On Board

William Jay took on formal organizational responsibilities and embedded himself in abolitionist networks. His name, his reputation, his proximity to New York City, and his ties to the Tappan brothers facilitated the process. Jay served a term as president of the New-York Anti-Slavery society. He also joined the AAS’s racially integrated board as foreign secretary.

The growth of the abolitionist movement and an aggressive campaign to circulate antislavery literature in the South garnered the AAS many enemies and detractors. Jay’s legal scruples found expression in the board’s denial of “gross misrepresentations” that the AAS agenda somehow threatened the “constitutional rights of the South.” Indeed, the board’s September 1835 statement, which included Jay’s name, reiterated that abolition could only occur through the actions of the states, not congressional fiat; that the organization did not support violent slave insurrections; and that educating and protecting the rights of Black people were not precursors to interracial marriage. At the same time, the board’s commitment to moral suasion led it to affirm that free speech was absolutely critical to the antislavery cause. Spreading the abolitionist argument, the board asserted, would not promote the nation’s “dissolution” but rather avert it by speeding slavery’s end.³

The abolitionists’ insistence on making themselves heard even attracted criticism from the president of the United States, prompting the AAS board to fire back. The AAS Executive Committee issued a statement in late 1835 responding to President Andrew Jackson’s denunciation of the circulation of antislavery literature in the South and his approving words for northern opponents of abolitionism. While claiming nonpartisan motives, Jay and his colleagues leveled charges against the president consistent with those articulated by Jackson’s growing coalition of Whig opponents. The AAS officers charged Jackson for “assum[ing] a power not belonging to your office.” More to the point, they accused Jackson of leveling false accusations in suggesting that circulating abolitionist appeals in the South would encourage conspiracies among southern slaves and free Blacks against whites. The removal of abolitionist tracts from the mail, according to the board, provided the South “worthless protection … by the most unblushing and dangerous usurpation of which any public officer has been guilty since the organization of our federal government.”⁴ Jay and his colleagues had taken on the nation’s most powerful politician to defend their right to advance morally persuasive arguments where they were needed most.

Jay took an active role in crafting the AAS’s message. The board’s lengthy address to the American people in the summer of 1836 was largely his handiwork. The statement came from a place of urgency. As national politicians took measures to silence the abolitionist message, he wrote Tappan, “For myself, I begin to be seriously alarmed at the progress of tyranny & the corruption of our public men. Nothing in my opinion can now restore the love for constitutional liberty, but the anti-slavery agitation. Hence the vast importance of harmony & forbearance among abolitionists.”⁵

The address made clear that those who harassed opponents of slavery and muzzled congressional debate on slavery trammeled the Constitution. In 1836, the House of Representatives passed a rule that tabled all antislavery petitions as a matter of course. Squelching the right of petition flagrantly violated the First Amendment. In so doing, the House abdicated its own core responsibilities: “Search the annals of legislation, and you will find no precedent for such a profligate act [of] tyranny, exercised by a majority over their fellow legislators, nor for such an impudent contempt of the rights of the People.” Under these rules, congressman could not address even the most violent horrors: “The negro may be bound alive to the stake in front of the capitol … his shrieks may resound through the representative hall … but no vote may rebuke the abomination.” Even in calling for Americans to flood the House with petitions as a way of resisting the effort at “tranquilizing the public mind,” the address insisted that the issues raised by the gag rule transcended the issue of abolition. Denial of the right to petition threatened every American’s rights; it threatened to make every American a slave.⁶ Abolitionists had ignited a battle for the soul of American politics, as well as for the liberty of African Americans.

In private and public correspondence, Jay articulated a purposeful commitment to the moral imperatives of abolitionism and the ethical nuances that he felt should guide abolitionists. In a February 1836 letter to Joel Doolittle that found its way into the annual report of the Vermont Anti-Slavery Society, Jay rejected the notion that abolitionists withdraw from the public fray until conditions were “more favorable.” As economic ties between North and South grew more extensive, more northerners became allied with the slaveholding interest even as the southern slave population continued to grow. Jay asked, “What is to be gained by delay?” Action meant “the exhibition of TRUTH” as a way of inducing slaveowners to renounce the sinful practice. Were abolitionists to exchange an emphasis on religiously inspired principles for an emphasis on political elections, “the consequences would probably be disastrous to the cause of human rights, and to the welfare of our common country.”⁷

Amid the backlash against organized abolitionism, Jay reflected on the nature and sources of public morality and immorality. In a letter to Rev. Oliver Whetmore that found its way into print in the fall of 1836, Jay urged continued abolitionist resolve based on conservative principles. Jay asserted, “Our great capitalists are speculating, not merely in land and banks, but also in the liberties of the people.” Recalling the recent string of anti-abolitionist violence in Boston; New York City; Utica, New York; and Cincinnati, Jay observed that the fomenters of “anarchy and violence” were men of wealth who sought to muzzle the advocates of freedom to safeguard their business relationships with the South. Such a strategy stood the logic of social class on its head. “The political influence of wealth was” supposed to be “conservative,” with the rich usually inclined to favor “law and order.” Jay, who as a judge enforced law and order in the face of much less violent disturbances, warned, “It cannot be, it is not in human nature, that judges, and lawyers, and rich merchants, will long enjoy the exclusive privilege of trampling upon the laws.” Raising the stakes to biblical proportions, Jay predicted, “These men are sowing the wind, and they will reap the whirlwind,” because riotous behavior, once legitimized, would turn its full fury not against “the humble abolitionist, but the lofty possesor of power and fortune, who will first be levelled by the blast.” Members of the elite were playing with fire—a fire that could burn down society.⁸

As he wrote to Benjamin Lundy and other officers of the venerable Pennsylvania Abolition Society, faith in the morality of those institutions had proven false: “Unfortunately … the assaults on the plainest & most essential principles of republicanism which have marked the present struggle has [sic] with scarcely an exception, been instigated by men of superior intelligence and education.” And, if capitalists had proven inadequate to the task of protecting liberty, so too had educators and editors. Newspapers, rather than impart “lessons in morals, in human rights, & in constitutional freedom,” had instead spread “malignant falsehoods & atrocious doctrines relative to abolitionists.”⁹

Yet as much as he expressed scorn for corruptions of politics and money, Jay believed there were pragmatic limits to what abolitionists had to require of themselves. Calls to boycott slave-labor products dated to before the rise of immediate abolitionism in America. Jay, however, was dubious of initiatives to limit consumption to goods produced by free workers.¹⁰ In a long letter to Gerrit Smith, a wealthy upstate New York landowner who was assuming an increasingly prominent role in the abolitionist movement, Jay dissected the efficacy of abolitionists’ boycotts of southern agricultural products. If buying anything made of slave-labor-produced cotton was morally wrong, then merchants like the Tappans who sold anything to southern slaveholders would be wrong as well. So too would printing the Bible on paper made of this cotton. To be sure, such steps might demonstrate abolitionist “sincerity.” Jay wondered, however, if, instead, abstaining from slave products would reinforce the image of abolitionists as “fanatics.” Operating under the premise that abolitionists aimed to persuade southerners to abandon slaveholding, he thought charges of fanaticism would only lead others to have “less respect … for our opinions.” Meanwhile, no northerner of modest means would be able to afford clothing made exclusively of flax, wool, or other fibers. Printing an abolitionist newspaper on linen instead of cotton would similarly drive the price up and undermine the effort to spread their message. Mill workers in Lowell who lost their jobs to a cotton boycott would be irate.

Moral suasion should be allowed to do its work without abolitionists making threats to disrupt the economy. The use of labor products, in Jay’s view, should remain a choice for individual abolitionists to make, not an organized expression of the movement. In any event Jay did not believe that a mere 100,000 abolitionists would have much impact on a cotton market that operated on a global scale. Jay noted that Christians had to engage the material world, in this case the capitalist world of trade, even as they challenged an institution deeply implicated in the getting and spending that Christians undertook.¹¹ Despite his sharp criticism of the grasping moral myopia of capitalist elites, Jay sought to redeem or at least morally regulate them, rather than destroy the social order. He also wanted the movement to maintain a tight, unifying focus. Working with Smith and others, Jay explored avenues for moving minds, hearts, and souls that pointed to the specific narratives and experiences of African Americans as key to advancing the antislavery campaign.

The Cabinet of Freedom

Through the short-lived antislavery series, The Cabinet of Freedom (1836–37), Jay participated in the development of antislavery print culture as the immediatist movement surged. Much as Garrisonian Maria Weston Chapman would edit book-length annuals as a complement to The Liberator, Jay, Smith, and Rev. George Bush teamed up with evangelical publisher John S. Taylor to launch the Cabinet of Freedom. At the suggestion of Lewis Tappan, the series was to be a long-form vehicle for assailing US slavery. In assembling their texts, Jay and his colleagues made an important contribution by featuring Black-authored narratives of southern slavery in antislavery print culture. After beginning the series by reclaiming from the colonizationists the Thomas Clarkson classic, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, Jay seized on A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man as an energizing way to bring the immediacy of slavery’s cruelties and sinfulness to the attention of northern readers. Although one of Jay’s less-appreciated contributions to the antislavery movement, the Cabinet of Freedom sheds new light on his thinking as an antislavery public intellectual.¹²

The decision to launch the Cabinet series reflected a belief that the obstacles placed by slavery’s apologists and defenders in abolition’s path could be overcome by informed discourse. At its inception in early 1836, the Cabinet of Freedom series announced itself as an attempt to enrich the crucial and unavoidable national debate on slavery by making thoughtful new and classic commentaries on the subject available to the public “in a cheap but neat form.” The series fit abolitionism into the broader evangelical reform discourse of the day. Its publisher John S. Taylor, a self-described “Theological and Sunday School Bookseller,” also offered such ecumenical titles as Hints to Parents on the Early Religious Education of Children, tracts from Sabbath and Sunday School societies, and sermons by the preeminent evangelical preacher of the day Charles G. Finney.¹³

The panel that chose texts for the Cabinet of Freedom—Jay, Smith, and Bush—embodied a convergence of experiences and expertise. Like Jay, Smith was a privileged son of New York landholding wealth but of more recent and more spectacular dimensions. Gerrit’s father Peter Smith parlayed a fur-trading partnership with John Jacob Astor and marriage into a branch of the Livingston family into ownership of well over a half-million acres of land. Like Jay, Gerrit Smith also had learned about slavery firsthand, through the enslaved people who worked for his father. Smith followed a conventional reformist path of support for Sunday School, Bible and tract distribution, and temperance toward participation in Black-related causes, specifically Black religious training and colonization. Much as for William Jay, the trauma of mob violence helped crystallize for Smith the importance of embracing the American Anti-Slavery Society. In October 1835, Smith and his wife Ann attended, as observers, the state’s first antislavery society meeting in Utica, New York. After an unruly mob swarmed into the Presbyterian church where the conventioneers were meeting, a horrified Smith offered his own home in Peterboro as an alternative site. He would soon become an ardent abolitionist and a leading figure in the New-York Anti-Slavery Society, succeeding Jay as president of that organization.¹⁴

George Bush’s name lent further literary and intellectual weight to the Cabinet of Freedom. Bush put himself through college at Dartmouth by teaching school, after which he trained to be a Presbyterian minister at Princeton Theological Seminary. Following a four-year stint as a missionary in Indiana, he returned east. His budding reputation as a scholar led to a professorial post in Hebrew and Oriental Literature at New York University. Bridging the worlds of scholarship and reform, he also took a post overseeing the press of the American Bible Society, a cause near to Jay’s heart. By 1836, Bush himself had published on a wide variety of religious subjects, including the life of Mohammed for the Harpers’ Family Library series, a commentary on the Book of Psalms, and a Hebrew grammar textbook. Bush enjoyed a close relationship with many of New York City’s booksellers, who valued his discernment. Bush, a scholar of biblical literature, complemented the two philanthropist-abolitionists. The Cabinet of Freedom would contain intellectual substance beyond the latest polemics.¹⁵

The selection of Clarkson’s massive 1808 narrative of the crusade to end the British slave trade for the first book in the Cabinet of Freedom series forged an explicit link between Britain’s withdrawal from the international slave trade and the current campaign against US slavery. The Cabinet edition did not leave to chance that readers would grasp the moral of the lengthy British drama and its relevance to “the present moment” in American history. An advertisement inserted in the first installment of the serial declared that the British struggle had pitted “strength of selfishness” against “the still greater strength of Christian truth, zeal, and perseverance” and asserted that “the same great principles … are employed in assailing and defending American slavery” now. The advertisement also noted that in 1809 Congress passed a resolution acknowledging that the Library of Congress had received from an early antislavery organization a copy of Clarkson’s history. A previous generation of political leaders, the point was made, had shown an openness to abolitionist thinking that the present one lacked. The current US Congress, the advertisement noted, turned a blind eye toward the domestic interstate slave trade that was “in many respects, scarcely less atrocious than” the reviled international slave trade.¹⁶ The Cabinet of Freedom thus preempted any attempt to separate, as Dr. David M. Reese had in his critique of William Jay, an earlier generation of gradualists from the current generation of abolitionists.

In reviving Clarkson’s text, the Cabinet of Freedom attempted to reclaim him from the colonizationists. American presses had only published Clarkson sporadically since his work’s first appearance in the United States. The most recent edition was an 1830 two-volume abridgment published in Augusta, Maine, that earned an endorsement from the ACS and included a lengthy appendix describing the success of colonization in Sierra Leone and Liberia.¹⁷ Even though Clarkson himself had yet to renounce colonization, the Cabinet’s new edition of his work symbolically placed him in the American abolitionist camp. The imposition of the gag rule in Washington, D.C., at the time that the Cabinet’s serialized edition came off the presses, moreover, created a powerful contrast between Clarkson’s frank, forceful British parliamentarians and their American counterparts.¹⁸

Clarkson’s narrative attested to the persuasive power of publicly and painstakingly presenting antislavery evidence. Clarkson reflected, “By entering into a patient discussion of the merits of the question; by bringing evidence upon it; by reasoning upon that evidence night after night, and year after year, and thus disputing the ground inch by inch, the abolition of the Slave-trade stands upon a rock, upon which it never can be shaken.” His prolonged effort to place and keep the issue of the slave trade before the British public and his commitment to compiling empirical evidence even in the face of physical threats made the British activist an exemplary figure for an American abolitionist audience.¹⁹

Clarkson’s approach to abolition, however, left scant room for the slave trade’s or slavery’s Black victims to speak or act on their own behalf. The British abolitionist’s vision of the Black man as a suffering, subordinated, largely silent partner made a direct impression in The Cabinet of Freedom. The frontispiece of the bound editions of the serials featured the names of Jay, Bush, and Smith in stylized script and beneath that a rendition of a classic British antislavery icon—the half-naked kneeling slave under the motto, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother”—that had been originally approved by Clarkson and his abolitionist colleagues in 1787 (see figure 7). In the version presented at the front of the Cabinet of Freedom volumes, the enslaved man, gazing up with manacled hands in prayer, possessed a soft, almost angelic, even feminine look. The presence of the names of the editorial board above the supplicant reinforced the notion that freedom depended on deliverance not just by God-in-heaven but also by the white abolitionists doing God’s work.²⁰ A man and a brother—yes—but not a powerful or self-liberating one.

William Jay convinced his colleagues to take the Cabinet of Freedom in a dramatic new direction: in the next volume, an African American man would tell his own story. Charles Ball’s account of his life in bondage and struggle for freedom placed the series on the cutting edge. For the next quarter-century, the personal narratives of those who escaped to freedom became a central feature of the abolitionist argument. Although slave narratives had played a role in Anglo-American antislavery movements before the mid-1830s, Ball’s popular, oft-reprinted account was an early instance of the more secularly oriented exposé sponsored by immediate abolitionists. By bringing out an edition of Ball’s story (originally published by Pennsylvania attorney Isaac Fisher) under the Cabinet of Freedom imprint with a new editors’ introduction, Jay expanded his own field of vision while attempting to do the same for the reading public.²¹

When considering what should be the second book in the Cabinet series, Jay became taken with the idea of republishing the account of a contemporary Black man who had lived long enough to tell the tale of his resistance to southern slavery. He urged on Smith an exciting discovery: Charles Ball’s narrative. Jay was impressed with the immediacy that Ball’s memoir brought to the subject: “Its interest is that of a first rate romance. it is admirably written, & makes you almost as familiar with Southern Slavery & plantations, as if you were an overseer.” That Jay imagined the reader as “an overseer,” not a slave, shows the limits of his racial imagination and betrays his sense of the intended audience. He imagined white readers viewing the text through the eyes of white, not Black, actors. This stance placed the onus of moral guilt on the reader, because clearly Ball was the tragic protagonist of his life’s drama.²²

Jay recognized and had a ready response to the question of authorship. He indicated to Smith that the book was actually composed “by a man of letters” because “it abounds with wise reflections which come awkwardly from a poor slave.” Jay, nonetheless, believed the “facts” to be true and to belong to the slave himself. He urged Smith to consider welcoming the Ball memoir into their series. Jay suggested that Ball’s story should have an introduction testifying to the narrative’s “credibility.” Anticipating the publication practice of prominent white abolitionists adding prefatory endorsements to the autobiographies of the formerly enslaved, Jay provided an introduction to frame the subsequent narrative for readers, though in this case the editorial introduction was unsigned.²³

The introduction to the Ball memoir highlighted Jay’s broader concern with moral order and disorder in the republic. He editorialized that the plantation constituted a miniature imperial fiefdom not subject to the correctives that “public opinion” provided in free society more generally. Meanwhile, slave codes “paralyz[ed] the moral sense”—precisely the opposite effect that laws should have. Indeed, closely reflecting Judge Jay’s abhorrence of mob rule and extralegal violence, the introduction described the southern public’s interventions on behalf of slavery as exhibiting unrestrained bloodthirstiness. It shared a series of newspaper accounts of white crowds enforcing lynch law by immolating the Black targets of their rage. The introduction also attested that Ball was a real person who in fact dictated the story of his life. Yet Jay did not mention that he edited the original version of the book, excising not only some material he found unlikely but also some content with sexual implication that he thought might upset female readers. Even with these interventions, Jay aimed to make more widely available a very lengthy text that detailed a long life of suffering and spoke to the current political moment.²⁴

Indeed, Ball’s life story bridged the era of Clarkson and the era of Garrison, the era of the Atlantic slave trade and that of the US internal slave trade. The effects of the slave trade, both foreign and domestic, were integral to Ball’s story from beginning to end. In recounting his late eighteenth-century youth in Maryland, Ball vividly described the sale of his mother and his siblings to a slave trader. Ball was left with the permanent image of his mother being beaten by her Georgia trader-owner as she desperately sought to remain with her young son. Later wrenched from his own wife and children, Ball recalled wakefully lying in chains, thinking “of my grandfather, and of the long nights I had passed with him, listening to his narratives of the scenes through which he had passed in Africa.”²⁵

The 500-plus-page narrative of injustices and one man’s persistent efforts to escape spoke to one of the aspects of slavery that the socially conservative William Jay found particularly objectionable. Virginia’s sons and daughters of privilege, white “gentlemen and ladies by birthright,” frivolously rode around the countryside or “visit[ed] their neighbours’ houses”; meanwhile, their fathers fought off creditors, “the evil tyranny of old customs” preventing any “honest and honourable industry” being engaged in by the rising generation of whites.²⁶ Southern elites were incapable of exercising the responsible leadership that the Jays felt their wealth and lineage demanded. The economically retrograde institution of slavery had taught them to treasure a life of ease, rather than develop the moral and material means of stewardship.

Ball’s travels through the South revealed southern society’s characteristics that were antithetical to northern visions of religion-inspired reform and secular order. Slavery profaned the Sabbath: Sundays, according to Ball’s account, had become a time for slaves to earn a little money and for masters to extract a little extra labor. Owners actively sought to discourage slaves from Christian worship, because “they fear that the slaves, by attending meetings, and listening to the preachers, may imbibe with the morality they teach, the notions of equality and liberty, contained in the gospel.” Denied literacy, the gospel, and Sabbath observance, slaves made do with “the grossest and most abject superstition.” For abolitionist guided by their Christian faith, as Jay insisted they should be, such spiritual deprivations were anathema. Meanwhile, lawlessness prevailed. One of Ball’s masters lost his life in a duel. Enslaved people suffered violent punishments outside an organized court system. Slavery made a mockery of the nation’s symbolic core; for example, a July 4 Independence Day afternoon was capped off by a slave auction. At one point, Ball was marched past the White House, occupied at the time by abolitionist bête noir Andrew Jackson.²⁷

Despite his perseverance and ultimate escape, Ball’s story was marked by deteriorations in morality and circumstance. In 1830, after escaping from his master two decades earlier, his former mistress’s brother seized Ball while he worked on his own truck farm outside of Baltimore. Returned to Georgia, Ball saw that nothing had improved there in the years since he had escaped: the lack of clothing was more obvious than before, whereas the skin and hair of the fieldhands betrayed inadequate protein in the diets of the enslaved. Although Ball ultimately found a way to escape a final time and return to his Maryland home, he discovered his farm occupied by a white man and learned that his wife and children had “passed into hopeless bondage, and were gone forever beyond my reach.” Ball’s narrative ends in Pennsylvania, where, with “a broken heart,” he was destined to live out his years in an unspecified location, still “fearful” that even as an old man his former masters might seek to reclaim him.²⁸ There could be no happy ending for an African American made to live as a fugitive in a slaveholding nation.

William Jay took great pride in spreading Ball’s story, and indeed it gained a wide and long-lasting reputation among abolitionists. He bristled at the accusation that the narrative might not be true. In a letter to his friend and AAS colleague Lewis Tappan, Jay confidently asserted, “The cause of abolition was supported by such a superabundance of truth, such an inexhaustable store of facts that abolitionists had no inducement to call falsehood to their aid.” For that reason, Jay disdained enlisting fictional portrayals of slavery in the cause. He proclaimed, “As to Charles Ball, we have brought him before the public, not as the hero of a novel but as a witness.” The Emancipator concurred with this judgment, a notice in the New York paper calling the Cabinet of Freedom edition of Ball’s narrative “the best book we know of” to start a conversation about abolitionist principles.²⁹

The selection of Ball’s saga was an inspired choice that reflected some of Jay’s particular animosities toward southern slavery and also broader transformations in the abolitionist struggle. No one knew at the time how long the House and Senate gag rules would remain in effect. Widening the arena of public opinion thus acquired tremendous urgency in the mid-1830s. Midcentury white abolitionists sought to turn the entire North into a courtroom in which the public judged slavery based largely on testimony, in the form of the narratives of escaped slaves, of southern abuses.³⁰ Moreover, the Charles Ball project expressed Jay’s expanding vision of the role that African Americans played in forging their own freedom and how he and his son might contribute to that struggle.

Vigilance

William Jay’s involvement with African Americans battling for freedom extended well beyond the printed page and his abolitionist committee work during this period. In late 1836, William Jay sought out the assistance of activist David Ruggles in response to the apprehension and transportation to the South of Peter Lee, who had been living as a free person in Westchester County. Ruggles was the moving force behind the Committee of Vigilance, an organization dedicated to defending the Black population of New York City from predatory kidnappers. The seizure of Peter Lee in Rye ignited William’s outrage.³¹

Twenty days after New York City officials seized Lee, Jay wrote a respectful letter to Ruggles seeking his help in gathering information on the case: “I think the facts in the case of the black man Peter lately kidnapped … may if well established be used in a manner that will conduce to the future safety of people of color.” Jay saw an opportunity for a humanitarian intervention that could leverage his legal prominence and set a precedent that would have wider effects. He wrote, “First I want proof of his freedom if to be obtained, & if not, then of the length of his residence at the North—proof of his having here a wife & children & proof of all the particulars of his abduction.” Jay recognized that Ruggles had already done work on Peter’s behalf and wished to be sensitive, not wanting to take advantage of Ruggles’s efforts: “I am told that you have interested yourself in his case.… If you can furnish me with the requisite affidavits, I will be much obliged to you, & will moreover defray any expense you may be at in procuring them, not exceeding ten dollars.”³²

Jay felt comfortable enough about the case to denounce publicly the actions of New York City law enforcement officers, which ultimately put him into conflict with the mayor and even the governor. Jay convened a public meeting on December 20. This gathering led to a letter to Mayor Lawrence and the naming of Constable Tobias Boudinot and Marshal Daniel D. Nash as two of the men responsible for snatching an ostensibly free man and sending him into slavery without any sort of procedural safeguards. For this “outrage on decency and humanity,” the meeting demanded the mayor fire Boudinot and Nash. The letter outlined for the mayor and the reading public why the seizure of Lee was so egregious. A man being “handcuffed” and “gagged” on the Sabbath constituted a threat to the “peace and good order of every community.” The governor’s warrant, issued three years before for “seventeen colored persons,” invited abuse, given how much money slaves sold for in the southern slave market. Such loose connections between warrants and the actual persons seized created a “tremendous calamity to the weak and unprotected.” As Jay documented for the mayor, anybody, white or Black, could be labeled a slave and see their freedom end in a slave sale under these conditions.³³ Judge Jay had identified in the Peter Lee case an opportunity for indicting slavery and racism as threats to civil liberty that implicated northern governments in the evils of southern slavery.

As with his denunciations of colonization, Jay’s trading on his good name left him vulnerable to attack and drew him further into the fray. An article in the Albany Argus leapt to the defense of Governor Marcy’s original warrant against the group of seventeen who allegedly stole a boat in the South and sailed it to New York. The article also lashed out against the kind of “rabid abolitionist” who allegedly wanted the governor to ignore his obligation to return criminals who crossed state lines just because they were “colored persons.” The Argus indicated that William Jay should have known better, given that Governor John Jay had issued interstate criminal warrants too.³⁴

William fired back at the Argus’s attempt to portray him as a fanatic in contrast to his father. “I have no desire to disclaim the fanaticism of believing, that every human being is entitled to justice, whatever may be the color of his skin,” William wrote. He conceded that Governor Marcy had executed his duties in issuing the warrant. But William also insisted that such fugitive warrants provided a ready means for “the practice of seizing as such, colored men in our cities & villages & hurrying them off to the South without any proof of their identity.” Moreover, “the warrant in the case of Lee was executed” in a fashion that “was harsh & unfeeling & very disgraceful.” Just as the 1826 Horton case had induced Judge Jay to think more systematically about slavery in the nation’s capital, the Lee case had highlighted the need to think more intensively about the law and practice of fugitive slave rendition.³⁵

Frontline activist David Ruggles suffered far worse than newspaper ridicule. Daniel Nash invaded his home in the middle of the night, hoping to seize Ruggles and sell him into slavery. (Nash sought to punish Ruggles for exposing another kidnapping scheme.) The undaunted Ruggles raised awareness of the vital role of the Vigilance Committee. He organized a gathering at the First Colored Presbyterian Church to mark the group’s first year in operation, drawing attention to Peter Lee’s wife and two children who were in attendance, as were Jay’s close allies, the Tappan brothers.³⁶

As Jay discovered, African American activists in New York were exposed to dangers that could produce internecine conflict. Samuel Cornish, the pioneering Black newspaper editor and AAS executive committee member, had to shut down The Colored American because of a libel suit prompted by its coverage of actions taken by Ruggles’s Vigilance Committee. The committee had intervened on behalf of three Africans transported through the port of New York on their way to southern slavery. The notice the Vigilance Committee printed in the Colored American identified a Black man named John Russell as conspiring to get the Africans on a New Orleans-bound ship—a charge Russell successfully contested. Cornish blamed Ruggles for the situation. His printing operations were within days of being seized by the sheriff because he had insufficient funds to pay the libel judgment.

Cornish sought out Jay, writing him in early November 1838: “Any sum you will have the goodness to give to help me out of this difficulty will be thankfully received and ever encumbered.” Jay joined the Tappans, Gerrit Smith, and others in helping cover the Colored American’s debt. The price to Black abolitionists was high nonetheless. The relationship between Cornish and Ruggles subsequently collapsed.³⁷

Questioning Politics

The internal politics of abolitionism could be fraught, but collaborative relationships shaped not only published materials and the protection of fugitives but also electoral politics in the 1830s. The Peter Lee case demonstrated that who held office mattered. Governor Marcy’s open-ended warrant for the arrest of Black fugitives had the potential to transform a New Yorker living in freedom into southern chattel. In 1838, Jay once again teamed up with Gerrit Smith, this time to explore how abolitionists might tip the Empire State’s gubernatorial elections in a more favorable direction.

Jay and Smith, representing the New York Anti-Slavery Society (NYAS), sought to ensure that the state’s gubernatorial candidates would publicly share their views on slavery-related issues. The duo crafted three specific questions for the candidates:

1. Did they support trial by jury for those accused of being fugitive slaves?
2. Did they favor eliminating all legal provisions that used color to unequally delineate the constitutional rights of New Yorkers?
3. Did they want to abolish the legal provision that allowed slaveholders to bring their human property into New York for up to nine months without violating the prohibition against importing slaves into the state?

Jay had developed his own line of legal analysis regarding the first query. He drew a sharp distinction between the federal constitutional principle that a state had an obligation to return fugitives and the individual state’s right to legislate its own procedures and proofs for adjudicating whether an individual was a fugitive subject to reenslavement. The US Congress had, in Jay’s view, no right to make the specific rules. The second query reflected Jay’s growing interest in how racism in the North factored into the struggle against slavery. The third query involved closing an explicit loophole in New York State law governing slavery and emancipation.³⁸

The candidates’ questionnaire scrupulously sought to avoid crossing into partisan electioneering. In their letter accompanying the survey, Jay and Smith claimed a “deep and rapidly increasing interest felt … by a very large portion of our electors” in slavery-related issues and emphasized the “non-partisan” nature of the inquiry. They indicated that the NYAS just wanted information, not a pledge. Jay had insisted on this last point, believing that it would be inappropriate to seek a promise from a future officeholder and that doing so would make it less likely that a candidate would respond at all.³⁹

The attempt to draw candidates out in this fashion produced uneven results. The Whig candidate for lieutenant governor Luther Bradish was the first to reply, which Smith sought to promptly disseminate before the election and which ultimately led to the publication of a pamphlet on the exchange. Smith believed Bradish’s reply to be fully satisfactory. Indeed, Bradish took a strong stance on the right to trial by jury and the principle that every New Yorker “is to be presumed free until he is proven to be otherwise”; Bradish also asserted that the loophole permitting slaveholders to bring slaves temporarily into the state was “liable to great abuse.” Viewing New York’s obligation to the slaveholding South as limited to no more than acceptance of existing constitutional compromises, Bradish even stated a moral obligation to critique slavery and persuade others against it. On the issue of racial equality within New York, the candidate alluded to Peter Augustus Jay’s anti-disfranchisement position at the 1821 state constitutional convention. Bradish proclaimed the state’s racially discriminatory voting rights provisions “an anomaly entirely at war with the above Democratic principle.” Jay and Smith had garnered the considered attention of a major party candidate and even induced him to articulate pro-abolitionist principles.⁴⁰

William H. Seward, the up-and-coming Whig who had outmaneuvered Bradish to claim the top of the gubernatorial ticket, provided a much less satisfactory response to the inquiry. Seward ignored Jay’s personal plea to prioritize “human rights” over the quest for electoral victory. The gubernatorial candidate had intended to ignore the survey, but once Bradish responded, he felt obligated to do so. Seward questioned whether the abolitionists had even addressed matters important to “the political creed” of most voters. Nonetheless, he too affirmed the principle that alleged southern fugitives should receive jury trials to determine their status. However, he indicated that he had no interest in repealing the state constitution’s racial double standard for determining the right to vote. He also saw no merit in repealing the sojourn loophole that allowed masters to keep their human property in New York for up to nine months. Seward suggested that this was an issue of hospitality, rather than human rights. Democratic incumbent William Marcy, who had previously used part of his annual message to criticize abolitionists, did not even concede that accused fugitives from slavery should receive a jury trial.⁴¹

Although the abolitionists got answers to their questions, their survey tactic failed to demonstrate their power or influence. The NYAS and AAS took the position that abolitionists should only vote for Bradish, the one candidate who stood with them. But Bradish’s responses cost him more voters hostile to abolitionists than Seward’s answers lost abolitionist ones. Smith, who had taken a hard line on abolitionists, only voting for those allied with the movement’s principles, was despondent that so many abolitionists had apparently voted for Seward, despite his unacceptable answers. Even so, Bradish won his bid to become lieutenant governor, his open avowal of African American rights notwithstanding.⁴²

For twenty-one-year-old John Jay II, now preparing to become an attorney, the exposure of abolitionism’s weak political hand inflamed his righteous passion. He observed “that the abolitionists were never less beloved, less respected or less fared than at present.” He felt the Whigs had betrayed the abolitionists after the election, with Whig editors heaping scorn on them now that the votes had safely been counted in their favor. The younger Jay contended, however, that the abolitionists had no choice but to ask hard questions of candidates. John also denounced abolitionists who considered Seward as “the least of two Evils.” He invoked from Ecclesiastes the ancient reassurance of the momentarily defeated: “The battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift.”⁴³

Constitutional Conflict

At the time of its foray into New York electoral politics, organized abolitionism risked not only exposing itself to scorn from outside the movement but also to disabling conflict from within. Judge Jay found himself moving toward the center of a controversy he would very much have preferred to avoid. At issue was whether the AAS should continue to endorse and act according to the principle that the US Constitution left the authority to abolish slavery to individual states. Jay held tight to this principle, explicitly articulated in the AAS’s own constitution, even as more expansive views of what the AAS might demand of the national government and support for more provocative tactics for making those demands gained traction. The debate opened a tear in the organizational fabric of the national movement likely to grow beyond repair.

Pressure to revisit the issue of congressional authority over slavery came from two sources: New York abolitionist Alvan Stewart and New England Garrisonians. Stewart asserted that slavery itself was unconstitutional because the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution stated that a person could not be denied freedom without due process. In other words, the federal government did have jurisdiction over slavery. The Utica lawyer claimed that, unless a slaveholder obtained an indictment against a person claimed as property, pursued a trial, and won a judgment, ownership was invalid. Congress could pass a law clarifying that all persons held as slaves without proof of due process were free. Garrisonians in Massachusetts, meanwhile, had started suggesting that the US Supreme Court might rule slavery unconstitutional.⁴⁴

Jay girded for a showdown with Stewart at the upcoming AAS annual meeting. Jay brooked no tolerance for the notion that there was room for disagreement about the US Constitution within the organization. He saw his own position as just as fundamental to AAS principles as not allowing slaveholders, gradualists, and colonizationists into the organization or, at the other end of the spectrum, advocates of slave rebellion. Absent fixed principles, the AAS risked “dissolution.” Putting matters in personal terms, Jay wrote in a private (meaning, not to be published) letter to Joshua Leavitt: “Many of us have taken an Oath to support the Constitution of the U.S.” Participating in an organization that supported what Jay regarded as Stewart’s deeply flawed constitutional reasoning would put him at odds with his judicial obligations. Similarly, Stewart’s doctrine involved asking congressmen to violate their oaths, which was a “sin.”⁴⁵

Jay’s desire to stem the radical tide sent him to the AAS annual meeting for the first time in three years. As anticipated, Stewart moved to strike the clause from the AAS constitution that acknowledged that slave states had sole legislative jurisdiction over emancipation. After Jay and Stewart debated the proposition, Garrison later reported to his wife Helen, “I think Jay had the best of the argument.”⁴⁶

Jay regarded Stewart’s contentions as historically ill informed, politically naïve, and destructive to the rule of law, the abolitionist cause, and the nation itself. Combining erudition and contempt, Jay mocked the notion that Stewart had found a fundamental antislavery principle embedded in the Magna Carta and the US Constitution that lay undetected until the 1830s. The Bill of Rights, including the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, Jay contended, was designed to limit the national government’s power, not expand it by giving it the authority to declare slavery illegal throughout the country. The first federal Congress had not endorsed the Fifth Amendment in order to nullify the three-fifths compromise. The judge also eviscerated the notion that due process was synonymous with convening grand juries, as Stewart seemed to suggest. If so, then US civil courts and any number of state court actions would suddenly become invalid, a point of no small significance to a sitting member of the judiciary. Stewart’s narrow view of due process, like his broad view of congressional power, led to disorder. Militias, for instance, could no longer suppress mobs.

The wreckage of Stewart’s aggrandizing of federal power, Jay predicted, would redound to the abolitionist movement itself. The proponents of the hated gag rule were already abusing the constitutional goal of “domestic tranquility” by silencing the right to petition. Slaveholders and their northern allies could claim that the “general welfare” required prosecuting abolitionists themselves, as indeed an anti-abolitionist from Zanesville, Ohio, had already proposed. Abolitionists had far more to lose than gain by expansive constitutional interpretations. But even if somehow abolitionists did persuade Congress that it had the power to end slavery, the slave states would leave the Union, war would follow, and “if slavery perish, it will perish only in a deluge of BLOOD.” Prophecy aside, the Stewart doctrine represented to Jay a betrayal. Abolitionists again and again, on both the state and national levels, had insisted that they recognized that only the states themselves could execute emancipation. On this pledge rested the movement’s reputation. Asked what would happen if the abolitionists were to renege, Jay responded, “Who can trust us—who ought to trust us?” Seizing political power should, in Jay’s formulation, never be allowed to replace sincere and religiously sanctioned moral persuasion. Trust mattered.⁴⁷

Jay and his supporters won at best a pyrrhic victory. Stewart won forty-six votes for his resolution, and those opposed numbered thirty-eight. But since amending the AAS constitution required a two-thirds majority, the motion failed. Garrison wrote that “the leading abolitionists” were “equally divided.” Jay had some important allies, including Garrison’s close associate Wendell Philips and Emancipator editor Joshua Leavitt. Perhaps recognizing that a dramatic repositioning of the AAS with regard to the US Constitution would have fractured the organization, Garrison commented, “I am glad, on the whole,” that Stewart did not carry the day. Even so, abolitionist Theodore Weld heard that the Jay–Stewart dispute had engendered “a good deal of bad blood” at the AAS business meeting. Jay had gone into the meeting contemplating resignation from the society and did in fact relinquish his position as corresponding secretary.⁴⁸ His vision of moral suasion and constitutional analysis was clearly losing ground.

The passage of time only strengthened Jay’s sense that he had lost his place within the AAS and its New York subsidiaries. In his view, slavery could be abolished without burdening the movement with novel constitutional doctrines or a quest for moral purity in all things. That living in society under a system of laws sometimes entailed compromise, even moral compromises, in no way, he believed, should impinge on the abolitionists’ ability to fight slavery with determination and sincerity. Only picking unnecessary fights with each other could do that. He felt that performing official tasks for national or state organizations would make him a hypocrite or expose his ideas to ridicule. By late 1838, Jay’s dismay and anger at the AAS grew as Stewart’s position gained ground. Jay also feared that abolition was becoming “a packhorse to carry forth into the world some favorite notion having no legitimate connection with the Anti Slavery cause,” such as extreme views against alcohol consumption. The unity of the movement was dissolving, its energies dissipating.⁴⁹

William Jay eschewed a false front but not the larger cause. He responded to a request to chair the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society’s meeting by sharply refusing it. Stewart’s pernicious doctrine had caused people like William Jay to endure “insult & ridicule.” Though William would “ever regard it as a duty & a privilege” to work in the larger cause, he would rather not attend meetings where his presence might stoke distracting controversy. Conflict, however, hardly disabled William Jay’s commitment. In truth, he much preferred the pen to the rostrum. Indeed, Judge Jay found in his dispute over the Constitution motivation to pursue with great vigor his antislavery research and writing.⁵⁰

Sins of Federalism

William Jay’s 1839 book A View of the Action of the Federal Government in Behalf of Slavery began with the arresting assertion, “Our Fathers in forming the Federal Constitution entered into a guilty compromise on the subject of Slavery, and heavily is their sin now visited upon their children.” The statement served both as a direct shot at Alvan Stewart and his followers and as a personal confession. Abolitionists should not treat the Fifth Amendment like a backdoor leading to an antislavery version of the federal charter. The book’s epigraph, taken from the Constitution’s preamble—“We, the People of the United States, do ordain and establish this Constitution”—also made the point that abolitionists and all Americans had to own up to their sin. In starting the book with “Our Fathers,” the writer—whose repute as an abolitionist rested in no small part on his status as progeny of one of the Constitution’s Federalist defenders—was acknowledging the burden of a sin he himself specifically bore. He detailed the ways that the “guilty compromise” had shaped federal policy, foreign and domestic, across the subsequent four decades. The compromise, novel interpretations notwithstanding, was set in stone. Articulating all that the United States had to answer for might produce better abolitionist answers.

As the nearly 200 pages of research that followed exposed government officials regularly made the choice to enact proslavery laws and procedures. Abolitionists should convince their fellow citizens to reverse these laws, these political choices, by putting pressure on the slaveholding regions that they had never felt before. Understanding the “facts”—the difference between constitutional limits and egregious policies—could set the enslaved free from bondage and America free from sin.⁵¹

The data were grim. Yet by putting in one place such a well-informed catalog of federal policy, Jay created a guidebook to issues on which antislavery politicians and lawyers could make their stands. He had not given up entirely on the AAS either. His terms with the publisher John S. Taylor, with whom he had worked on The Cabinet of Freedom, included allowing the AAS to purchase two thousand copies at cost.⁵² The assembled examples on all the ways the federal government had advanced slaveholding interests at home and abroad were meant to be as troubling as they were instructive. The Constitution’s three-fifths compromise had created political advantages for slaveholding states that they exploited relentlessly and effectively throughout the federal government, in the halls of Congress, in presidential campaigns, in diplomacy, and in executive branch administration. Southern slaveholders used their constitutionally assisted leverage to engage in political “INTIMIDATION”—manifested through threats to leave the Union and denunciations of abolitionists. Enhanced southern power caused presidential candidates to adjust “their ideas on the subject of human rights … to the meridian of the slave region.” The dominoes that fell to undue southern influence included the Missouri Compromise, which “deliberately surrendered to all the cruelties and abominations” of slavery vast territories and the ongoing permission to make the nation’s capital “the great slave mart of the North American continent.” The 1792 law barring Blacks from militia service, a product of an improperly proportioned Congress, Jay found “repugnant to the principles both of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”⁵³

The fugitive slave clause of the Constitution also paved the way for all sorts of subsequent maleficence. In 1793, Congress crafted a federal statute that denied to accused runaways the constitutional principle of trial by jury and interposed federal authority over the means by which fugitives might be returned, when such matters properly belonged to the states to determine. The United States lowered its standing in the world by pressing demands for the return of runaways with foreign governments, according to Jay; he derided our “republican ambassadors … bear[ing] to foreign courts the wailings of our government for the escape of human property.” Relations with Great Britain in particular, Jay claimed, were distorted by the US government’s unhealthy preoccupation with the return of slaves who successfully sought asylum with the British during the War of 1812.⁵⁴

The United States’ withdrawal from the international slave trade masked the federal government’s sanction of an internal slave trade that reproduced the horrors of the condemned African commerce. Jay found “gross hypocrisy and duplicity” in documenting the lax enforcement of the international slave trade ban and the efforts of the US government to avoid cooperation with other nations. On the domestic front, Jay insisted that the same commerce clause that gave the federal government authority to ban participation in the international slave trade could be deployed domestically to stop a trade that, he amply documented, even victimized Americans who were actually white. Here, the Constitution could be regarded less as a “guilty compromise” causing a moral problem and more as an untapped resource for forging an antislavery constitutionalism. Like his AAS rivals, then, Jay looked for ways to deploy the US Constitution against slavery.⁵⁵

In Jay’s book, the poison born of moral compromise spread in every direction. Proslavery sentiments made the United States hostile to the emancipating instincts of other neighboring nations; his own country scorned former Spanish colonies as “being drunk with liberty” simply because they acted on “the principles of human rights, professed in our declaration of independence.” It was little surprise then that, for three decades and counting, the United States had refused to recognize or place trade on a normal footing with Haiti, a nation founded by former slaves fighting for their liberty. Shamefully, the US government even abetted the tyrannical Napoleon’s “vengeance” when France sought to reconquer the Black republic. Subsequently, northern politicians prioritized “southern votes” over Haitian commerce, as the United States maintained a policy of shunning recognition of that nation. Jay suspected that the ready recognition of the Republic of Texas would pave the way for incorporating that huge slaveholding territory into the republic. Writing in 1839, Jay sardonically noted that one need not have “the gift of prophecy” to anticipate that the United States would contrive to launch a war with Mexico to secure “the dominion of the WHIP” throughout the continent.⁵⁶

The insidious effects on domestic institutions and principles underlying consistent proslavery activities, Jay observed, hollowed out the rights fundamental to the constitutional order itself. Southern postmasters worked to rid the southern mails of antislavery literature; northern congressmen who acquiesced in slaveholder demands to gag consideration of antislavery petitions colluded to foil the principles of a federally protected freedom of press and debate. Late in the book, Jay enumerated fourteen specific ways in which the national government policies had aided and abetted slavery that were not constitutionally required and that were, therefore reversible at the behest of “the people of the United States.”⁵⁷ Dubious readings of the Constitutions were not, in his view, necessary.

Jay’s exposé of the federal government anticipated the Slave Power arguments that in time would become a galvanizing concept within antislavery politics, but at the time of its writing, View also embodied an ethos that blended historical empiricism with idealism. Once southern slavery lost the unwarranted support of the federal government, Jay predicted, conditions would still be such that the South would have far more to lose than to gain by seceding. The nation would have found its moral footing from which progress flowed. Moral suasion, then remained at the core of his vision for the abolitionist movement.⁵⁸

Jay felt buoyed by his book and the success that the first edition enjoyed, even though he was under no illusion that the View would reverse the radical tide within the AAS. In a March 1839 letter to Rev. Thomas Pyne, whose antislavery views had led him to leave his ministry in New York and return to England, Jay offered the case for abolitionist optimism. Echoing his findings from the View of slaveholders’ political domination of American politics, Jay found reason to compare the American antislavery movement favorably to its British counterparts. Against far greater and more dangerous opposition, the Americans had achieved great strides in a scant amount of time. Jay claimed to Pyne, “We have effected a great change in public opinion at the north. Multitudes have joined us.… You were 30 years assaulting the slave trade, before you demolished it, & about 30 more attacking Slavery before you finally conquered it. We have been at work only 7 years; & as yet have no reason to doubt our ultimate success.”⁵⁹

Sales of the first print run of 2,500 were so brisk that Jay moved quickly to finish a second, revised edition. Lewis Tappan encouraged him to do so with word of Jay’s View of the Action of the Federal Government circulating among the elite vacationers of Saratoga Springs, who included a congressman, a US senator, and even President Martin Van Buren.

Jay eagerly conducted research and sought to check sources to add new stories. Nevertheless, he declined a request for a new edition of his first book, Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, and American Anti-Slavery Societies, because he did not wish to air his grievances with the AAS in its current condition. Jay’s relation to the AAS was precarious. Although the AAS published the second edition of View of the Action of the Federal Government, Jay made sure to retain the copyright, presumably so that future publication of the work would not be at the mercy of any organizational rifts.⁶⁰

The preface to the new edition set high stakes. Jay described slavery as “a perfidious, encroaching enemy, that must either conquer or be conquered.” Abolitionists would wage this war on the grounds of “public opinion,” a force “as fickle as it is powerful.” Jay offered as inspiration a condensed version of the quarter-century struggle to abolish the British slave trade, the predicate for emancipation in the West Indies three decades later. Yet, in his introductory remarks, the analog to the end of the slave trade was small bore: emancipation of six thousand slaves in the District of Columbia. This imbalance between rhetoric and plan perhaps reflected the precariousness of the divide over constitutional powers. Even so, the second edition did expand the enumerated list of federal actions that advanced slaveholding interests from 14 to 21. And Jay thickened this antislavery guide to federal policy, including a substantial chapter on the Seminole War and information on the undue dominance of pro-slavery federal officers. As he stated in the final line of his new preface, the ultimate goal remained lofty: to “restore the Federal Government to its legitimate functions, of establishing justice and securing the blessings of liberty.”⁶¹

Readers of A View of the Action of the Federal Government on Behalf of Slavery found the book useful, even inspiring. In February 1840, Rev. Samuel H. Cox wrote Jay, “I have meditated, as I read its statements, with wonder, grief, & joy!” certain that “the verdicts of history” would be on Jay’s side. That same month, Emancipator editor Joshua Leavitt reported having shipped fifty copies of Jay’s View to Washington, D.C., with hopes of further distribution of the work in Congress. The following year, Salmon P. Chase, an up-and-coming Ohio antislavery lawyer and politician, recorded reading Jay’s book on the same day that he gave a speech excoriating Congress’s unconstitutional gag rule and calling for the end to slavery and the slave trade in the nation’s capital.⁶² It was a place to start.

Jay’s zealous antislavery argument provided moral persuasion with a stiff empirical, legal backbone. The spurious issue resulting from the “sins of the fathers” could only be defeated if clearly identified. Whether abolitionist readers agreed with his constitutional arguments, Jay himself had begun to sense that he might more effectively operate as an abolitionist free from some of the strange political bedfellows he had acquired when he joined the AAS.