contains a marked-up copy of the proposed bill; I am grateful to Sarah Gronningsater for sharing her digital photos of this document. 22. Journal of the Assembly (1816), 222, 264, 272, 357, 587, 604, 616; Levine-­ Gronningsater, “Delivering Freedom,” 253–54; The Eve­ning Post, Apr. 9, 1816; Albany Register, Apr. 25, 1815; for an article critical of l­egal obstructions to Black voting, see New-­York Courier, Mar. 25, Apr. 10, 1816; Gronningsater, “Expressly,” brilliantly demonstrates how African American New Yorkers exercised their franchise rights in the midst of po­liti­cal efforts to restrict their access to the polls. 23. Journal of the Assembly (1816), 50, 60–61, 419; Journal of the Senate (1816), 113– 14, 115, 126, 145; Journal of the Assembly (1815), 305–6; “An Act concerning the maintenance of certain person, formerly slaves,” Mar. 22, 1816, Laws of the State of New-­York (1816), 37. 24. Jay, Memorials, 92–93; Colden quoted from Albany Advertiser, Jan. 8, 1817 (emphasis in original); Public Papers of Daniel D. Tompkins, 1:106–7; Zilversmit, First, 213– 14; Levine-­Gronningsater, “Delivering Freedom,” 124–25; JCNY, 67–72; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 205–6. 25. JJ to PAJ, Mar. 12, 1817, PJJ, Doc. 90065; Horton, “Listening,” 109–10. 26. NJ to MJB, Mar. 2, 1818, PJJ, Doc. 06036. 27. 1810 United States Federal Census; 1820 United States Federal Census; search through Ancestry​.­com; the 1820 entry for “John Jay” requires entering “John Fay” in the search engine; Horton, “Listening,” is surprisingly ­silent on the entire subject of Clarinda’s manumission, though eloquent on the conditions of the ­later years of her life. 28. ACPAS, 2:632–33, 639–40, 641–43, 649–56, 662–70, quotations 642, 651, 655, 670; Polgar, Standard-­Bearers, 286–89. 29. Mason, Slavery & Politics, 177–81; Richards, Slave Power, 52–54; Brown, “Missouri Crisis”; Forbes, Missouri Compromise, 33–68; Wilentz, Rise, 222–31; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 186–87; Hammond, “President,” esp. 848–89. 30. Accounts of the meeting include Eve­ning Post (NYC), Nov. 17, 1819; The National Advocate (NYC), Nov. 18, 1819; Salem Gazette (Mass.), Nov. 23, 1819. News of the meeting

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TO PAGES 141– 148

spread all the way to Edwardsville, Illinois, near St. Louis, Missouri (Edwardsville Spectator, Dec. 25, 1819); see also Jay, Memorials, 94. 31. For a profile of Boudinot, see Den Hartog, Patriotism, 93–115. 32. JJ to Elias Boudinot, Nov. 17, 1819, PJJ, Doc. 08767 (emphasis preserved from the handwritten letter); National Recorder, Dec. 18, 1819; WJ, LJ, 1:452–53; Stahr, John Jay, 372–73. 33. Arbena, “Politics”; Richards, Slave Power, 49–51; Papers Relative to the Restriction of Slavery; New-­England Galaxy & Masonic Magazine, Dec. 17, 1819, Vol II, No. 14, p. 2, Stahr, John Jay, 373; New York Daily Advertiser, Dec. 15, 1819; Albany Gazette, Dec. 16, 1819; Rhode Island American, Dec. 17, 1819; New-­York American, Dec. 18, 1819; Vermont Journal, Dec. 20, 1819; (Newark, N.J.) Centinel of Freedom, Jan. 4, 1820; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 187. 34. In JJ to Daniel Raymond, Dec. 21, 1819, in WJ, LJ, 2:405–6, Jay expressed approval of Daniel Raymond, The Missouri Question (1819), a pamphlet that denied that ­either colonization or westward extension of slavery would weaken the institution and emphatically identified gradual emancipation (35) as the only v­ iable means of ending the institution; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 187–88. 35. WJ to Boudinot, quoted in WJCM, 28–9; JJ to Raymond, Dec. 21, 1819; Budney, William Jay, 20–21; Den Hartog, Patriotism, 191 and 186–200 generally, emphasizes William’s more avowedly religious approach to politics than his older b­ rother’s and also notes that the Missouri letter was “his first known objection to slavery.” 36. Wilentz, Rise, 232–35. 37. WJ, Diary, Dec. 31,1820; Wilentz, Rise, 235–36; JCNY, 84–86; Gellman, Emancipating New York, 209; Moore, Missouri Controversy, 138–39, 142–59. 38. Riley, Slavery, 214–41. 39. Munro et al., Address; PAJ to MJB, Mar. 17, 1820, JJ; Fox, Decline, 198–99, 206–28; PAJ to JJ, Jan. 28, Mar. 18, Apr. 1, Apr. 7, Apr. 15, May 20, 1819, PJJ, Docs. 06224, 06226, 06228, 06229, 06231, 06232; JJ to PAJ, Feb. 2, Mar. 12, Mar. 16, Mar. 21, Apr. 13, Apr. 20, 1819, PJJ, Docs.13425, 90099, 13424, 13515, 06230, 11591; PAJ to DeWitt Clinton, Apr. 10, 1819 (draft); Apr. 24, 1821, JJP; Den Hartog, Patriotism, 177; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 257, 365, 368; see ­later discussion on the disposition of the Rye property. 40. Polgar, “Whenever,” 11. 41. Reports of the Proceedings, 134–35. Sitting in the Albany gallery on September 12, the same day that the new outlines of racialized democracy in New York w ­ ere first officially proposed, William contrasted in his diary the impressive setting of the general assembly chamber with “the crude & jacobinical speeches of unprincipled & ignorant demagogues.” See WJ, Diary, Sept. 12, Dec. 31, 1821. 42. JCNY, 103. 43. JCNY, 105–8. 44. JCNY, 111–14. 45. JCNY, 138–42. 46. JCNY, 142; Reports of the Proceedings, 202. 47. PAJ to JJ, Oct. 3, 1821, PJJ, Doc. 06250. 48. JCNY, 176–83. 49. JCNY, 179. 50. JJ to PAJ, Oct.16, 1821, PJJ, Doc. 11609; see also PAJ to JJ, Oct. 10, Nov. 15, Nov. 22, 1821, PJJ, Docs. 06251, 06253, 06254.

NOTES TO PA GES 149– 152

433

51. JCNY, 180, 187; Reports of the Proceedings, 370, 377, 378; Polgar, “Whenever They Judge it Expedient,” 13–17. 52. JCNY, 194–98; Reports of the Proceedings, 487. 53. PAJ to JJ, Oct. 28, 1821, PJJ, Doc. 06252; PAJ to Mary Clarkson Jay, Nov. 8, 1821; Reports of the Proceedings, 657, 661, 664. 54. ACPAS, Nov. 27, Nov. 28, 1821, 2:780, 783–85, quotations 784. 55. ACPAS, Nov. 28, 1821, 2:790–98, quotations 791, 792, 793; see also Oct. 3, 1821, 2:748; Mason, Slavery and Politics, 206. Subsequently, the NYMS and the American Convention moved more decisively to embrace the notion that emancipation should be coupled with Black removal; Harris, In the Shadow, 140–41; Peter A. Jay too softened his opposition to Black emigration, forming a group seeking to cooperate with the government of Haiti to recruit f­ree Blacks to relocate to the Black republic where “they and their posterity may be placed in a situation to attain to a higher rank in civilization than we conceive it pos­si­ble for them to arrive at among ourselves”; M. Clarkson, Peter A. Jay, J. Grisom; Geo Newbold, Theodore Dwight et al to Robert Walsh, Esq., July  10, 1824; [Box 1013B, Cope Collection, Thomas Pym Cope 1768–1854, Friends Mtg. Affairs; folder Cope, Thomas Pym (letters to)], Haverford Quaker Collection, scan graciously shared with author by Sara Fanning; Wilder, Ebony & Ivy, 257. 56. Jay, Memorials, 64–81, 123–14; Pencak, “Salt of the Earth,” 247–48. 57. WJ to JJ, July 4, July 26, 1816, PJJ, Docs. 09670, 09671; WJ to Elias Boudinot, Mar. 25, 1816; [WJ], Memoir, quotation 14; WJ to Boudinot, Apr. 25, May 15, 1816, all in JJH [scanned from Elias Boudinot Papers]; WJ to Rev. Dr. Romeyn, May 13, 1817, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, American Prose, Jay, William Author; Brier, Mr. Jay, 224. Den Hartog, Patriotism, profiles the Jays, ­father and sons, chaps. 1, 7 and 8, to chart what he describes more broadly as a transformation of Federalism from a po­liti­cal movement to one centered on religious and social reform; see also Heale, “From City ­Fathers.” On Peter’s involvement, see PAJ, May 13, 1816, two drafts of notes for an address to American Bible Society, NYHS—­Ide collection box 3-­misc /misc man folder; PAJ, in Proceedings of a Meeting, 9–15; Den Hartog, Patriotism, 112, 181, 188. 58. WJ, Diary, entries for Christmas, Dec. 28, Dec. 31, 1817, and “Summary of po­ liti­cal events for 1817.” 59. North, “Amiable,” 4–5; WJ, Diary (entries Apr. 12, 16, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27; May 11, 1818); quotation Apr. 27; MJB to WJ, May 6, 1812, on closeness of William and Sally. The following July, William and Augusta would name their fourth child Sarah Louisa. 60. WJ. Diary, May 7, May 11, June 24, Dec. 31, 1818; June 16, 1819. 61. His childhood friend and soon-­to-­be-­famous novelist James Fenimore Cooper also assisted in securing this promotion; see WJ to James Fenimore Cooper, June 20, 1820, Cooper, ed. Correspondence, 1:88; Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, 247, 609 n.25; WJCM, 14; Budney, William Jay, 18; WJ, Diary, June 15, 1820. 62. WJ, Diary, June 1, 1819; January 19, 1821. 63. For examples of such punishments meted out by the Westchester courts, see General Sessions Minutes, Oyer & Terminer—­Misc. 1830 Series 250 A-0312 (8)L, folder 9, Sept. 24, 1827; folder 10, May 26, 1828; folder 11, Sept. 23, 1828, WCA; Trendel, William Jay, 95–104, offers a valuable evaluation of William Jay’s “law and order” judicial rec­ord and temperament.

43 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 152– 157

64. Den Hartog, Patriotism, 112–15; JJ to S. S. Woodhull, Dec. 17, 1821; ABS to JJ, Jan. 3, 1822; PAJ to JJ, Jan.11, 1822; JJ to PAJ, Jan. 14, 1822; ABS to JJ, May 9,1822, PJJ, Docs. 13372 (original at JJH), 13373, 06255, 06256, 13377 & 13378 (original held by JJH). For two letters in which the sons acted as conduits for John to ABS meetings, see JJ to SS Woodhull, Apr. 23, 1822, and JJ to PAJ, Apr. 21, 1823, PJJ, Docs. 02922 (original held by ABS), 09992 (held by unknown repository); JJ, May 9, 1822, PJJ, Doc. 02918 (original held by ABS); Brier, Mr. Jay, 225–28. 65. WJ [A Churchman of the Diocese of N-­Y, pseud.], Letter to the Right Reverend Bishop Hobart, esp. 18, 49, 78; see also Bishop John Hobart [Corrector, pseud.], A Reply to a Letter to the Right Rev. Bishop Hobart; WJ, A Letter to the Right Rev. Bishop Hobart, in Reply to the Pamphlet Addressed By Him to the Author; Bishop John Hobart [Corrector, pseud.], A Reply to a Letter Addressed to the Right Rev. Bishop Hobart, by William Jay; WJ, A Reply to a Second Letter to the Author. 66. WJ, Prize Essays, quotations 3, 32, 34–35. 67. WJCM, 29; Gregoire, Enquiry; [Heyrich], Immediate. For evidence of William’s reading Gregoire, see WJ to Angelina Grimké, Feb. 1, 1837 and file notation, JJHF. Evidence of the influence of Heyrich is more speculative; see Sturge, Visit, 55–56; and Mayer, All on Fire, 70, 642n; Davis, Slavery, 145, 183–84; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 178–80, 639n. 68. DeWitt Clinton, Sept. 20, 1826, Letter Book 7 (1825–26), 455, DeWitt Clinton Papers, Columbia University; WJ to PAJ, Sept. 23, 1826; WJCM, 29–31; WJ, View, 1st ed., 34. 69. McMaster, History, 221–23; Journal of the House of Representatives, 224, 280, 309, 341, 367, 438, 457, 727. 70. WJ to Cooper, Jan. 5, 1827, in Cooper, ed., Correspondence 1:114. 71. WJ to Walker Todd, Jan. 8, 1828, JJHF; see also WJ to Minor, Apr. 21, 1828, JJHF; WJCM, 32–36; see also WJ to Thomas S. Williams, May 4, 1829, Papers of Timothy Pitkin, 1681–1847, HL. 72. Oakes, Freedom National, 9–11; Scorpion’s Sting, 61, 107; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 187– 88, 190–91. See chapters 2 and 4 of this book for fuller discussion of this decision and its implications. 73. ­Will of Mary Jay, typed transcription; ­Will of (Blind) Peter Jay, typed transcription; 1810 US Census, Ancestry​.­com; Brier, Mr. Jay, 78; Jay Heritage Center, https://­ jayheritagecenter​.­org​/­land​-­ownership​-­residents​/­. 74. JJ to PAJ, Nov. 4, 1824, PJJ, Doc. 06284; Brier, Mr. Jay, 131. 75. Van Der Lyn, July  22, 1826, 1:91; Brier, Mr.  Jay, 134, 239, 256–57; WJ, LJ, 1:443–44. 76. WJ to PAJ, Mar. 28, 1827, PJJ, Doc. 11629; WJ to JCJ, Apr. 4, 1827, JJHF-­WJ ­family letters. See also WJ to PAJ, Dec. 16, 1828, PJJ Doc. 11637. 77. WJ to John Clarkson Jay, Mar. 18, 1828, JJHF-­WJ ­family letters. Although Irish immigrants ­were the largest group of the Society’s applicants for placement, hundreds of ­free African Americans also sought out the Society’s assistance to find work. First Annual Report; Second Annual Report, see esp. 10–12; Armstead, Freedom’s Gardener, 55– 56; Harris, In the Shadow, 183. 78. For this and subsequent quotations from the w ­ ill, see John Jay’s W ­ ill and Surrogate Court Rec­ord, Apr. 18, 1829, PJJ, Doc. 07377. 79. Stahr, John Jay, 384.

NOTES TO PA GES 161– 165

435

7. Joining Forces

1. Liberator, June 29, 1833. 2. WJ to PAJ, Dec. 1, 1831 (typescript not original; emphasis retained from typescript); PAJ to WJ, May 16, 1833; see also WJ to MJB, Feb. 6, 1833; WJ to Anna Jay, Apr. 1, 1833; WJ to JJII, c. Apr. 5, 1833; Anna Jay to WJ, Apr. 8, 1836. 3. WJ, LJ, 1:459, 463; see also1:294, 400, 428; and WJ to Timothy Pitkin, Feb. 21, 1832, Papers of Timothy Pitkin, 1681–1847, HL. 4. WJ, LJ, 1:232–35, 285, 390–91, 396, 402, 408, 452–53. 5. [Sedgwick], Practicability, esp. 10–14, 25–30, 37–42; WJ letter to Sedgwick quoted from WJCM, 37–38; WJCM, attributes the pamphlet to Henry D. Sedgwick, but the online Collections Guide to the Sedgwick ­Family Papers curated by the Mas­sa­chu­setts Historical Society indicates Theodore as the author; see http://­www​.­masshist​.­org​ /­collection​-­guides​/­view​/­fa0248. WJ to Cooper, Dec. 11, 1832, in Cooper, Correspondence, 1:301–3; Wilentz, Rise, 374–79; see also WJ to MJB, Jan. 7, 1833, on William’s anticipation that congressional compromise would stave off “­either Civil war, or a dissolution of the Union.” 6. Liberator, June 29, 1833 (emphasis in original); the letter was also published in The Abolitionist, Aug. 1, 1833; the latter was the official newspaper of the Garrisonian New ­England Anti-­Slavery Society, with Garrison and his partner Isaac Knapp as publishers; Henderson, “History,” 5; Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 81–82. 7. WJ to Arthur Tappan, June 24, 1833, JJHF; Henderson, “History,” 9–10; Wyatt-­ Brown, Lewis Tappan, 103–4; Budney, William Jay, 30–32; Hewitt, “Peter Williams, Jr.,”117; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 224–25. 8. Constitution of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 3–4, 6, 9; JJII, Constitutional Princi­ ples, 7 (collected in a bound volume of JJII speeches at NYHS); WJCM, 49–52, recounts Jay’s relationship to the pro­cess of founding the AAS; Mayer, All on Fire, 174–77; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, chap. 7, esp. 225–27; First Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 6; Hewitt, “Peter Williams, Jr.,” 118–19. 9. William Lloyd Garrison to George W. Benson, Apr. 23, 1834, Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 1:326–27; First Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 38; Henderson, “History,” 31. 10. Union League Club, Memorial, May 15, 1894, JFP; Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 114; according to Tuckerman, WJCM, 55, John Jay II lived at Cox’s ­house at the time of the riot. 11. Numerous historians have described and accounted for the 1834 riots. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 556–59, offer a compelling synthesis; their account of this complex set of events should be supplemented by Kerber, “Abolitionists”; Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 112–19; Richards, Gentlemen, 15, 43, 113–22, 132–34, 150–55; Weinbaum, Mobs, 22–33, 39–41, 44–49, 56; Gilje, Road, 152–70; Swift, Black Prophets, 64–71; Hodges, Root, 227–28, 335n2; David Ruggles, 63–65; Peterson, Black Gotham, 99–102. In addition to Richards, Gilje, and Weinbaum, for broader perspectives on mobs and riots, anti-­abolitionist and other­ wise during this era, see Wilentz, Rise, 408–10; Prince, “­Great”; and Grimsted, “Rioting.” 12. MBJ and Augusta Jay to JJJII, July 14, 1834, copy and transcription, JJII Box 1 (State), JJH; Richards, Gentlemen; see also Weinbaum, Mobs, 25–28; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 559; Peterson, Black Gotham, 99.

43 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 166– 169

13. Biographers and historians have not properly accounted for the deeply intertwined nature of the two men’s abolitionist c­ areers; Pencak, “Salt of the Earth,” 246; Scharf, History, 536, however, are suggestive. 14. Preamble and Constitution of the New-­York Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society, 7, 8; Muelder, Theodore Dwight Weld, 163; “Preamble and constitution of the anti-­slavery society of Lane Seminary,” The Standard.—­Extra. [n.d.]; Liberator, Aug. 3, 1833, Apr. 12, 1834; Leavitt, “Amherst College Anti-­Slavery Society”; for additional context see Wilder, Ebony & Ivy, 265–70. 15. Foner, “Columbia & Slavery,” Hawkey, “Hardly”; Kallstrom, “Entrenched”; and Odessky, “Possessed,” provide a wealth of information about Columbia during the era that John Jay II attended; for further background, see also, McVickar, Life, esp. 30, 39. 16. For examples of his parents’ concern for his education and character development before and during college, see WJ to JJII, Nov. 22, 1831; Oct. 10, 1832; Jan. 20, May 31, June 12, 1834; Sarah Louisa Jay to JJII, Feb. 5, 1834, all in JJHF-­family letters; AJ to JJII, May 18, Oct. 14, 1831; Mar. 22, 1832; Oct. 7, 1834; WJ, Feb. 4, Apr. 5, Apr. 13, 1832; and for JJII’s responses, see JJII, notes from a sermon by Francis Lister Hawks, Jan. 12, 1833, all in JFP. On the sermon by Mr. Holdridge, May 3, 1835; and Notes on sermon by Mr. Eastburn in Ascension Church, June 14, 1835, JFP. 17. WJ to JJII, c. Apr. 5, 1833; WJ to JJII, Jan. 20, Feb. 5, Mar. 15, 1834, JJHF-­family letters; Petition from the Freshman Class, Columbia College, re weekly reports, Oct. 17, 1832, JFP; Odessky, “Possessed of but One Idea,” notes, that JJII founded a fraternity chapter at Columbia during his se­nior year. See also JJII, 1836 draft, explaining to the Peithologian Society, JFP, that he had been less involved less of late in its activities ­because he had gotten engaged, further evidence of JJII’s eagerness to embrace the trappings of adulthood at an early age; on his early marriage plans, see also JJII to Eleanor Kingsland Field Jay, c. Oct. 10, 1836; Scharf, History, 536; Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 112, 140. 18. John Stanford to JJII, July 30, 1829, JJII Nina Iselin (Tolman) Ms Col, JJHF; AJ to JJII, May 11, 1835. 19. Address of the New-­York Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society, 3, 7, 29; the pamphlet (13) footnoted a May 1834 published letter by William Jay on the latest judicially sanctioned kidnapping of a ­free Black man in Washington, D.C. 20. Davis, Joshua Leavitt, 108; morally supervisory uplift by both whites and Blacks is a major theme of Harris, In the Shadow; First Annual Report of the New-­York Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society, 13. 21. Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 120–21; Kerber, “Abolitionists,” 36–37; Hodges, David Ruggles, 67; Henry C. Ludlow to WJ, n.d.; WJ to Ludlow, Oct. 25, 1834. 22. Constitution of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 11; Letter from Judge Jay, to the Secretary of the New York State Anti-­Slavery Society [From the Standard and Demo­ crat],” Nov. 17, 1835, WJ clipping file, JJH; Henderson, “History,” 65, 69–70; WJ to Oliver Wetmore, Sept. 26, 1836, JJHF; “[From the New York American]” 1835, in WJ clipping file, JJH; WJ, Inquiry in MWS, 52, 116–19; WJ to William L. Stone, Aug. 4, 1836; Johnson and Wilentz, Kingdom, detail Matthias’s story. This account of the connection between the riots and William Jay’s plunge into the national abolitionist crusade is consistent with William Jay’s original biographer, Tuckerman, WJCM, 54–58, and with

NOTES TO PA GES 170– 178

437

his most recent biographer, Budney, William Jay, 1–2, 33–35; see also Kerber, “Abolitionists,” 37; Trendel, William Jay, 181–83; Hodges, David Ruggles, 67. 23. Many historians have told this story, including Sidbury, Becoming; Campbell, ­Middle Passages, 16–56, 60–64; Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 183–208; see also Goodman, Of One Blood, 15–35; for a recent erudite assessment of colonization, see Davis, The Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 83–192. 24. WJ to William L. Stone, Feb. 4, 1829; WJ to Robert Smith (draft), Jan. 2, 1834; Douglass, Eulogy, 25–26; Garrison, Thoughts; McDaniel, Prob­lem, 37–39, 45, 46, 129; Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison, 39–44; Mayer, All on Fire, 54, 61–62, 72–73, 77–78, 116, 134–40, 216–17, 641n, who argues that Garrison’s ac­cep­tance of colonizationism had been tepid; Hodges, David Ruggles, 70–75; Ruggles, Extinguisher; [Ruggles], Brief Review. 25. WJ, Inquiry, epigraph and preface; ­unless other­wise noted, quotations and page numbers are taken from the first edition, published in 1835 by Leavitt, Lord & Co. in New York and Crocker and Brewster in Boston; in 1840, the AAS brought out a tenth edition of Inquiry. 26. WJ, Inquiry, 21, 22. 27. WJ, Inquiry, on Crandall and Connecticut, see 25–46; quotations 39, 46, 52. 28. WJ, Inquiry, 53–69, quotation 69. 29. WJ, Inquiry, 73, 75, 76, 77, 83, 90. 30. WJ, Inquiry, 86, 98. 31. WJ, Inquiry, 103; WJ, LJ, 1:235; Ruggles, Extinguisher, 32. 32. WJ, Inquiry, 105–15, quotations 106, 107, 113; interestingly, Ruggles, Extinguisher, 10–11, also made an analogy to temperance. 33. WJ, Inquiry, 119; JCNY, 179. 34. Budney, William Jay, 36–37. 35. WJ, Inquiry, 134, 136. 36. WJ, Inquiry, 140–44, quotations 143, 148. 37. WJ, Inquiry, 164; Jefferson, Notes, 138, 163. 38. WJ, Inquiry, 166–73, quotation 172–73; [Heyrich], Immediate, 7. 39. WJ, Inquiry, 176, 177, 185, 184–88; see Rugemer, Prob­lem, 160–65, for a careful and informative reading of this part of Jay’s argument. 40. WJ, Inquiry, quotations 194, 198, 202, see also 194–96. 41. WJ, Inquiry, 189–90; WJ, Inquiry, 2nd ed., 194. 42. WJ, Inquiry, 191–94; Rugemer, Prob­lem, 164; Foner, ­Free Soil; Drescher, Abolition, 264, 296–97, 391–92. 43. WJ, Slavery in Amer­i­ca, vi; Filler, Crusade, 62; Budney, William Jay, 37–38; WJCM, 59–62; Trendel, William Jay, 188–89; Henderson, “History,” 24–25; Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 114. 44. AJ to MBJ, July 17,1830; also AJ to MBJ, Dec. 13, 1830 from NYC asking Maria to say hi to all the servants.; AJ to JJII, Oct. 8, 1831. 45. AJ to MBJ, Jay, Aug. 5, 1830, JJH transcription in file provided to author marked Primary Documents w/ Mention of Slaves and ­Free Blacks; AJ to JJII, Feb. 19, 1831; Mar. 22, 1832. 46. AJ to JJII, Oct. 8, 1833, in letter by MBJ to JJII, copy of transcription from ­Family Papers, in file provided by JJH.

43 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 178– 188

47. Anna Jay to NJ, Nov. 17, 1832; Catherine Beecher to WJ, Dec. 9, 1831, AJ to JJII, Dec. 17, 1831, Mar. 22, 1832; Sarah Louisa Jay to JJII, Feb. 5, 1834, JJH; MBJ (in a note from Augusta) to JJII, Feb. 22,1834; Horton, “Listening,” 118; MBJ to JJII, July 14, 1836, JJH copy of transcription from F ­ amily Papers, in file provided by JJH; see also MBJ to MJB, Feb. 6, 1836, JJH transcription of Columbia University letter. 48. WJ to JJII, Apr. 13, 1834, JJHF; JJII to WJ, Apr. 12 and May 1, 1837, Nina Iselin (Tolman) Ms Col Friends gift, JJH. Gender divisions or not, in their letters to John II in the wake of the riots, both Maria and Augusta mentioned his role in acquiring a cook for the ­family in New York City; MBJ & AJ, July 14, 1834, scan and transcription, JJH, JJII Box 1 (State). 49. WJ to JJII, May 14, 1836. 50. Eliza Jay to WJ, May 2, 1836, JJH transcription of F ­ amily Papers; WJ to JJII, Jan. 14, 1837. 51. Jay, Inquiry, 198. 52. Commercial Advertiser, Mar. 24, 1835, quoted in ­Reese, Letters, 66; Filler, Crusade, 62. 53. “Judge Jay against Colonization,” African Repository 11, no. 5 (May 1835): 132–33. 54. ­Reese, Brief Review. For his effort, ­Reese had drawn the withering scorn of Ruggles; see Hodges, David Ruggles, 70–77, and note 24 ­earlier. 55. Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 245; ­Reese, Letters, iii. 56. ­Reese, Letters, vi–­viii, x (emphasis in original). 57. ­Reese, Letters, 79. 58. ­Reese, Letters, 82, 83, 86. 59. ­Reese, Letters, 59–60. 60. ­Reese, Letters, 111. 61. ­Reese, Letters, 115–16. 62. JJII to AJ, June 1, 1835, Nina Iselin (Tolman) Ms Col Friends gift, JJH. That John Jay II took the attacks on his ­father personally is clear from the commentary, “Some remarks on an editorial review of Jay’s Inquiry into the Colonization & Anti-­Slavery Socie­ ties by the editor of the ‘Commercial Advertiser’ ” blasting that paper’s review of Inquiry, JFP (folder dated Jan. 1, 1838, but the document itself contains no date and is almost certainly from 1835). 63. WJ to JJII, June 3, 1835; see also WJ to JJII, May 8, 1835, in which William asks his son to forward an item in a colonizationist publication that took note of Inquiry. 64. WJ to PAJ, June 11, 1835. 65. JJ, May 9, 1822, PJJ, Doc. 02918 (original held by American Bible Society). 66. WJ to D. M. ­Reese, M. D., Jan. 11, 1836, American Prose, HSP; WJ to William L. Stone, Aug. 4, 1836. 67. WJ to Rev. D. Turner, Mar. 20, 1837, JJHF (emphasis in original); see also WJ to Turner, Sept. 1, 1836, JJHF. 68. JJII, Report to New York Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society, c. Jan. 1, 1836, JFP. 69. WJ to MJB, Mar. 16, 1837; MJB to JJII, Apr. 14, 1837, JJH transcription from ­Family in file provided by JJH; Horton, “Listening,” 123. 70. Horton, “Listening” has deeply informed my sense of Zilpah’s trauma (on Clarinda, Zilpah, and isolation, see esp. 113, 118, 122–23, 125), as did Horton’s pre­

NOTES TO PA GES 190– 196

439

sen­ta­tion of her research in November  2000 at Symposium: Slavery and Abolition in Eigh­teenth and Nineteenth C ­ entury New York, The John Jay Homestead State Historic Site, Katonah, New York. 8. A Conservative on the Inside

1. WJ to Samuel May, Apr. 20, 1836, JJHF (emphasis in original). 2. Emancipator, Feb. 1, 1836. 3. Liberator, Sept. 12, 1835. 4. Emancipator, Jan. 1, 1836; see also Emancipation Extra. Protest of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, Dec. 26, 1835, clipping file, JJH. 5. WJ to LT, June 7 (draft), June 8, June 21 (draft), 1836, JJHF (emphasis in original). 6. Liberator, July 9, 1836; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 251. 7. Second Annual Report of the Vermont Anti-­Slavery Society, 17; WJ to Joel Doolittle (draft), Feb. 11, 1836. 8. Emancipator, Dec. 1, 1836; WJ to Rev. Oliver Whetmore, Sept. 26, 1836, JJHF. 9. WJ to Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Nov. 25, 1836, JJHF. 10. Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 19, 171, 178–80, 282, 283. 11. WJ to GS, July 12, 1836, GSP (emphasis in original). 12. I was informed of Tappan’s role in a personal email from the scholar Michaël Roy. 13. Cabinet of Freedom, Vols. 1–3 (New York: John S. Taylor, 1836); see also Roy, “Vanis­hing Slave,” 527–29. Classic but still valuable analyses of antebellum reform include Thomas, “Romantic Reform”; Walters, American Reformers; and Cross, Burned-­ Over District. 14. Although Smith identified with the Garrisonian AAS, he continued ­until 1837 to consider colonization itself as a v­ iable reform program if uncoupled from hostility to a broader emancipation. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 6–9, 19, 163–70, 187, 214; Stauffer, Black Hearts, 75–6, 81–82, 92–102; Henderson, “History,” 27, 32–41, 47–48, 66– 69, 94. 15. Fernald, Memoirs, 1–10, 185–90; Dictionary of American Biography, 3:347; Griswold, Prose, 354–56. Bush would ­later go on to become one of the nation’s leading Swedenborgian intellectuals, probing the mysteries of ­humans’ eternal spiritual essence and hoping to move humankind closer to earthly perfection; see Fernald, Memoirs, 10–31. N. F. Cabell in Fernald, Memoirs, 197–220, offers a nineteenth-­century contextualization of Bush and the Swedenborgian challenge to conventional Protestantism. For modern scholarly appraisals of Swedenborg and of his influence in the United States, see Cross, Burned-­Over District, 341–47; Walters, American Reformers, 167–68. 16. Cabinet of Freedom, Vol. 1, No. 1. 17. Clarkson, in Cabinet, 1:iv–­v; 2:232–34, 240–45. Clarkson’s volume was only sporadically reprinted in the United States. Philadelphia editions came off the presses in 1808 and 1809, and another edition was printed in Wilmington, Delaware. Publication information on Clarkson’s book is based on reviewing American Bibliography; Checklist of American Imprints and a search of the WorldCat online database. 18. Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 222; see GS to Thomas Clarkson, Nov. 2, 1840; Apr. 9, 1841, Papers of Thomas Clarkson, HL, for expressions of almost worshipful admiration,

44 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 196– 200

including joy at receiving a lock of Clarkson’s hair. On Parliament, see especially the last third of Clarkson’s History, including, Cabinet, 3:220. On the gag rule, see Wirls, “Only Mode”; Miller, Arguing. 19. Clarkson, in Cabinet, 2:120, 32–35; Rugemer, Prob­lem, 142. 20. For Clarkson’s discussion of the adoption of this icon, see Cabinet, 2:64–65. 21. Roy, “Vanis­hing Slave,” provides an impor­tant publication history of Ball’s narrative. Starling, Slave Narrative, divides this survey of the slave narrative into “The Slave Narrative before 1836” and “The Slave Narrative a­ fter 1836” and identifies the Ball narrative as “the first book-­length narrative published ­under the aegis of the abolitionists” (106); he provides useful information about its popularity and publication history (106–7, 226–27, 232). Taylor, I Was Born a Slave, 1:xx–­xxi, estimates that ­there ­were ten editions of Ball’s narrative prior to the Civil War and that it was one of the “most popu­ lar”; Ball’s is one of the oldest of the twenty narratives Taylor selected for his two volumes, in part chosen based on popularity. Taylor’s distinction between e­ arlier “spiritual journey” oriented African American memoirs and t­ hose specifically designed as antislavery exposés also supports the idea that Ball’s narrative should be considered as being on the leading edge of Black-­voiced American abolitionist autobiographical writing. Of the “Black Autobiographies and Memoirs” listed in the bibliography of John Blassingame, Slave Community, 384–87, Ball’s is among the earliest listed; Davis and Gates, Slave’s Narrative, 319–27, offer a chronology that also supports the notion that Ball’s narrative precedes the steady stream of narratives that followed. 22. Roy, “Cheap Editions,” warns against reifying the slave narrative as a single genre, when the conditions of production and distribution of vari­ous antebellum African American autobiographies differed markedly; he also suggests that the presumed whiteness of the audience is more speculation than fact. 23. WJ to Prof. Bush, Aug. 6, 1836, HSP; WJ to GS, Sept. 13, 1836, JJHF and GSP (emphasis in original); WJ to Isaac Fisher, Nov. 24, 1836, JJHF; Foner, editorial introduction to Ball, Fifty Years, v–­vi; Taylor, I Was Born a Slave, 1:260–22. For a modern scholarly defense of the dependability of Ball’s narrative, see Blassingame, Slave Testimony, xxiii–­xxvi, and Roy, “Vanis­hing Slave,” 540. For the white abolitionist front m ­ atter to the Douglass and Jacobs narratives, see Gates, Classic; I am inferring that Jay authored the preface to the Cabinet of Freedom edition of Fifty Years in Chains, based on Jay’s spearheading the proj­ect, suggesting an introduction, and the language of the introduction itself. 24. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, i–ii, iv, v, vi–­viii; Roy, “Vanis­hing Slave,” 529–32, 538, 539. On the standard features of published slave narratives, including attestation of authenticity, see Olney, “ ‘I Was Born,’ ” 152. 25. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 15–23, 38–39; Johnson, Soul by Soul, a landmark study of the internal slave trade, makes use of the Ball narrative several times. 26. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 54–55. Interestingly, Isaac Fisher, who originally produced Ball’s narrative, emphasized Ball’s encounters with the “old aristocracy” in his brief preface to the narrative—­see Yuval, I Was Born a Slave, 264. 27. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 124–27, 162, 164–66, 187, 271, 343, 372–78, 483. 28. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 480–83, 497, 514–17. It is worth noting that Isaac Fisher openly stated that he “carefully excluded” all expressions of “bitterness” from the Ball narrative, and thus set the tone of the account at the end as elsewhere; see Roy, “Vanis­

NOTES TO PA GES 201– 205

441

hing Slave,” 517–21, 532; and Yuval, I Was Born a Slave, 264; for further remarks on Fisher’s editorial interventions, see Andrews, To Tell a ­Free Story, 81–86. 29. WJ to LT, Mar. 25, 1837 (emphasis in original) JJHF; Emancipator, June 15, 1837; also mentioned on May 4, 1837; Roy, “Vanis­hing Slave,” 532–45, describes the volume’s notoriety, including a new edition in the 1850s. Starling, Slave Narrative, 227–28, confirms that the revelation that a contemporaneous slave narrative was actually the product of a white novelist fueled suspicions of the Ball book; see also Yuval, I Was Born a Slave, 261; and Blassingame, Slave Testimony, xxiii–­xxvi. 30. Although Newman, Transformation, may overcredit his own organ­izing premise, nonetheless he rightly highlights the emergence of “mass action” as a distinguishing characteristic of the immediate abolition movement, a reflection perhaps of an expanding demo­cratic po­liti­cal culture. But as Richards, Slave Power, shows, that culture was not open to challenges to slavery channeled through the national government. DeLombard, Slavery, 7, 41, 49, 50, 69, 109, and throughout; see especially her comment on 41 on how Jay and o ­ thers “repositioned themselves vis-­à-­vis American public opinion by identifying the Slave Power with a corrupt judiciary and the suppression of f­ ree speech”—an assertion borne out h ­ ere, although DeLombard does not work at all with the Ball narrative or the Cabinet of Freedom. 31. The Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society board on which John Jay II served was also integrated; see JJII to WJ, Apr. 12, 1837, Nina Iselin (Tolman) Ms. Col. Friends gift, JJH. It is worth noting that William still had qualms about ­whether public abolitionist meetings featuring Black speakers aided the cause; see LT to Theodore Weld, Mar. 15, 1836, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 275–77. Hodges, David Ruggles, includes a detailed study of the Committee of Vigilance. 32. WJ to David Ruggles, Dec. 10, 1836; for apparent follow-up on the case, see WJ to Caleb Roscoe, Jan. 18, 1837, JJHF. 33. Emancipator, Mar. 16, 1837 (emphasis in original). 34. Emancipator, May 4, 1837. 35. WJ to the Editor of the Albany Argus, Apr. 11, 1837 (copy), JJH; “Mr. Wm. Jay’s argum’t that Congress have no constitutional right to legislate on the subject of delivering up fugitives from Justice, or from l­abor,” no precise date, 1838 (4-­page typescript). 36. Colored American, Jan. 14, 1837; Hodges, David Ruggles, 98–99, recounts the Lee affair, the attack on Ruggles, and the anniversary meeting; Nash was also undaunted, several years l­ater, successfully filing a civil suit for libel against abolitionist publisher S. W. Benedict for depicting Nash as a kidnapper in the pages of an antislavery publication; see NASS, Apr. 1, 1841. 37. Samuel Cornish to WJ, Nov. 3, 1838; Cornish enclosed a clipping on the suit from the Colored American in his letter to Jay; WJ to Cornish, Nov. 5, 1838; Hodges, Ruggles, 145–52; Harris, In the Shadow, 202–16. 38. WJ, “Mr. Wm. Jay’s argum’t”; WJ to LT, Feb. 20, 1837; JCNY, 70–71. 39. WJ to GS, Sept. 25, 1838, which includes a marked draft of the proposed letter; GS to WJ, Sept. 21, Oct. 1, 1838. 40. GS to WJ, Oct. 19, 1838; Fox, Decline, 378–79; [William Jay, Gerrit Smith, and Luther Bradish], An Examination, 5–13 (emphasis in original); Luther Bradish to GS, Oct. 10, 1838, GSP.

44 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 205– 213

41. WJ to WHS, Oct. 1, 1838, WHSP; Bancroft, Life, 1:70–71; Hammond, History, 2:456; Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, 51. 42. Sewell, Ballots, 17–18; Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, 51; GS speech in Emancipator, Nov. 1, 1838. Fox, Decline, 378–79; Hammond, History, 2:485–87, who was often encyclopedic in his approach, did not even mention the petition in his narrative; Bancroft, Life, 1:72; Goodwin, Team, 80–81. 43. John Jay II to Mr. Editor, c. Nov. 1838, JFP. 44. Emancipator, May 17, 1838; Sorin, New York Abolitionists, 50–51. 45. WJ to Joshua Leavitt (draft), Mar. 13, 1838; WJ to LT, Mar. 28, 1838; WJ to Loring, Mar. 29, 1838. 46. JJII to WJ, Apr. 22, 1838; William Lloyd Garrison to Helen Garrison, May 4, 1838, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 2:349. 47. Emancipator, May 31, 1838; Jay noted in the introductory letter accompanying the published version of his remarks that he revised the original text presented at the AAS annual meeting; see also Emancipator, May  17, 1838; and WJ to Elizur Wright, Apr. 13, 1838. 48. William Lloyd Garrison to Helen Garrison, May 7, 1838, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 2:351; Theodore Weld to Angelina Grimké, May 8, 1838, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 670; Fifth Annual Report, 4, 9–10, 14, 49; WJ to Elizur Wright, Apr. 13, 1838. 49. WJ to Gamaliel Bailey, Sept. 1, 1838; WJ to Elizur Wright, Nov. 13, 1838; WJ to Abel Libolt, Dec. 14, 1838. 50. WJ to Abel Libolt, Jan. 28, 1839; WJ to Joseph Pierce, June 22, 1839. 51. WJ, View, 13–15, 183–98. 52. WJ to John S. Taylor, Feb. 8, 1839. 53. WJ, View, 19–22, 24, 27–28. 54. WJ, View, 29–32, 47–50, 53–58. 55. WJ, View, 63–91, 91–120, quotation 103. 56. WJ, View, 126–44, quotations, 126, 132, 141, 159 (emphasis in original). 57. WJ, View, 177–80. 58. WJ, View, 182–98. Jay’s inclusion as an appendix the AAS executive board’s forceful 1835 response to President Jackson (199–217) reaffirmed that analyzing the historical rec­ord in no way precluded a strategy of vigorous antislavery publicity. 59. WJ to Thomas Pyne, Mar. 25, 1839. 60. S. W. Benedict to WJ, June 6, 1839; LT to WJ, Aug. 20, 1839; WJ to Benedict, June 17, 1839; see also, WJ to JJII, June [n.d.], 1839; WJ to Executive Committee of AAS, Nov. 27, 1839; James Gillespie Birney to WJ, Dec. 6, 1839. 61. WJ, View, 2nd ed., ix, x, xix, xx, 36–39, 150–66, 212–13. Based on the introduction to the second edition, one can see why supporters of Alvan Stewart and Garrisonians had grown impatient with a narrow reading of the US Constitution. Interestingly, the New York Anti-­Slavery Society’s 1844 reissue of the book went back to the first edition; WJ, View, 1844 ed. 62. Samuel Hanson Cox to WJ, Feb. 13, 1840; Leavitt to WJ, Feb. 6, 1840; SPC, Jan. 5, 1841 and editor’s note, in Chase, Salmon P. Chase Papers, 1:147.

NOTES TO PA GES 214– 220

443

9. Breaking Ranks

1. JJII to WJ, May 14, 1840 (emphasis in original); Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 263. 2. WJ, Inquiry, 4th ed., 30, 32, and the next several pages; see also chapter 7 of this book. 3. Sklar, ­Women’s Rights, provides a highly accessible summary of the Grimké s­ isters and their rise to fame; see also Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 270–82. 4. Not coincidentally, it should be noted, Elizabeth Heyrich and Prudence Crandall also emerged from the Quaker tradition. On Crandall’s Quaker background, see Mayer, All on Fire, 145, though in WJ, Inquiry, 4th ed., 30, Jay refers to her as a Baptist, the religion of the minister she married ­after shutting down her school (Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 230). 5. WJ to Angelina Grimké, Feb. 1, 1837, JJHF (emphasis in original). 6. [Grimké], Letters, 45; Sklar, ­Women’s Rights, 29–31. 7. In characterizing and adapting a vocabulary for writing about the Jay f­ amily and gender in this and the next subsection, I draw on Lystra, Searching, 121–56; Jabour, Marriage, 2–7; and Rotundo, American Manhood, 129–66; schemas for assessing gender in nineteenth-­century white middle-­class homes do not map perfectly onto the Jays, as the following pages also demonstrate. 8. Lystra, Searching, 123–24, 129–36; Rotundo, American Manhood, 130–32. 9. WJ to Anna Jay Balch, Apr. 11, 1839; see also Lewis Penn W. Balch Sr. to WJ, Apr. 15, 1839. 10. On Peter Williams Jr., see Hewitt, “Peter Williams”; for more on Williams, his parish, and the Episcopal Church, see chapter 12. 11. WJ to Anna Jay, Nov. 4, 1840. 12. ­There was another model of adult femininity for William and Augusta’s ­daughters to take notice of—­that of their aunts Maria Jay Banyer and Ann “Nancy” Jay. Maria’s combined inheritance from her ­father, her husband Goldsborough Banyer, and her subsequent widowhood made her one of the thousand or so wealthiest ­people in Manhattan. She and Nancy, who never married, lived together for the rest of their lives; although they w ­ ere educated, informed, and philanthropic, theirs was not a model that could have been readily adapted by William and Augusta’s d­ aughters, nor did Maria and Nancy defy patriarchal or gendered norms by pursuing public lives in the fashion of their female contemporaries in the abolitionist movement. See North, “Amiable,” 3–4; Beach, Wealth; Cooke, Funeral Sermons. 13. AJ to JJ, July 8, 1816; June 20, 1817; May 29, 1818. The Jay marriage exhibited some traits and tensions of emerging companionate ideals of supportive intimacy while also reflecting the particularities of the c­ ouple’s status, wealth, and personalities. Jabour, Marriage, 2–7, articulates the ideal and the tensions that almost inevitably resulted in practice; see also, Rotundo, American Manhood, 129–32; Lystra, Searching, 127. 14. WJCM, 163–67; Rotundo, American Manhood, 133, 140, 157; Lystra, Searching, 129– 36. According to Beach, Wealth, William Jay possessed a fortune of $150,000. The 2018 dollar value of $150,000 is worth at least $3.85 million; however, if one uses the unskilled wage index the figure becomes almost $42 million, and if one uses GDP per capita it balloons to almost $93 million; calculations from “Mea­sur­ing Worth” (accessed Sept. 11, 2020).

44 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 220– 227

15. AJ to JJII, May 11, 1835. 16. AJ to JJII, May 21, [1836]. 17. WJ to JJII, April 17, 1837; I borrow the phrase “activist ­couples” from Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 285. 18. AJ and WJ to JJII, June 21, 1836. 19. AJ to JJII, n.d.; AJ to JJII, May 27, 1831; AJ to JJII, May 1, 1838; AJ to MBJ, Aug. 14, 1830; AJ to JJII, April 7, 1831; natu­ral history mentioned in AJ to JJI, June 20, 1832; several years before, she queried her d­ aughter Maria about her studies, hoping that “Natu­ral Philosophy” remained part of her curriculum (AJ to MBJ, July 12, 1827). 20. AJ to JJII, May 18, Feb. 19, March 19, 1831; Catherine Esther Beecher to WJ, Dec. 9, 1831; Lystra, Searching, 126–27. 21. AJ to JJII, Apr. 7, 1831; AJ to MBJ, Aug. 19, Nov. 26, 1830; June 5, 1832; AJ to JJII, May 27, 1831; May 11, 1838; Nov. 7, 1839; Oct. 11, 1843, Oct. 8, 1845; see also Anna Jay (Balch) to WJ, Apr. 24, 1836. 22. AJ to JJII, Jan. 18, 1838. 23. AJ to JJII, n.d. (c. 1838–39); AJ to Louisa Jay, Oct. 23, 1850, John Jay Ide Collection, NYHS; JJII to Eliza Constable Jay, Aug. 12, 1844, JFP, on Augusta’s legacy as a ­mother, with some tension over how many grand­daughters should be named in her honor. 24. AJ to Anna Moore McVickar, Mar. 12, 1827. 25. AJ to MBJ, March 31, Apr. 6, 1830; AJ to JJII, Mar. 19; 1831; see also AJ to MBJ, Mar. 31, Apr. 3., Aug. 7, Aug. 11, Aug. 14, Nov. 26, Dec. 13, 1830; AJ to JJII, Feb. 19, Apr. 7, 1831. 26. WJ to Rev. John McVickar, Jan. 15, 1831, JJHF. 27. WJ to AJ, July 22, 1833 (emphasis in original); in a slightly less romantic but still sweet vein, William wrote Augusta e­ arlier that summer from New York, where President Jackson was also passing through, that he would rather spend time with her than in Jackson’s “train” (WJ to AJ, June 11, 1833); AJ to WJ, Nov. 25, 1840; see also AJ to MBJ, July 12, 1827; Dec. 10, 1830, for expressions of affection for her husband. 28. See note 37. 29. AJ to JJII, June 20, 1832; AJ and WJ to JJII, Feb. 10, 1846. 30. Mayer, All on Fire, 249–51, 254–56, 258, 260–62; Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison, 92–97, 112–13; McDaniel, Prob­lem, 10, 69–70, 92, 106, 112, 113–15, 135, and more generally, emphasizes the demo­cratic potential of Garrisonian doctrines; for a thorough consideration of nonre­sis­tance theory and its relation to antislavery, see Perry, Radical, 55–91; for a philosophical take on the subject by a turn of the twentieth-­ century writer with an attachment to the Garrisonian and Jay traditions, see JJC, “Doctrine.” 31. Chapman, Right and Wrong, 11–13; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 261; Mayer, All on Fire, 264–67. 32. WJ to Lewis Tappan, Aug. 23, 1839; WJ to Joseph Pierce, Dec. 14, 1839. 33. WJ to Committee of Arrangements, Connecticut AAS, Apr. 17, 1840. 34. Mayer, All on Fire, 278–82; JJII to WJ, May 14, 1840; Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 198. 35. Constitution of the American and Foreign Anti-­Slavery Society included in Leavitt to WJ, July 2, 1840.

NOTES TO PA GES 227– 237

445

36. JJII to WJ, May 14, 1840; Davis, Joshua Leavitt, 157–61, 181; NASS, Sept. 26, Oct. 3, Oct. 24, 1844; Jan. 9, Jan. 23, Jan. 30, Mar. 27, 1845; Mayer, All on Fire, 277; and chapter 12 of this book. 37. WJ to James Caleb Jackson, June 8, 1840 (emphasis in original). 38. NASS, July 16, 1840 (emphasis in original); see also Chapman, Right and Wrong, for an extensive defense of the AAS that is highly critical of New York abolitionists, though she does not name Jay specifically. 39. Art. IV, Constitution of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 4; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 256, 285–86; Kraditor, Means and Ends, 39–77; Mayer, All on Fire, 282–84; Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison, 118–19; Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 197–200. 40. WJ to Joseph Pierce, Dec. 14, 1839 (emphasis in original). 41. WJ to LT, Sept. 22, 1840 (emphasis in original); Mayer, All on Fire, 277; JJII, “The Dignity of the Abolition Cause as Compared with the Po­liti­cal Schemes of the Day. Speech of John Jay, of New [sic] Bedford, N.Y.,” scrapbook, JJH; Sewell, Ballots, 43. 42. WJ, Address to the Friends of Constitutional Liberty, on the Violation by the United States House of Representatives of the Right to Petition, in MWS, 397–408, esp. 405. 43. Sewell, Ballots, 43–74; see 64 for reference to Jay’s View; see also Kraut, “Forgotten,” esp. 135, 141–43. 44. GS to WJ, July 20, 1840; Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 186–87. 45. WJ to GS, July 25, 1840 (emphasis in original). 46. WJ to GS, July 25, 1840; Wilentz, Rise, 493; Fox, Decline, 378–79; Bancroft, Life, 101–3; Hammond, History, 2:520–21; Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, 57–58, 64– 66; two years l­ater, Jay praised Seward directly for his h ­ andling of the V ­ irginia ­matter—­WJ to William Henry Seward, June 23, 1842, WHSP. 47. WJ to Birney, Apr. 22, 1836, copy provided by Clements Library, University of Michigan; WJ to James Gillespie Birney, Apr. 20, 1840; WJ to Birney, Mar. 28, 1840; James Gillespie Birney to WJ, Dec. 6, 1839; WJ to Lewis Tappan, Sept. 22, 1840; Sewell, Ballots, 44, 74–75, shows that Jay was not alone in his low expectations. 48. Deskins et al., Presidential Elections, 119; Wilentz, Rise, 493–507, 530; Fox, Decline, 406; Hammond, History, 2:528, Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 191; Bancroft, Seward, 104–6; Van Deusen, Seward, 66–67, 74–75; Valentine, Manual, 366; Sewell, Ballots, 72, 76–79. 49. For a sharp disparagement of public opinion as “a contemptible idol,” see WJ to JJII, Feb. 23, 1841. McDaniel, Prob­lem, 89–112, offers a learned and nuanced discussion on abolitionist conceptions of public opinion. 50. WJ to Hickson W. Field, Dec. 16, 1840 (emphasis in original). 51. Liberator, Feb. 19, 1841; Renwick, Lives of Jay and Hamilton; WJ to JJII, Jan. 17, Feb. 23, 1841, JJHF. 10. The Condition of ­Free P ­ eople of Color

1. NASS, Nov. 25, 1841. 2. Wyatt-­Brown, “Proslavery,” 308–36, esp. 312, 316–38, insightfully frames the class perspective of abolitionists. 3. Wood, “Town,” 622. 4. Jones, Birthright, emphasizes Black self-­advocacy in the ­battle for citizenship. 5. JJII, Thoughts on the duty of the Episcopal Church, 6, 8.

44 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 237– 248

6. WJ, Condition in MWS, 373, 374. As the pamphlet was about to come out, William expressly anticipated the reaction of a new ­family nemesis, the Episcopal bishop of New York, a riper target for his and John’s disdain; see WJ to JJII, Oct. 19, 1839. As an anti-­colonizationist, Jay implicitly supported birthright citizenship, but ­here he framed his argument explic­itly through Christian universalism; Jones, Birthright, 1, 13, chap. 2. 7. WJ, Condition, 374–75; Jones, Birthright, 3, 5, 11, emphasizes the multiple ways in addition to voting rights that ­free African Americans sought to instantiate their citizenship rights. 8. WJ, Condition, 375–81. 9. WJ, Condition, 381. 10. WJ, Condition, 389–93. 11. WJ, Condition, 382–83. 12. John Jay II, Emancipator, Sept. 19, 1839. See also “Cinque and Heroes of the American Revolution,” Colored American, Mar. 27, 1841. 13. Jones, Mutiny, 11, 14–30; Rediker, Amistad, 1–95, esp. 1–2, 43–52, 68–79. 14. Emancipator, Sept. 12, 1839 (emphasis in original); WJ to LT, Sept. 7, 1839; the letter was also reprinted in Liberator, Sept. 20, 1839; Bemis, John Quincy Adams, 391. 15. John Jay II, Emancipator, Sept. 19, 1839; see Basker, Amazing Grace, 428–31; Joshua Leavitt to WJ, Sept. 10, 1839, written on back of “Extra Sun” featuring Cinqué. Rediker, Amistad, 9–10, 171, 207, 235, notes how African Americans ­were particularly keen to make links between the Amistad uprising and the American Revolution; he also provides an extensive, nuanced analy­sis of the iconography of the rebellion, including the Sun extra, and the rapidity with which the rebellion insinuated itself into popu­lar culture, 99–104, 114–18, 127–28. 16. John Quincy Adams to WJ, Sept. 17, 1839; Bemis, John Quincy Adams, 394; Wyatt-­ Brown, Lewis Tappan, 212. 17. WJ to JJII, May 10, 1840; WJ to Lewis Tappan, Nov. 6, 1840; Jones, Mutiny, esp. 44, 129–35, 140–43. 18. WJ to LT, Oct. 13, Nov. 6, 1840 (emphasis in original). 19. WJ to LT, Oct. 31, 1840; NASS, Dec. 17, 1840; Jones, Mutiny, 146–48, 153. 20. WJ to LT, Jan. 23, 1841, as quoted in Jones, Mutiny, 168; see also 169. 21. Jones, Mutiny, 188–94. 22. Rediker, Amistad, 122–60, 179–83, does a particularly good job emphasizing the critical role of the Africans in winning their own freedom. 23. Jones, Mutiny, 192–93, 205, 218–20; Rediker, 106, 171, 206–11, 213–16; Sinha, 411. 24. Jones, “Peculiar Institution,” 28–34; Hendrick and Hendrick, Creole, esp. 99, 109–10. 25. NASS, Mar. 24, 1842 (emphasis in original); “Letter from Judge Jay to Joseph Sturge on the Creole Case,” Scrapbook, JJH. 26. [WJ], Creole Case, 12, 21; NASS, Mar. 24, 1842. 27. [WJ], Creole Case, 16, 22. 28. [WJ], Creole Case, 26–27, 29; Channing, Duty; Oakes, Freedom National, 1–41, esp. 22–26, which makes reference to the Creole and to William Jay; Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, 31, 105–56; see also Rugemer, Prob­lem, 175–76. 29. [WJ], Creole Case, 30–31. 30. NASS, Apr. 14, 1842 (emphasis in original); Liberator, May 13, 1842.

NOTES TO PA GES 248– 256

447

31. WJ, Condition, 383. 32. Crummell, “Jubilate,” 33; Peterson, Black Gotham, 108–12. 33. PAJ, Thirtieth Annual Report, esp. 4–5; see also Harris, In the Shadow, 144; WJ, Condition, 383. A year a­ fter publishing t­ hese remarks in his pamphlet on race, Jay was still concerned that the doors of colleges remained largely closed to Blacks. As Jay noted to Tappan, t­ here was an inherent link between “lessen[ing], the prejudice against color” and improving the a­ ctual lives of Black p­ eople. To that end, he suggested to his wealthy abolitionist friend, “I am inclined to believe that the founding of a few scholarships in some of our colleges for coloured young men, would do much good”; WJ to LT, Sept. 22, 1840; the expansion of public schooling for whites and the exclusion of Blacks from ­these schools are the subject of Moss, Schooling. 34. Crummell, “Eulogium,” 58–59, and Moses’s introduction to Crummell, in Destiny and Race, 3–4; Moses, Alexander Crummell, 20–22; see also Moss, Schooling, 1–3; Peterson, Black Gotham, 106–7. 35. Moses, Alexander Crummell, 24; Crummell, “Jubilate,” 32; Hewitt, “Peter Williams”; Peterson, Black Gotham, 101–2; Townsend, Faith, 30–31, 38, 40, 53, and throughout; WJ, Condition, 387–88. 36. Crummell, “Jubilate,” 32–33, 42–43; JJII to Thomas Pyne, Sept. 20, 1839 (draft), JFP; JJII to WJ, Sept. 27, 1839; [JJII], Caste, 6–9, 14; Moses, Alexander Crummell, 27–29; Emancipator, Oct. 3, 1839; Proceedings of the Board of Trustees, 220, 229, 233, 238. 37. WJ to GS, Oct. 1, 1839; WJ to JJII, Oct. 19, 1839. 38. John A. Vaughan to WJ, Dec. 10, 1840, and WJ’s draft response to Vaughan recorded on the back; Moses, Alexander Crummell, 29–33, 310n, and chap. 3; Crummell, “Jubilate,” 33–34; WJ to Thomas Pyne, Dec. 10, 1839; American and Foreign Anti-­Slavery Reporter, Oct. 1840, 41–42. 39. JJ Flournoy to WJ, Dec. 21, 1838 (emphasis in original); ironically, Flournoy, who was deaf, was trying to end ­legal discrimination against deaf ­people and to establish a school for this population; J. J. Flournoy letter headnote; Frederickson, Black Image, 133. For a fascinating review of the so-­called curse of Ham in Western intellectual discourse, see Braude, “Sons of Noah.” 40. Richard Moran to WJ, Apr. 16, 1839; WJ to Moran, Apr. 29, 1839 (draft?). 41. WJ, Condition, 393–94 (emphasis in original). 42. WJ, Condition, 373–74. 11. Soul and Nation

1. WJ to Merritt Mitchell, Letter from Judge Jay [From the Western Freeman], May 1, 1843, Scrapbook, JJH; WJCM, 122–25; NASS, May 25, 1843; Budney, William Jay, 97. 2. WJ to SPC, June 5, 1843, Salmon P. Chase Papers, HSP; for a summary of Chase’s early antislavery activities, see Niven, Salmon P. Chase, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 20, 48–86; Foner, ­Free Soil, 78, 88–89; Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 108–15. 3. WJ to SPC, Mar. 24, May 5, 1845, May 30, 1846, Chase Papers, HSP (emphasis in original). NASS, Apr. 17, 1845; WJ, War and Peace, 3. McKivigan, War, provides ample proof of the paucity of Episcopalians in the abolition movement. His Appendix, “Religious Affiliations of the Officers of the Four National Abolition Socie­ties, 1833–1864” indicates only 8 Episcopalians in a list of nearly 600 names, or less than 1.4 ­percent. Of

44 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 256– 262

the approximately 400 officers for whom McKivigan could identify a religious affiliation less than 2 ­percent w ­ ere Episcopalians; see also, 50, 60, 70–71, 77, 165, 179, 180. 4. Perry, Radical, 178. JJC, William Lloyd Garrison, 147–57, contrasts William Jay and Garrison but smartly captures William Jay’s responsiveness to events in formulating his disunionist sentiments; as Chapman wrote on 156, “Not only Garrison and Jay, but ­every soul who lived in Amer­i­ca during ­these years had fluctuating views about the ­matter of slavery.” 5. WJCM, 117–21. 6. Jay, Memorials, 161–62, 189, 209–14, and passim for Peter A. Jay’s life and c­ areer more generally; personal communication, Oct. 5, 2017, with Caitlin Stamm, Reference Librarian, Christoph Keller Jr. Library, General Theological Seminary, offered details on the years of Jay’s trusteeship. On the Philomathean Society and on Bell, see Hodges, David Ruggles, 53, 62, 69, 96, 103, 108, 113–14, 147, 149, 199; Pencak, “Salt of the Earth,” 247–48. 7. ­Will of Peter Augusts Jay, scanned copy of handwritten w ­ ill provided to author by JJH; typed transcription of Feb. 20, 1843 inventory, Jay Heritage Center, Rye, New York; United States Federal Census. 8. Jay, Memorials, 201–3; New-­York Historical Society, Mar. 20, 1843, Scrapbook, JJH. 9. WJ, War and Peace, 1–5. 10. Thomas Pyne to WJ, Dec. 20, 1838; July 15, 1839; WJ to Thomas Pyne, Dec. 10, 1839; see also WJ to Pyne, Mar. 25, 1839; Oct. 12, 1836; Sturge, Visit, 55–57, and Appendix F, lii–­lxi; Whitney, American Peace Society, 65–68, 329; Ceadel, Origins, 137–38, 301–7, 335–46. 11. Whitney, American Peace Society, 17–68; Ziegler, Advocates, 1–87; Walters, American Reformers, 115–24; see also Ceadel, Origins, 136–37, 270, 286, 312–25, for variations of peace advocacy, Atlantic crosscurrents, and comparisons; WJ, War and Peace, 13; on Jay’s pro-­institutional inclinations, see Budney, William Jay, 3. 12. WJ, War and Peace, 53–62, traces this arc. 13. WJ, War and Peace, 47, 48. 14. WJ, War and Peace, 15, 17–18, 20 (emphasis in original). 15. WJ, War and Peace, 20–24. 16. WJ, War and Peace, 62, 63, 67. 17. Whitney, American Peace Society, 65–68; Ceadel, Origins, 311, 341–42; Trendel, “William Jay,” 18; Boston Quarterly Review 5 (Apr. 1, 1842): 255; for other reviews, see Court and Lady’s Magazine, monthly critic and museum, June 1843, 103–4; The Eclectic Review 13 ( June 1843): 717; New York Evangelist, Mar. 24, 1842, 46. 18. JJ to John Murray Jr., Apr. 15, 1818; Feb. 27, 1819; JJ to Noah Worcester, June 21, 1819, PJJ, Docs. 09598, 09602, 08764; Walters, American Reformers, 116; WJ, War and Peace, 29–33, 47. 19. For statistics on Episcopalians in the abolitionist movement, see note 3; McKivigan, War, 165; Trendel, William Jay, 303; Trendel, “John Jay II.” 20. NASS, Jan. 5, 1843 (emphasis in original). 21. JJII, Caste and Slavery, 10, 12, 41–42, 49, 50; see also, JJII to CS (draft), June 23, 1843, JFP. William, the proud f­ ather, forwarded the son’s handi­work to Salmon Chase, his fellow antislavery Episcopalian, to demonstrate his commitment to reform and to cultivate a promising alliance. Indeed, shortly thereafter Chase shared his objection

NOTES TO PA GES 263– 268

449

with vari­ous church leaders regarding some of the proslavery mea­sures reported in Caste and Slavery. WJ to Chase, June 5, 1843, Chase Papers, HSP; Salmon P. Chase, June 24, 1843, in Salmon P. Chase Papers: Journals, 1:166. 22. Townsend, Faith, 3, 18–43, 97, 158, 164–65, 175–76; Hewitt, “Peter Williams”; Peterson, Black Gotham, 37, 44–46, 101, 108, 113–14, 168–70; Albright, History, 186, 226–51; WJ, Oct. 16, 1843, in Scrapbook, JJH; Bulthuis, Four Steeples, 9, 10, 120, 140–43 147–54, 172–78. 23. Townsend, Faith, 108–14, including JJII quotation. 24. Onderdonk, Statement; Albright, History, 233, 236–37, 240–41; Strong, Diary, 1:209, 248–50, 253; Proceedings of the Court Convened. That Onderdonk was a lightning rod within the church can be seen in the following pamphlets, none of which mention Crummell, St. Philip’s, or slavery: Richmond, Conspiracy Against the Late Bishop; Trapier, A Narrative of Facts; Lacius, Trial Tried; Richmond, Mr. Richmond’s Reply; ­Meade, Statement. 25. Townsend, Faith, 118–19; JJII, Facts; Spencer, Report; Peterson, Black Gotham, 212–13; Hewitt, “Unresting the ­Waters,” 10–12. 26. NASS, Mar. 27, 1845 (emphasis in original). For Townsend’s more critical perspective on this intramural debate precipitated by Jay, see Faith, 121–24. 27. NASS, May 29, 1845. 28. Townsend, Faith, 120–21; Hewitt, “Unresting the W ­ aters,” 13–14; [JJII], Proceedings of the Late Convention. 29. Journal of the Proceedings of the Sixty-­Second Convention, 72–79; Townsend, Faith, 125–39; Evan M. Johnson to JJII, May 29, 1843, JFP. 30. [WJ], A Reproof, 3; Wilberforce, History, 410–31, drew from John Jay II’s Caste and Slavery in the American Church, which he cited as “a noble and heart-­stirring protest” (415); WJ to JJII, Jan. 5, 1846; WJ, A Letter to the Right Rev. L. Silliman Ives in MWS, 465–69, 487 (emphasis in original). 31. Jay, Letter to the Right Rev. L. Silliman Ives, 486, 488, 489. On come-­outerism and its ideological and religious contexts, see Perry, Radical, 92–128; McKivigan, War, 64– 69, 93–110; for a biography of a leading come-­outer, see Robertson, Parker Pillsbury; see also Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison, 153–55. 32. See also WJCM, 132, 146–48; Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 311; Filler, Crusade, 116; and Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 105. 33. WJ to SPC, May 30, 1846, Chase Papers, HSP. On the concepts of “voice” and “exit” as deployed by influential social scientist Albert Hirschman, see Gladwell, “Gift of Doubt”: Budney, William Jay, 80, notes Jay’s desire for “voice” in the church, but neither his account of come-­outerism, 79–83, nor disunion (see the ­later discussion), 103–8, draws on Jay’s revealing correspondence with Chase; McKivigan, War; see esp. 17, 69–73, 181. 34. Varon, Disunion! see esp. 5, 16, has initiated an impor­tant conversation about disunion and its relation to politics. 35. WJCM, 125–26. 36. WJ to GS, Oct. 21, Oct. 31, 1843; see also WJ to GS, Oct. 20, 1843, all in GSP; Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison, 124. 37. Jay wrote commentaries from Egypt and Malta on the same sheet of paper and mailed them together; WJ to GS, Jan. 23, 1844 (Egypt) and Feb. 15, 1844 (Malta), GSP;

45 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 268– 275

The Liberator, June 14, 1844, and NASS on June 20, 1844, from which quotations are cited ­here, carried the letter. 38. WJ to GS, as printed in NASS, June 20, 1844; CS to JJII, June 5, 1844, JFP. 39. JJII to Albert Gallatin, Apr. 25, July 11, 1844, in Gallatin Papers, NYHS; Walters, Albert Gallatin, 376–77. 40. Kornblith, “Rethinking,” reviews some of the pertinent facts; see also Wilentz, Rise, 565–73. 41. WJ, Letter of the Honorable William Jay, quotations, 6, 8; WJ to GS, Oct. 16, 1844, GSP. 42. WJ to GS, Sept. 8, 1843; WJ to GS, Oct. 16, 1844, GSP; see also Jabez D. Hammond to GS, Dec. 17, 1845, GSP; Trendel, William Jay, 348–50. For mentions of Jay as a pos­si­ble Liberty Party presidential candidate, see SPC to LT, Feb. 15, 1843, and Sept. 12, 1843, in Salmon P. Chase Papers, 2:102–3, 103–4; and even e­ arlier, see A. L. Post to GS, Mar. 17, 1840; Dyer Burgess to GS, Mar. 11, 1840, GSP. Jay made token runs for the US Senate on the Liberty Party ticket in 1845 and 1847—­see Tuckerman, WJCM, 120–21; Trendel, William Jay, 357, 359. 43. Deskins et al., Presidential Elections, 93, 100, 110, 118–20, 127–33; Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections; American Presidency Proj­ect. 44. On William Jay and the Liberty Party, see also WJCM, 118–22; Budney, William Jay, 63, 71–72. 45. “Judge Jay on Annexation. Extracts from a letter read by Judge Jay for the Mas­ sa­chu­setts Liberty party convention and published at the request of the convention,” n.d., Scrapbook, JJH. 46. Wilentz, Rise, 561–66, 577; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 698–99; Varon, Disunion! 5–14, carefully distinguishes the vari­ous rhetorical functions of disunion. 47. Kraditor, Means and Ends, 204–6, makes much of this letter. 48. NASS, Apr. 17, 1845. 49. WJ to SPC, May 5, Aug. 22, 1845, Chase Papers, HSP; NASS, July 17, 1845. 50. WJ to Thomas Clarkson, Feb. 2, Aug. 4, 1846, Papers of Thomas Clarkson, HL; see also WJ to JJII, Feb. 16, May 12, 1846. 51. NASS, Feb. 11, 1847; Wilentz, Rise, 581–82. 52. Wilentz, Rise, 594–601. 53. WJ to JJII, Nov. 26, 1847. 54. WJ to GS, Sept. 25, 1846, GSP (emphasis in original); WJ to JJII, Nov. 10, 1847. As the Liberty Party’s token US Senate candidate, Jay almost took a perverse plea­sure in losing votes by remaining true to his opposition to talk of breaking up large estates precipitated by the Hudson Valley Anti-­Rent movement; see “Judge Jay and the National Reformers,” WJ to George H. Evans, Oct. 11, 1847, in Scrapbook, JJH; WJ to JJII, Oct. 11, 1847. John Jay II also insisted that the Liberty Party maintain its antislavery focus; see JJII to Arthur Cleveland Coxe, Dec. 22, 1846 (draft), JFP. 55. JJII to CS, Nov. 4, 1846, Dec. 18, 1848, CSC. Both Jays developed a mutually supportive connection to Sumner during the 1840s; see WJ to CS, Aug. 22, 1845; Sept. 11, 1846, Feb. 2, May 22, 1847; Feb. 7, 1848, CSC; JJII to CS, Sept. 5, Nov. 8, 1845; Jan. 30, 1847; Jan. 11, Mar. 29, Sept. 30, 1848, CSC; CS to JJII, May 25, 1843; Apr. 6, 1844; June 5, 1844, Jan. 14, 1847, JFP; on Sumner’s po­liti­cal interests during this period see Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 112–34.

NOTES TO PA GES 275– 282

451

56. WJ to JJII, August n.d., 1848; Sewell, Ballots, 156–60; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 140. 57. WJ to JJII, Sept. 13, 1848; WJ to Eleanor Jay, Oct. 1, 1848; Deskins et al., Presidential Elections, 136–38. 58. Deskins et al., Presidential Elections, 136–41; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 832–34; Wilentz, Rise, 626–32. 59. Whitney, American Peace Society, 83–84; see also The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal, Oct. 6, 1849, 22–23. 60. WJ, Review, 3, 5; Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience.” 61. WJ, Review, 53, 74, 80, 107, 119. 62. WJ, Review, 160, 161, 162, 166, 179. 63. WJ, Review, 201–3. 64. WJ, Review, 213. 65. WJ, Review, 246, 252, 268. 66. WJ, Review, 278, 279, 281, 289. 67. Howe, Po­liti­cal Culture, 196; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 807; New York Tribune, excerpted as part of a sampling of reviews reprinted in Friends’ Review: A Religious and Miscellaneous Journal, June 30, 1849, 659–60; Jay himself, however, complained that the mainstream Whig press ignored his book—­WJ to CS, June 22, 1849, CSC; Liberator, June 15, 1849; National Era, May 24, 1849; Advocate for Peace Apr./May 1849 as excerpted in Friends’ Review, 659–60; Friends’ Review also reprinted the National Era remarks, June 9, 1849; Literary Union: A Journal of Pro­gress, in Lit­er­at­ure and Education, Religion and Politics, Science and Agriculture 1 (Aug. 11, 1849): 300; for other relevant reviews see Vermont Chronicle, May 9, 1849, 74; Ohio Observer, July 18, 1849; The In­de­ pen­dent, May 3, Sept. 13, 1849. 68. WJ to JJII, Apr. 16, 1849; WJ, Address to the Inhabitants, in MWS, 493, 494, 496. Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 199, 203, 350, attributes Address to the Non-­Slaveholders to Jay; it was originally published in 1843 and then subsequently reissued, perhaps in 1849, with a modified introduction; the pamphlet had been previously misattributed to Lewis Tappan. 69. Address to the Inhabitants, 550–51; abolitionists also published a Spanish-­language version of the address, Dedicatoria a los Habitantes, signed by an interracial group headed by Jay and Arthur Tappan and including Samuel Cornish and Charles B. Ray. 70. Pencak, “Salt of the Earth,” 240–43, 245–47. Advocate of Peace, Apr./May 1849 as excerpted in Friends’ Review, June 30, 1849; the John Quincy Adams chapter was one of two that The In­de­pen­dent, Sept. 13, 1849, singled out for praise, while National Era, May 24, 1849, listed the chapter as one of a “series of power­f ul chapters” at the end of the book; WJ, Review, 289, 290. 71. WJ, Review, quotations, 310; Budney, William Jay, 110, inaccurately states that ­there is no mention of disunion in Review; his reading of the work and of Jay’s state of mind at the end of the de­cade differs markedly from mine. 72. WJ, Review, quotations, 312, 316, 317, 318; Kraditor, Means and Ends, 25–26, analyzes the abolitionist rejection of vox populi vox dei Jacksonian demo­cratic logic. 73. WJ to Chase, May 24, 1849, Chase Papers, HSP (emphasis in original); Jay, Address to the Inhabitants, 551; Wilentz, Rise, 631; Varon, Disunion! 190.

45 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 285– 288

12. Uncompromised

1. WJ to JJII, Nov. 16, 1852; Trendel, William Jay, 219–20. On the ­Virginia fugitives, see NYT, Oct. 2, 1857; Gronningsater, “On Behalf ”; Davis, “Napoleon v Lemmon”; Gordan, “Lemon Slave Case”; Tyler-­McGraw and Pitcaithley, “Lemmon Slave Case”; Foner, Gateway, 140–42. 2. Foner, Gateway, is an invaluable study of the development and maintenance of ­those networks; on John Jay II, see 112–13, 137. 3. Foner, Gateway, 23, 82, 98, 100, 165, 181, notes how pro-­f ugitive and pro–­Under­ ground Railroad activities sometimes brought rival abolitionist factions into alignment. On the ­Virginia fugitives, see NYT, Oct. 2, 1857; Gronningsater, “On Behalf ”; Davis, “Napoleon v Lemmon”; Gordan, “Lemon Slave Case”; Tyler-­McGraw and Pitcaithley, “Lemmon Slave Case”; Foner, Gateway, 140–42. 4. Quotations from NASS, Sept. 26, 1844; Mar. 27, 1845; see also Oct. 3, 1844; Jan. 9, Jan. 23, Jan. 30, 1845; and Mayer, All on Fire, 277–78. 5. WJ to GS, Oct. 4, 1843, GSP; WJ to JJII, Oct. 4, 1843. For further context, see Sewell, Ballots, 124. 6. Despite this avowal of covert and overt commitment, Jay’s debate with his accuser as to what precisely tran­spired in this par­tic­u­lar case dragged into the following year; NASS, Oct. 26, Dec. 21, 1843; Feb. 1, 1844. 7. JJII, Pro­gress and Results, 21–28, 30; Peterson, Black Gotham, 127–32; Hodges, David Ruggles, 69; see also JJII to MBJ, Apr. 4, 1846, JFP. On West Indian emancipation and its image in the American abolitionist mind, see Davis, Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 256–90, and Rugemer, Prob­lem. 8. JJII, Pro­g ress and Results, 21, 27–28 (emphasis in original). Paternalistic self-­ understanding was a critical component of William Jay’s view on issues other than slavery; on landholding and rents, see WJ to John Clarkson Jay, Nov. 11, 1844, John Jay Ide Collection, NYHS; see also WJ to JJII, Oct. 11, 1847; On respectability politics among Black New Yorkers more generally, see Harris, In the Shadow, 170–73, 178–88, and Foner, Gateway, 48. 9. Proceedings of the New York Historical Society, 14, 121, 195; “New York Historical Society,” The United States Magazine, and Demo­cratic Review, New Series 14, No. 72 ( June 1844): 664. Intriguingly, unlike the minutes included in the United States Magazine, the Proceedings published the next year by the Historical Society omit any mention of the debate over w ­ hether to thank Beakley, just recording that he presented his paper; moreover, Beakley’s paper was not included in the appendix to the year’s proceedings, unlike some other materials, including a speech the next month by Judge John W. Edmonds, who would ­later rule favorably for Jay in two subsequent fugitive slave cases (see the l­ater discussion). 10. NASS, June 6, 1844. 11. On the theme of continuity across emancipation eras, see Gronningsater, “On Behalf,” 210–11. Historian R. J. M. Blackett has observed that in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act, northern courtrooms became “po­liti­cal theaters” where Blacks demonstrated against the injustices perpetrated against their communities by the authorities; see Blackett, Making Freedom, 96–97.

NOTES TO PA GES 289– 297

453

12. “Mr. Wm. Jay’s argum’t that Congress have no constitutional right to legislate on the subject of delivering up fugitives from Justice, or from ­labor.” Undated typescript filed with 1838 materials; WJ, View, 29–30; Baker, “A Better Story.” 13. NASS, Sept. 14, 1843; Sturge, Visit, 55; Foner, Gateway, 56–57. 14. Gronningsater, “On Behalf,” 206, 214–15; Davis, “Napoleon v Lemmon” 36, notes this flexibility was a hallmark of African American New Yorkers’ approach to fugitive cases; NASS, Oct. 29, 1846. 15. Supplement to the New-­York ­Legal Observer, quotations 461, 12, 14, 18; NASS, Oct. 29, 1846; see also Finkelman, Imperfect, 134–36. 16. JJII to CS, Nov. 4, 1846, CSC; Foner, Gateway, 112–14; NASS, Jan. 28, Feb. 4, 1847, devoted extensive space to reprinting Jay’s argument in court; see also Nov. 5, Nov. 12, Nov. 19, Nov. 26, Dec. 10, Dec. 17, 1846; Jan. 21, Feb. 11, 1847. 17. “In the m ­ atter of Joseph B ­ elt,” in New-­York ­Legal Observer, 80–89, quotation 82; NASS, Dec. 28, 1848; Jan. 4, Jan. 11, Apr. 5, 1849; North Star, Jan. 12, 1849; Finkelman, Imperfect, 136; Foner, Gateway, 114–15. 18. NASS, July 15, July 22, July 29, Aug. 5, Aug. 12, 1847; Foner, Gateway, 107. 19. NASS, Aug. 12, Sept. 16, 1847; see also Aug. 5, Sept. 2, 1847. 20. Strong, Diary, 1:300; WJ to JJII, Aug. 11, 1847. For further evidence of John Jay’s efforts on behalf of fugitives and how they bolstered his reputation, see Arthur Tappan to JJI, n.d., letter of introduction on behalf of JJII from LT to Joseph Sturge, Apr. 22, 1848, JFP; Gronningsater, “On Behalf,” 215, 237n41; and Foner, Gateway, 133. 21. “Letter from William Jay to Moses Pierce,” Oct. 9, 1847, Scrapbook, JJH. 22. Wilentz, Rise, 638–39. 23. Davis, Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 3–44, brilliantly deploys the concept of “animalization.” 24. WJ, Letter to Hon. William Nelson, in MWS, 560–65. 25. Sturge, Visit, 55; Foner, Gateway, 57. 26. NASS, March 28, 1850; Liberator, Mar. 29, 1850. 27. William Jay, “fugitive slaves. Address of Hon. William Jay Before the Anniversary of the American and Foreign Anti-­Slavery Society,” n.d., Scrapbook, JJH. For Jay’s personal commentary on his anti-­Missouri Compromise public writings, see WJ to CS, Feb. 21, Mar. 14, Apr. 3, May 28, 1850, CSC. 28. Fugitive Slave Act 1850, Avalon Proj­ect; Davis, Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 250–51; Blackett, Captive’s Quest, 3–41. 29. Hewitt, “Mr. Downing”; Powell was an advocate for providing education to Blacks and was against colonization; see Hewitt, “Unresting the ­Waters,” 23, 30n86; NASS, Oct. 17, 1850, and “Letter from William Jay,” Oct. 2, 1850, Scrapbook, JJH. 30. NASS, Oct. 17, 1850. 31. Blackett, Captive’s Quest, 32–34, discusses Jay’s letter and pos­si­ble African American responses to the hated law; Blackett, Making Freedom, 5, 40, 44, 48, focuses on a Pennsylvania African American community’s response to fugitive rendition. 32. NASS, Oct. 17, 1850; Fugitive Slave Bill; Harris, In the Shadow, 238; Foner, Gateway, 136, 145–50, 165–72. 33. NASS, Oct. 17, 1850 (emphasis in original). On constitutional issues, see also in the William Jay scrapbook, next to a copy of this letter to Downing and Powell, an

45 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 298– 302

intriguing newspaper excerpt, “Can I Support the Constitution?”—an anonymously authored piece by “an eminent jurist, who is an Anti-­Slavery man by descent and princi­ ple,” originally submitted to the Williamsburgh Gazette. The essay made a distinction between accepting the legitimacy of the Constitution and declining to obey immoral laws passed ­under the auspices of constitutional government. 34. JJII to CS, Jan. 2, Jan. 4, Jan. 14, 1851, CSC (emphasis in original); NASS, Jan. 16, 1851; Annual Report of the American and Foreign Anti-­Slavery Society, 26; Foner, Gateway, 130–32; Blackett, Captive’s Quest, 380–81. 35. JJII to Lyman Mungar et al., May 26, 1854, JFP; Blackett, Captive’s Quest, 382– 84, 385, 390; Foner, Gateway, 169–70, 173–74. 36. JJII to CS, May 15, 1850, CSC; JJII to Washington Hunt (copy), May 10, 1852; JJII to the Editor of the Herald, May 20, 1852, JFP; Blackett, Captive’s Quest, 365; see also Foner, Gateway, 138, though my evidence suggests a dif­fer­ent understanding of Jay’s petitioning strategy; for another of Jay’s cases during this era, see Foner, Gateway, 133–34. 37. Townsend, Faith, 178–87; NYT, Sept. 30, 1852, 7–8; Oct. 1, 1852; Hewitt, “Unresting the ­Waters,” 19–22; Moses, Alexander Crummell, 43–44. 38. Townsend, Faith, 183–97, is quite critical of John Jay; Trendel, “John Jay II,” offers a much more positive assessment; see also, Odessky, “Possesed.” 39. Strong, Diary, 2:131; NYT, Sept. 30, 1853; Townsend, Faith, 197; Hewitt, “Unresting the ­Waters,” 22; Peterson, Black Gotham, 210–15. 40. JJII to Theodore Frelinghuysen (draft), Jan. 17, 1851; JJII to Aaron Rand (draft), Jan. 20, 1851; JJII to Alexander Hodgson Stevens, Oct. 4, 1851, JJII to John Player Crosby (draft), Sept. 23, 1852 (quotations); JJII II to Charles O’Connor (draft), n.d.; see also JJII draft letters, Dec. 20, 1850; Mar. 10, 1851, all in JFP; Odessky, “Possessed”; Keane, “Blurring the Lines”; and Foner, “Columbia and Slavery.” 41. Gronningsater, “On Behalf,” 206–7, 209–10, 214–15, 225–29; Davis, “Napoleon v. Lemmon.” 42. NYT, Oct. 2, 1857; Gronningsater,” On Behalf,” 206–7, 212, 216–18; Davis, “Napoleon v Lemmon,” 30–35, 37–40; Gordan, “Lemon Slave Case,” 9–10; Tyler-­McGraw and Pitcaithley, “Lemmon Slave Case.” 43. Arthur Tappan to JJII, Feb. 11, Dec. 13, 1852; Feb. 12, June 11, 1853; Jan. 7, 1854, all in JFP; Tyler-­McGraw and Pitcaithley, “Lemmon Slave Case”; Gronningsater,” On Behalf,” 218; Foner, Gateway; for trenchant remarks on the Under­ground Railroad, see also Davis, Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 232–38. 44. As the sides prepared to do b­ attle in court over the under­lying ­legal issues, John Jay and Louis Napoleon eventually grew ner­vous, particularly ­after the 1857 Dred Scott decision in which the US Supreme Court sided decisively with slaveholders’ right to bring enslaved ­people into federal territories. What if the other shoe dropped, and Chief Justice Taney and his colleagues gave ­legal permission for masters to carry slaves into ­free states too? Jay worried deeply about this possibility, which he told John King, governor of New York, would be a “Calamity.” He and Napoleon thought it best to keep the Lemmon case out of the courts—­attempting to convince the governor and the state legislature that with the Black Virginians now ­free and their putative ­owners agreeing to terms of manumission, the entire m ­ atter no longer had parties to contest it; see JJII to WHS, Mar. 16, 1857, WHSP; JJII to John Alsop King, Dec. 28, 1857, Jan. 2, Jan. 9, 1858 (copies), JFP; JJII to CS,

NOTES TO PA GES 302– 308

455

Oct. 28, 1859; Mar. 24, 1860, CSC; NYT, Oct. 2, 1857; Gronningsater,” On Behalf,” 207–8, 218–25; Gordan, “Lemmon Slave Case,” 10–11; Tyler-­McGraw and Pitcaithley, “Lemmon Case”; see also Finkelman, Imperfect, 298–312; as early as 1854, Salmon  P. Chase expressed his concerns that the Lemmon case might set a dangerous negative precedent—­ see SPC to JJII, Jan. 23, 1854, JFP; see also, Blackett, Captive’s Quest, 386–89. 45. WJ to Sydney Howard Gay, Sept. 1854 (emphasis in original); Foner, Gateway, 9–10, 90, 98, 172–75, 194–95, and throughout; Blackett, Captives’ Quest, 391–93. For further historical commentary of William Jay helping fugitives, see WJCM, 140; see also Trendel, William Jay, 214, 216, 220; Budney, William Jay, 116. 46. Stephen A. Myers to JJII, Dec. 17, 1858, in Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:407–9 [spelling in the quotation uncorrected]; Foner, Gateway, 177–79; Blackett, Captive’s Quest, 360–61. 47. Strong, Diary, 2:24–25. 48. Strong, Diary, 2:31, 34. 49. Stuart, Conscience, 63. 50. Stuart, Conscience, quotations 45, 54; among the passages on Paul are 46–47, 49, 61; see 25–43 for a lengthy commentary on Moses and Mosaic law. 51. WJ, Reply to Remarks, 3, 4, 7, 9 (emphasis in original). 52. WJ, Reply to Remarks, 10, 16, 19, 21, 22; WJ, Review, 317; on his motivations for responding to Stuart, see WJ to JJII, June 29, 1850. 53. WJ to GS, Aug. 27, 1853, GSP (emphasis in original). 54. Flanders, Lives, 214–20, quotation 218. 55. Liberator, May 25, 1855. 56. Hood, In Pursuit, 104–5; Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 58–59; JJII, James Monroe and James J. Ring, Union Club House (1851), JFP. 57. WJ to CS, Dec. 16, 1850, CSC (emphasis in original). 58. WJ to Joseph Coerten Hornblower (typescript), Aug. 12, 1850. 59. WJ to Hornblower (typescript), July 17, 1851 (emphasis in original). See also WJ to Hornblower (typescript), July 11, 1851, in which Jay wrote, “­Pardon me my dear Sir, for this trespassing on your time & patience, but it is so seldom that I find gentlemen moving in your sphere to whom my sentiments on ­these subjects are not offensive, that I could not deny myself the plea­sure of expressing them to one to whose heart & conscience I know they are acceptable.” 60. WJ to Hornblower, July 17, 1851; for a fascinating account of Hornblower’s ­career and jurisprudence related to slavery, see Hartog, Trou­ble, 30–44, 67, 122–32, 143– 44, 146; see also Gigantino, Raged Road, 183, 220, 230; Hartog is more emphatic, 166n, about Hornblower’s commitment to abolition. Finkelman, “State Constitutional Conventions,” reviews Hornblower’s rec­ord on fugitive slave law; 780–74, discusses his interactions with Jay and Chase. 61. Hornblower, quote in Finkleman, “State Constitutional Protections,” 773 (emphasis in original); WJ to Hornblower (typescript), July 29, 1851, as well as July 21, 1851; Finkelman, “State Constitutional Protections,” 757, 770–74, 782–86; see also Hornblower to SPC, Sept. 16, 1851; Chase to Hornblower, Oct. 21, 1851, in Salmon P. Chase Papers, 2:338–41. 62. WJ to Elizabeth Clarkson Jay, June  14, 1851, PJJ, Doc. 11656 (emphasis in original).

45 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 309– 314

13. Parting Shots

1. WJ to CS, May 10, 1856, and also Mar. 4, 1856, and an undated letter from the same time frame, CSC; on Sumner’s long-­standing admiration of William Jay’s writing, see CS to JJII, June 5, 1844; Nov. 6, 1853, JFP; CS to Joshua R. Giddings, May 6, 1848; CS to SPC, Jan. 24, 1850; CS to JJII, May 13, 1850, in Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, 223–24, 284, 294. Sumner, “Freedom National,” 287, cites WJ, LJJ. 2. JJII to CS, May 21, 1856, CSC; WJ to CS, n.d., CSC appears to have felt similarly. 3. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 233–49. 4. JJII to CS, May 23, May 27, May 29, 1856; JJII and Eleanor Jay to CS, June 3, 1856, CSC; JJII to Hiram Barney, May 27, 1856, Barney Papers, HL; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 249–54. 5. WJ to MJB and Sarah Louisa Jay, June 21, 1856; WJ to JJII, Sept. 2, 1856; see also JJII to CS, June 23, 1856, CSC; WJ to JJII, May 29, June 7, June 12, June 19, 1856. 6. John Jay, William C. Bryant and O ­ thers, “International Copyright,” 7–8; see also JJII to Alfred B. Street, May 8, 1848, Misc Mss J Box 2 Jameson-­Johns, NYHS; JJII to Francis Lieber, May 11, 1848, Papers of Francis Lieber, HL; JJII to CS, Jan. 14, Feb. 19, 1853, CSC; CS to JJII, Dec. 17, 1852; Jan. 31, Feb. 4, 1853, JFP; JJII to WHS, Jan. 24, 1853, WHSP. 7. Bulletin, 3–5; Proceeding of the American Geo­graph­i­cal and Statistical Society in Reference to a Uniform Standard of Weights and Mea­sures (which includes a Memorial to Congress, presented by Charles Sumner to the Senate, Feb. 6, 1854), John Jay II Clubs & Socie­ties Box, JJH; JJII to Hiram Barney (draft), Jan. 12, 1855; JJII to William Learned Marcy, Jan. 1855, Feb. 1855, Mar. 1855, Jan. 18, 1857 (drafts); JJII to Joseph Henry (draft), May  16, 1856, JJII to Marshall Pinckney Wilder (draft), Jan.  11, 1859, JJI to Nicholas Trübner (copy), Mar. 25, 1859, all in JFP; JJI to WHS, Apr. 16, 1858, WHSP. 8. JJII, Statistical View, 24; Foner, ­Free Soil. 9. JJI to CS, May 8, Sept. 3 (quotation), Sept. 14, Sept. 19, Sept. 23, 1853, CSC; see also CS to JJII, May 19, 1853, JFP; Sean Wilentz, Rise, 658–66, 684; Sewell, Ballots, 250–53. 10. ­Free Demo­cratic League. Minutes, 1853–54, NYHS, contains folder at front with this financial contribution information. 11. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 192–95; Oakes, Freedom National, 1–48, lays out the conceptual framework. 12. Constitution of the F ­ ree Demo­cratic League of the City & County of New York; Rec­ords of the F ­ ree Demo­cratic League of the City of New York, NYHS; FDL, Minutes, Oct. 31, Nov. 7, 1853. 13. FDL, Minutes, Oct. 21, Oct. 25, Oct. 28, Oct. 31, 1853. 14. Sydney Howard Gay to Maria Weston Chapman, Sept. 2, 1851, Gay Papers, Columbia University as transcribed by Eric Foner and shared in a personal email to the author; JJI to Sydney Howard Gay, n.d., Nov. 2, 1847; Apr. 19, Apr. 22, 1848; June 2, 1853 [misdated as 1833], Sydney Howard Gay Papers, Columbia University; Foner, Gateway, 112. 15. WJ, NASS, May 19, 1853; see also WJ to Gay, Dec. 8, 1849; Feb. 23, 1853; June 28, Aug. 28, 1854, Sydney Howard Gay Papers. 16. Johnson, “Liberty”; JJH holds JJII’s personal copy of the flyer announcing the series and its roster.

NOTES TO PA GES 315– 323

457

17. NASS, Jan.  14, 1854; Johnson, “Liberty,” 565–66, 575, 576; Oakes, Freedom National. 18. JJII, notes for Tabernacle speech, Jan. 10, 1854, JFP; NASS, Jan. 14, 1854; NYT, Jan. 12, 1854. 19. JJII notes; NASS, Jan. 14, 1854 (emphasis in original). 20. NASS, Jan. 14, 1854; NYT, Jan. 12, 1854; see Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, 14, 16–17, 30–31, 56–57, 63–69, on the significance of slavery in the District of Columbia to the abolitionist and Republican visions of slavery’s end. 21. JJII, notes, Jan. 10, 1854; Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, 61–62. 22. SPC to JJII, Jan. 23, 1854; CS to JJII, Jan. 12, Jan. 21, Jan. 22, Jan. 26, 1854, JFP; JJII to CS, Jan. 13, Jan. 14, Jan. 20, Jan. 24, 1854, CSC; JJII to SPC, Feb. 8, 1854, SPCPM. 23. “The Nebraska Perfidy and Slavery Aggression, New York State Convention, to be held at Saratoga Springs, Aug. 16, 1854” (printed Anti-­Nebraska materials), JJH; Wilentz, Rise, 672–77. 24. WJ to GS, Mar. 24, 1854, GSP; WJ, “The Kansas League. Letter from the Hon. William Jay,” Sept. 11, 1854, Scrapbook, JJH; see also WJ to GS, Apr. 28, June 22, July 15, Aug. 2, Dec. 20, 1853; Jan. 30, May 2, 1854, GSP. On Smith’s surprising election and brief time in Congress, see Stauffer, Black Hearts, 174–79; Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 314–16. 25. Wilentz, Rise, 564, 584, 631, 663; Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 301; Johnson, “Liberty,” 561. 26. Hale, Barney, and JJII, “­Free Demo­cratic Address.” 27. Wilentz, Rise, 663, 678–79, 683–85, 698, 703; Sewell, Ballots, 264–65, 271–74; Holt, Po­liti­cal Crisis, 155–56, 158–59; Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, 156–61. 28. JJII to CS, Mar. 20, 1856, CSC; see also JJII to CS, Oct. 13, 1855; Feb. 3, 1856; WJ to CS, Oct. 10, 1855, CSC; WJ to WHS, Aug. 25, 1855, WHSP; George E. Baker to JJII, Sept. 4, 1855, JJII Nina Iselin (Tolman) Ms Col Friends gift, JJH; James R. Cox to JJII, Sept. 21, 1855, JFP. 29. JJII, Amer­i­ca ­Free, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8. 30. JJII, Amer­i­ca ­Free, 11, 18. 31. JJII to CS, Nov. 7, 1856, CSC; see JJII to Lord Stanley, Aug. 5, 1856, JFP, for his more inflated preelection hopes; Deskins et al., Presidential Elections, 150, 161, 162; Wilentz, Rise, 693–706; Sewell, Ballots, 289–91; Shonnard and Spooner, History, 587–88. 32. WJ to Theodore Dwight Jr., June 25, 1855, Misc. Mss Dwight, Theodore, Jr. Letters, Minutes, 1818–1903, NYHS; WJ to CS, Mar. 4, 1856, CSC. 33. WJ to Dwight, June 25, 1855; WJ to JJII, Sept. 2, 1856. 34. WJ, “Letter to Lewis Tappan,” in MWS, 661–64, quotation 664; the letter e­ arlier appeared in NASS, June 4, 1853, as well as in WJ, Letters Respecting the American Board; Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 292–94, 311–21; see also “Slavery and the American Bible Society,” Scrapbook, JJH; although this anonymous mid-1850s article cannot be unequivocally assigned to Jay, the rhe­toric echoes Jay’s. 35. WJ, “Letter to Rev. R. S. Cook,” in MWS, 641–58, quotations 642, 644, 647, 651 (emphasis in original); NASS, May 12, 1853. 36. WJ, Examination, 6, 9 (emphasis in original). Intriguingly, in parsing the Hebrew vocabulary of servitude, as distinct from slavery, Jay listed the biblical Zilpah as an example. On the conceptual significance of chattel, see Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, 54–56, and Johnson, Soul by Soul, who, draws directly on Pennington’s observations, 19, 218–19.

45 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 323– 329

Although a few proslavery authors during this era abandoned the idea of unitary creation in order to justify enslavement, the theological mainstream continued to debate slavery on biblical terrain; Frederickson, Black Image, chap. 3. 37. Jay, Examination, 27, 30, 39, 47. 38. Jay, Examination, 54. 39. WJ to E.C. Wines, Mar. 18, 1854, American Prose, HSP (emphasis in original). 40. Berrian, Facts against Fancy, 6; WJ to GS, Feb. 13, 1856, GSP; WJ, A Letter to the Rev. William Berrian, esp. 4, 10. Jay told Smith that his response to Berrian had garnered a positive reception, though Strong, Diary, 2:253, labeled Jay’s public letter “feeble and foolish.” 41. WJ, A Letter to the Committee, 26–27, 38; Acts 17:26; Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan, 315. 42. For a succinct account of the decision and its fallout, see Varon, Disunion!, 295–304. 43. JJII to WHS, Mar. 16, 1857, WHSP; JJII to John Alsop King, Dec. 28, 1857; Jan. 2, Jan. 9, 1858 (copies), JFP; JJII to CS, Oct. 28, 1859; Mar. 24, 1860, CSC; NYT, Oct. 2, 1857; Gronningsater,” On Behalf,” 207–8, 220–27; Gordan, “Lemmon Slave Case,” 10– 11; Tyler-­McGraw and Pitcaithley, “Lemmon Case”; see also Finkelman, Imperfect, 298– 312; Varon, Disunion!, 299, 303. 44. JJII to Edward John, Lord Stanley, Mar. 30, 1857, JFP; JJII to CS, Apr. 14, 1857, CSC; Varon, Disunion!, 302–3. 45. NASS, May 9, 1857; Liberator, May 15, 1857. The italicized words in this reprint ­were not highlighted in the copy of the letter ( JJ to Elias Boudinot, Nov. 17, 1819, PJJ Doc. 08767) in Jay’s hand, nor in a sample of newspapers from 1819 I reviewed, nor in WJ, LJ, 1:453. See also NASS, Sept. 5, 1857, for an article titled “The Contrasts: Rynders and Clarkson, Taney and Jay, Buchanan and Washington.” 46. WJ to JJII, June 7, June 12, June 26, June 30, July 3, Aug. 1, 1856; WJ to MJB and Sarah Louis Jay, June 21, 1856; Eliza Jay [Pellew] to JJII, Oct. 26, 1856; WJ to Eliza Clarkson Jay, Apr. 26, 1857; WJ to John Clarkson Jay, July 14, 1857; Budney, William Jay, 128–29. 47. WJ to GS Aug. 12, 1857, GSP; WJ to JJII, Oct. 15, 1847; see also WJ to JJII, Sept. 2, 1856; Jan. 2, Mar. 9, Oct. 21, Dec. 12, 1857; n.d., 1858; WJ to John Clarkson Jay, Mar. 17, July 14, 1857. 48. Liberator, Oct. 9, 1857. 49. Compare and contrast to Trendel, William Jay, 428–32. 50. WJ to Francis Lieber, Mar. 9, 1858, Papers of Francis Lieber, HL (emphasis in original); on Lieber, see Mack and Lesesne, eds., Francis Lieber; and Trilling, “A Tale.” 51. WJ to JJII, Oct. 15, Oct. 21, 1857; JJII to CS, Oct. 18, 1858, CSC; JJII to Osgood Field (copy), Oct. 26, 1858, JFP; JJII to John Gorham Palfrey (draft), Oct. 30, 1858, JFP; JJII to Cropper, Dec. 1, 1858, JJII Nina Iselin (Tolman) Ms Col, JJH; JJII to SPC, Mar. 7, 1859, SPCPM; see also Budney, William Jay, 132–33. 52. Arthur Tappan to JJII, Nov. 26, 1858, JFP; WJ, Last ­Will and Testament, signed Apr. 14, 1858, JJH; Stephen A. Myers to JJII, Dec. 17, 1858, in Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:407–11. 53. NASS, Nov. 27, 1858; New-­York Daily Tribune, Nov. 18, Nov. 26, 1858; and Ottawa Republican, Dec. 4, 1858, Scrapbook, JJH.

NOTES TO PA GES 330– 332

459

54. ­Under the ironic, mocking heading, “The Higher Law,” the Daily Picayune published the same piece on consecutive days, Nov. 27 and Nov. 28, 1858; a reprinted version of the item also found its way into the end of the William Jay scrapbook, JJH. 55. Douglass, “Eulogy”; NYT, May 13, 1859; Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One, 3:249. 56. JJII to CS, Oct. 18, 1858, see also, CSC; JJII to SPC, Mar. 7, 1859, SPCPM. 57. Rev. Leland Tucker to JJII, Oct. 16, 1858, Rev. A Cleveland Coxe to JJII, Oct. 18, 1858; Susan Sedgewick to JJII; see also Rev. J. H. Hobart to JJII, Oct. 16, 1858, A. H. Partridge to JII, Oct. 17, 1858, Rev. Coxe to JJII, Oct. 22, 1858; James Constable to JJII, Oct. 24, 1858; George C. Beckwith, to JJII, Nov. 8, 1858, is an exception in mentioning antislavery explic­itly; all letters in Nina Iselin (Tolman) Ms Col, JJHF. 58. John McVickar to JJI with “Recollections,” date unknown, Nina Iselin (Tolman) Ms Col, JJHF. 59. Eve­ning Post, Oct. 15, 1858; NYT, Oct. 16, 1858; New York Sun, Oct. 16, 1858; The Evangelist, Oct. 21, 1858; Morning Express, Oct. 16, 1858—­all in Scrapbook, JJH; the NYT included two more, even briefer, mentions of William Jay’s death on Oct. 16, one in a list of death notices, the other ­under the “News of the Day” heading, making for three mentions all on the same day. Two magazines picked up the Eve­ning Post’s obituary: see The Historical Magazine 2, no. 11 (Nov. 1858): 349–50; and ­Little’s Living Age, vol. 59, pp. 472–73. For contrast to t­hese items downplaying Jay’s abolitionism, see an item from Washington, D.C., Oct. 21, 1858, which stated, “We doubt ­whether the writings of any single man have contributed as much to” antislavery’s “advancement as t­ hose of Judge Jay,” Scrapbook, JJH. 60. New-­York Daily Tribune, Oct. 16, Oct. 19, Oct. 21, 1858; The In­de­pen­dent, Oct. 21, 1858, Scrapbook, JJH. 61. News clipping, Nov. 15, 1858, Scrapbook, JJH; Eastern State Journal, Nov. 12, 1858, Scrapbook, JJH; African Repository, Dec. 1858, 381; The Protestant Churchman, Oct. 30, 1858, Scrapbook, JJH. Eulogies avoiding slavery w ­ ere, of course, not necessarily off the mark; for a heartfelt tribute that dwelt almost entirely on his religious devotion, a vital aspect of his biography to be sure, see Partridge, Memory; Crosby, Annual, 177– 80, offered, by contrast, a much more down-­to-­earth account that integrated William Jay’s antislavery activities into the facts of his life. 62. William A. Tyson and Charles A. Horton, Jr., Church of the Messiah, NYC, Resolution, Oct. 20, 1858, William Jay Corres., JJHF; William A. Tyson to JJII, n.d., JJII Nina Iselin (Tolman) Ms Col, JJHF; New-­York Daily Tribune, n.d., in William Jay scrapbook. 63. LT to JJII, Feb. 19, 1859; JJII to LT (copy), Feb. 19, 1859; Arthur Tappan to JJII, Dec. 21, 1859, JFP; NYT, May 9, 1859, makes a passing reference to the American Peace Society eulogy; see also Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, 1:255n. Douglass made use of a letter Jay had written to a New York newspaper when composing his iconic speech on the meaning of the Fourth of July; Frederick Douglass to GS, July 7, 1852, in Frederick Douglass Papers, Series Three 1:545–46; A. B., “The New York Journal of Commerce,” Scrapbook, JJH. Douglass, in his eulogy, recalled encountering Jay for the last time four years prior at a Charles Sumner speech in New York City, but the key link was their mutual friendship with Gerrit Smith, as well as mutual connections to James McCune Smith; see Stauffer, Black Hearts; and McKivigan, “Frederick Douglass-­Gerrit Smith Friendship”; JJII to Frederick Douglass (copy), Apr. 7, 1859; Frederick Douglass

46 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 333– 340

to JJII, Apr. 11, June 30, 1859; John Peterson, Charles L. Reason, and James McCune Smith to JJII, May 11, 1859, JFP; NASS, Apr. 30, 1859. 64. Not only did Douglass make this comparison in the speech but he also included an appendix in the pamphlet version containing tribute poems about Clarkson and Wilberforce; see Douglass, Eulogy, 30–32. 65. All quotations from Douglass’ Monthly, June 1859, 81–86. 66. Douglass, Eulogy; John Jay II to Frederick Douglass, May 24, May 29, 1859, Frederick Douglass Papers. ­There is an extensive lit­er­a­ture on Douglass’s complicated relationship to the founding, most famously prompted by Douglass himself in his oration, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”; see Sund­quist, To Wake, 34–35, 83–134; Mills, “Whose Fourth of July?”; Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass; for Douglass and abolitionism, see Martin, Mind, chap. 2; and on Douglass and the politics of the 1850s, see Blight, Frederick Douglass’s Civil War, chap. 2; and Oakes, Radical, chap. 1. 67. William Jay, Last ­Will and Testament, signed Apr. 14, 1858. 68. William Jay, Codicil to Last W ­ ill and Testament, written May 15, 1858, and signed July 1, 1858. 69. 1850 United States Federal Census, accessed via Ancestry​.­com, rec­ords Zilpah as unable to read. 70. That is how the National Anti-­Slavery Standard seems to have interpreted the codicil; see NASS, Nov. 27, 1858; New-­York Daily Tribune, Nov. 18, 1858, Scrapbook, JJH, also reprinted this codicil. 14. Civil Wars

1. “Why We Resist,” quotations, 243, 244, 246. 2. Strong, Diary, 3:57; Hood, In Pursuit, chap. 4. 3. JJII to WHS (copy), Dec. 18, 1858, JJII to Frederick A. Conkling (copy), Apr. 1, 1859, JFP; JJII, Proxy; JJII to Caleb Sprague Henry (copy), Dec. 28, 1859, JFP; JJII, American Church; “John Jay on the African Slave Trade”; Strong, Diary, 3:42–43; Myers to JJII, Jan. 2, 1860, JJH; Myers to JJII, Dec. 17, 1860, Eric Foner notes from JJH shared with author; Hirame Wilson to JJII, Dec. 24, 1860, JJII Nina Iselin (Tolman) Ms Col, JJHF. 4. JJII to Joshua Bates (draft), c. June 23, 1859; William Lloyd Garrison and Helen E. Garrison to JJII and EKFJ, June 21, 1859, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 4:603, 632–33; JJII to SPC, May 16, 1859, SPCPM. 5. JJII to CS, Oct. 28, 1859; CSC; JJII to Henry Sherman (copy), Feb. 23, 1859, JFP; CS to JJII, Nov. 15, 1856; Jan. 6, Feb. 18, Feb. 22, Mar. 2, Dec. 1, 1857; Apr. 3, Apr. 23, May 13, May 18, June 1, 1858; Aug. 23, 1859; Feb. 9, 1860, JFP. 6. JJII to SPC (copy), Feb. 22, 1858; SPC to JJII, Nov. 18, 1857; Jan. 12, 1858; Mar. 3, May 14, June 13, 1859, JFP; JJII to SPC, Mar. 7, May 16, 1859, SPCPM; Niven, Salmon P. Chase, 230. As some of ­these letters indicate, the two had a business relationship as well. In March 1861, the incoming secretary of the trea­sury even asked Jay for a personal loan; SPC to JJII, Mar. 11, Mar. 20, 1861, JFP. 7. JJII to CS, Oct. 28, 1859, CSC; Goodwin, Team, chaps. 7–8. 8. CS to JJII, June 5, June 7, June 27, 1860; see also Mar. 19, 1860, JFP. 9. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 294–305; JJII to CS, June 7, June 23, 1860, CSC.

NOTES TO PA GES 340– 346

461

10. JJII, Rise and Fall, esp. 3, 13, 14–15, 19, 22, 24, 33–40, 45 (emphasis in original). 11. Deskins et al., Presidential Elections, 172, 173, 176; Whitaker, “The Civil War,” 490–91; Shonnard and Spooner, History, 592–93. 12. JJII to CS, Dec. 31, 1860; see also Dec. 17, 1860, CSC; CS to JJII, Jan. 17, Jan. 22, Feb. 1, Feb. 3, Feb. 5, 1861, JFP; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 305–14. 13. JJII to CS, Jan. 12, Jan. 24, Feb. 1, Feb. 2, Feb. 4, Feb. 7, Feb. 16, Feb. 18, 1861, CSC; Memorial, Union League Club, May 5, 1894, JFP. 14. Hood, In Pursuit, 139–45. 15. JJII to John Ellis Wool, July 17, 1861, JFP; WJII to EKFJ, Aug. 22, Aug. 23, Aug. 24, Dec. 11, 1861 (all WJII letters cited from transcription of Civil War letters of William Jay II, provided to author by JJH); JJII to Augusta Field Jay Robinson, Aug. 22, 1861, JFP; Rezneck, “Civil War Role.” For a summary of William Jay’s Civil War ser­vice, see McLean, Jays of Bedford, 32–36. 16. Oakes, Freedom National, 93–144; Foner, Fiery Trial, 174–76, 341. 17. WJII to EJC, Sept. 19, 1861; Apr. 2, 1862; WJII to Mary Jay, Oct. 17, 1861; WJII to EKFJ, Sept. 4, 1861. 18. Brier, “Joseph Cusno,” 44; WJII to JJII, Sept. 11, 1861; WJII to Mary Jay, Sept. 12, 1861; WJII to EKFJ, Sept. 13, Oct. 15, 1861; WJII to Augusta Jay, Nov. 20, 1861. 19. WJII to EJC, Oct. 2, 1861; on Frémont, see Oakes, Freedom National, 156–59, 163–65; Foner, Fiery Trial, 176–80. 20. WJII to EKFJ, Oct. 15, 1861; Jan. 17, 1862; WJII to Augusta Jay, Jan. 18, Jan. 22, 1862, WJII to JJII, Feb. 17, Apr. 11, Apr. 21, Apr. 25, 1862; WJII to Henry G. Chapman, Mar. 1, 1862; JJII to John Milton Hay (copy), Nov. 13, 1861, JFP; WJII, Spring 1862, letter fragment; Rezneck, “Civil War Role,” 245, indicates that Wool did receive the promotion as a reward for organ­izing the capture of Norfolk; McLean, Jays of Bedford, 34. 21. Heidler and Heidler, “George Sykes”; Stonesifer, “­Little Round Top”; Catton, Stillness, 49; McPherson, Tried by War, 181, 199, 212; WJII to EKFJ, July 1, July 11, 1863; Mar. 26, June 7, 1864; WJII to JJII, July 14, 1863; Mar. 26, July 8, 1864; McLean, Jays of Bedford, 34. 22. JJII to CS, Apr. 18, June 19, July 25, 1861, CSC; JJII referenced his ­father’s writing in the midst of this discussion—­see WJ, Address to the Inhabitants, in MWS, 542–43; Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, discusses military emancipation doctrine and history at g­ reat length. 23. JJII to CS, Sept. 10, Sept. 12, Sept. 26, Oct. 26, Nov. 19, 1861, CSC. 24. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, 25–26; Oakes, Freedom National, chap. 4, esp. 134–36. 25. JJII to CS, Apr. 18, Oct. 14, Nov. 8, 1861, CSC; JJII to James R. Cox (draft), July 24, 1861, JFP; see also JJII to Edwin Denison Morgan (copy), Apr. 11, 1861, JFP. 26. Sumner to JJII, date uncertain, c. Aug. 1861, JFP (emphasis in original); JJII to Augusta Field Jay Robinson, Aug. 22, 1861, JFP. 27. JJII Letter to Editor of the Herald (draft), Sept. 16, 1861 (emphasis in original); see also JJII to Sumner, Nov. 8, 1861, CSC; and New York Tribune, Oct. 4, 1861, for that paper’s racist contempt for Jay and his long-­standing efforts on behalf of African Americans within the New York Episcopal Diocese. 28. CS to JJII, Nov. 10, 1861, JFP, urged Jay to keep using his influence to make “military necessity” arguments for emancipation; JJII to Simeon Cameron (draft), Nov. 30, 1861, JFP; AH to JJ, Mar. 14, 1779, in LJJ, 2:31–32.

46 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 346– 355

29. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, 54–55; JJII to CS, Feb. 12, 1862, CSC; Oakes, Freedom National, 224–39; Foner, Fiery Trial, 215–18. 30. JJII to CS, Jan. 4, 1862, CSC; see also JJII to John Jay Dana (copy), Jan. 3, 1862; JJII to John Parker Hale (draft), July 1, 1862, JFP. 31. JJII to CS, May 28, 1862, CSC; for references to his f­ather’s visits, see WJII to EKFJ, Oct. 31, 1861; Mar. 10, 1862. 32. JJII to CS, Apr. 19, May 3, 1862, CSC. 33. JJII to Robert Hamilton (copy), July 10, 1862, JFP; Peterson, Black Gotham, 260; Foner, Fiery Trial, 160, 165, 180, 194, 196. 34. JJII to CS, Mar. 18, 1861; Feb. 12, May 28, June 12, June 25, 1862, CSC; JJII to Lyman Trumbull (copy), July 5, 1862, JFP. 35. JJII to Edward Bates (copy), June  21, 1862, JFP; JJII to Seward (copy and draft), June 27, 1862, JFP; Seward was dismissive of Jay’s fears—­June 23, 1862, JJII Box 1 (State), JJH. 36. JJII to CS, July 4, Aug. 7, Aug. 26, 1862, CSC; CS to JJII, Aug. 5, Aug. 16, 1862, JFP. 37. Foner, Fiery Trial, 230–33; Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation; JJII to CS, Sept. 12, Sept. 29, 1862, CSC; JJII to SPC, Sept. 27, 1862, SPCPM. 38. JJII to CS, Jan. 5, Jan. 12, Jan. 15, Jan. 19, 1863, CSC. 39. JJII to CS, Mar. 18, Mar. 20, Mar. 26, Mar. 28, Apr. 18, June 4, July 28, 1861, CSC. 40. JJII to SPC, June 5, 1861, SPCPM. 41. CS to JJII, Mar. 27, Aug. 2, Aug. 8, Aug. 10, 1861, JFP; Sumner kept Jay’s hopes alive into the fall—­see Sumner to JJII, Oct. 27, 1861, JFP; SPC to JJII, Apr. 1, 1861, JFP; JJII to Augusta Field Jay Robinson, Aug. 22, 1861, JFP; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, 15–16, 19–25, 87–111; Foner, Fiery Trial, 193. 42. JJII to WHS, Sept. 26, Oct. 17, Oct. 18, 1861; JJII’s suggestions continued—­see JJII to WHS, Jan. 5, Apr. 24, 1862; Apr. 23, Sept. 18, 1863; Aug. 14, 1864, all in WSC; and JJII to WHS (copies), Dec. 16, 1861; Jan. 1, June, 27, 1862, JFP; JJII to CS, Oct. 26, Nov. 8, 1861, CSC; WHS to JJII, n.d., Oct. 19, 1861; June 23, 1862, JJI Box 1 (State), JJH; WHS to JJII, Dec. 18, 1861; Apr. 30, July 8, 1862, JFP; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, 57–58; see also CS to JJII, Nov. 10, 1861, JFP. 43. JJII to CS, Aug. 6, Aug. 13, Sept. 10, Sept. 12, 1861; EKFJ to CS, Mar. 25, Mar. 29, Apr. 14, July 25, Oct. 24, 1862[?], all in CSC (emphasis in original). 44. JJII to CS, Dec. 1, 1863, CSC. 45. JJII to CS, Apr. 6, 1864 (marked “not sent”), JFP. 46. JJII to CS, Mar. 28, 1861, CSC. 47. Duncombe, Katonah, 130–31; Town of Bedford, 6:345; Shonnard and Spooner, History, 596; JJII, An Address Delivered at Mt. Kisco; JJII, “The ­Great Conspiracy,” 323–46. 48. NASS, Oct. 19, 1861. 49. NASS, Apr. 5, 1862. 50. NASS, Apr. 5, 1862; JJII to Hiram Barney, Jan. 8, Jan. 11, Feb. 23, Mar. 6, Mar. 30, 1862, Barney Papers, HL; John Milton Hay to JJII, Apr. 8, 1862, JFP; JJI to CS, May 28, 1862, CSC; Scharf, History of Westchester County, 489, 530; JJII to SPC (copy), Aug. 3, 1862, JFP; SPC to JJII, Sept. 15, 1862, SPCPM; JJII to SPC, Sept. 17, 1862, SPCPM. 51. JJII, New York Election; CS to JJII, Nov. 8, 1862, JFP. See Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, 67–86, esp. 85, on Sumner’s reelection efforts.

NOTES TO PA GES 355– 362

463

52. Foner, Fiery Trial, 234–35; JJII to CS, Nov. 5, Dec. 11, Dec. 22, 1862, CSC; Shonnard and Spooner, History, 602; see also JJII to SPC, undated [1862?] “Confidential” letter, SPCPM. 53. JJII, Judge Jay’s Portrait, esp. 5, 9–10, 17, 22–23, 24; JJII to SPC, Dec. 15, 1862, SPCPM. 54. JJII to Rev. Benjamin I. Haight (draft), c. Nov. 1, 1862; JJII to Episcopal Diocesan Convention (draft), c. 1862; JJII to Edward Boggs, c. 1862, JFP; JJII, Church and the Rebellion. 55. JJII, “To the Rector,” 3–4, 19–22, 31; see also JJII to CS, Dec. 11, 1862, CSC. 56. Jay, “To the Rector,” 12, 34–35; Jay, Church and the Rebellion, 14–15. 57. For Jay’s continued strug­gles in Westchester, see Thomas Nelson to JJII, Sept. 9, Dec. 10, 1863; JJII, Reply to an Attack, JJII Box 1 (State), JJH. 58. Strong, Diary 3:276, 286, 288, 292–93, 299, 302, 303, 307n; Bellows, Historical Sketch, 1–19, 28–29, 32, 33, Olmstead quotation, 13. 59. Bellows, Historical Sketch, 37; Strong, Diary, 3:306–8; Peterson, Black Gotham, 259–60; Hood, In Pursuit, 136–38, 150–53. 60. Bellows, Historical Sketch, 32, 52; JJII to CS, Mar. 11, Mar. 28, May 19, June 20, 1863, CSC; JJII to SPC, Sept. 13, 1863, SPC to JJII (typescript), Sept. 16, 1863, SPCPM; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 887; Rezneck, “Civil War Role,” 249. 61. Ann Jay, Last ­Will and Testament, Jay Heritage Center, Rye, New York. 62. Peterson, Black Gotham, 223–28, 232–58; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 887–95; Harris, In the Shadow, 280–86, 337n; Hodges, Root, 263–67, 280; Shonnard and Spooner, History, 602; French, History, 1:155; WJII to EKFJ, Jul. 17, Jul. 18, 1863; WJII to JJII, Jul. 14, 1863. 63. Strong, Diary, 3:336–37; Bellows, Historical Sketch, 59–60; Rezneck, “Civil War Role,” 249–52. 64. Peterson, Black Gotham, 250–51, 255–57; Strong, Diary, 3:392. 65. Bellows, Historical Sketch, 63; Strong, Diary, 3:411. For critical appraisals of the ULC in response to the riots, see Hood, In Pursuit, 136–38, 150–70; Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 139–41. 66. Eldest d­ aughter Eleanor may also have signed, if Mrs. Henry C. Chapman was a misprint of Mrs. Henry G. Chapman; Bellows, Historical Sketch, 56–57, 187–89; JJI to CS, Mar. 8, 1864, CSC; Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 134–35. 67. Peterson, Black Gotham, 261–63; Herald, quoted from Quigley, Second Founding, 13; Memorial, Union League Club, May 15, 1894, JFP, described the address as “stirring”; Bellows, Historical Sketch, 57, 64–65. 68. WJII to EKFJ, Jul. 12, Jul. 17, Jul. 18, Aug. 30, Sept. 6, Dec. 4, 1863; Mar. 26, May 14, May 15, May 17, 1864; WJII to Mary Jay, Aug. 26, 1863; WJII to JJII, July 14, July 26, Nov. 2, 1863; July 8, Aug. 23, 1864; WJII to Augusta Jay, Dec. 9, 1863; WJII to EJC, Feb. 21, 1864; WJII, letter fragment, June 1864. 69. Oakes, Radical, 225–27; Foner, Fiery Trial, 297–99; Strong, Diary, 3:473, 501; JJII to CS, Nov. 21, 1864, CSC; JJII, Narrowness; Bellows, Historical Sketch, 66. 70. JJII, ­Great Issue, quotations, 4, 11, 31. 71. Jay, ­Great Issue, quotations 9, 10, 27. 72. JJII to CS, Nov. 15, 1864, CSC; JJII to SPC, Nov. 23, 1864, SPCPM; Goodwin, Team, 631–65, 676–80. 73. JJII to CS, Nov. 21, 1864, CSC; JJII, Our Triumph, 2, 3, 4, 6.

46 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 363– 376

74. NASS, Feb. 25, 1865; Bellows, Historical Sketch, 83. 75. JJII to CS (draft), c. Apr. 1, 1865, JFP. 15. Reconstructed

1. JJII, Our Duty, 1, 7; NYT, May 10, 1865; Bellows, Historical Sketch, 84; Foner, Fiery, 136–38. 2. NYT, May 10, 1865; William Lloyd Garrison to Helen Garrison, May 10, 1865, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 5:271–74; see also, Douglass, “In What New Skin.” 3. JJII, Our Duty, 3, 6; NYT, May 10, May 11, May 14, 1865. 4. JJII, Our Duty, 4, 5, 6, 7; NYT, May 10, 1865; on the attempted exclusion of African Americans from the Lincoln funeral pro­cession, see JJII to CS, Apr. 29, 1865, CSC; Bellows, Historical Sketch, 86–87; Quigley, Second Founding, 24; Cornelia Jay, Diary, 198, reports the voluntary activity on behalf of Freedmen’s Aid by a member of another branch of the Jay ­family. 5. Address of the American Freedmen’s Aid Union; Stearns, Boston, Oct. 9, 1865. 6. American Thanksgiving, quotations 9, 10; Cornelia Jay, Diary, 196. 7. Strong, Diary, 4:61. Six months a­ fter Jay’s election as president of the Union League Club, E. H. Gillett, published a historical profile of the founding f­ather that highlighted some of ­these qualities: see “The Christian Statesman.” 8. JJII, Po­liti­cal Situation, 2–4, 8; Hood, In Pursuit, 153–55; Foner, Reconstruction, 243–45; Civil Rights Act of 1866. 9. JJII, Po­liti­cal Situation, 13. 10. JJII, Po­liti­cal Situation, 17–18, 23–25, 27–30, 38–39, 42–47. 11. JJII, Po­liti­cal Situation, 50. 12. JJII, Po­liti­cal Situation, 52, 53, 54, 56. 13. JJII, Po­liti­cal Situation, 56–58, 59–60. 14. JJII, Po­liti­cal Situation, 43–46 and “Advertisement” at the front of the published text; Foner, Reconstruction, 247–51. 15. NASS, Nov. 10, Nov. 17, 1866. 16. Foner, Reconstruction, 176–227. 17. Foner, Reconstruction, 233. 18. Foner, Reconstruction, 228–303. 19. Union League Club of New York, Report, 5, 6; Foner, Reconstruction, 269, 304–5. 20. Union League Club, Report, 6–12, Foner, Reconstruction, 305. 21. Union League Club, Report, 12–13. 22. Strong, Diary, 4:130; Union League Club, Report, 12–13. 23. Foner, Reconstruction, 110, 283–85, 287–88, 290, 305. 24. Horace Greeley to Geo. W. Blunt, et al., May 23, 1867, in Proceedings at the Unveiling, 191–92; Greeley, Recollections, 412–16; Stoddard, Horace Greeley, 231–38; Linn, Horace Greeley, 218, 220–23; Van Deusen, Horace Greeley, 350–56; Nichols, “United States.” 25. Union League Club of New York, Proceedings in Reference to the Death of Hon. John A. King, 21–26, quotation 21. 26. Foner, Reconstruction, 241–42; Nichols, “United States,” 273; Union League Club of New York, Proceeding in Reference to the Death of Governor John A. Andrew, 3–7 quotation 6. 27. Strong, Diary, 4:98, 99, 104, 160; NASS, Mar. 7, 1868.

NOTES TO PA GES 376– 382

465

28. Bellows, Historical Sketch, 97, 105. 29. JJII, Union League Club of New-­York, esp. 19, 22; Quigley, Second Founding, 51–78; Hood, In Pursuit, 165–70; Beckert, Monied, 171–80. 30. For war context, see Faust, This Republic, 61, 66–69; McPherson, Crossroads, esp. 3. 31. Communication from the Governor, 1–6. 32. Communication from the Governor, 6–8; NYT, Jan. 30, 1868; Faust, This Republic, 237–38, provides an overview while omitting Jay’s role. 33. Communication from the Governor, 35, 36, 37, 41–43. 34. Communication from the Governor, 39–40. 35. Communication from the Governor, 47–48. 36. NYT, June 18, 1868; Mar. 2, 1869; National Park Ser­vice, Antietam National Battlefield; Faust, This Republic, 238. 37. NYT, May 26, 1868. 38. Bellows, Historical Sketch, 107–8. 39. JJII to Adam Badeau, Mar. 16, 1869, JFP; Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 254, 258; Strong, Diary, 4:244. 40. For a brief moment in 1866, US relations with Austria reached a flashpoint. During the Civil War, France’s Napoleon III had installed the ­brother of the Austrian emperor as Mexico’s Emperor Maximilian. Word that the Austrian government had plans to replace French troops as Maximilian’s protectors against Mexican re­sis­tance to his regime prompted the United States to threaten war ­under the Monroe Doctrine’s opposition to Eu­ro­pean intervention in hemispheric affairs. Soon to suffer a humiliating military defeat at the hands of its expansionist Prus­sian neighbor, Austria would, like France, leave Maximilian to his violent demise and fade back into the background of US diplomacy well before Jay’s arrival; Valone, “Weakness”; Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 251–53, 267; for Jay’s Civil War take on the Monroe Doctrine, see JJII, Mr. Jay’s Letter. 41. JJII to Augusta Field Jay Robinson, Aug. 19, 1870; JJII to Edmund Randolph Robinson, Sept. 12, 1874; JJII to Anna Jay von Scheinitz, Feb. 17, 1872, all JFP. 42. JJII to Joseph Hodges Choate (draft), June 3, 1874, appears to be Jay’s notes for his remarks; JJII to Hamilton Fish, July 11, 1874, both JFP: JJII to Hiram Barney, Jan. 18, 1874, Barney Papers, HL. 43. Foner, Reconstruction, 523, 549–50, 552–53; JJII to Augusta Field Jay Randolph, Nov. 8, 1874; JJII to Harriet Grote (draft), Dec. 11, 1874, both JFP. 44. JJH has a copy of burial listings for St. Matthew’s Church cemetery; the gravestone lists Zilpah Montgomery as living to the age of eighty; the 1850 census, twenty-­ two years before her death, listed Zilpha as sixty, so such dates are estimates. See also chapter 6 of this book. 45. Baird, Chronicle, 187; in fact, Rye’s Black population was substantially larger in 1870 (250) than 1860 (132), even though it is true that in 1870 the town’s foreign-­born population was approximately seven times larger than the black population (Ninth Census, 219); 1860 United States Federal Census, 1870 United States Federal Census. See Williams-­ Myers, Long Hammering, 117, 139–46, on competition and tension with immigrants. 46. Williams-­Myers, Long Hammering, 115, 127, 153–56. 47. 1850 United States Federal Census; Zilpah’s name is not recorded as a member of the ­house­hold in 1860 or 1870, nor could I find her anywhere e­ lse in the census; Horton, “Listening,” 125–28.

46 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 383– 390

48. Commemoration, 5, 90. The NYHS estimated an attendance of 10,000, the New York Times estimated almost 5,000 (Commemoration, 88, 94). 49. Commemoration, 96–97. 50. Commemoration, 7. 51. Commemoration, 9, 10. 52. Commemoration, 12, 14, 15. 53. Commemoration, 9, 33, 34. 54. Commemoration, 35, 36, 37. 55. Columbia College, 6, 7–8, 17, 22–23, 26, 38–39. 56. Quigley, Second Founding, 122–23, 130–34. 57. NYT, Mar. 10, 1877; Bellows, Historical Sketch, 191–92; Jordan, Roscoe Conkling, 232–33; Foner, Reconstruction, 566–69; Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes, 256–59, 266. 58. JJII to William Maxwell Evarts (draft), Oct. 1876, JFP; Beckert, Monied, 231; Foner, Reconstruction, 569. 59. Foner, Reconstruction, 575–83; see also Peskin, “Was T ­ here a Compromise of 1877?” Woodward, “Communication”; and Benedict, “Southern Demo­crats.” 60. Inaugural Address of Rutherford B. Hayes; Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes, 298–306. 61. Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes, 307–18; Union League Club to Rector of St. Marks, April 28, 1877 (copy), JFP; Jordan, Roscoe Conkling, 265–67. 62. “Commissions,” 16, 17, 38, 40; Jordan, Roscoe Conkling, 270–87; Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes, 318–25, 352–53. 63. JJJII to William Maxwell Evarts, c. Mar. 1877 (draft), Mar. 25, 1877 (draft), Apr. 28, 1877 (copy), Dec. 7, 1877 (copy); JJII to John Sherman, Sept. 10, 1877 (draft); JJII to Rutherford B. Hayes, Dec. 3, 1877 (draft), all JFP; Bellows, Historical Sketch, 142. 64. The New York Times printed two articles the following day, on p. 2 of the Dec. 22, 1877, edition, about the Union League Club event—­one on the reception itself and the other on the art exhibit; Hayes, Diary, 3:456; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 102–38. 65. JJII, Presidential Election, quotations 338, 342; JJII, Demo­cratic Policy; JJII to Charles Augustus Peabody, Nov. 2, 1884, partial typescript, JFP. For other expressions of support for Garfield’s candidacy, see JJII to Edwin A. Studwell (draft), June 11, 1880, JFP; “To the Editor of the World,” Sept. 4, 1880, JFP; JJII to John Dickson Bruns (drafts), Sept. 8, Sept. 19, 1880, JFP; JJII, “To the Editor of the World” (draft), Sept. 18, 1880, JFP; some of ­these examples focus on defending Garfield’s reputation against charges of corruption. For other thoughts on the 1884 election, see JJII to LaGrand Bouton Cannon, May 5, 1884, JFP. On t­ hese elections and subsequent Republican policies, see Calhoun, Bloody Shirt, 67–75, 85–94, 115–20, 124–25, 129–30. 66. JJII, To the Editor of the Tele­g ram (draft), Feb. 22, 1888; JJII to George William Curtis (carbon), Jan. 30, 1888. JFP; see also, JJII to William S. Langford (draft), March 5, 1888; JJII to Robert Charles Winthrop (copy), Dec. 20, 1888; JJII to John T. Young, Feb. 27, 1888 (draft), JFP. On the Blair Bill, see G ­ oing, “South”; Crofts, “Black Response”; Gatewood, “North Carolina”; Upchurch, Legislating Racism, 46–65. On Jay’s continued advocacy of educational funding in the context of the 1890 “First Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question,” see First Mohonk Conference, 72–77, and, for context, Fishel, “Negro Question”; Burgess, “­We’ll Discuss It”; Upchurch, Legislating Racism, 63; and Luker, “Social Gospel,” 89.

NOTES TO PA GES 391– 393

467

67. JJII to John A. Sleicher, July 1, 1886; JJII to Henry A. Richmond (draft), Jan. 17, 1888, JFP; see also JJII to August Schoonmaker, May 25, 1883, JJII to Franklin Edison (copy), Oct. 2, 1883; JJII to Samuel Ruggles (draft), c. 1883; JJII to the Speaker of the Assembly (draft), Feb. 6, 1884; JJII to William Potts (draft), Mar. 11, 1884; JJII to Denis O’Brien (draft), Mar. 22, 1884, JJII (typescript), Apr. 19, 1884; JJI to James Schoolcraft Sherman (draft), Aug. 27, 1884; JJII to William B. Ruggles (draft), Nov. 13, 1884; JJII to Philip Becker (carbon), Mar. 15, 1886; JJII to Denis O’Brien (carbon), Mar. 16, 1886, JFP; see also JJII to Silas M. Burt, Dec. 30, 1887, in Silas W. Burt Collection, NYHS; and JJII to David Bennett Hill (carbon) c. 1887, JFP. 68. JJII, Rome, the Bible, and the Republic, 13, 24, 32. Hofstadter, “Paranoid Style,” 9, 19–23; Davis, Slave Power, 76–86, makes the connection between Slave Power and Catholic Power thinking explicit as he contemplates the broader significance of the “paranoid style”; for background, see Massey, Anti-­Catholicism; Jordan, Evangelical Alliance, 136–37; for further examples of Jay’s anti-­Catholic rhe­toric, see JJII, Rome in Amer­i­ca; JJII, Presidential Election, 322, 336; JJII, Demo­cratic Policy, 1, 2, 4, 6; JJII, Duty to His Age, 5, 7. Not surprisingly, Jay had no trou­ble sympathizing with Senator Blair, who charged that his plan for federal subsidies to southern education had been undermined by Catholic opposition to public schools funding; see JJII to Hugh N. Camp (draft), May 17, 1888, JFP; Evans, “Catholics,” reviews Catholic concerns about public schools, as well as Blair’s pronounced prejudice against Catholics and Catholic education as a component of his desire for federal intervention into public education. 69. JJII to A. J. Arnold (draft), Apr. 25, 1884; JJII (carbon), Jan. 22, 1887; JJII to Arthur Cleveland Coxe (carbon), July 18, 1891, JFP; Strong, Our Country; Maclear, “Evangelical Alliance”; Higham, Strangers, 39; Jordan, Evangelical Alliance, 33–67, 77, 133, 134, 138, 142, 153, 171, 186–88. In remarks made at a cele­bration of his seventieth birthday, Jay himself drew a direct line from the princi­ples that animated the abolitionist movement, the founding of the Republican Party, and the work being done by Strong and ­others to combat the rising tide of immigration. 70. JJII to John B. Pine, Oct. 30, 1888, JFP; Jordan, Evangelical Alliance, 193. 71. JJII, “Demand,” 23–25, 35, 37, 38; Pencak, “Salt of the Earth,” 258–64, contextualizes Jay’s presidency of the AHA and offers an astute analy­sis of his speech. 72. JJII, Peace; JJII, Fisheries; JJII to George Haven Putnam (carbon), May 22, 1888; May 8, May 12 1891; Henry Phelps Johnston to JJII, Dec. 16, 1888; Johnston to Putnam, Apr. 26, 1891, all in JFP; for another example of JJII’s interest in scholarship on his grand­father, see JJII to W.W. Rupert, Sept. 22, 1888, JFP; Pellew, John Jay, vi, 90, 136, 217, 242–43, 274, 301, 305, 314, 326, 328, 329, 347, 354, 361. 73. JJII, Last ­Will and Testament (copy), JJH. For references to his biographical efforts, see JJII to Susan Livingston Ridley Sedgwick (copy), Dec. 7, 1859; CS to JJII, Mar. 19, 1860, JFP; JJII to Hiram Barney, May 13, 1886, Barney Papers, HL; “Notes by John Jay II on William Jay” in John Jay II Box of materials marked as a gift of JJH Friends of Nina Iselen (Toland) materials; in a letter to his ­sister he makes reference to a privately circulated “Sketch” with plans to publish in London—­see JJII to Louisa Jay Bruen, n.d., John Jay Ide Collection, NYHS. 74. McLean, Jays of Bedford, 30; “John Jay’s ­Career Closed,” NYT, May 6, 1894; WJCM, iii. Crawford, Famous Families, 163–66; “Bayard Tuckerman Dead,” NYT, Oct. 21, 1923; “Some New Publications: Peter Stuyvesant’s Unhappy Rule,” NYT, May 29, 1893;

46 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 393– 397

Tuckerman and Jay had a previous philanthropic association through the Society for the Instruction in First Aid, one of Jay’s reform c­ auses; see Bayard Tuckerman to JJII, Nov. 19, 1884; JJII to Thomas Hunter, Feb. 11, 1884, JFP; Bayard Tuckerman to EKFJ, May 21, 1891; Tuckerman to JJII, Nov. 25, Nov. 28, 1891, all in JFP. 75. JJII “Preface” in WJCM, xvi, xvi–xx. 76. JJII, Constitutional Princi­ples, and NASS, Jan. 2, 1864; WJCM, xi–­xiii; “William Jay and Slavery,” NYT, Dec. 17, 1893; The Nation, Jan. 4. 1894, was more critical of Tuckerman, but also embraced the image of Jay as a representative of abolitionism’s moderation. 77. JJII to William Henry Edwin George Pellew, Dec. 1, 1891, JFP. 78. JJII to Hiram Barney, Jan. 12, 1894, Barney Papers, HL. Epilogue

1. Ziglar, “Community,” and Hyser and Downey, “A Crooked Death,” offer careful reconstructions of the event; for more context and detail see Downey and Hyser, No Crooked Death. 2. All JJC quotes in this epilogue, ­unless other­wise noted, are from “Address of John Jay Chapman,” Harper’s Weekly, Sept. 21, 1912; for an anthologized version of the speech, see Unbought Spirit, 1–4; for accounts of Chapman in Coatesville, see Howe, John Jay Chapman, 214–21; Bern­stein, “John Jay Chapman,” 30–31; Hovey, John Jay Chapman, 209–12. 3. Ayers, Promise, 24, 120, 146, 305–9; Hyser and Downey, “A Crooked Death,” 85, 89–90; and Hyser and Downey, No Crooked Death, 7, 13, 121–37; see also Ziglar, “Community,” 267. 4. Hyser and Downey, “A Crooked Death,” 85–87; Hyser and Downey, No Crooked Death, chap. 1; Ziglar, “Community,” 246–51. 5. JJC, “Address of John Jay Chapman”; Ziglar, “Community,” 253–66; Hyser and Downey, “A Crooked Death,” 87–89, 95; Hyser and Downey, No Crooked Death, chaps. 2–4. 6. Wister, Two Appreciations, 6, 11; Barzun, “Introduction,” v–­xxi; Stone, “Introduction,” Unbought Spirit, xxi–­xxii; Howe, John Jay Chapman, 214. Bern­stein, “John Jay Chapman,” 21–23, 25, succinctly summarizes key biographical facts; see also Howe, John Jay Chapman, 6, 28, 36. 7. JJC, ­Causes, quotations 5, 33, 43; see also Bern­stein, John Jay Chapman, 35–37; Bern­ stein, “John Jay Chapman,” 27–28. 8. Chapman’s “Emerson” essay can be found in Stone, Unbought Spirit, 112–71; for scholarly commentary on Chapman and Emerson, see Paul, “Identities”; Bern­stein, “John Jay Chapman,” 24–25; Bern­stein, John Jay Chapman, 85–88, 93, 124; Hovey, John Jay Chapman, 174, offers a succinct summary of Emerson’s influence. 9. Bern­stein, “John Jay Chapman,” 23; Bern­stein, John Jay Chapman, 20–24; Hovey, John Jay Chapman, 1–2; John Jay Chapman, “Maria Weston Chapman,” is anthologized in Unbought Spirit, 64–71; quotation from Howe, John Jay Chapman, 11; see also JJC to Minna Timmins, Apr. 22, 1889, in Howe, John Jay Chapman, 82. 10. JJC to JJII, Feb. 2, 1881; Jan. 17, Dec. 27, 1884; Feb. 25, Dec. 9, Dec. 16, 1891; JJII to JJC, Dec. 10, 1891 (carbon), all in JFP. The intense virulence of Chapman’s anti-­ Catholicism in ­later works such as JJC, Roman Catholic Mind, and JJC, Notes on Religion, 1–48, 53–55, is undeniable and creates challenges for the generally admiring portraits some scholars construct; see Paul, “Identities,” 260, 262; Bern­stein, John Jay Chapman,

NOTES TO PA GES 397– 400

469

70, 75–79; and Hovey, John Jay Chapman, 207, 217, 268–70, 273–74, 281–91; ­these expressions, as scholars note, strengthen the historical link between Chapman and John Jay II, and the anti-­Catholic current that runs through the ­family’s long history. 11. Howe, John Jay Chapman, 19–20; Last ­Will and Testament of John Jay (copy), JJH; JJC, “Retrospections,” in Howe, John Jay Chapman, 15; JJC to Frederic Bancroft, Oct. 24, 1898, and n.d., Frederic Bancroft Papers, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts. Biographical studies and sketches of Chapman often place some emphasis on his historic lineage, abolitionist and other­wise; see Wister, Two Appreciations, 12–16; Bern­stein, “John Jay Chapman,” 24, 33; Bern­stein, John Jay Chapman, 20–23, 128–29; see also, Barzun, “Introduction,” ix; Howe, John Jay Chapman, 10–11, and JJC’s reflections quoted therein, 12–20. For sharply ­etched profiles of Chapman that take a contrarian tack dif­fer­ent from most, see Baird, “John Jay Chapman,” and Paul, “Identities.” 12. Bern­stein, John Jay Chapman, 13–14, 71; Stone, Unbought Spirit, xiii, xvi–­xvii; Hovey, John Jay Chapman, 38, 44–53, 159–80. 13. JJC to Oswald Garrison Villard, Nov. 3, 1910; Sept. 28, Oct. 11, 1911, John Brown Manuscripts Ser. I Cata­logued Correspondence (Villard, Oswald Garrison), Columbia University; Villard, John Brown; JJC, William Lloyd Garrison—on William Jay, see 147–57; Howe, John Jay Chapman, 221–22; Bern­stein, “John Jay Chapman,” 31–32. 14. Quoted from Hovey, John Jay Chapman, 210. 15. Barzun, “Introduction,” ix, was drawn to Chapman’s unknowingly Freudian language ­here. 16. For Bern­stein, “John Jay Chapman,” 24–25, and for Baird, “John Jay Chapman,” 195, 198, his emphasis on the individual moral imagination makes Chapman quintessentially Emersonian. 17. By 1912, Harper’s Weekly was past the peak of its influence and struggling financially; for glimpses of its history, see Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865, 469–87; Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1885–1905, 10, 57; Exman, House, 83, 93, 189, 204–5; Prettyman, “Harper’s ‘Weekly,” 25–26. JJC to Annie (Adams) Fields, Jan. 16, Jan. 20, 1913, Papers of James Thomas Fields and Addenda, 1767–1914, HL. 18. Chapman, “Emerson,” in Unbought Spirit, quotation, 116; on Emerson and abolitionism, 137–43, 152–53. 19. Burdick, “Coatesville Address,” highlights the prophetic qualities of Chapman’s remarks. See also, John Jay Chapman, “Negro Question,” in Barzun, Selected Writings, 252, though this essay falls well short of “Coatesville” morally, historically, and artistically. 20. Chapman’s serpentine ­mental path is, to say the least, disturbing. Spurred by his virulent anti-­Catholicism, he made common cause with the emergent second Ku Klux Klan. In 1925, he published an anti-­immigration poem in the National Kourier casting his scorn ­toward “the Jesuit and the Jew.” Just a few years before, in 1921, Chapman brought out a second edition of his Garrison biography; his new introduction offered up his hopes that the shock of World War I would spark a renewed appreciation for the abolitionist’s centrality to U.S. history. For his biographer’s description and attempts to come to grips with his relationship to the Klan, see Hovey, John Jay Chapman, 280– 91, and the final three chapters of his biography more generally; see also, Bern­stein, John Jay Chapman, 50, 77–78; Paul, “Identities,” 262; and on Chapman’s anti-­Catholicism more broadly, see note 10 above.

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Index

Abbe (enslaved person), 50–51, 53, 66–71, 188 Adams, John, 59–61, 62 Adams, John Quincy, 241–42, 280–82 Africa: African slave trade, 124–25, 140, 350; Jay ­family business in, 11–12, 18–19, 20; return of Amistad slaves to, 242–44. See also colonizationism/colonizationists African Americans: activism of, 201–3; free, as Jay h ­ ouse­hold servants, 177–80; freedom for, b­ ehind British lines, 43–44; military ser­vice for, as war aim, 344–45, 346–48, 349, 359; mob vio­lence against, in New York City, 164–65; vio­lence against, in the draft riots, 357–58. See also citizenship, Black; ­free Black ­people; freedom, Black; re­sis­tance, Black; rights of f­ ree Blacks African ­Free School(s), 114, 118, 122, 249 African Repository: “Judge Jay Against Colonization,” 181 agency, Black, 87–88, 114–15, 174–75, 196–97 Allinson, Samuel, 44–45 American and Foreign Anti-­Slavery Society (AFAS), 226–27, 229 American Anti-­Slavery Society (AAS): on candidates for governor in 1838, 205; Constitutional disagreement of, 206–9; racial integration of, 163–66, 169, 190; in rebuttals to Inquiry, 182; and William Jay, 169, 173, 176, 190–94, 209–10, 212, 225–29; ­women’s rights and participation in, 214–15, 227–28 American Bible Society (ABS), 150, 152–53, 322 American Colonization Society (ACS), 169–73, 180–81, 183–84 American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, 114, 117–18, 149–50, 153–54 American Freedmen’s Aid Union, 365

American Geo­g raph­i­cal and Statistical Society, 311–12 American Historical Association, 392 American Missionary Association, 322 American Peace Society (APS), 258–60, 276 American Tract Society, 322, 324–25 La Amistad, 239–44 “An Act concerning slaves and Servants,” 118–19 Andrew, John A., 375–76 Anglican Church, 16 animalization of Black ­people, 293–94 Antietam National Cemetery, 377–79 anti-­institutionalism, 259–60 anti-­Protestant terror, France, 12 antiracism: in activism on the Episcopal Church, 265, 266; of the AFAS, 226–27; in conflict with elites and neighbors, 305–6; in the reputation of John Jay II, 286–88; of the ULC, 359–60; in work of William Jay, 234–36, 249 antislavery constitutionalism, 247 Army of the Potomac, 344 arson plot of 1741, 21–25, 412n35 Articles of Confederation, 1–2, 83–88, 326, 328 Auboyneau, Prince, 22 Austria, 379–80, 465n40 Ball, Charles: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, 194, 197, 199–201, 440n21 Banyer, Maria Jay, 53, 104–5, 165–66, 223, 443n12 baptism of slaves, 16–17 Barnett, James P., 300–301 Barney, Hiram, 318, 393 Beakley, Jacob: “Pro­g ress of the Caucasian Race in Science and Civilization,” 287–88 Bedford, New York, 382 Bedford Estate, 130–33, 135–36 505

50 6 I n d e x

­Belt, Joseph, 290 Ben (enslaved person), 22–25, 26–27 Benevolent Empire, 322, 338 Benezet, Anthony, 34, 44–46, 49; Serious Considerations on several Impor­tant Subjects, 45–46 Benoit (enslaved person), 50–51, 53–54, 70–71 Benson, Egbert, 48–49, 80, 115 The Bible, 193, 236–37, 251–53, 276–77, 304, 322–25. See also American Bible Society Bill of Rights, 207 Birney, James G., 230, 231–32, 269–70 Black Codes, 372 Black Regiments, 359 Blair, Henry W., 390 Boggs, Edward, 355–56 Book of Negroes, 64–65 Boudinot, Elias, 141, 152, 326 Boudinot, Tobias, 141, 142–43, 202 Bowditch, Henry, 272 boycotts of slave ­labor products, 193–94 Bradish, Luther, 204–5 Brash (enslaved person), 22–25, 26–27 Briggs, Olney, 147–48 Britain: abolitionism of, 96, 196–97, 212–13, 259; evacuation of slaves by, 58–62, 64–65, 82–83, 85–86, 93–96, 99–100. See also Peace of Paris; Revolutionary War Brooks, Preston, 310 Buchanan, James, 320–21 Buckley, Theodore, 289 Bucktails, 144, 147 Burton, Mary, 23 Bush, George, 194, 195 Butler, Benjamin, 342 Cabinet of Freedom, The, 194–201 Caesar (enslaved person), 109–12, 134–35 Calhoun, John C., 268–69 California, 274, 279–80, 293, 295 Carleton, Guy, 64 Carmichael, William, 51, 52–53 caste system, racial, 3, 236, 253–54, 262–67, 286, 324–25. See also racism Catholic Church/Catholicism, 7–8, 15, 36–37, 318–19, 368, 385, 391, 397. See also Chris­tian­ity; religion cemetery plots, 253–54 centennial cele­brations, 383–85 Chapman, Eleanor Jay, 338 Chapman, John Jay, 394–95, 396–400, 397, 469n20; ­Causes and Consequences, 396; “The Grand­father,” 397

Chapman, Maria Weston, 225–26, 396–97 Chase, Salmon P.: in antislavery party politics, 312, 316–17, 319; and the Civil War, 337, 339, 350, 354, 362; in the fight for soul and nation, 255–56, 266, 272, 274–75, 282; as reader of View, 213 Child, David Lee, 234–35 Child, Lydia Marie, 228 ­children: enslaved, in rural New York, 26; indenture of, 136; mandatory ser­vice period for, 138–39; in Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation plan, 48; Peter Jay trafficking in, 20–21; sale of, 20–21, 43–44; in separation of slave families, 109; in the transition to abolition in New York, 118–19, 121–22 Chisolm v. Georgia, 90 Chris­tian­ity, 125, 200, 294–95, 324. See also Catholic Church/Catholicism; Episcopal Church/Episcopalians; religion Cinqué, Joseph, 236, 239–40, 242, 244, 249, 254 citizenship, Black: in antislavery organ­izing, 76–77; as Civil War aim, 347, 349; in the Dred Scott decision, 325, 328; in end to gradualism, 140; in gradual abolition law, 114, 116, 117; in Reconstruction, 365, 366–68, 372–73; in the St. Domingue insurrection, 174; undermined by racism, 237–39 civil rights, 143, 144–48, 347, 369–70, 372–73, 382, 386. See also rights of ­free Blacks Civil Ser­vice Commission, New York, 391 civil ser­vice reform, 386, 388 Civil War: aims of, 7, 344–49, 361; diplomatic ser­vice and foreign policy in, 350–52; draft riot and racism in NYC, 356–62; succession and secession in, 338–41; vindication of abolitionism in, 362–64; in Westchester County, 352–56; William Jay II on frontlines of, 341–44 Claas (enslaved person), 42–43, 58 Clarinda (enslaved person), 3, 90, 109, 130–34, 139–40, 156, 177–78, 187–88 Clarkson, Thomas, 80, 272–73, 333; The History of the Rise, Pro­gress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, 194, 195–97 class, socioeconomic: in 1850s antislavery politics, 315; in the arson plot of 1741, 23; ascent in, 15–16, 17–19, 26–27; in attacks on William Jay, 235, 302–8; Black ­labor in, 112; in Civil War frontline ser­vice, 342–44;

I n d e x in the draft riots, 358–59; of the Grimké ­sisters, 216–17; in lives of ­house­hold servants, 177–78, 179–80 Clay, Henry, 269, 293 Clinton, DeWitt, 144 Clopper, Catherine, 44 Coercive Acts, 33, 36 Colden, Cadwallader D., 138–39 College of Physicians and Surgeons, NYC, 300–301 colonizationism/colonizationists: in the Amistad case, 243–44; in The Cabinet of Freedom, 194, 196; in Condition of the ­Free ­People of Color, 237; countering of Inquiry by, 180–87; and the end of gradualism, 140; in immediatism, 126, 163, 165; rejection of, 149, 169–77, 335; in remembrances of William Jay, 331–33, 335 Colored American, 203 Colored Orphan Asylum, 347–48 Columbia College, 123, 166–67, 385. See also King’s College Combs, Hester, 110 come-­outerism, 265–67, 282 Committee for Detecting Conspiracies, 28 Committee of Vigilance, 201–3 compensation: in The Creole case, 245–46, 247–48; to ­free Blacks, for kidnapping, 271–72; in gradualist acts and laws, 113, 116, 117; in the Laurens plan, 47–48; monetary, in re­sis­tance of Abbe, 66–67; in the Peace of Paris, 58–62, 64–66, 82–83, 92–96, 99–101; in Reconstruction, 370; in rejection of colonizationism, 175–76 compromise: Fugitive Slave Act as, 293–95; in implementing the Peace of Paris, 82–83; Missouri Compromise, 141–44, 209–10, 316–18, 320, 325, 343; moral gaps in, 6–7, 211; necessity of, 208; Republican opposition to, 341; in the U.S. Constitution, 83–88 Confederate war dead, 377–79 Congress, U.S.: and abolition in Washington, D.C., 154; authority of, in issues of slavery, 141–42, 206–9; in The Cabinet of Freedom, 195–96; gag rules by, 196, 201, 207–8, 211, 229–30, 238, 241–42, 281; limitations of, in state procedures for fugitives, 204–5; and the Mexican War, 277; power of, in the migration of slaves, 326 Congressional Congress, New York Del­e­ga­tion, 36 Conkling, Roscoe, 386

507

Connecticut, 170–71 conservatism: and the Cabinet of Freedom, 194–201; in cele­bration of the American centennial, 384–85; and commitment to abolitionism, 190–94; in constitutional conflict, 206–9; in education of William Jay, 107, 123–24; of the Episcopalian Church, 324; and the Fugitive Slave Act, 297–98; in the Harlem Plains address, 384; and the New York constitution, 144; in the politics of abolitionism, 203–6; and radicalism, 5–6, 8, 180, 261, 370–71; in Reconstruction, 370–71, 372, 374–75; and the sins of federalism, 209–13; in vigilance on the rights of ­free Blacks, 201–3; of William Jay, 174, 180, 189–90, 237–38, 266 constitution, New York, 39–42, 144–50, 328 Constitution, United States: AAS conflict over abolition power of, 206–9; in admission of Missouri, 141–42; annexation of Texas in violation of, 271–72; Civil War aims for amendments to, 349; compromises on slavery in, 83–88; fugitives in, 289; and the Fugitive Slave acts, 294–95, 307–8; ratification of, 1–2; in rebutting the Dred Scott decision, 326 Continental Congress, 1–2, 32–33, 36–37, 45–46, 47–48, 65–66 conversion, Christian, 14, 16–17 Cooper, James Fenimore, 107, 162–63, 319–20 cooperation, interracial, 102, 163–64, 372–75 copyright law, 311 Cornish, Samuel, 203, 251 correspondence, Jay f­ amily, 4–5 Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, 393 corruption: of the Episcopal Church, 266; in expansion of slavery, 321, 322–23; in partisan politics, 272, 280; in reckoning, 396; and Reconstruction, 375–76, 385–86, 387–88, 391–93 da Costa, Jose and Maria, 291–93 Council of Safety, New York, 44 Cousins, George, 342 Covode, John, 377–79 Cox, Abraham L., 164, 167 Cox, Samuel H., 164, 176, 213 Crandall, Prudence, 170–71, 215 The Creole, 245–48, 260–61 crown/colonial tensions, 32 cruelty, 108–9, 132–33, 194, 249, 253–54, 268, 277–78

50 8 I n d e x

Crummell, Alexander, 236, 248–51, 252, 254, 262, 264, 299 culture: demo­cratic, 261, 277–78; Gilded Age culture wars, 389–93; interracial, in New York City, 23; proslavery, threat of, 310–11 Cusno, Joseph, 135, 139, 223, 334–35, 343 Davis, Jefferson, 375 Dawson, Henry, 313–14 De Bow’s Review, 3, 336–37 Declaration of In­de­pen­dence, 40–41, 117, 142, 143–44, 241, 326 “Declaration of Rights” (Vermont), 41 Demo­cratic Party/Demo­crats: abolitionist skepticism of, 229–30; in the Civil War, 361; in Gilded Age culture wars, 390; and the Kansas-­Nebraska Act, 318–19, 320–21; in partisan politics and disunion, 269–70; in Reconstruction, 370, 378–79, 385–87; in Westchester County, 352–55 dependence and slavery, 20, 53–54, 69–70, 89–90, 176, 177–78 Dinah (enslaved person), 108–9, 121–22 diplomatic ser­vice, 50–51, 379–82 discipline of enslaved, 68, 70–71, 109–10. See also punishment of enslaved discrimination, racial. See racism disunion/disunity, 267–73, 281, 327–28, 340 Dolphin, 20 domestic order/disorder, 130–36, 224–25, 227–28 Dongan, John C., 91 Douglas, Stephen A., 340–41 Douglass, Frederick, 3, 330–31, 332–35, 366–67 Downing, George T., 295–97 draft riots, 357–58 Dred Scott decision, 325–29 due pro­cess, 206–9, 271, 293–94, 295, 372–73 Durer, William Alexander, 166–67 Dwight, Timothy, 123–24, 125–26 economics: in alliances between northerners and southern slaveholders, 192; de­pen­ dency on slavery in, 20; in ­free states, 279–80; in Huguenot migration and use of slaves, 13, 17; of immediatism, 176; of slave owner­ship, 31, 54–55, 75–76, 108; of slavery in Northern colonies, 2–3; of slavery in the nation’s founding, 5–6; of the slave trade, 18–19, 238–39 Edict of Nantes, 12 Edmonds, John W., 290, 291–92

education: for African American servants, 137; and anti-­Catholic sentiment, 391; Blair bill on, 390; denied to southern slaves, 200; for indentured servants, 135–36; of John Jay, 29–31; of John Jay’s ­daughters, 104–5; racism as impediment to, 186–87, 248–51, 447n33; in the Reconstruction agenda, 366–69, 370–71; in transition to abolition, 118; of William Jay, 107, 123–27; of William Jay’s d­ aughters, 221–22; Young Men’s Society in, 168–69. See also literacy egalitarianism: in antiracist activism, 236; in arguments against the Missouri Compromise, 142; centennial references to, 384; in critique of colonizationism, 173–74; in gradual abolition law, 117; in immediatism, 163, 166, 167–68; in Jay ­family activism, 6–7; of the NYMS, 76–77; as Reconstruction goal, 379; in the split with the AAS, 227–28 el­derly slaves: ethics of caring for, 97, 109–10, 257–58; support for in New York legislation, 138 elites/elite classes: in anti-­abolition vio­lence, 193–94; antislavery activism in conflict with, 7; in the Civil War era, 357–61; in class conflict, 302–8; in Gilded Age culture wars, 389–90; in New York, 15, 20–21, 24–25, 30, 33, 92, 302–8, 357–61; in Reconstruction, 365–66, 368–71, 375–76; slavery in life of, 20–21, 30; Southern, in Charles Ball’s slave narrative, 199–200 Ellison, Thomas, 107 Emancipation Proclamation, 348–49, 354 Emancipator, The, 286 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 396 Ennals, Abram, 120 Episcopal Church/Episcopalians: in the abolition movement, 447–48n3; ­battle for soul of, 262–67; Black, 218, 248–51, 262–65, 332, 338; fight for Black equality in, 248–51, 255–56; moral compromises of, 6–7; public dispute with, 324; racism of, 236–37, 248–51; recognition of St. Phillips by, 299–300; in Rye, 355–56. See also Chris­tian­ity; religion equality/in­e­qual­ity: in antislavery organ­ izing, 77; in colonizationism, 173–74; and conservatism, 8; in the Episcopal Church, 248–51, 255–56; equal protection in law, 2, 90, 372–73, 386; gendered, 214–15, 217, 227–28; in the gradual emancipation era,

I n d e x 136; in the Harlem Plains address, 383–84; ­house­hold, 4–5; in immediatism, 166; in paternalism, 54; radical, 3–4; in Reconstruction, 365, 370, 371–72; in tributes on William Jay, 331–32; and voting rights in New York state, 146–47, 148; West Indian experience of, 287 ethnicity, 14–15, 384, 392 evacuation of slaves, 58–62, 64–65, 82–83, 85–86, 93–96, 99–100 Evangelical Alliance, 391 exceptionalism, American, 323–24, 388 expansion of slavery: in compromise for trade with Spain, 85; in Kansas, 316–17, 320; and the Mexican War, 269, 274, 275, 277, 279–81; in the Missouri crisis, 141–44; as a religious prob­lem, 321 export bans, 73–74, 78–88, 110, 118–19 f­ amily separation, 90, 108–9, 130–34, 136, 199 fanatics/fanat­i­cism, 161–62, 173–74, 180–83, 184, 193, 202–3, 305, 329–30 federalism, 209–13 Federalist Papers, 85–86 Federalists/Federalist Party, 86–87, 92–93, 98, 104, 113, 117, 147 female bodies, Black, 294 feminism, 225–26 Fenton, Reuben, 377–79 Fifth Amendment, U.S. Constitution, 206–9 First Amendment, 190–92 First Confiscation Act, 342 Fish, Hamilton, 380 Flanders, Henry, 305 Flournoy, J. J., 251–53 foreign policy, U.S., 1–2, 6, 350–52 Fortress Monroe, 342–44 found­ers/founding ­fathers: in analy­sis of the Dred Scott decision, 328; in antislavery politics, 318; avoidance of slavery in nation-­building by, 74; in the Broadway Tabernacle speech, 314–16; legacy of, 2–4, 129–30, 167–68, 185–86, 304–5, 333–34, 384–85; pragmatism and piety of, 44–49; proslavery sentiments of, in nation-­building, 420n3. See also Jay, John ­Fourteenth Amendment, 372–73 France, 12–13, 58–71 Franklin, Benjamin, 2, 59–61, 62, 65, 67–68, 76 Franklin, William ­Temple, 69 ­free Black ­people: assertiveness and agency of, 115; and colonizationism, 140, 169–71;

509

in domestic order, 135–36; and the fugitive slave laws, 295–302; insults to, 251–54; as Jay ­house­hold servants, 177–80; kidnapping of, 6, 78–80, 201–3, 238–39, 271–72, 290, 291–92, 296–97; ­legal defense of rights of, 119–21; in Missouri, 129–30, 143; in New York colony’s slave regime, 19; in the New York Constitution, 144–48; in New York’s gradual abolition law, 115–16, 117, 119; in post-­Revolutionary War New York, 78–81; racism in condition of, 235–36; rejection of colonizationism by, 169–70; threat to home and ­family of the Fugitive Slave Act, 296–97; white fear of, 174, 175–76, 191. See also African Americans; citizenship, Black; Jay, William: On the Condition of the ­Free ­People of Color; rights of f­ ree Blacks ­Free Demo­cratic League of the City & County of New York (FDL), 312–16 ­Free Demo­crats. See Republican Party/ Republicans Freedmen’s Aid Union/Association, 365, 366–68 Freedmen’s Bureau, 368 freedom, Black: Black agency in achieving, 114–15; in British war policy, 58–66; in international law, 81–83, 97; and national liberty, 76–77; paired with citizenship, 116; in post-­war New York, 80–81; presumption of, in the ­Belt case, 290; in the Reconstruction agenda, 368–69; transitional period in, 118–22 “freedom national” princi­ple, 312–13, 314–15 ­free ­labor, 162–63, 176, 287, 311–12, 318, 372–73 ­free soil, 67, 290, 301–2, 310–11, 325 ­Free Soil Party, 275–76, 312–13, 318 ­free states, 143, 271–72, 279–80, 293, 295, 317–18, 325–26, 454–55n44 Frelinghuysen, Theodore, 269 Frémont, James C., 320–21 fugitives, slave: in Civil War policy, 342; compensation for, in negotiations with Britain, 93–96; in the Constitution, 84, 85, 87–88, 210; in Jewish law, 323; John Jay II’s role with, 285; jury ­trials for, 204–5, 210, 231; in kidnappings, 202–3, 291–92; in laws, 153–54, 288–99, 304–5; in New York City, 115; in vindication of John Jay, 304–5; in the w ­ ill of William Jay, 329–30 Fussell, Rose, 119–20

51 0 I n d e x

gag rules, Congressional, 196, 201, 207–8, 211, 229–30, 238, 241–42, 281 Gallatin, Albert, 268–69 Garnet, Henry Highland, 250 Garrison, William Lloyd, 6–7, 163–64, 208, 366, 398; Thoughts on African Colonization, 170 Garrisonians/Garrisonianism: in the AAS conflict over the Constitution, 206; anti-­institutionalism of, 232, 259–60; criticism of John Jay II by, 286; cross-­ factional alliance with, 290, 314; and peace advocacy, 259–60; radicalism of, 189–90, 225; rapprochement with, 338; on the ­women question, 214, 217, 225–26, 227–29 Gay, Sydney Howard, 302, 314 gender: in attachment to ­house­hold servants, 178; in domestic patriarchy, 217–19; economy of, 180; equality/ in­e­qual­ity of, 214–15, 217, 227–28; in expectations of Jay f­ amily ­women, 219–25; and the Fugitive Slave Act, 294; in Jay ­family roles, 219–25, 443n12; norms of, 214–15, 228–29, 294 government, federal: in The Condition of F­ ree ­People of Color, 238, 245; in expansion of slavery, 141–42, 279–80; and fugitive slaves, 210, 288–89, 293, 308; jurisdiction of, 206, 325, 346; power of, on slavery, 206–9, 313–14, 348–49; in Reconstruction, 372–73, 387; and slavery in Washington, D.C., 154–55, 163; A View of the Action of the Federal Government in Behalf of Slavery, 209–13. See also Congress, U.S.; Constitution, United States governorship of John Jay, 113–18 gradualism/gradualists: in the Broadway Tabernacle speech, 315–16; of John Jay, 3–4, 50–51, 103–4, 109–10, 162, 183, 185–86, 305; in joining forces, 167–68, 172, 175–76, 182–84; in nation-­building, 77–78, 87, 91; in the New York constitution, 39–42, 148–50; in New York State law, 1–2, 3, 113–18, 136–40; in the paradox of slave owner­ship and abolitionism, 102–4, 109–10, 111–12, 113–22, 124–25, 127–28; in Pennsylvania, 48–49; as resource for abolitionism, 8; in sharing the flame, 130–40, 141, 142, 143–44, 148–50, 151, 154; transition to immediatism of, 4–5, 161–62; in William Jay’s education, 123, 124–25, 126 Graham, Lewis, 44

Grant, Ulysses S., 379 Greeley, Horace, 375 Gregoire, Henri, 153 Grenville, Lord, 93–94, 95–96 Grimké, Angelina, 215–17, 225–26 Grimké, Sarah, 215–16, 225–26; Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of ­Women, 217 Grimké, Thomas, 124 Haight, Edward, 354 Haiti, 174–75, 211 Hale, John P., 312, 318 Hamilton, Alexander, 2, 46–48, 80, 86–87, 100–101, 120–21 Hamilton, Robert, 347–48 Hamilton, William, 102–3, 115, 127–28 Harpur, Robert, 30 Harrison, William Henry, 230, 232–33 Haskin, John B., 353 Hayes, Rutherford B., 386–89 heroism, Black military, 359 Heyrich, Elizabeth, 153, 215 historical education, Euro-­centered, Protestant, 392 Hobart, John Henry, 262–63 Hornblower, Joseph Coerten, 306–8 Horsmanden, Daniel, 22–25 Horton, Gilbert, 153, 238–39 House of Representatives, 84, 191–92. See also Congress, U.S. Hughson, John, 22 Huguenots, 12–14, 15–16, 17–19 ideology: of British antislavery, 94; of the FDL, 313–14; ­free ­labor, 176, 287; Garrisonian, on gender, 215, 217; of nonre­sis­tance, 228–29; and the paradox of abolitionism and slaveholding, 112; Quaker, 76 immediatism/immediatists: in breaking ranks, 215–16, 221; in the Broadway Tabernacle speech, 315–16; in class conflict, 305; and conservatism, 189, 193, 194, 197; Jay ­family’s embrace of, 3–4, 6–7; of John Jay II, 166–69, 287; as official government policy, 358; in the paradox of slaveholding and abolition, 124–25, 126, 127–28; as radicalism, 6–7; as reckoning, 399–400; in sharing the flame, 146, 153–54; transition to, 4–5, 161–62; of William Jay, 161–66, 169–77, 186, 333. See also radicalism/radical abolitionism

I n d e x immigration, 313, 318–19, 391, 469n20 import of slaves, 18–19, 73–74, 78, 88, 110, 118–19 indenture/indentured servitude, 19, 117, 122, 135–36 In­de­pen­dent Demo­cratic Party, 316–17 indignities, 250, 254, 262–63 indignities of slavery and racism, 98 infrastructure, antislavery, 312–14 insurrection, slave: in Civil War policy, 346, 347; in the Constitution, 84; in Manhattan, 19; in South Carolina, 21–22; on St. Domingue, 113, 115, 120–21; in William Jay’s critique of colonizationism, 174–75 integration, racial, 163–66, 169, 190, 249–50, 265, 384 intermarriage/racial intermixing, 126, 165, 183–84, 251–53, 262 international court proposal, 259–60 international relations: The Creole case in, 245–48; in diplomatic ambitions of John Jay II, 350–52; John Jay in, 1–2, 50–54, 58–66, 81–83, 92–101 Ives, Silliman, 265 Jackson, Andrew, 191, 277 Jackson, James Caleb, 227 James II, King of ­England, 14–15 Jay, Ann (“Nancy”), 104–5, 135, 326, 443n12 Jay, Anna, 179, 217–19 Jay, Anna Marie Bayard, 15 Jay, Anna Marika, 81 Jay, Augusta McVickar, 130, 165–66, 177–78, 219–25, 224, 326–27 Jay, Auguste (Augustus), 6, 11–14, 15, 18–19 Jay, Eleanor Kingsland Field, 221, 351, 353, 389 Jay, Françoise, 20 Jay, Frederick, 54–56, 114 Jay, James, 29–30 Jay, John: advocacy for the U.S. Constitution by, 83–88; An Address to the P­ eople of the State of New York, on the Subject of the Constitution, 86; anti-­slavery in national ser­vice of, 73–74; in antislavery organ­izing, 74–81, 152–53; early life and elite ambitions of, 31–33; final years and death of, 155–57; as governor, 1–2, 3, 91–92, 98–101, 113–18; as gradualist, 1–2, 3–4, 113–18; legacy and rec­ord of, 129–30, 181–86, 247–48, 261, 303–5, 307; national vision of, 311–14; in

511

negotiations on compensation with the British, 92–101; in negotiations with slaves, 50–51, 71–72; and the New York constitution, 39–42, 415–16n35; opposition to expansion of slavery in Missouri, 141–42; owner­ship and management of slaves by, 2–3, 6, 50–51, 54–58, 66–72, 107–12, 130–33; as parent, 103–7; paternalism t­ owards slaves by, 54–58; and the Peace of Paris, 50–54, 58–66, 81–83; portraits of, 63, 99; pragmatism and piety of, 44, 45–46, 48–49; revolutionary path of, 36–39; as Supreme Court Chief Justice, 88–90; in the transition to abolition in New York, 121–22 Jay, John II: abolitionism in politics, 205–6; in advocacy for fugitive slaves, 285, 288–93, 298–99, 301–2; American Centennial address by, 383–85; on the Amistad, 241; as an immediatist, 3, 6–7, 166–69; anti-­corruption work of, 388–89, 391; and Antietam National Cemetery, 377–79; and Charles Sumner, 309–10, 339; and the Civil War, 7, 337–40, 344–49; in class conflict, 306, 307; death of ­brother in importance of, 225; in defense of Inquiry, 184–85; departure from focus on Black rights, 386–88; diplomatic ambitions and ser­vice of, 350–52, 379–80; on the Dred Scott decision, 325–26; and the Episcopal Church, 236–37, 250–51, 262–65, 299–300; ­family history in ­will of, 392–93; and ­free ­house­hold servants, 179–80; in Gilded Age culture wars, 389–93; marginalization of, in Westchester County, 352–56; and the New York elite, during the Civil War, 357–62; in party politics, 268–69, 310–11, 312–14, 316–21; on po­liti­cal abolitionism, 314–16; portrait of, 367; Protestant-­centered vision of, 385, 391–92; in public disputes, 180–86, 206–9, 323–24, 377–80; in Reconstruction, 374; Reconstruction agenda of, 7–8, 365–68; uncompromising reputation of, 286–88; as witness to the Thirteenth Amendment, 362–64; and the YMAS, 187, 227 Jay, John II: writings of: “American ­Free—or American Slave,” 319–20; Caste and Slavery in the American Church, 262; “Enlistment of slaves in the Army,” 346; “Our Duty to the Freedmen,” 366–68; Thoughts on the Duty of the Episcopal Church in Relation to Slavery, 236–37; “Why We Resist and What We Resist,” 336–37, 340

51 2 I n d e x

Jay, Maria (­daughter of William and Augusta), 165–66 Jay, Mary Duyckinck, 134, 155 Jay, Mary Van Cortlandt, 20 Jay, Peter (­brother of John), 56, 133–35 Jay, Peter (­father of John), 20, 24, 25–27, 30–31, 35, 42, 57–58 Jay, Peter Augustus: on colonialization, 433n55; death and ­will of, 257–58; ­legal and po­liti­cal activism of, 104; in New York abolition, 119–20, 121–22, 136–38, 140; in the New York constitutional convention of 1821, 144–50; in NYMS activism, 113–14; opposition to expansion of slavery in Missouri, 141; on rebuttals to Inquiry, 184–85; on sale of disruptive slaves, 97–98; as slaveowner, 3, 109–10 Jay, Pierre, 11–13 Jay, Sarah Louisa, 104–7, 106, 151 Jay, Sarah Van Brugh Livingston (“Sally”), 31–32, 43–44, 51–54, 89–90, 106 Jay, William: and the AAS, 169, 173, 176, 190–94, 209–10, 212, 214–15, 225–29; on the annexation of Texas, 267–68, 270–71; as antislavery activist, 6–7; in the ­battle for the soul of the church, 265–67; bequest for fugitive slaves by, 329–30; and The Cabinet of Freedom, 194–201; childhood of, 105–7, 106; in class conflict, 303–5, 306–7; and colonialization, 169–77, 180–87; and the Committee of Vigilance, 201–3; conservatism in abolitionism of, 189–94; conservatism of, 174, 180, 189–90, 237–38, 266; in constitutional conflict, 206–9; death of, 328–29, 330–34; on disunion, 271–73; early antislavery expressions of, 129–30, 143, 150–55; education of, 107, 123–27; in electoral politics, 203–6; forebodings of civil war, 309, 310; and the ­Free Soil Party, 275–76; on fugitive slaves and fugitive slave law, 288–89, 293–98, 307–8; gendered expectations for ­family of, 217–25; health prob­lems as impediment to, 128; as immediatist, 3, 6, 161–66, 168–77, 186, 333; peace advocacy by, 258–61; portrait of, 177, 355; racism in personal attacks against, 234–36; in rebutting the Dred Scott decision, 327–29; on religion and slavery, 317, 321, 322–25; as social critic, 310–11; and the Under­ ground Railroad, 302; on the war with Mexico, 273–74; w ­ ill and testament of, 334–35; on w ­ omen in activism, 215–17

Jay, William: On the Condition of the ­Free ­People of Color: Amistad case in, 239–44; The Creole case in, 245–48; impediments to education in, 248–51; insults and outrage in, 251–54; northern racism as inspiration for, 234–36; racism by church and state in, 237–39, 248–51 Jay, William: writings of: Address to the Inhabitants of New Mexico and California, 279–80; An Examination of the Mosaic Laws of Servitude, 322–23; Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, 169–77; The Life of John Jay, 161, 171–72, 328; “On the Profession of Lawyering,” 126–27; “Reply to a Letter from a Clergymen of the Episcopal Church,” 262; A Review of the ­Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War, 256–57, 276–82; A View of the Action of the Federal Government in Behalf of Slavery, 209–13; War and Peace, 258–61 Jay, William II, 341–44 Jay Gardoqui Treaty, 85 Jay Homestead, 131, 338 Jay Treaty, 1–2, 95–96, 98–101 Jefferson, Thomas, 2, 3–4, 129; Notes on the State of V ­ irginia, 77 Johnson, Andrew, 368–69, 371, 375–76 Johnson, Peter, 134. See also Peet (enslaved person) Johnson, Samuel, 30 Joseph, Peter, 120 jury ­trials, 204–5, 210, 231 Kansas, 309–10, 316–21 Kansas-­Nebraska Act, 317–18 Kelley, Abby, 214, 225–26 Kerry, Margaret, 23 kidnapping of ­free Black p­ eople, 6, 79, 201–3, 238–39, 271–72, 290, 291–92 King, John A., 375 King, Joseph, 119–20 King’s College, 30 Kirk, George, 289–90 Kissam, Benjamin, 31 Know Nothing Party, 318–19, 320 La Rochelle, France, 11–12 Laurens, Henry, 59–61, 65, 248 Laurens, John, 46–48 Laurens Plan, 46–48, 58, 346 law, international: in The Creole case, 245–48; Lebranca case in, 291–92

I n d e x laws and legislation: anti-­Black, and colonizationists, 170–71; federal, in perpetuating slavery, 209–13; on fugitive slaves, 84, 85, 87–88, 153–54, 210, 288–99, 304–5; gradual abolition acts and laws, 113–18; personal liberty law, 231; required for emancipation, 171–72; Somerset decision in, 35 Leavitt, Joshua, 213 Lee, Peter, 201–3, 238–39 legacy, Jay ­family: defense of, on the war with Mexico, 273–74; evoked against expansion of slavery, 129–30; founding and slavery in, 2–4; of John Jay, 181–86, 247–48, 261, 303–5, 307; in the question of disunion, 272, 327–28; Thirteenth Amendment as vindication of, 363–64; in William Jay’s biography, 392–93 Leisler, Jacob, 15 Leisler Movement and Rebellion, 15 Lemmon, Juliet and Jonathan, 301–2 The Liberator, 161–62 Liberia, 171, 186–87, 347 Liberty Party, 232, 255–56, 267–68, 269–70, 274–76, 286–87 Lieber, Francis, 328 Lincoln, Abraham and administration, 339–41, 342, 343, 344–45, 350–51, 365 literacy, 54, 125, 137, 146, 200, 279–80, 323–24. See also education Littlepage, Lewis, 52 Livingston, Brockholst, 51, 52–53, 81 Livingston, Robert R., Jr., 31–32, 59–60 Livingston, William, 32–33, 42–43, 44–45, 81 Long, Henry, 298 Louis XIV, King of France, 12 Loyal National League, 357–58 loyalty: in the Civil War and Reconstruction, 354–55, 357, 366–67, 371; in culture wars, 391; oaths of, as enslavement, 37–38; of slaves and masters, 4–5, 58, 134, 155, 334–35 Ludlow, Henry, 164, 165, 168–69 Lushington, Richard, 78–79 lynching, 199, 268, 305, 357–58, 394–96 Madison, James, 2, 59–60 Maine, 143 Manhattan, 21–25, 32, 42, 64, 340–41 manumission: and antislavery activism, 76–78, 80–81; be­hav­ior in, 68–69; in gradualism, 76–78, 87; in Jewish law, 323; laws on, 19, 73–74, 76, 78, 118–19; negotiations for, 50,

513

109; purchase price in terms of, 108; socie­ties in activism for, 315–16; in the transition to abolition, 119–20, 121–22, 136, 138–39; violations of, 114–15. See also New-­York Manumission Society Marcy, William, 202–3, 205 marriage: interracial, 126, 165, 183–84, 251–53, 262; of slaves, 54, 265 Martinique, 51–52, 80 Mary (enslaved person), 57–58, 75–76, 97, 110–11 Mary­land, 377–78 Mas­sa­chu­setts, 35 McVickar, John, 166–67, 331 medical school, 299–300 Mexican War, 256–57, 273–80 migration: Black, post-­Reconstruction, 395; of f­ ree Blacks, 146, 238; of slaves, 141–42, 325–26 Milbourne, Jacob, 15 militarism, critique of, 277–78 military emancipation doctrine, 344, 348 military ser­vice: for African Americans, 344–45, 346–48, 349, 359; in the Laurens Plan, 46–48, 58, 346; of William Jay II, 341–44 Miller, Samuel, 115–16 miscegenation. See intermarriage/racial intermixing Missouri and the Missouri Compromise, 129–30, 141–44, 209–10, 316–18, 320, 325, 343, 344–45 Moll (enslaved person), 75–76 Montgomery, Zilpah (enslaved person), 3, 130–33, 139, 177–79, 187–88, 334–35, 381–82 morality/immorality: in a Civil War slave trade treaty, 351; in immediatism, 163, 167; in the Mexican War, 276–77, 278; in the paradox of slaveholding and abolitionism, 103, 104–5, 123, 124–25; and partisanship, 280; and patriotism, 8, 45; in public commitment to abolition, 192–93; in rebutting the Dred Scott decision, 327; of reenslavement, 100–101; of re­sis­tance to the Fugitive Slave Act, 295; of slavery and founding ideals, 5–6, 58; southern, 199–200; in William Jay’s critique of colonizationism, 171 Moran, Richard, 253 Morris, Gouverneur, 39–42, 44, 84 Morris, Richard, 26 Morris, William, 299

51 4 I n d e x

Morrison, John, 176 Mosaic Law, 322–23 Munro, Peter Jay, 68–69, 70, 113–15, 119–21, 136–37, 144, 149, 427–28n47 Murray, John Jr., 31 Murray, Lindley, 31 Myers, Stephen A., 302 Napoleon, Louis, 289, 291–92 Nash, Daniel D., 202, 203 National Anti-­Slavery Standard (NASS), 228, 292 nationalism: in the Harlem Plains address, 384; of John Jay II, 7–8, 311–12, 379–80, 388–90; as the key to preserving the ­union, 341; merged with abolitionism, 361–62; in the Mexican War, 277–78; and social justice, in Reconstruction, 365–66; of the Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society, 167–68 nativism, 318–19, 366, 391 natu­ral law, 34–35, 40–41, 83, 93–94, 238–39, 247. See also positive law Neau, Elias, 16–17, 19 Nebraska, 316–18 necessity, military, 345, 346, 348–49 New ­England Anti-­Slavery Society (NEAS), 189–90 New Jersey, 44–45, 308 Newkirk, Barnet, 119–20 New Mexico, 274, 279–80, 293 New Rochelle, New York, 17, 30 New York: constitution of, 39–42, 144–50, 328; export bans in, 73–74, 78–88, 118–19; manumission laws in, 73–74; politics in, 84, 113, 376, 385–86; slave population in, 77–78 New York Anti-­Slavery Society (NYAS), 169, 204–6 New York City: Black population of, 357–58; as the national capital, 74–75; riots in, 164–65, 356–62; slave codes in, 40–41; slave population of, 17 New York Colony, 14–15, 16–17, 18–19 New York Federalism, 144 New-­York Historical Society, 287–88 New-­York Manumission Society (NYMS): in advocacy for gradualism, 102, 113–16; in the Broadway Tabernacle speech, 315–16; on colonialization, 433n55; in defense of rights of ­free Blacks, 78–79; in the end of gradual abolition, 136–37, 139; in enforcement of antislavery statutes, 113–14; and John Jay, 76–81, 88, 91; and the Philadelphia constitutional conven-

tion, 84–85, 87; in the transition to abolition in New York, 120–21, 122. See also manumission New York State law: gradual emancipation in, 1–2, 3, 113–18, 136–40; on slavery and emancipation, sojourn loophole in, 204–5 New-­York Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society. See Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society nonre­sis­tance, theory of, 225, 226–27, 259–60 norms, gendered, 214–15, 228–29, 294 Northwest Ordinance, U.S. Constitution, 85 Ohio, 238, 239, 326, 329. See also Salmon P. Chase Olmstead, Frederick Law, 357 Onderdonk, Benjamin, 248–51, 263–64 Onderdonk, Henry, 250–51 Oswald, Richard, 59–60 pacifism, 45–46, 76, 225, 258–61, 272–73 Paine, Elijah, 301 Paine, Thomas, 34 Paley, William: The Principals of Moral and Po­liti­cal Philosophy, 124–25 partisanship: and the Civil War, 339–40; and disunion, 267–73; in government ser­vice, 387–88; in gradualism, 116; in the Harlem Plains centennial address, 385; in the Missouri crisis, 129, 143; and morality, 280; in nation-­building, 92–93, 98–100; in parting remarks of John Jay II, 385; perils of, in 1858, 310–11; in po­liti­cal appointments, 313–14; in removal of John Jay’s portrait, 355. See also po­liti­cal parties paternalism: in approaches to antislavery activism, 6–7; in bequests to former slaves, 257–58; in domestic order, 135; in ­house­hold equality, 4–5; long-­distance, 54–58; of the NYMS, 77, 124–25; ­toward Abbe, 66; ­toward w ­ omen in abolitionism, 215–16 Paton, David, 156 patriarchy, 6–7, 55–56, 97, 214–15, 217–19, 228, 294, 296–97 patriotism: in the American Centennial address, 383–84; in Civil War military ser­vice, 341–42; invoked in politics, 319–20; of John Quincy Adams, 280–82; and meta­phors of enslavement, 38–39; and morality, 8, 45–46; in peace advocacy, 259–60; in rebuttals to Inquiry, 183, 184; and Reconstruction, 369–70, 378; redefining, 276–79

I n d e x patronage, po­liti­cal, 354, 355, 388, 391 peace advocacy of William Jay, 258–61, 272–73 Peace of Paris, 58–66, 81–83 Peet (enslaved person), 89, 96–97, 133–34 Pennington, J. W. C., 244, 298–99 Pennsylvania, 48–49 persuasion: antislavery evidence in, 196; moral, 166, 171, 190–94, 207–8, 211, 213, 232, 261; war­time as opportunity for, 345 Philipse, Cuffee, 22 Philipse, Frederick, 18, 26 Phillis (enslaved person), 111 Phoenix Society, 168–69 piety, 44–49, 77, 147–48, 152–53, 172–73, 303–4, 308, 330–31 Pine, Jack, 135–36 plantation society, 51–52 Plato (enslaved person), 42–43, 56, 57–58, 75–76 Plato, young (enslaved person), 97–98 poetry, antislavery, 115 po­liti­cal abolitionism, 232–33, 256, 314–15 po­liti­cal parties: alliance building with, 310–11; antislavery, 226–27, 229–33, 256, 274–76, 316–21. See also u ­ nder name of party; partisanship po­liti­cal tyranny-as slavery-­trope, 37–39 politics: anti-­administration, in the draft riots, 358; antislavery, 266, 267–73, 275–76, 316, 318; electoral, 203–6, 229–33; New York, 84, 113, 376, 385–86; racial, in Douglass’s eulogy of William Jay, 332–33; in Reconstruction, 371–73, 376; revolutionary, in critiques of slavery, 34; of slavery and disunion, 267–73; as temptation from abolitionism, 189; in Westchester County, 353 Polk, James and administration, 269–70, 273 positive law, 35, 40–41, 83. See also natu­ral law poverty, 151, 311–12 Powell, William P., 291–92, 295–97 pragmatism, 44–49, 95–96, 193–94, 274–75, 345–46 prejudice, color. See racism Preliminary and Conditional Articles of Peace, 60–61 Preston, Horace, 298–99 Prigg v. Pennsylvannia, 288–89 property: in The Creole case, 245–46; in En­glish liberty, 33–34; in the Fugitive Slave Act, 297; h ­ uman, in w ­ ills and estates,

515

57–58; in negotiations on compensation, 95; in the Peace of Paris, 59–66; in pragmatism on slavery, 44; rights to, 34–35, 36–37, 65, 245–46; slaves in Jay’s survey of, 107–8; in voting rights, 144–45, 147 Protestant Church. See Episcopal Church/ Episcopalians; Huguenots public opinion: and The Cabinet of Freedom, 201; danger of Black vio­lence in, 296; Eu­ro­pean, on the Civil War, 350, 351; and moral leadership, 256–57; as moral standard, 280, 281–82, 304; northern, and nonviolent re­sis­tance, 196; overseas, in Civil War foreign policy, 350; in peace advocacy, 259; power of moral suasion in, 232; in the sins of federalism, 212–13; Southern, on abolition, 199 punishment of enslaved, 24–25, 97–98, 109–10, 200. See also discipline of enslaved Pyne, Thomas, 212, 259 Quakers, 31, 44–46, 216 Quincy, Edmund, 286 race: in constitutional rights, 204–5; environmentalist ideas on, 125; in the Harlem Plains address, 384; in hy­poc­ risy of the Episcopal Church, 265–66; integration of, in the AAS, 163–66, 169, 190; and ser­vice in the Jay ­house­hold, 156; and voting rights in the New York constitution, 144–50 racism: in attitudes on William Jay, 234–36; in colonizationism, 169–70; in De Bow’s Review, 336–37; in disfranchisement, 144–47; in the draft riots, 358; of the Episcopal Church hierarchy, 236–39, 262–65; in failure of gradual emancipation bills, 77–78; graveyard, 335; as impediment to education, 186–87, 248–51, 447n33; institutional, 236–39; in the Missouri Compromise, 143; Northern, in abolitionism, 204; as obstacle to American pro­gress, 186–87; patterns of, 254; proslavery militancy in, 324–25; ULC’s attempts to reverse, 359–60 radicalism/radical abolitionism: of the AAS, 163–64, 225; in antislavery fusion politics, 318; and conservatism, 5–6, 189–90; embrace of, 6–7; joining forces with, 169; in Reconstruction, 371, 373–75. See also immediatism/immediatists Randolph, Edmund, 93–96

51 6 I n d e x

ratification of the Constitution, 86–87 rebellions, slave: aboard La Amistad, 239–44; as an argument for abolition, 175; in the Constitution, 84; aboard The Creole, 245–47, 260–61; New York arson plot, 21–25, 412n35; in South Carolina, 21–22; St. Domingue insurrection, 113, 174 reckoning, 394–400 Reconstruction: burying the past in, 377–79; and the election of Hayes, 385–89; elite agenda in, 366–68; hopes for social justice and equality in, 365–66; intervention and contention in, 372–76 reenslavement, 87–88, 100–101, 111–12, 204 ­Reese, David M., 181–86 refugees: French West Indian, 120–21; Huguenot, 13–14; slaves freed by the British as, 64–65, 93–94; Southern slaves as, in the Civil War, 342, 344–45; white, from St. Domingue, 113, 115 religion: denial of, to slaves, 323; in excusing slavery, 322–25; in the life of Jay ­family ­women, 221–22, 223; in meta­phors of enslavement, 38–39; in patriarchy, 217–18; in the Reconstruction agenda, 366–68; renunciation of, 265–67. See also Catholic Church/Catholicism; Chris­tian­ity; Episcopal Church/Episcopalians Renwick, Henry, 233 Republican Party/Republicans, 7, 318–19, 320–21, 336–37, 339–40, 345, 353, 372–76 reputation: of the Jay ­family, defense of, 233; and the Jay ­family ­daughters, 104–5; of John Jay, 273–74, 303–5; of John Jay II, 286–88, 292–93; social, of the Grimké ­sisters, 216–17; of William Jay, in rebuttals to Inquiry, 181–82 re­sis­tance, Black: of Abbe, 66–71; aboard The Creole, 245–47; on the Amistad, 239–40; Black, against racism, 236; Civil War potential for, 347; to the Fugitive Slave Act, 294–96; and gradualism, 77–78, 113–14, 115; as inspiration for activism, 254; in international conflict, 260; by New York slaves, 24–25; public, to fugitive slave rendition, 293 responsibility: to el­derly slaves, 97, 110–11; of ­Great Britain to former slaves, 100–101; personal of John Jay ­toward ­family slaves, 54–58; of slaveholders ­toward slaves, 75–76, 89; in the transition to abolition, 122

Revolutionary War, 42–44, 58–66, 141, 261, 318, 320, 326, 346 Rice, Edgar, 395 Ridley, Matthew, 71–72 rights of ­free Blacks: in The Creole case, 245–46; defense of, 119–21, 201–3; kidnapping as violation of, 238–39; in the Missouri Compromise, 143; NYMS in defense of, 78–79; right to testify, 117, 239, 244, 295; violations of, in the north, 237–39; voting rights, 137–38, 144–50, 237–38 riots in New York City, 164–65, 356–62 Robertson, Henry, 354 Robertson, James, 120–21 da Roche, Jose, 291–93 Romme, Elizabeth, 23 Romme, John, 23 Roo­se­velt, Quaco, 22 Ross, John Z., 145 Rou, Louis, 16 Ruggles, David, 170, 201–3 rule of law, 207, 297 Rush, Benjamin, 34 Rye, New York, 26–27 St. Domingue insurrection, 113, 174 St. Philips Church, 164–65, 250, 262–65, 299–300 sale of slaves: as discipline, 111; in domestic order, 133–34; in ­family separation, 56, 199; gradualism in, 168; interstate, in the transition to abolition in New York, 119; paternalism in, 55–56; by Peter Jay, 20–21; in Peter Jay’s ­will, 57–58; sale of ­children, 20–21, 43–44 Sanders, Thomas, 120 schisms, abolitionist, 314–16 Scott v. Sanford, 325–29 secession/secessionists, 336–37, 340–41, 386–87, 390 sectionalism: in disunion, 270–71; in the election of 1854, 317; expansion of slavery in, 282; in the Fugitive Slave Act, 293; in the Harlem Plains address, 383–84; in nation-­building, 74, 84–85, 420n3; in Reconstruction, 378–79, 386–88 Sedgwick, Theodore II: The Practicability of the Abolition of Slavery, 162–63 segregation, 358–60, 382, 390 servitude, Biblical, 322–23 Seward, William H., 205–6, 230, 231, 350–51 sex, interracial, 43–44

I n d e x Seymour, Horatio, 354–55, 357 Sharp, Granville, 34–35, 73–74, 87 Sidney, Thomas, 250 Sierra Leone colonial proj­ect, 96 Silliman, Benjamin, 123 sins of federalism, 209–13 slave codes, 19, 40–41, 85, 199 slaveholders/slaveholding: colonizationism in abetting, 171–72; in The Creole case, 245–46; ethics of, 110–11; federal government in interests of, 209–10, 212–13; influence of, 282; interests of, in the Constitution, 84–88; obligations to slaves of, 75–76, 89, 97, 110–11, 122, 155, 257–58; post-­Revolutionary organ­izing in rights of, 79–80; and religious organ­ izations, 322; slaves in socioeconomic status, 17–18; in the war with Mexico, 277; on the ­will of William Jay, 329–30; at Yale, 123 slave narratives, 194, 197, 199–201, 440n21 “Slave Power,” 277, 278, 312–13, 317, 353, 355–56, 363, 370 slave states: admission of Texas as, 269; in constitutional crisis, 207–8; disadvantages of, 278–79; gradualism in, 175–76; in the Missouri crisis and compromise, 129–30, 141–42, 143, 145; reversion to territories, 346 slave trade: bans in, 73–74, 78–88, 110, 118–19; British, abolition of, 212–13; in The Cabinet of Freedom, 195–96, 199; in Civil War diplomacy, 350, 351; in the Compromise of 1850, 293; in the Constitution, 73; international, 84, 210–11, 260–61; interstate, and Texas statehood, 270; Jay ­family in, 18–19, 20–21; John Jay’s social connections to, 33; La Rochelle, France in, 11–12; reckoning with, 398; as sin of federalism, 210–11 Smith, Elihu H., 115–16 Smith, Gerrit: and the AFAS, 226–27; and The Cabinet of Freedom, 194–95; election to Congress, 317; in electoral politics, 203–6; and the Liberty Party, 274, 275; in party politics, 230, 232; in posting bond for Jefferson Davis, 375; in support of Crummell, 251; William’s alliance with, 6–7, 193 Smith, Melancton, 86–87 Snowden, James P., 299

517

society: colonial, 30; connections in, 15, 31–33; postwar, in the Reconstruction agenda, 369–70; southern, un-­Christian characteristics of, 200 Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestics, 156 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), 16 Somerset, James, 34–35 Somerset decision (Lord Mansfield), 34–35, 93–94 South Carolina, 13–14, 21–22, 47–48, 162–63, 247, 324 sovereignty: national, 65–66, 149, 184; personal, 90, 132; popu­lar, 317, 318–19, 324; state, 372–73 Spain, 52, 87–88 Stamp Act Crisis of 1765, 31 Stewart, Alvan, 206–9, 230 Stewart, Charles, 34–35 Stiles, Ezra, 123 Stone, William L., 180–81, 186 Stouppe, Pierre, 29–30 Strong, George Templeton, 292–93, 300, 302–3, 379–80 Strong, Josiah, 391 Stuart, Moses, 303–6 Sturge, Joseph, 245–46, 259 suffrage, universal, male, 144–45, 147, 148, 370–71, 378–79 sugar production, West Indies, 17–18 Sumner, Charles: “The Barbarism of Slavery” speech, 339–40; in the ­battle for soul and nation, 274–75; in the Civil War, 339–40, 345, 346, 350–52; connection to John Jay II of, 309–10, 339 Supreme Court, U.S.: in the Amistad case, 243–44; Dred Scott decision by, 325–29; John Jay as chief justice, 88–90; on jurisdiction over fugitives, 288–89; Salman Chase appointed to, 362; as threat to Civil War aims, 348 Susan (enslaved person), 75–76 Sykes, George, 344 Tallmadge, James Jr., 141, 148–49 Taney, Roger, 325–29, 362 Tappan, Arthur, 164, 329 Tappan, Lewis, 164, 165, 194, 225, 226, 240, 243–44 Tappanites, 227, 228–29 Taylor, John S., 194 Taylor, Zachary, 275–76

51 8 I n d e x

Tea Act, 33 Tea Parties, 36–37 testify, right to, 117, 239, 244, 295 Texas, 211, 256, 267–73 theft, or­ga­nized, 21 third-­party movement, 229–33 Thirteenth Amendment, 362 three-­fifths clause, 84, 86–87, 209–10, 270–71 Tilden, Samuel, 386–87 Tompkins, Daniel D., 136–37 tracts, antislavery, 190–92 transitions to freedom from slavery, 118–22 Trinity Church, New York, 16, 324 Tuckerman, Bayard: William Jay and the Constitutional Movement for the Abolition of Slavery, 392–93 Tyler, John, 269, 270–71

vindication, 363–64, 369 vio­lence: against the AAS in New York City, 164–65; anti-­abolition, elite classes in, 193–94; against Charles Sumner, 310; in the draft riots, 357–58; racism in patterns of, 254; in support for immediatism, 168–69 ­Virginia, 35, 373–75, 395 voting rights: colonizationists against, 170; for f­ ree Black men, 137–38, 144–50, 237–38; in the gubernatorial election of 1838, 204–5; John Quincy Adams belief in, 281–82; in the New York constitutional convention of 1821, 144–48; in rebutting the Dred Scott decision, 328; in Reconstruction, 370–71, 372–73; universal male suffrage, 144–45, 147, 148, 370–71, 378–79

Under­g round Railroad, 285, 302, 338. See also fugitives, slave Union Club of NYC, 306, 308 Union Defense Committee, 353 Union League Club (ULC): in the draft riot, 358–59; founding of, 357; and President Hayes, 387–89; in Reconstruction, 369–70, 373, 374, 375–76; as voice of reform, 386; in witnessing the Thirteenth Amendment, 362–63 Union Missionary Society, 244 unity/disunity: in advocacy for the Constitution, 86; and the Dred Scott decision, 327–28; fears of, in the election of 1860, 340; in the Harlem Plains address, 383–84; politics of slavery in, 267–73; in Reconstruction, 372, 374–75; in rhe­toric of John Quincy Adams, 281; as war­time aim, 345 Upshur, Abel, 268–69 Ury, John, 22, 24 US Peace Commission, 60–66 Utah, 293

wages, 120, 132–34, 135–36, 176 Walker, Zachariah, 394–96, 398–400 war: for freedom in the West Indies, 174–75; Mexican War, 256–57, 273–80; Revolutionary War, 42–44, 58–66, 141, 261, 318, 320, 326, 346; against whites as fear of immediatism, 126; William Jay’s advocacy against, 258–61 Washington, D.C., 153–55, 293, 295, 347 Washington, George, 2, 3–4, 48, 64 Washington, Madison, 245, 248 Watkins, Judith Livingston, 112, 130 wealth: in anti-­abolitionism, 193–94; in conflict in New York colony, 15; in lives of ­house­hold servants, 179–80; and slavery in New York City, 75; slaves as marker of, 112; slaves as repositories of, 107–8 Webster, Daniel, 245, 246–47, 294, 303 Westchester County, 25–27, 42–44, 136, 319–20, 340–41, 352–56 West Indies, 17–19, 174, 287 West ­Virginia, 377–78 Wheatley, Phillis, 34 Whigs, 32–33, 204–6, 232–33, 269–70, 274, 312–13, 318–19 white supremacy, 288, 365–66, 385–86, 390 white-­washing, 384 Wilberforce, William, 96, 122, 125, 173–74, 333 Williams, Peter Jr., 164–65, 218, 262–63 Williams, Peter Sr., 108–9, 115

Valentine, Caesar, 3, 257–58 Valette, Marie ( Jay), 20 Valette, Pierre, 20 Van Buren, Martin and administration, 148, 230, 232–33, 275–76, 277 Van Cortlandt, Françoise Jay, 20 Van Cortlandt, Frederick, 20 Van Cortlandt, Mary, 20 Varick, Caesar, 22 Vermont, 41

I n d e x

519

Wilmot, David, 274 ­women: Jay ­family, 215, 217–19; ­women question, 214–17, 225–29 Wool, John Ellis, 342–44 working class, white, 357–58

Yonkers Overseers of the Poor, 138 Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society, 166–69, 208, 227, 286, 441n31 Young Men’s Colonization Society, 186–87 Young Ralph, 120

Yaff (enslaved person), 89–90 Yale College, 123–27

Zilpah. See Montgomery, Zilpah Zilpha (enslaved person), 56, 57–58, 75–76