Movement

One can hardly blame The Liberator for celebrating their new ally William Jay or for drawing attention to his famous founding father. During the years in which national events and militant voices were catalyzing the emergence of a new kind of abolitionist movement, William sought to build a literary monument to his beloved father’s memory. Through a lengthy and comprehensive 1833 biography of John Jay, William attempted to provide a nation in need of instruction with an exemplary life. Consisting of a 463-page narrative volume and a similarly sized second volume of documents, the biography required of William a considerable investment of time and emotional energy.²

Andrew Jackson’s rise on a wave of partisan democratic energy and populist nationalism provided a moral foil for William’s reconstruction of his father’s career. In the final pages of the narrative, he commented that his father withdrew from public life before the vulgar new era: “His long retirement had exempted him from all participation in the conflicts and animosities of modern parties.” William summarized the founding father’s virtue: “Much as he loved his country, he spurned the principle implied in the sentiment—‘Our country, right or wrong.’ ” In William Jay’s construction of his father’s character, the willingness to prize moral judgment over amoral rallying cries marked John Jay’s historical and contemporary singularity.³

In accounting for his father’s record with regard to slavery, William discussed John’s gradualism with equanimity and even a hint of pride. He cast his father as part of a small group of “zealous pioneers” who were “far in advance of public opinion” in identifying slavery as an unjust institution. The gradual emancipation law passed during his governorship “afforded” John Jay “unfeigned pleasure.” Enslaved members of the Jay household played no part in the narrative beyond William’s uncritical remark: “As free servants became more common, he was gradually relieved from the necessity of purchasing slaves; and the two last which he manumitted he retained for many years in his family, at the customary wages.” William’s treatment of his father’s record on slavery barely foreshadowed the starker notions he had begun to contemplate as he worked on the biography.⁴

By the early 1830s, William Jay had come to understand southern slavery as not only wrong but also dangerous. A month after Garrison began publishing The Liberator in January 1831, William’s cousin-by-marriage Theodore Sedgwick II delivered a lecture The Practicability of the Abolition of Slavery that questioned the racist assumptions on which the defense of slavery rested and argued that a more humane free labor system would promote greater prosperity. In response, William wrote Sedgwick that it was “wise policy” for the South “immediately to emancipate their slaves”; indeed, if not granted, the enslaved would “wrest it by force from their masters.” The national political crisis provoked by South Carolina’s attempt to nullify the federal tariff laws of 1828 and 1832 deepened such views. In December 1832, he wrote his old school friend, the celebrated novelist James Fenimore Cooper, that if the South insisted on making northerners their “enemies,” war would follow, during which “the Slaves will assert their rights.” The desire of the enslaved themselves for liberty was natural; as he put it to Cooper, “What think you—are these Slaves to be the only portion of the human race that are for ever to be denied the rights of humanity?”⁵

In May 1833, William publicly announced his support for immediate abolitionism in a letter to the recently founded New York abolitionist newspaper The Emancipator. His logic was both evangelical and lawyerly. Victory could only come by “convert[ing]” potential allies through “the exhibition of TRUTH.” Americans with good intentions but debilitating fears should know that antislavery views were gaining ground internationally. In the face of constitutional limits, the only place the federal government could liberate any enslaved people was in Washington, D.C. Thus, he argued, “moral interference” with slavery, meaning the right to “exhort slaveholders to liberate their slaves,” was essential. Fortunately, abolitionists had “facts in abundance” to mount their campaign. When reprinting William’s letter several weeks later, The Liberator proclaimed, “The Christian world is rousing from its slumbers.”⁶

Jay’s willingness to align with the emerging immediatist movement, however, only went so far. William worried about the direction in which Garrison was taking the movement. The same week that The Liberator reprinted his letter, William privately advised Arthur Tappan, the wealthy New York businessman and evangelical reformer, to check Garrison’s New England radicals by forming a New York abolitionist society on more moderate lines. William believed that the New Englanders placed too great an emphasis on racial egalitarianism. Combating slavery and bestowing political rights, he argued, should not be mixed together, nor should white abolitionists so openly collaborate with Black abolitionists. William also counseled against needless contention with advocates of colonizing free people of color outside the United States, even though he believed that such a program did not advance abolition.⁷

When immediatists gathered in Philadelphia that December to create a national organization, William declined to attend. Although the new American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) honored Jay’s conviction that the US Constitution provided no room for the federal government to abolish slavery within existing states, the organization did not mince words about its radical goals. A passionately worded Declaration of Sentiments authored by Garrison called on abolitionists “to overthrow the most execrable system of slavery that has ever been witnessed upon earth” and “to deliver our land from its deadliest curse.” The work of the abolitionists not only addressed what the founders had left “incomplete” but also abolitionism’s ultimate “results … transcends theirs as moral truth does physical force.” The organization incorporated interracial cooperation into its structure. Headquartered in New York City, the AAS executive committee included African Americans Samuel Cornish and Theodore S. Wright. Arthur Tappan served as president.⁸

Five months later, in May 1834, the AAS held its first annual meeting in New York City, close enough to his Westchester home that William Lloyd Garrison himself anticipated that William Jay would be speaking as part of the proceedings. William once again chose to stay away. The Treasurer’s Report issued for the meeting, however, listed Jay as having contributed $50 to the organization, a fact that Jay had intended originally to remain private.⁹

Headquartering the interracial AAS in New York City may have removed the organization from the direct control of New England radicals, but that was a distinction without a difference to hostile white New Yorkers. For three days in July 1834, African Americans and leading white abolitionists found themselves under siege by New York City, their property, their institutions, their physical security threatened by white mobs. Egged on in the pages of William L. Stone’s Commercial Advertiser and James Watson Webb’s Courier and Enquirer, groups of whites ransacked the home of AAS founder Lewis Tappan, Arthur’s brother and business partner. A mob destroyed the interior of the Presbyterian church of Henry Ludlow, an abolitionist minister. It also targeted the church and home of Rev. Samuel Cox, who had recently embraced the abolitionist cause and had suggested from his pulpit that Christ was a person of color. A group of young men, including Columbia College student John Jay II, defended the home of Rev. Cox’s brother, Dr. Abraham L. Cox, a board member of the AAS. They also sought to protect the warehouse of AAS president Arthur Tappan.¹⁰ One thousand people surged on the Bowery Theater to disrupt a performance by English actor Edwin Forrest. The Englishman quelled the mob by singing the patriotic standard “Yankee Doodle” and the blackface minstrel favorite “Zip Coon.”

The mob directed especial brutality toward African Americans. The African Baptist Church and an African American school came under attack. St. Philip’s African Episcopal Church, where Black abolitionist Peter Williams Jr. presided, was leveled. In Five Points, the rowdy and rough neighborhood inhabited and patronized by both whites and Blacks, white mobs beset Black homes while leaving white homes unmolested. Hundreds of African Americans hastily left their homes in fear. Black businesses also drew the ire of rioters. After the mayor finally called out the militia to face down the rioters, calm returned, leaving, all told, six churches and sixty homes damaged.

The cause of the riots was at once clear and contested. Urban rioting was not uncommon in this era, nor was harassment of African American New Yorkers. At the same time, Black institution-building in Manhattan and the emergence of an interracial movement for the immediate abolition of slavery caused widespread alarm. White editors Stone and Webb, who supported American Colonization Society efforts to send free Blacks to Africa, and working-class whites who feared Black advancement and racial amalgamation, seized on signs of Black self-assertion and white cooperation.

Rumors that the white minister Ludlow and the Black minister Williams had performed interracial marriage ceremonies served as a provocation. So too did the fact that Black activist Samuel Cornish and Lewis Tappan shared a pew in Cox’s church on a recent Sunday. Confrontations over public meetings of abolitionists and a disturbance over whether a Black civic meeting or a white music society had properly reserved the Chatham Street Chapel further riled resentment. Members of the city’s merchant class feared that abolitionism threatened to undermine trade with the South. Workers in the riotous mobs took offense at Black aspirations of social equality, as well as the support those aspirations received from some prominent white New Yorkers. Thousands of angry whites ultimately poured into Manhattan’s streets to violently demonstrate their displeasure with Black liberties.¹¹

Responding to the news of the riots, some members of the Jay household in Bedford even blamed the abolitionists. John Jay II’s older sister Maria and his mother Augusta, clearly concerned for young John’s safety, expressed their displeasure with the abolitionists. Maria wrote, “It is a great pity good people expose themselves to such insults by their impudence & indiscretion.” Augusta Jay went further: “I hope you will be quiet on the subject—Although you may agree with abolitionists in principle, I would when necessary express that opinion modestly but by no means defend their measures—or take any part in them—They appear to wish to incite all the angry feelings of the opposite party.” Indeed, she accused the abolitionists of “act[ing] as much from perverseness as benevolence.” Augusta and Maria voiced a negative view of the new wave of abolitionist organizations that was not uncommon in respectable society.¹²

That critical interpretation of the abolitionist role in the riots, however, would not hold for long in William’s Bedford home. The reformer and reputable judge had begun to see antislavery and disorder through different eyes, with a vision more akin to that of his son John on the frontlines in New York City than to that of his wife Augusta and daughter Maria. The household was about to become fully abolitionized.

Son in the City

William Jay’s abolitionism drew strength and substance from his precocious son John Jay II, who during the July 1834 riots staked out a defensive position on the frontlines. To follow young John into the New York City of his college years is to see how iconoclastic the cause of immediate abolitionism was for an elite family like the Jays. To watch the founding father’s namesake acting on his own father’s antislavery opinions is to begin to appreciate the familial intimacy located at the core of the Jays’ burgeoning commitment to the radical abolitionist movement.¹³

John Jay II had already cast his lot with the radical cause of organized immediate abolitionism movement by May 1834, becoming a charter member of the New-York Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society (hereafter Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society). This group, which proclaimed itself to be an auxiliary of the AAS, was part of a wave of young people’s organizations inspired by the Garrisonian break with colonization and its repudiation of gradualism. At the Oneida Institute in upstate New York, Lane Seminary in Ohio, and Amherst College in Massachusetts, students embraced immediatism. In language borrowed, tweaked, reordered, and quoted by these groups, the New Yorkers proclaimed an uncompromising and comprehensive commitment to “the immediate emancipation of the whole colored race, the emancipation of the slave from the oppression of the master, the emancipation of the free colored man from the oppression of public sentiment, and the elevation of both, to an intellectual, moral, and political equality with the whites.” Such language placed the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society’s aspirations at the vanguard of the radical movement, embracing not only moral suasion (“Truth and truth only shall be the weapon of our warfare”) but also racial egalitarianism.¹⁴

Unlike his abolitionist contemporaries at other schools, John Jay II had to venture alone beyond his college to find like-minded radicals. Columbia, his revered grandfather’s alma mater, was not a place to find support for abolitionist views inside or outside the classroom. There is scant evidence that the classics-heavy curriculum sustained much if any consideration of the ethics or politics of slavery, though it is possible that William Paley’s critique of slavery and endorsement of gradual emancipation were invoked. Rev. John McVickar, moral philosophy professor and John II’s uncle, held antislavery views, but there is no indication he incorporated his critique into his lectures. Much to the disgust of African-American New Yorkers, the college’s president from 1829–42, William Alexander Durer, was also the president of the Colonization Society of New York City. Columbia College did not admit any Black students to its small, wealthy white student body during John II’s years. The only other antebellum abolitionist to graduate from Columbia was John’s second cousin Theodore Sedgwick III, who graduated three years before John arrived.¹⁵

Well aware of his attentive parents’ interests in his moral and intellectual development, John explored his broader surroundings and gravitated toward abolitionism. He sometimes sent home notes about sermons he attended.¹⁶ He was aware of his father’s burgeoning interest in abolitionism, having been instructed to check the status of his father’s Emancipator subscription and to send along a book on slavery he had ordered. Signaling that there was more to his moral education than Columbia provided, his father instructed him to buy for himself a published compendium of Dr. Dwight’s decisions at Yale. John did not ignore social life at Columbia, but this small Manhattan school could not contain his energies or his interests. His landlord was the earlier mentioned Abraham Cox, a medical doctor and Tappan ally on the board of the AAS, as well as the founding president of the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society. When Jay helped defend Dr. Cox’s home against rioters, he expressed his commitment to the larger moral life he was carving out for himself in New York City.¹⁷

John Jay II early on was socialized to think of his life with an enlarged sense of public moral purpose, which the intensifying debates between colonizationists and abolitionists in the city heightened. A condolence letter that he received after his grandfather’s death, lectured the twelve-year-old, “I am much mistaken if Providence has not produced this mortal event, just at the time when the faculties of your mind are ripe for expansion, and thereby give you leave to derive the more valuable advantages from the consideration of the life of Governor Jay.… This legacy to you is of immense value!” Several years later, his mother wrote the young college student, “Do not cease to thank God who made you the descendant of such a man.”¹⁸ Great expectations evoked by his famous name and youthful energy spurred John Jay II to keep pace and even exceed his father’s growing abolitionist commitment.

Far from being cowed by the riots, the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society doubled down on its ambition to spread abolitionism throughout the city and far beyond. Toward the end of 1834, the organization published a sprawling pamphlet explaining the rationale for immediatism. It took a nationalist perspective while highlighting aspects of New York’s history. After the almost ritualistic opening invocation of the Declaration of Independence’s egalitarian preamble, the authors insisted that “no hypocrisy lurked in” the founders who produced those words. They called out John Jay, Rufus King, and Alexander Hamilton as exemplary anti-slavery New Yorkers. Focusing on the present, the pamphlet proclaimed that because “slavery is a NATIONAL EVIL,” it “requires to some extent a NATIONAL REMEDY,” and the US Congress should intervene against the interstate slave trade.

To expose the “illusion” of gradualism, the authors looked both to the North and South, in effect picking apart the founders’ preferred methods. New York’s long delay in emancipating slaves left them vulnerable to sale southward: “In this view of the subject the boasted scheme of gradualism is no more than a hollow pretence of philanthropy, made by slave-dealers.” They frankly asked, “What real difficulty would have been encountered by New-York if she had manumitted her slaves in 1799, that was not experienced in 1827,” when slavery legally ended and thousands received their freedom at a single time? Making such a question urgent was the fact that, while the nation dithered, risking disunion, the size of the slave population in the South continued to shoot up. The gradually emancipating North had set a bad moral and a bad practical precedent.¹⁹

By signing on to such rhetoric, John Jay II drew a sharp line between his own and his grandfather’s abolitionism. Even so, another aspect of the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society program did carry forward an earlier generation’s focus on education. The organization joined an initiative to provide instruction for African American adults in the evening, as well as helping to set up Sunday schools and Bible classes. The Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society night school took place at the Phoenix Society, an organization prompting Black education and advancement established by Black clergy, including Samuel Cornish and Peter Williams. These young men partnered with leading African Americans in a way that went beyond the moral stewardship model of the NYMS’s African Free School.²⁰ Thus, John Jay II defied the conventions of college and class.

For his father William, although he was only observing the riots from Bedford, the summer’s anti-abolitionist upheaval lingered. That autumn Henry Ludlow, minister of one of the ransacked churches, sought to bolster William Jay’s support for the movement. Ostensibly, Ludlow wanted the judge’s help with preparing a new petition against slavery in the nation’s capital, but the scope of Ludlow’s appeal was broader. “The cause dear Sir in which we are engaged is one which will inevitably triumph. The late mobs, to whose violence, the room in which I am now writing can testify, have only seemed to strengthen my attachment to it,” wrote the abolitionist minister. Ludlow reached further back in time to secure Jay’s support: “The earliest Association of my lisping infancy are [sic] intimately connected with the name of your now gloried Sire.” Appreciating Ludlow’s familial flattery, Jay nonetheless stiffly lectured the minister about the need for the abolitionist movement to strictly adhere to the U.S. Constitution. Then the judge warmed to Ludlow’s offer of abolitionist “fraternity” over the wreckage of the summer riots. Referring to abolitionism as “our cause,” Jay proclaimed, “No hope or expectation of conciliating our enemies should ever induce us to conceal or surrender any of our fundamental principles. The violence to which you allude, was intended to intimidate us; if it fails in effecting this object, it will not probably be repeated.”²¹ The two men now shared a common resolve.

Within the next year, William formally joined forces with the American Anti-Slavery Society, becoming a member of its racially integrated executive board. He also consented to his election as president of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society, citing the mob violence as a motivating factor. In the wake of the 1834 riots, he no longer viewed colonizationists as relatively harmless. William perceived the line between slavery’s critics and slavery’s apologists as more clearly drawn than ever before and the rights of others, no matter how unpopular, as linked to his own. As William stated in 1835 to the grand jury investigating the conspiracy against the hapless religious zealot Matthias, the self-proclaimed prophet who established a patriarchal, sexually unconventional compound in Westchester County, “No man in society is safe … if freedom of speech means only the right of speaking what the lawless and violent may please to approve.”²² William thus joined his son John in identifying unmistakably with the unpopular cause of radical abolitionism.

An Inquiry with Only One Answer

As he prepared to formally support the AAS, William Jay embraced the new organization’s disdain for colonization and became more open to racial equality. His disgust with the notion that expatriation could serve as a substitute for emancipation became the organizing feature of the book that articulated his full-blown commitment to immediatism. At more than two hundred pages, Jay’s 1835 book Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, and American Anti-Slavery Societies advanced a new phase in the forty-five-year-old’s career as a writer, reformer, and polemicist.

William’s book exposed the deceptive, racist strategy of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which Jay had come to understand as strengthening rather than weakening American slavery. Historically, that had not been an obvious conclusion. Key Black leaders, such as shipping magnate Paul Cuffee and African Episcopal Methodist Church founders Daniel Coker and Richard Allen were drawn to the notion that the cause of African-American freedom might be served by establishing colonies in West Africa for former slaves and free Blacks. Yet most northern free Blacks overwhelmingly rejected the notion that they belonged in Africa, not the United States, the country of their birth. As a result, colonization would largely be administered by elite whites with little interest in Black popular opinion.²³

In publishing his denunciation of colonizationism, William expanded on his own doubts about the project while following in the footsteps of other leading figures in the abolition movement. In 1829, Jay had declined an invitation to attend the convention of the New York state’s colonization society stating, “I confess I entertain no hope, that the efforts of the Am. Col. Socty. will promote any direct & sensible diminution of the number of Slaves in our Country.” Three years later, William Lloyd Garrison published his Thoughts on African Colonization in 1832. David Ruggles, a leading African-American New York City antislavery activist, published two pamphlets skewering the racist presumptions on which colonizationists continued to rely, contemptuous of the mob violence that such sentiments had helped inspire.²⁴ Jay was likely influenced by Ruggles.

While titling his 1835 abolitionist treatise an Inquiry, Jay brooked not even the slightest compromise with colonizationists and rejected any notion that there was a moral middle ground on the subject of slavery. Slavery, he announced, was “a heinous sin” in and of itself “and, like every other sin, ought to be immediately abandoned.” Yet slavery in the South was growing not shrinking. Enacting the epigraph he selected from John Milton—“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely, according to my conscience”—Jay emancipated himself from caution and intimidation.²⁵

To William, the ACS’s fixation on libeling free Blacks revealed the organization’s underlying lack of interest in emancipation. Jay deployed extensive quotation of ACS literature to demonstrate his charge “that THE SOCIETY DISCOURAGES ALL ATTEMPTS TO IMPROVE THE CONDITION OF THE FREE BLACKS” to advance its expatriation agenda. William noted that the New York branch of the ACS lobbied the state legislature to strictly enforce the virtual disfranchisement of 1821 and was “not contented with giving their sanction to past acts of injustice.”²⁶

William sardonically criticized colonizationists for their role in fomenting anti-Black laws in Connecticut in response to efforts by Prudence Crandall and others to make education available to African Americans. He noted that if Black students were to be run out of town based on vagrancy laws, then the same logic should be applied to (white) Yale students. But the question that weighed most heavily against those who shared the worldview of colonizationists was this: “Why a free black man cannot be a citizen, because another black man is a slave?” William concluded that the ACS program combined a lack of realism with a vicious spirit: the ACS would never succeed in convincing free Blacks to move en masse to Africa, and yet sought to magnify the exclusions and “persecuting spirit” that perpetuated their “degraded” condition.²⁷

William dismissed the alleged goals of colonizationism: to implant a Black American colony on the western coast of Africa as a means of combating the slave trade, spreading civilization to Africa, and initiating the decline of American slavery. He noted that, if the ACS really wanted to abolish the illegal slave trade, then abolishing slavery was the much more direct route. How people that the colonizationists held in such contempt could spread Christianity to the people of Africa remained equally unclear to Jay. The true missionary spirit should have guided white Americans to approach Black Americans “with Christian kindness”; then “instead of being nuisances, [they] would have been valued and useful citizens.”²⁸

William disputed the central colonizationist premise that a successful Liberian colony would erode southern slavery, except perhaps at an insufferably glacial pace that at best would take “centuries.” Jay asserted that it would be far more efficacious to ask southern slaveholders to apply the assertion of equality stated plainly in the Declaration of Independence than to expect that a successful Liberian experiment would cause them to renounce their human property. Meanwhile, more slaves were born in the South every five-and-a-half days than had thus far been freed and sent to Africa. He also took note that Madison, Clay, and George Washington’s nephew, members of the ACS all, had not freed their own slaves. In reality, Jay found that “no desire exists at the South to get rid of slavery.”²⁹

William embraced moral suasion as the abolitionists’ principal weapon against slavery, but he drew on historical evidence to argue that eliminating slavery could not be achieved by mass voluntarism on the part of slaveholders. Ultimately, the law—in the form of individual state laws—would have to mandate emancipation, forcing the unwilling slaveholder to give up his property. Indeed, Jay asserted, “In no country in the world, in ancient or modern times, has slavery been abolished by the unanimous consent of slave holders.” Emancipations in New England, the mid-Atlantic, and South America all demonstrated the importance of legal intervention. While Kentucky declined to end slavery for its 12,000 slaves in 1790, “New-York could liberate ten thousand in one day in 1827,” proving that immediate abolition was in fact a legal choice possible for reformers to advocate and legislators to make.³⁰

History, however, created some unacknowledged paradoxes in William’s argument. This insistence on legal coercion forced him to mock some of the very terms he used to explain his own father’s approach to emancipation. Colonizationists, Jay argued, abetted slaveholders who claimed that freeing slaves would be inhumane, presumably because of an alleged inability of Blacks to function in freedom. Jay thundered, “Thus do we find the whole system of American slavery justified on the tyrant’s plea, necessity.” Ironically, in The Life of John Jay, William had explained his father’s gradual approach to the transition away from slavery in terms of “necessity.” Presumably the difference for William was that his father did not seek to pass slaveholding onto his children, pursuing an exit strategy rather than one of indefinite delay. Thus, he avoided the guilt that Ruggles had argued in his pamphlet increased when one generation received slaves—the moral equivalent of stolen goods—from the previous generation.³¹

Ultimately, the conviction that the ACS was “AN ANTI-ABOLITIONIST ASSOCIATION” with an utter lack of interest in actually ending slavery hardened Jay’s adverse judgment of colonizationism. Summoning another cause he held dear, Jay suggested that the ACS was like a temperance society that looked after the needs of liquor sellers even as it condemned drink. Gazing backward, William found that chronology clinched his point—and made it personal. The ACS had, he wrote, condemned abolitionist societies in 1828, even before Garrison, Tappan, and other had launched the new breed of immediatist organizations. In other words, the ACS had attacked “The Abolition Societies … founded by JAY and FRANKLIN, and which advocated gradual emancipation.” Colonizationists crushed the hope of progress fostered by subsequent gradualists. As for the new strain of abolitionist, they found themselves under assault, colonizationists having forged an unholy alliance between the legally ordered tyranny of southern slavery and the extra-legal disorder of the northern streets. “[T]he war now waging between Abolitionists and Colonizationists,” to William, was an expression of unchecked “infidel” mobocracy.³²

William’s confrontation with slavery at this critical juncture in the 1830s took the form of a test of faith, with the rejection of colonization offering a form of salvation. Summarizing the first half of his Inquiry, he deployed second-person language with direct first-person implications: “If that Society leads to the degradation and oppression of the poor colored man—if it resists every effort to free the slave—if it misleads the conscience of the slave holder, you are bound, your God requires you to oppose it, not in secret, but before the world.” Then, sharpening the edge of his brother Peter’s 1821 argument against disfranchisement in which he reminded delegates to the New York constitutional convention that masters and servants went to the same heaven, William imagined a heavenly trial: “Soon will you stand at the judgment seat of Christ; there will you meet the free negro, the slave, and the master—take care lest they all appear as witnesses against you.”³³

And yet, having searched his conscience and identified a great evil, William Jay had to face the same question that reformers and revolutionaries throughout history have faced: What is to be done? In his later years, John Jay had viewed the American Bible Society as an agent of millennial progress, one of the tokens of which was the abolition of the slave trade and the missionary spread of Christianity. If the ACS represented a perversion of the antislavery and missionary impulses, then William would have to explain how and why the American Anti-Slavery Society was the proper agent of change. More broadly, he would have to explain why the gradualism that had served his father’s generation and his home region well enough had to be replaced with a program of immediate abolition.³⁴

Despite the reservations he previously expressed about Garrisonianism, William first offered an uncompromising embrace of the AAS platform. He quoted approvingly the group’s unequivocal opposition to “a system which classes with the beasts of the field … an intelligent and accountable being,” a system that contravened all normal principles of law and due process. Jay also touted the “ultimate elevation of the black population to an equality with the white, in civil and religious privileges,” along with abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself.³⁵ Jay moved toward racial egalitarianism as he gravitated toward the AAS.

The judge recognized that modern abolitionists had attracted charges of being fanatics, incendiaries, even suborners of treason. Jay deflected the charge of fanaticism by stating that abolitionists now sought the same object as a varied list of heroes, from Protestant divines Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley to British parliamentarians William Wilberforce and Edmund Burke, and to New World independence visionaries Thomas Jefferson and Simon Bolivar. He knew, however, that the charge of fanaticism had less to do with the historical company than the social company whom abolitionists kept. Jay exonerated white abolitionists from the charge of promoting interracial marriage while parsing what the abolitionist goal of equality really meant. The well-heeled Jay asserted that abolitionists sought an equality for Blacks that measured up to but did not surpass that of lower-class whites. In other words, according to William, no white need “associate” with Blacks, but the right of African Americans to work, vote, learn and serve their own “happiness” should not be impeded. If such a goal was fanatical in 1835, William wrote, then it was not seen as such when his father expressed the same sentiment in the 1780s. Still, as William understood, many respectable people, including colonizationist, blamed the recent riots in New York City not on the rioters but rather on the abolitionist themselves. To this charge, abolitionists rightly “plead NOT GUILTY.”³⁶

A favorable view of abolitionism, however, had to rest on the efficacy of its program, not just an assertion of its innocence regarding the recent riots. William offered a combination of conservative principles, godly justice, and historical experience to make his case that abolition could take place safely. Emancipation, he assured his audience, granted liberty, not license, because it “does not necessarily contemplate any relaxation of the restraints of government or morality; any admission of political rights, or improper exemption from compulsory labor.” In other words, one could be an immediate abolitionist without being an immediate egalitarian, and certainly without renouncing the legal and cultural restraint that Jay the judge, Jay the Federalist scion, and Jay the temperance advocate held to be the pillars of social stability. Meanwhile, the “divine economy” should allay white fears of post-emancipation racial reprisals, for God did not “permit any community to be destroyed, merely because it had ceased to do evil.” Thus, Jay reversed the argument made by Jefferson a half-century before, when he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, that the prospect of Black revenge made emancipation contingent on expatriation of former slaves.³⁷

William did not simply make promises; he appealed to the history of Black responses to emancipation in the West Indies to illustrate the safety of immediate abolition in the United States. The Haitian Revolution was seemingly the most violent episode in abolition’s recent history. Yet William joined a line of immediatists stretching back to Elizabeth Heyrick to articulate his own considered case for abolition’s safety. The mishandling of the citizenship claims of free Blacks, not slave restiveness, had caused order to disintegrate in the French colony of St. Domingue. When French authorities emancipated the slaves to fend off British designs on the colony, chaos did not ensue. Without any of the plans and preparation that slavery’s apologist always insisted must precede emancipation, 600,000 freed people had remained orderly under Toussaint L’Ouverture’s rule, even as war waged all around them. Playing down the independent role of the mass of plantation slaves in the St. Domingue wars of liberation, William was able to celebrate “a glorious demonstration of the perfect safety of immediate and unconditional emancipation.”³⁸

To those who pointed to independent Haiti’s alleged shortcomings, Jay responded that the Black republic would have been much better off if not “compelled” to fight for its freedom in wars against the British and French. These wars of freedom dispelled erroneous aspersions of Black idleness. Indeed, William asserted, had they been whites fighting against outside powers for their freedom, the people of St. Domingue would have been hailed as heroes by “the civilized world.”

The experience of the British West Indies also proved the safety of immediate emancipation. Former slaves endured pre-emancipation apprenticeship with “meekness, patience, and forbearance, utterly without parallel” in some islands, while in others, where abolition occurred immediately as abolitionist preferred, all went smoothly.³⁹ William’s West Indian free people were compliant and patient enough to be portrayed as safe, but not so lacking in initiative as to support colonizationist arguments that Black people in the Americas could not make proper use of their freedom.

William’s cagey approach to Black emancipatory agency in the West Indies gave way to more forthright assertions of Black revolutionary potential in the final chapter of the Inquiry titled “Danger of continued Slavery.” Jay informed his readers that “the whole history of slavery is a history of the struggles of the oppressed to recover their liberty.” One had only to look at rebellions in Jamaica, insurrections in New York in 1712 and 1741, and the recent Nat Turner insurrection to perceive this truth. The South perched precariously on a “volcano” and would do well to look into the abyss before refusing the advice pressed on them by abolitionists, the general public, and even foreign nations who might threaten to boycott slave-produced staples. While southern slaveholders dithered in self-pity, “their slaves will be multiplying with a fearful rapidity, and becoming each day more conscious of their own strength; and unless their fetters are loosened, they will inevitably be BURST.”⁴⁰ Unlike Jefferson or his colonizationist disciples, Jay was convinced that the danger of insurrection could not be eliminated by colonization or relief of the demographic pressure valve through the diffusion of slavery westward across the continent. Emancipation itself was the only morally legitimate and practically efficacious safety valve. For Jay, moreover, Black violence could only be the product of Black slavery, not Black freedom.

To make his case for the AAS, Jay had to address a challenging paradox: Why was the gradual abolition of slavery in northern states, especially his native New York, not appropriate for the southern slave states? In New York, Jay explained, the whites demographically dwarfed Blacks, so that there was no fear that the emergence of a free Black population would inspire violence from or social upheaval amongst those still enslaved. In the South, where “nearly all the laborers are slaves, where every free black is regarded as a nuisance and an incendiary,” gradualism would never be tolerated. Immediate abolition was the more practical option. As for compensation, New York’s 1827 precedent, as well as those in Mexico and South America, showed that it was not necessary; in addition, governments had a right to “suppress practices injurious to society.” William significantly strengthened his objection to compensation in a paragraph added to the second edition of Inquiry also published in 1835. He labeled compensation “MORALLY IMPOSSIBLE” and called “absurd” the notion that the “free States” would offer up a billion dollars to slaveholders or that the slaveholding citizens would raise the money to, in essence, pay themselves.⁴¹

The economics of immediate emancipation, in Jay’s reckoning, was far more elegant than any gradual scheme or British-style buyout of West Indian slaveowners. In Jay’s projected southern future, echoing Theodore Sedgwick’s 1831 lecture, former slaveowners would pay their former slaves. Given the dependent condition of ex-slave, Jay suggested that a newly freed man would likely stay put, “negotiate[ing] with his late master.” Here the change might be gradual but it would lead inexorably to an “improve[d]” Black population in an improved society. In the short run, “there will be a charm in the very name of wages, which will make the pittance he receives, appear a treasure in his eyes.” A harmony of interest between employer and employee would develop through a free wage economy, laws of “supply and demand” would take over, “and justice be done both to the planter and his laborers.”

William here expounded the free labor argument that would emerge as the watchword of Republican antislavery ideology two decades later. In making this case, Jay sounded far more sanguine about the morality-inducing properties of the marketplace than he did when he doled out punishments to unruly wage earners as a Westchester County judge. For William, liberty and license were quite different, with the law safeguarding the former by policing the latter.⁴²

William Jay’s first antislavery book firmly embedded him in the immediate abolition movement. He had cast his lot with those who rejected a reform strategy predicated on inherent racial inequality and the accommodation of slaveholders. The book went through three American editions in 1835. John Morrison, the editor of an 1835 London imprint of Jay’s Inquiry, wrote, “The views of Judge Jay are, in substance, those of the American Anti-Slavery Society … who have adopted the noble sentiments expressed by Mr. Jay in this volume.” Further illustrating the new Jay–AAS alignment, the English edition included an introduction by Samuel H. Cox, the Presbyterian minister whose church and home were attacked by the anti-abolitionist mob in 1834.⁴³ William’s comfortable rural home would from this time forward be the seat of an abolitionist enterprise of state, national, and even international renown (see figure 6).

The Uncolonized

Jay had to make himself an expert on colonizationism to write his book. But before starting to write it, he already knew something, or thought he did, about the uncolonized: free African Americans, who rather than departing or being banished to a faraway shore, worked humbly for a modest wage. He headed a household where people who had once been the slaves of his father remained a functional part of the family’s material well-being and sense of order. His servants thus left their own trace on William Jay’s manifesto and the family’s broader commitment. Zilpah and Clarinda embodied a form of permanence and persistence, the opposite of exile. Their humble positions also represented the seeming permanency of class hierarchy, making the transition from slavery to freedom look like something quite different from a revolutionary act.

Clarinda and Zilpah catered to the needs of the well-to-do family that included six children, five girls and one boy (two other children died in infancy). The two women also entered the affective lives of the Jays, especially for William’s wife Augusta. Her attachment to the servants reflected gendered roles, with the woman of the house bearing more direct responsibility for the details of day-to-day household management. As a person of great empathy and as a woman, she may have identified more directly with Clarinda and Zilpah than did her husband. Mrs. Jay made a point of including references to her servants in her correspondence, cognizant not only of what she wanted them to do for the family but also of what they meant to the family. She instructed her children in household management as well as manners. During a summer beach visit to Rockaway, Long Island, Augusta asked fifteen-year-old Maria, who remained at the Bedford house, to make certain household preparations, praising her daughter as “an excellent housekeeper.” Augusta also asked Maria to convey “remembrance … to all the servants.” She conveyed particular wishes for Clarinda’s continued health.⁴⁴

Augusta wanted her children to feel and express the same solicitude for the servants that she expressed and felt. When Maria departed Bedford shortly after Augusta’s return, the mother chided her daughter, “You forgot to bid Clarinda goodbye wh[ic]h hurt her, therefore mention her in your letter.” She wrote her son John at school, “Clarinda makes constant inquiries about you & was much gratified by your remembrance of her,” and then reported, “She has been unusually well this winter.” A year later, Augusta asked her son “if any one had mentioned to you Clarinda is well & often inquires about you.”⁴⁵ Caring about Clarinda was a way for the Jays to register their humane goodness, while the servant’s emotional ties to them strengthened the already tight affective circle that this very close-knit family cultivated.

The once troublesome Zilpah was also ensconced in the family’s extended affective circle in the early 1830s. She was, to the Jays, a figure of condescension though not contempt, whom they perceived as needy, even dependent. In October 1833, Augusta reported to her son John that Zilpah “in sweeping off your shed, which was a voluntary piece of work on her part, brought me a shilling as a part of your property.”⁴⁶ Augusta conveyed to her son, and confirmed to herself, that Zilpah felt a special devotion to the family, expressed through her hard work and honesty.

The reduced size of Zilpah’s universe could be contrasted to the expanded world of the Jay children, with governesses to teach the girls French and trips to the city to broaden their experience. Zilpah could seem like a bit of country bumpkin to the Jay offspring. For example, William and Augusta’s oldest child Anna, then in her late teens, described in a letter in 1832 on a trip to New York City that included Zilpah. According to Anna, Zilpah was stunned by the urban hustle and bustle: wrote Anna, it was “quite amusing to hear her remarks; she asked Eliza [Anna’s nine-year-old sister] if the people in New York walked all day long.” This anecdote suggests Zilpah’s isolation as an adult, for after her banishment in her teenage years from the Jay’s Bedford home, she had lived in New York City. Twenty years later, if the anecdote is accurate, Zilpah found the booming metropolis to be a strange and threatening place. As her employers portrayed her, Zilpah was a friendly member of the family staff, whose limitations were blithely tolerated, but who had few options other than to retain her lowly position.⁴⁷

William Jay’s letters emphasized the management and recruitment of household help and the allocation of household resources, rather than emotional attachment. In his son, John Jay II, William sought to develop the habit of class authority and business acumen. As would be the case in any family business including antislavery business, John II’s presence in New York City was an asset when securing staff for the Bedford household. The family suddenly found itself without a cook in 1834. William wrote to his son to go immediately to the employment agency to secure one, specifically a white one, at $8 a month. Perhaps to motivate his son to act quickly, he added that his mother had begun the spring house cleaning “& the departure of the cook embarrasses her.” After that, William immediately added, John should bring the latest editions of The Liberator when next he came to the country home. John was his father’s eyes and ears in the city for political as well as domestic purposes.⁴⁸

Two years later, in 1836, William requested that the nineteen-year-old John make a more direct intervention on the family’s behalf. William had hired a Black man named Mathias Day to travel up from New York to serve as a waiter at Bedford. When the man failed to show up as expected, William instructed John to investigate, giving details that illustrate the material and spatial economy of class in which the Jays and their servants operated. John was to go to the basement apartment where Day or, at least, Day’s wife boarded. There he was to find out from Mrs. Day “what has become of her husband.” If Day was not planning to come to Bedford, then John was to proceed to the employment agency and negotiate for a waiter, offering a wage as high as $14 a month.⁴⁹ Although William did not intend John to threaten or compel Day to come work at Bedford, the presumption was that his son, a wealthy white student, should confront a woman in her modest home in search of information; furthermore, separating husband from wife for the purposes of paid domestic service was nothing unusual. Such were the prerogatives of the wealthy. Their role as abolitionists did not disrupt power and privilege.

Although the Jays at times identified their servants by race, they clearly had no compunction against—indeed seemed to have preferred—a biracial staff of women and men. Within that gendered service economy, a male waiter, Black or white, might command a substantially higher wage than a white female cook. In any event, Day did not join the household; two weeks later, William’s daughter Eliza recorded that a “good looking white man” had joined the staff. That waiter, however, did not last long. Several months later, William relayed orders for John to seek out through advertisement or employment agents the “best you can black or white” to come to Bedford as a waiter. This time William refined his search strategy, saying he would like to start the new person at $12 per month with the promise of a $1 raise if the waiter remained six months.⁵⁰

The Jays and their servants did not experience emancipation as a radically disorienting break from the past, just as William assured readers of his Inquiry that even in the South it need not be. In William’s book, slaveholders sat precariously on a volcano of potential insurrection. He contemplated this volatile southern landscape from a much gentler, settled hill. People of his class had prospered not suffered. Toward the end of his Inquiry, he wrote of southern slaveholders, “By rejecting Abolition, they reject all the rich and varied blessings in morals, in security, in political power and wealth.”⁵¹

Fathers and Sons

It was William Jay’s public charges, not his private household circumstances, that alarmed critics. They scarcely knew or cared whether John Jay’s heirs retained any of their former slaves as servants, let alone how these servants were treated or how they regarded their condition. What colonizationists viewed as dangerous, and not a little bizarre, was that William Jay, a man of conservative political principles and possessed of a name rooted deeply in the nation’s founding, had come out so forcefully against them and in favor of their radical opponents.

The colonizationist countered William Jay at his most vulnerable point: the link between the politically perspicacious father and the irascibly moralistic son. To that point, William L. Stone, in his role as editor of the Commercial Advertiser, wrote, “Never did we expect to meet with such a book, from the pen” of John Jay’s son and biographer. “And such a son!—a man of high political and moral worth—of scholarship and sound integrity.” The urge to advocate immediate abolition was a sickness—“a contagion … like the cholera.… whomsoever, this spirit of immediate and unconditional abolitionism fastens itself, it drives reason from her empire.”⁵² For people of Stone’s mindset, the respectable William Jay did not dispel the notion of abolitionists as diseased fanatics; instead, Jay’s infection proved the virulence of the outbreak.

The editors of the African Repository, the official organ of the American Colonization Society, were sufficiently disturbed by the appearance of Jay’s Inquiry that they published a response based solely on excerpts picked up in the abolitionist press. Under the title, “Judge Jay Against Colonization,” the Repository commented, “The advocates of instant and uncompromising abolition feel or affect a pleasure almost amounting to rapture” at the publication of Jay’s book—in other words, the symptoms of religious extremism. Mixing disdain for their radical rivals with concern over immediate abolition’s new and well-respected advocate, the editors observed, “This gentleman is so favorably known to the Public for his piety and philanthropy, and as the Biographer of his father, the illustrious JOHN JAY, that the appearance of a controversial work from his pen … could not fail to find eulogists among those whose particular partialities and antipathies he has undertaken to defend.”

William’s reputation and lineage, combined with the apparent weight of his pro-immediatist argument, threatened to bring a marginal cause into the mainstream. Thus, the charges leveled by William against the ACS had to be answered: “Whatever Judge Jay utters is undoubtedly uttered conscientiously; but the extracts referred to make it equally clear that he can carry the right of arguing ‘freely’ to an extent which some reasoners, less ostentatious about their consciences, might deem to be licentious.” In other words, abolitionism’s corrupting powers had turned the self-righteous Jay into a promoter of vice.⁵³

The aggressive and lengthy response of respected New York City physician David M. Reese, in an 1835 book, showed how threatening colonizationists found his critique and how exposed William had become personally to attack by entering the fray so emphatically. Reese, a native Marylander, attempted not only to defend colonization systematically against William’s Inquiry, but also to undermine the name and reputation of its author. Reese had experience defending the ACS from abolitionist critiques, having published a widely distributed critique of the AAS’s first annual meeting.⁵⁴

William Jay offered an irresistible target in an escalating ad hominin war, battles over reputation sharpening the struggle over policy. His impressive patrimony was undeniable. The son’s own status and social standing, however, might be questioned, especially if William Jay could be impugned for distorting his father’s moderate record so that he could make common cause with the imbalanced fanatics leading the AAS. Reese wrote his book in the form of letters to Jay and published it with a house that produced an edition of William Jay’s biography The Life of John Jay. Going on the offense immediately, the front matter contained endorsements by various ministers, including one who addressed the reputation issue head-on: according to John Breckinridge, William Jay “under an imposing name, has said more disengenuous, sophistical, and yet dangerous things, than I had supposed it possible … by so honest, so good, and so sensible a man.” Respectability and credibility provided the context in which the issues between colonizationists and abolitionists, between Reese and Jay, were to be hashed out in the 120 pages that followed.⁵⁵

Reese’s preface addressed the standing of the Inquiry’s author, adopting a patronizing tone that quickly shaded into insult. The doctor claimed that arguments in Jay’s book were so impotent that if not for “the magic of his name upon its title page” which might dupe the unsophisticated reader, it might be better to ignore Inquiry in the American Colonization and American Anti-Slavery Societies. Seeking to account for how William Jay, a man of quality, had veered so dangerously off course, Reese explained that Jay allowed himself to fall in with “zealots” who “perverted his own mind, so that, on this particular subject, he has become disqualified for sober thinking.” Asked Reese, “Under what other influence save that of pure fanaticism could an intelligent, virtuous, and respectable citizen” get so off track?

Reese sought to wrest from Jay the power to interpret the famous John Jay’s legacy. The proof of William Jay’s fanatical delusion, according to Reese, was that this “good man” had twisted and distorted John Jay’s ideas about abolition to support “the scheme of immediate abolition.” According to Reese, John Jay’s own writings indicated the founder was an “unwavering advocate” of gradual emancipation. To further demonstrate William Jay’s pattern of historical delusion, Reese also noted that he had similarly mangled Thomas Jefferson’s views on racial separation and gradualism in a “palpably perverted” fashion. Not content to launch personal bromides at Jay, Reese, in his preface also tauntingly argued that the Garrisonians had inflated free Black self-regard to the point that a once-humble people expected “social equality in every relation” with whites and had begun to spurn their true friends the colonizationists. False Black pride, Reese claimed, had caused the antiabolitionist rioters to turn on African American New Yorkers. Reese threw down the gauntlet, mocking Jay’s judgment and questioning his very fitness to carry forward honorably the historical mantle of his own father. Reese’s jibes, moreover, struck at the very notion that Jay’s cause promoted the order, stability, and Christian morality that the Westchester County judge claimed to value.⁵⁶

Reese drove a wedge between father and son by juxtaposing William Jay’s biography of John Jay with William Jay’s Inquiry. Reese’s letters sought to prove that the American Anti-Slavery Society was “anti-American in its very nature.” By implication, William Jay, through his support of the AAS, had forfeited the patriotic inheritance to which he laid claim through the authorship of John Jay’s biography. With false generosity, Reese indicated that William Jay was entitled to whatever views he held on slavery. But Reese asserted an obligation to “the American people” not to allow John’s “distinguished name” to be misappropriated and to make the choice clear “between the contrary sentiments of the father and the son.”⁵⁷ Citing specific page numbers from the 1833 biography, the doctor emphasized repeatedly that the elder Jay was an avowed gradualist. In expressing early support for gradual emancipation in New York, in founding a society that promoted manumission and the improvement of Blacks over time through education, in owning slaves some of whom he freed after extracting several years of service, John Jay established his record of moderation. According to Reese, the ACS was the appropriate heir to John Jay’s practices and beliefs.

Reese sought to diminish, indeed to belittle, William Jay. He charged that William should “be ashamed of your attempted analogy between” the early gradualist groups and the American Anti-Slavery Society and its insistence on “instant abolition.” William’s own analysis of his father’s actions, Reese pointed out, made allowance for the “necessity” of owning slaves until alternative sources of labor fully matured, a necessity that William disparaged when claimed by southern slaveholders. Moreover, Reese contrasted John’s modulated rhetoric, his patience for incremental change, and his realistic appreciation of slavery’s importance in parts of the nation, with the blunt “sentiments, language, and spirit of his son.” Delivering the coup de grace, the colonizationist asked “Which is entitled to the greater confidence,—the late John Jay, chief justice in the Supreme Court of the United States, or—William Jay, associate judge of Westchester County Court!”⁵⁸ Reese attempted to portray William Jay as confused and, ultimately, inconsequential: he had failed to live up to the achievements of his father.

In an argument that unintentionally undermined its own logic, Reese claimed agreement with William Jay that the traditional gradualist societies had failed to have any impact on southern slavery. Reese argued that it was with the growth and increased effectiveness of the ACS that proslavery southerners began to express alarm and heap abuse on the old gradualist groups. Only then did colonizationists feel the need to criticize abolitionists, so as to dissociate their image from any dangerous implications. Yet Reese insisted that the true insult was William Jay’s yoking old and new abolitionists together as part of a common cause. In a provocative reference to miscegenation, the doctor charged that such a false union was worse than “an amalgamation of colors.”⁵⁹

Reese’s final letter attacked Jay’s patriotism and his courage, further attempting to sever the historical power that his name carried for the abolitionist movement. In response to Jay’s assertion that international opposition to American slavery would in time bring great pressure to bear on the United States, Reese vigorously waved the flag of anti-British patriotism. The doctor directly evoked the American Revolution against Jay and his fellow radicals: “There is too much of the spirit of ‘76 and of old John Jay yet lingering among our countrymen, to withhold the expression of their indignation, at the insult which the repetition of such language conveys.”⁶⁰

Having questioned Jay’s commitment to national sovereignty, he then questioned his fortitude. If Jay truly believed that Christian duty compelled him to preach against slavery, then he should “GO into the south.” In a footnote at the bottom of the page, Reese mocked William “quietly sitting in his study in Bedford, West Chester County, New-York, and writing an anti-slavery book.” William and his abolitionist brethren were, Reese indicated, paper tigers, missionaries afraid to face the dangers of their mission. If they cared about the souls of the slaves they would travel South to convert them. Reese thus mocked the fanatics for not being fanatical enough. Abolitionists should, the doctor implied, jump from the frying pan of their riot-inducing northern reputation into the fire of the militant proslavery South.⁶¹

Reese’s argument featured almost everything that William Jay did not like about colonizationism. The doctor deployed race-baiting; he blamed abolitionist for riots perpetrated against them; he simultaneously claimed abolition as a goal and disavowed abolitionism as an organizing principle; he promoted moderation and politeness as the most important Christian virtues; and he sought to accommodate the fears of southern slaveholders. Yet what outraged Jay most were the stark distinctions Reese drew between father and son. Reese had touched a very sensitive nerve. He had revealed the psychological and reputational risks of abolitionism for the living Jays. William Jay and other members of the family could not help but notice not only the insults but also the attempt to undermine their respectability by separating the family from its intensely valued claim to the legacy of John Jay.

John Jay II felt conflicted about how he should approach the public attack on his father’s reputation. From New York City, he sent an excerpt of Reese’s book that had been printed in The Spectator, the semiweekly edition of William L. Stone’s Commercial Advertiser. The young abolitionist betrayed his anxiety and his anger to his mother Augusta in a letter accompanying the excerpt. At first, he planned to enclose the entire inflammatory volume, but played down the seriousness of the matter, commenting that Reese’s letters “amused me very much.” Then, John did not sound so amused. “I am surprised to see so many respectable names approving of & praising the book,” he informed his mother. “The book is just such as one would suppose would be written by a man ignorant & vulgar self conceited & unprincipled.” In a postscript, John decided not to send Reese’s book at all, supposing that his father already had a copy. Clearly, the college student had been rattled.⁶²

Two days later, William wrote his son expressing his frustration with the newspaper clipping. The excerpt “so grossly misrepresented your grandfather’s opinions, that I thought it my duty to answer it. & I accordingly addressed a letter to Mr. Stone.” Yet William cautioned his son against betraying too much interest in the controversy, even as he instructed young John to forward the newspaper if his letter appeared. Dispensing advice to his son that was as much meant for himself, William wrote, “The less you say about Reese in conversation the better. If you appear vexed, it will be so far a triumph to his friends.”⁶³

Peter Augustus Jay, who knew well his younger brother’s sensitivity about his writing prowess and his capacity for prolonged rhetorical combat, counseled him against taking Reese’s bait. William agreed that he should henceforth ignore Reese’s “dishonest” book, though he had felt compelled to correct the record about their father. He asserted, “My book must, & will speak for itself, & its fate will not depend either on Dr. Reese or any replies that may be made to him.” He then added, with an author’s pride, “I understand it is selling rapidly.”⁶⁴

William Jay attempted to calibrate his response to Reese’s public Letters, because the psychological stakes were high. He was, after all, his father’s biographer, living in his father’s house and writing from his father’s study. The son needed to feel armed with his father’s morals, ethics, and reputation, but William’s embrace of the new abolitionist movement made him vulnerable. Reese and others, their snide condescension notwithstanding, had made a plausible distinction between the evidence presented in the biography and the argument Jay made in his Inquiry. His father’s abolitionism had been both cautious and protective of his personal and his class’s interests. The colonizationists had a point. William Jay, in embracing the American Anti-Slavery Society, made a bold departure from his father’s legacy.

At the same time, William Jay had reason to be angry with Reese’s implication that the delusional son had veered toward ideological patricide. Reese emphasized means, William Jay ends. Reese took gradualism to be John Jay’s most important commitment with regard to slavery; William Jay viewed abolitionism itself as his father’s legacy. For William, his father’s belief that slavery should end and his willingness to take steps to advance that goal had little in common with colonizationist policies that protected slavery and showed contempt for any version of African American equality based on the founders’ egalitarian creed.

William’s exchange of gradualism for immediatism had much to do with intention and progress. He believed that colonizationists had no intention of forcing southern slaveholders to confront either the moral or practical danger of perpetuating their slaveholding regime. Even if, as Reese suggested, the first wave of northern abolition societies rarely challenged or posed much of a threat to southern slaveholding interests, men like John Jay had seen northern abolition achieve its goals. Moreover, John Jay, late in his life, anticipated moral and spiritual advancement, such as Britain’s withdrawal from the international slave trade and the global spread of the Christian gospel, portending the millennium. History progressed toward God’s truth.⁶⁵

It fell to William Jay to connect the dots between the abolition of the slave trade, the campaigns for moral reform including the spread of Christianity, and the campaign to abolish slavery nationally. Just as Jay had no intention of conceding that he had turned his back on his father’s legacy, neither did he intend to back down from the larger fight over abolitionism or from defending specific observations that contributed to his broader argument. The devil, William implied, was in the details. Thus, William could not resist continuing to express his disagreements directly with his colonizationist interlocutors. In January 1836, he privately quibbled with Reese over the precise terms of emancipation in Mexico. Later that same year, he wrote William L. Stone a letter defending his criticisms of the editor for playing a role in precipitating the 1834 anti-abolitionist and race riots. William mocked Stone’s claim that the editor had not even been in town at the moment of the riots, quipping, I “truly wish you had also been absent when a great many other editorials were written”; he also bemoaned Stone’s defection from the cause of abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C. Sanctimoniously acknowledging that their “paths [were] greatly divergent from each other,” Jay suggested at kingdom come that he and Stone would learn whose route was the righteous one.⁶⁶

William Jay’s negative appraisal of colonizationism, however, brought out more than pedantry and spiritual self-satisfaction: it was based on his understanding that American prejudice was the obstacle to American progress. Rev. Turner of the Young Men’s Colonization Society sought support from Jay for a college in Liberia to train African American missionaries. Jay articulated to Turner where the colonizationist diverged from the reasonable, as well as the righteous, path. Jay regarded spreading the gospel to Africa as a fine idea. But the colonizationists’ hostility to abolitionism and racial prejudices betrayed them. African American education should take place “in the land of their birth,” not in Africa. Racism, as shown by recent experiences to thwart Connecticut initiatives for Black education, not impracticality, was the real obstacle to domestic education. Declared Jay, “I cannot sympathize with that philanthropy which delights in calling Africa the native land of thousands & hundreds of thousands of our citizens whose ancestors for many generations drew their first breath in the same country as ourselves.”⁶⁷ North and South, much work lay ahead to transform the lives of the uncolonized and the enslaved.

Whatever barbs skeptics might hurl their way, William Jay and John Jay II readied themselves to make the Jay name synonymous not only with the founding of the nation but also with national abolition. John’s 1836 speech to the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society assessed the landscape: opponents were “numerous & strong”; “Lynch law & mob violence” continued to menace. The Columbia College student called for “unflinching firmness” from “every abolitionist to conquer the difficulties in his path.”⁶⁸ Even without the verve of youth, his father Judge William Jay shared the same energy and commitment as the son who carried forward the revered founding father’s name and, therefore, his legacy.

Alone

However annoyed William Jay might become at the taunting aspersions of his critics, however perilously close to the mark they might sometimes strike, he had ample networks of support to fall back on: his siblings, a wife, and children all could be counted on to applaud his abolitionism. Wealth and servants sustained his comfort. A network of abolitionist readers, editors, officers, activists, and philanthropists shared William Jay’s core commitment to emancipation and would, when necessary, gamely debate him on principles, strategies, and tactics in their shared, albeit fractious, crusade. In his attacks on slavery and racism, as in his personal life, William Jay was not alone and never would be.

Not so his servant Zilpah. In March 1837, her mother Clarinda died. The daughter faced a future without relatives and hardly any friends. Jay family letters commenting on Clarinda’s death balanced pity with perspective. Writing his sister Maria in England, William first shared his acerbic comments on America’s twin afflictions of runaway economic growth and runaway democracy before turning to domestic affairs. Clarinda’s death, he reported “was attended with very little suffering.” Her mind apparently had gone before her body. Zilpah herself, however, clearly suffered, “seem[ing] very much grieved by the loss of her mother.” The sad reality now was her isolation. In William’s words, “She has no relations left & scarcely any associate”; according to his sister Maria Jay Banyer, Zilpah had “no relative to love or to take an interest in her welfare.” The Jays and Zilpah understood that they were neither family nor friends, no matter how deeply intertwined were their lives.

For Zilpah, the psychological blow of Clarinda’s death manifested itself immediately in a fashion that William Jay found puzzling: “She positively refuses to sleep any longer in the white room, the room in which her mother died. Whether this arose from a feeling of superstition or merely from painful association I do not know.” He nonetheless felt obliged to accommodate his longtime servant: “The result has been that she has a bed in the same chamber with the white maid, & takes her place in the kitchen with the other servants.”⁶⁹

Zilpah was not the first family servant disturbed by the presence of death. More than a half-century earlier in France, Abbe’s less timely, less natural passing had provoked ghostly fears in those serving the Jay household. Zilpah’s reaction was different: she did not say she saw an apparition—just that she did not want to sleep so near her mother’s deathbed. Her request suggested that she sought a modicum of distance and of control to contemplate her grief. William could not quite see where Zilpah was coming from, even though, as a confirmed radical American abolitionist, he now wrestled with his father’s legacy, but he agreed to her request.

More than most leading northern white abolitionists, William Jay had direct experience with the personal, prosaic reality of slavery. Without leaving his home, he could directly observe, through Zilpah, the institution’s melancholy aftermath. An unbridgeable gulf between master and slave, employer and servant, writer and subject nonetheless remained. He let Zilpah move rooms without understanding her. Was her request motivated by superstition? Painful association? The need to sleep within the sound of another human being’s living breath? Zilpah grieved as a daughter, as a person left behind. Alone.⁷⁰