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 principles 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 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 geographically 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 mental 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 Free Democracy to strike their first blow in New York.”⁹

To advance in the nation’s leading city the movement for a new national party, John founded the Free Democratic League of the City & County of New York (FDL). In that endeavor, he had the active support of his father. 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 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 free 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 organization’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.” Those 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 were “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 every state and Territory as a system that has no valid sanction in human 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 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 future greatness.

The Tabernacle of Higher Law

Even as the Jays sought to assemble a coherent antislavery political organization 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 were leading lights of New England 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 founding 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 whole. Early in the talk he disavowed any intent to present his grandfather’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 earlier 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 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 founders’ antislavery agenda to his version of the Free Democrats’ agenda. Democratic 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 lawyer 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 future 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 organizing. 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 organizing: 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 people of the Free 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.

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 political 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 Free 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 people. Jay’s sensibility was nonetheless evident. The broadside argued that Virginia’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 great 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 Free Democrats’ standard, “then freedom, honor, faith, will become, as of old, the moving principles of our republic.” As a Free Democrat, Jay participated in a populist appeal that also reflected his legal and historical concerns. Ordinary voters could look to the founding fathers’ 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 the acute vulnerabilities of the Whigs and the Democrats to muddy the political waters. 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 there is little room for hope in the coming Presidential Election, but I have huge hopes for the future.”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 grand legacy of the nation’s founding. He spoke in Bedford, where he was having a house built for his family of five children 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 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 fathers,” ignoring the fact that his grandfather, in one of his final political 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 “great principles as those for which our fathers fought” in the Revolution and then quoted John Jay’s address to Great Britain, which “sound[s] like a voice from the dead—the voice of the Fathers 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 independence 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 migrants, “in whose veins flows the blood of the Pilgrims and the Huguenots,” in the battle 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 either 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 future victory. While Sumner continued to languish in ill health, John 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 great enthusiasm for the Republicans’ performance. Presidential candidate James C. Frémont swept New England, while, as Jay stated with great 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 every 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.

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 giant … 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 unregulated 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 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 principle 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 people 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 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 contemporary 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 & legal equity.” With “every seventh man … held as a beast of burden … his wife & children sold like cattle 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 mother parish of New York Episcopalianism and of the Jay family 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 brother” 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, whether in Kansas or in New York, would not protect anyone’s rights. Jay embraced the role as speaker of truth to the powerful.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 abolitionist biblical creed that Blacks and whites were 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 future 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, 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 free labor principles in Missouri and even Virginia. 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 England 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 family’s woes, William’s two remaining sisters passed away in November 1856. Augusta followed them in death on April 26, 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 mother.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 were 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 future 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. After 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 economically, better consequences would ensue—and “when this day arrives, the Union will 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 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 family legacy loom larger.⁴⁹

If the Union were 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 legal 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, free Blacks were not only citizens but also exercised those 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 Virginia 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 under 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 father’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 defiant 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 will 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 will and testament on April 14, 1858, that sum had doubled to $1,000. The ninth clause of the will 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 others 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 career, 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 will. The New-York Daily Tribune stated, “The bequest is probably the first of its kind in the country.” It openly violated 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 others to imitate his devoted efforts in behalf of fugitive slaves.”⁵³

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 powerful 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 that founding father 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 others, 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 great 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 great 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 father’s passing, news of the Republican Party’s electoral success in the Midwest “called forth his last expression of thankfulness.”⁵⁶ For John, the battle 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 piety and devotion to the church stood out, along with “elevated principles” and an interest in “great 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 causes 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 father’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 future will 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 great 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 causes 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 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, will be initiated by others, 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 father’s story. John’s priority of highlighting his father’s antislavery advocacy made him cool to the public eulogy planned by the Tappan brothers under 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 project. 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 people 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 great 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. There was no denying that Jay had conducted his battles 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 great readiness. He wrote precisely at the right time.—No great occasion escaped him. He was ready for every 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 those 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 continued with an ornate metaphor, “If he had faults, they were to his whole 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 celebration 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 fathers 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. These “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 family’s entanglement with slavery and race had a private, personal dimension that endured alongside public battles. Cusno, the Sicilian immigrant who was sometimes labeled as a mulatto, had benefited from John Jay’s largesse before. Zilpah’s connection 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 century, John banished the younger Zilpah from the household for a time after she got pregnant. With this codicil, another generation born in servitude received testamentary acknowledgment of their loyalty to another generation of dying 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.