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 great 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 woman traveling with her female slave to New York City. The incident was convoluted. The slaveholder in question was the sister 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 women 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 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 great 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 progress confounded prejudice.⁷

In building his case for the efficacy of immediate abolition in the United States, John’s patrician instincts merged with his free 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 organization 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, sociological, and historical evidence, Jay contended, belied the racist pseudoscience of the likes of Dr. Beakley and arch defender of southern slavery John C. Calhoun.

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, were hunted from their homes … their children exposed to hunger and nakedness; their wives and daughters 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 great 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 father.

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 authority 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 under 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 those 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, either 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 whether 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 toward “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,” ought 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.

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 owner’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 whether 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 because 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 free soil principles and the ability of northern state courts to shirk obligations to make accommodations for the laws of other states.¹⁷

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 woman, Maria da Costa, who had the status of slaves under 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 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 were 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 were 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 were 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 were 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 under 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 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 legal 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 ought 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 grand 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 settle northern concerns about the spread of slavery included admitting California as a free 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 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 horse 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 daughter 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 children, 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 violated by such laws. He wrote that slave catchers will “be roaming through our bed-rooms and ransacking our closets in search of prey.” The animalization of one people 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 woman [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 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 people sacrifice for their principles 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 would-be 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 free 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 shall 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 process 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. 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 whether 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 hazard 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 people, Jay acknowledged, had as much right to defend themselves as white people, but Jay had grave concerns about plans for organizing armed resistance. He “implore[d]” free 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 free 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 doing, 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 children, you are now placed at the disposal of any villain who is willing to perjure himself for the price you will bring in the human shambles of the South.” It is hard to 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–Underground 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 important 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. These 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 great 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 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 hotel waiter and alleged fugitive from Virginia, Jay wrote Charles Sumner in January 1851, “I had hoped & … expected to carry it from Court to Court until 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 because 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 whether 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 were seized as 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 were alternatives, however, to making a federal case to aid fugitives. In a matter 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 favor. The three Black delegates—Peter Ray, Henry P. Scott, and Philip Augustus White—joined the convention immediately. The final stages of St. Philip’s battle for recognition displayed both the advantages and limitations of John Jay II’s aggressive advocacy. Much of the 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 these 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 after he was discovered to have mixed racial ancestry. The school prohibited the admission of nonwhites, and Jay pursued the matter 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 original 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 were no legal grounds on which eight people 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 free state.

The US Constitution, the lawyers claimed, had no relevance to the current circumstances. Only in the case where the people in question were runaways did federal fugitive law intervene, but the Black people traveling in the Lemmons’s custody were not fugitives. The implication of these arguments was that, like England at the time of the famed Somerset decision, New York should be regarded as entirely free 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 brothers 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 project. Their supporters were determined that this group of Virginians’ freedom could not be revoked regardless of future judicial decisions. The former Lemmon slaves were not fugitives, but their path northward and the allies who helped them get there were part of the same web that assisted those 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 were persuaded to press for reversal of Judge Paine’s decision in the higher courts of New York, because 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 resistance. 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 Underground Railroad figure in Albany, Stephen A. Myers, wrote a letter to John Jay II summarizing his father’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 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 under foot the Constitution which his father 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 were 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 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 father 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 father’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 because I regard a fugitive free by the laws of God, that I cannot aid in reducing him to slavery; and because 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 precedent: “Neither Abolitionists nor their fathers 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 father’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 favor 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 founders and slavery was far from simple. 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 founders and slavery. He took Eliot to task for arguing that because the founding fathers passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 any criticism of the 1850 law would mean “ ‘denouncing our fathers.’ ” Fulminated Jay, “Well, sir, were 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 father’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 father’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, whether gradualist or immediatist, made moral and reasonable antislavery appear fanatical.

Counterpunching to defend the family 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 because 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 great 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 father, 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 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 fashionable 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 family’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 family’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 & water.” 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 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 here prove it according to law.” No wonder Jay “exclaimed to myself ‘Capital! Capital!’ ” on reading these words before rushing the decision into print. Here 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 people could still forge progress 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 people 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.