Organizing

Landing with Sally and their two daughters in New York City on July 24, 1784, John reunited with a Jay family itself relocating to the familiar ground of Rye and New York City. He leveraged his new position as the Continental Congress’s foreign affairs secretary to lobby that New York City, the place where he had already planned to settle, serve as the nation’s capital for the next several years. The city at the southern end of Manhattan to which the Jays returned was in the midst of a dramatic expansion in population and commercial opportunity. Although 1790 would be the last year that New York would serve as the capital of the nation, the city recovered from the wartime disruption and overcame lingering hostility from former British loyalists to claim a central role in the nation’s economic life.⁵

The secretary for foreign affairs and his wife assembled a large household in a newly built home on Broadway. The 1790 census records a household of seventeen, including five enslaved people. Clarinda, sold when John’s father was still alive, was likely repurchased as some point after Jay’s return from Europe to become a member of the New York household. Enslaved people secured the Jay’s comfortable well-being and helped them to entertain the city’s elite.

The Jays were hardly unusual as a slaveholding household in the city: more than one-quarter of merchant households held slaves, and slaveholding correlated with wealth. Owning slaves remained an integral part of life in the extended Jay family as well. His elder brother Peter held nine slaves at the Rye estate who passed to him in their father’s will. His sister Anna, his brother Frederick, and their nephew Peter Jay Munro all owned enslaved people.⁶

After returning to the United States, Joh Jay continued to feel a sense of obligation toward certain vulnerable people associated with the family network. His account book refers to payments made and moneys “laid out for old negroes.” Old Plato and Zilpha had both been manumitted by John’s father as the family attempted to cope with wartime financial difficulties. Those for which Jay took a financial responsibility may not have found stable residences; Jay recorded payments to his brother Peter and to Eliza Gedney for boarding and later looking after the health of an ailing Moll. In 1786, Jay paid a G. Van Gelder for expenses related to Plato and Zilpha and in 1790 made a payment to Primus, perhaps a free Black man, “for boarding Old Plat.” In Old Plato’s case, responsibility extended beyond the end of his life, as Jay’s account book in late 1791 and early 1792 records payments for the former slave’s coffin, for “Liquors at his Funeral,” and for the gravedigger. Although the expenses incurred by Old Plato’s burial were not large, John made good on the assurance he had expressed from France that he would look after the slave in reward for loyal service to his father.

Supporting elderly or incapacitated slaves involved other members of the family as well. John paid his brother Frederick, now living in New York, ₤30 for supporting Mary, likely in accordance with their father’s will. Their brother Peter received payments in 1789, 1790, and 1791 for the board of their deceased father’s slave Susan. There is no reason to believe that the quality of life for Plato, Moll, Zilpha, Mary, and Susan was pleasant; the payments suggest that they were in poor health. John’s obligation to them meshed with his obligation to his brothers to share in the financial support of slaves and former slaves, rather than abandoning them to an even unhappier fate.⁷ Jay believed in keeping those he deemed loyal in his orbit.

Parts of the country that John Jay came back to in the mid-1780s had taken more systematic steps to phase out slavery than reflected in his paternalism and personal manumission plans for Benoit. By 1784, Quaker activism and revolutionary libertarian ideology working in informal concert had even produced concrete results. Two New England states, Connecticut and Rhode Island, passed gradual abolition statutes in that year, which like Pennsylvania’s 1780 law, offered freedom to the children of female slaves on reaching a prescribed adult age. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society renewed its operation after a wartime hiatus. The previous year, the chief justice of Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled that slavery contradicted the principles of the state’s new constitution, and Maryland banned slave imports, following Virginia’s wartime lead. In 1782, Virginia passed a law legalizing private manumissions of adult slaves.⁸

Six months after his return to America, Jay joined the newly formed New-York Manumission Society at its second meeting, held in February 1785, and immediately accepted a leadership role. Quaker antislavery leaders understood that a broader campaign against slavery in New York would have to draw support from prominent non-Quakers. The sect’s commitment to pacifism and neutrality during the Revolutionary War had alienated many of their neighbors. The new society drew leading political Manhattan figures such as Alexander Hamilton, Melancton Smith, and Alexander McDougall. William Livingston, from New Jersey but with strong New York City ties, also became a member. The society installed Jay as chairman of the 1785 meeting at which the group formally adopted its rules; by the next meeting, Jay would assume the title of president, thus lending his prestige and his expertise to the cause. Two years later, in 1787, Franklin—then an elderly man of dwindling energies but still of great fame—became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Jay, almost four decades Franklin’s junior, was very much in the prime of his personal and public life and was not a mere figurehead.⁹ He would not only offer significant benefits to the organization but also incur meaningful costs to himself through his association with the society.

The NYMS’s organizing principles were consistent with the critique of slavery Jay had articulated in his 1780 letter to Egbert Benson and in Benoit’s manumission document. The preamble to its rules stated the principle that “as free Citizens and Christians” members had an obligation not only to show “Compassion” toward slaves suffering “Injustice” but also must “endeavour, by lawful ways and means, to enable them to Share, equally with us, in that civil and religious Liberty with which an indulgent Providence has blessed these States; and to which these, our Brethren are, by nature, as much entitled as ourselves.” Black freedom and national liberty were two sides of the same coin. In a March 24 letter to Pennsylvania political activist and abolitionist Dr. Benjamin Rush, Jay expressed himself in similar terms, anticipating shortly “the Time … when all our Inhabitants of every Color and Denomination shall be free, and equal partakers of our political Liberty.” With freedom from bondage came full citizenship. Such a vision of antislavery thus transcended the practice of personal benevolence and fell in line with the development of a republican nation.¹⁰

Jay believed that the work of the NYMS promoted divinely sanctioned equality. In a draft passage of an October 10, 1786, letter to the society’s treasurer, the Quaker John Murray Jr., that Jay subsequently deleted, he wrote, “What acts of public or private Justice and Philanthropy, can occasion more pleasing Emotions … than such, as tend to restore the oppressed to their natural Rights”; he further noted that slavery forced people to labor “at the pleasure of Persons, who were not created more free, more rational, more immortal, nor with more extensive Rights and Privileges than they were!” Although he kept these particular thoughts to himself, the contrast with the contemporary reflections of Thomas Jefferson is dramatic. In Notes on the State of Virginia, completed in 1785, Jefferson clothed his antislavery expressions in forebodings of an apocalyptic race war. For the New Yorker, God’s endorsement of racial justice promised a much more redemptive trajectory.¹¹

Egalitarian and libertarian visions notwithstanding, the NYMS also gave voice to a paternalism with which Jay would have felt at ease. Whatever they might become, actual slaves, in the society’s view, were weak and needed others to speak for them. Thus, in the same founding document, NYMS proclaimed itself ready to protect and speak for the slave “Destitute of Friends and of knowledge, struggling with Poverty and accustomed to submission.” Piety made it easier not only to accept slaveholders as members but also to elevate a slaveholding John Jay to the presidency of the organization. Indeed, the Society bent over backwards to accommodate its slaveholding members like Jay, declining to adopt a timetable for manumission supported by Alexander Hamilton. Change would take time and advocates with power. The NYMS placed great faith in the good intentions and honesty of its slaveholding members.¹²

Despite the prominence of some of its members, Jay and the Manumission Society faced stiff resistance to even initiating the process of gradual abolition, let alone equal citizenship. A 1786 census recorded more than 18,000 slaves in the state. The 1785 rebuff of a Pennsylvania-style gradual emancipation bill that would have started the process of freeing the children of slave mothers, while obligating those same children to more than two decades of service to their mothers’ masters, revealed how much work the NYMS had still to do. Although it petitioned the New York legislature on the bill’s behalf, racism and proslavery legislative muscle prevailed.¹³ Assemblymen in the lower house attempted to throw up roadblocks by proposing bans on Black office holding and voting, severe limitations on Black jury service and court testimony, and stiff fines on both parties to a marriage between a Black and white person. The prohibition of African American voting rights stayed in the final bill, triggering a veto by the Council of Revision, which included Jay’s old friend and future rival Robert R. Livingston. Support for gradual abolition proved remarkably thin in the end, with a core of proslavery legislators from Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Ulster County gaining additional support from around the state to kill the bill entirely.

The 1785 legislative session, however, was not a total loss for abolitionists. The legislature banned the importation of slaves, not only internationally but also from other states; substantial fines were authorized for violating this statue and enslaved people transported to New York illegally received their freedom. The legislature also somewhat liberalized rules governing private manumission, removing the colonial-era indemnity that former owners had to pay to local officials to guarantee that a freed person would not become a public charge. This indemnity had made private manumissions extremely rare. The new rules specified that a freed slave must be younger than fifty years old and that local officials certify the potential self-sufficiency of the newly free person. New York’s lawmakers were crawling, not marching, toward the goal of translating revolutionary principles into antislavery laws.¹⁴

Jay put an optimistic face on the gradual emancipation bill’s failure. Challenged in a letter from antislavery English dissenting minister and writer Richard Price to explain why all Americans did not embrace a gradual program of Black liberation, Jay defended his country with philosophical realism. He conceded that the continued practice of slavery is “very inconsistant,” but such injustice was to be expected in a world where “the Wise and the Good never form the Majority” in their struggle against “union of the wicked & the weak.” As if steeling himself for a prolonged struggle, Jay opined, “All that the best Men can do is to persevere in doing their Duty to their Country … being neither elated by Success however great nor discouraged by Disappointments however frequent or mortifying.” Difficult, potentially frustrating work lay ahead.¹⁵

Jay and his fellow NYMS members defended the rights of Blacks legally entitled to or already enjoying the status of a free person. A letter Jay received in February 1786 from South Carolina Quaker Richard Lushington illustrated why the NYMS deemed it crucial that New York pass a law against exporting slaves out of the state. Hearing that Jay was “a friend to the distress’d of whatsoever colour” who are in “bondage,” Lushington informed Jay that a free Black man named George Morris from New York had been put up for sale in Charleston to the “highest bidder.” Lushington believed that Morris had been kidnapped. He also urged action more generally against “so villainous a practice.”¹⁶

Jay affirmed Lushington’s antislavery principles and acted on the Quaker’s concerns by forwarding the case to the NYMS. An excerpt of Lushington’s letter found its way into the pages of one of the city’s newspapers. The story put New Yorkers, kidnappers and otherwise, on notice. The New-York Packet stated that, even before the letter arrived, “some gentlemen … investigated the matter” and induced the authorities to make two arrests. “There is no doubt,” read the commentary, “but such miscreants, as have been accessary to this violation of the laws of God and the laws of man, will shortly meet with their just deserts” and expressed the hope that the public would mobilize to combat this widespread kidnapping problem. For his part, Jay confirmed to Lushington that he had correctly identified a kindred spirit and ally, not just on behalf of the kidnapped but also of enslaved Blacks more generally. “It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished,” wrote Jay. “The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity … loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.”¹⁷ Unlike his Quaker allies, however, Jay and some of his NYMS colleagues continued to act in just such an inconsistent manner.

During Jay’s tenure as president, the NYMS moved forward to curtail the previously almost absolute prerogatives of slaveowners. The NYMS also worked to convince the state legislature to ban the exportation of slaves out of state. As a 1786 petition—signed by Jay, various Livingstons, including brother-in-law Brockholst, and many other prominent men—stated, selling slaves out of state was a moral outrage. Such slaves were treated “like Cattle, and other articles of Commerce.” The practice broke apart families and exposed free Blacks to kidnapping. The petition labeled exportation as “a Commerce so repugnant to Humanity and so Inconsistent with the Liberality and justice which should distinguish a free and enlightened People.”

Coupling the previous ban on importation with a ban on commercial exportation of slaves would limit the property rights of slaveholders, including those in the Manumission Society. A ban on exportation also would give slaves and their allies more leverage to sue for freedom when such laws were inevitably violated. In 1788, the NYMS achieved its goal. The £100 fine for violating the new export provision fell not on masters but on buyers, “factor[s],” and “agent[s]” facilitating such trades, thus protecting slaveholders. The provision, moreover, was part of a law reaffirming the domestic slave code that kept in place most other colonial-era features of bondage.¹⁸

Shortly after the slave export ban became law, Jay again pursued the issue of illegal enslavement. Jay informed his NYMS colleagues of the need to intervene in the case of two people likely to have been wrongly transported to the French island of Martinique: he hoped that contacting the French governor there would resolve matters, especially if NYMS contacts in Georgia or South Carolina could be found to take responsibility for the returned parties. Jay and two prominent non-Quaker political allies in the Manumission Society—Alexander Hamilton and Egbert Benson—also were appointed in May 1788 as an ad hoc committee charged with formulating a policy on whether Blacks entitled to their freedom under a state law liberating slaves seized during the war by state authorities as part of confiscated loyalist estates should actually be given their freedom.¹⁹

During Jay’s tenure, the society also founded a school for Black children, free and enslaved. By training a future generation of Black New Yorkers for productive lives, NYMS benefactors hoped to dispel prejudice. They also sought to extend the organization’s supervisory influence over the morals and public deportment of Black residents of New York City more generally.²⁰

Jay served on a committee designated to receive donations for the organization’s efforts and as its liaison to broader Atlantic antislavery networks. For this task, Jay, also the nation’s chief foreign affairs official informed prominent men abroad—such as the pioneering British antislavery advocate Thomas Clarkson and the French champion of American independence Marquis de Lafayette—that they were honorary members of the society. Such honors affirmed that the NYMS was engaged in a transatlantic cause of humanitarian significance, even as it worked to reduce the scope of domestic slavery in a single state. Thus, while acting locally, the organization, according to the correspondence committee, viewed its mission in universal terms: “We see with pleasure that the minds of Men are becoming daily more enlightened, and that a Liberality of sentiment begins to prevail, which will admit the Claims of Africans to a rank among rational Beings and to the natural Rights of Mankind.”²¹

Black freedom, in fact, did become much less exceptional in post–war New York. Runaways and those who claimed liberty in exchange for military service added to the ranks of the free. The withdrawal of Quakers from slaveholding, the state legislature’s decision in 1786 to free slaves confiscated from British loyalists, the many slaves who were manumitted to cut family costs during the war, and the decisions of a small number of slaveholders to reward good behavior or to act on libertarian principles all contributed to the trend. Approximately one-third—more than a thousand people in total—of New York City’s substantial Black population were free in 1790. One in five African Americans in Westchester County was free.²²

The extended Jay family participated in these trends, alert to manumission’s moral and utilitarian possibilities. In New Jersey, Sally Jay’s father William Livingston apparently became so taken with the principle of emancipation that he may have freed the last two of his slaves in the mid-1780s. Several years later, Sally’s brother Brockholst took a more calculated tack, purchasing an adult slave named John Lott in 1795 with the agreement that he would manumit him seven years later or a year sooner in exchange for good behavior.²³

John’s older sister, Anna Maricka Jay, who lived in Rye, also made manumission plans. On her death in 1791, she freed Hannah and any of Hannah’s children not already free. She specified that her executors, who included John, “give to my servant Hannah” several items for her comfort: “one feather bed with a bolster and two pillows four strong sheets four pillow cases and four blankets and also ten pounds worth of new wearing apparel such as they may think most proper and purposefull.”²⁴ These actions put Anna well ahead of her famous brother.

Managing

Jay’s philanthropic work influenced how he thought about his responsibilities as secretary for foreign affairs during the Confederation period. In this job, Jay experienced firsthand the effects of the nation’s political dysfunction. He was working on behalf of a government whose Congress struggled to form a quorum, let alone to raise revenue to fund a military or even provide Jay with a proper staff. He represented a collection of states determined, it seemed, to act in their own narrowly conceived interests, rather than together in the national interest.²⁵

Slavery, as it happened, posed an obstacle to achieving one of Secretary Jay’s most basic aims: seeing the 1783 treaty with Britain fully implemented. The British, American slaveholders asserted, had failed to honor Article 7’s prohibition against transporting formerly enslaved men, women, and children out of the country. At first, Jay did not question the legitimacy of the slaveholders’ complaints. He dutifully attempted to demonstrate the dimensions of Britain’s infractions. He began the arduous process of assembling and disseminating the necessary documents, starting with a formal request to George Washington himself, now a private citizen, to supply Congress with the records the retired general had assembled. As time passed, however. the problem looked very different to national officials like Jay and Ambassador to Great Britain John Adams than to state officials and the slaveholders’ points of view.²⁶

Three days after Jay penned his private, near-ecstatic thoughts on God’s approval of the NYMS mission to “raise” Blacks to their just equality, he issued a report to the Continental Congress that frankly critiqued the nation’s failure to implement key provisions of the 1783 peace treaty with Great Britain. His unsparing analysis of the United States’ responsibility for delaying the implementation of the 1783 Treaty of Paris detailed specific state laws and actions designed to thwart the rights of British creditors to collect debts and for Americans to launch forbidden reprisals against former British loyalists.²⁷

Toward the end of Jay’s October 1786 report to the Continental Congress, he clipped the wings of the indignant notion that British violations of the treaty provision forbidding the seizing and carrying off of Americans slaves justified ongoing US violations. In the process, he made arguments about treating human beings as property that acknowledged African American liberty as a relevant consideration of international law and openly criticized color prejudice. His views on the treaty provisions relating to slavery that he himself had helped negotiate had evolved.

At first, Jay conveyed that he took the matter of compensation seriously. “There is no doubt,” wrote Jay, that the British failed to adhere to this part of the treaty. But he also insisted on analytical precision in assessing US grievances, in the process paring down their scope. The secretary asserted that there were “three classes” of Blacks to consider. The first category comprised slaves swept up in the course of the war “as booty.” The treaty did not apply to this group, because property seized during wartime as booty properly belonged to the “captors.” Two other groups of Blacks, however, Jay regarded as subject to the treaty’s jurisdiction, with their removal triggering legitimate American claims. Blacks living as slaves within British lines, but who were the property of Americans could not legally be evacuated without their owners’ consent. More importantly, Jay argued, Blacks who left their masters for British lines based on “proclamations and promises of freedom” remained the property of their American masters. The British, in evacuating this third group, violated the terms of the treaty. By Jay’s initial logic, only white British choices, not Black American agency, extinguished the status of Black people as white American property. If the British chose to make legal persons of the human property forcibly seized as booty, they could; if slaves chose to avail themselves of the British promise of freedom, that choice, according to Jay, had no legal force under the treaty.²⁸

Then Jay turned the tables. He had come to regard British actions with regard to the last two groups of evacuated slaves in a “less unfavourable” light, admitting that “higher motives” now led him “to say unpopular things” on this subject. Without drawing further attention to the fact, he placed antislavery principles, developed as an officer in the Manumission Society, onto the scales of national policy. Imagine, Jay prompted his readers, a war in which France promised freedom to Americans held in captivity by Algiers. What, asked Jay, if France then returned those Americans to Algerian slavery after concluding a peace treaty? Jay wondered, “Is there any other difference between” British actions and hypothetical French actions “than this … that the American slaves at Algiers are white people, whereas the African slaves at New York were black people?” In asking about skin color, Jay left no doubt as to his own answer.²⁹ Jay called “cruelly perfidious” the notion of returning people who had relied on British promises of liberation “to the severities” of slavery.

If they were to be compensated for the loss of their slaves, Jay insisted that Americans abandon their self-righteousness and retreat from the moral high ground. While admitting that Americans had a right to “full value,” he also insisted that a person’s freedom was priceless. The property claims of slave owners did not have the same moral standing as the quest for personal liberty. An accounting of monetary value did not render slavery any less cruel, and even if it were possible now to return these men and women to their masters, that would not be right.³⁰

Denouncing prejudice and inserting his antislavery principles into the nation’s international affairs took some courage. Still, as a practical matter, Jay had left plenty of room for slavery to accommodate compromise.³¹ The law of slavery affirmatively written into state laws and international treaties still operated alongside the natural law that limited slavery’s jurisdiction. Because such written law existed, Jay could defend a pared-down version of compensation, he could still own and purchase slaves, and he could justify the participation of slaveholders like himself in an abolition society. For Jay, such compromises were part and parcel of nation-building.

Reconstituting

The combination of Jay’s familiarity with the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation and the great esteem he enjoyed in Washington made him a key player in setting in motion dramatic revisions to the national governing structures. In urging his friend George Washington to write a new charter that would revive the country, the language of freedom almost inevitably suggested itself. There are “errors in our national Government, which … threaten to blast the Fruit we expected from our ‘Tree of Liberty,’ ” Jay wrote Washington in March 1786, and if “a general Convention” were to take place, General Washington should participate.³²

New York politics, however, forestalled Jay from participating in the Philadelphia convention. Deep suspicion of the convention’s purposes held by leading New Yorkers, including Governor George Clinton, meant that the state sent a small delegation—the nationalist Alexander Hamilton flanked by two men, Robert Yates and John Lansing—jealous to preserve New York state’s future autonomy. The state senate thwarted Hamilton’s effort to have Jay join an enlarged delegation. Even so, the Philadelphia convention included like-minded nationalist colleagues—not only his fellow NYMS member Hamilton but also Franklin. Jay’s father-in-law William Livingston was a member of the New Jersey delegation, and Jay’s political friend and ally Gouverneur Morris joined Pennsylvania’s slate.³³ These were men with whom Jay had worked, who shared Jay’s sensibility on slavery, and whom he trusted on the larger political questions under consideration.

The Philadelphia convention was famously a closed-door affair, the proceedings conducted out of public earshot and delegates tight-lipped about what went on over the course of the summer. Jay and his NYMS colleagues briefly contemplated trying to nudge the convention “to promote the Attainment of the Objects of this Society.” In August, Jay and two other Manumission Society members drafted an antislavery statement, but the NYMS concluded that the convention “would not take up the Business” and decided not to send their memorial. They supposed, rightly and wrongly, that the convention would not concern itself with slavery and abolition. Slavery worked its way into the convention’s business repeatedly, but like the NYMS, delegates who harbored antislavery beliefs mostly pulled their punches.³⁴

Jay’s support for writing and then ratifying the US Constitution thus placed him in tragic alliance with the interest of southern slaveholders. That was not his goal, but it was the result. Despite Gouverneur Morris’s efforts to denounce slavery during the proceedings, the convention secured the power of slaveholders and the future of slavery in a number of ways. The three-fifths clause, which Morris strongly criticized to his fellow delegates, significantly enhanced southern representation in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College. The decision to permit the international slave trade at least until 1808 meant that southerners could continue to add to this political advantage by violating “the most sacred laws of humanity” for another two decades. The final document obligated states that abolished slavery to return fugitives from slave states to bondage. In addition, it required all states to participate in the suppression of domestic insurrections, among which, it went unstated, might include slave rebellions.³⁵

To be sure, subsequent generations of abolitionists, including allies of John’s son William, found ways to read the Constitution using an antislavery lens. The framers studiously avoided the words slave and slavery, an indication of the desire not to sully a national charter many delegates hoped would endure long after slavery had disappeared. And the Constitution did not make slavery a national institution, but rather one confined to those states that chose to maintain their own slave codes. Just as Hamilton and Jay’s NYMS colleagues sought to weaken slavery in New York by limiting the institution to the state’s borders, perhaps slavery’s containment might be a first step toward elimination.³⁶

Yet, in part to resolve sectional disputes caused by the diplomacy of Foreign Secretary John Jay, the Constitutional Convention incorporated an additional compromise that helped secured slavery’s southwestern expansion for the next two generations. To gain access to trade with Spain, Jay had ceded the right of US citizens to navigate the Mississippi River south of the Ohio River for thirty years. Southerners inside and outside the convention found such a concession unacceptable, because it restrained their plans to expand westward by taking advantage of the great aquatic highway.

Evidence points to coordination between the convention and the Continental Congress to fix the problem, with tremendous consequences for slavery’s future. Congress, meeting just ninety miles up the coast in New York City, enacted the Northwest Ordinance that same summer. Famously, the 1787 statue banned slavery in these territories north of the Ohio River. Yet slavery in the vast territory to the South was not regulated, and the ordinance included a fugitive slave clause protecting the recovery of southern slaves fleeing across the Ohio. Meanwhile, the drafters of the Constitution ensured that the Jay-Gardoqui Treaty would never go into effect by providing that the new US Senate had to approve treaties by a two-thirds majority. Ensuring that the unpopular treaty with Spain would never go into effect thus played a vital role in cementing a slavery ban in one part of the country, while ensuring southern support for the Constitution and encouraging the South’s ability to expand slavery westward in the future.³⁷ Jay, of course, had not intended such an outcome. Yet his wholehearted support for ratification of the Constitution obliged him to accept the full package of compromises on slavery and sectional power that his colleagues had worked out in Philadelphia.

In advocating for the US Constitution, Jay remained largely silent on slavery, even though some New York Antifederalists identified circumlocutions on the subject as a vulnerability. “A Countryman from Dutchess County” saw in the document’s elliptical language regarding slavery as “Cloaks … to cover” the framer’s “Wickedness.” In the famed Federalist Papers, written by Jay, Hamilton, and James Madison to secure ratification in New York, the two local men left it to the Virginian Madison to answer Antifederalist critiques of the Constitution’s approach to slavery. Madison, writing as Publius, alternately deployed opaque language, complex rationalizations, and disingenuous optimism to defend the varying ways the proposed national charter incorporated slavery. In Jay’s more modest contributions to the Federalist Papers, he came closest to invoking slavery directly in Federalist No. 3, when he noted that a stronger nation would more successfully win “compensations” from international negotiating partners than a weak “confederacy,” perhaps a reference to Britain’s evacuation of slaves.³⁸

Whereas the threat of political slavery had punctuated his revolutionary rhetoric a decade earlier, Jay deployed the language of freedom-preserving unity during the constitutional ratification debate. In his highly influential, anonymously published An Address to the People of the State of New-York, On the Subject of the Constitution, Jay warned in 1787 that the “seeds of discord” threatened to “poison our gardens and our fields.” Wise men had done the best that could be expected in framing a new government; where they could not agree, these wise men reached compromise. Sounding an appeal that Lincoln would transform into poetry in the Gettysburg Address seventy-five years later, Jay wrote, “Let us also be mindful that the cause of freedom greatly depends on the use we make of the singular opportunities we enjoy … for if the event should prove, that the people of this country either cannot or will not govern themselves, who will hereafter be advocates” for republicanism. In making this argument, however, the freedom and self-government of African Americans dropped from view.³⁹

The job of Jay and his fellow Federalists at New York’s ratifying convention, held in Poughkeepsie between June 17 and July 26, 1788, was to overcome the still strong reservations about the Constitution. Technically, the charter could go into effect without New York, because a week after the convention opened, word came that New Hampshire became the requisite ninth state to ratify it. News of Virginia’s ratification followed. Still, the growing and geographically pivotal New York State was essential to the future of the republic; the Constitution’s New York opponents committed to having their say.

Slavery entered the debate in regard to congressional representation. Melancton Smith, a Manumission Society member, regarded the three-fifths clause as “absurd” and “utterly repugnant.” He also viewed the ratio of congressman to population as so inadequate that it paved the way toward “a government for slaves.” Hamilton, in contrast, not only defended the “spirit of accommodation” as essential to securing the union but also went further: he defended the three-fifths clause, much as Madison had, as a way of ensuring that both property and people received representation. New York, after all, qualified voters based on property holding. In the end, the list of proposed amendments that the convention drew up to make the ultimate decision to ratify more palatable included none that applied to the slavery-related clauses, not even the three-fifths clause.⁴⁰ Jay and Hamilton had gotten their constitutional victory.

English abolitionist Granville Sharp’s 1788 rebuke to the NYMS over the Constitution showed that criticism could not be dismissed as opportunistic Antifederalist rhetoric. As Sharp indicated, “The declarations of the American Congress so frequently repeated” during the war for independence had led him to expect more. Meanwhile, as Sharp informed Jay and his colleagues, abolitionists in England continued to mobilize their petition drive to force the government there to take action against the slave trade.

The empire appeared to be outdoing its former North American colonies in hastening slavery’s demise. For his defense against Sharp’s jibes, Jay reached for an earthy, if ungainly, metaphor. The American compared the progress of antislavery opinion to the leavening of bread, in which a small amount of yeast only slowly works its way through a vast quantity of meal. Antislavery men like Jay could only play the part of attentive bakers, vigilantly watching “the natural operations of truth” without futilely trying to rush the process. Such imagery was at once optimistic and pessimistic. The bread was rising—or at least it would rise—but only very slowly over an extended period. Even at the state level, progress would be gradual. For as Jay explained, so many “legislators … are proprietors of slaves” with deep-seated “prejudices” that “a sudden and total stop to this species of oppression is not to be expected.”⁴¹ Whether he regarded himself as one of those afflicted by prejudice, he was a proprietor of slaves and knew well enough the very deliberate pace his own habits and comforts imposed on the process of manumission.

In the waning months of the Confederation period, Jay actually protected the interests of slaveholders at the national and international level. While still serving as secretary for foreign affairs, Jay sided with Georgia on the matter of slaves running away to Spanish East Florida, where the possibilities for forging new lives as free people had drawn southern slaves from the time of the Revolutionary War. The Spanish governor there caught the runaways but did not feel he had legal authorization to return them to their Georgia masters. Jay expressed to the Continental Congress his opinion that the United States should seek a treaty with Spain stating explicitly that each country would return runaway slaves to the other; in the meantime, he indicated that he could write to Spain requesting that their colonial officials do so as a diplomatic courtesy. He also conveyed his views to both the Spanish ambassador and the US representative in Madrid.

His stance indicated how little he credited the intentions of fleeing African Americans in his analysis. In 1786, he had denied that US masters had any claim to slaves seized as war booty. In the present instance, slaves crossing to Spanish territory were advancing their own claims to freedom. Contrary to his previous arguments about the violation of rights entailed by the reenslavement of captured slaves, Jay called here for putting people who took action to obtain their liberty back into bondage. In essence, Jay applied the logic of the new fugitive slave clause to the southern border.⁴²

Jay’s understanding of governmental jurisdiction over slavery—leaving the states free to protect the interest of property holders but limiting the national government’s ability to secure freedom—served neither the interests of African Americans nor those of their white allies. At one level, by 1788 the Manumission Society’s effort to isolate slavery in New York through importation and exportation bans had succeeded in limiting the future scope of the institution in that state. In that same year, however, the ratification of a new national Constitution, with great effort by Jay and Hamilton, offered the promise of national unity and prosperity, while raising barriers to effective nationalist critiques of slavery. The implications of the compromise made in Philadelphia between regions and by antislavery Federalists with themselves would hamper the efforts of abolitionists for decades, indeed, for generations to come.⁴³

Circulating

With the creation of the new federal government structure, John Jay remained as committed as ever to public service. In 1789, President Washington selected Jay as the inaugural chief justice of the newly established US Supreme Court. This appointment prompted Jay to resign from the New- York Manumission Society in 1789. It is not clear why he resigned from the organization. As a new institution with an uncertain mandate, the Supreme Court and its role in law and politics were not yet specified. Despite his belief that emancipation would remain a state, not a national, concern, he may have sought to preempt any assertion of judicial bias in cases that came before the Court involving slavery and abolition.⁴⁴ Even though he had seen no such conflict of interest between presiding over the NYMS while overseeing the nation’s foreign relations and presiding over an antislavery society, perhaps Jay was acting with an abundance of prudence, as well as setting a precedent for future justices to clear the decks of advocacy commitments. He did not, however, divest himself of his slaves to guard against any conflict of interest created by his being a slaveholder. Indeed, access to slave labor made some of the disruptions of his new position more palatable for the Jays, even as it complicated the lives of the enslaved.

In May 1790, with the help of his nephew Peter Jay Munro, John acquired Peet from Morgan Lewis. Munro recommended and negotiated the deal for his uncle, having first to convince not only John but also his Aunt Sally Jay, who thought the price of ₤80 too high and expressed a preference for hiring a servant instead. John Jay finally decided he wanted Peet for his personal service when he rode circuit as a federal trial judge. Jay viewed this travel as the most onerous and undesirable aspect of Supreme Court duty.⁴⁵

Jay understood full well that Peet suffered personal hardships when traveling and that, as an enslaved person, Peet was embedded in networks of friendship and family at home. While riding circuit in 1791, Jay forwarded detailed instructions to his son Peter Augustus, which highlighted the interconnections between various African Americans in the Jay family’s New York City orbit:

Peet has written a Letter to Mr. King, which it seems is the name of a black man (Servant belonging to old Mr. Lewis, but who lives with his wife a free woman in Nassau Street). He requests me to enclose this Letter to you. He requests also that you will be so kind as to send it to King immediately by Yaff, or by Clarinda’s Husband Pompey, both of whom know where King lives. Direct the one whom you may send to tell King that Peet has written two Letters to him, but recd. no answer.

Yaff and Clarinda were Jay family slaves who were familiar with King, a man enslaved by Peet’s former master with whom he anxiously sought to stay in touch.

Jay may have felt a little guilty—or at least responsible—for being the proximate cause of Peet’s difficulties in maintaining his ties to King. Thus, he instructed his adolescent son: “If neither Yaff nor Pompey can go, it would be good natured in you to leave this Letter at Mr. Lewis’s House.” But rather than betray ambivalence about their power to Peter Augustus, John turned his request into an occasion to instruct his son about the obligations that this hierarchy of masters and men conferred on the Jays: “Providence has placed these Persons in Stations below us. They are Servants, but they are Men; and Kindness to Inferiors more strongly indicates Magnanimity than Meanness.” This comment subtly substituted the language of class for the language of race, in the process communicating to his son that this inherently exploitive situation was an opportunity for rectitude. But, of course, Peet, Yaff, and King were slaves, and slavery only widened the gulf of inequality that separated John Jay and Peet.⁴⁶

Her husband’s absence also drove home for Sally how reliant she was on her servants’ compliance. After the birth of William in 1789 and Sarah Louisa in 1792, John and Sally’s household swelled to five children. The young and growing family no doubt added to the work of men and women like Yaff, Maria, Essex, David, Benny, and Clarinda—enslaved people who served the family during this era. Sally did not relish the role of managing the complex household. In 1790, perhaps remembering the trouble that befell her Parisian home when Abbe and the French servant woman Louissan feuded, Sally wrote to John in Boston: “A week has elapsed since your departure & the servants have not yet given one occasion for the smallest dissatisfaction.”

In the spring of 1792, Sally, soon after the birth of Sarah Louisa, shared with John, who was again on circuit in New England, a broader reflection: “Our domestic concerns have never been conducted with so much facility as at present. Indeed, it is incredible how much our tranquility depends upon our servants.”⁴⁷ But however vulnerable to disrupted tranquility that she felt, her slaves were even more so.

Clarinda acutely suffered the vagaries of slave life. Her husband Pompey was not the property of the Jays and so did not live with her. Clarinda nonetheless had at least two children. In late 1792, her youngest child died of the whooping cough that had broken out in the household. The bacterially spread illness also struck the white Jay children but not fatally. Perhaps Clarinda’s child fell victim to poor nourishment, a drafty room, a feeble physical makeup, or just bad luck. Who consoled the grieving mother and how is also not something that the letters between the Jays allow us to know.⁴⁸

The only trace that slavery left on Chief Justice Jay’s judicial writings suggest his understanding that the institution that continued to provide his family comfort was a troubling anomaly in a republican system. A philosophical aside in the 1793 case Chisholm v. Georgia registered his belief that African American bondage contradicted the fundamental precepts of the nation’s laws. The case itself concerned whether the Supreme Court had jurisdiction when a citizen of South Carolina sued the government of Georgia. In the chief justice’s view, when combined with the bedrock principle of “equal liberty” and “equal justice,” the right of an individual to sue states before a national court became essential. The people were “sovereigns” without being “subjects,” a very different situation from the “feudal ideas” of European jurisprudence in which sovereignty ultimately resided with the “prince.” Into this formulation of “sovereigns without subjects” Jay parenthetically dropped an exception—“unless the African slaves among us” could be labeled subjects. Slavery thus stood out as the exception that proved the rule. Black bondage was a feudal outcropping in a landscape of legal equality among citizens, a location where “justice without respect of persons” gave ground to the conditional “privileges” granted by princes to subjects. The experiences of Clarinda, Peet, and other slaves in his household bore out the nature and the costs of those privileges.⁴⁹

Campaigning

As Jay discovered the year before he wrote the Chisolm opinion, some of his fellow New Yorkers were far from ready to accept the notion that slavery was an atavistic aristocratic privilege and viewed his prior antislavery work with the NYMS with suspicion. His political friends in New York convinced the Chief Justice to run for governor in 1792. They believed that a man of Jay’s stature could take down long-time governor George Clinton. Clinton, a prominent Antifederalist during the ratification struggle, had a reputation as a political populist, and he drew his support from ordinary farmers and artisans.⁵⁰ Despite his prestige and public service, Jay’s connections to the state’s large landholders made him vulnerable to being portrayed as an out-of-touch candidate who favored the interest of enslaved African Americans over common white people. Hudson Valley supporter John C. Dongan advised Jay months ahead of the election that his opponents “mislead the ignorant and unwary.… exaggerat[ing] and paint[ing] in the most lively colors” Jay’s role in the Manumission Society. Jay, rumor had it, would “rob every Dutchman of the property he possesses the most near his heart … his Slaves.” Moreover, Jay reputedly demanded that these same yeoman provide the children of slaves with an education that surpassed what was available to the farmers’ own children. Dongan wanted Jay to tamp down such misrepresentation and to soothe fears in the rural electorate.⁵¹

Although Jay’s response to Dongan noted that he had resigned from the NYMS when he became chief justice, he defended the principles of the New York City organization he once headed: “To promote by virtuous means the existence of the blessings of liberty, to protect a poor and friendless race of men, their wives and children from the snares and violence of men-stealers, to provide instructions for children who … will now become useful members of society.” These goals, insisted Jay, were “objects and cares of which no man has reason to be ashamed, and for which no man ought to be censured.” The NYMS did not advocate the expropriation of slave property but embraced Black freedom and advancement as worthy, indeed necessary, goals. Jay also affirmed the philosophical principle underlying such beliefs: “In my opinion, every man of every color and description has a natural right to freedom.” He did not make common cause with slaveholding voters by identifying himself as one of them, though he did concede that both “justice due to their master” and attention “to the actual state of society” meant that slavery’s end had to be “gradual.” After the fashion of the time and his own sense of propriety, Jay was standing for office, but not personally campaigning for it. He did not see any reason to gloss over such a moderate yet committed position on emancipation.⁵² He was not willing to back down from his principles.

The New-York Journal, a New York City newspaper, exposed the ways in which Jay’s views on slavery and his elite standing weakened his candidacy. An imagined dialogue between two farmers, David and Abraham, in the heavily Dutch Ulster County where slaveholding was common, probed the appeal of the Jay and Clinton candidacies, casting a shadow on each. David warned Abraham not to be deceived by Jay’s elite proponents: “You know” that Jay “is for making the negroes free … that they may mix their blood with white people’s blood, and so make the whole country bastards and out-laws.” Unfazed, Abraham responded that ridding themselves of slaves might be for the better, because “negroes were generally thieves, idiots and squanderers.” Then addressing the issue of elite support for emancipation, Abraham stated, “Great folks, who puzzle their heads so much about our liberty, ought certainly to live better in the world than we farmers, who … ought to work our farms ourselves.” Although the dialogue poked at both campaigns, it made the weaknesses of the Jayites more apparent. Clintonians might be attempting to stir up fears of immediate abolition and racial mixing out of all proportion to reality, the dialogue suggested, but those fears existed and could make a difference at the polls.⁵³ Jay’s talk of natural rights and the future contributions of Blacks to society did not impress these characters, David and Abraham, concerned as they were with race mixing and making a living.

Given the razor-thin margin of Clinton’s victory, anti-Jay race-baiting may well have helped turn the election. Five of the six counties with the largest proportion of African Americans supported Governor Clinton, four of these by more than 64 percent of the vote. Jay, by contrast, enjoyed substantial victories in counties containing smaller proportions of slaves, where possible emancipation or race mixing posed less of a threat. Jay also carried Manhattan; despite a relatively high proportion of African Americans, slaveholders there often were members of the mercantile class from which Jay drew heavy support, and the Manumission Society’s actual character was better known. The election turned in the end on the success of Clinton’s supporters contesting the ballots of pro-Jay Otsego County based on procedural violations.⁵⁴ Despite the gulf between Jay’s antislavery views and his continuing use of slave labor, his abolitionist goals had damaged his candidacy. In such a political and racial climate, abolitionism had a long way to go.

Compensating

The chief justice longed for a more local post, but his allies in the Washington administration had other ideas. In the years since Jay’s failed attempt to become New York’s governor, partisan divisions had grown. The Jay–Clinton divide was reflected at the national level by a growing partisan breach between Federalists, identified with the Washington administration’s Hamilton-designed taxation and banking policies, and Republican dissenters with deep reservations about both the design and implementation of those policies. Foreign relations exacerbated this divide. The United States had a variety of grievances with Britain. These included interference with US ships on the high seas, the impressment of American sailors into the British Navy, and the exclusion from the British West Indies of US merchant ships. Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton, nonetheless, wished to preserve a trading relationship, no matter how unequal, with the Atlantic’s most dynamic economy. He and Washington viewed war with Britain as ill-conceived and dangerous. The Federalists, moreover, found Republican support of the French Revolution to be an appalling dalliance with potentially dangerous radicalism. There were many issues to negotiate with the British, all with the one goal of achieving a secure peace.

Washington and Hamilton viewed Jay as the ideal person to send to London, notwithstanding the fact that he already held a position in a separate branch of government. Jay would be finishing the work that he, Franklin, Adams, and Laurens pursued in the early 1780s and that Jay had then overseen as the chief foreign affairs officer during the confederation period. Republicans, for their part, took a dim view of the Jay mission. They considered him as far too pro-English, as witnessed by his previous critiques of US treaty violations. Moreover, Jay’s appointment raised questions about the separation of powers; a treaty concluded by Jay, once ratified by the Senate, would carry the force of law—the law that Jay as chief justice might then find himself interpreting. But Washington trusted Jay, who had much experience in high-stakes diplomacy. Accompanying John were John Trumbull, serving as his administrative secretary, and Peet, the enslaved man who traveled with the chief justice on the circuit. Eighteen-year-old Peter Augustus, recently graduated from Columbia (it was named King’s College when John had attended) joined the group as his father’s personal secretary. The party embarked aboard the Ohio on May 12, 1794, arriving in England early the next month.⁵⁵

On the issue of compensation for African American Revolutionary War refugees as on most other issues during this vital diplomatic mission, Jay’s actions confirmed Republican suspicions. Indeed, in the conflict between antislavery principles and treaty-based property rights, Jay moved decisively toward the abolitionist side. In the second paragraph of a lengthy report to Secretary of State Edmund Randolph regarding negotiations, Jay indicated that “informal conversations” with the British went on “with great fairness.” But his counterpart Lord Grenville, as Jay detailed, had a strong case to make against compensation. In this view, the formerly enslaved people who ran to their lines during the Revolutionary War were no longer American property but rather British, and therefore no violation of the treaty had occurred. The British representative argued that slaves who came under the promise of liberty could not be handed over without making the treaty “Odious.” Seizing on this word, Jay deployed the language of the Somerset decision, in which Lord Mansfield had indicated that an “odious” interpretation of the law only applied when demanded by explicit positive law language. By implication, if the language of the treaty was ambiguous, a non-odious interpretation inoffensive to the natural law of freedom should apply. By those lights, Article 7 only promised that the British would not make any additional seizures of American property during the 1783 evacuation. Jay at first did not concede the point, presenting the arguments “which I once made to Congress on the Subject” as to why the British owed financial compensation in lieu of returning the people themselves. “On this point,” meaning compensation, “we could not agree,” Jay reported.

Having claimed that he tried to uphold the American end of the argument, Jay dropped a small bombshell into his September 1794 report to the US secretary of state:

“I confess” wrote Jay, that his British counterpart’s “Construction of that Article has made an impression upon my Mind, & induced me to suspect that my former opinion on that Head may not be well founded.” The British, Jay informed the Virginian Randolph, had it right; the Americans, including Jay himself, had it wrong. The British at the end of the war not only had rightly protected the natural rights of the former slaves but they had also legitimately come into possession of the runaways. Therefore, demands for compensation had no force.⁵⁶

Perhaps Jay intended to signal that there was little point in pushing the runaway slave compensation issue. Yet, the secretary of state’s strong negative reaction suggests that Jay had crossed a dangerous ideological and political line in giving so much credence to the logic of British antislavery. Indeed, Jay had done just that. In two separate letters in December 1794, the Virginian warned Jay against bowing to British arguments on the slave compensation issue. In a letter of December 3, Randolph wrote, “I am extremely afraid, that the reasoning about the negroes will not be satisfactory.”⁵⁷ In a much longer commentary twelve days later, Randolph explained why he found Jay’s approach so displeasing. Significantly, Randolph not only rejected Grenville’s logic but also implicitly repudiated much of Jay’s original 1786 case that compensation constituted an appropriate compromise.

From Randolph’s perspective, Jay had illustrated the danger to slaveholders of the slippery slope of applying any sort of freedom principle to slaves—and for not thinking racially. According to the secretary of state, there was no reason that the rules for the return of property should be any different when applied to human slaves than to other physical items that were carried off. If anything, it should be more obvious that “Negroes” belonged to Americans, because unlike other property, “they carried an infallible mark.” In other words, Black-skinned people were manifestly American property. This remark distinguished Randolph’s guiding assumption from that of Jay, who in his 1786 report had stated his view that the former slave’s humanity was the crucial feature to consider in sorting out the compensation issue.

Randolph was ready to fight Grenville’s—and Jay’s—Mansfieldian premise about slavery’s essential wrongness.⁵⁸ According to Randolph, the mere fact that British law did not allow slavery on its home soil could not make it “odious”—and therefore arguments that flowed from that assumption bore no weight. He briefly conceded that there might be a problem if slaves had been given their liberty and then had it taken away. But no manumission, no grant of liberty, had ever occurred on American soil: “The War only presented the chance of liberation,” but he argued, the slaves held by the British had never ceased to be anything but runaway property.

Although the exchange between Randolph and Jay was between one American slaveholder and another, Randolph did not address Jay in these terms. The secretary of state perceived Jay as a diplomat who was all too soft on the issue of Black freedom, willingly conceding claims for monetary compensation by giving quarter to antislavery- tinged British arguments. The secretary urged Jay to take his arguments seriously, in part for broadly political reasons, suggesting that the diplomat “be … sensible of the anxiety of many parts of the United States upon this subject.”⁵⁹

Jay did not care for Randolph’s letter or his arguments. Jay’s antislavery beliefs made it easier for him to drop the slave evacuation issue from his agenda for pragmatic reasons. Although Jay did not say as much in his February 1795 reply, the Virginian’s views on the compensation issue and other aspects of the negotiation were moot even before Randolph had written about them in December: Grenville and Jay had by mid-November signed the treaty that would forever be known in this country as “Jay’s Treaty.” Still, Jay attempted to assuage Randolph, reminding him that a “Bargain” could only be struck by two willing parties. Jay found no common ground with Grenville on “the Negroes.” “Was that a good Reason for breaking up the negotiation?” he asked. Jay counseled that Randolph and, implicitly, other Americans consider the treaty in toto. Compensation came in the form of other clauses of the treaty favorable to the United States.⁶⁰

Jay’s views on slavery and international law had advanced considerably since the 1780s. As a treaty negotiator in Paris, he supported the principle that the British should not depart the United States with African Americans once held as slaves. As secretary for foreign affairs, he argued that escaping former slaves deserved their freedom and their former masters’ monetary compensation. Now, he regarded the arguments for compensation weak and not worth pursuing. English legal assumptions about slavery’s moral stench were, he believed, a more appropriate basis for international law than American racial prejudices.⁶¹

Jay’s encounters in England deepened his connections to British abolitionism, likely fortifying his conviction that compensation demands should not stand in the way of his negotiations. Shortly after his arrival in England, Jay dined with Samuel Hoare, the Quaker banker whose son, Samuel Hoare Jr., had been a founding member of organized abolitionism among English Quakers and between English Quakers and non-Quakers. Jay also made the friendly acquaintance of the prominent politician and conservative assailant of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke. Whether Jay ever discussed slavery with these men we do not know. Yet the well-informed Jay surely knew of Hoare’s and Burke’s connections to British antislavery; indeed, in 1788, Jay had extended an honorary membership in the NYMS to Hoare Jr.⁶²

Jay also befriended William Wilberforce, Parliament’s great champion of the campaign to end the British slave trade. In January 1795, Wilberforce forwarded copies of a report on the Sierra Leone colonial project to Jay. If the American familiarized himself with the launching by British abolitionists of a free Black colony on the coast of West Africa, Jay may have found it ironic. Some of the very men and women whose evacuation as freed people by the British to Nova Scotia had prompted American demands for compensation had by then moved to the Sierra Leone colony. A decade later, Wilberforce recalled “the pleasure we derived from your Society.”⁶³ Jay’s encounter with such prominent opponents of slavery could only have confirmed his own philosophical opposition to the institution.

Even as Jay’s critique of proslavery beliefs gained conceptual clarity, he continued to be a slaveholder while in England. When he accompanied Jay to England, Peet left behind a wife, just as Abbe, a decade before, had left behind a husband.⁶⁴ Moreover, Jay also once again violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the law of his host country: had Peet run away, he would have been in exactly in the same position as James Somerset, whose freedom Lord Mansfield established in a decision in which he declared slavery “odious.”

Although Peet did not test authority or the law as Somerset famously did in 1772 and Abbe, more obscurely and tragically, had done in 1783, this American slave’s European sojourn nonetheless underscored how much overseas slavery could undermine a person’s happiness and dignity. In August 1794, John Jay wrote Sally that “Peet begins at times to wish himself Home again. The novelty is a good deal over.” But rather than dwell on Peet’s unhappiness, Jay sentimentalized the family bonds that he imagined lovingly enveloped both free and enslaved alike at their Manhattan home: “I wish we were all entering the Street Door and you and the Children and Servants running to meet us. God grant that his wish may be realized.”⁶⁵ In this letter, the connection between Peet’s homesickness and slavery ran through John’s self-image of benevolent patriarchy.

Jay, however, did not completely compartmentalize his personal responsibilities from the international legal principles governing Black freedom that he debated with Lord Grenville. In September 1794, the day after he admitted to Randolph that American slaveholders might not have any right to compensation for runaway slaves, Jay wrote to his nephew Peter Jay Munro, expressing his unshakable commitment to his parents’ former slave Old Mary. Like the former slaves in the treaty negotiations, Old Mary’s story stretched back to the war, when she was already an invalid. John instructed Munro on the ethical imperative, fearing that not all his family members could be trusted to discharge their duty to her. Jay wrote, “I am anxious to be informed on that Head; for if she should suffer I should be hurt and mortified.” Seizing the opportunity, as he did with his own children, to extend a moral lesson, Jay made the point that “the Claims of Humanity however must always be primary objects of attention.” Old Mary’s claim was not an abstract one: “She has been so good to my Father and Mother, and to their children. & for so long a course of years been a faithful ready and affectionate servant, that in my opinion she has” put “us all under obligations which her subsequent faults and Errors can never cancel.” He instructed Munro to pay for “whatever her necessities may require”—and to charge his uncle for the expenses incurred.⁶⁶ Clearly Jay wanted to think of the master–slave relationship, at least in his household, as a human one governed by ethical rules as opposed to mere property rights.

As long as the Jays owned slaves, such expressions of faithfulness and family unity necessarily ran afoul of the will of slaves and the authority of masters. The Jay household in New York was not, in fact, happy and obedient. A young slave named Plato became so disruptive that Sally Jay resolved to bind him out to another New York City family for six years at a rate of ₤5 per year, with the Jays having an option to take him back if his new employers no longer wanted him. Sally’s handling of the Plato situation won the approval of her family members then in London. Writing to his mother from England, Peter Augustus Jay, beginning to imagine himself in the role of an adult head of household and therefore as a master, approved: “Among our domestic concerns, I think the removal of Plato from the family a most happy event. He wd. have become more & more troublesome as he increased in ability for mischief.” And to his sister he wrote of the young Plato, “That he should have given Mama much trouble does not surprise me, I only wonder how she obtained so good terms as those on which she parted with him.” Two weeks later, John added his own words of sympathy and approval.⁶⁷ Disruptive slaves were not to be tolerated, though a reassignment of his service to where he had worked before was, all things considered, fairly mild punishment. At any rate, John, Sally, and Peter Augustus concurred that, absent obedience, they should secure compensation and the harmony of the household.

Even for the loyal slave, petty indignities could not be avoided—perhaps more so abroad than at home. Like Abbe in Paris, Peet became the object of scorn from a locally hired white servant. It turned out that the Black American slave had wanted to see the lions housed at the Tower of London “& complained exceedingly of his having too little time” to do so. William, a white servant, played on Peet’s credulity by concocting a story that the lions were washed each month at London Bridge: “This was told with so grave a countenance that Pete believed every word.… But being sadly laughed at by a person he met & to whom he imported the object of his journey, he returned so much displeased & mortified,” reported Peter Augustus to his sister Nancy, who added, “& he is still … tormented by the other Servants of the house.” No wonder that, as John noted from London the following spring, “Peet prefers New York to London, & is anxious to be at home again.”⁶⁸ The public problems and personal paradoxes of slavery would travel back with the Jays across the Atlantic.

Debating

Postponing his return from England so he could sail on calmer springtime seas, Jay arrived home on May 28, 1795. He returned in time to be buffeted by political crosswinds that landed him in a new position of power but made him the subject of partisan invective (see figure 3). Prior to his return, Jay’s Federalist political friends in New York, with his approval, mobilized voters to elect him governor over Robert Yates, Republican incumbent George Clinton having declined to run again. Jay exchanged national office for a state one, his latest in an unbroken chain of important political positions.⁶⁹

Opponents of the treaty were not deferential to any of his high offices. They viewed the treaty Jay negotiated as having sold out America’s interests by accepting an insulting subordination to British power. The terms governing trade between the mother country and its former colonies were unequal, they asserted, and the British did not give way on respecting US ships on the high seas and honoring US neutrality. Jay had headed off war, secured British withdrawal from frontier posts, clarified some outstanding border questions, and bargained for US merchants to gain limited access to the British West Indies and increased access to the East Indies, but from the perspective of prideful anti-British and pro-French Republicans, that was hardly enough. For his alleged betrayal, Jay was mocked in poetry and his effigy burned in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Public protests were common in various cities; in New York, Alexander Hamilton even received a blow to the head as he prepared to deliver public remarks in defense of the treaty. Jay’s failure to secure any compensation for the evacuated former slaves did not help his cause.⁷⁰

The treaty’s detractors in New York made clear that silence on slave compensation was a national affront. Jay’s former friend and now rival Robert R. Livingston, writing as “Cato” in New York City’s Argus, took aim at this alleged betrayal of American interests in the second and third installment of his anti-treaty essays. Without any trace of irony, Cato complained at length about the denial of “the personal liberty of our citizens” through the practice of British impressment of American sailors, while also taking Jay to task for failing to obtain compensation for slaves whose freedom the British helped secure at the end of the Revolutionary War. Calculating a British debt on this score of ₤1.7 million, Livingston noted, “What makes this omission the more extraordinary” was the extensive documentation that Jay had at his disposal (and which, he might have added, Jay originally helped compile) and the fact that America had for so long sought redress. A commentary on the treaty by Decius, appearing in the same Republican newspaper, reviewed the history of the British evacuation of former slaves and hoped-for compensation before complaining, “Yet this compensation … is formally abandoned in a manner as direct, unequivocal, and avowed, as that in which the infraction was committed, and that too in a moment when all America believed that Mr. Jay was sent to demand justice for this, among other grievances.” Cato and Decius each cited Jefferson as an authority on the right, now forsaken, of Americans to compensation.⁷¹

Jay left it to others to defend his diplomacy publicly. He found the popular and partisan melee distasteful. Alexander Hamilton, who resigned from the cabinet in early 1795, had no such qualms.⁷²

When Hamilton, the treaty’s most vociferous advocate, turned to the issue of compensation, he embraced the same Mansfield-inspired antislavery logic that Jay had himself echoed when describing why he had yielded the point. Writing a series of newspaper essays under the pseudonyms Camillus and Philo Camillus. Hamilton asserted that depriving former slaves of their freedom was a far greater moral offense than enticing slaves away from their masters. The African Americans who escaped to within British lines did so on the promise of freedom and then actually received their freedom. Echoing the Somerset decision’s and Lord Grenville’s opposition to reenslavement, Hamilton stated that, once being free, “to fall again under the yoke of their masters and into slavery is as odious and immoral a thing as can be conceived.” As a result, Hamilton claimed, “The general interests of humanity conspire with the obligations which Great Britain had contracted towards the Negroes to repel” a “construction of the Treaty” implying the reenslavement of free people when an alternative interpretation was available. Hamilton also emphasized the practicality of Jay’s original decision to drop the issue of compensation. Camillus asked confrontationally, “Is there anyone who will be rash enough to affirm that he [Jay] ought to have broken off the negotiation on account of the difficulty about the negroes? Yes! there are men who are thus inconsiderate and intemperate! But will a sober reflecting people ratify their sentence?”⁷³

Hamilton articulated an unabashed, natural rights antislavery argument in defense of the Jay Treaty. Hamilton was sincere in these beliefs. But he also viewed these antislavery arguments as politically persuasive, at least to a New York audience. Slavery, he sensed perhaps, was losing some of its grip on the political imagination of some northerners.⁷⁴ George Washington, who signed and supported the implementation of the treaty, had a different perspective on the politics of slavery. Continuing southern political resentments over implementation of the treaty cemented Washington’s decision to wait until he was no longer president to proceed further with private emancipation plans that he had begun to secretly contemplate.⁷⁵

The politics of slavery refracted in different ways through different lenses—personal, regional, national, and international. Nation-building sometimes produced almost paralyzing caution. But for New York’s new governor, John Jay, who for years had regarded slavery as philosophically indefensible, the path forward—despite personal and partisan pitfalls—was more clearly lit than ever.⁷⁶