Succession and Secession

During the two years after his father’s death, John Jay’s abolitionist pugnacity remained unchecked even as he strengthened abolitionist alliances, Black and white. Taking up his father’s late-life cause, he sought to dilute the power of slavery within Benevolent Empire organizations by lobbying for legislation to allow more people to vote on matters of corporate governance. Inside the Episcopal Church, with the support of Black Episcopalian abolitionist Dr. James McCune Smith, Jay agitated fruitlessly for the Episcopal bishop of New York to issue a pastoral letter denouncing alleged participation by Manhattan ships in the illegal trading of enslaved African slaves to southern ports. With his father’s bequest at his disposal, John remained connected to the Underground Railroad network. At the beginning of 1860, Albany’s Stephen Myers reported a surge in fugitives over the past three years. At year’s end, Myers informed Jay that the spike continued, before adding that he had recently named a grandson William John Jay Myers in tribute to the family.³

John also became the third-generation proprietor of the family’s hillside estate and farm, to which he would soon affix the grand name the “Jay Homestead.” In June 1859, Bedford also witnessed the expansion of the Jay’s abolitionist family circle. His eldest daughter Eleanor Jay married Henry Grafton Chapman, the son of the formidable Boston Garrisonian Maria Weston Chapman. The wedding embodied the rapprochement between the Jays and the most radical wing of the abolitionist movement.⁴

As heartening as such personal and activist connections were, the US Supreme Court and partisan politics would determine the fate of John’s abolitionist goals. Jay continued to worry greatly about Chief Justice Taney Court further expanding the rights of southern slaveholders. Meanwhile, Jay’s national contacts provided him with opportunities to extend his own influence. He maintained a close relationship with the Sumner. During the senator’s prolonged recovery from his caning, Sumner stayed in touch with Jay and relied on his friend to help book him a stateroom for his voyages to Europe. In their frequent letters, Sumner addressed Jay as a trusted friend and shared his doubts about how and whether to resume his public career.⁵

John and Chase trusted each other as friends and as allies. In a February 1858 letter to Ohio Governor Chase, Jay sized up potential Republican candidates for 1860, including John C. Frémont and William Henry Seward. The New Yorker concluded with the none-too-subtle flattery, “I know no State more likely to furnish us our next President than Ohio.”⁶

As the presidential election grew closer, Jay did not appear to have the Republican’s ultimate nominee, Abraham Lincoln, in view. In an October 1859 letter to Sumner, Jay expressed confidence in the party’s presidential prospects: “The impression I think gains ground that the Republicans will elect the next president, but who that man is to be is more a question than sure.” Jay then mentioned a variety of contenders, among them Chase, Seward, Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, and Ben Wade of Ohio. At the party’s convention in Chicago six months later in May 1860, however, Illinois’s Lincoln outmaneuvered his competitors to claim the presidential nomination.⁷

In June 1860, when Sumner spoke from the Senate floor for the first time since the infamous assault, one of his goals was to cultivate Jay’s avid support for renewing the attack on the Slave Power even as a fateful election approached. The occasion was a provocative bill to admit Kansas as a free state. Sumner titled his speech “The Barbarism of Slavery.” Describing in a letter to Jay his preparations for delivering the four-hour antislavery vituperation, Sumner wrote, “I felt encouraged whenever I thought of your father,” and went on, “I think of him constantly.”⁸

Some Republicans did not view Sumner’s going on the sectional offensive as helpful for Lincoln’s candidacy. Jay, however, praised the speech for “giving a vigour to the cause, & a definiteness to the opinion of the north”; he also sent $25 to aid in the printing of the speech for wide distribution. Then, informing his friend of a new Chapman–Jay grandson, Jay revealed how closely he associated the personal and the political: “It is in viewing such a scene that one can realize something of the ‘Barbarism of slavery’ when it lays its accursed finger upon the mother & her children, & changes every God given blessing into despair.” The friends shared a belief that the Republicans should not conciliate as they strove for northern votes and national power.⁹

John Jay’s election-eve speech, subsequently excerpted in De Bow’s, presented his neighbors with his vision that the imminent Republican victory would allow the nation to realize its highest purposes. He cast himself as a local farmer with a continental vista. There was, he noted, nothing unusual about “friends and neighbors” gathering to discuss breeds of cattle or “the latest experiments in agricultural science.” This presidential election, however, required more than the usual friendly rivalry of farmers at a county fair. The day’s address required the audience to take on the “responsibility” of “citizens” of a vast country that stood at a crossroads.

More than forty pages long in pamphlet form, Jay’s remarks were far more pedantic history than folksy stump speech. He recounted decades of crises, confrontations, controversies, and crises over slavery. In making the case that the Republican Party embodied the nation’s founding principles and incorporated the most important abolitionist principles and policy goals, Jay barely expressed an interest in Lincoln’s personal narrative and traits. The candidate’s fitness belonged to history. Lincoln’s replacement of James Buchanan in the White House was the culmination of a “systematic movement to restore the Government to its ancient landmarks, which, after earnest and persevering efforts for more than a quarter of a century, are now about to be crowned with so great success.” A Republican victory at the polls “will declare in a voice of thunder that the negro is a man.” The many prerogatives claimed by the slave states would melt away; the Supreme Court would be revamped to more accurately reflect the nationwide distribution of the population; the northern tier of slave states would commence emancipation.

Meanwhile, fears of disunion were misplaced. “Cool headed” southerners would prevail because secession would only hasten, under far less orderly conditions, slavery’s destruction. Jay concluded with a vision of interregional and interracial harmony: “North and South, East and West, white and black, free and slave” brought together under the unified national banner of the nation’s founding beliefs.¹⁰

The 1860 election results validated Jay’s confidence that Lincoln would win. Abraham Lincoln won the fractured four-way national race by carrying the electoral votes of every northern state, including New York. Westchester County was another matter. The Jay Homestead sat in a Democratic stronghold. A majority of Westchester voters (54.4 percent) cast their votes for Stephen A. Douglas and gave the northern Democrat his twelfth highest number of votes of any county in the country. The election went even worse in Manhattan; Jay’s other base, where Douglass received 65.2 percent of the vote.¹¹

In the wake of the election, Jay joined the camp of Republicans who opposed compromise, even as states in the Deep South began to secede. His letters to Sumner during the long months between Lincoln’s election and his presidential inauguration encouraged the senator’s own instinct that any concessions would embolden rather than weaken secessionism. Even as prominent political figures such as Sumner’s friend Massachusetts congressman Charles Francis Adams and Lincoln’s choice for secretary of state, William H. Seward, looked to conciliate, Jay was emphatic that the party stick to its antislavery principles. On December 31, Jay wrote Sumner, “Our moral prestige will be destroyed in an instant” and “the party will be demoralized & the people who created it will be betrayed,” should they not remain strong. Writing to Jay from the senate chamber, Sumner conveyed his own distress about those, including Lincoln, who might waver.¹²

Although Jay had no doubt that preserving the Union could never be worth “selling out the liberties of the African race on this continent,” he counseled that consolidating northern support meant emphasizing nationalism, not antislavery sentiments, in public utterances. The key to success, Jay urged, was to hold out against compromise through Lincoln’s inauguration, which he attended on March 4. Jay had to feel some satisfaction that Sumner’s and his desire to forestall compromise had won out, even as the new president’s speech attempted to squelch all notions that he supported emancipation.¹³

The war came anyway—changing everything—and yet, from John Jay’s perspective, changing not nearly enough and not nearly fast enough.

Frontlines

Unlike most sons of New York City’s upper class, William Jay II went to war. And once in uniform, William not only sought to stay at war but also to get closer to battle. The first decision, to volunteer for service, the twenty-year-old Columbia College graduate made with his parents’ active support. The second, to witness combat firsthand, required wearing down his wary mother and father. As a Jay, William forged new ground. The namesake of his abolitionist grandfather, who had been an internationally recognized peace advocate and lifelong skeptic of the military, became the family’s first man in arms. Although not a simple extension of his father’s abolitionism, William’s wartime experience combined key elements of family history: patriotism, privilege, and antislavery commitments.¹⁴ Young William did not dwell on the subject, but he understood explicitly that fighting to end slavery went hand in glove with that patriotism. His son’s wartime service raised the personal and emotional stakes of the Civil War for John Jay II while giving the relentless abolitionist firsthand glimpses of what African American self-emancipation could look like.

A “sense of duty” led William to the military, but his father played an active role in channeling that duty toward an assignment that was prestigious, comfortable, and safe. John found a position for William as an assistant to General John Ellis Wool. Wool, a New Yorker from upstate Troy, was one of the US Army’s most senior career generals at the time the Civil War started. A Democrat, the seventy-seven-year-old Wool first remained deeply committed to the Union as the nation disintegrated. The elderly general helped oversee security at Lincoln’s inauguration and then headed to New York City to mobilize military supplies In August, after Wool was given command of the Department of Virginia and stationed at Fortress Monroe, John and William set about Washington, D.C., lobbying to secure William a commission to serve as one of his officers.¹⁵

By the time William arrived to serve as an officer, Fortress Monroe had already played a crucial role in shaping wartime policy toward slavery. Located near the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay at the mouth of the James River, the strategic federal outpost drew runaway slaves to Union Army lines. General Benjamin Butler took possession of these African Americans as contraband of war. As Blacks turned up at the fort and other Union positions, the pressure mounted on the Lincoln administration to clarify the military’s policy and the legal status of the fugitives. The result, the First Confiscation Act, which the president signed on August 6, 1861, invalidated any right that masters participating in the rebellion might claim to runaway slaves laboring on behalf of the southern military effort. How anyone would validate that a refugee had or had not been put to work on behalf of the southern military effort was an ambiguity that neither fugitives nor Union soldiers nor the War Department felt compelled to clear up.¹⁶

William recorded the presence of African Americans at Fortress Monroe in a breezy, casual, and condescending fashion. In October, he reported that he and some other officers employed full-time “a contraband here for $8 a month,” who supplied them with seafood. The following April, he derived a bit of patronizing mirth from describing a dinner party he threw where “a venerable negress” had to keep washing the limited supply of flatware and “overcome I suppose either by her arduous labours or by a bottle of wine that she stole” did not return to service.¹⁷

William’s situation and experiences at Fortress Monroe reinforced rather than challenged his class and racial status. A servant from Bedford named Philip traveled southward to work for William and in the mess hall in which William, General Wool, and other officers dined. Another arrival at Fortress Monroe was George Cousino, an army enlistee. George was the grandson of the longtime Jay family servant and recipient of family favor Joseph Cusno. William claimed that he was taking no responsibility for George’s well-being but did at least keep his eye out for him.¹⁸

Privileged though he was, William had no doubt that the abolition of slavery was an essential feature of the cause in which he had enlisted. Prompted by his father’s contribution to a newspaper from home and to events in Missouri, in October 1861 William shared an unusually long political outburst. He declared, “Every one who is true to the Union now must be an abolitionist.… For since Slavery is the cause of the whole war it must be gotten rid of to secure tranquility.” Crushing the rebellion meant crushing slavery.

William critiqued what he perceived to be the Lincoln administration’s misguided desire to “conciliate the South.” Southern hatred made that impossible. He advocated remorseless war long before that became the Union Army’s standard practice: “I would burn & devastate this infernal country till they gave in.” Delving deeper into politics, the young captain denounced the Lincoln administration for reversing General John C. Frémont’s policy in Missouri of offering freedom to the slaves of secessionist masters, calling Lincoln’s actions “contemptible.” Nurtured on abolitionism and with the impatient certitude of youth, William’s pro-emancipation stance went beyond narrow military or political calculation. He wanted all slaves free, concluding, “Long before this” Lincoln “should in my opinion have liberated every slave in the country no matter how loyal his master might be.”¹⁹ Abolition remained a shared family faith that ran deeper than attachment to a political party or a president.

William increasingly chafed against his parents’ desire that he spend the war with General Wool doing routine work removed from military action. Given the protected nature of his duties, William quickly soured on his position; serving away from the action had begun to sap his pride. He referred to Fortress Monroe as the “dullest hole” and as “this absurd fort,” begging his father to use his connections in Washington to secure him a new commission. As William wrote, “If I had to remain I could no longer even make a pretense of being engaged in the war for preservation of Union & the destruction of Slavery.” He felt that he had a responsibility to advance the family’s historic and moral causes. His parents had the opposite priority. John feared that Wool might retire, freeing William to seek more dangerous assignments. So, in November 1861, he wrote President Lincoln’s personal secretary John Milton Hay asking that the elderly Wool be rewarded for his laudable “ability & energy” through permanent promotion to major general.²⁰

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

War Aims

His son’s posting at Fortress Monroe provided John Jay II with a chance to assess in person ideas about African American military service that had been on his mind from the first months of the war. Existing law stood in the way of African American service, he noted in the summer of 1861, and should be revised. In July, Jay suggested to Sumner that Congress pass a law giving the president the flexibility to authorize field commanders to free local slaves and enlist them in military service, “whenever in their judgment the successful prosecution of the war against the rebels, or the safety & welfare of the country shall require such a step.” He articulated clearly the doctrine of military emancipation, the notion that in times of war the nation’s leaders had a right to free slaves out of necessity.²²

A visit to Fortress Monroe later in the summer of 1861 led Jay to briefly waver in his support for Black enlistment before recovering his confidence in the essential efficacy of such a policy. On September 10, 1861, he wrote Senator Sumner that the large numbers of former slaves at the fortress would breed contempt among the white soldiers and, in an uncharacteristic remark, suggested that the refugees might be sent to Haiti. Two days later, however, he reported to Sumner conversations at Fortress Monroe in which Union officers who had begun military drills with the refugees “seemed clear upon the point that the sooner we began to arrange them on our side the better.” On September 26, John, as did his son in uniform, reacted negatively to Lincoln’s reversal of General Frémont’s unilateral emancipation measures in Missouri. A month later, Jay wrote Sumner that “the time is [at] hand for the enrollment of thousands of blacks free & slave in our army if we” want “to conquer the rebellion.”²³

In these early months of the war, Jay distinguished between emancipationist strategy and tactics, viewing the concept of “military necessity” as a way to gain approval for Black liberation from a public that remained highly skeptical of abolitionists and abolitionism. A broad spectrum of northerners, including President Lincoln, would not approve of emancipation for mere moral reasons. Emphasizing necessity, Jay aligned himself with mainstream congressional Republicans as they worked their way toward passing the First Confiscation Act.²⁴

Jay attempted to reimagine himself as a practical political figure rather than a pugnacious, even inflammatory, lawyer and public advocate. For both public safety and public relations reasons, he worried about the American Anti-Slavery Society holding its 1861 annual meeting in Manhattan. Abolitionists, he thought, must learn the virtues of circumspection. In July 1861, Jay counseled a correspondent against overt abolitionist agitation. The war itself was “more powerful than all the conventions we could assemble” but only if the northerners rallied as one: if people thought that war aimed at emancipation, rather than union, “the Government will find it difficult to procure either men or money, to the extent it can today command them.” The war would then teach northern soldiers and civilians that slavery bore the blame for the conflict. Abolitionists would do well to remain “watchful & prepared to speak,” but as a practical matter it would be the abolitionists’ old foes preaching “necessity,” not activists preaching philanthropy, who would do the work. The war, Jay clearly believed, offered not only practical tools for freeing actual slaves but also opportunities for propaganda and persuasion. Abolitionist grandstanding would, he believed, only undermine their goals.²⁵

Jay’s self-casting as a savvy pragmatist fit uneasily into his personal mix of reputation, temperament, and ambition. Radical Republicans wanted far more than the First Confiscation Act delivered. Charles Sumner urged Jay to visit Washington “at once to press upon the Prest. the duty of Emancipation; in order to save the country.” Sumner went on, “Somebody should see the Presdt every day, to exhibit to him this supreme duty.” When Jay actually did visit with Lincoln, however, the New Yorker found himself only “touching lightly on” the “slavery question,” perhaps because he was a bit star-struck and because he wanted to make a good impression to facilitate a possible diplomatic appointment.²⁶

When in the public arena, Jay’s natural instincts to seize the historical and moral high ground were hard to shed. In the draft of a letter to the New York City’s Herald newspaper, Jay offered an elaborate denial that his presence at a recent public meeting on war policy indicated that, to quote the Herald, “Our Abolition incendiaries [are] at it again.” Try as he might to deny that he now eschewed traditional antislavery agitation and to offer up “military necessity” as a nation-saving endeavor, his identification of the South with “absolute barbarism” and “semi-civilization” made him sound very much like the abolitionist he still was. So too did his support for African American military service. Reviving the spirit of 1776 and 1815, he proclaimed, “If voluntary enlistments slacken at the North, stout arms now employed against us, await but the word to fight for the Union … as did the blacks in the Revolution and the battle of New Orleans.” Indeed, the abolitionists had been right all along, as Jay pointed out: For three decades they had “sounded the note of warning against those gradual encroachments of the Slave power on the liberties of the Country, which have culminated in rebellion.”²⁷

Looking to history, Jay worked to find a pragmatic voice during the first year of the war. In November 1861, in response to Sumner’s urging, Jay worked on a memo to Secretary of War Simon Cameron on “Enlistment of slaves in the Army” that hearkened back to the American Revolution. He argued that the alternative to putting slaves under arms for the Union was a violent slave insurrection in the South. Such a “cruel & bloody” uprising would be hard for federal troops to put down and would create “sympathy for the rebels” enduring the attacks of their lawless former bondsmen. Jay invoked as precedent for slave enlistment the Laurens Plan to enroll thousands of South Carolina slaves in the war against the British. To prove the point, John Jay II cited the endorsement of the plan that Alexander Hamilton sent to Continental Congress president John Jay. Thus, the Republican Civil War operative sought to make the case that emancipation and military necessity shared a revolutionary lineage that paralleled his own.²⁸

As the war approached the end of its first year and then entered its second, Jay continued to think about how to secure emancipation. Jay supported Sumner’s revival of the thesis that, on rebelling, the slave states reverted to territorial status. In that case, the federal government now had the authority to ban slavery in those places. Jay welcomed the prospect of a second more aggressive Confiscation Act making its way through Congress.²⁹

Jay argued that social order among the emancipated would serve the larger goal of social justice. In January 1862, he wrote Sumner, “It seems to me all important that the negroes should be placed under control the instant they are emancipated … it will help us immensely towards universal emancipation if the country can see that its practical effects wherever it is tried is to develop the industrial faculties of the freed slaves, & assist in the rapid procurement of cotton.” Amid the chaos of wartime, order had, in his mind, to be put at the service of liberty.³⁰

There was no mistaking that African Americans, whether enslaved in the South or free in the North, represented a potent force for achieving their own freedom. After another visit to his son at Fortress Monroe, Jay passed along to Sumner something he gleaned in conversation with one of General Wool’s officers. A colonel related his elderly Black servant’s observation that southern slaves had not fomented a general insurrection yet because they expected the war would free them; the servant said, however, that if the war ended without emancipation, a rebellion would ensue. To emphasize the hidden resources of the enslaved population, Jay passed along word of how swiftly southern slaves communicated with one another across the region, a message from Florida apparently able to make its way to Virginia in a mere eight days. Directing the potential power of mass resistance by mustering hundreds of thousands of African Americans into the Union Army was one of Jay’s key objectives.³¹

Jay also prodded Sumner on civil rights, each positive step the federal government took begging for another. The banning of slavery in Washington, D.C., and extension of diplomatic recognition to Liberia prompted Jay to seek legislation to explicitly extend citizenship to free people of color and to suggest that “our legislative acts & official orders should ignore all difference of race or … between whites & blacks, & as far as possible recognize the latter as citizens.” Because of the war, some of the earliest abolitionist dreams of the Jay family were coming to fruition even as momentum built for even more dramatic changes.³²

By making use of his long-standing ties to New York City’s African American leaders, Jay hoped to mobilize northern Blacks for military service, so that their enlistment would become a vital tool to secure emancipation nationwide. In early July 1862, he wrote Robert Hamilton, editor of the Weekly Anglo-African, in anticipation of congressional action on Black military service. More than six decades earlier, Robert Hamilton’s father William had written Governor John Jay urging him to take action to abolish slavery in New York. Now John Jay II, a subscriber to the Anglo-African, was making a request of Hamilton. Jay wanted the newspaper to insert “in a prominent place” in “successive” issues a call for Black volunteers. With northern enlistments lagging, Black volunteers would create an opportunity well worth seizing to “assist in dissipating prejudice & creating a kindly feeling of respect for your people.” Jay requested that his own name not be part of the call for enlistment and encouraged Hamilton to edit the announcement in any way he wished. Nonetheless, the editor credited Jay for the militant words he used in the actual advertisement: “To arms! … be ready promptly to meet the call of our common country.”³³

Even as Jay urged that lawmakers and African Americans institute military emancipation, the former fugitive slave lawyer could not shake the fear that the Supreme Court could stop all progress in its tracks. Even before the war, Jay wanted to see the Taney-led Supreme Court reformed to prevent additional proslavery judicial decisions. As Congress negotiated various proposals for extending federal power to confiscate and emancipate, Jay tried to sound the alarm among Republican insiders on what he regarded as this fundamental judicial danger. As he wrote Senator Lyman Trumbull from Illinois, the threat in Jay’s mind that freedom-favoring laws could be “swept away” was real. Jay wrote Sumner on June 12, 1862: “Until the Supreme Court is reorganized I feel anxious about the safety of the slaves who have come to our lines, & I would like to see their freedom secured beyond all question.”³⁴

Fearing that the Lincoln administration had overlooked its responsibility to reform the Court that had perpetrated the Dred Scott abomination only a few years earlier, Jay wrote letters to Attorney General Edward Bates and Secretary of State Seward highlighting the danger. The prospect of a decision as consequential as the Dred Scott ruling would thwart “the Emancipation project of the President” and Congress. Given the Supreme Court’s prestige, Democrats would respond to such a decision by rallying to “overthrow” the Lincoln administration. Jay advised adding new justices to outnumber the untrustworthy Taney and his allies. Betraying no attachment to judicial independence or checks and balances, Jay bluntly urged the attorney general to help “secure beyond all contingency a perfect concurrence & harmony between the executive Legislative and judicial branches of Government.”³⁵ Progress must not be undone by overconfidence and neglect.

By the summer of 1862, Jay foresaw that a sweeping emancipation at the direction of the president had become necessary. His letter of July 4 to Sumner claimed that military setbacks and diplomatic dangers had reached the point at which “all the means authorized by the law of war”—meaning mass emancipation—would attract the support of even old-line conservatives for the sake of the country. Jay wondered whether the impending confiscation bill would be enough or whether a presidential proclamation would need to follow. As anticipation of just such a presidential action grew in the antislavery ranks, Jay wrote Sumner in August, “Slavery will die & the nation & Freedom will live, & the price paid for these blessing will be the blood of our sons and a large part of the national wealth we have acquired while consenting to the oppression of the blacks.” (Lincoln’s magisterial Second Inaugural Address in 1865 would poetically echo this view.) Correctly assuming that the president was waiting for greater military success before taking the next bold emancipatory step, Jay indicated that, rather than denouncing Lincoln, the wiser course was to stand in his corner and “not throw away our influence over him, & give him up to our opponents.” The moment of liberation and maximal antislavery influence was at hand.³⁶

And yet when Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September, after the Union Army’s stunningly bloody success at Antietam, Jay expressed all sorts of political concerns. His worries had little to do with the details of Lincoln’s document, which promised to free all slaves in any Confederate state or part of a state that did not renounce rebellion by January 1, 1863. From his seat in Westchester County, New York, the dangers of resurgence of “pro-slavery Democracy” had Jay calling for suppressing “treasonable presses” and for troops to be at the ready to crush an internal northern rebellion. Despite this aggressive stance, Jay also wished that President Lincoln had more clearly articulated emancipation as a “military necessity” in order to stave off attacks on the preliminary proclamation in the crucial upcoming midterm elections. In Jay’s view, branding the president’s plan as abolitionist could only hurt him politically.³⁷

When January 1, 1863, came and President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation itself, freeing all slaves in rebel-held territory and welcoming slaves into the military (though not explicitly in combat roles), John Jay almost immediately started looking ahead. Writing Sumner from New York City, where Jay recorded “a grand celebration” by African Americans, Jay urged that Congress pass a law affirming Lincoln’s measure as a way of guarding against an adverse Supreme Court ruling against the president’s action. He not only renewed his call for arming freed people but also suggested, “The act of Congress sustaining the Emancipation policy should secure to every slave a few acres”; he believed that land reform would ensure greater social calm in the end. He also looked ahead to the amending of the Constitution, including the political need to declare Blacks as citizens.³⁸ For the moment, in early 1863, the psychological and political roller coaster of John Jay’s Civil War was on an upswing. The fates of slavery and the Union, however, were not the only engines of his angst. He did not want his wartime role to be limited to informal adviser and occasional lobbyist. Like his son, he too wanted to serve.

Diplomatic Dreams

Seeking to follow in his grandfather’s foreign policy and diplomatic footsteps, John Jay II envisioned himself representing his nation in crisis on the world stage. He identified European diplomacy as a crucial front in the struggle between North and South. As he awaited word of an appointment to an ambassadorship, Jay made sure that his contacts in Washington knew what he was thinking. Those contacts were seemingly ideal. Sumner became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, working closely with President Lincoln himself. William H. Seward became secretary of state; the former senator from New York, though not a close political ally, was no stranger to Jay. Chase served as secretary of the treasury. Personal ties, Republican Party service, and wise counsel, John assumed, would bring him his just reward.

Even before the Fort Sumter crisis culminated in the outbreak of war, Jay sought to influence Sumner’s thinking on foreign policy. Jay was particularly eager that the United States negotiate a treaty for the suppression of the African slave trade with Britain and other European powers. His hope was to outflank the rebel Confederacy morally and practically. A new slave trade treaty would indicate the antislavery leanings of the Lincoln administration, highlight the rebels’ proslavery character, and potentially lead to the harassment of southern vessels by permitting foreign inspections. Jay also recommended revising tariffs in order to lessen the South’s advantage over the North as a major trading power with Europe. Jay subsequently suggested to Sumner that the US Navy seize southern cotton and export the crucial commodity to England directly. Jay considered it vital that Europeans understand that the Confederacy was motivated by a desire to protect slavery. That way, antislavery public opinion overseas would make it difficult for politicians to extend recognition to the Confederacy as a way of weakening the United States.³⁹

Jay did not confine his foreign policy analysis to Sumner. In a lengthy letter to Chase that he marked confidential, Jay wrote about the need for the president to make a public statement that clarified the real cause of division between North and South or at least highlighted the abuse by the Confederacy of southerners loyal to the Union. He went on to bemoan the fact that southern emissaries to Europe seemed to be doing a better job than the US representatives, indicating that some ambassadors lacked the language skills to do their jobs properly. He pressed on Chase, as he had Sumner, the importance of forestalling “interference” from European powers.⁴⁰ Getting diplomacy right mattered.

So too did getting a diplomatic posting. Sumner’s significant influence on Lincoln regarding foreign appointments did not produce a diplomatic placement for Jay early on, but the New Yorker remained undeterred. Sumner continued to stoke Jay’s hopes, saying he had spoken very highly of his friend to President Lincoln, who “I am sure … regards you with favor.” Even so, Sumner admitted to Jay that he had not effectively managed his New York friend’s bid for an overseas post. Sumner felt a greater obligation to support Massachusetts’s John Lathrop Motley for the Vienna ambassadorship; meanwhile Secretary of State Seward, a fellow New Yorker, appeared to be unsupportive of Jay’s quest. Essentially, in a game of diplomatic musical chairs, Jay lost. Still, wrote Sumner, “Really, you deserve any thing & every thing, & I told the Presd. & Seward that you did.” When Jay visited the president himself, Lincoln managed to flatter his visitor about his qualifications for a federal post, without delivering the goods. That Jay’s best would-be advocate was from Massachusetts, with his own constituents to look after, and not Seward from New York, may have reduced Jay’s traction. Sumner’s growing hostility toward Secretary of State Seward could not have helped Jay’s cause either.⁴¹

Yet the persistent Jay made sure to highlight his acumen and his overseas connections to Seward. Jay urged the secretary of state to expend greater resources on winning the overseas battle for European public opinion. Jay also passed along to Seward what he saw as helpful analysis from his own European contacts. On October 17, 1861 he wrote a multipoint memo to Seward on the merits of a slave trade suppression treaty. Moral and diplomatic imperatives aligned. Seward’s responses to Jay’s communiques were more perfunctory than personal, but, in any case, the United States reached a new anti-slave-trade accord with Great Britain. On April 24, 1862, Sumner successfully stage managed the Senate’s unanimous ratification of the treaty.⁴²

John tried to keep his disappointment and frustration over the lack of a diplomatic post in check in his dealings with Sumner. His affection for Sumner was genuine, and having such a prominent ear to hear his policy opinions was invaluable. His wife Eleanor’s letters to Sumner reveal how the passage of time spent on the diplomatic sidelines troubled her husband. She frankly raised possible openings in Spain and Russia with the senator and even suggested that a failure to appoint John might suggest that President Lincoln “has some personal enmity to Mr Jay.” Eleanor was quite direct in insisting that her husband’s qualifications and his long service to the Republican Party and the antislavery cause should induce Sumner to exert himself. As she told the senator, “His Friends think he is entitled to something.”⁴³

By late 1863, John’s feelings about being repeatedly passed over for an ambassadorship bubbled over into anger at Sumner. Jay’s December letter to Sumner demanded some sort of closure—either he should be given a post, or there should be an end to the charade that he might get one. The routine of being mentioned for but nor receiving a post had grown publicly humiliating. Political rivals in Westchester County, wrote John, “have attempted to lessen my personal & political influence by shewing that the administration had not regard my principles or my services as entitled to consideration.” Jay stated that Secretary of State Seward was not the obstacle. To make a point about loyalty, Jay told Sumner he had recently found a note from Seward to William Jay proclaiming his debt to the Jays and their devotion to liberty. Would that Sumner had connected liberty and friendship, rather than leaving his friend exposed and embarrassed.⁴⁴

An April 1864 letter John wrote but chose not to send to Sumner expressed in even rawer terms his hurt and betrayal—and how tied up those feelings were with family history. Proclaiming himself as having “as much to do with the organization of the Republican party as any man in the Country,” Jay resigned himself to the fact that he would never serve the Lincoln administration. He now wished to secure federal funding to support the editing of founding father John Jay’s papers, the current war making the work of the founders all the more relevant. But he feared that Sumner might undercut him again. Feeling sorry for himself, John penned his true feelings: “If I have not been permitted by my friends who enjoy the highest offices under the gov. to share their triumph it was not because I … failed them in our life long contest.”⁴⁵ He had been a loyal and true advocate for the antislavery cause. Jay saw the war as a completion of the abolitionist mission. Sumner, Chase, and others shared those goals but did not deliver him his reward.

John’s anger, to be sure, had many sources. Vanity, ego, and family history made him covet the prestige of an ambassadorship. His sense of entitlement stemmed from both his service to the Republican and antislavery causes and his belief that his Jay lineage embodied the connection between the American Revolution and the Civil War. He also desperately wanted to serve the twin causes he fervently believed had become one: emancipation and national salvation. Local politics exacerbated his sense of abandonment. John Jay II expected that his neighbors would respect him and even rally to him. Instead, they reviled him.

Homefront

John Jay came home to Westchester County as the wrong messenger with the wrong message. The skills and reputation he had gained as an abolitionist lawyer and an antiracist church agitator with a high regard for his family’s history alienated his rural neighbors. The Civil War, rather than legitimizing abolitionism and the Underground Railroad in this Democratic county, only underscored how different John’s views were from those of his neighbors. The years spent away making his career in New York City made it difficult for him to navigate the local political terrain. In southern New York, whether Manhattan or Westchester County, the war within the war did not often reward Republicans of Jay’s abolitionist stripe. His contacts in Washington, D.C., seemed to understand the local landscape better than Jay himself did. While awaiting the call to diplomatic service, he fought poorly a losing battle to redeem his family’s abolitionist legacy in Westchester County. From his perspective, the Republican Party had negligently rewarded its enemies and left its friends to suffer the abuse of northern agents of the Slave Power. To his neighbors, Republicans as well as Democrats, John Jay was an imperious interloper claiming a social authority neither earned nor granted.

Jay at some level understood that remaking local politics to conform to his national vision would not be easy. Jay reported to Sumner in March 1861, before the war had commenced, that a group of Democrats meeting in New Rochelle “openly adopted as its platform the Constitution of the Southern Confederacy.” Such attitudes were symptomatic of a broad subversive challenge that the new Republican administration needed to answer promptly and decisively.⁴⁶

John and Eleanor Jay sought to take seriously the role of elite leadership. Not surprisingly, he joined the local committee to organize an army unit. The Union Defense Committee helped provision local enlistees. For her part, Eleanor Jay invited local women to come to the Jay Homestead to help make bandages for the troops. Other activities struck more discordant notes. John had a nose for controversy. His July 4, 1861, speech titled “The Great Conspiracy” attempted to educate his neighbors that the Civil War laid bare a long-standing plot by the Slave Power to undermine the great nation and subvert the freedom-embracing principles of the founders.⁴⁷ This message was not one that others necessarily wanted to hear.

For Westchester Democrats, the outspoken Jay’s prewar abolitionism made him an easy target, readily grouped with more infamous antislavery advocates. In a speech given after the war was underway, former Democratic congressman John B. Haskin emphasized that the conflict was about union and only union. Haskins’s visit to Fortress Monroe revealed that contraband slaves were not ready for freedom. He reminded his audience that abolitionists had denounced the US Constitution, contemptuously referred to Jay’s “ephemeral legal notoriety” as a lawyer for fugitive slaves, and proclaimed, to shouts of approval, that loyal southerners with whom the North should make common cause should not be allowed to think “that Garrison, and Phillips, and Jay are the exponents of the Northern people.”⁴⁸

Jay’s Bedford remained a tough place for abolitionists even to give public speeches. In the spring of 1862, NASS carried a description of a crowd of roughnecks harassing an antislavery meeting with racial epithets and curses.⁴⁹ In this environment, Jay proved to be far more of a lightning rod than consensus builder.

For Jay, an excruciating battle over Republican patronage in his own backyard took place at the post office. Westchester might be a Democratic stronghold, but the federal government appointed local postmasters, making the post office a crossroads of national and local politics. Jay vigorously sought to exercise his influence in this arena, only to discover in the process that he was not even the local Republican with the strongest hand in the patronage game. Jay managed to use his influence to have the Katonah post office taken away from the auspices of a Democrat who conducted his government service from a place where the civil servant also sold liquor. However, the intervention of pro-Union Democratic congressman Edward Haight and Republican judge and former Lincoln Electoral College delegate Henry Robertson led to the removal of the postmaster sponsored by Jay.

John Jay openly objected to this maneuver and privately tried to work his connections to the postmaster general and even to the president himself. In a March 27, 1862, speech about the postmaster controversy, Jay could not resist mixing family pride with abolitionist bravado: “The Jay Homestead was—and is—as I trust it will always remain till the last bondman has dropped his fetters—a resting place for the fugitive from slavery.” Such language hardly curried favor with neighbors angered by how his father had used his last will and testament to flaunt the family’s support for fugitive slaves. Even so, Jay grew increasingly distraught as he not only failed to save the job of his favored postmaster but also no longer could trust that his own mail would not be tampered with at the local post office. Jay found it mind-boggling that the administration catered to people who so brazenly opposed pro-emancipation Republican policies. The personal abuse that resulted was humiliating. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase explained to Jay the political exigencies that led the Lincoln administration to work with Congressman Haight and indicated that after the coming elections the patronage situation might be resolved to Jay’s favor, temporarily soothing Jay’s feelings.⁵⁰

In an October 30, 1862, preelection speech delivered in southern Westchester County, Jay presented himself as a pro-Lincoln nationalist, willing to make peace with northern political rivals for the greater cause of union. Jay expressed support for Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation without making abolition his dominant theme. To be sure, Jay lambasted Democratic gubernatorial candidate Horatio Seymour, who, he claimed, catered to southern slaveholders and would have the North sue for a degrading peace. Overall, however, the speech emphasized loyalty to the nation, which meant making common cause with unionist Democrats whom Jay privately despised, resented, and feared. Sumner, who in his reelection campaign in Massachusetts had emphasized emancipation, told Jay he found the speech “admirable” and once again affirmed his intent to help Jay secure an administration post.⁵¹

The results of the midterm election were depressing. Republican setbacks fueled Jay’s conviction that the party had lost its way not only in Westchester but also nationally. Seymour became governor of New York, carrying Westchester County with more than 58 percent of the vote. Nationally, the Democrats enjoyed gains in Indiana and Illinois as well.⁵²

In the wake of the election, John Jay’s political rivals sought to make clear in an excruciatingly personal fashion that the abolitionist Jays had no claim to political, moral, or historical authority in the county. A move was launched in the Westchester County Board of Supervisors to remove the portrait of the late William Jay from the White Plains courthouse where he had served from 1818 to 1843. John had donated the painting at the request of the county bar association after his father’s death. A few short years later, in December 1862, John had to scramble to avoid insult to his father’s memory. The ostensible reason for the proposed removal was the receipt from the county bar of a portrait of former Democratic governor and vice president Daniel D. Tompkins. Suspecting that the plan had to do instead with his own and his father’s abolitionism, John was quick to point out in his lengthy letter to the Board of Supervisors that Tompkins himself had played a crucial role in ending slavery in New York. John anticipated that the Westchester County Bar as a whole would not approve of perpetuating “political partisanship beyond the grave, or of venting the malignity toward the living in insults to the dead.” A petition reached the Board of Supervisors suggesting that, despite William Jay’s divisive abolitionism, the judge had exhibited many laudable personal qualities and served a lengthy, praiseworthy tenure on the bench. A week after the original resolution to return the William Jay portrait, the board reversed itself by a vote of 12–9. For Jay, the humiliating portrait controversy was impossible to separate from issues of local patronage and suspected pro-Confederacy conspiracies in New York and the North more generally.⁵³

Signs of the Slave Power’s northern resurgence seemed to be everywhere in 1863, even in the local Episcopal parish where his family had long exercised great influence. Jay continued to agitate on race-related issues in the New York diocesan convention during the early war years. Jay also spoke out against the rector of the Episcopal parish in nearby Rye for alleged Confederate sympathies. Such activities proved too much for some of his fellow church fathers and Rev. Edward Boggs, the rector of Bedford’s St. Matthew’s Church. A move was made to have Jay removed from the vestry and as a delegate representing the parish at the convention. This was a direct, personal slap at Jay and his family’s local prestige as the first family of St. Matthew’s.⁵⁴

John Jay’s response revealed not only how beleaguered he felt in his own backyard but also how passionately he clung to his core identity as an antislavery crusader. He penned and printed a thirty-seven-page response to Rev. Boggs and the vestry, followed by a fifteen-page “preface” in reply to Boggs’s public remarks on Jay’s comments. Jay’s emotional investment was high in defending his prerogatives and the war in which, he reminded the vestry, his “only son” fought. He connected two of his opponents in the parish church to the erstwhile plan to remove the William Jay courthouse portrait and also relitigated the post office controversy. The current travesty in the church was a manifestation of the bloodthirsty “Slave-power” and an echo in wartime of Judge Jay’s removal from the bench two decades before at the behest of pro-southern Democrats.⁵⁵

He asserted that he would not be silenced on slavery; nor would he be cowed by accusations that he felt himself entitled by family name to power within the church. He drew attention to the formerly enslaved themselves: “Thousands of that unhappy race, rightly freed by the rebellion from traitorous masters, who turned their strength against the Government, are being baptized with fire and blood citizens of our Republic, for whose preservation they are ready to die, even before they have begun to live.” Through their manifest courageousness, these Black soldiers had earned “the immortal gratitude of the American people,” while beginning “to solve the great problems of the age—the duration of slavery; the dignity and destiny of their race, and its relation to the world at large.” This unfolding achievement would secure “the onward progress, in the path of empire, civilization, freedom, and Christianity, of the American Republic.” Yet the internal threat of subversion, Jay noted in July 1863, was all too real, with victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg compromised still by “Northern renegades” and the South’s “reverend allies in Northern pulpits.”⁵⁶

Frustrated by his inability to wield wider political influence, concerned about the safety of his son, and buffeted by the ups and downs of emancipation policy and warfront news, Jay placed his local travails on the biggest possible historic stage. Given how poorly he continued to get on with his rural neighbors, however, John Jay II was very fortunate that he had not severed his ties to Manhattan, where embattled unionist elites could band together.⁵⁷ In wartime New York City, Jay would forge deep connections to friends in need.

Riot, Rancor, and Redemption

In November 1862, Frederick Law Olmstead invoked John Jay II as an archetypal member of a club that would draw together New York City’s social elite to sustain the Union in its time of dire need. Olmstead—author, designer of Central Park, and a leading figure in the US Sanitary Commission—advised Walcott Gibbs, who would go on to be a founder of the Union League Club (ULC), that “men of good stock, or of notably high character, of legal reputation, would be desirable,” with “those of old colonial names well brought down” particularly desirable. Jay’s former elite nemesis George Templeton Strong was installed to head the new club’s admissions committee, which settled on the name Union League to solidify ties to a group in Philadelphia organized along similar lines.⁵⁸

In the early months of 1863, Strong and a small group of fellow New Yorkers advanced their plans to bring together the city’s commercial and cultural elite in a club devoted to the cause of the Union and the Lincoln administration. The election of antiwar Democrat Horatio Seymour as governor of New York had been taken as a troubling sign. If such men wanted their efforts to succeed, they would have to mobilize power and prestige more effectively and self-consciously. Unbreakable loyalty to the nation struggling to survive secession and war was the group’s fundamental organizing principle. Strong envisioned the club preserving the nation while “stimulating[ing] property-holders and educated men to assert their right to a voice in the conduct of public affairs … and do a little something toward suppressing the filthy horde of professed politicians … draining our national life by parasitical suction.” From the beginning, the Union League Club tied suppression of the southern rebellion to the problem of political corruption in the North. Strong’s unionism, elitism, and support for emancipation had melded with the views of his one-time rival Jay.⁵⁹

Jay gravitated to the ULC, lending some of the historical credibility that Olmstead imagined. Jay also joined the more politically minded parallel organization, the Loyal National League, an ostensibly nonpartisan statewide group coalescing around the preservation of the republic, but which Jay hoped would influence the Republican Party on policy. Jay anticipated that plans for a federally mandated draft to sustain the Union Army through a war with no end in sight would not be easy to implement in New York City. Sustaining patriotic order amid the draft would be a significant test of the city’s, the state’s, and even the nation’s strength in a time of acute crisis.⁶⁰

New York City failed the test—confirming Jay’s worst fears. White working-class protesters responded to the draft lottery on Monday, July 13, 1863, with violence aimed at the draft office. Their focus soon shifted. Mobs, which included large numbers of Irish immigrants, marched on homes and businesses associated with elite Republicans. Rioters also aimed their vicious ire on African Americans. They looted the Colored Orphan Asylum, an institution to which the Jays had been benefactors.⁶¹ It then burned to the ground, displacing 237 children. Rioters hunted down Black people in the streets, lynching and desecrating bodies. The victims included a grandmother, her daughter, and her grandson whom they beat to death. Four days of chaos and attacks on African American related properties led Black New Yorkers to flee to the shelter of police headquarters and to outlying wooded areas in New Jersey and Long Island. The city’s Black population fell by one-fifth in the wake of the riots. The fewer than 10,000 African Americans who remained struggled to advance claims for compensation, and authorities did little to punish the perpetrators.

The Draft Riots, with an official death toll of 119 by time order was restored, represented more than a rejection of a draft law that favored the rich at the expense of the working class: it was a stunning breakdown of authority in the nation’s biggest city. Popular white anger was, moreover, not confined to the city. In Westchester County, rioters tore up railroad tracks. William Jay II wrote home from the warfront, passing along advice on how the family might protect the Jay Homestead if it came under attack.⁶²

Like the New York City anti-abolitionist riots of 1834, which John Jay II had experienced at the outset of his abolitionist career, the 1863 riots required a rededication of purpose. Much had changed in three decades. Immediate emancipation was no longer the distant dream of reformers but rather the official policy of the national government. The murderous New York City upheaval dramatized that racism, class division, and anti-administration political sentiment posed a combustible threat to that policy. In 1834, Jay stood guard himself against the mob. Three decades later, he and others lobbied Mayor George Opdyke and General John Wool, his son’s former commander now charged with the city’s military defense, to move strongly against the rioters.⁶³

In rallying the city’s elite against disorder, pro-war and pro-emancipation men like John Jay expressed interracial humanitarianism, intraclass solidarity, and a redoubled commitment to the Union. Jay joined the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots to raise and distribute funds. The riots also struck a blow against the African American institution to which Jay had deep ties: St. Philip’s Church. Jay contributed funds to repairs needed after the church served as a barracks for soldiers in the wake of the riots; these guests had treated their temporary home with disrespect. Meanwhile, the ULC reinforced solidarity among unionists who sought out the group’s clubhouse as a sort of safe haven for the like-minded.⁶⁴

The ULC, to whose executive committee Jay ascended in 1864, had broad ambitions, simultaneously asserting the social elite’s role in securing order and the rights of African American citizens. In the short term, these dual goals involved pursuing one of Jay’s most cherished wartime aims—African American service in the Union Army.⁶⁵ The ULC played an instrumental role in recruiting Black regiments from New York to join the war effort, an initiative that Jay viewed as essential to achieving emancipation. In the face of Governor Seymour’s recalcitrance, it raised $18,000 for mustering Black troops.

The Jays made a point of participating in the pageantry associated with the redemption of the city through the celebration of Black military heroism. On March 5, 1864, less than eight months after the riots, a massive audience witnessed New York’s first regiment of African American troops being presented its official colors at the ULC clubhouse. In a powerfully symbolic gesture repudiating racism and any notion that African American soldiers represented a threat to either white manhood or white womanhood, 135 mothers, wives, and sisters of ULC members signed an address to the regiment: “The daughters of this great metropolis” acknowledged their “brave champions in the field” who “they will anxiously watch … glorying in your heroism, ministering to you when wounded and ill, and honoring your martyrdom with benedictions and with tears.” John Jay’s wife, his recently married daughter Mary Jay Schieffelin, and his youngest daughter Anna, as well as another Miss Jay (perhaps his daughter Augusta), numbered among the signatories. The gesture affirmed that abolitionism and racial dignity remained family-wide commitments.⁶⁶ The club’s very public role in the raising of these regiments underscored the privileged position of its members and their families, as private citizens presuming to ritually confer the honor of national service on men risking death for their own good reasons.

The celebration of Black military service by elites at the clubhouse and other citizens in the streets also represented a powerful rejection of the racism that so often prevailed. Leading African American New Yorkers were on the rostrum of March 5 at the ceremony honoring the first Black regiment. The New York Herald venomously commented on the white “daughters of Fifth Avenue” extending their blessing to Black soldiers, thereby, from an antislavery perspective, proving the very necessity of such symbolism. Three weeks after the event, John Jay himself had the honor of addressing the second African American regiment mustered in a single month with the help of the ULC (see Figure 12).

Reversing racism mattered to the unionist organization. The private white club challenged the segregation of the city’s railroads, initiating a pro bono suit on behalf of a Black military widow who had been removed from a railcar. Publicity from the case drove city rail lines to revoke their policies of maintaining segregated cars.⁶⁷ John Jay must have found it enormously gratifying, indeed vindicating, to see antiracist activism become part of the mission of this signature elite organization. Attracting racist contempt for advocating African American rights had long been a part of the family’s abolitionist experience. But now their class peers were in step with the Jays.

And yet John Jay was far too energetic, anxious, and cantankerous—and the Union’s fate far too dependent on yet unresolved military and political events—to bask in redemptive moments. His son remained in the army, the young officer expressing a determination to see the war through to the end. As the Union Army sought some way to pin down General Lee and destroy the rebellion, William dismissed the notion that he had served long enough to justify leaving the war behind. Yet his letters conveyed the grimness of a lengthy war that produced huge casualty numbers. He also expressed a low opinion of how the administration in Washington conducted the war and the pressing need for more troops.⁶⁸

The 1864 presidential campaign tied Jay into knots but in the end gave him the opportunity to carry the banner for the ULC’s nationalist vision. Lincoln’s reelection was neither a foregone conclusion nor deemed universally desirable among abolitionists, some of whom questioned whether Lincoln was sufficiently committed and capable of leading the transition from mass emancipation to permanent, irreversible abolition. Jay’s concerns were at once practical and eccentric, as he worried far more about whether conservatives would support the Republican ticket than whether radicals would. He became convinced that declaring that the war was for the express purpose of destroying slavery, as Lincoln wished to do, would precipitate a dangerous hemorrhage in support. Now that the Lincoln campaign had committed itself to Jay’s abolitionist goals, he was curiously reluctant to acknowledge the victory. That Jay should insist on a cautious position on declaring abolition as a war aim struck George Templeton Strong as both ironic and emblematic of Jay’s difficult personality. A more charitable explanation would be that Jay so feared the disastrous implications of a Lincoln defeat that he wished the campaign to play as safe and noncontroversial hand as possible. And yet, according to Strong, even after a vastly improved military situation shored up Lincoln’s reelection bid, Jay continued to wonder whether the ULC should back the Republican ticket, a stance Strong attributed to “some inscrutable, mysterious law of his factious nature.”⁶⁹

His erratic expressions during the presidential campaign notwithstanding, Jay came around to proclaiming the epochal significance of the 1864 election, embracing both nationalism and emancipation. Days before the election, Jay delivered a speech to the Union Campaign Club of East Brooklyn that elevated defeat of the Democrats to a historical significance that surpassed that of the American Revolution. Jay claimed that northern voters would not only save the republic but also determine “in large measure the future of christendom” with their ballots. “The Great Issue” at stake in the war and therefore the impending election was the global survival of republican government against a phalanx of enemies—a “grand conspiracy”—north and south, foreign and domestic. Invoking at the outset George Washington’s dramatic fog-shrouded retreat from Brooklyn in 1776 to solemnize the location of his speech, Jay pivoted to the optimistic offensive. On the eve of the election it was not fog but sunshine that marked the nation’s current path—as a people enlightened by “free schools, free speech and a free press” had overmatched the republic’s enemies. Prosperity spreading to the continent’s interior validated the freedom that Jay claimed as the core identity of the “Imperial Republic.”⁷⁰

To his preelection Brooklyn audience, Jay avowed abolition—and Black humanity—as expressions of American freedom. Drawing on the unhealed scars of the 1863 draft riots, Jay recalled the “pro-slavery” northerners who “burned an asylum for colored orphans” and “hung negroes with brutalities never exceeded by a Parisian mob” during the French Revolution. By contrast, wartime emancipation had not only proven safe but also contributed “to the glory the prestige, the power and the perpetuity of the American Republic.” The war provided a platform for the formerly enslaved to showcase their own civic devotion: “Their heroism, again and again, has saved the honour of our flag, and the lives of our friends and kinsmen.” The memory of these deeds would live on, he asserted.⁷¹

The blunders of southern slaveholders had, in this telling, unlocked the nation’s destiny. Four years before, on the eve of the 1860 election, Jay portrayed Republican victory as the historic realization of abolitionist history. In 1864, emancipation was the realization of American history. From such heights, his rivals, as well as his own political fears, looked small-minded.

In the wake of Lincoln’s electoral victory, John Jay knew that there remained very specific types of work to be done. When Chief Justice Roger Taney died in October 1864, the bogeyman of a second Dred Scott decision reversing all the wartime gains of emancipation diminished. Jay felt strongly that Lincoln should appoint Salman Chase, who departed from Lincoln’s cabinet that summer, to Taney’s former position on the Supreme Court, which the president ultimately did on December 6.⁷²

With Lincoln’s reelection, Jay also understood clearly what the abolitionist endgame must be—a Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution abolishing slavery once and for all. As he wrote Sumner on November 21, “I regard this step as the one most important for us to secure immediately.” Jay publicly shared his broader vision in December at the victory celebration at the East Brooklyn Union Campaign Club. The southern rebellion had provided “a more perfect union, a more intense nationality, and universal freedom,” while demonstrating “that that Constitution, in its wonderful adaptability, is as well fitted for war as for peace.” In peace, the nation could exchange “free homesteads” for the soon to be defunct “slave plantations.” “Let the nation be true to itself,” and then the “flag of freedom” would become “the fitting emblem of the Star of Empire.”⁷³ As Union victory approached, Jay had fully merged his nationalism with his abolitionism.

Witness

To secure America’s grand and great future in the waning months of the war, the ULC dispatched John Jay to Washington as part of a committee to lobby both for the Thirteenth Amendment and for the establishment of a federal bureau for educating and safeguarding the rights of freedmen. This mission became one of witness. Jay and six colleagues were present on the day the House of Representatives approved the constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. Following up on a brief telegram it sent to New York City moments after the congressional vote, the committee composed a dramatic and detailed report of the historic congressional vote.

The committee’s account bore Jay’s mark: it was a personal history making this moment of collective abolitionist triumph as also one of family vindication. In surveying the gallery of onlookers, the report delighted at the attendance of foreign diplomats whose alleged plotting to destroy the republic, a Jay fixation, had come to naught. An imaginative reconstruction of the “historic recollections that crowded upon the thoughts of the spectators” included many pivotal moments from the Missouri Compromise to the gag rule to the fiasco of Bleeding Kansas. The audience also “recalled” the 1827 debate over abolition of the slave trade in the nation’s capital, prompted by the attempted sale of a Westchester County free Black man named Gilbert Horton; the report’s one and only footnote reminded readers that it was “the late Hon. William Jay” who had originally taken up Horton’s cause. The most consistent historical actor through the decades and into the Civil War, according to the report, were not abolitionists or politicians, but rather “the Slave Power,” whose memory haunted the chamber still. And so it was that the almost unreal moment arrived when the Slave Power was to be vanquished by a congressional vote on an amendment to the Constitution.

The final tally, in which enough Democrats joined their Republican colleagues to produce the necessary two-thirds majority, was met first by silence and then by joyful celebration: “From floor and galleries burst a simultaneous shout of joy, spontaneous, irrepressible, and uncontrollable,” the ULC representatives recorded. The moment had a special historical intimacy. In the ULC delegation’s telling, Congress had completed the work of the founding fathers. The amendment attached the “anti-slavery views” of “the framers of the Constitution” and thus “brought as it were face to face, the past and the present.”⁷⁴

Abolition’s vindication helped renew Jay’s sense of his own historic standing and personal embodiment of a noble if disrupted legacy. Yet his political wounds had not healed. Sometime in the spring of 1865, a year after shelving his bitter letter to Sumner, Jay revisited his personal grievances, penning a new draft reviewing the facts of how the radical Massachusetts senator had allegedly assisted “the pro-slavery opponents of the Republican party in New York in their persistent Efforts to exclude me from all recognition.” Jay connected the dots between Seward and his allies allegedly helping elect the Copperhead Democrat Seymour, the humiliation of the attempted removal of his father’s courthouse portrait, and the prolongation of the war itself. In an effort to justify his paranoia that only made him sound more so, he quoted an 1862 letter from his longtime political friend and now fellow ULC member Hiram Barney. Barney juxtaposed what Jay had “done & suffered for humanity” with “the petty infamous persecution … from certain men who have been abetted & encouraged in their misconduct by the first administration” embracing “the views which you & your family have” championed.⁷⁵ Amid the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, amid the triumph of abolition and the Union, Jay could not shake grievances born of principle and privilege.

Still, the fact remained that John Jay II—unlike his grandfather, his father, or his uncle and unlike earlier generations of enslaved members of the household—had lived to see those antislavery principles triumphant. The scion of the founding had been granted the rare privilege of watching a signal moment in the history of abolition unfold before his very eyes. His Civil War commentaries, public and private, had been prescient, impassioned, but paranoid. The conflict allowed him to reunite a vision of the nation’s ascendant destiny with his family’s legacy. At age forty-eight, he was well positioned to represent a revived class of elite reformers who intended to make a mark on a reconstituted republic now free from slavery but still morally obligated to the formerly enslaved. Reconstruction presented an opportunity to assert his leadership anew, to advance racial equality, and to reap the rewards of his own steadfastness.