Exceptions

William Jay knew perfectly well that women played a critical role in the history of the immediate abolition movement. He cited the English Quaker Elizabeth Heyrich’s 1820s pamphlet on immediate abolition as an important influence on his thinking about emancipation. The harassment of Prudence Crandall after her attempt to educate Black girls in Canterbury, Connecticut, in 1833 had drawn William Jay toward the abolitionist movement. In fact, he devoted several pages of his Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, and American Anti-Slavery Societies to the Crandall case. Yet he cast the Crandall story in socially traditional, paternalistic terms. The unmarried Crandall, “a lady of irreproachable character,” played the conventional role of schoolteacher. She was “an unprotected female” facing, along with her young Black students, the legal bullying of local officials and colonizationists. She merited protection.²

The heightened public activism of women in the immediatist movement posed a more direct challenge to William’s paternalism. Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who dramatically distanced themselves from their wealthy South Carolina slaveholding family by moving north and becoming Quakers, played a particularly prominent role in the movement. They became the AAS’s first female agents in late 1836. Large crowds of men and women came to hear them speak. They helped spark a dramatic increase in AAS membership.³

William’s exchange of letters with Angelina Grimké in early 1837 reveal his ambivalence about the role women should play within the abolitionist movement. Jay was no stranger to the Grimké family, having attended Yale with Angelina’s brother Thomas, who several years earlier had sent his old college friend a translation of the antislavery pamphlet by the Frenchman, Abbé Henri Grégoire. A unique combination of religion, regional origin, and social class permitted, in William’s view, the Grimké sisters to pursue their case against slavery so publicly. William informed Angelina, “As a general rule, I think public addresses from females inexpedient, & inconsistent with the reserve which is at once the ornament & the safeguard of your sex.” But their Quaker identity had created a loophole. The Society of Friends, William noted, “recognized public female teachers; & many of its female members feel it a religious obligation to preach in public.” Since the Quakers combined modesty with public preaching, William regarded Angelina’s approach as less alarming. By a similar logic, the judge viewed slavery and abolition as a suitable topic for the Grimkés’ public speech; abolition was a religious issue, and for no religious group more so than the Quakers. Speaking out on slavery was an extension of the Grimkés’ obligations.⁴

William Jay also recognized that Angelina Grimké brought an important attribute to the slavery debate that few other people, men or women, possessed: her insider’s knowledge of southern slavery. Jay noted, “We of the North are constantly assured that we do not, & cannot understand this subject.” Without acknowledging himself as a kind of slavery insider, Jay expressed his scorn for “our opponents … [who] insist that to the initiated alone belongs the right of discussing the sublime merits of the system.” But as his letter to Grimké implied, such criticisms of northern abolitionists were effective in blunting the case against slavery. That is why she had “the right & perhaps consequently the duty” to speak out against slavery: “Your competency as a witness can be questioned by none.” Like Charles Ball, Grimké was the sort of reliable voice required to advance the cause.

Class and social reputation also played a role in justifying making an exception for Grimké. As Jay, who understood the power of his own last name, wrote Angelina, “The name you bear, & your religious profession & standing guaranty your credibility.” As a result, she had great potential “to deliver your testimony with perpiscuity & force.” Thus, Jay proclaimed, “Why then should” her testimony “be withheld.” Jay sealed his approval with an invitation to visit his Bedford farm at any time.⁵ In this instance, he found a way to rationalize his discomfort with public female activism.

Jay’s understanding of sex and gender occluded his ability to recognize women’s oppression as a separate cause, let alone one related to emancipation of southern slaves. In 1837, when he wrote his letter to Angelina Grimké, however, he underestimated the specific radical trajectory of her and her sister’s abolitionism. Sarah Grimké would soon publish in book form Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, under the imprint of Garrison’s publishing partner Isaac Knapp: it called for women to “arise in all the majesty of moral power … and plant themselves, side by side, on the platform of human rights, with man.” The Grimké sisters embedded in their assault on slavery an attack on patriarchy and sexual inequality that did not claim special exemptions for Quaker women but rather united the plight of all women, Black and white.⁶ The traditional norms and rules maintained in William Jay’s household indicate why the expansive role women carved out for themselves in the wider abolitionist movement accelerated William’s disillusionment with the Garrisonians.

Rules

William Jay’s inheritance of his father’s household and his curation of his father’s legacy fortified his patriarchal orientation; ongoing experience shaped and tempered these attitudes. Just as his stern approach to ruling from the bench and his skepticism about mass democracy helped define his understanding of social reform, so too did his relationships with female family members. Women in the Jay household did not simply follow orders or obey unreflectively. Reflecting aspects of emerging separate spheres of gender ideology, William understood women as privately supporting men’s public roles—mindfully developing their moral and intellectual identities to support but not to usurp or contravene men’s public pursuits.⁷

William’s marital advice to his daughter Anna articulated some of his central ideas about gender. He hoped his daughter Anna would through her actions fulfill her duties as a wife, a Christian, and the bearer of the family tradition. As Anna prepared to move to Maryland with Reverend Louis Balch in 1839, William indicated that her role was not to be passive but rather conscientiously supportive. As a minister’s wife, Anna’s activities were not limited to the domestic sphere but rather blended public and private responsibilities. William instructed, “Be a helpmeet to your Husband, in the church as well as in the house. Strengthen & enforce by your example the precepts he delivers from the pulpit. Cultivate the good will of his parishioners & lend him aid in executing his various plans of benevolence & piety.” She should manage the household in such a way as to support Rev. Balch’s mission and status. Anna’s “frugality” would greatly lessen her husband’s money worries the marketplace concerns that preoccupied other men. The couple then could show the generosity toward others as befit a minister’s family. “Your happiness is now identified with your Husband & you cannot promote his, without advancing your own. Thus the reward of duty” lies “in its discharge.” Anna and Louis’s spheres were neither separate nor identical; rather the wife’s nested in and dutifully contributed to the husband’s.⁸

Through properly modulated conduct, Anna would honor both her Jay heritage and the “Heavenly Father.” Thus, when she moved away with her husband, Anna did not leave behind her own family history, handed down through the generations from father to son, and, in her case, from father to daughter. William prefaced his advice by first observing that no family had “more cause to trust in the God of their Fathers than our family.” God had rewarded these descendants of “popish persecution” who held steadfast: “For successive generations, have our parents been blessed with the comforts of this life, & the hopes of a better.” If Anna played her part correctly, then such good fortune would continue. In the iconoclastic fashion that had led William to fight many battles against his own Episcopal Church’s hierarchy, the father also warned the daughter not to conflate the church with the gospel or the “ministry” with core beliefs. His daughter, even as wife of a minister, should value conscience over command, though presumably a good marriage would obviate the need to make any such choices in her personal life.⁹

William still expected that Anna would maintain a sense of racial justice even though her marriage obligations relocated her to a slave state. A November 1840 letter expounded didactically on the report of the funeral of Rev. Peter Williams Jr., New York’s pioneering Black Episcopal minister and advocate of Black equality. That his fellow clergymen treated Williams so much better in death than they had in life was, commented Judge Jay, a sign of the “triumph of abolition principles & influence” and a marker of the church’s deep hypocrisy. Recounted William Jay, Rev. Williams’s color had barred him from ordination for years, and even so, he and his parish were never granted admission into the Episcopal Church’s official councils. Peter Williams’s story was an object lesson in the importance of challenging the existing order with her father’s unapologetic abolitionist values.¹⁰

There were, however, distinctly gendered limits to Judge Jay’s support for flouting social conventions. Having derided racial discrimination in one paragraph, William embraced a narrow view of the roles that women might perform in public, in tones both puritanical and coarsely sexist. In response to Anna’s inquiry as to what he thought of the Austrian ballet dancer Fanny Elssler’s donation to the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, Massachusetts, William labeled Essler an “impudent Hussey” and a “foreign vagabond” who came to the United States to make money “by publicly exhibiting herself.” His prudish distaste conveyed his restricted view of female propriety. He found a foreigner’s gift to be inappropriate for this distinctly American monument, especially one commemorating a battle fought by Puritan men notable for “their high toned morality,” who, he joked, would likely “send girls like Fanny” to jail.¹¹ If his daughter had any doubt about the difference between crossing boundaries based on race and crossing those based on sex, she could have none after her father’s response. For William Jay, the woman question and the color question existed on separate planes.

Expectations

If, while coming of age, Anna had paid attention to her own mother’s example, then her father’s letters were mere reminders of her prescribed role of serving as a demure and pious wife who invested in the family’s philanthropic and historic callings.¹² Augusta Jay did not seek a public role in the abolition movement. She exhibited tremendous devotion to her children, her husband, and, while he was alive, to her father-in-law John Jay. She read religious and secular literature, as well as abolitionist writings, while immersing herself in her Christian faith. Augusta kept careful track of the health of her family, worrying over any signs of danger or discomfort. Her prosperous circumstances could do only so much to protect her from the pains and risks of childbirth or the devastation of losing infant children.¹³

The mutual love of William and Augusta existed in a setting in which William had inherited the mantle of family authority over the household from his father. Although William’s responsibilities as a judge and activist did at times take him out of the home, the Bedford estate was not a separate women’s sphere. Their privileged lives did not conform to the emerging middle-class pattern of husbands deriving their livelihood and social identity striving in a working world defined by the values of the marketplace and wives overseeing the feminine domestic sphere governed by emotional nurturance, morality, and religion. Considerable family wealth and personal choices embedded the pious William within the home. There, as his nineteenth-century biographer described, William spent his days reading and writing in his book-lined study, taking breaks to survey the farm, and participating with family members and servants in twice-daily prayers.¹⁴ Nonetheless, as a county judge, a writer, a social reformer, and as a Jay, William was a public figure. His wife was not. Augusta served as the kind of “helpmeet” that William counseled Anna to be, one who supported the family’s greater purpose in the world.

Through marriage and experience, Augusta indeed became personally invested in the family’s historical legacy. She revered the memory of her father-in-law with whom she had shared a home. A letter written to her son at college revealed her overlapping dedication to the founding father, to her son John, and to her husband William. In the spring of 1835, Augusta, having finished reading her husband’s biography of John Jay, exclaimed in a letter to John II, “My love for the Jay family increases the more I read & think of Papa’s character—how just! & how kind!” She was even moved to make a historical judgment that comported with the Federalist historical ethos of the family, proclaiming that Jay and George Washington belonged “in the foremost rank of worthies if those of all ages & nations could be compared together.”

As a mother, Augusta’s judgment had a pedagogical purpose: she wanted John to work hard at college. Thus, she exhorted her eighteen-year-old son, “Dear John endeavour to imitate” your grandfather. Lest her son dismiss her words as excessively emotional, Augusta admitted, “I come warm from the subject—but my deliberate feelings are the same.” In other words, her head validated what her heart felt.¹⁵ She and William consciously paid tribute to the Jay family in the names they chose for their children. In addition to naming John for William’s father, they named a daughter Sarah after William’s mother and two daughters after William’s sisters. William and Augusta also passed on their own names to their youngest children.

Augusta was very much alive to the present, not only the past, understanding that greatness flowed from morally directed action on the issues of the day—including the abolition of slavery. She did not rely on her husband’s word alone to reach her own judgments; instead, she filtered her own reading through her finely honed religious sensibilities. At the time of the 1834 New York City riots, Augusta still thought of abolitionists as trouble-making provocateurs but adapted her views to embrace the movement. In an 1836 letter, she wrote John, “I have read of the Anti-slavery meeting—I am more fully convinced than ever that Abolitionists are right.” She then stated approvingly, “I am glad you are interested in the cause.” Abolitionism was “truth & justice,” making it “a sin to be indifferent to it.”¹⁶

Augusta knew that some women had become important public voices of abolitionism. She and William, however, cannot be described as joining the ranks of “activist couples” prominent in the history of the movement. In April 1837, William relayed to John that his mother would like some copies of a publication by one of the Grimké sisters, which suggests that Augusta wished to share it with others.¹⁷ But she did not establish a prominent separate identity as an abolitionist.

Immediate abolitionism in and of itself was a radical cultural stance in the context of mid-nineteenth-century American society, but neither Augusta nor her husband wished to construe it as such. In response to John’s plans to marry Eleanor Kingsland Field in 1836, Augusta counseled, “Having chosen your companion you have now to determine your course, & from all your early impressions & present advantages, I hope it may be the narrow & the safe one.” In Augusta’s mind, being an abolitionist was not inconsistent with following a narrow and safe course of action; this was in contrast to the popular view of abolitionists in both the North and South in the mid-1830s. The note William added to Augusta’s congratulatory letter underscored this Jay habit of mind toward abolitionism and the duty of one generation to the next in pursuing this course: the judge offered stilted congratulations on the engagement before dispatching instructions to stop by the New York Anti-Slavery Society office in Manhattan to pay his Emancipator newspaper subscription and acquire other slavery-related publications.¹⁸

Augusta Jay pursued a broad array of readings and interests, secular as well as religious. She broadened her intellectual horizons without undermining her gendered expectations of her own and her children’s responsibilities. She made reference in her correspondence to reading William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, and Lord Byron, as well as longtime family friend James Fenimore Cooper. She also pursued an interest in religious literature, reading the works of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Welsh Presbyterian writer William Henry and the early nineteenth-century Anglican missionary Henry Martyn. She reported reading Scottish history and once informed her son that she wished she knew more about natural history, suggesting to John that he might share his knowledge with her.¹⁹

As a parent, Augusta enforced and elevated standards. She carried on the family tradition of using letter writing as a pedagogical tool—handwriting being considered a manifestation of character. She chided her daughter Maria for not dating her letters and warned John against “acquir[ing] incurably slovenly habits” by inattention to his writing. Her children needed to be cultured as well as disciplined, which, for her daughters, included training in music, drawing, and French. At one point the Jays hired a governess from the Hartford school of Catherine Beecher, oldest daughter of the prominent New England divine Lyman Beecher and herself a leading educational authority. Augusta readied her girls not for work but rather to take their place as members of a cultured elite in which they would become companionable wives.²⁰

Augusta Jay’s own participation in moral reform movements fulfilled her perceived spiritual need to embrace “eternal things.” She participated in local Bible and missionary societies, causes in keeping with Jay family tradition and her own religious promptings. Augusta served at one point as a manager of the local Tract Society. She and William hosted a Sunday School on their farm grounds. Augusta embraced the importance of encouraging religion among not only her own children but also those not so well provided for spiritually or materially. As she noted in a letter to her son, Sunday School teaching “is to be our vocation here” because “Providence seems to have placed so many poor children before us, as if to give us an opportunity to express our gratitude for the blessings we have received, & it is a privilege to be employed in the moral renovation even of one human being.” The principle of saving souls one by one could be applied in her own neighborhood or on the other side of the world; in 1845, she reported that her missionary society had pledged funds to support a child in China.²¹

Much like her husband, Augusta did not interrogate the material reasons why her family occupied a place in society that allowed them to dispense moral and material aid near and far. Her understanding of charity and hardship was top-down and, though sincere, not inconveniencing. In the winter of 1838, amid the economic displacement caused by the financial panic of the previous year, she commented, “It is fortunate for the poor that the weather is so mild, on account of fuel, there is a general complaint of want of employment.” She urged her husband to “plan some improvements to furnish them with work, they must be assisted in some way, & if they can be through the exercise of their own industry, so much the better.” Her own family’s Spanish dancing lessons and reading of Lorenzo de Medici, nonetheless, continued apace.²²

Augusta Jay’s concern for the education, moral health, and physical well-being of her children indicate her deep commitment to her role as a mother. In a letter to her son on hearing the news that his wife was pregnant, Augusta encouragingly stated, “I have nothing but love & dutiful behaviour to remember from my children & have long thought myself one of the happiest mothers that God ever blessed.” She hoped that her daughter-in-law Ella would experience the same good fortune. Augusta experienced great satisfaction as a mother, and her children admired her. Disagreements among her children as to how many granddaughters should bear her name were in a way a tribute to her influence.²³

For Augusta, parenthood also meant that she was no stranger to excruciating loss. The death of William and Augusta’s unnamed daughter in 1826 and nine-month-old son William in 1829 increased the couple’s reliance on faith to recover from personal tragedy. In 1827, she wrote to her own mother that “anxiety … must be great when our children are in circumstances where our care & foresight can be of no avail, how comforting to believe & dwell on the thought that they have a Father in Heaven.” Yet the comforts of religion, Augusta well understood, did not come easy or without pain. She confessed that knowing of her babies’ heavenly destination was not always enough for her: “I often think of this, but I have not the full comfort of it, because my faith is weak.”²⁴

Augusta expressed great concern over the spiritual well-being of her living children. Her daughter’s visit to New York City in 1830 prompted Augusta to instruct Maria about priorities: “The fashion, & the splendour of the city will almost bewilder your little head,” so the girl was to remain mindful “that those things which are of great esteem in the sight of men are of little account in the sight of God.” Augusta exposed her children to the finer things in life but also cautioned against making too much of them. Good Friday that year prompted Augusta to remind Maria that death could come at any time, and in case her daughter missed the point, the letter’s postscript urged her to take care in prayer and reading the Bible. The second anniversary of little Willie’s death prompted this painful observation to John: “It was a solemn call to me, for you know how I loved him, & I hope it was also, young as you were a call to you Dear John to prepare to join him there.”²⁵

William Jay also experienced the long-lasting emotional trauma of losing children. Almost two years after their son Willie died, William observed how much he enjoyed having his brother-in-law’s children visit Bedford: as William held his nephew, he “perpetually thought of my sweet Willie, & I hugged him to my breast, with almost a father’s fondness” before reporting that “Augusta I think continues to gain.” They shared a burden.²⁶

William and Augusta forged a devoted marriage, an impression that rare written effusions between husband and wife confirm. In 1833, William wrote her affectionately from Saratoga Springs: “No place is like home, nor any kindness, so delightful to my heart as that of my dear wife.” In 1840, their marriage now twenty-eight years old, Augusta wrote William after attending the funeral of the wife of their longtime servant Joseph Cusno: “Think of me a great deal & love me very much as I will you ever.”²⁷ William derived from Augusta the loving companionship that ratified his own deeply felt sense of social and religious propriety.

Augusta’s demeanor, her hopes, and her expectations avoided the deep breach in convention that Garrison and his female allies seemed to portend. She sustained, indeed embraced, the sort of “female modesty & decorum” that her husband saw as being threatened by women joining the formal leadership of the AAS. Augusta Jay did not seek the sort of equality in the private or the public sphere that her husband proclaimed to be contrary to “domestic order & happiness” and to the scripture (see figure 8). Although her world was not entirely circumscribed by home and children, she operated within gendered boundaries that reaffirmed the domestic sphere as the primary locus for married women’s activities.²⁸

The female-heavy composition of the Jay family, in Augusta’s view, raised the stakes for its males, who carried forward the family reputation. In 1832, mindful of the loss of her second son, Augusta took comfort in the prospects of her fifteen-year-old son John, admitting quite frankly, “You are a sort of magnet to us, being the only Brother & Son. Dear Willie having soon attained his rest—we all turn to you with great affection, & you Dear John I trust will never disappoint us.” Tragedy thus may have contributed to John’s sense of self-importance. So too did coincidence. John Jay II and his wife Eleanor had four daughters but only one son, named William. This pattern, only one male Jay in successive generations of their branch of the family tree, meant to Augusta that “an additional obligation rests on the stronger sex to excel in all goodness that their name may not be cut off from the earth.” Augusta Jay understood her son and John’s son as bearing a particular historical burden.²⁹ God would judge all her progeny’s souls, but in this world, in the struggle for emancipation, males should make the history.

The Split

The split precipitated by the seating of Abby Kelley on the AAS business committee had been coming for some time; part of a larger constellation of grievances. As Jay and his allies further defined their positions within the antislavery movement, so too did the radicals. To Garrison and some of his followers, constitutions and laws might, in fact, be beside the point. The Massachusetts radicals had started to articulate a theory of nonresistance. This worldview posited a theory of pacifism that renounced not only violence but also the notion that governments had the right to compel anyone to do anything. Only moral conscience defined one’s obligations. Because government authority was rooted in coercion, activists should abstain from the electoral sphere. Garrison and his allies saw themselves as advancing democracy by repudiating the coercions of law and state to create a more inclusive, morally directed public sphere. The Garrisonians, however, did not insist on formally fusing nonresistance and organized abolitionism.³⁰

On the question of women’s rights, however, the Garrisonians, were more insistent. Some of Garrison’s closest Massachusetts allies and most able supporters, including Kelley and Maria Weston Chapman, were women. The Grimké sisters’ frank feminism and their appearances before audiences made up of males and females emboldened other women to defy convention. The 1839 AAS annual meeting granted women the right to vote as delegates.³¹

From William Jay’s perspective, the abolitionist movement was now freighted with wrong-headed ideas that undermined the AAS’s ability to attract public support. The woman question laid bare the limits of his tolerance for the intellectual experimentation of the Garrisonians. Due to the AAS’s “unwarrantable attempt to alter the relative social conditions of the female sex,” Jay asked for a public acknowledgment that his $1,000 donation was for the distribution of Theodore Weld’s Slavery as It Is and was not a general contribution to the organization. Using what he saw as the twin follies of “the rights of Women” and calls for an abolitionist political party to explain the diminishing sway of the AAS, Jay expressed his doubts “that anti Slavery Societies” were to be God’s “chosen instruments” for combating the evil of slavery.³²

The month before the fateful 1840 AAS meeting that elected Kelley to the business committee, Jay spelled out his disillusionment in a letter turning down an invitation to address the Connecticut branch of the AAS. The organization, he wrote, no longer possessed a “singleness of purpose.” By denying the significance of laws, nonresisters kicked over one pillar of organized antislavery, the demand for laws against the slave trade and slavery in the District of Columbia. Judge Jay noted that, without statutes, abolitionists could not even defend “the poor colored men, his wife & children from the merciless kidnappers.” In suggesting that it might be time to form a new antislavery organization, he cast himself as a purist, rejecting feminism, radical social ideas, and the formation of an antislavery political party.³³

The 1840 AAS Convention unfolded as William Jay, who did not attend, suspected. In a crowded New York City church, packed, in John Jay II’s words, with an “abundance of women white & black,” Lewis Tappan decried the elevation of Kelley as “contrary to usage of civilized Soct.” The next day, Tappan formed a new organization, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFAS), rather than remain in the AAS; in anticipation of its formation, Tappan had already drafted AFAS’s foundational principles.³⁴

William joined the executive board of the AFAS, as did white allies such as Gerrit Smith, S. W. Benedict, and Joshua Leavitt, along with two African American former colleagues on the AAS board, Theodore S. Wright and Samuel Cornish. The preamble of the new organization’s constitution denounced slavery and “the prejudice against color” as sinful and contained stances that reflected Jay’s sensibility. In a shot against nonresistance, the AFAS “recognize[d] the existence of human government” and the appropriateness of abolitionists voting, though not forming a separate political party. The organization made the dissemination of “accurate information” regarding slavery an explicit priority. The constitution also included plans for a Women’s Auxiliary. Interestingly, given Jay’s previously expressed skepticism of cutting off trade with slaveholders, the AFAS favored “as far as practicable” free rather than slave-produced commodities. True to its origins, the new organization focused its radicalism solely on abolition and antiracism.³⁵

John Jay II assisted the Tappanites while naively hoping not to antagonize the Garrisonians. The Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society took over responsibility for publishing the Emancipator, which had recently been taken out of the AAS’s hands. The younger Jay was the point person in the complex negotiations, hoping that by remaining in the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society, the newspaper would occupy “neutral” ground in the AAS–AFAS split. John’s role in the transfer, however, earned him the mistrust of Garrisonians for years to come.³⁶

William Jay made clear his disgust with the embrace of women’s equality entailed by Kelley’s and Garrison’s triumph—declaring it as the reason that he wished his name “erase[d]” from AAS “rolls.” In a letter to AAS recording secretary James Caleb Jackson, published in the Emancipator, the judge frankly denounced the practice of elevating women within the society and the principles of sexual equality that the practice implied. Jay rolled out the slippery slope of ungodly social developments. He proclaimed that the AAS was being “used … for advancing the doctrine of equality of the Sexes, in all the relations of life.” The very method was scandalous: “married women, without their husbands, were associated with men in the Executive Committee … whose meetings have hitherto been & will probably continue to be both frequent & private.” Jay made his preference for Victorian propriety into a political statement.

William also objected that the new AAS sought to foist its sexual egalitarianism onto the international abolitionist stage. The Garrisonians not only dispatched a female representative to the upcoming world convention in London but also resolved the following: “It trusts that the convention will fully & practically recognize in its organization & movements, the equal brotherhood of the entire human family, without distinction of color, Sex or clime.” Jay trotted out his all-purpose call for the AAS to hew to its chartered purpose of fighting slavery, but made no attempt to suppress his underlying contempt for women’s rights: “How ever grievous some women may find the yoke imposed upon them by the opinions usually entertained on the subject of female modesty & decorum, that is not the yoke which abolitionists associated to break.”

The whole tenor of claims for women’s rights within the organization alarmingly portended more sweeping changes—women ministers, women voters, and women’s equality within marriage. None of these forms of equality, the judge asserted, had the least bit to do with the abolition of slavery; such demands undermined “domestic order & happiness” and violated “the precepts of the Gospel.” Jay had not signed his name to such an agenda.³⁷

Jay’s reputation, prestige, and blunt critique required a direct and vigorous response from his former colleagues. The National Anti-Slavery Standard (NASS), edited by Lydia Maria Child assisted by her husband David Lee Child, republished Jay’s letter, followed by almost a full column’s-length rebuttal. Jay, his critics argued, had misstated the nature of the AAS’s actions and their implications. The AAS had simply “refused to disfranchise a large proportion of its members” or to turn away people in no way excluded according to the AAS constitution. The newspaper’s response to Jay dismissed the notion that the AAS had taken a position on the rights of women in society as voters, wives, or candidates for the ministry and showed little patience for concerns about women and men meeting behind closed doors at board meetings.

According to the NASS commentary, it was Jay who had unnecessarily harmed the reputation of abolitionism by using his good name to denigrate the AAS. The “enemies” of abolition would seize on Jay’s reputation to validate his falsehoods. But something bigger was at stake—the pursuit of “free inquiry.” The Garrisonians would not be cowed by Jay’s prominence: “The interposition of great and venerated names will present no barrier to its investigations. Even that of our respected fellow citizen, Judge Jay, though it may give currency to calumny, can obtain for it no credibility among the true and independent friends of human freedom.” Having once proudly claimed the Jay name, William Jay’s accusations left the radicals no choice but to disclaim the authority that derived from it, linking Jay to “the ‘patriarchal’ tree of despotism” associated with slaveholders.³⁸

The Garrisonian defense of an abolitionist movement that welcomed the full participation of women was decidedly more progressive and laudable than the position of Lewis Tappan, William Jay, and their allies. Ironically, given Jay’s insistence on adherence to both the constitutions of both the AAS and the United States, the Garrisonians were the more faithful adherents to the AAS constitution on the woman question, given that it defined members as “any person” (not “any man”) who subscribed to its principles. Garrison’s effort to achieve procedural fairness for women need not have been interpreted as such a broad assault on gender norms. Jay and his allies, in some sense, chose to make the debate over female participation in the AAS into the woman question. In doing so, they engineered their own defeat and, thus, their exit from a unified national antislavery organization. Put another way, the controversy over seating female officers gave the Tappanites an excuse, a proverbial last straw, to do what they already wanted to do—to sever ties with the Garrisonians. Garrison’s contempt for organized religious institutions and his nonresistance ideology struck many mainstream abolitionists, including Jay, as disturbingly radical and as alarmingly counterproductive.³⁹

Schism, Skepticism, and Politics

In repudiating cultural radicalism, the logical move for some of Jay’s fellow dissenters was toward the exclusively male sphere of parties, elections, and voting. Electoral politics became an appealing alternative to the impracticality of an open-ended radical crusade for what seemed an increasingly implausible southern moral conversion. Even before the split with the AAS, however, William Jay hesitated to embrace that move to politics. He observed, in late 1839, that some abolitionists had traded in “moral suasion” for the possibility of “a third political party.” Thus, “money which ought to be spent in enlightening the consciences of slaveholders, is fruitlessly squandered in electioneering; & the rights of the Slaves seem in many instances to be forgotten by their professed friends.”⁴⁰ He viewed the urge among abolitionists to organize themselves into a political party as a twin folly to Garrisonian radicalism.

After breaking from the AAS and venting his displeasure with its sexual politics, William became more eager to move forward than to look back. Jay’s advice to Tappan on the new AFAS was to steer clear of the diversions of intramural abolitionist politics or the temptations of electoral politics. In private he spoke condescendingly toward the AAS but in public urged a “prudent conciliating course, avoiding the whims & follies & extravagances of our brethren, without rebuking them.” Jay advised that Tappan should hold management of the new organization closely and keep in mind that “Mr. Garrison with his women, & our own abolition friends with their nominations, are doing more to injure & retard the anti Slavery cause than all the politicians in the land.” Jay wished to steer a middle course that did not waste energy on internecine rivalries or party building. Doing so, however, was easier said than done. His own son publicly argued in an 1839 address that abolitionists should make their votes count. Some concluded that the best place for abolitionists to cast their ballots was, therefore, not for Whigs or Democrats but for members of a separate abolitionist party.⁴¹

William’s objection to a third party were tactical and strategic, rather than moral or ideological. He saw value in petitioning legislators and attempting to influence elections. Indeed, early in 1840, he authored a fiery address condemning the congressional gag rule as a gross violation of the fundamental constitutional right of petition; he optimistically forecasted that “public opinion” was eroding the support for the gag among northern congressional delegations.⁴² If Jay were correct that abolitionists were already making their voices heard in the corridors of power, then launching their own party would be counterproductive.

Alvan Stewart, Jay’s rival in the debate over the constitutionality of abolishing slavery in southern states, reached the opposite conclusion. In 1839, the Utica lawyer and New York Anti-Slavery Society stalwart, began rallying support for a third party as a better place to invest abolitionist energies than moral suasion. Fueling the nascent third-party alternative was, on the one hand, the divisions clearly growing within the AAS and, on the other, a belief that the Whigs and the Democrats were not about to nominate presidential candidates meriting the support of antislavery voters. The third-party movement, which enjoyed particular strength in western New York State where evangelical and reform movements were especially fervid, netted the support of Gerrit Smith by November. Some in the antislavery camp, however, eager to see the defeat of Democratic presidential incumbent Martin Van Buren, tried to convince themselves that Whig standard-bearer William Henry Harrison was suitable. Ohio antislavery editor Gamaliel Bailey even provided Harrison with a copy of William Jay’s A View of the Action of the Federal Government in Behalf of Slavery. However, Harrison’s antislavery credentials were weak enough and the persistence of the third-party advocates strong enough that in April 1840, the new party, which had yet to adopt a name, nominated AAS officer James G. Birney for president.⁴³

Gerrit Smith sought to convince his colleague William Jay to join the new party’s ranks, even proposing that the judge run for governor of New York. Doing so would mean running against William H. Seward, whose answers to their survey on African American rights two years before had been unsatisfactory. Smith pressed the case for a third party on Jay: “Whilst American slavery exists, our National political parties will be … proslavery parties,” meaning “that abolitionists cannot therefore vote consistently for the candidates of each party.” Abolitionists had to run their own iron-clad antislavery candidates like Jay as symbols of their resolve. Smith labeled such a run “a very great service to our holy cause.”⁴⁴

Jay, however, saw the role of electoral politics in advancing the cause very differently than did Smith. Jay replied to the suggestion that he make a symbolic run for governor with an extended critique of abolitionist electioneering. He viewed the nature of voter decision making and the current disorganized state of abolitionism as antithetical to the formation of an abolitionist party. In his view, voters did not choose whom to vote for in the abstract but rather selected “the best who can be elected”; if perfection were the object, no one would vote at all, and, if every man voted only for the person whom each perceived as the best candidate, voters would never form coalitions.

Jay articulated a hard-headed, practical approach to abolitionist voting based on an understanding of politics as compromise in a way that religion and morality were not. There were clearly situations, he believed, in which the professed abolitionist would not be the best candidate, either because the office did not require a position on that issue or because the abolitionist might divert votes from the better major-party candidate. Here he imagined a hypothetical scenario in which John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun ran in the same district. Would abolitionists prefer to throw the election to the virulently proslavery Calhoun by voting for their own antislavery candidate rather than the laudable Adams, even though the latter was not affiliated with an abolitionist organization? Even more to the point, Jay did not see the abolitionist movement as sufficiently unified to wield meaningful political strength. Instead, he favored the approach he and Smith had taken in 1838, questioning candidates and withholding their votes accordingly. In that election, according to Jay, abolitionists had not quite played their cards right when it came to actually casting their ballots, but they might have done so.⁴⁵

Seward’s actual record once in office lent credence to the notion that a good mainstream politician might actually be persuaded to advance parts of the abolitionist agenda. The governor rebuffed demands by the governor of Virginia that white New York sailors who abetted the escape northward of a Virginia slave be extradited southward. The New Yorker claimed that only the violation of laws “universal” to “all civilized countries” should be respected in such interstate cases. Moreover, the Whig-dominated state legislature passed a personal liberty law guaranteeing accused fugitive slaves a jury trial—one of the three issues that Smith and Jay had pressed on the candidates for governor in 1838. In Jay’s letter to Smith spurning the idea of becoming a gubernatorial candidate, the judge referred to this legislation as “the Glorious & blessed Jury law.” Seward also had announced his commitment to Black education in New York.⁴⁶ At the state level, at least, Jay saw hope for movement toward abolitionist priorities.

Jay also showed no enthusiasm for the new antislavery party’s nomination of a presidential candidate. Although James G. Birney and William Jay held each other in fine regard, Jay anticipated that Birney’s presidential run was doomed to do more harm than good. In September 1840, Jay forecast that Birney was likely to get so few votes that abolitionists would look “contemptible in the eyes of politicians, & perhaps in their own.” As Jay noted to Tappan, abolitionists “have hitherto talked loud & thus acquired some importance.” With their own electoral effort underway, “I expect we shall exhibit our real weakness & become the scoff of all parties.”⁴⁷

Jay’s prediction about the elections of 1840 hit close to the mark. Birney garnered less than seven thousand votes nationally. This comprised 0.3 percent of the total votes cast in an election in which the winner, Harrison, garnered more than 1.2 million votes. The dreadful economy and the Harrison campaign’s mastery of vapid but effective electioneering forestalled the hastily assembled Birney ticket’s impact. Meanwhile, the Whigs, whose northern representatives seemed more likely to oppose the gag rule than their Democratic counterparts, achieved majorities in both houses of Congress. At the state level, Seward again ran with Bradish in 1840. The emerging antislavery ally gained reelection, but by a much smaller margin than in 1838, taking his home state by far fewer votes than did presidential candidate Harrison. Gerrit Smith, who himself ended up taking on the role of third-party gubernatorial candidate in New York, did not accomplish much more than Birney had nationally; he garnered 0.6 percent of the votes cast. The Liberty Party had exposed abolitionism’s electoral weaknesses.⁴⁸

The surge of interest in politics among non-Garrisonian abolitionists and the weak initial results of those efforts exposed William Jay’s dilemma. A belief in antislavery moral suasion, Jay recognized, was a belief in the power of public opinion. It was an idealistic stance. Elections also were an exercise in rallying public opinion, but on this subject Jay’s views ran from pragmatic to cynical. He was highly skeptical of the ability of democratic politics to produce virtuous results. Yet elections were the primary place where public opinion was regularly registered. He found himself caught not only between the Garrisonian dismissal of voting and political abolitionists’ attraction to electoral politics but also between his hopes that spreading the truth about slavery would work and his fears that the nation’s political culture would drown out such appeals.⁴⁹

His own analysis of the Whig victory in 1840 emphasized his skepticism of the ability of politics to promote substantive change. Harrison, scion of the Virginia slaveholding aristocracy and former territorial governor of Indiana, had posed as a cider-drinking, log-cabin-living frontiersman to drive consummate political insider Martin Van Buren from the White House. The Jay family’s low regard for Van Buren, who had played a key role in dismantling John Jay’s original New York State constitution and whose views on race and slavery were highly suspect, had to make the electoral results somewhat satisfying. As Jay wrote in a December 1840 letter, a “political tornado” had “swept over the country prostrating the democratic party, & raising in the whirlwind the multidudinous and discordant elements, which constitute the modern ‘Whigs.’ The People have expressed their will & the Log Cabin candidate is President of the U. States …! how far it will advance the interests of the Country time will shew.” He, however, did not expect the Democrats to be chastened by their defeat: the party would explain its loss away as the product of “the People” having been “deceived or defrauded, or taken by surprise” and would be taking aim at the Whig’s tenuous hold on the electorate soon enough. William put little faith in the constant motion of democratic politics or the “whirl” of contemporary culture.⁵⁰

Withdrawal from public battle into the private sphere of home and family was not an option for William. The fight against slavery continued, moreover, to be a manly exercise in defending the Jay family’s good name. In 1841 the Harper and Brothers publishing firm brought out a biography of founding father John Jay designed to reach younger readers. William was galled that the author, Henry Renwick, contrasted John Jay’s commitment to gradual emancipation in New York unfavorably with current abolitionists’ aggressive national opposition to the institution. Jay took personal offense, labeling these remarks “a sort of half-concealed, irresponsible charge, that the son of John Jay, and those who act with him, are doing what his father forbore to do.” Jay wrote, “There is as little truth as there is manliness in the insinuation.” In the concluding paragraph of his assault on Renwick, which took up two newspaper columns, William stated, “I would, indeed, be recreant to honor and to duty could I witness the sordid sacrifice of one of the brightest features of my father’s character on the altar of slavery, and refrain from protesting against the obscene rite.”⁵¹ His own notions of masculinity, honor, and historic responsibility were bound up in the ongoing fight for abolition. In that fight, internal divisions among abolitionists sometimes faded into the background. Although Jay originally submitted his critique of Renwick’s book to a New York City newspaper, Garrison’s Liberator republished William’s critique not only of the author but also of a northern publisher that habitually catered to southern proslavery sensitivities. The implacability of their opponents sustained affinities among abolitionists that ran as deep as their divisions.