The Agenda

The speakers who followed John Jay II at the Freedmen’s Aid meeting were Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Although members of the American Anti-Slavery Society rejected Garrison’s motion that it dissolve because emancipation had occurred, the reality that the former slaves of the South needed allies, assistance, and advocates weighed heavily on Jay and Douglass. The New York Times reported “great applause” when Douglass asserted, “The negro had a claim on the North, not as black men, but as men. A claim for education and to educate the black man was the mission of the Freedmen’s Aid Association.”²

Jay’s address, “Our Duty to the Freedmen,” was no less emphatic that African Americans had a strong claim to the nation’s attention and resources—not only because of the sufferings of slavery but also because of their wartime service to the Union. He stated, “We must repay in part this injured class the debt which as a people we owe them for their long and cruel bondage.” He also asserted that “the colored race” had proven themselves during war, indeed had saved the nation, through their “unwavering loyalty” and “unshrinking bravery.” Anticipating Douglass’s concern that the organization not be merely a vessel for distributing “old clothes,” Jay foregrounded securing Black citizenship as central both to the organization’s and the nation’s agenda:

We must protect them in their constitutional rights, furnish them with freeholds, and guard them in their homes; that, with the institution of the family re-established and the relation of husband and wife and mother and child restored, they may taste at last the blessings of Christian civilization. We must see that school-houses and churches are scattered throughout the South as in New England and New York; and that education in the trades and arts, education moral, religious and intellectual is brought within the reach of every citizen of whatever shade.

Jay was fully cognizant that a postwar humanitarian crisis loomed if northerners did not help supply farm tools and clothing to the formerly enslaved. In this speech, he called attention to the cultural capital necessary to safeguard personhood and practice citizenship. He left no doubt that the freed people themselves were up to the task: they were “temperate in habit,” “anxious for instruction,” and “apt to learn,” and future hopes would be well invested in the freed people of the South.³

Despite his optimistic projections, Jay’s experience in New York City complicated the notion that the widespread suffering and loss of the Civil War forged “a new tie of sympathy between the colored race and their fellow countrymen.” City officials had sought to prevent African Americans from marching in the funeral procession carrying Lincoln’s remains through Manhattan. Yet even from this shameful action, Jay derived hope. A small number of African Americans ultimately did join the procession, prompting the crowd to signal its approval with “hundreds of thousands of handkerchiefs waved like snow flakes at the approach of those persecuted men.” But the memory of a different sort of street politics, the Draft Riots of less than two years before, lingered; old political enmities festered. The “satanic school of theology” that defended slavery still bedeviled the cause. He drew audience approval for his anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant swipes, including a reference to “the devices of Jesuits … creating in our midst an ecclesiastical despotism under the specious cover of religious toleration.” Jay sought to rally an audience that shared his prejudices and his sympathies to believe itself up to the task of Reconstruction. As New York became “the centre of the commercial world,” linked to Europe by a transatlantic telegraph cable and the rest of the continent by a transcontinental railroad, it would with “unity and efficiency” bring the entire nation a system of justice and liberty for all.⁴

Jay imagined a postwar America in which elements of the old Benevolent Empire of northern reformers would fuse with a reinvigorated commercial and political elite to lead society to new moral heights. As treasurer of the American Freedmen’s Aid Bureau, Jay committed to help supply the Freedmen’s Bureau with qualified teachers; the organization was guided by Reconstruction principle “that no injustice may be done to a class without being visited upon the whole nation.” Jay also joined an initiative to work through the Freedmen’s Bureau to inundate the South with printed materials promoting reform.⁵ Knowing the antebellum history of efforts to squelch the distribution of antislavery materials in the South, Jay and other northern optimists reveled in a reversal of fortune that placed northern reformers in a position to remake the defeated region. Whether abolitionist organizations remained operational, abolitionist principles appeared to be at the vanguard of substantive change.

Prospects for the nation looked even rosier from abroad. While in Europe on an extended vacation with members of his family in late 1865, Jay presided over a lavish and festive American Thanksgiving celebration in Paris in a room festooned with US and French flags. Before a room of approximately three hundred, Jay delivered remarks brimming with confidence. With no hint of the recrimination that would drive a vicious wedge between President Andrew Johnson and Congress, Jay preceded his remarks by reading Johnson’s proclamation declaring December 7, 1865, a Thanksgiving Day. Later in his remarks, he would toast Johnson, as well as Lincoln and George Washington. The United States, Jay proudly proclaimed, had realized Daniel Webster’s vision of “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable,” implicitly forgiving the now deceased Massachusetts Whig whom William Jay had regarded as a craven compromiser to the interests of slaveholders. The United States could “proceed in the work of reconstruction on the basis of freedom and education,” all the while confident in its military might, its economic power, and its vast assets. Other speakers echoed his confidence in the nation’s rising glory. At midnight, Jay adjourned the meeting.⁶

Early in the new year, while still in Europe, John Jay received confirmation that, when he spoke on national affairs, he spoke for many other rich and well-connected men like himself. On January 11, the Union League Club of New York City elected Jay as its new president. For Jay, the affirmation from his peers was sweet, the vindication of an abolitionist almost totally scorned in the past by Westchester neighbors and Manhattan peers. What better American name in the wake of the Civil War could there have been than John Jay to embody the club’s commitments? The founding father of that name had advocated for the authority of national political institutions; was an early abolitionist; defended property, wealth, and social hierarchy; and established a reputation for moral probity and religious devotion.⁷ His grandson assumed the mantle of those values.

In remarks delivered in Paris in June 1866 and addressed as a letter to the ULC of New York, Jay provided a version of history that flattered the elite membership’s sense of entitlement to direct the course of postwar society. He credited the class of people who formed the ULC with providing the Lincoln administration with the backbone and financial wherewithal to survive the initial blow of secession. Subsequently, the club supplied resources to the US Sanitary Commission, encouraged the enlistment of Black soldiers, and “purifying the Northern atmosphere,” displaced “treason” with patriotism in public discourse. During Reconstruction, the club advocated for the new Civil Rights Act that explicitly extended citizenship to freed people, thereby “placing the former master and the freedman on an equal footing” and enshrining the principles of the Declaration of Independence in law. In reality, the law rested on the shaky ground of a federal judiciary willing to enforce it. Still, for Jay, who only a few years before battled against the Fugitive Slave Act, a federal law that set up an apparatus for helping freed people challenge discriminatory state laws and practices was a powerful achievement.⁸

Jay insisted that equal justice was the cornerstone of a new age. The Civil War confirmed a basic truth: “We cannot trample with impunity on the rights of the blacks, and plead colour or race as an apology for the crime,” because “our mutual rights and liberties and interests, however widely separated in appearance, are in reality so identified by” God; if “a Free Government” is to prevail “we must accord these blessings equally to them.” The ULC’s responsibilities clearly extended beyond formal abolition, just as William Jay and John Jay II had decried discrimination against free people of color in the North during the antebellum period.⁹

Jay also worried about a resurgent Slave Power alliance that could exploit political disorder for malignant purposes. If southern representatives were welcomed back to Congress prematurely, Jay warned, the old Democratic coalition would reassemble to deny rights to freed people. Their political power would be swelled because the formerly enslaved, even though denied voting rights, would be fully counted toward the southern population. With their renewed political dominance, Democrats would repudiate the national war debt or approve compensation for former southern slaveholders for emancipation, with payments coming from the federal treasury. There were those in Europe, he warned, who would be all too happy to benefit from revived American political disarray.¹⁰

Jay’s racially progressive and conservative impulses were in tension with one another. He envisioned something well short of universal manhood suffrage, with the guiding hand of education a crucial tool to overcome ignorance of both whites and Blacks. Where once Jay had feared that the US Supreme Court would invalidate emancipation, now he hoped that the national tribunal would render moot the debate over Black voting rights by finding that the abolition of slavery made wholesale Black disenfranchisement illegal. Then the states could take up for themselves what Jay regarded as the legitimate process of defining “residence, intelligence, and taxation or property” as standards for voting. Under such standards, Black men would not gain the vote all at once but only “as they prove themselves fit for it.” Jay, imagining a continuous dissipation of racism with the ending of slavery, compared his “conservative” vision of extending Black suffrage to “exaggerated views of the capacity of the race” to instantly qualify to vote. He was confident that a more deliberate pace would still produce liberating results. Educational investment was crucial to advance Blacks and whites to the point where democracy could function safely.¹¹

This spokesman for the New York elite rooted his analysis largely in class rather than race, updating his family’s long-standing suspicion of universal male suffrage and democracy itself. According to Jay, the “ignorance” of southern whites had been crucial to sustaining southern slavery, making southern white voters no less in need of education than Black voters. And the same was true in the North, where Jay reminded his elite fellow clubmen, “We … know by daily experience the evils that result from the exercise of the suffrage, among a population uninstructed in the elements of American freedom, and unable to read the Constitution and the law of the country.” Only careful planning and “universal education” made a country safe for universal liberty. Radical Reconstruction, therefore, required, in this view, conservative engagement.¹²

From his European perch, Jay indicated that the success of Reconstruction rested in no small part on the ability of the nation’s political and social elites to remain unified. Revealingly, the person whom Jay quoted at greatest length in his letter was former Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, whose conciliatory remarks about recognizing Black rights—and assertions about the essential loyalty of Black workers—seemed to have convinced Jay that an entente between northern and southern elites was possible. Jay also called on the Union League Club to welcome “Southern gentlemen” into their midst to impress on the visitors their own commitment to equal rights and to cement the “bonds of a common interest and mutual affection” between the regions.¹³

Jay’s grasp of the political situation back home, however, was flawed. President Johnson was far less committed to Black rights than Jay thought. He believed that Johnson’s troubles with Congress were driven by personality rather than substance and clung to the notion that a “Union party” still existed that could bind together in peace the wartime coalition of Republicans and former Democrats. The president’s racism and states’ rights beliefs placed him at odds not only with congressional Republicans’ interventionist agenda in the South but also with Jay’s vision that steady progress toward racial equality was Reconstruction’s essential and necessary purpose. By the time Jay published a British edition of his letter in October, he gingerly acknowledged in a brief prefatory note that the political situation was much knottier than his June remarks had indicated.¹⁴

Radical and old-line abolitionists could reasonably interpret Jay as endorsing the sort of aggressive federal support for Black advancement that kept abolitionists active even after the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. In November 1866, two consecutive issues of the NASS, still the official newspaper of the AAS, prominently featured Jay’s commentary on the nation’s political challenges. Jay had come by his present “Athenian glory” honestly, as one who had suffered the insults of being an abolitionist in profoundly difficult times. His address, according to NASS, rode “the moral wave of Christianized humanity against the pestilential fortresses of a bastard President and cowardly enemies in the masks of friends.” Jay was, in the NASS’s view, “a brother who has not forgotten nor forsaken his early love” for abolitionism. He could be forgiven mistakes born of distance from American shores. The bedrock commitment to Black equality that Jay and the ULC embraced, the editor opined, made “their power” and “their influence” a profound force for good.¹⁵

At this juncture in Reconstruction, the tensions born of conservative impulses and elitist priorities were undercurrents that mattered far less than a united front against the southern subversion of emancipation. Southern states had enacted Black Codes to enforce slavery-like racial subjugation and had elected unreconstructed former Confederate politicians to high office throughout the region. No one with a sincere, long-standing commitment to African American liberation could find acceptable the Reconstruction process directed by President Johnson.¹⁶

Intervention and Contention

The priorities John Jay laid out in his speeches on Reconstruction become central to Republican policy. But the clock was ticking. As Jay would observe firsthand when he returned to the United States, forging unity in the South and maintaining unity in the North were easier to envision than to achieve.

The political landscape shifted rapidly toward more aggressive intervention by the federal government to remake southern political life and expand the reach of African American citizenship.¹⁷ In 1866 and 1867, Republicans in Congress seized the reins of Reconstruction from President Johnson. The party coalesced around a Fourteenth Amendment that enshrined civil rights principles in the Constitution. The amendment nationalized citizenship—putting the final nail in the coffin of the Dred Scott decision—and guaranteed due process and equal protection to all citizens. The amendment also incentivized enfranchisement of Black male voters by reducing a state’s representation in Congress and in the Electoral College by that portion of the population of adult males denied the vote. With white southern regimes digging in their heels during the midterm election season, Republicans in Congress went even further, reimposing military rule in most of the former Confederacy. Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment and new state constitutions enfranchising Black voters became requirements for restoring state sovereignty. The expanded emphasis on voting rights was part of a strategy to allow Republican interracial coalitions to gain political traction in the South. If this model of Reconstruction worked, the state Republican Parties would be loyal to the national party and ready to institute reforms in education, invest in economic development, and spread the gospel of free labor as the key to material progress and social mobility.¹⁸

With the new, more radical phase of Reconstruction underway, the ULC of New York City determined in February 1867 to explore how to exert more influence on “national questions.” President Jay joined a committee of five members who sought to coordinate with branches of the club in Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. By the spring Virginia emerged as a focus of the ULC’s energies. That state’s beleaguered governor, Francis H. Pierpont, prior to the imposition of martial law, had unsuccessfully favored the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Even so, efforts to forge unity between the radical, largely African American faction of the Republican Party and white moderates proved difficult.¹⁹

Jay and Union League colleagues from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston traveled to Richmond in June to broker a compromise between Virginia’s feuding Republican factions. Jay perceived the split as having to do with “etiquette,” by which he seemed to mean social class, color, pride, and protocol, not “principle.” White unionist landowners who, Jay noted in his subsequent report to the New York club, were largely from colonial era families, planned to hold their own Republican convention rather than join the party organization composed mostly of African Americans.

Jay himself presided over an evening meeting at the governor’s mansion at which representatives of both groups shared their grievances; it continued past 2 a.m. The radical, Black-dominated faction felt that they had legitimately organized the party and did not wish to, in Jay’s words, “invalidate their own acts” by attending an alternate convention called by the white faction. Nor did the radicals feel they needed white votes to succeed. The leader of the white faction, in contrast, argued that Blacks might succeed for a few election cycles, but that in the long run they would need white support to stave off a return of the Democrats to power. Jay tried to put a positive face on this initial meeting, describing it as “characterized by ability and great earnestness”; the participants “exhibited at times strong personal feeling, the expression of which was, however, tempered by mutual expressions of regard and a formal courtesy.” The next day produced compromise. A joint resolution called Republicans to gather in August for the purpose of “extend[ing] and perfect[ing]” the party, thus acknowledging rather than superseding previous Black reform efforts. The August meeting would be held at a Black church in Richmond. That night, the northern delegates attended an impromptu celebratory gathering hosted at the city’s “African church.”²⁰

For John Jay, the visit to Richmond had to have been a heady one. His abolitionist father William could not imagine even traveling safely to a slave state, let alone presiding over an interracial political meeting in the South. The Richmond encounter embodied a version of John’s long-standing effort to wed his elite status to the interest of ordinary free Blacks. His summary report to the New York ULC doled out praise on both sides of the coalition. Jay was convinced that “a large body of the most intelligent and substantial landowners of the South” would contribute to “the character and dignity of the party.” Jay also conveyed his confidence in Virginia’s free African Americans who displayed “a firm resolve to consent to no compromise of their rights.” He believed that the Virginia proceedings set an example for the entire South. In accordance with his own sense of how society functioned best, he found that a respect for elites would ensure rather than retard the racial progress that he observed was already well underway.²¹

The trip had been a small triumph. His report to New York colleagues was received “with loud demonstrations of applause” when presented at the New York ULC clubhouse. The group also passed a resolution to raise $1,500 to seed Virginia with Union League Clubs. The effort to partner with upper-class white Virginians contained additional personal meaning for John Jay. His daughter Augusta was engaged to Edmund Randolph Robinson, a descendant of an old Virginia family. “This alliance” of a man with deep southern roots and “the daughter of an Abolitionist, who talked Abolitionism twenty years ago” was, according to George Templeton Strong, “an encouraging event.” Regional symbolism notwithstanding, the impending nuptials did not indicate a softening commitment to Black rights. For John Jay, a vital emerging alliance between northern elites, segments of the southern landholding class, and enfranchised free Blacks required tactical cooperation, but not a sacrifice of core aims and values.²²

The compromise forged in Richmond proved to be somewhat of an illusion. Union League organizations in the South, which had already formed before Jay’s brief foray, were not clubs for urbane white Republican reformers, but rather dynamos of Black political activism and in some cases interracial political cooperation. The Virginia radicals with whom Jay met differed not only in color but also in program from their more conservative rivals and from men like Jay, as they kept alive the hope that Reconstruction would include the redistribution of plantation land to those who had always done the work. At the new convention brokered by Jay and his colleagues, the radicals emphatically asserted their primacy.²³

Radical Reconstruction also tested unity among northern elites. Horace Greeley, the crusading newspaper editor and one of the most famous members of the New York’s ULC, tested the patience of some of his fellow clubmen with his position on the continued imprisonment of Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederate States of America. Greeley favored amnesty over a punitive approach to former Confederates. In May 1867, he joined a group of northerners, including Gerrit Smith, traveling to Richmond to help post bond for Davis’s release from prison. Some Union Leaguers viewed this intervention as an act of betrayal and demanded that Greeley appear before the club to explain himself. As president, Jay wrote a letter to Greeley inviting him to select a night when the editor could take “the opportunity of being heard on the subject.” Greeley not only declined but also blasted his detractors as “narrow-minded blockheads, who would like to be useful to a great and good cause, but don’t know how.” The famous editor dared the club to expel him and defended his forgiving approach to former adversaries. The club backed down.²⁴

In this pressurized atmosphere, disagreements and diverging agendas even crept into meetings memorializing eminent men, as Jay and others sought to make past struggles serve the needs of the political present. The deaths in 1867 of two former governors—John A. King of New York and John A. Andrew of Massachusetts—elicited remarks about the ongoing work of Reconstruction. King, elected New York’s first Republican governor in the late 1850s, was a natural person for the club and for Jay in particular to honor. King was not only an early member of the ULC but was also the son of Rufus King, signer of the US Constitution, leading light of New York Federalism, and staunch early opponent of the spread of slavery westward. As the final orator at the July 11 event memorializing King, Jay conferred a biography on King that paralleled his own, labeling him “one of the few men of high social position in New York … during our long struggle” consistently advocating “freedom.” Jay noted that King’s “love of liberty” was “hereditary.”²⁵

The death several months later of John Andrew, Massachusetts’s abolitionist wartime governor, gave expression to the tensions that Greeley had brazenly highlighted. Though as governor he had famously organized the pioneering African American Massachusetts 54th Regiment, Andrew had staked out a moderate position on Reconstruction. He opposed the idea of aggressively promoting the enfranchisement of freed people and shared Greeley’s support for leniency toward former Confederates. As the first speaker at the ULC’s tribute to Andrew, Jay struck a belligerent tone. The deceased Andrew now “rests from his labors, but for us the contest is far from being ended,” Jay declared. The agenda was laden with challenges: “unenlightened” voters burdened the body politic north and south, and some southerners might even stir up a race war. Echoing the anti-Johnson sentiment boiling over in Republican circles, Jay noted “the defection of a President whom we trusted,” as well as the dangers of resurgent former Copperhead Democrats and corrupt Republicans no longer focused on party principles. Andrew’s death, then, should serve as a source of principled renewal for the living.²⁶

The ULC during Jay’s presidency focused intently on Reconstruction politics. The memorial services for passing politicians reflected on the glorious unionist past while provoking commentary on unresolved challenges. Jay himself believed that elites had to beat back opponents and complacency. To that end, in March 1868, Jay’s ULC notified Congress that it supported the impeachment of President Johnson.²⁷

Amid the strains wrought by Reconstruction, the ULC sought to project self-confidence as an institution of power and permanency in New York’s social, cultural, and political landscapes. In the spring of 1868, the ULC prepared to move its original clubhouse in Union Square to spacious new quarters farther uptown. The facilities, which included a restaurant and an art gallery along with an assembly room and a library, helped the club rapidly reverse its recent decline in membership.²⁸

Jay delivered a valedictory address on the occasion of the ULC’s final meeting in its old clubhouse on March 26. Alongside a repetition of the self-congratulatory narrative of national ULC influence, Jay emphasized the club’s local agenda. The ULC had succeeded in wresting such reforms from the New York state legislature as a professional fire department and a board of health. Looking forward, the club would seek to spread education to “the masses of the South” while also battling in New York “the profligacy of a municipality whose system of government is a scheme of plunder.” The tension between revolution—the US example of abolition was to inspire the death of the feudal system in Europe—and reform, clipping the wings of popularly elected state and city governments, was palpable in Jay’s speech. His remarks described a class of men navigating the ideological gulf between Black enfranchisement in the South and in New York and a deep suspicion of urban democracy in the North. Men “representing so largely the culture, the commercial energy, the social worth, and material wealth of our city,” by Jay’s reckoning, would ensure that a triumphant past was but a prologue to a successful future.²⁹ As the ULC prepared to enjoy enhanced material comforts, the reconstruction of national and New York politics along the lines Jay favored seemed still to be flowing toward high tide.

Burying and Unburying the Past

Optimism notwithstanding, the navigation of Civil War memory, Jay learned, could be as tricky and contentious as charting Reconstruction’s future. In October 1867, New York’s Republican Governor Reuben Fenton appointed Jay to represent New York State on a commission to oversee the National Cemetery to be laid out at Antietam Battlefield. Twelve northern states joined Maryland in contributing funds. Serving as a trustee for the Antietam National Cemetery, Jay took the responsibility of respectfully burying the war’s dead with the utmost solemnity. The position, as it turned out, was no mere honor.³⁰

In a report to Governor Fenton in December 1867, Jay gave notice of a potential problem—the inclusion of the Confederate war dead in the cemetery. By the terms of Maryland’s original incorporation of land for the burial ground, “all who fell” were to find a place in the cemetery. Jay, who was trained to take legal language seriously, moved that a separate section of the cemetery be reserved for Confederate casualties. The vote of the trustees in support of this motion from various states carried 7–2. Jay’s inquiries in Washington, D.C., including with General Ulysses S. Grant, revealed that federal funding for this additional project was unlikely, as were contributions from the prostrated southern states. Jay’s suggestion to Governor Fenton was that New York and others northern states appropriate the needed funds. Jay’s logic was not only legal but also moral and visceral. Properly burying the southern dead would indicate “the humanity and honor” of the victorious North and be an expression of “National character.” At present, the Confederate dead lay in graves “so shallow that their bones are sometimes disturbed by the ploughshare and the harrow” of the farmers who once again worked the battle’s fields. The president of the cemetery commission, Jay reported, had been presented with a severed head. This macabre situation was no way for New York to remember a crucial military success.³¹ The governor concurred.

Yet not everyone saw burying Confederate dead in the same cemetery as the Union dead as an elegant solution, even though the grounds were to be watched over by a giant monument crowned with the statute of a Union soldier. Jay also felt compelled to counter an attempt by Congressman John Covode of Pennsylvania to prevent additional state funding of the National Cemetery because of its planned inclusion of Confederate graves.³² Four days after celebrating the accomplishments of the ULC as it prepared to move uptown, Jay penned a letter to the congressman that exhibited his customary blend of insulted pride, procedural detail, verbal venom, and morally astute political insight.

As with people he crossed with during the Civil War, Jay’s impulse was to swing hard against his opponent. Covode’s letter demanding of Fenton that New York not fund the burial of Confederates was “an assault upon myself and my colleagues.” The congressman had been “strangely disingenuous” and “singularly unjust” in his accusations that the commissioners sought to pay tribute to the Confederate war dead at Antietam. Jay rehearsed the facts. Governor Fenton himself had written a letter to Jay outlining the original purpose of the cemetery to inter the bodies of every fallen soldier, without regional qualification. Moreover, two of the states contributing funds, Maryland and West Virginia, had casualties on both sides of the battle. The trustees had not contemplated any sort of monument to the Confederate nation or cause. The states, including Covode’s Pennsylvania, Jay noted, knew the plan’s outlines when they signed on to the project. No “treachery” by Jay and his fellow trustees, then, could have occurred in resolving to bury the rebel dead.³³

Jay’s counterassault on Covode grew cruel and egotistical. The New Yorker acknowledged Covode’s pain at having lost two sons, one of whom suffered the miseries of the Confederacy’s infamous Andersonville prison. Converting sympathy into ammunition, Jay argued that while the congressman’s “clearness” of “vision” had been obscured, the trustees’ clarity could not be. Covode suffered from a “perturbed spirit” and “mental and moral blindness”; thus, “in the name of patriotism” the congressman “would rob the dead of their rightful graves.” He served as a negative example for the public, who would see from his “anarchy of morals” the dangers of “basing a public policy on private griefs” and “the indulgence of personal vengeance by political leaders.”³⁴ The cemetery was not, Jay felt, a place to settle grudges or assuage resentments.

Jay, far from making a plea for facile sectional reconciliation, sought to elevate the controversy into a parable about the larger liberating aims of Reconstruction. Toward the end of his letter, Jay seized on an affecting detail of Congressman Covode’s story. While the congressman’s son, a colonel in the Union Army, “lay helpless amid the dying and the dead, an old colored woman brought him water to drink while he was dying, and the next day he was buried in her garden.” That Black woman “was the representative of the humble race, upon our treatment of whom, depends in the future as in the past, the destiny of our country.” The war caused by slavery was over. The struggle for Black rights continued. “To make their slavery the corner-stone of a new empire was the object of the rebellion,” recorded Jay; now Democrats schemed to revive “the old system of caste, privilege and aristocracy.” In burying the Confederate dead, Jay had forgiven or forgotten little. Slavery and racism remained the central issues of these times. And so, Jay instructed the still grieving congressman, “Our part is yet to be accomplished, and emulating the devotion of your sons, let us … complete their work, and reconstruct the nationality which they cemented with their blood, upon the sure foundation of equal rights, equal laws, equal suffrage and equal justice.”³⁵

Contemplating the Civil War dead in 1868, John Jay saw great purpose. Reconstruction would vindicate the sacrifices of battle. The treatment of the humblest, symbolized by the elderly Black woman who succored Congressman Covode’s dying son, constituted the means for the living to keep faith with the dead. The combative Jay thus attempted to turn a political dispute into a sermon on the egalitarian goals of Reconstruction. Ultimately, however, only Union dead were interred at Antietam National Cemetery. Not enough people were willing to make the artful distinction Jay envisioned.³⁶

While political opponents attempted to use Governor Fenton’s support of Confederate burial against the New Yorker’s bid to become the Republican nominee for vice president, Jay did not suffer for his role in the dispute.³⁷ Indeed, with the election of Ulysses S. Grant as president, Jay would, at long last, receive his reward for serving his party in war and in peace. The ambassadorship he coveted removed him from the political scene for the next several years during which the Reconstruction that Jay envisioned fell apart.

Fading away in Vienna and Bedford

To represent his country abroad, John Jay II was at once an obvious and a curious choice. He had traveled in Europe extensively and shared a name with one of the Revolutionary Era’s preeminent diplomats. Of more immediate relevance, his service as president of New York City’s ULC deepened his ties to the emerging postwar Republican establishment. With Jay still at the helm, the club enthusiastically embraced Ulysses S. Grant’s presidential candidacy. It saw Grant as representing the opportunity to put the bitter divisiveness of the Johnson years in the past and to keep at bay the recovery of the Democratic Party to full strength.³⁸

Jay had significant downsides as a potential ambassador. His knack for embroiling himself in invective-filled public disputes was well established. His views on European affairs sometimes could be belligerently nationalistic. In March 1869, shortly after President Grant’s inauguration, Jay composed a letter to General Adam Badeau suggesting that Great Britain cede Canada to the United States in compensation for damages inflicted by the Alabama, a Confederate warship built in England that wreaked havoc during the Civil War. When George Templeton Strong heard that Jay would likely be made ambassador to Austria, he reported to his diary that Jay really “wanted to be sent to London (!), and to assume grave responsibilities, to which he’s quite unequal, though he thinks otherwise.”³⁹

In any event, Jay finally had the right ally in Washington when Hamilton Fish, a prominent New York Republican and ULC member, became the new secretary of state. Eight years after he first imagined that he would be Lincoln’s minister to the Hapsburg court, Jay became Grant’s man in Vienna. Jay’s new position conferred the prestige he craved, but the posting took him about as far away from slavery and emancipation as any European or American ambassadorship could do: Vienna was the inland capital of a Central European empire without significant connections to the Americas or to Africa.⁴⁰

Furthermore, his service in Vienna lacked the high moral purpose that animated Jay so often in the past and would again in the future. The dull routine of the job made him feel restless. On August 19, 1870, he reported to his daughter Augusta, “My days pass monotonously, one so like another”; he continued, perhaps for dramatic effect, “I am sometimes in danger of losing my reckoning.” The posting, however did provide at least one social benefit: his youngest daughter Anna married Prussian general Hans Lothar von Schweinitz, deepening the family’s ties to the European aristocracy that Jay disparaged but also envied.⁴¹

A trip back to the United States in 1874 gave him the opportunity to show off his new German son-in-law in Washington and at home, as well as to play once more the role of sage and celebrant to his ULC colleagues. Jay sought to strike an upbeat pose during a reception at the club; his notes refer to the group’s “historic & heroic record” and the “triumph of our principles” in the corridors of power. He forecast progress in Austria-Hungary toward “constitutional government” while observing with concern developments in New York City. “Eternal vigilance” would be required to secure “liberty & property.” His notes indicate he had only platitudes to share, with little to say about deteriorating conditions for freed people in the South.⁴²

Back in Vienna, the ambassador got word of the calamitous 1874 midterm elections that confirmed the dramatic weakening of the Republican Party’s power. Amid an economic depression that started the previous year, Democrats trounced Republicans in the North and the South, with governorships changing hands in New York and elsewhere; what had been a 110-seat Republican majority in the US House of Representatives became a 60-seat Democratic majority. With the Republicans staring into the political abyss, Jay leaned on history for support: “Whatever its fate—it will live in history as the party that saved the union & abolished slavery.” He also knew, however, that slavery’s “evil consequences” still lingered.⁴³

Although the final acts of Reconstruction would play out after Jay retired from his diplomatic post, another era ended while he was in Vienna—the era that linked the Jay family directly and personally to their slaveholding past. In January 1872, Zilpah Montgomery, the elderly former slave who had served four generations of Jays, was laid to rest in the Jay family burial plot in St. Matthew’s Church cemetery in Bedford, New York (see Figure 14). Her actual date of birth remained unknown. But by inscribing her age as eighty, the family set in stone the first John Jay’s claim that she was age twenty-five at the time of her manumission in 1817.⁴⁴

In the Westchester countryside, Zilpah was part of a fading generation of marginal women and men. The year before Zilpah’s death, a published history of Rye, New York, where the Jay family and their slaves first established themselves in the county more than a century earlier, included this retrospective on slavery:

Numbers of these were to be seen in the village and along the streets, at nightfall after the day’s labor, and on holidays. Every family of means had some humble retainers, once their bond-servants, and still their dependants. Few of them remain at present. The European laborer has almost completely supplanted the African; and whether by death or by removal to other places, they have been reduced to a mere handful.

The passage, whatever its shortcomings as history, captured aspects of Zilpah’s and the Jay’s world a little farther north in Bedford. During the final decades of Zilpah’s life, Bedford’s Black population hovered around 100 people, out of a total town population that by 1870 was just shy of 3,700. That same year more than 400 of the town’s residents were foreign born. A transformation at the bottom end of the socioeconomic and cultural hierarchy had occurred in the Jay Homestead as well. Four resident servants listed in the 1860 censuses were from Ireland, and in 1870 almost all of the ten non-Jay residents were listed as Irish.⁴⁵

Demography was not the only thing changing for African Americans in New York. The Fifteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1870 overturned New York’s racially restrictive voting standards, but it did not apply to women. African Americans in the Hudson River Valley successfully pushed for civil rights legislation and school desegregation. Zilpah was far too old to benefit from such initiatives. She lived and died at the edge of social change.⁴⁶

Although her final resting place in the Jay family burial plot is certain, Zilpah’s relationship to the Jay family in her final decades is not. The last time she appeared in the federal census as a member of the Jay household at Bedford was 1850. At that time, other staff members included three women from Ireland between the ages of eighteen and thirty, as well as one forty-year-old Irish-born man. An unpublished history of the Jay family slaves, focusing on Zilpah’s mother, states without citation, that Zilpah lived at the Jay family home until her death in 1872.⁴⁷ That seems plausible, although the $100 annuity that William left Zilpah may have allowed her to live or spend significant time with friends or relations. Her burial in the Jay plot suggests that she remained with the family or quite close to it. Zilpah’s burial concluded a century-and-a-half cycle of Jay domestic slaveholding history.

American Centennial

Jay resigned his diplomatic post in 1875, returning to his country at a time when white supremacists’ attempts to regain control of the South gained ever more traction; yet it was also a fortuitous time for a man eager to exalt his family’s historic legacy. The following year, the nation celebrated its one hundredth anniversary, and New York City’s elite turned to John Jay to lay claim to the America’s glorious Revolutionary Era past. He obliged with language that bolstered the metropolitan elite’s claim to stewardship over the future while paying scant attention to Reconstruction or freed people.

In requesting that Jay commemorate the Battle of Harlem Plains—the patriot army’s one moment of Manhattan success in the fateful year of 1776—the New-York Historical Society emphasized that Jay’s patrimony made him an ideal orator. John Austin Stevens’s letter on behalf of the planning group stated, “Our eyes naturally turn to you as a representative of old New York.” At the September 16 event, New-York Historical Society president Frederic DePeyster introduced Jay to the thousands assembled near the site of the battle in upper Manhattan as “a gentleman who worthily upholds the honor of his ancestral name—the grandson of that pure, patriotic, and elevated man, the friend of Washington, the first Chief-Justice of the United States, of whom Webster so beautifully said that when the ermine of justice fell on his shoulders it touched nothing less spotless than itself.”⁴⁸

Jay laid claim to history as a proud inheritance and as a responsibility to uphold. One newspaper covering the event flatteringly explained, “He is now in the prime of his physical and mental powers, and by descent, by wise scholarship, by reverence for historical traditions, and by a rare gift of eloquence, he is peculiarly fitted for the grateful task which devolved upon him.” On such an occasion, he was not so much an abolitionist or a son of an abolitionist as a son of the American Revolution and a keeper of its patriotic flame.⁴⁹

Amid vivid displays of red, white, and blue, Jay shunted slavery aside even as he sought to connect the Civil War to the Revolutionary War, highlighting the transcendent importance of national, intersectional unity. In the very first paragraph, he noted that the soldiers who fended off the British in battle “represented all sections … indicating the common ties that have bound us in a common destiny … recalling the generous thought of Patrick Henry, when he said, ‘I am not a Virginian—I am an American.’ ”⁵⁰ The historic memories of bravery on Harlem’s plains and heights that Jay then attempted to evoke derived much of their meaning from a future made possible as much by the Civil War as the Revolutionary War: the more recent conflict “has crowned the accomplishments of our first century with the conviction, that neither foreign power nor internal strife can reach the life of the Republic.” Rather than engage the collapsing fortunes of African Americans in the South, his rhetoric declared an implicit victory for the values of equality as part of a portrait of an expansive nation: the United States existed “no longer as a doubtful experiment, but as a fixed fact—a power of continental boundaries, of limitless resources, of unmeasured energy, of schools and churches, and universal freedom, more closely united than ever before on a basis of equal rights and mutual interests, and with no lingering element of sectional discord to again disturb its harmony.”⁵¹

The centennial provided an occasion to wish away rather than confront vital unfinished work. Although Jay had spoken in such grand terms about the national prospect throughout the Civil War era, he no longer tethered these sentiments explicitly to a specific program of reconstruction. References to the egalitarian language of the Declaration of Independence and an incorporation of the abolitionists’ favorite antiracial biblical adage that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men” were mere ornaments in his speech. The recent struggle over “the antagonism of principles and systems” functioned as a purifying thunderstorm, rather than an ongoing call to action.⁵² His history had become white-washed.

Indeed, when Jay repeatedly invoked race in the speech, he did so as a Eurocentric romantic nationalist rather than as an advocate of African American civil rights. To look to the future required contemplation of America’s “ancestors.” And those forebears, Jay repeatedly indicated, were exclusively European. The martial “stock” of Washington’s troops included Dutch, Huguenot, Swiss, English, and Danish elements, each carrying across the Atlantic with them the impress of military heroism from battles in centuries past. This racialism led Jay to describe the American colonies as “a mingling of the best blood of Europe.” From “ages of training in the varied schools of Europe, may be traced the course of American culture,” Jay insisted.⁵³ It is not entirely surprising that Jay measured culture by European standards; his education, upbringing, and travels were conventionally oriented in that direction. But his effacement of Black people from his accounting of colonial, revolutionary, and contemporary America revealed an almost willful blindness. In prior decades, Jay’s political vision gravitated toward racial controversy, as evidenced by his efforts to integrate the Episcopal Church, to assist Black fugitives, to advocate for the enlistment of Black troops in the Union Army, and to forecast a reconstruction predicated on progressive Black empowerment. The centennial celebration evoked dramatically different priorities. The embodiments of the founders who were recruited to commemorate the American Revolution offered an ethnically circumscribed and politically conservative vision.

As Jay linked past American accomplishments to current national challenges on a September afternoon before a patriotic assembly of thousands, he presented the unchecked spread of democracy as the greatest threat to the founders’ legacy. Too many people voting in too many elections, too much partisan organization—these developments constituted “radical change” that raised “the gravest questions” on this one hundredth anniversary of the United States. And so Jay’s centennial battle cry “call[ed] forth your noblest sons from every college and academy, from the bar, the pulpit, and the press” that he likened to Washington’s lieutenants, “to defend our national heights against official corruption.”⁵⁴ Jay couched his elitism explicitly in a language of political purity that had malignant implications for Reconstruction. The southward glance of his Harlem speech was down Manhattan Island toward corrupt politicians, not toward Virginia, Alabama, or Texas. Jay’s stance as a public historian expressed a narrowing vision of political participation at the same moment that white redeemers in the South were rolling back African American rights in state after state. He did not repudiate his former commitments, but they cast only the faintest shadow over how the past informed the present and shaped the future.

Jay’s Harlem Heights performance was no aberration, no mere playing to the day’s crowd. Three months later Jay reprised his role as the New York elite’s historian of the centennial before the alumni association of Columbia College. The event took place in the ULC’s theater. He noted that Columbia alumnus Daniel D. Tompkins had helped end slavery in New York when he served as governor, slaveholding or abolitionism among other graduates went unmentioned. When making reference to the Civil War, Jay left unstated what he might have highlighted a few years before: slavery as a cause, emancipation as an outcome, and equality as a necessary legacy. What did not go unstated were Jay’s preoccupations with political corruption and Protestant cultural hegemony. He raised as twin concerns the alleged danger of American education being hijacked by Roman Catholics and atheists, both groups, in his view, that were the enemies of true knowledge. As he had expressed in his Harlem Plains address, the battle for the next American century depended on elites being invested morally and intellectually in the fight.⁵⁵

Departure and Arrival

When Jay delivered his Harlem Plains oration, another presidential election was less than two months away. Republicans faced a rough test at the polls. During the centennial year, Democrats stood poised to complete their comeback as the dominant national party. White supremacist Democrats benefiting from the violent mobilization of white redeemers, had regained control of most southern states, with Republican governments barely clinging to power in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina. The corruption scandals of the Grant years had damaged the Republicans’ claim to be the party of good government. Poised to become the first Democratic president in sixteen years and to roll back the last remnants of Reconstruction was New York’s governor Samuel Tilden. Tilden had carved out a space for himself in New York politics as a reformer hostile to the corrupt Tammany Hall wing of his own party and favoring fiscal restraint. The commission that Governor Tilden appointed the previous year stole much of the Republicans’ thunder by limiting the scope of democratic power over municipal affairs. Tilden made it known that his support of reform and small government went hand in hand with the full resumption of white power in the South.⁵⁶

The ULC sought to position itself as a voice of reform within the Republican Party, a commitment to honest government being the only path to retain the White House. In strong language endorsed by the editors of the Republican New York Times, the club’s March resolutions took a stance for honest government, against the state’s own Republican political machine and, by implication, against New York Republican senator Roscoe Conklin. The moral energies that the club had once poured into affirming Black rights as an essential component of a unified nation now emphasized moral rectitude in government operations and the selection of a presidential nominee. Yet the ULC had not entirely forgotten other commitments. In May 1876, the club affirmed three principles, the first of which gestured broadly at Black civil rights constitutionally enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment: equality before the law and equal protection. African American citizenship still mattered, at least notionally. The other two ULC resolves were for a return to the gold standard and civil service reform, two crucial tenets of conservatism and Republican governance for the rest of the nineteenth century. At the Republican national convention, reformers got their wish, as the party passed up Conkling and nominated Ohioan Rutherford B. Hayes. The Civil War veteran, former congressman, and former governor, however, was also ready to back away from Reconstruction.⁵⁷

With the election approaching, Jay’s concerns with sectional relations and national unity no longer revolved around racial justice. A letter he drafted in the month before the election emphasized that a Tilden victory would be a disaster for the nation’s financial health. The real southern problem allegedly facing the country was that a Tilden administration would allow southern states to make claims against the government for their wartime losses. Such a step would deliver a severe blow to a nation already struggling to pay off its national debt. This “radical change in policy” would undermine the domestic and international credit of the United States. In tarring the Democratic Party as apologists for secession, Jay described the Civil War as originating in a disagreement over the “powers of the National Government in its relation with the states.” Although Jay’s pro-union stance long had incorporated this logic, such a statement, like his Harlem Plains speech in September, indicated how disentangled Black rights had become from his historical and partisan consciousness. His sense of urgency, when looking southward, was financial, not racial.⁵⁸

Rutherford Hayes’s historically convoluted victory helped confirm John Jay’s status as a consummate reform-minded insider even as it also confirmed Reconstruction’s defeat. Although Tilden received a majority of the popular vote, he did not gain the presidency; a fifteen-man congressionally appointed commission ultimately awarded contested Electoral College votes from three southern states to install the Republican as the victor. The price was steep. Behind-the-scenes deal-making cemented an understanding that the federal government would cease to deploy troops or any other coercive means to enforce the Reconstruction amendments or civil rights laws.⁵⁹

The new president’s inaugural address couched policy toward the South in even-handed terms designed to soothe consciences, as well as sectional animosity. The Ohioan even spoke of former slaves living “upon an equal footing with their former masters” and the “moral obligation” of the federal government “to employ its constitutional power and influence to establish the rights of the people it has emancipated.” Yet Hayes preceded these statements with an acknowledgment that the time had arrived when “wise, honest, and peaceful local self-government” had become an “imperative necessity.” The anomaly of a powerful national government intervening in southern affairs, Hayes implied, had promoted conflict, corruption, and violence—the same sorts of problems that reform-minded elites in the ULC associated with northern politics as practiced by their Democratic rivals. The president also emphatically called for civil service reform that “shall be thorough, radical, and complete”—bringing government back to the founders’ nonpartisan vision of government service.⁶⁰

John Jay placed himself squarely in Hayes’s corner. During his first weeks in office, Hayes quickly delivered South Carolina and Louisiana into white Democratic hands. The ULC affirmed the president’s “policy of conciliation and equal Justice” that “may result in the more perfect union and cordial Harmony of all sections and races.” Hayes faced opposition from Senator Conkling and other Republicans to cabinet nominations that passed over stalwart Republicans to include a southern Democrat David M. Key and reformer Carl Schurz. Yet Jay organized a rally in New York City to defend the president’s appointment prerogative.⁶¹ The ULC, with Jay resuming the helm for one last year in 1877, acclimated itself to the new era in which sectional reconciliation and civil service reform took precedence over African American rights.

President Hayes enlisted Jay directly in the cause of civil service reform. On April 23, 1877, Hayes placed Jay in charge of a commission to probe the New York customs house, the entryway to a huge portion of the nation’s imports and a hotbed of patronage for Conkling’s allies. Jay’s committee filed a series of reports whose recommendations caught the eye of Secretary of Treasury John Sherman and even of President Hayes. The task force asserted that the customs house provided a variety of opportunities for corruption and a good place for politicians to give jobs to loyalists regardless of their qualifications. Jay and his fellow commissioners claimed that the customs operation had a bloated staff that needed to be reduced by 20 percent. Workdays allegedly were too short, inspections too lax, and the acceptance of “gratuities” from importers for expedited service entirely too common, as were mistakes in record keeping. Federal antibribery law “has become a dead letter.”

Jay tailored the vocabulary of abolitionism and nationalism to fit his anti-corruption work. The first of the Jay commission’s four reports asserted that “the evils wrought by mismanagement and corruption, can be accomplished only by the emancipation of the service from partisan control.” To this moralistic language of liberation from evil, the second report added a flourish of Jay’s nationalistic exceptionalism. People “at home and abroad” would admire a reformed system that “will serve as an example of republican excellence and enhance the American pride of country.” Where once he and his father had pored over the details of slavery-related laws, Jay immersed himself in the nitty-gritty of customs collection and portside corruption, sentiments of moral regeneration echoing still. President Hayes endorsed the Jay commission’s goals in the dry language of “efficiency” and “a strictly business basis.” The president issued an executive order banning public employees from simultaneously serving as a party official in response to the Jay commission’s first report. Several months later, however, when Hayes attempted to make changes in the customhouse leadership, members of his own party in the US Senate delivered an embarrassing defeat to the president’s nominees.⁶² His bond with the reform-minded ULC remained strong.

In taking on the Conkling machine, Jay once again had challenged established and powerful interests. But unlike his antebellum pro bono work and church agitation, he was now cultivating access to power. Jay seized the opportunity to be an insider of high standing. He shared policy and personnel recommendations with the new secretary of state, New Yorker William Evarts, with Secretary of the Treasury Ohioan John Sherman, and with Hayes himself. Jay’s New York ULC even scored the great prize of hosting President Hayes and Mrs. Hayes for a grand evening toward the end of 1877—with its president, John Jay, playing the role of host.⁶³

Just before 9 p.m. on December 21, 1877, the Honorable John Jay escorted First Lady Lucy Hayes into the Union League Club’s reception room, followed by President Hayes escorting Eleanor Jay. The club spared no expense to brighten the winter solstice night. The Times reported that the clubhouse was “beautifully decorated throughout,” with flowers and plants seemingly everywhere from entrance hall and staircases to tables and chandeliers. The club also assembled an exhibit of almost fifty paintings by American artists, many featuring pastoral and natural scenes of the Northeast, spiced by more exotic fare depicting Middle Eastern scenes. A band and “tables laden with delicacies” added to the splendor.

On a flower-festooned platform, with the Jays at their side, the president and his wife greeted guests, with John Jay presenting each new well-wisher. Dignitaries in attendance included a slew of generals, clergymen, elected officials, and judges, along with at least two district attorneys, the president of Yale College, the English consul-general, and financier J. Pierpont Morgan, who was also a member of the Reception Committee. The New York Times lavished attention on the ladies in the receiving party, especially Mrs. Hayes, whose couture took several sentences to describe. Mrs. Jay’s dress drew shorter notice, though the report did comment that her jewelry as “superb.” Overall, the event’s “display of diamonds,” reported the Times, “has never been surpassed.”

As festivities began to wind down after 11 p.m., carriages crowded the surrounding streets for a half-mile in every direction. The impressive evening that Jay and the ULC gave President and Mrs. Hayes demonstrated that wealth and power could, at least on this one night, command the streets in a city and a nation still riven with conflict.⁶⁴ That evening, John Jay II was the ultimate insider, the former abolitionist agitator claiming all the prestige that his historic name conveyed.

Native Son

As Reconstruction gave way to the Gilded Age, John Jay II threw himself into the culture wars of his time. President of New York State’s Civil Service Commission, president of the American Historical Association, anti-Catholic nativist crusader, public education advocate—Jay spent his sixties and seventies battling against forces he viewed as threatening to undermine the country’s foundations. As with the Slave Power, he cast his new opponents as subversives scheming to foist evil on the unprepared and the morally feckless. Unlike his abolitionist days, he conducted his new campaigns secure in his status among the social elite and confident that the Jay family was, as it had been in his grandfather’s time, synonymous with a nationalist vision. The fight against slavery survived more as an analogy for describing high-stakes moral combat than as an ongoing struggle for justice.

Presidential elections still coaxed forth the old abolitionist rhetorical flames, even though Jay’s post-emancipation political passions cut him off from the sort of interracial activism and social risk-taking that previously propelled him to agitate relentlessly for African American liberty. In advance of the 1880 election, Jay let loose accumulated resentments against secessionists and Democrats to denounce the illegitimate return of elite white political supremacy to the South. Jay, improbably, likened the contest between Republican James Garfield and Democrat General Winfield Scott Hancock to the Civil War election pitting President Abraham Lincoln against General George McClellan. In 1884, Jay continued to portray the Democratic Party as tainted by its history and its present reliance on its southern wing. Despite Democratic candidate and New York governor Grover Cleveland’s reform credentials, a vote for Cleveland meant capitulation to the South’s political violence and chicanery. If Democrats captured the presidency, southerners among them would advance their claim to be compensated for the destruction wrought by the Civil War in their territory while continuing to use political violence as a tool. The nation’s “ ‘free institutions’ ” allegedly hung in the balance.⁶⁵

Jay regarded New Hampshire Republican Senator Henry W. Blair’s effort to provide millions of federal dollars for education in the southern states as a means of advancing the work of emancipation. Blair Bill funds were to flow in a nondiscriminatory fashion to Black and white schools without the federal government interfering with racial segregation. Jay saw the Blair Bill as addressing an ongoing obligation to African Americans and as a continuation of the battle against slavery: “Emancipation,” he believed, was “but half completed while millions of Children with votes awaiting them are left without Education.” In 1888, he hyperbolically compared the Blair Bill to the two most important abolitionist triumphs—the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. Despite Jay’s continued faith in the promise of federal educational aid, congressional support for the initiative crested and receded without action.⁶⁶

During the 1880s, Jay devoted himself far more steadily and intensively to fighting governmental corruption than to the rights of African Americans. When John Jay received his appointment to New York State’s new Civil Service Commission in 1883, he gained an official perch from which to play the role of elite warrior for American political values. The bureaucratic nature of the work—seeking to replace political patronage with written rules, formal applications, and exams—did not stop Jay from claiming the moral high ground in the rhetorical mode of civil rights agitator he once was. With echoes of the egalitarian principles enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, Jay lectured one correspondent regarding civil service rules: “The order of society, and the protection of equal rights of all citizens, depends upon the just and impartial administration of the laws. Every evasion or violation of the laws affects the rights of citizens in some way.” With the election of a new governor threatening his place on the commission, Jay made a self-aggrandizing analogy: Governor David Bennett Hill in trying to derail civil service reform would “perhaps be known in history as having played in the abolition of the spoils system, the same … part which Jeff Davis did towards the abolition of slavery.”⁶⁷

In the Catholic Church, Jay found a foe that he viewed as especially menacing. Jay saw Catholic immigration as providing cover and foot soldiers for what he regarded as the church hierarchy’s plan to replace American liberty with loyalty to a foreign power. That same church hierarchy, Jay argued, undermined the mass public education necessary to maintain democracy. In Jay’s view, it sought to siphon public funds to subsidize Catholic schools teaching the wrong lessons and making a mockery of church–state separation. He embraced a vision of historical struggle premised on nativist bigotry. The church, he claimed in 1879, aimed to take over the country, bringing to scale the “blending of dirt, misgovernment and confiscation” that typified New York City politics. They were a “ ‘foreign colony’ … come to conquer us,” with “Jesuit plans against our liberties becom[ing] more and more developed.”⁶⁸

In support of his anti-Catholicism, Jay became an active member of the Evangelical Alliance, serving as president in 1884–85. In 1887, Jay successfully recruited Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong as the organization’s general secretary. By that time, Strong had already published the widely circulated book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, a blistering nativist treatise that Jay labeled “a clarion call.”⁶⁹

The battle against slavery continued to serve as an informative historical reference point in Jay’s campaign to preserve his vision of American identity. In 1888, Jay compared the role of the Protestant churches in battling the “monster problems” of the day—“intemperance, illiteracy, political corruption, jesuitism and superstition”—favorably to “failings and weaknesses which were painfully apparent in the earlier part of the anti-slavery conflict.” In other words, Protestant churches had learned their historical lesson.⁷⁰

John Jay II used his selection in 1890 as president of the American Historical Association as an opportunity to advocate for the civic value of academic research that emphasized a northern European Protestant-centered vision of US history. His famous name and lineage leant a historic and nationalist patina to the fledgling professional organization. His address, “The Demand for Education in American History,” argued that historical education should incorporate the advanced methods imported to American universities from European ones to act as a bulwark against “civilizations inferior, alien, and hostile to our own” and the “un-American” influences that new waves of Americans brought to these shores. He included the “constitutional emancipation in our own day” and the “latest amendments to our national Constitution” in his sweeping arc of Anglo-Saxon legal development. However, he did not include African Americans among the founding ethnic components of the nation.⁷¹

Amid his post-Reconstruction reform causes and cultural crusades, John Jay II struggled to find the appropriate way to record the family’s abolitionist story even as he worked to further secure a central place for the Jay name in the history of the nation’s founding. In the 1880s, the energetic activist published two substantial studies relating to his grandfather’s landmark diplomacy when negotiating US independence in Paris. He had a hand in the publication of the four-volume Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay. He also sought to have some influence over the biography that his nephew, the journalist George Pellew, wrote of John Jay for Houghton Mifflin’s American Statesman series. That book attempted no special insight into the role of slavery and emancipation in the founder’s story.⁷²

With good reason, John Jay II feared that he would not live long enough to fulfill what he saw as a responsibility to tell his father William’s abolitionist story. Signing a codicil to his Last Will and Testament in 1888, three days after his seventy-first birthday, John essentially admitted that his own efforts might come to naught. He set aside money to find “a competent person” to produce volumes on “the life and letters of my father”—speculating that “it may be that the historic value of the material as illustrating a phase of the anti-slavery struggle, the true history of which is still unwritten, will in the opinion of the publishers justify its extension to three volumes.”⁷³

Serious injuries suffered in September 1890, when he was hit by a carriage on 42nd Street in Manhattan, served as the last impediment to doing this abolitionist biographical work himself. Jay enlisted Bayard Tuckerman, a member of a socially eminent New York and Boston family who had an abiding interest in Old New York history.⁷⁴ A New York City publishing house brought Tuckerman’s book out in autumn of 1893, the single-volume William Jay and the Constitutional Movement for the Abolition of Slavery. The infirm John Jay mustered a preface to the study, attempting to define the terms by which William Jay’s life and abolitionism continued to matter. John Jay II acknowledged that the “pledges” the Union made during the war “to the national discredit” remained “unfulfilled” and gestured toward the principles of the now defunct Blair Bill, envisioning federal funds to the states “so as to secure to every child of our coloured citizens the ability to read the Bible and the Constitution, to fulfill his duties and protect his rights.” But “The Lessons for To-Day” that followed this tepid policy prescription served up a roll call of bygone, almost entirely white, heroes and an abbreviated version of his now familiar rant against subversion and corruption of “American institutions” by “foreigners.”⁷⁵

The book’s title, with its emphasis on “the Constitutional Movement” to end slavery, signaled its cautious premise. The notion of a “constitutional movement” was an invention designed to portray abolitionism as something other than fundamentally radical. A credulous December 17, 1893, New York Times review of the book fell in line, lauding the contentious and rhetorically aggressive William Jay for his decorum and spirit of fair play that allegedly redeemed abolitionists from the charge of being “a lot of hot-headed, revolutionary, law-despising men.”⁷⁶

John Jay II knew full well that, as abolitionists, he and his father had spread dangerous, disruptive flames in the name of justice. In 1891, he recalled with pride: “For disapproving of Slavery;—assisting fugitive slaves, and advocating the right of a black Church to a seat in the Episcopal Convention, I was tabooed and black-balled and called all manner of unpleasant names;—amalgamationist, disunionist, and what-not.” For that he, like his father, could claim fame far beyond the reflected glory of the first John Jay’s role in the nation’s founding.⁷⁷

On January 12, 1894, John Jay II penned a note to his old political comrade Hiram Barney. “Still on my back” from illness and injury, he admitted that the pain had been bad enough to require morphine. Jay was now nearing his end, which, indeed, came in May. “What changes we have seen while working together,” Jay wrote Barney, “what changes still seem to await our Country.”⁷⁸ Truer, more tragic words he had never written.