Requiem for a Reformer

Peter Augustus Jay’s death on February 20, 1843, served as a reminder that servitude and service, slavery and race, remained at the heart of the Jay identity, even in the more cautious branch of the family headed by the older of John Jay’s two sons. Prominent white legal colleagues and leading Black New Yorkers marked the passing of the well-connected corporate attorney and philanthropist who had stuck with the New-York Manumission Society long after it had drifted to the margins of antislavery activism. A week after his death, a group of Black admirers convened at the Philomathean Hall, where African Americans met to discuss intellectual and political issues, to commemorate his life. The gathering produced a resolution noting Peter Augustus Jay’s “early and unremitted exertions in the Manumission Society,” as well as “his interest in our educational and religious advancement.” The resolution labeled him “a benefactor of our despised race.” Boston Crummell was among those selected to convey the resolution to Peter’s family, apparently not placing any blame on the trustee of the General Theological Seminary for his son Alexander’s travails. Peter Augustus had been an old school elite patron of New York’s African Americans, who had not made the transition to the more provocative brand of abolitionist advocacy. Nonetheless, this patrician’s years of service to the NYMS, his role as a legislative advocate, and his heroic defense of Black voting rights at the Constitutional Convention of 1821 earned the respect of Black New Yorkers.⁶ In passing along their condolences to Peter’s family, these African American citizens also implicitly reminded the next generation of Jays that their obligations of charity and justice continued.

In death, Peter Augustus Jay made a personal gesture in keeping with the family’s long-standing paternalism toward select former bondspeople. His will, written less than a year before he died, included a stipulation to “give to Caesar Valentine, a black man long a servant in my family an annuity of forty eight dollars a year during his life.” Peter further sought to maintain this multigenerational chain of obligation by stating, “I request my children not to let him suffer if through age or infirmity he should be unable to support himself with comfort.” A $48 annuity was neither a great nor a trivial sum. He granted another long-time employee, Giles Green, $250 in outright cash. Depending on how long Caesar lived, his annuity might add up to a few hundred dollars as well. Caesar, however, had no direct control over his inheritance, no ability to pass along anything other than what he might save to anyone else. The obligation and the payments to Caesar may not have lasted long. There is no record of C. Valentine in Westchester County in the 1850 census, nor did the household of John Clarkson Jay, Peter’s son who inherited the Rye estate, contain anyone who resembled his description.⁷

Peter’s request that his children collectively look after Caesar’s well-being as he aged carried forward a family tradition inculcated by his father John Jay. Slavery had not become an abstraction or a distant evil but rather remained an ongoing legacy. History required personal accountings based on long-standing hierarchical and ethical assumptions.

William Jay marked Peter’s passing by making a gift that threaded together family, slavery, and his brother’s commitment to the preservation of New York’s history. One of Peter’s civic projects had been the New-York Historical Society. Peter had presided over the organization, helped secure it a permanent home, and donated to its collections. A month after his brother’s death William transferred to the Historical Society four thousand pages of recent parliamentary documents on the slave trade and slavery. In transmitting the documents to the Historical Society, William could not resist driving home his own views on abolition. His missive accompanying the documents celebrated the success of emancipation in the West Indies, seeing it as proof that immediate abolitionism was far superior to gradual abolition.⁸ As he pressed on with his own life’s work, William wanted his brother’s elite former colleagues to take heed that the family’s abolitionist commitments lived on.

War and Peace

Like his older brother Peter Augustus, William Jay had never been content to focus his reform energies solely on slavery. In the early 1840s, William opened a new chapter in his activist career by embracing the cause of international peace. Peace advocacy held an almost natural attraction to William. He was the son of one of the founding era’s foremost diplomats, he was a skeptic of war dating at least as far back as the 1812 clash with Great Britain, and he was a critic of dueling on moral grounds. The judge’s legal expertise and the diplomatic controversies stirred by the Amistad and later the Creole affairs may have further prompted him to pursue this interest. Antislavery and peace advocacy had long shared transatlantic networks into which Jay tapped. By 1842, Jay was not only an officer in the American Peace Society (APS) but also the author of War and Peace: The Evils of the First and a Plan for Preserving the Last, a treatise on how to end war between nations.

Peace advocacy complemented, rather than diverted, Jay from his antislavery work. Indeed, similar assumptions guided Jay’s approach to both peace and abolition. He sought to foster moral transformation outside of corrupted government structures without denying that states legitimately constituted the ongoing framework of law and society. In confronting the problem of war and peace, he wrestled with the same paradoxes presented to him as an abolitionist in the 1840s regarding the necessity and the folly of relying on public opinion. The success of British abolitionism made advancement toward a peaceful international system seem more plausible. British abolitionists had won without “armies” or bloodshed; “solely by the exhibition of truth,” a “glorious triumph of humanity” came to pass.⁹

Personal contacts with British reformers helped draw Jay into peace advocacy. Jay and Anglican minister Thomas Pyne, who would become a leading British peace promoter, had a cordial relationship and mutual reform interests. Pyne channeled publications relating to peace to Jay, explaining in July 1839 that “they who are devoted heart & fortune to the abolition of slavery must necessarily be friends of Peace.” Jay, in a December 1839 letter seeking to enlist Pyne in the struggle against racism in the Episcopal Church, affirmed, “It is the part of true patriotism to avoid not invite the horrors of war.” When Quaker and prominent English reformer Joseph Sturge visited Bedford in May 1841, William shared a manuscript he had written, “On the Folly and Evils of War,” in which he proposed the use of arbitration agreements between nations. The Englishman regarded Jay’s proposal as “beautifully simple, and of easy application.” Sturge returned to England determined to make Jay’s idea a centerpiece of a growing and more organized movement. A revised version of the full argument would find a publisher in New York and, with Sturge’s help, in London in 1842, the same year William became a vice president of the APS.¹⁰

By becoming active in the APS, Jay once again planted himself on the opposite side of a schism with the Garrisonians and implicitly sought to reclaim another epochal goal, the abolition of war, from the anti-institutionalism of more radical activists. The Garrisonian-minded advocates of pacifism had already defected from the APS in 1838, so Jay was not saddled with the need to battle them internally. Jay rejected the nonresistance creed both in his abolitionism and his peace advocacy. To Judge Jay’s mind, the personal “right of self-defence,” the need to arrest criminals and pirates, and the “right indispensable to the very existence of civil government of enforcing obedience to the laws” need not be argued. The path to world peace lay in fostering a new set of relationships between states that possessed domestic authority.¹¹

Jay envisioned a sort of virtuous domino theory, with the United States knocking over the props of war by entering into treaties to resolve all conflicts through arbitration, rather than fighting. As nations gradually signed on to agreements with one another, the momentum would build for the creation of an international court. All of “Christendom,” perhaps Europe first but South America as well, would be drawn into a peaceful “alliance” with the United States. Over time, the threads of bilateral agreements for peaceful arbitration would become a web of international conflict resolution that would banish war.¹²

Some of Jay’s arguments against war paralleled objections to slavery and the slave trade. War ripped families apart and exposed young men to vice. Militarism, like slavery and proslavery politics, undermined republics, because “war is in its nature adverse to political freedom,” it “strengthen[s] arbitrary power,” and it encourages “malignant passions” as well as “fraud and crime.”¹³ In essence, militarism combined features of the gag rule, Andrew Jackson’s denunciation of abolitionist publicity, and the anti-abolitionist mobs of northern cities—all of which Jay despised.

The existence of slavery complicated what Sturge had called Jay’s “beautifully simple” plan. Slavery illustrated why politicians could not be trusted: slaveholding interests threatened to light the fire of war, and slave resistance brought nations into conflict. Abolishing war required abolishing slavery. Jay proclaimed in his peace treatise that the United States stood poised for the “glory of teaching to mankind the blessings of peace and the means of securing them,” but elsewhere in his essay, he showed that the nation’s divisions placed this future citadel of peace at odds with itself. Slavery discredited his own government, as Jay pointed out: “Perhaps the most sublimated wickedness and baseness in degree” at the moment are “practised in the city of Washington” where Black people merely suspected as runaways were jailed and then sold “to pay their jail fees!!” The alleged honor of the country and its flag induced the US government to undermine the British-led transatlantic alliance against the slave trade by refusing to allow its ships to be searched, in effect making it possible for illegal slavers from any country to gain protection by flying the Stars and Stripes. Jay scornfully commented, “Such is national honor, the safeguard of nations, and, for the maintenance of which, national slaughter is indispensable!”¹⁴

The Creole rebellion provided another example of how slavery drew the United States toward war rather than peace. “Millions” of slavery’s American defenders rattled sabers over British “oppression” when the return of the formerly enslaved cargo was not forthcoming. Jay even imagined an American strike on the British West Indies bringing a liberating Black army from the Caribbean to the South, “kindling a conflagration” of devastating proportions.¹⁵ Slavery was clearly at odds with peacemaking.

As with abolitionism, Jay’s skepticism about democratic culture stood in tension with his hope that it would force the hand of government to pursue more moral policies. Jay’s proposal for abolishing all international warfare centered on the negotiation of diplomats functioning in a system of states. Ordinary people, Jay believed, had to hold their leaders’ feet to the fire to ensure they would comply with their treaty obligations. In the current age, “the progress of education and the power of the press, enables every individual to sit in judgment on the conduct of his rulers.” The people’s voice would complement the evolving world system’s desire to enforce international agreements. War, like the slave trade and the trade in strong drink, would therefore be driven from the world by “voluntary associations, the pulpit, and the press.”¹⁶ Moral individuals working together would redirect the state—with the power of moral suasion transforming the international order in a way that had, to date, failed in terms of slavery.

Jay’s essay on slavery made a splash in Britain but drew criticism at home in the United States. The London Peace Society produced four thousand copies of War and Peace for the 1842 Conference of the Friends of Peace. In contrast, the Boston Quarterly Review, a pro-Democratic Party journal, dismissed Jay’s effort with undisguised condescension and contempt. Jay should be seen as “much better fitted for the moon than for the earth.” Anyone who preached such doctrines when the nation was under risk of war, “why, up with him to the lamp-post” to be hung like a “traitor.” “It is better to fight, to kill or be killed on the battle-field, than to live and die a slave,” claimed the reviewer without irony—in essence, confirming Jay’s belief that peace reform and slavery were at odds.¹⁷

Like his embrace of immediatism, his pursuit of world peace forced William Jay to implicitly challenge his father’s more conventional legacy. Indeed, in some ways, his peace advocacy challenged his father’s assumptions about the world more than his abolitionism did. John Jay had argued well into retirement for the legal and practical necessity of “just” war. William Jay also was well aware that the American Revolution had embedded the defense of war in the American psyche. Seeing no way around this conundrum, William frankly admitted the death, destruction, degraded morals, and even “despotic” powers of “our fathers,” before making the argument that the colonies could have purchased their freedom at a much lower price than what that which the Revolutionary War had imposed on them.¹⁸ A commitment to moral reform had once again made this conservative man a radical thinker.

Caste, Convention, and Come-Outerism

The hierarchy of the Protestant Episcopal Church would have dearly loved if the Jays had been more radical, renouncing their affiliation, and coming out of the church entirely. Instead, William and John II continued to belong while loudly and disruptively insisting that racism and slavery needed to be excised from the church. The Jays, part of a tiny minority of abolitionist leaders connected to the Episcopal Church, would not forget, forgive, or leave. In refusing to come out of their church, the Jays conducted a lonely but loud fight over its soul. No two white people did more to implicate the Episcopal Church for its racial sins that William Jay and John Jay II.¹⁹

In the 1840s, William Jay deployed increasingly inflammatory rhetoric. An 1843 letter titled “Reply to a Letter from a Clergymen of the Episcopal Church” and published in NASS declared, “The southern conscience is diseased by self-interest, by habit, by example, and by” bad ministers. Jay directly addressed one of the standard canards against emancipation offered by slavery’s defenders—intermarriage or so-called amalgamation: “If white fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters prefer such marriages, I know no law of God that forbids them to gratify their eccentric tastes.” He went on, “But surely,” fear of racial mixing “is a strange reason for keeping millions of human beings in bondage” until the end of time, especially given the prevalence of the practice under slavery itself.²⁰ Rather than retreat from the racially charged rhetoric that anti-abolitionists had long deployed, he turned that rhetoric back against his church to mock distinctions of color.

Still rankled by Alexander Crummell’s ill treatment, John Jay II engaged in criticism of the church that also grew more sweeping and intense over time. In 1843, writing as “A Churchman,” the young attorney published a fifty-one-page pamphlet titled Caste and Slavery in the American Church that amplified the family’s concerns. “Every act of clerical inconsistency, every crouching to an unholy prejudice, will be apt to reflect their own dishonor upon the Church at large,” wrote John. Status did not elevate racism. Whether espoused by “a lawless gang of shirtless ruffians” or prestigious clergy, “prejudice against colour” required denunciation. Once admitted into the church, the caste principle locked arms with the chattel principle, making it permissible to purchase slaves to sustain charitable projects while leaving those slaves languishing in spiritual ignorance. The church’s subordination to slavery thus made “divine truth and eternal principle” seem “chamelion-like.” The church had much work to do to “vindicate the purity of our Holy Faith.”²¹

Discrimination against St. Philip’s, an African American parish in Manhattan, by New York State’s Episcopal Diocese gave John Jay II a specific cause to fight for in his effort to “vindicate” the family faith. New York City’s first Black Episcopal church had a long, paradox-ridden history with the church hierarchy. African American Episcopalians first started worshipping separately from Trinity Church in 1809. It took a decade for Black worshippers to secure funding for their own church building, recognition as a separate parish, and approval from the Episcopal Church to set in motion the ordination of a priest, Peter Williams Jr. He would not receive formal ordination until 1826. The autonomy of St. Philip’s parish, however, came at a price. New York bishop John Henry Hobart exchanged his patronage for a promise from Williams that the Black parish would never seek to participate in the state’s diocesan convention. St. Philip’s developed its practices along High Church lines favored by New York’s Episcopal bishops rather than the less liturgically august, less clerically deferential Low Church views favored by the Jays. St. Philip’s historic alliance with New York’s bishops made it wrenching for members of the congregation to bear witness to the indignities of discrimination within the Episcopal Church. Toward the end of his life, Williams began to reconsider the parish’s exclusion from diocesan representation. Black churchmen, however, did not contest this problem in earnest until well after Peter Williams Jr. passed away in 1840.²²

John Jay II made the first dramatic public attempt to force the issue of inclusion at the New York Episcopal Church’s 1844 annual diocesan meeting. From the floor, he moved that the committee charged with admitting new parishes probe why St. Philip’s did not have a place at the convention. He made this motion using the most inflammatory term possible, labeling the exclusion of St. Philip’s as “a state of schism.” In other words, the arrangement was not an oversight but a division that in essence sinfully destroyed the spiritual unity of the Episcopal Church. Bishop Benjamin Onderdonk, the presiding officer, dismissed the motion as not following proper procedure.²³ Stymied at the convention, Jay took advantage of Onderdonk’s personal vulnerability to undermine the bishop’s authority by stoking the flames of sexual scandal.

According to Bishop Onderdonk, John Jay and a colleague from South Carolina trolled for testimony of rumored sexual misconduct and fed what they found to his eager clerical rivals in autumn 1844. A leading supporter of High Church views sympathetic to the Catholic-sounding Oxford movement tracts produced by members of the English church, Onderdonk had his enemies. He therefore claimed that false or misleading accusations of his penchant for fondling churchwomen served as a stalking horse for religious opinions that some of his colleagues viewed with disfavor. Be that as it may, the 330-page published transcript of the December trial conducted by the Episcopal Church detailed the bishop’s serial groping of unsuspecting women. His peers ruled 11–6 that the charges of inappropriate sexual advances had merit. In a 9–8 vote, the bishops also approved an open-ended suspension for the wayward cleric.²⁴

John Jay reveled in his role as part of the team that had laid Bishop Onderdonk low, but New York’s African America Episcopalians were divided over whether his suspension advanced their cause. The official response of the St. Philip’s vestry to Onderdonk’s precarious situation was one of sympathy: because “we do not know aught of the truth of the charges,” the vestrymen expressed “profound and overwhelming grief” that at least for the moment they would lose “the public services of our shepherd.” The vestry evoked their own dignity and striving for equality by extending Christian charity to the bishop, perhaps hoping to secure future support from Onderdonk should his suspension be lifted.²⁵

Other Black Episcopalians forthrightly seized on the opportunity to define Onderdonk’s humiliation as a blow for racial justice. In a letter by “A COLORED EPISCOPALIAN” printed in NASS argued that once Onderdonk became a bishop he ceased to be a friend of St. Philip’s, undermining Peter Williams Jr., rejecting Alexander Crummell, and now unfairly attacking the illustrious John Jay II. The Onderdonk brothers, former Philadelphia bishop Henry Onderdonk and Benjamin, would “go down to all future times as deep, inveterate, determined negro haters.”²⁶

A group of thirty-three Black New Yorkers, including Boston Crummell, signed their own published letter rejecting the notion that Jay’s intervention on St. Philip’s behalf was unwanted and stating how pleased they were that Jay had joined them in the fight against “Caste in the Church.” They “hail[ed] the glorious fact of a young man of your name and character, your advantages and prospects, closing your ears to the enticements of popularity, and calmly choosing the almost deserted pathway of philanthropy and freedom”; furthermore, they paid tribute to the Jay family’s antislavery lineage. Connecting the dots between Onderdonk’s fall, Jay’s pedigreed antislavery advocacy, and agitation for equal rights within the church made more sense to these African Americans than currying the suspended bishop’s favor.

Jay’s accompanying response published in the NASS warmed to the praise and the opportunity to connect dots of his own. Soaring above Onderdonk’s sordid sins, the young white lawyer sermonized on the way forward for African Americans. He sided with those African Americans who favored confrontation with the church hierarchy over conciliation as part of a broader strategy to combat racism. Not only the church but also “scientific pretenders endeavor to prove by the aid of philosophy, that you are irrevocably destined to an inferior position.” Complacency in the face of such religious and scientific libel would make African Americans “involuntary apologists and abettors of the wrongs” they suffered. “The duty rests upon you to vindicate the dignity of your race and the honor of your Creator; to disprove the bold slander,” declared Jay. His Black partners, however, should fight on, knowing that “the great and the good” were on their side.²⁷

Jay, however, failed to convince St. Philip’s or the Episcopal Diocese of New York to fully back his confrontational approach to Onderdonk or to approve racial integration of the convention. In preparation for the 1845 diocesan convention, St. Philip’s vestry instructed a delegation to apply for admission. The vestry, however, also voted 7–1 that these representatives should oppose calls to turn Onderdonk’s suspension into a full resignation; Jay, for his part, sought to beat back any attempt to rehabilitate Onderdonk.²⁸

The 1846 New York convention adopted a bureaucratic approach, rather than pure stonewalling, to deal with St. Philip’s renewed application: it empaneled a five-man committee to report on the subject of Black churches. Two documents emerged, a majority report backed by three men defending the racial status quo and a minority report endorsed by two recommending that the convention cease to use color to justify St. Philip’s unusual separation from the main body of the church. The majority report repudiated Jay’s antiracist position. Because the “intelligent, refined, and elevated” diocesan representatives did not socially mingle with the “ignorant, coarse and debased,” they should not suffer “amalgamation of such discordant materials” in their religious deliberations.²⁹

The battles against Onderdonk and on behalf of St. Philip’s were nested in a larger national and international struggle for the soul of their church. In 1846, William charged that the Episcopal Church “virtually suppressed” the English bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce’s lengthy A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America because it included passages critical of slavery and racism. William also aggressively denounced North Carolina bishop Silliman Ives in a December 1846 essay, after Ives dared to contradict the English bishop’s critique of the American church. Jay regarded any spiritual offices that southern slaveholders offered their bondspeople worse than inadequate. What good were Good Friday or Easter services to a slave who could be sold the next day? What inspiration could slaves draw from a religion in which their marriages did not count and they were treated as inferior beings required to labor for others? The Episcopal Church, William Jay worried, had ceded the moral high ground with “pastoral admonitions against dancing, and sermons in abundance in favor of human bondage.”³⁰

While Jay cared deeply about the battle for the soul of the Episcopal Church, he was also troubled by the collateral damage to the moral health of society at large. Religious hypocrisy over slavery and race, asserted Jay, empowered free-thinking anti-Christian radicals to make their bid for the public’s approval. Such “infidel philanthropy” based on “wild abstract political theories” would foster “anarchy and misery.” The monstrosity of slavery thus threatened to unravel the entire social fabric of both the North and South. Come-outerism and even renunciation of religion entirely were clear and present dangers posed by his church’s continued failings.³¹

The intensity of the Jays’ activism within the Episcopal Church expressed, particularly for William, a need to square social conservatism and family identity with antislavery politics and antiracist beliefs. William revealed his personal motivations for remaining attached to such a flawed religious institution in an unusually frank six-and-a-half-page letter to Salmon Chase in May 1846. The rising Ohio politician had expressed doubt as to whether he could remain an Episcopalian given the church’s abysmal record on questions of race and slavery. Jay expressed how his own commitment to the church was akin to that of marriage: “I still love her from my heart, because I believe that … she is the most pure and scriptural church in Christendom.” A break with the church was, for Jay, a form of personal infidelity, an act of unfaithfulness.

To persuade Chase not to leave the Episcopal Church, the New Yorker disputed the very notion that there were any “proslavery churches” to come out of. No church, and certainly not the Episcopal Church, required “a profession of faith in the lawfulness of human bondage.” What the come-outers advocated, charged Jay, was something that never did nor could ever exist: a “pure church.” Such perfectionism was bound to turn in on itself, because sins other than slaveholding would still abound. The demand for “a perfect church” would lead to the end of all “public worship,” producing rather than undermining religious infidelity. One could denounce or boycott a “heretical” proslavery minister. Yet a minister who simply remained silent on slavery was unoffending, especially to a committed abolitionist who had no “need” to hear what he already knew.³²

Ultimately, Jay implied that the come-outers had everything backward. “Paradoxical as it may seem, the corruptions endangering our church” explain “why we should not desert her.” The Episcopal Church played a powerful role in American life. An abolitionist walkout would ensure that the church’s “influence” would be all to the bad. Abolitionists in the church ensured that its message would be “broken & discordant,” not uniformly proslavery, and kept alive the possibility of turning toward a more righteous path. By contrast, “the slave holders would rejoice” if men like Jay and Chase left. Jay exhorted, “Let us … strive valiantly for the truth, giving our Bishops & Clergy no peace while they side with the oppressor.”

Thus, Jay opted for voice over exit. He desired to perpetuate the faith of his father, much as he appreciated the faith of his son, who paid his tribute by investing so much of his own energy in challenging the church hierarchy over racism.³³

Partisan Politics and the Specter of Disunion

Intensifying battles against slavery and racism in the Episcopal Church during the mid-1840s took place alongside a series of political events that challenged the Jays, especially William, to find a fixed perspective on the nation’s future viability and to define their political obligations. The Jays sensed more deeply than ever that the politics of slavery threatened the survival of the nation with which the family identified so deeply. Thus, even as the Jays got drawn into the political fights within their church, antislavery politics became almost impossible to resist. William articulated clearly his complete aversion to come-outerism in religion, but he could not so readily dismiss its political analog, disunionism. Ironically, William became less skeptical of the importance of electoral politics because the survival of the nation seemed perilously dependent on political events.³⁴ Meanwhile, John, living in New York City, cast about for new alliances to give the Jay antislavery creed a practical footing.

Dismissal from his judicial post by Democratic governor Bouck provided William Jay with an opportunity to travel abroad and to broadly contemplate his country’s prospects for surviving slavery-driven politics. On November 1, 1843, William, his wife Augusta, and their daughters Maria and Augusta embarked aboard the Victoria on a trip that would take them to Europe and the Middle East.³⁵ He sensed that he was leaving a nation at a crossroads. In letters to Gerrit Smith written before his departure, Jay struggled to mute his combustible political analysis. He noted the current congressional agitation for Texas statehood; Jay wrote Smith, now a leading figure in the Liberty Party, that he would advocate “dissolution” of the Union in such an event. Conversely, if, through effective political organizing, including a concerted effort to make the major potential presidential candidates declare in advance their position on annexation, statehood for Texas were stymied, “the fate of slavery will be sealed” and the republic saved.

Having declared himself so openly to his well-connected abolitionist colleague, Jay soon thought the better of it. Ten days later, on October 31, when he was about to embark on his voyage, Jay dashed off a request that, if Smith wished to publish his letter, he leave off Jay’s name and some of his “reasons” for calling for political action. Jay did not wish to taint the Liberty Party or his own reputation with the sort of politically schismatic views advocated by Garrison and his band of ultraradicals.³⁶

The view from atop the great Egyptian pyramid of Giza on January 23, 1844, led William to counter his own apocalyptic musings with political determination. In a letter to Smith that made its way into the American abolitionist press five months later, Jay contemplated “a land for forty centuries cursed with Slavery.” Nature and history testified to God’s “wrath”—the desert sands sweeping over Egypt’s “magnificent structures” while the nation’s “energies have been crushed by foreign rulers; and her inhabitants wasted by pestilence.” But as he looked homeward from his perch, the abolitionist former judge affirmed that “while trembling for my country I here devote myself anew to the cause of American Abolition.”³⁷

Three weeks later, on the same sheet of paper, Jay continued his observations to Smith, also published later in the abolitionist press, on what American slavery politics looked like from abroad. Writing from Malta, Jay observed that neither American slavery nor American freedom fared well when compared to conditions in the Mediterranean. Jay judged southern Christian slaveholders to be crueler than Muslim Middle Eastern ones. Jay acerbically explained that “the Turks have among them no Bishops and Clergy … teaching them that Slavery is a divine institution” and noted that Islamic religious institutions did not practice a caste system to screen out color-coded undesirables. Moreover, “lynch law” did not prevail in the Middle East to teach lessons to slaves and abolitionists. Jay thought Egypt as safe as “a New England village.”

Travel, Jay indicated, had not dulled his edge or his determination. The fifty-four-year-old now felt “years younger.” He proclaimed himself ready “to mingle once more in the mighty host which is now battling in the cause of human rights.” He also congratulated Smith on the Liberty Party’s progress in New York. Upon reading a published version of William Jay’s overseas observations, rising Massachusetts public intellectual Charles Sumner wrote to John Jay II, “I rejoice that he has found new incentives.… The leisure with which he is blessed will ripen with fruits of transcendant good.”³⁸

In response to the expression of southern territorial ambitions that took place while his parents were abroad, John Jay II stepped up his own political activism. Successive secretaries of state, John C. Calhoun and Abel Upshur tried to engineer Texas’s admission to the Union via a treaty. This treaty approach set a high bar, requiring approval by two-thirds of the US Senate. John enlisted the venerable Albert Gallatin, who had served both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as secretary of the treasury, in the anti-Texas cause, seeking to publicize the eighty-three-year-old statesman’s views as widely as possible. In the face of this crisis, the Jay family’s anti-Jeffersonian bias melted away; the aged Gallatin served as the next best thing to a founding father in rebuking the Tyler administration’s attempt to bring Texas into the Union.³⁹

By the time William returned to America, the fate of Texas was bound up in the 1844 presidential contest. The failure of the Calhoun–Upshur gambit to bring Texas into the Union via a treaty served as a backdrop for an election with enormous consequences. Democrat James Polk avowed his commitment to territorial expansion, which would include finding some way to admit Texas to the Union as a slave state. The Whig nominee Henry Clay opposed annexation and the war with Mexico that would likely ensue.⁴⁰

William Jay, keeping faith with his promise made from the Mediterranean—to jump back into the abolitionist cause—focused his efforts on swaying the views of Whig vice presidential nominee Theodore Frelinghuysen. The New Jersey senator had a reputation as a religiously motivated moral reformer. Jay published an open letter to Frelinghuysen attempting to show that a mainstream politician with his moral commitments could in fact embrace abolitionist principles. Jay argued that because neither the American Anti-Slavery Society’s constitution nor the Liberty Party advocated that the federal government could preempt state laws allowing slavery, the reformer should not use that excuse for eschewing abolitionism. Frelinghuysen had stood up for temperance, Bible distribution, Sabbath observance, and foreign missions. Christians would therefore like to know, wrote Jay, “on what principles of ethics, or what precepts of the Gospel of Christ, you oppose the abolition of slavery.” Jay suspected that Frelinghuysen was at heart far closer to the kind of person who might someday proclaim, “I am an abolitionist, and thank God I am,” than he was to being a proslavery apologist. Although this line of attack against the Whig vice presidential candidate would not transform that ticket into an antislavery one, Jay made his point that Christian and antislavery politics should be morally aligned. By that logic, the Liberty Party, an avowed antislavery party, might also be made to seem less radical to reform-minded evangelicals.⁴¹

Indeed, Jay emphatically embraced the Liberty Party in 1844, running for a congressional seat in Westchester County under the party’s banner. This was a turnabout from his previous resistance to attempts to press him into this sort of symbolic run for office. As he explained to Gerrit Smith a year earlier, “My life is devoted to the slave not for office”; self-confessed as being “a very indifferent public speaker,” he wished to make a difference with his “pen,” not public appearances. Jay entered into the 1844 congressional campaign with studied modesty and realistically low expectations.⁴²

The fortunes of the Liberty Party in the election of 1844 provoked a conflicted response from Jay. The results in New York and nationally exposed the conundrum that he and his Liberty Party associates faced. As Jay knew would be the case, he was not elected. At the presidential level, his home county remained a Democratic one. The Liberty Party’s appeal elsewhere in the state, however, had a decisive impact on the presidential results. With thirty-six electoral college votes at stake in New York, the Liberty Party candidate James G. Birney’s 3.25 percent of the vote in the exceptionally close Empire State tally tipped this large Electoral College prize from the Whigs to the Democrat. Six of Birney’s largest county vote totals nationally were in New York, where some formerly Whig counties produced weak pluralities in favor of the Democratic Polk. With Polk’s victory in New York came the White House.⁴³

Jay sought to justify the Liberty Party’s uncompromised rejection of the major party candidates that had created the conditions for Polk’s hazardous victory. In a letter to Massachusetts Liberty Party state convention delegates, Jay defended the Liberty Party run as necessary, even though it abetted a looming disaster. He argued that a vote for Clay would have been just as “faithless to our avowed principles” as a vote for Polk. Clay’s demerits included his ownership of many slaves, his role in brokering the admission of slave states Missouri and Arkansas into the Union, his “repeatedly avowed hostility to emancipation, whether gradual or immediate,” and his membership in the American Colonization Society. The Democrat Polk, for his part, lacked even the advantage of Clay’s extensive record of public service and represented a party wholly subservient to the Slave Power. In contrast to such flawed parties, the Liberty Party stood on “principle”—and not merely as a “little knot of fanatics.” By tipping an election, the Liberty Party now stood “before the whole nation in a prominent and imposing attitude,” commanding attention.⁴⁴

Yet Jay conceded that there was no getting around the dire results likely to follow from Polk’s Liberty Party-enabled victory: the nation faced “calamity.” Democrats would surely do as their southern leaders demanded. They would support annexation of Texas “with the same childlike submission that they heretofore opened their jaws to receive the gag”—a vivid adaptation of the commonly metaphor for congressional rules against receiving antislavery petitions. Now “horrors” awaited. The humanitarian disaster of an intensifying interstate slave trade would be accompanied by the political disaster of Texas slaveholders benefiting from the US Constitution’s three-fifths clause to swell the slaveholding interest in Congress. “Cotton, sugar, and human flesh” would determine all US policies thereafter. Jay’s electoral analysis portended a vision of national moral collapse.⁴⁵

The next shoe that dropped, the annexation of Texas, pushed Jay to publicly proclaim his readiness to usher in that national political collapse. Just before handing the executive branch over to President-Elect Polk, President Tyler and his allies steered around the two-thirds Senate majority required to approve a treaty with Texas that would make the independent nation a US state. Instead, Texas entered the Union by a joint resolution approved by majorities of both houses of Congress. Under the heading “Annexation of Texas-Duties of the North,” the National Ant-Slavery Standard published Jay’s disunion manifesto, which blended constitutional analysis with prophesy and sectional retaliation.⁴⁶ The most important fact for Jay was that the joint resolution method was “a clear, deliberate, fraudulent, wicked, and irremediable violation of the Constitution.” By circumventing the treaty process required to acquire territory from a foreign country, the Republic of Texas, the US government opted for “treason,” pursuing a legislative strategy that delivered a “wound … to the Constitution [that] is utterly incurable.”

The result of unconstitutional annexation, as Jay had predicted privately, was the transformation of the Constitution into an instrument to spread slavery throughout the Americas. For all the document’s flawed legacies, as delineated in his own View of the Action of the Federal Government, this change profoundly undermined any hope of prodding the nation to abandon the institution. The North could no longer serve as a bulwark “against the cruelties and arrogance of the slaveholders” while slavery expanded. As the numbers of slaveholders inevitably grew, southerners would no longer need the political assistance of northern Democrats. The South by itself would have the votes to quash dissent, to make slaves of free people of color, and to ignore due process. Given the alacrity with which the slaveholding interest shunted aside the Constitution’s provisions and its presumptive neutrality on slavery in order to annex Texas, it was far more likely, in Jay’s estimation, that southerners would spread slavery northward than that northerners would engineer its national demise.

Jay couched disunion as the most peaceful alternative, but barely so. The Union, Jay thought, would break up sooner or later under these new conditions. He urged that the non-slaveholding states leave peaceably rather than through the civil war that would become inevitable if the sections remained together under a “mutilated” Constitution. Yet Jay’s proposed responses to the annexation of Texas seemed calculated to produce anything but an “amicable dissolution.” Because the constitutional bargain that both protected slavery and limited its national footprint no longer existed, he pointed out, “We are left at liberty, unrestrained by any constitutional provisions or acts of Congress, to war upon Slavery by every possible means not forbidden by the law of God.” This meant that northerners no longer had to abide by the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, which mandated that free states return runaway slaves. Even more provocatively (and long before Lincoln’s eye-for-an-eye response to the execution of Black federal soldiers during the Civil War) Jay called for hostage taking. Whenever southern states kidnapped free Black northerners and made them slaves, northerners should seize whites from those southern states until the wrongfully enslaved Blacks received “liberation and full compensation.” If Jay had come over to the Garrison camp of disunion, his logic did not adhere to the Garrisonian philosophy of nonresistance.⁴⁷

The case for a radical renegotiation of the American project gained much of its gravitas from Jay’s family legacy. Henry Bowditch, a Massachusetts abolitionist, shared his ostensibly private letter from Jay with a Boston newspaper, which the NASS reprinted. He introduced Jay’s essay by linking William to the founders, referring to the judge as “the well-known son of a well-known sire, John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States—the friend and adviser of Washington.” William’s essay may have sounded more like Tom Paine’s Common Sense than his father’s contributions to the Federalist Papers, but his paternal ties to the founding and the Constitution implied that he had not reached his conclusions without careful consideration.⁴⁸

Despite Jay’s powerful rhetoric, his deep ambivalence about endorsing disunionism subsequently played out both in public and in private. He wavered over how hopeless he considered the present circumstances to be. William wrote Chase that he felt obligated, when Bowditch solicited a reaction to Jay on annexation, to tell the truth about his position. Yet two months later, NASS printed a letter that Jay wrote to Chase suggesting that all was not lost and placing his hopes in moderate measures: “Probably the freedom, happiness, and continuance of our Union will depend on the events of the next twelve months.” Jay encouraged “discretion and firmness becoming men who feel that the dearest interests of themselves and their posterity are in jeopardy” as opposed to “intemperate declamation and impracticable resolves.” Even so, the following month, Jay wrote a letter to Chase criticizing the logic by which the Ohio lawyer and abolitionist attempted to put the onus on the South for splitting up the country. In the wake of annexation, Jay insisted that any attempt to construe the Constitution as an antislavery document had become “practically impossible so long as the Union shall continue.” Jay’s self-described “gloomy” analysis was that “Liberty, or any other party” would not succeed in stripping the “power” of those who held slaves and that “the American Union will become more & more a mighty instrument of oppression corruption & human misery.” By the end of this letter, however, William seemed to have talked himself into a more resolute pose, expressed by a piquant metaphor: “Infidels & Demagogues, like dead fish, float with the stream—let us breast the current, & bravely struggle for our country & our God.”⁴⁹

Despite his ambivalence, Jay’s expectations for disunion were sincere and difficult for him to shake. His letters to British abolitionist icon Thomas Clarkson, whom Jay had met during his recent trip overseas, struck somber notes. In February 1846, Jay dampened the aged Clarkson’s prediction of slavery’s ultimate demise by citing the power of the Texas annexation to extend the institution with still more “conquests.” The best the American offered was that in the long run slavery “may exhaust itself—that the slaves will become so numerous as to be both dangerous & unprofitable.” Six months later, with the US–Mexico war underway, Jay indicated that he and Clarkson’s mutual attachment to the cause of peace had suffered another blow. Whatever slavery’s long-run future, Jay’s was pessimistic about the future of the United States: “I have little faith in the permanence of the present Union,” even though he admitted that “there are no indications of its speedy dissolution.”

On the bright side, one of the drivers of dissolution was a strengthened northern antislavery moral resolve. Jay reported to Clarkson, “At the north Anti-Slavery feeling is consistently gaining strength, & particularly in the Churches.” Still, he wrote, “The American Republic under its present organization is devoted to the protection, extension, & perpetuity of human bondage.” William predicted to Clarkson “that our sins will find us out, that as a nation we shall receive the punishment so richly merited.”⁵⁰ Ancient Egypt’s demise might yet prove prophetic, with the nation buried under the sands of iniquity.

Mexico

That in the immediate term it was Mexico, not the United States, that suffered a national cataclysm did not comfort William Jay in the least. The Polk administration contrived to provoke hostilities along Texas’s disputed southern border to launch a war of conquest in May 1846. As the nation was sacrificing its reputation and honor by brutally invading Mexico to fulfill territorial ambitions stoked in part by slaveholding interests, northern politicians who supported the war had to justify their position. Massachusetts congressman Robert C. Winthrop tried to appropriate revered founding father John Jay to rationalize his own support for the ongoing war, citing the elder Jay’s grudging acceptance of the War of 1812.

In response, William Jay once again felt compelled to defend the Jay family’s historic honor and reputation. He rhetorically thrashed Winthrop for defending an unjust cause, explaining in a published letter that Winthrop’s analogy was deeply flawed. John Jay had recognized the need to defend the young nation against the world’s foremost military power. By contrast, the United States was battering a very weak Mexican Army for the transparent motives of grabbing land and extending slavery. Asserted William, the founder’s “reverence for truth, his sense of moral obligation, his habitual remembrance of his accountability to his Maker, would have led him, under existing circumstances, to take a path widely diverging from” Winthrop’s. History provided no cover for a politician unwilling to stand up against injustice.⁵¹

As the Jays well knew, the Mexican War generated possibilities for political innovation, as well as moral fecklessness. Distant battlefield victories portended acquisition of huge amounts of territory in the West, not just an expanded Texas but also the Mexican frontier provinces of New Mexico and California. In August 1846, two days after Jay had recorded his disunionist prognostication for Clarkson, Pennsylvania Democratic congressman David Wilmot sought to attach a proviso to a war-funding bill banning slavery from any territories ultimately acquired through the war with Mexico. Congressional representatives responded to Wilmot’s proposal on regional rather than party lines. Under such conditions, abolitionists might find themselves with new political allies from the northern ranks of the Democratic and Whig Parties.⁵²

William Jay took a pragmatic view of the Wilmot controversy. He hoped that Whigs, less enamored of the war to begin with, would oppose both the acquisition of territory and the proviso preventing the spread of slavery to any new territories. That proviso could then function as a bargaining chip, “rendering the ratification of a treaty dismembering Mexico more difficult.”⁵³ Presumably such a stance could force Democrats who wanted Mexican land to accept the bar to slavery’s expansion.

The dramatically shuffled northern political deck also created more space for an antislavery party to operate. Jay insisted to Gerrit Smith that clarity of purpose should distinguish the Liberty Party from the mainstream parties as it sought to seize the moment. For party members to dicker over issues like capital punishment, the tariff, or infrastructure would divert focus from the “crime of crimes which curse our land.” In addition, Jay argued, defectors from the Democratic and Whig Parties would be driven away by extraneous talk about issues on which these mainstream parties had already staked out their positions.⁵⁴

William Jay and John Jay II both showed special enthusiasm for the ascendant political star of Charles Sumner, whose reputation as a speaker, writer, peace advocate, and, more recently, a critic of Massachusetts congressman Winthrop made him an appealing ally. On hearing that Sumner had declined to run for Congress in 1846, John wrote Sumner that it was only a matter of time “before your voice may be heard in our national councils, in vindication of those glorious principles of right which you have so nobly maintained in your own New England.” Although Sumner chose not to run in 1848, he was, along with Chase, a person who not only respected the Jays’ political perspective but also someone who might someday be able to represent their views in the national arena. Indeed, in late 1848, John cited word of Sumner’s potential candidacy for congress in the next round of elections as proof that “high principles & masculine virtue, united by learning honor & eloquence, yet exist among us.”⁵⁵

The emergence of the new Free Soil Party during the 1848 election cycle prompted William Jay to think like a political pragmatist and to shift his political hopes away from the now-fading Liberty Party. The first Free Soil convention at Buffalo in August drew thousands, including Jay allies Sumner, Salmon Chase, and Joshua Leavitt. The party was a coalition devoted to stopping the westward expansion of slavery. Despite its disregard for Black equality and the nomination of abolitionist bête noir former president Martin Van Buren as its presidential candidate, Jay saw real possibilities that the Free Soil Party would strengthen the hand of antislavery in the North.⁵⁶

In mid-September William described the new political scene to John Jay II with unusual exuberance: “The Old parties are greatly disorganized & exhibit very little zeal,” while abolitionists had almost entirely lined up behind the Free Soil Party. Tellingly, Jay did not even mention the fragmenting Liberty Party, even though his friend Gerrit Smith was the presidential nominee of the purist faction insisting on racial equality and abolition. With steady progress for the Free Soil Party in New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, and even in several slave states, the gentleman farmer observed, “The seed the abolitionists have [sic] been scattering for years is suddenly germinating & exhibiting vigorous growth.” It was the Free Soil alliance that had provided the much-needed fertilizer. Whatever the ultimate limitations of Van Buren’s antislavery commitments and his vote tallies, the Free Soil ticket might push the policies of the winning presidential candidate in an “anti Slavery” direction. By October, the judge’s confidence grew, as he informed John Jay II’s wife Eleanor that Van Buren’s Free Soil ticket possibly could “carry several States” and judged the party so “formidable” that “before long” it would “be predominant in the northern states.”⁵⁷

Such projections about the Free Soil Party’s influence, however, landed well wide of the mark. Far from carrying numerous states, Van Buren only managed to finish second, a distant one at that, in two states: New York and Massachusetts. He did not earn a single Electoral College vote. Still, the percentage of the national popular vote for the antislavery party jumped dramatically from the previous election—10 percent as compared to just over 2 percent. Jay’s Westchester County polled Whig for the first time. Meanwhile, throughout the North, the old Liberty Party faded to the point of disappearance. Although the policy plans of the victorious Whig candidate and southern slaveholder Zachary Taylor were deliberately obscure at the time of the election, the candidate from the party that was more friendly to moral reform won. The Free Soil party had not seized the future, but a new form of antislavery politics had emerged that warranted the abolitionist Jays’ attention.⁵⁸

Causes and Consequences

For William Jay, accounting for the ravages of the Mexican War was a far more compelling project than the shifting fates of political parties. For him, the war was an urgently revealing moral travesty. His 1849 magnum opus, A Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War, married his passions for peace and abolitionism. Jay, who became president of the American Peace Society in 1848, paid for the initial printing himself and gave the original stereotype plates to the organization. The society raised funds to distribute Jay’s book for free, including to members of Congress and northern state legislators. Within a year the APS had disseminated 17,000 copies of Jay’s ripping indictment of the war, an indictment that served as a prism through which to view the afflictions of the entire US body politic.⁵⁹ The project also allowed him to articulate a new definition of patriotism that reconfigured the founders’ legacy for the present era.

Over more than three hundred pages, Causes and Consequences provided a detailed narrative analysis of the path to war, reflected on human nature in wartime, and contemplated the moral limits on the demands that a nation should place on its citizens. The book not only exposed the self-interested political manipulations of slaveholders and the fecklessness of national politicians but also criticized the moral premises of democracy itself. Jay did not celebrate personal acts of civil disobedience along the lines of Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay on a night spent in a Concord, Massachusetts, jail for refusing to pay taxes that were allegedly levied to support an immoral war. But like Thoreau, Jay elevated personal moral autonomy above the dictates of the state and the wisdom of political crowds. Jay’s version of the individual defying the popular will was explicitly biblical: “He who admits the authority of the Bible will not readily acknowledge that whatever is ‘highly esteemed among men’ must be right, nor that what is unpopular is, of course, wrong.” In God’s court “no majority, however great, can be pleaded in justification of crime, or in mitigation of punishment.”⁶⁰ The gulf between conventional definitions of democratic processes and just ends, for both the former Westchester judge and the one-time Concord prisoner, was equally vast. Each found in the proslavery military venture a means of questioning whether the entire American enterprise was a mistake based on a deluded, self-important conception of itself.

As in most of his major works, Jay prosecuted his case with an intense exhumation of the facts. His review began with several chapters describing a multiyear march to war driven by a desire to expand slavery and aggrandize the political power of the South. Caught between the emancipated North and Mexico, which also abolished slavery, the slaveholding South sought to reverse the tide by prying loose Texas. During the Texas revolt from Mexican rule, the United States ignored the long-established principle of staying out of foreign conflicts. The Jackson administration, Jay asserted, sought a variety of flimsy pretexts to provoke conflict with Mexico on the heels of the breakaway republic’s independence. The plan all along was to find a way to annex Texas, which quickly legalized slavery and established ties with “the breeding States” in the United States. Feeling countervailing pressure from southern slaveholders and northern opponents of annexation, the Van Buren administration opted for a policy of “harassing negotiation” with Mexico over various financial claims, using any pretext to keep hostilities between the two countries simmering. Meanwhile, southern slaveholders openly salivated over the prospect of seizing Mexican territory including California. Jay quoted at length a Virginia congressman’s 1842 remarks for their revealing emphasis: “SLAVERY SHOULD POUR ITSELF ABROAD WITHOUT RESTRAINT.” With southerners “stimulated to a ravenous ferocity” after the annexation of Texas, the Polk administration pursued its implacable policy to “bully,” “bribe,” and ultimately invade its way into “dismember[ing]” Mexico.⁶¹

Perhaps even more dismaying was the failure of a political opposition in Washington to coalesce against Polk’s declaration of war. The tough old trial judge found it “melancholy and humiliating” that Congress showed “a disregard of evidence, which no court of judicature in our land would dare to manifest in consigning to the penitentiary a man charged with petit larceny.… Thus was a system of human butchery commenced without argument.” The crime, of course, was not petit larceny, the “war differ[ing] from murder and robbery only in the stupendous enormity and extent of the crime.” The alleged weakness of the victim underscored the gravity of the crime. America’s political culture ensured that even those who knew the war to be wrong would support the effort anyway. US voters, “ever fascinated with military glory,” would exact a price on any Whig who declined to join the Democrats in pursuing the unjust conquest of foreign lands on a scale surpassing even Napoleon.⁶²

In taking up the consequences of the Mexican War in the final 130 pages of his book, Jay launched a broader critique of militarism and American nationalism. He sought to detach military heroism from patriotism, denying that America’s democratic culture made its warriors any less cruel. Jay insisted that denouncing the nation’s immoral actions was a moral imperative and suggested that the survival of the Union was not inevitable. At a time when the nation celebrated the fulfillment of its manifest destiny, spanning from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, Jay’s assessment of his country’s character bit hard. He asserted that officers commanded their men to do terrible things, such as cruelly shelling civilian women and children at Vera Cruz or ordering the killing of Mexicans who were not engaged in battle but in merely disrupting American supply lines.⁶³

If the morality of American officers was blinkered, the class-conscious Jay believed the soldiers’ morality was worse. His guiding presumption was that military service degraded rather than elevated character. Jay’s elitism came through loud and clear on this point: “The great mass of all armies, it is well known, is collected from the ignorant, reckless and vicious.” What military life did was concentrate such troubling individuals in one place where their “vicious propensities” spread.⁶⁴

Indeed, Jay anticipated that the nation would pay a grave political price for its sins, merging the classic republicanism of the Revolutionary Era with nineteenth-century fears of the Slave Power to make his point. The president’s claim of a “royal prerogative” of warmaking was aggrandized by the acquisition of huge territories where his rule held sway. A people once suspicious of a large military as a threat to freedom now celebrated that military. Proponents of war “intimidate the opponents” with the threat of “popular violence,” a sure sign of freedom’s decline. The future was, in this context, grimly predictable. He projected “thirteen large slave States” might emerge, “sufficient to give the slave power an entire control of the Federal Government.”⁶⁵

Rather than wallow in pessimistic projections, however, Jay clambered for higher ground in the closing chapters. He articulated philosophical principles and concrete steps to move the nation and even the world away from further calamity. Echoing his Life of John Jay, in which he portrayed his father as a classical statesman of unerring moral wisdom, William draped his chapter on “Patriotism” in an example from ancient Greece as a way to skewer the unthinking modern sentiment, “Our country right or wrong.” In modern as in ancient times, “the purest patriotism,” William indicated, was doing right, not multiplying a republic’s power. Citizens, Jay urged, must not suspend moral judgment and follow blindly. Having denounced his nation’s actions and cast the harshest aspersions on the character of its leaders and even its people, Jay articulated the moral sphere in which true patriots might still operate. Ministers, Sunday School teachers, and other “humble Christian men and women”—not politicians—led the way to public good. The Whig Party may have let the country down badly, but Whiggish impulses of Christian reform might yet rehabilitate the notion of love of country.⁶⁶

The multiple editions of Jay’s widely distributed book garnered high praise from a spectrum of reform and antislavery publications. Although Jay did not heal the breach among antislavery forces, his expansive analysis addressed a shared desire to elevate the stakes of the war and its aftermath above ordinary wrangling. The New York Tribune, edited by free soil-oriented Whig Horace Greeley, noted Jay’s “reputation” as “a clear and vigorous writer” and judged the current work to be another success, emphasizing “Eternal Justice in the midst of party clamour and military hallucination.” In June 1849, The Liberator hailed the third edition of Causes and Consequences. Praising its meticulousness, the unsigned editorial concluded with a flourish, “May fifty editions of it be exhausted in less time than the war which it so powerfully condemns was prosecuted.” National Era, the Washington, D.C.-based political antislavery newspaper edited by Salmon Chase’s close associate from Ohio, Gamaliel Bailey, paid tribute to Jay’s oeuvre. The paper labeled the former judge “one of the best writers of the day,” noting that his work “never appears before the Public without having entirely mastered the subject” at hand. Causes and Consequences was judged by the reviewer to be “probably the best production of his pen.” A reviewer in the Literary Union of Syracuse, New York, who noted that the book was already in its fourth edition, expressed hope that Jay’s book would “exert a controlling influence for good” in the looming struggle between free soil and slavery expansionists over the status of the territories seized from Mexico.⁶⁷

Even before the reviews were in for Causes and Consequences, Jay felt compelled to press on with his pen to ensure that the reaction against slaveholder expansionism took hold. His 1849 pamphlet Address to the Inhabitants of New Mexico and California, on the Omission by Congress to Provide Them with Territorial Governments, and the Social and Political Evils of Slavery accused the “slave power” of holding self-government in the new territories hostage to their desire to extend human bondage. In hyperbolic language once again hearkening back to Revolutionary Era rhetoric, Jay accused the federal government of making slaves of the inhabitants of these territories by appointing federal officials over them, rather than letting the territories organize their own governments. New Mexicans and Californians were treated like “the negro slaves of South Carolina” and made into a “servile race.” After his preface, which was directed specifically to Westerners, Jay recycled verbatim the arguments he had advanced in his unsigned 1843 pamphlet Address to the Non-Slaveholders of the South on the Social and Political Evils of Slavery. Jay offered quantitative and anecdotal evidence to demonstrate that the population of free states grew faster than slave states; that literacy rates were higher in the free North than the slave South; that free states exhibited more economic dynamism; and that southern aristocrats ruled their society for their own economic benefit, to the detriment of white non-slaveholders.⁶⁸

Addressing Californians and New Mexicans directly in his the pamphlet’s conclusion, Jay explicitly prioritized conscience over union, advising westerners that keeping slavery out of their territory carried more benefits than becoming part of the United States. Although patriots and Christians would fight to keep slavery out of the newly acquired lands, Jay commented, “If you cannot be free, happy, and virtuous in union with us, be free, happy, and virtuous under a government of your own … tolerate no servile caste, kept in ignorance and degradation to minister to the power and wealth of an oppressive aristocracy.” If Westerners stood firm in their antislavery convictions, they would find many others to stand with them. As Jay put it, “Be true to yourselves, and your northern friends will be true to you.”⁶⁹ He rejected any sort of manifest destiny that granted territorial growth priority over the containment of slavery.

The Adams Paradox

Among the conundrums that William Jay—and indeed the entire fractious and fractured abolitionist movement—struggled with was the appropriate relationship between the corruptions of partisan democratic politics and morally guided action. How, when, and in what ways could a just cause depend on public opinion or on constitutional and electoral procedures? Even the struggle against racial caste in the Episcopal Church challenged the Jays to find the proper balance between effective action and moral integrity within a carefully constructed constitutional order. Racism, slavery, and war, each in its own way, heightened tensions between engagement and withdrawal, union and disunion.

Jay looked to the life of John Quincy Adams for a way forward. The penultimate, and by far the longest chapter of Causes and Consequences profiled the recently deceased former president, son of one of the few founding fathers who exceeded John Jay in revolutionary stature. William Jay’s sketch was a gem. As one reviewer proclaimed, “The chapter on J. Q. Adams is alone worth the price of the whole book twice over.”

The grounds for eulogizing John Quincy Adams were threefold: the Massachusetts congressman opposed the war, he died just weeks after the signing of the treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo formally ended the war by confirming the dramatic expansion of US territory, and he embodied Jay’s alternative vision of true patriotism. The author claimed that Adams’s life story provided “sanction for almost every moral and political sentiment maintained in these pages.” The Massachusetts congressman expressed his love for the country in a fashion that defied the expectations and mores of the present age. Unlike the age’s archetype of democratic glory, Andrew Jackson, or his current stand-in, President Zachary Taylor, “no military halo encircled his brow.” Adams served well as the hero in an antiwar book teeming with scoundrels.⁷⁰

Jay recounted Adams’s later years as a congressional gadfly specializing in tormenting his proslavery colleagues and subverting the infamous gag rule against recognizing antislavery petitions. According to Jay, Adams deployed disunion to brilliant rhetorical effect in 1842 when the congressman brought before his colleagues a petition using the very words of the South Carolina nullification campaign of the early 1830s. His southern rivals in response drew up a resolution to have Adams expelled from the House. According to Jay, it was “preposterous to maintain that a union formed by consent of the partners, cannot by the same consent be severed.” For his part, Adams used his expulsion trial to speak in the House of the manifest harm that slavery had caused the nation, thus entering into the congressional record the very subject that the gag rule was designed to suppress. Disunion was logically defensible but, in Adams’s hands, became even more valuable as a tool to interrogate the relationship between freedom and slavery and as a club with which to face down a congressional mob.⁷¹

Adams also exemplified how high principle could sustain effective antislavery tactics. Something remarkable happened as a result of Adams’s expulsion trial: he went from being reviled to being revered. In Jay’s estimation, by the time Adams died, the former president’s standing “had reached an elevation never surpassed by that of any man on the American Continent, with the single exception of WASHINGTON.” The moral of Adams’s ascent to the patriotic pantheon had profound and paradoxical meanings for American politics. Adams embraced “integrity” over the pursuit of popularity, “scorning and defying public opinion … to his last breath.”

Jay explained that the reason he devoted so much space to Adams was that the deceased hero “illustrate[s] some great truths” on which the book rested, particularly “the utter worthlessness of public opinion as a standard of right and wrong.” Moreover, Jay proclaimed that if Adams was a patriot, then all definitions of patriotism in common use were bogus. For Adams advocated against America in international disputes, he criticized America’s war, and held firm to his antislavery beliefs no matter what arrangements the Constitution had made to protect the institution. Adams’s belief that Blacks should enjoy access to the ballot on the same terms as whites exposed “the lying Democracy of the day.” Some politicians might, Jay hoped, learn to recalibrate their course, attracting followers by doing right—and not confusing the voice of the people with the voice of God.⁷²

John Quincy Adams was, in crucial ways, also like William Jay himself. Both men lived in a founding father’s vaunted shadow yet courageously defined life’s most important work as the struggle against slavery—an injustice that the founding generation had manifestly failed to rectify. For all the wrongs Jay’s Causes and Consequences sought to expose, writing the book also helped him articulate how and why the fight against the political and moral blight of slavery must continue. As his critique of come-outerism in the Episcopal Church suggested, there was a crucial difference between maintaining one’s personal integrity and refusing to participate in impure, imperfect institutions.

Writing to Salmon Chase in May 1849. William distilled for the man recently chosen to represent Ohio in the US Senate the political challenge that lay ahead. Pinning his hopes on Congress, Jay declared, “I am for the Proviso at all hazards, & nothing but the Proviso”: a federal ban on the extension of slavery to the new territories. This ban would shift the sectional political equation. For all the moral havoc the Mexican War had brought, it was now the South that seemed to Jay unusually “feeble & divided.” Advised Jay, “Were they to bind themselves by oath to abandon the union unless permitted to convert our conquests into a slave region, I would withhold the permission.” In August, Jay publicly voiced a similar confidence in his Address to the Inhabitants of New Mexico and California: “The slave-holders are losing their influence, and are divided among themselves, while their northern allies, withering under the scorn of public opinion, are daily deserting their standard.” It lay in the power of the government and the people to press the advantage.⁷³ For at least a few moments in the spring and summer of 1849, political and moral strength appeared to come into precarious alignment—an unjustifiable war unexpectedly serving the cause of justice.