Governing the Family

John Jay presided over a rapidly growing state and a rapidly growing family when he became governor in 1796. He was admired in both spheres. Although the satisfactions of family might have leavened the intense contentiousness of the era’s politics, household affairs were not without difficulties and even tragedies. Still, John could consider himself blessed by a combination of wealth, status, and family love that few of his contemporaries could match. Socialized to care about education, reputation, self-discipline, and, not least of all, his family, he would be shaped by the experiences of the 1790s as the landscape of slavery shifted toward an the era of gradual emancipation.

Following John’s return from the London treaty mission, Peter Augustus Jay, the family’s oldest child, prepared to follow his father into the legal profession while also wading into New York’s churning political waters. In a May 1796 letter, Peter sought to impress his father about his own budding Federalist activism among the young elite men of New York City. Like John, Peter favored the pen over the sword, expressing concern at the impulse to organize militias, whether supporting or opposing the Adams administration. Still, he felt compelled to join one. In contrast to the discord of politics, the maturing Peter, who trained with his cousin Peter Jay Munro, imagined the practice of law as harmonizing. “Defend[ing] the Rights & Interests of every class & individual” would at once safeguard the property of the rich and defend the freedom, dignity, and security of everyone else. He construed the law as the reformer’s and civilizer’s creed.⁴

His father’s moderate values and temperament guided Peter Augustus, and John Jay judged his eldest son Peter, at age twenty-three, to be at least a qualified success: “Few fathers have more valuable or numerous Reasons to be pleased with a Son.” Still, John called attention to “a Tendency in your Disposition to musing & consequently to Procrastination” that could erode focus and resolve if unchecked. There were practical reasons for the father to continue to mold his son’s habits. As the oldest son, Peter, in addition to his professional and political pursuits, would be asked to take on responsibilities for helping manage family business affairs, including oversight of the family’s slaves.⁵

For Peter Augustus’s younger sisters, public reputation mattered, even if gender precluded professions or political careers. The two older girls, Maria and Nancy, born in Europe, and the youngest child, Sarah Louisa (known as Sally), born in New York in 1792, received educations designed to produce refinement, good judgment, and religious commitment. A letter John wrote to the ten-year old Maria and nine-year old Nancy reveals not only their father’s paternal sweetness but also his didactic bent. To Maria, John wrote, “The more Progress you make in acquiring useful accomplishments, and amiable Manners, the more you will do Honor to yourself & to your Parents.” He wanted his daughter to understand that love was something she earned: “You know that the Merit of my children is the only Rule by which my affection for them will ever be measured; and I please myself in the Expectation that I shall have Reason to love them all exceedingly.” Yet he kept the bar for purposeful moral development high: “Virtue and Religion must be the corner Stones; & if with these you connect useful Knowledge, mildness of Temper, & Prudence and good Manners, you will … have great Reason to expect Happiness here” and in the afterlife. As the girls grew older and pursued additional formal education, the father dispensed similar advice even more sternly. The statesman instructed thirteen-year-old Maria, “Be cautious never to write what it would give you uneasiness to see published.” Maria’s taste for education convinced her parents to send her to the Moravian Young Ladies’ Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where her sister Nancy later joined her.⁶

The birth of a second son, the fourth of five children who would survive infancy, added to the delight and responsibilities of the household, whose primary location remained Manhattan until after the state capital moved to Albany in 1797. The young boy soon impressed the family with his temperament. Sally Jay wrote from New York that the eighteen-month-old was “a sweet little solace … in his Dr. [dear] Father’s absence.” She found “Our little Wil [sic] has plead so irresistably to be taken on my lap that he has gained his point, & tho’ by his caresses he interrupts me continually yet I cannot find in my heart to check him.” As William approached age three, his charms remained undiminished. His mother reported, “Will is all vivacity.”

William also seemed to share his mother’s admiration for the oft-traveling chief justice. Sarah wrote to John in Boston, “You are the prevailing subject of his prattle. I believe he dreamt the other night that you had returned, for when he awoke he insisted upon your being at home, nor would he be convinced of the contrary until I carryed him in your room.” William aimed to please a father with high expectations. At age five when the chief justice departed for London in 1794 to negotiate a commercial treaty with Britain, “William asked if I did not think I might venture to tell you that he is a very good boy,” which his mother then verified, calling him “a lovely child that interests ones feelings & promises much.”⁷

During his childhood, William developed a strong personality and close familial bonds, especially to his younger sister Sally. A lovely pastel portrait, painted when the brother and sister were approximately seven and four, clearly shows that William’s warm attachment to his family extended to his younger sister, their relationship thus preserved not only in words (see figure 4). Sarah Livingston Jay holds her daughter around the waist with one arm, while extending a bird’s nest to the young William, who is sitting in the crook of a tree. William appears to be making a point with his upraised arm and finger, while his sister feeds a bird some berries and fixes the artist with a steady, bemused gaze. In 1799, when William was just shy of ten and the family lived in Albany, their mother described an incident that calls attention to the boy’s precociously caring nature. A spat prompted little Sally to question her brother’s love. In response, William dug up two peach trees from his part of the garden and replanted them in Sally’s plot. The proud mother reported to her husband that William’s “Countenance glow[ed] with benevolence” and commented, “I did not know which most to admire his generosity, or her grateful sensibility & Candid humility which led her to confess her error & acknowledge his superiority.”⁸

Although he derived joy from his children’s affectionate bonds, John also provided a counterbalance of paternal restraint. In 1792, when William was not yet three and Maria ten, John wrote to his daughter, “Give little Wm. A kiss for me,” but then warned of too much sisterly indulgence: “I know you love him dearly, but take care not to humour him in any Thing improper. The sooner he learns to bear being denied, what he ought not to have, the better.” According to the father, the child’s future character was at stake. He did not want to raise his son to be a tyrant or his daughter to be a flatterer. John wanted to head off “a Habit of expecting that all his Caprices and Passions are to be indulged.” Inculcating self-disciplined purposefulness in all his children and tempering abundance with self-control to forestall indulgence and idleness were governing principles of John Jay’s parenting. As he grew up, William remained anxious for paternal endorsement of his character. In 1800, John concluded a letter from New York to his wife Sally with this request: “Tell Wm. That I am much disposed to take his word for his being a fine and a good Boy; and that I hope to find on my Return that he has not formed that opinion too hastily.” The love and admiration his children felt for him allowed John to keep his expectations high.⁹

William received his formal education in Albany. Beginning at age eight, he studied under Rev. Thomas Ellison, an Englishman who operated a preparatory school. At Ellison’s school, William met his lifelong friend, the future novelist James Fenimore Cooper. The boys undertook classical studies and the rigorous observance of Anglican ritual. Presumably they were also exposed to Ellison’s archconservative political views, including contempt for Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, as well as admiration for George III. In 1799, as his mother sent him back to school from a family stay with relatives in Rye, she wrote to her husband, “William goes cheerfully to school. May our fond hopes in him be realized!” In William much was invested.¹⁰

Governing the Enslaved

Enslaved workers, whether having served in the family for a time or newly purchased, did much of the cooking, cleaning, heating, and carrying that made life comfortable for this wealthy household of well-mannered, well-educated, pious children. These men and women were also markers of the family’s gentility.¹¹ Clarinda, Caesar, Dinah, Phillis, Mary, and others also were, legally speaking, repositories of monetary wealth, although for the Jays, owners of land throughout the state, they were nowhere near their most valuable assets. For the purposes of new federal taxes, imposed in the autumn of 1798, John Jay took stock of the property that would help secure the economic fortune of his family for generations to come. He opened his inventory by providing a painstaking description of the house and land he rented in Albany, noting the total number of windows of his dwelling and measuring the outbuildings’ dimensions in feet and inches. Five subsequent pages carefully detailed the governor’s holdings in six New York counties, as well as in Vermont and New Jersey. He recorded thousands of acres of upstate land, of Manhattan lots, and tracts in his home county of Westchester.

The second item in his property survey was different—for it concerned people, not real estate: “I have three male and three female slaves—five of them are with me in this city; and one of them is in the city of New York.” Something compelled the governor to explain his process and plans regarding this peculiar property, the flow not only into but out of his hands: “I purchase slaves and manumit them at proper ages, and when their faithful services shall have afforded a reasonable Retribution.” In other words, the enslaved had to work off their purchased price to earn their liberty. Jay noted that, for the purposes of the new tax law, slaves were “property … vested in me.” But he also felt compelled to record that he did not plan to remain vested in them. The enslaved assured his present comfort but not his long-term financial security.¹²

Following through on such self-defined slaveholding ethics was easier said than done; the costs were not as equitably distributed as Jay’s brief statement suggested. As one careful student of slavery and freedom during this period has noted, such arrangements for “self-purchase” constituted “a long and expensive route to freedom.” Jay may have had confidence in his ability to uphold his side of the bargain and calculate the costs fairly, but it was the people he purchased who had to do the work and stay on his good side long enough to complete the bargain.¹³

Governor Jay’s slave acquisitions perpetuated the casual cruelties of slavery even when accompanied by the prospect of freedom. In February 1797, Jay purchased Dinah, a Black woman whom he planned to free “after serving me faithfully a certain Term.” But Dinah had a two-year-old. The child’s owner, her previous master, planned to let Dinah have the child. The governor, however, wanted a dedicated servant in Albany, not the preoccupied mother of a toddler, whom Jay referred to as “it,” recording no name or gender. Dinah’s uncle was Peter Williams Sr., a tobacconist, a free man, and a leader among New York City’s Black Methodists. As John explained to Richard Lawrence, an associate in New York City, Dinah had written Williams in hopes that her uncle would take care of the child “but recd. no answer.” Wishing to ease her anxiety, no doubt caused by fear of losing this chance to secure her own child’s freedom though at the price of separation, Jay requested that Lawrence go in search of Williams and convey the message. Explaining himself in the intimate tone of one master to another, Jay stated, “I make no apology for giving you this Trouble, because under similar circumstances I would chearfully do the same thing” for Lawrence.¹⁴

Jay portrayed a sad and potentially tragic situation that he created as an act of magnanimity, collegiality, and practicality on his part. The freedom that Williams enjoyed and his niece Dinah’s future manumission pleased his sense of justice, but during this nascent transition, there was household work to be done. In this case, the governor’s sympathy aligned neatly with his self-interest. Meanwhile, Dinah’s insecure position left her with little choice but to rely on the judgment of the powerful man who had become her master. Jay ended up selling Dinah and her son to a man named Inman, with the stipulation that he eventually free them. This decision would have dire consequences.¹⁵

The Jays clearly reserved the right to make judgments and arrangements as they wished about enslaved families. Clarinda, it seems, was allowed to bring her six-year-old daughter Zilpah when the household moved to Albany. But sympathy for a person with a longtime connection to the Jays only went so far: Clarinda had to leave behind a husband.¹⁶

A slave named Caesar further exposed the limits of Governor Jay’s patience and principles. Caesar first appears in the family correspondence in January 1797 as a slave “as yet pleased and attentive” in the family’s New York City residence.¹⁷ This state of affairs did not last. After being moved to the Albany household, Caesar made himself so unpleasant there that Governor Jay sent him back to his son Peter in New York City. “Caesar’s conduct here has been improper—in constant ill Humour and indisposed to work—noisy and grumbling,” which the governor feared the neighbors might observe. As with Abbe in France, Jay could not figure out “any Principle” that could be the source of Caesar’s poor attitude, given how well disposed the family had been to him; the only possible explanation could be the bad influence of some other person. The frustrations of being a slave, even amid talk of liberty and emancipation, did not strike John as a sufficient “Principle” for such recalcitrance.

Caesar thus presented the governor with a conundrum. He was apparently too old for corporeal punishment to do any good, “and my Situation forbids any Experiments of that kind,” a suggestive phrase that likely referred to John Jay’s status as a public figure favoring gradual emancipation. Or perhaps the governor simply did not want to be perceived as a person who could not command respect from his servants. Either way, Jay conveyed his out-of-sight, out–of-mind disciplinary method to his son Peter, commenting, “I think it better to get rid of Servants who give Trouble, rather than to take harsh measures to reclaim them.”

John Jay solved his problem by passing Caesar on to his son, the aspiring attorney. Peter, his father instructed, “must have a Servant,” by which the governor meant a slave. Whether that slave be Caesar or someone else was Peter’s decision; if Peter found Caesar to be too much trouble, then he should “sell him, and with the money buy another.” Even though the governor wished to see the institution of slavery wind down, John was training Peter to be a master, telling his son, “I set no Price because you are to treat him and do … with him as your own.” Still, the elder Jay made it clear he wanted to receive updates from Peter.¹⁸

The same month that his troubles with Caesar came to a head, the governor exercised his prerogatives to show kind restraint and exact harsh discipline on behalf of other slave masters in the state. In each case, he made the problem go away, just as he had advised Peter. On October 11, 1797, Jay requested that the secretary of state issue a pardon for an enslaved man named Tom after a month of imprisonment in Rensselaer County for grand larceny. Two weeks later he issued a pardon for an enslaved woman named Hester Combs that may have proven worse than the original punishment. Jay conditioned his release of Combs from six months of hard labor on her master either permanently sending her out of state or being subject to a substantial fine if he did not comply. Jay, in essence, incentivized Combs’s owner to perpetuate her enslavement out of state, perhaps in the South. The pardon was a dubious work-around of New York’s slave law revisions allowing the exportation of slaves only when a court deemed it necessary. More tellingly, the arrangement violated the spirit of the New-York Manumission Society’s goal of sealing the borders to the import or the export of slaves. Governor Jay in this instance gave official sanction to his personal impulse—expressed in frustration over Caesar—to make difficult slaves go away.¹⁹

For his part, Caesar returned to New York City, a place that he likely preferred to Albany. He may have realized that there were worse fates than working for the Jays or bouncing back and forth between Albany and Manhattan. Shortly after Caesar’s arrival in New York City, Peter wrote his sister Maria that the slave “begged he might not be sold.” As Peter studied for the bar examination in New York City, Caesar for the time being remained in his service.²⁰

A month after washing his hands of Caesar by making him Peter’s responsibility, John Jay reflected on the recent death of Mary, “the last of our old Family servants.” Unable to resist further instructing his son in the ethics of slave ownership, Jay considered care for Mary a familial obligation. Although he wished he had known sooner that she was sick, John wrote, “It is a consolation however to reflect, that you found her comfortably circumstanced as to accommodations; and that she had not been without medical aid.” He continued, “The attention paid to her by Mr. [Peter Jay] Munro, Dr. Chandler and yourself gives me great satisfaction.” Although alluding to “Indiscretions & consequent Troubles of her latter Years,” perhaps a reference to her alcohol consumption, Jay cast the family’s relationship to Mary in the language of reciprocal obligation: “Few servants and few Families deserved better of each other than they did—so greatly does right conduct on the one side, tend to produce it on the other.”²¹ He wanted the family’s notion of generosity to continue into the next generation.

Meanwhile Caesar decided he did not want to wait around to see if he would earn any beneficence. Caesar ran away sometime in 1798 and became a sailor. He was not the last slave prior to the passage of the gradual emancipation law to test the Jays’ patience, principles, and sense of mastery. In January 1799, even as a gradual emancipation bill began to make its way through the state legislature, the governor considered how best to handle difficulties with a slave named Phillis. Writing Peter Augustus from Albany, the governor advised against freeing Phillis in the short run: “I think with your mama that to liberate her immediately would be of evil Example to the others, considering what her Behavior has been.” Instead, John suggested selling the difficult slave—with the provision that she be manumitted within two years by her new master. Although suggesting a sale price to Peter, John seemed more interested in making an example of Phillis. Neither he nor Sally presumably wished a repeat of the depressing episode with Abbe or the irritating one with Caesar. The objective Jay stated to his son Peter was a practical one: he did not want to be stuck supporting Phillis for the rest of her life, as “there is little prospect of her being good for much, considering her Habits.” There would be no shortcuts to eventual freedom, he wished to convey. Whatever his intent, a year-and-a-half later, Phillis was still working for the family; Sally mentioned her to Peter in a letter requesting “coarse thick cotton” to make blouses “for the wenches.”²²

Surprisingly, Caesar too would remain attached to the Jays, and they to him, by virtue of the unequal bargain of benevolent master and loyal slave. A ship Caesar worked on had sailed to Cap Francois in St. Domingue and thus right into the heart of the war between the French colony’s former slaves and waves of Europeans who sought to subdue and reenslave them. In February 1800, Caesar reported to the Jays via another Black man that he had been seized “& is now a Drummer in Toussaint’s Army” where, Peter relayed to his father, “He is very ill used, & extremely desirous to return to me.” Governor Jay responded from Albany with “pity” and thought that providing the American consulate in St. Domingue with “an application supported by proper Documents, might … be made with some prospect of success.”²³ Once returned to the mainland, Caesar remained with the Jay family for decades to come.

Judith Livingston Watkins, Sally Jay’s sister and John’s sister-in-law, illustrated how reluctant white New Yorkers were to let go of the prerogatives of slavery even as the political, demographic, and ideological landscapes shifted in their state. Judith wished to transport the slaveholder’s gentility to the New York frontier, where the institution barely existed and had little support. She complained to Sally about the difficulties of properly raising a daughter in the Finger Lakes region in the western part of the state where her husband had moved their family in 1798. Too many chores prevented her daughter Susan from having sufficient time to read. Thus, Judith made a special request: “For the more effectual establishment of my Comfort & for the particular advantage it will be to Susan I do earnestly request & entreat Mr. Jay that he will be good enough” to buy “a negro girl” she knew of from Schenectady and send her westward. A girl, she thought, would be better than an older slave woman who would adjust poorly to the primitive environment. Judith recognized, however, that she might be putting Governor Jay in an awkward position with the request, presumably because of his status as a prominent antislavery figure. She suggested to Sally that, “to prevent any further investigation,” the bill of sale be put in the name of another sister, who had brought her a “wench” previously. Though acknowledging shifting norms and her brother-in-law’s need to keep up political appearances, Judith hoped that her personal predicament would take priority over scruples.

Whether John Jay demurred to or even knew about the request is not known, but Watkins clearly equated the availability of Black labor with social status. Two years later, in August 1800, she remarked that the anticipated arrival of migrants from Pennsylvania and Maryland “will introduce a more polished Society”; one of the migrants, she noted, bought 20,000 acres of land and “will bring seventy blacks with him.” She also mentioned, perhaps jealously, the “Maryland gentlemen” visiting the previous summer to appraise the land “hansomly … Attended by Black Servants.”²⁴ Judith was clearly guided by the deeply ingrained notion of racialized servitude as a key marker of wealth and status. Given the persistence of such assumptions, eliminating slavery in New York would be no small task—either before or after gradual abolition became the law of the land.

Acts and Laws

In January 1796, the New York State Assembly took up a gradual abolition bill for the first time in several years. With calls for compensation to slave owners complicating the proceedings, the legislators declined to move forward. William Hamilton, who wrote the governor in March two months later, could have reasonably concluded that Jay had not invested his energy and prestige in advancing the cause of emancipation that winter. Indeed, John Jay’s remarks to the State Assembly in early January covered such topics as improving the fortification of the port of New York City, clarifying jurisdiction over appointments to state government, and increasing judicial salaries to attract more qualified jurists—but said nothing about abolition. Decades later, William Jay explained his father’s reticence as politically judicious. According to William, who as an adult years later may well have discussed these matters with his father, the governor did not wish to make gradual abolition a partisan issue between Federalists and Republicans; inserting abolition into this contentious political context might have bolstered opposition to the measure. Instead of taking the lead himself, Jay, according to his son, encouraged New York City representative James Watson to tender a bill in the State Assembly, where it floundered. The failure of the proposed legislation was not without positive effect, however; it attracted the public’s renewed attention to this crucial issue.²⁵

Governor Jay’s caution did not prevent him, however, from steering into other churning political waters. His 1796 gubernatorial address drew the public’s notice to white refugees from St. Domingue fleeing from civil war and rebellion to the United States. Without describing these refugees as slave owners or mentioning the slave insurrection, the governor instructed the legislature, “The situation of these unfortunate people still continues to be truly distressing” and should stimulate “our compassion” as “real objects of charity.” Jay’s solicitousness concerning destitute French arrivals was not fleeting, even though humane concern mixed with financial apprehension. Later that same year, Jay reported to the legislature on state funds spent to support “the French refugees from St. Domingo” whose “fate” he found “peculiar as well as distressing.”²⁶

As Governor Jay continued to maintain a low profile on gradual abolition, others—including members of his own family—stepped up to rally public opinion against slavery and to enforce existing antislavery statutes. The New-York Manumission Society played a crucial role in connecting Black resistance and white activism. Peter Jay Munro followed his Uncle John’s (and Frederick Jay’s) footsteps by joining the organization in 1791. Munro, now a lawyer, was no longer the callow youth who accompanied John Jay to Europe during the Revolutionary War and had poked fun when the family servants mourned Abbe’s death. In May 1798, Munro introduced another aspiring attorney to the Manumission Society, none other than the governor’s son Peter Augustus Jay.²⁷ If he felt constrained to stay above the debate over slavery’s future, John Jay placed no such constraints on other family members, including his dutiful eldest son.

The NYMS base of operations remained in and around Manhattan, though the organization’s leadership understood that the confrontation with slavery took place at the state and, ultimately, the national levels. Munro’s colleagues selected him to be one of the society’s three delegates to the first meeting in Philadelphia of the newly founded national convention of state abolition societies. The American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery’s emphasis on citizenship complemented the NYMS’s own efforts. In the view of white abolitionists, slavery created an environment in which neither subordinated slaves nor despotic masters developed properly as responsible citizens, whereas gradual emancipation provided a path for advancing the benefits of citizenship across the color line. As a member of the NYMS committee charged with suppressing vice in New York City’s Black community, Munro would have understood the link between improving African American social environments and combating slavery itself. Munro and his uncle Frederick Jay also subscribed to NYMS’s signature initiative for shaping Black behavior and showcasing Black intellectual equality—the African Free School. In 1796, Munro served on a committee organized to acquire a new property for the school; the society hoped to raise funds for this project by selling a Manhattan lot donated by Frederick Jay.²⁸

Munro put his legal skills to work helping monitor violations of state laws designed to protect Black people under certain conditions. For example, Munro pursued the case of a man named Dick whose assailants took him straight from prison onto a ship where, had a city watchman not heard a cry of “murder,” he presumably would have been sold out of state. Munro also won freedom for a woman in Westchester County named Lucy Garrett whose mother was purported to have been a free Native American. NYMS members came to value Munro’s expertise in wrongful enslavement cases; he may have earned a reputation among African Americans as well. Standing Committee minutes include a letter to Munro from a free woman who feared that her daughter had become ensnared as a slave. During the late 1790s, even as the state legislature repeatedly took up the possibility of a gradual emancipation law, dozens of African Americans obtained their freedom by bringing to the NYMS testimony of reneged manumissions, transportation across state lines in violation of the state’s postwar slave law reforms, and Native American or white maternal lineage that invalidated enslavement. Manumission Society members like Munro matched their skills to Black-sourced evidence to create leverage for freedom. Even without a gradual emancipation statute, existing state laws gave enslaved people, with the help of white reformers, enhanced powers to weaken the slaveholder’s grip.²⁹

African Americans took additional initiatives to undermine slavery’s legal and moral foundation. Free Black community leader Peter Williams Sr., with whom Governor Jay was familiar, established a Methodist church; other African Americans obtained municipal funds for a burial ground. The incidence of Black runaways in New York City and its surrounding areas also spiked in the 1790s. The more free Blacks who congregated in the burgeoning port city, the more difficult it became to capture runaways, to distinguish slave from free, and to imagine slavery as the inevitable fate of Black New Yorkers. Such resistance also raised the cost for slaveholders forced to expend time and money on retrieval efforts, instead of extracting more labor.³⁰ In some ways, William Hamilton, by writing his 1796 letter to Governor Jay, represented the emerging assertiveness of emancipated and self-emancipated Black New Yorkers.

Jay’s reformer, journalist, and publishing friends grew bolder and more impatient with the slow pace of change, despite their discomfort with some of these forms of African American self-assertion. At a special meeting in late November 1795, the NYMS determined that the time had arrived to renew their effort to urge the state legislature to take up a gradual abolition bill. Longtime Jay friend Egbert Benson, whom Jay had urged years before to pursue an abolition law, was on the committee charged with advocating for the bill. A 1795 NYMS initiative to try to persuade newspaper publishers to ban advertisements for runaway slaves failed. Even so, the state’s newspapers continued to publish a variety of items that placed slavery and even racism on the defensive. The sort of antislavery poetry that William Hamilton quoted in his letter to Governor John Jay in which imagined Black speakers eloquently articulated their plight was often found in the New York press. Governor Jay’s sympathies for French refugees from St. Domingue notwithstanding, there was even a turn, especially in Federalist papers, toward portraying the insurrection and its leading general Toussaint L’Ouverture in a favorable light. On the other side of the political coin, in 1797 no less a figure than George Washington came under fire as a slaveholder in a Republican newspaper.³¹

The NYMS sponsored orations in 1797 and 1798 that the organization published to highlight the need for progress toward abolition. Presbyterian minister Samuel Miller labeled the continuance of American slavery a “humiliating tale.” He debunked arguments about the inherent inferiority of Blacks and noted the institution’s deleterious social effects on whites, encouraging “haughtiness, a spirit of domination,” and “the seeds of social weakness and disorder.” Physician Elihu H. Smith’s critique of legislative inaction in 1798 was blisteringly direct: “You, yes you, Legislators of this Commonwealth, you foster and protect it [slavery] here! … It is you who sanction, you who uphold the crime.”³²

Even though legislative efforts to pass a gradual emancipation law repeatedly stalled, political geography increasingly favored the antislavery forces. In 1796, the state reapportioned its legislature to account for northward and westward expansion. As a consequence, the core regions of slavery’s support in the state—the Hudson River Valley, Staten Island, and Long Island—lost legislative influence. In frontier regions, slavery, as the governor’s sister-in-law Judith noticed, scarcely had taken hold. Representatives from these newer regions of the state had little political reason to fend off gradual abolition and even less incentive to support direct compensation of slaveholders from state coffers for the loss of their slaves. Making the state responsible, as opposed to local authorities, for the cost of upkeep for the formerly enslaved who became paupers also had little appeal to people from counties with few slaves. Thus, representatives from the western and northern parts of the state became reliable partners with the large and now solidly antislavery representatives from Manhattan.

The ability of slavery’s defenders to erect barriers to a decisive vote on gradual emancipation weakened. In the years since gradual emancipation’s defeat in 1785, many New Yorkers had come to think of slavery more as a southern institution than as one integral to their own economy and society. Meanwhile, abolition’s proponents had paired the language of citizenship with freedom effectively enough that, should a bill pass, Governor Jay and his colleagues on the Council of Revision would not be asked to stomach clauses denying free Blacks the right to vote or serve as jurors.³³

Perhaps John Jay had acted wisely in not identifying himself too closely with the effort to win a gradual emancipation law. Partisan vitriol was reaching a crescendo in the late 1790s. A quasi-war with France, the Federalist-dominated US Congress’s passage of Alien and Sedition Acts designed to suppress Republican opposition, and the Republican response of claiming that the states could judge federal laws to be unconstitutional fueled division. Remarkably, on March 29, 1799, the “Act for the gradual abolition of Slavery,” passed the New York State Assembly with bipartisan support.³⁴

In the biography of his father, written more than three decades after passage of the law formally commencing the gradual abolition of slavery in New York, William Jay commented, “Probably no measure of his administration afforded” John Jay “such unfeigned pleasure, and certainly none was more propitious to the morals, resources, and happiness of the State over which he presided.”³⁵ The modulated founding father and pioneer American opponent of slavery had every reason to be satisfied with the statute.

In accordance with the belief John Jay had expressed as far back as the Revolutionary War—that enslavement was an unnatural status for a human being—the law declared every child of a slave mother born after July 4, 1799, to “be deemed and adjudged to be born free.” This bold statement linked the law to the Declaration of Independence’s egalitarian creed. A series of qualifications written into the law, however, limited its scope and delayed the timing of freedom, echoing models of gradual emancipation in other northern states. In New York, free-born male children of slaves owed twenty-eight years of service to their mothers’ masters, and female children owed twenty-five years. Such an indenture bound another generation of African American New Yorkers to servitude well into adulthood during an era where life could be short, especially for the ill-housed and ill-clothed enslaved. Modest protection against masters’ manipulating their slaves’ ages was provided in detailed rules for registering the birth of each child of an enslaved mother, with fees and fines encouraging compliance. The law also provided for a mechanism by which masters could renounce their rights to their slaves’ children, at which point the children would be treated as “paupers” to be bound out like orphans or abandoned children. (The family taking them in would receive a monthly state subsidy.) Finally, the law granted masters the immediate, unconditional right to free their own slaves.³⁶

The law mirrored aspects of John Jay’s slaveholding credo since his days as a diplomat in France: the future freed person’s labor would compensate for the costs of ownership, with the master exercising some freedom when the inconveniences of caring for children arose. Indeed, the law provided far more protection for the interests of white masters than for the new class of free people that it created.³⁷ Some of the law’s more liberal features were expressed implicitly by what the act did not say. It did not impose any limitations—such as age or the freed person’s ability to support him- or herself—on the rights of masters to privately free their own slaves. It did not set up a color-coded system of second-class citizenship. Free Black males could vote, serve, as jurors, and testify in court on the same terms as white males. Under the state constitution that Jay himself had helped write, property—not color or prior status—would delimit the exercise of the franchise as long as Federalist principles ruled the day.

If his official position—and perhaps his status as a slaveholder—kept him from expressing what he thought was the larger meaning of the 1799 act, Jay’s contemporaries who inherited the mantle of abolitionist leadership from him were not so constrained. New Yorkers reporting to the annual American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery in 1800 summarized their state’s achievement—anticipating a time “not far distant” when slavery would end in the state and “the blessings of civil and religious liberty will be equally extended to all.” Jay, even before he became founding president of the NYMS, had expressed his belief in human equality, though as a master he also delayed the implementation of steps toward that equality. The law ushered in a new era that would change the manner in which New Yorkers, including Jay family members and Jay family slaves, understood and experienced this paradoxical balance.³⁸

Transitions

John Jay retired from the governorship in 1801 after a quarter-century of continuous public service and amid the declining fortunes of the Federalist Party. For the remainder of his long life, he would respond to the institution of slavery and to enslaved people as a slaveholder and as a private citizen. Before his second term ended, however, he signed off on additional slavery-related legislation that confirmed New York’s commitment to slavery’s demise as a methodical process governed by state regulation.

A law approved during Jay’s final year in office established public funding for a key feature of the NYMS agenda: education. The new statute required the City of New York to disperse in equal shares the remainder of funds raised for schools through previous statutes. Under the 1801 law’s provisions, the African Free School explicitly shared the same legal and financial status with schools run by Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, and other churches. Each school was to receive one-eleventh of the funds in the New York City Common Council’s possession as an endowment, using the interest to educate poor children. Thus, the state confirmed its support of the thriving school founded when John Jay was still a leading member of the Manumission Society. The education statute advanced Black equality and trained a generation of free Black community leaders.³⁹

Jay and the Council of Revision also approved “An Act concerning slaves and servants,” which attempted to protect Black New Yorkers and the state’s taxpayers from some of the unintended consequences of gradual emancipation. Whereas the 1799 law placed no restrictions on private manumission, the 1801 law reaffirmed legislation from the 1780s making former masters financially responsible for any slave freed after the age of fifty who became a public burden. The state also affixed tighter regulations on masters moving into the state with slaves. Henceforth a slave owner arriving in New York had to file paperwork under oath that the slave had been his or her property for a full year prior to arrival in the state. Failure to register a slave under this provision would lead to that slave’s freedom. The law reaffirmed the illegality of bringing a slave into the state for the purposes of making a sale. In addition, under the 1801 statute, the state explicitly expanded anti-export rules to cover children born after July 4, 1799. The anti-export clause made everyone involved in such transactions—buyers, sellers, and brokers—liable to a criminal fine of $250, with the victimized “slave or servant” becoming free. Although this statute governing servitude affirmed many aspects of slavery, such as banning unauthorized commerce with slaves or aiding runaways, it further insinuated state regulation into the ways that masters conducted the business of slavery. At the same time, the law highlighted ongoing assumptions that whites, including manumitting masters, would seek to abuse the conditions established under the new gradual emancipation regime.⁴⁰

The new law addressed, at least on paper, concerns that the NYMS identified after gradual emancipation went into effect. Freeing the children of slave mothers at birth without giving their parents effective control over these children created an incentive for human trafficking. Slavery’s slow demise in New York heightened the temptation to cash in through interstate sales of African Americans. In May 1800, the society recorded in its minutes “that a Practice has become pretty general to Ship Negroes from this to the Southern States” and from there to the West Indies. Subsequently, the NYMS petitioned the state legislature, reporting that children who were no longer slaves by the terms of the gradual abolition law, as well as free Blacks, “have been sacrificed to … rapacious” activity. The society also indicated that the ban, in place since 1785, on selling slaves from other states in New York had produced the unintended consequence of people from out of state indenturing their slaves, then manumitting them as paupers “burthensome to the public.”⁴¹

Peter Jay Munro and Peter Augustus Jay, as NYMS legal counselors during this first decade of gradual abolition, could see how greedy and abusive whites threatened Black freedom and personal safety. During this transitional period, even those recently freed Blacks who assumed that their privately arranged manumissions were valid needed advocates. These interventions did not always go well for those held in slavery. In March 1800, for example, a Brooklyn constable Barnet Newkirk arrested Rose Fussell on behalf of a person who claimed her as a slave, even though she had been freed by the will of her mother’s master. Newkirk publicly assaulted Rose Fussell. As bystanders attempted to intervene, Joseph King, a local shoemaker, charged in to pry Fussell from the porch to which she clung to protect herself. Another NYMS member consulted Munro on this case, which dragged on for months before reaching an ambiguous conclusion. The NYMS dropped its suit against the abusive Newkirk and King, with the society agreeing to compensate the two men for their legal fees. Fussell, meanwhile, would have to pay off two debts, one to the man who paid her alleged owner and the other to the society itself for the costs of the suit. For her physical and mental trauma, Fussell would have to work as a servant for two years and then forfeit money she herself had inherited from her father Pompey’s estate.⁴²

Despite the complications and liabilities entailed by the legal defense of free peoples’ rights, Peter Jay Munro and his colleagues confronted whites who violated New York’s laws or made dubious claims. In 1801, he advised that the Manumission Society sue Thomas Sanders on behalf of Peter Joseph, an East Indian boy who had served aboard a US naval ship; Sanders had withheld the wages due to Joseph, thus treating him as a slave. That same year his colleagues sought his help in the case of girl born in New York City to a mother who had been given permission by her Duchess County master to come there to work for wages toward her freedom. In 1802 Munro did work on behalf of Abram Ennals, from Maryland, who was manumitted in Pennsylvania but claimed as property by a North Carolina man.⁴³

Peter Augustus Jay consulted on the case of the Young Ralph, a ship in the city’s harbor that members of the NYMS strongly suspected of engaging in the slave trade between Senegal and the Danish Caribbean. Jay recommended filing suit under federal law prohibiting US citizens and others living in the United States from servicing the foreign slave trade. By partnering with federal officials, the society would, if successful, get a share of the steep fines on the alleged perpetrators.⁴⁴ In a world of porous boundaries, legalized slavery, and complicated arrangements between masters and servants, lawyers like Munro and Jay were crucial resources to the NYMS and people of color seeking to secure their freedom.

French West Indian refugees fleeing servile insurrection created a threat to freedom that prompted NYMS intervention. John Jay as governor had expressed sympathy for white refugees, but Munro and his colleagues grew concerned about the former slaves whom these men and women brought with them from St. Domingue. The legal issues were international in scope; the danger to individuals was acute. In August 1801, a group of Blacks originally from the area around Port-au-Prince but now in New York informed members of the Standing Committee of a plot to transport them to Savannah for sale as slaves. Because this group of people had been in St. Domingue at the time that French officials declared an end to slavery in the colony, the Frenchmen who brought them to New York and now tried to sell them were violating the former slaves’ rights. Munro investigated the case and went to the police magistrate on the former slaves’ behalf. He felt strongly that the NYMS should litigate the case to set a clear legal precedent: “That all black People held by Frenchmen and actually within the jurisdiction of the french Government at the time of the passing the decree were freemen.” He and Alexander Hamilton joined James Robertson in forming a committee to develop “a mode of procedure for the Standing Committee, in respect to Blacks held as slaves by French Emigrants in this City.”⁴⁵ Implementing such principles, even with high-level attention, proved easier said than done. The controversial Volunbrun case that heightened concerns about the machination of French emigrés ended with the NYMS retreating into inaction and several slaves still in the custody of their French mistress.⁴⁶

For Peter Jay Munro and Peter Augusuts Jay, the fraught nature of the transition from slavery to freedom also struck close to home. In December 1807, Munro reported to the Manumission Society that the adult son of a female servant in his household narrowly avoided winding up in the New Orleans slave market. Fortunately, the boat transporting him ran aground off the coast of New Jersey, where the man jumped ship, only to be thrown in jail.⁴⁷

In January 1808, Peter Augustus Jay even found himself doing the sort of fact checking of his father’s actions that members of the Manumission Society sometimes pursued to counter the malign intentions of white would-be masters. In 1808, Dinah, whom John Jay acquired in 1797 while governor, sought out Peter because she needed help freeing her child. Peter reported the following to John: Inman, the man to whom John Jay had sold mother and child for a supposedly “limited time” and who, John had allegedly promised was to pay her a “sum of money” upon her manumission had instead sold them to two separate masters, one in Utica, New York and the other in Attica, New York. Dinah had received her freedom from the new master. She did not, however, receive her promised payment while “her Child is still held as a slave.” Peter promised Dinah that he would pursue the matter with his father and, if the facts checked out, would intervene.⁴⁸ Although he had not violated any laws in selling Dinah and her child, John had left them exposed to the sorts of abuses that Peter Jay Munro and Peter Augustus knew all too well. Fortunately, or so Dinah and probably Peter Augustus hoped, John Jay could act as a powerful ally to redeem the situation.

John responded to Dinah’s pain with detachment. He wrote his son, “I do not recollect that Dinah was to have money at the Expiration of her Term.” Then he put his trust in the slippery character Inman to resolve the matter, telling Peter, “My Bill of Sale wh. I presume her late master will have, will ascertain the Bargain.” John made no mention of the plight of Dinah’s child. Had the welfare of the child been important to him, John would have issued instructions or encouragement to Peter, as he did on so many other matters financial, political, and familial. Instead, John provided his son with minimal leverage in pursuing the matter—no word of honor or strong recollection from the still influential founder and former governor and no expression of grave concern were forthcoming. In 1797, John had wanted to render Dinah’s child invisible by pawning her off on a relative and later actually selling her. In 1808, the child still remained invisible to John. The call to conscience and memory from his son stimulated nothing more from John than a tacit affirmation that he had in fact played a role in freeing Dinah.⁴⁹

Clearly, the retired governor had not turned against manumission as a practice, but he deflected real responsibility and disengaged from the ongoing work of abolitionism, in contrast with his nephew and his eldest son. For example, in 1805, when his old Manumission Society colleague John Murray Jr. was soliciting funds for the African Free School, John responded with a churlish lecture on how to put the school on a more secure footing and on the importance of separating Black students from their parents by providing them apprenticeships and domestic service opportunities in white households. In 1809, the elder Jay deflected politely the effort of British parliamentary antislavery activist William Wilberforce to enlist him in Anglo-American efforts to suppress the slave trade.⁵⁰ In his personal approach to manumission, as his response to Peter Augustus’s inquiry about Dinah and her child indicated, John adhered to the letter of his agreements, self-assured that the legal process defined the extent of his obligations. Meanwhile, his eldest son and his nephew served in an organization compelled to police slavery’s narrowing boundaries on behalf of slaves and former slaves just like Dinah.

The NYMS pressed on. Experience helped develop the organization’s legislative agenda. Clearly, unscrupulous whites would not restrain themselves from skirting laws limiting the scope of slavery and the latitude of slaveholders. With Peter Jay Munro’s participation, the NYMS in 1807 developed specific proposals to tighten the regulations for taking enslaved people and indentured servants out of the state and in 1809 for bringing the enslaved into the state. Revisions to the state’s slavery laws in 1807 and in 1810, the year Munro became president of the NYMS, incorporated these proposals. For members of the organization, volunteering to extend freedom and attack prejudice was a personal commitment. As an 1805 address delivered at the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery asserted, “Every individual sacrifice, to humanity and virtue, will be placed to our credit in the records of our lives.”⁵¹

Slavery, Education, and Ambition

During this period of transition, fifteen-year-old William Jay, the member of the family who eventually would have far more to say about slavery than any of the other Jays, entered Yale College. In his college years in New Haven, from 1804 to 1807, the sensitive and intellectually ambitious boy assembled building blocks for his emerging worldview. The college sought to instill the ethical architecture and polemical skills of a distinctively New England institution into students from around the fledgling country. Although the adult William Jay would credit his father for schooling him in antislavery views, Yale and its dynamic president Timothy Dwight contributed significantly to the future moralistic pugnacity and strong regional identity that would characterize his future abolitionism.⁵²

By sending his second son to New England for college, John Jay had no more removed William from slavery’s influence in shaping elite northern culture than had he attended Columbia, his father’s and brother’s alma mater. Still, going to Puritan Yale rather than quasi-Anglican Columbia served to diversify William’s cultural perspective while reinforcing his essential values. Like other Anglo-American colleges, slavery put its impress on Yale’s early years, a legacy that shaped the institution in William’s time and well beyond. The college, founded in 1701, cultivated benefactors in England, the West Indies, and New England with ties to Atlantic slavery and recruited students from slaveholding families. It derived income from the Rhode Island slave plantation gifted by Bishop George Berkeley, who also left the school part of his library. Trustees and faculty owned slaves, as did the prominent eighteenth-century president Thomas Clapp. Ezra Stiles, when he became president of Yale during the Revolutionary War, freed a slave he had purchased previously when serving as a minster in Rhode Island. Stiles later went on to found and lead a Connecticut antislavery society. Path-breaking nineteenth-century Yale scientist Benjamin Silliman had financed his own undergraduate education there through his mother’s sale of two family slaves and, in the words of one historian, “freely violated” the terms of Connecticut’s 1784 gradual emancipation law.⁵³ Lessons learned about slavery at such a college could hardly be simple, let alone radical.

When William arrived in 1804 at Yale, the third oldest college in the United States was firmly in the hands of Dr. Timothy Dwight. Dwight was a formidable intellectual who infused the college with his ambition. Dwight’s politics were distinctly conservative. As the bearer of a dissenting Puritan religious tradition and strong patriot credentials, he was armed with tools to critique the democratic turn heralded by the ascent of the Republicans and Thomas Jefferson. Dwight took seriously the moral regulation of the Christian republic that his graduates, more likely to be lawyers than ministers, were meant to lead. By the time William Jay arrived, Dwight had almost doubled the size of the student body. A collection of more than 200 boys attended the school at the turn of the nineteenth century.⁵⁴

In New Haven, young William Jay spent significant time with white southerners for the first time in his life. Of the sixty-one Yale seniors who began their capstone year with Jay in 1806, nine were from the South. John C. Calhoun graduated in 1804 shortly before Jay formally matriculated, so the two may never have met. Yet Jay knew and befriended another South Carolinian, Thomas Grimké, older brother of the future abolitionists and feminists Angelina and Sarah Grimké. Jay’s role as a member and officer in the student literary society, Brothers in Unity, would have exposed him to southern students as well.⁵⁵

Dwight’s moral pedagogy for northerners and southerners alike required an appraisal of slavery and emancipation. His lectures played off William Paley’s 1785 The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, the text in his senior course on moral philosophy. Paley’s comments on slavery, which make up a brief chapter in his vast treatise, were unequivocally negative, while his embrace of gradual abolition is of a piece with his cautious, paternalistic approach to hierarchies of class, age, and gender. According to Paley, an Anglican minister from Yorkshire, England, the prime responsibility of parents was to “endeavour to preserve their children in the class in which they are born.”⁵⁶

If, in Paley’s understanding, class relations were in some sense natural, permanent and inheritable bondage was not. Paley viewed the African slave trade to the Americas as wholly illegitimate—from enslavement in Africa, to the breakup of families that ensued, to the laws in America that were “the most merciless and tyrannical that ever were tolerated upon the face of the earth.” He even forecast a “great revolution in the Western world” following which “we will wonder if a country that did this was fit for empire.” This so-called revolution unfolded as Christian consciousness among the powerful, not resistance by the enslaved. Immediate abolition would lead to war, pitting slaves against masters: “The truth is, the emancipation of slaves should be gradual; and carried on by provisions of law, and under the protection of civil government.” For Paley, gradual emancipation fit safely into a narrative of Christianity acting as a solvent to ancient institutions, so that the gospel’s “advance” would mean slavery’s final demise.⁵⁷ William Jay, reading these passages, might have concluded that the actual course taken in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, his native New York, and, as of 1804, New Jersey dovetailed with Paley’s combination of sharp moral critique and practical patience. Paley’s view, moreover, fit neatly with his father’s and the NYMS’s expectations for emancipation.

William Jay and his fellow students would have been able to detect, from his actions and lectures, both President Dwight’s dislike of slavery and his paternalistic view of African Americans. Dwight was a member of a Connecticut anti-slavery society and had once purchased a Black woman with the plan to free her after she worked off the purchase price, and was no doubt pleased when his young college charges attended the funeral of a Black sweeper employed at Yale. He also supported a New Haven school teaching literacy to local Black children. Dwight’s poetry foreshadowed a mistrust of southern cultural values and New England chauvinism that would intensify in his later work.⁵⁸

In his remarks to Yale students, Dwight mixed hostility to slavery with environmentalist assumptions about race and paternalistic ideas about class. In a lecture given the year after William Jay’s graduation, Dwight noted the “monstrous iniquities practiced by the Europeans in the slave trade” and the high death rates the trade produced. He praised William Wilberforce for bringing this problem before Parliament. Dwight echoed Paley’s assertion that “the Spirit of Christianity” was antislavery, even if opposition to slavery was not named or promoted by early Christians. Dwight’s suggestion that Black skin might not be a permanent condition, but rather would disappear over time, was a corollary to his general belief that differences in human complexion were environmental rather than inherent. Yet Dwight’s illustration of the flawed concept of implied consent through the anecdote of a New England servant named Caesar (which marked him as a Black character) who took pears from a pear tree because the tree did not express any objections. The story evinces New England’s folk racism. Voicing a paternalistic sentiment, Dwight spoke as well of the challenge that masters faced “regulat[ing] the moral conduct of servants.”⁵⁹

To sharpen their arguments and inculcate Dwight’s and Yale’s version of right thinking, William and his fellow students practiced debating key historical, moral, and public policy propositions—including a few that related to slavery. By posing a series of brief questions—Should immigration be encouraged? Should there be state support of clergy?—Dwight attempted to make moral philosophy a useful guide for civic as well as philosophical questions. Student societies also debated similar propositions. From year to year, a series of propositions were put before students by Dwight and within the meetings of societies such as Brothers in Unity.⁶⁰

Two recurring questions, one about policy and the other about the meaning of American history, spoke directly to the issue of slavery in a fashion that, on balance, blunted rather than stoked moral outrage. In debates, the question whether the discovery of America was “beneficial to the world” was affirmed positively. Dwight did observe, according to a student’s notes, that it was a “difficult” question, with the slave trade the “most important objection.”⁶¹ A detailed account from the 1802–3 school year records the estimate (wildly low by modern scholarly standards) that 100,000 Africans and 100,000 Indians died as a result of the discovery; yet this tragedy allegedly was more than made up for by Europe’s doubling in population and the improvements in science and medical skills that made the world a better, happier place.⁶²

Yet, when it came to determining what, if anything, was to be done about the legacy of the slave trade, gradualism, compromise, and even racism reigned. The side arguing against a swift end to slavery was the presumptive winner when debating variants of the topic of immediate emancipation of the enslaved in the United States. The wrongs of the slave trade were evident and Black slaves were the equals of at least some European whites, but those observations did not dictate immediate emancipation. An 1801 student debate indicates that immediate abolition was not taken seriously by many students. The anti-immediate argument raised the specter of “idleness & dissipations” and stoked the fear that freed slaves would wage war against whites. As proof of Black martial strength, the student noted African American military efforts on behalf of the British during the Revolution. Conceding that the slave trade was “dreadfully wrong” and noting that recolonizing freed people elsewhere was entirely impractical, this debater regarded it as simply too dangerous to regard immediate abolition as “justice.” More strikingly, the student charged with affirming immediate abolition refused to sustain his side, saying “policy & expediency forbid” emancipation and then raised the unwelcome possibility of miscegenation as the consequence of freedom.⁶³

The way slavery was talked about at Yale left plenty of room for moral complacency. In the opening years of the nineteenth century, a Yale student—even one convinced of the slave trade’s catastrophic implications—could assume a position of moral and political complacency at peace with Paley’s, Dwight’s, and the northern state’s gradualist approach to emancipation and even the southern status quo.⁶⁴

William Jay’s own college statement about the future said nothing about slavery. William’s nine-part treatise “On the Profession of Lawyering,” ran through the first volume of the student-edited Literary Cabinet like a straight arrow.⁶⁵ William set himself the task of defending the honor and the necessity of the oft “abuse[d]” legal profession, carrying forward his father’s and Dr. Dwight’s faith in traditional institutions and social arrangements. William took the position that civilization required laws, laws required courts, and courts required lawyers. Lawyers served as society’s equalizers: without them, “How should the honest farmer or mechanic … defend himself against the encroachments of those, whom avarice has rendered both crafty and unfeeling?” Thus, lawyers, who defend all those accused of criminal wrongdoing and represent all those whose property interests are at risk, ensure that the law neither “bend[s] to the overgrown influence of the great, [n]or fall[s] down” to “the mad ravings of the populace.” Such skilled men were ideally suited to fill the ranks of “statesmen.” Federalist greats such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Rufus King, and John Jay were his exemplars.⁶⁶

The essay illustrates the seventeen-year-old William’s budding worldview. For the son of John Jay, finishing his training at a redoubt of New England Federalism in the wake of the reviled Jeffersonian ascendancy, it was virtually instinctual for William to take the position that ordinary, untrained people could not be trusted to govern themselves. The republic needed sober, well-trained men like himself to come to its rescue.⁶⁷

Mixed Blessings

Toward the end of his 1796 letter that began this chapter, William Hamilton asked John Jay a series of sharp questions about slavery. The carpenter challenged the governor: “Is it not high time that the scandal of this country should be taken away that it might be called a free nation … is it not time that negroes should be free[?]” Hadn’t the time arrived “that the threatening of heaven should be taken away” by ending slavery? Hamilton was not debating specific policies or history—whether slavery should end gradually or immediately, with or without compensation for slave masters, and what was the relationship between bondage in New York and in the nation. Yet he conveyed a principle of emancipation much more directly than President Dwight or his Yale debaters would, and he did so with the clear conviction of where God stood. He articulated a key precept of immediate abolitionism a generation before any Jay or virtually any other white abolitionist would do so: slavery must end. Hamilton presumably knew how emancipation actually occurred in places like New York—through the precise outlines of gradualism negotiated in the political corridors of power. That is why it made sense to him to write the governor, founding father, and former president of the New-York Manumission Society—a symbol of the nation who held at least some of the levers of political power. But before the governor could do anything substantive, Hamilton sought Jay’s moral agreement, which his divine threat against the United States dramatized.

Ultimately, however, Hamilton opted for blessings over curses. At its close, the letter pivoted toward an image of brighter future for the country: “May kind heaven smile upon this nation incline them to do unto all men as they would all men should unto them.” The letter to Governor Jay then concluded with an invocation: “May Negroes be manumitted may heaven diffuse its choiset blessings on your head may you open your mouth & jud[g]e righteously & plead the cause of the poor & needy [and] may your family be blessed from above.”⁶⁸

On balance, within the confines of their own households, the Jays as masters experienced slavery as more blessing than curse—or, if not a blessing, then instrumental to securing the blessing that their wealth made possible. The reward for a quarter-century of unremitting public service that ended in 1801 with the close of his second term as governor was for John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay to retire to an impressively expanded house located on inherited land in Bedford, New York, about two dozen miles north of John’s boyhood home on Long Island Sound. And, of course, a house for the Jays was not a home without men and women to look after them. Sarah took comfort when matters went well with her servants, enslaved or otherwise, remarking in a March 2, 1802, letter to John, “No servts. could have behaved better than ours have done.” Sadly, the mistress of the Bedford home would not be able to count her blessings much longer, as three months later, Sarah passed away following “a short & severe illness.” John expressed his misfortune several months later with his customary understated equanimity in the draft of a letter intended for political ally Rufus King: “My Expectations from Retiremt. have not been disappointed, and had Mrs. Jay continued with me, I should deem this the most agreeable part of my Life.” Still, no doubt thinking of his children and his comfortable home, he wrote, “Many Blessings yet remain and I enjoy them.”⁶⁹

Just as John did not experience retirement quite the way he had anticipated, health problems kept William from successfully launching the life he expected on his graduation from college. He went to train with a Federalist attorney in Albany, and based on what he learned his brother Peter expressed confidence that William was on his way to “becoming master of his profession.” But eye problems plagued William. On August 19, 1809, the twenty-year-old wrote his father planning his permanent relocation to the Bedford home, “bidding adieu to pursuits from which, from my childhood I had anticipated pleasure and honor.” William, born to wealth and social stature, was fortunate that despite his ailment he had such a hospitable place from which to chart a new life course.⁷⁰