Travel and Travail

Much of Jay’s mission, especially early on, did not go according to plan. Bad weather forced the Jay traveling party, which in addition to John, Sally, and Abbe, included John’s twelve-year old nephew Peter Jay Munro, Sally’s brother Brockholst Livingston, and John’s personal secretary William Carmichael, to land at Martinique Their Spain-bound ship the Confederacy was so harshly buffeted by stormy seas that the badly damaged ship had to divert course to that French West Indian island.

During their ten-day stay in this sugar colony, the Jays got a taste of plantation society, for the first and only time in their lives. Martinique did not disappoint. Sally’s first shipboard glimpse revealed “the most verdant, romantic country I ever beheld.” She found the French to be good stewards of their colony, commenting, “The neatness that prevails here cannot be exceeded & I frankly confess I never saw it equal’d.” After their departure for France aboard the Aurora, Sally continued to write of Martinico with pleasure and fascination. The production of coffee, coconuts, and sugar cane, in her telling, added to the island’s beauty, with the presence of slaves prompting only a mildly discordant note: as she reported to her father, New Jersey governor William Livingston, “Every here and there the eye is supris’d [by] settlements aside & amid the hills belonging to the negros who are employed upon the plantations. Then again a plain of small extent with genteel houses diversify the prospect.”

Although John was apparently too preoccupied with work to take it in, Sally was intrigued by the demonstration she received of how cane was processed into sugar. The Jays also reviewed a French regiment. Sally remarked, “I recognized the friends of American Liberty,” but also noted with melancholy the fate of soldiers in wartime. As the Jay party, now enlarged by one with the addition of Benoit whom Jay bought on the island, departed for Spain, Sally indicated little or no ambivalence that “the friends of American Liberty” relied for their comfort and gentility on slaves—as did she and her husband, albeit on a much smaller scale.²

Jay’s mission to Spain on behalf of his country proved to be largely an exercise in frustration, despite his eagerness to accomplish his diplomatic goals. His zeal gave rise to a rare remark of impatience from Sally. To her sister Susan, she reported, “There are many things in Cordova worth seeing but as Mr. Jay’s maxim is to prefer business to pleasure,” they did not tarry there on their way to Madrid, the capital where Jay hoped he might advance the purposes of his mission. The Jays need not have rushed. John struggled to gain access to Spanish officials who might be in a position to coordinate military and diplomatic strategy against their mutual British enemy or secure the recognition and financial assistance the new country needed. Unfortunately for Jay, the Spanish saw his presence on the periphery of their court as a goad to the British that might help bring their European rival to negotiate over the cession of Gibraltar. Aside from securing the loan of a paltry sum of money to the Americans, Jay accomplished virtually nothing during his more than two years in Spain.³

Personal relationships between the Jays and members of their American circle in Spain did not go smoothly either. These social problems took a particular toll on Sally and taxed the skills of John, still in his thirties, as a paternal figure. While in Spain, an eighteen-year-old Virginian named Lewis Littlepage attached himself to the Jay household. Although the full extent to which Littlepage manipulated John financially and emotionally would not emerge until after the Jays moved on to France, Littlepage proved himself to be a challenging youth to mentor from the start. He spent Jay’s money freely and resisted career-related advice.⁴ Meanwhile, Sally’s twenty-three-year-old brother Brockholst provoked an out-and-out family crisis; Livingston, like Littlepage, displayed a tendency to bite the hands that fed him.

Rather than feeling gratitude for the training and educational advice that John sought to provide, Brockholst expressed his resentment in ways that were publicly embarrassing and privately mortifying to his sister. Brockholst’s insolence included disparaging the morals of the members of the Continental Congress in the presence of a French guest and disdaining John’s attempt to guide his younger brother-in-law toward the study of law. According to Sally, her brother “treated almost every thing recommended by Mr. Jay as unessential & frequently ridiculous.” Sally surmised that Carmichael, John’s secretary, saw Brockholst as a rival and decided to encourage an unpleasant relationship between the brothers-in-law as a strategy for preserving his own place. That tactic appeared to be working: one evening, Brockholst declared to John “that he prefer’d going to America to remaining like a slave here.”

Sally tossed in bed over “the insinuation of slavery” by her brother. Indeed, the complaint did not even work as a metaphor. John provided Brockholst with a sizable monetary allowance, and “his washing and mending” were “done in the family”—presumably by Abbe or the Irish servant whom Sally hired in Spain. Moreover, Sally noted, the Jays had placed no limits on his social life. Sally, her father, her brother, and her husband knew full well what slavery was; Brockholst’s condition was plainly anything but slavery.⁵

Making matters far worse, Sally gave birth in Spain to a child who died twenty-three days later. For some time afterward, she would feel at wit’s end, “separated from my son, depriv’d of a lovely daughter, distress’d by a mistaken brother” and far from home.⁶

Abbe provided invaluable comfort to her mistress. Sally wrote her mother Susannah French Livingston in devastation over the death of her infant daughter, pausing to note, “The attention and proofs of fidelity which we have receiv’d from Abbe, demand, & ever shall have my acknowledgments, you can hardly imagine how useful she is to us, for indeed her place cou’d not be supplied, at least not here.” Describing herself as “bewilder’d,” Sally no doubt relied on Abbe all the more because, at the time she wrote her mother, John had followed the Spanish royal court to St. Ildefonso. It was from there that John penned his instructions to Egbert Benson regarding the moral necessity of pressing for the gradual abolition of slavery. Meanwhile, the importance of Abbe’s service continued to grow. In February 1782, Sally gave birth to Maria, a girl who remained healthy as the family relocated soon after from Spain to the epicenter of American revolutionary diplomacy in Paris.⁷

Sally Jay imagined that the Martiniquan Benoit would be a part of her reconstituted family life in America. The Jays had left their young son Peter Augustus in America with Sally’s parents. Sally promised five-year-old Peter, “When I return I’ll bring you a clever little black boy that speaks french, & then if you can read & write english well, you may learn that language.”⁸ The lack of self-consciousness, the ease with which Mrs. Jay assumed that her class and racial privilege would contribute to her own son’s ascent to cosmopolitan achievement, conveys how perfectly normal slavery could seem to these revolutionary Americans.

John also depended on the provision of intimate personal service. In March 1783, Jay dispatched a note to John Adams, informing his fellow peace commissioner that he could not join in a meeting with Count Sarsfield, a learned aristocratic French critic of slavery. His servant had taken nephew Peter Jay Munro to a fair and thus could not groom Jay’s hair.⁹ Whether that manservant was Benoit or someone hired in France, clearly these Americans were entrenched in a world where their social inferiors tended to their needs.

Long-Distance Paternalism

The vulnerabilities of the enslaved allowed Sally and John to imagine themselves as beneficent dispensers of favor. Abbe endured her own trying separation when she had to accompany the family to Europe, a fact that her mistress’s cavalier commentary revealed. Sally noted in a postscript to her sister Kitty, “Abbe is well & would be glad to know if she is mistress of a husband still.”¹⁰ Abbe’s service to Sally had severed a family bond, how permanently the future would tell. This separation provoked anxiety about her husband’s faithfulness, and the only way she could receive assurances of his faithfulness was to ask her literate white mistress to make inquiries on her behalf. Relying on Sally, the cause of Abbe’s removal, in this intimate matter could not have been pleasant. The cool irony with which Sally conveyed this request expressed a great deal about the inequalities of power at the core of Abbe’s relationship to her. Sally wrote with patronizing freedom about the fidelity of Abbe’s “husband” whom Abbe still wished to serve, even at the distance of three thousand miles. Because slave marriages had no legal meaning, their status as husband and wife was solely a matter of fidelity or at least personal devotion. Passing along Abbe’s message seemed to make Sally feel good about herself, whereas for Abbe, the emotional comforts of home remained distant and tenuous.

In a different way, John Jay’s European correspondence to his brother Frederick revealed his own sense of paternalistic mastery.¹¹ John persistently attempted to extend his benevolence from across the ocean to the slaves in the struggling household of his New York family. In these efforts, the diplomat blended an acceptance of the present reality of slavery with a personal sense of responsibility and offered hints of an emerging antislavery sensibility.

While John and the family were living in peaceful conditions in Europe, the Jay family was attempting to stay clear of the worst ravages inflicted by regular and irregular forces waging war in Westchester—taking refuge in Dutchess County, first about fifty miles to the northwest of Rye in Fishkill, and then farther north in Poughkeepsie. It fell to John’s younger brother Frederick to manage a large and needy household. That household included their father Peter, who was well past seventy, and two blind siblings, Peter and Anna Maricka, as well as Frederick’s wife Margaret. The household also included several enslaved people, perhaps initially as many as eleven or twelve. In April 1781, Frederick made no attempt to sugarcoat for John what he regarded as a very bad situation in their “large and helpless family.” As far as Frederick was concerned, most of their slaves were a burden rather than a benefit. A small number, including one Frederick referred to as “your Boy,” proved able to work on the farm, while the family sold Frank (possibly the same Frank who earlier ran away to the British) “for his good behavior.” Meanwhile, Frederick desperately wished to shrink the size of the household, enlisting his blind older brother Peter to try to convince their father “to reduce the number of Blacks.” Such efforts were “without effect.” Because the expense of feeding and clothing those too old or too young to meet the family’s needs was “beyond conception,” Frederick appealed to John to intervene with their stubborn father.¹²

Although he was not entirely unsympathetic to Frederick’s predicament, distance seemed to make John more sanguine about the family’s ability to negotiate the challenges they faced without completely disregarding the needs of their slaves. In March 1781, near the end of the letter expressing his gratitude and admiration for Frederick, John wrote, “Tell all the servants that I remember them.” John continued, “The Trunk I sent from Bordeaux contained something for each of them.” He expressed regret that it got lost in transit.¹³

John wanted to play the role of benevolent patriarch. He became fixated on the idea that providing the family slaves with a type of coarse cloth he had come across in Spain would be helpful to everyone concerned and would serve as a token of his esteem for them. The cloth, which John noticed Spanish laborers wearing, “would make good warm Cloathing for Negroes in our northern States.” He took pains to make sure that a shipment reached the “Parcel” of slaves attached to his family, enlisting the Revolutionary War financier Robert Morris to help him with the importation and delivery.¹⁴

John also clearly felt uncomfortable with Frederick’s desire to cut the family loose of responsibility for the unproductive. He mixed paternalism and moralism to justify a foot-dragging approach. In a July 1781 letter, John pointed out that he had sent cloth to “keep your servants warm” when winter arrived again. Claiming “I am really at a loss” as to what Frederick should do, John then proceeded to poke holes in plans to reduce the family’s slaveholdings. Three servants John understood to be already hired out and therefore of no financial burden. He authorized Frederick to threaten one particularly mischievous servant by informing her that John would not protect her if she continued to behave badly. But John balked at disposing of the family’s “old servants who have expended their Strength & youth for the family, they ought and must be taken good care of while we have the means of doing it. Common Justice and I may say Gratitude demands it.” John conceded that Frederick might consider “part[ing] with” some from a list that included Clarinda, Little Mary, Castor, and Peet—some or all of whom were relatively young, perhaps even children. John then immediately qualified that suggestion with the telling remark, “How far this may suit with your conscience I know not.”

John cast caution as being in the best interests of his father and blind brother. His brother Peter “undoubtedly [should] have a Boy with him at all Times” and offered “my Boy as at all times at his absolute Disposal”—thus combining his sincere concern for his brother’s well-being with another roadblock to ridding themselves of slaves. John erected an additional obstacle by stating that their aging and ailing father should not be bothered with such matters and that, for his sake, stability in the household should be maintained as much as possible. Toward the end of the letter, John offered his younger brother the kind of advice far easier to give than to follow: “You must endeavour to keep up such others spirits and oppose misfortunes with manly firmness & cheerful Resignation.”¹⁵

John and Frederick Jay were both literally and figuratively talking past each other on the issue of what to do. They did not always receive each other’s letters, and Frederick got the feeling that John did not understand the family’s situation clearly. In 1781, as winter approached, Frederick derided the shipment of European fabric as “not much Superior to brown paper” and requested that John not send any more.

The household situation was dire. Their father was deathly ill, and a large band of armed men had forced their way into their house, “plundering every thing they could lay hands on.” Frederick felt compelled to take action to shrink the size of the household, selling one slave, a girl named Clarinda, outright. He had already hired out Young Mary, who was probably Clarinda’s sister, and planned to sell her as well. Two other female slaves, Moll and Susan, and one male slave, Kingston, were hired out, while Old Mary, currently residing at a doctor’s home, was likely to “be an Invalid as long as she lives.” Their father manumitted Old Plato and Zilpha, possibly Clarinda’s parents, though they continued to live with the family. At present, reported Frederick, the household included “five whites exclusive of my little Son & Six servants”; he impressed on his older brother that “I have already sacrificed my all for the sake of the Family” and that he was “determined to remain with them as long as Papa lives.” Fredrick did not describe the emotional suffering that Clarinda’s sale imposed on her and her family.¹⁶

Even as John, Sally, Abbe, and Benoit made the transition from Spain to France in the spring and summer of 1782, John continued to express concern for his family’s slaves and former slaves in New York. The level of personal responsibility that he felt is evidenced by his pressing associates from outside the family to get involved in this matter, while also attempting to communicate his feelings to the enslaved themselves. In April 1782, Jay inquired of his brother, “How do all the old servants do?” and requested that his brother “tell them I have not forgotten them, and that they would have been convinced of it, if the Enemy had not intercepted the things I have sent for them.”¹⁷

On April 17, 1782, John’s father Peter passed away. The news reached Paris on June 23. Peter’s death deepened rather than dampened John’s concern for the family’s elderly former slaves. In August, Jay reported to his friend Robert Livingston that his father, while still alive, had freed some slaves “and that some others of the older ones have been put out.” This prompted the reflection, “Old Servants are sometimes neglected.” and the instruction that their friend and fellow New Yorker Egbert Benson “keep an Eye over them, and not to let any of them want.” Putting his money where his sentiments were, he asked Livingston to give Benson ₤50 to use on behalf of the slaves.¹⁸

The receipt in Paris of Peter Jay’s will prompted John once again to articulate his responsibility for African Americans who were attached, legally or otherwise, to the Jay family. The will also made John the owner, or part owner, of additional people. When John received a copy of his father’s will and its three codicils in the fall of 1782, he expressed satisfaction with its terms. His father died with enough wealth to provide substantial sums to support his blind daughter Anna Maricka and his mentally challenged child Augustus, as well as to ensure the well-being of his widowed eldest daughter Eve and her son Peter Jay Munro. The elder Peter Jay earmarked the family’s original Rye estate to his son Peter, one of his New York City properties to Frederick, and gave John a choice of farms in Bedford in northern Westchester County. Sir James Jay, whose erratic political behavior during the war troubled the family, received title to no specific piece of land, and his financial debt to his father was treated differently from that of the other children.¹⁹

The will, originally dated January 28, 1778, and its codicils, the last of which was written in December 1781, disposed of the enslaved. In the words of the deceased from the original will, “my two Negro women, Zilpha and the elder Mary, in consideration of their long and faithful Services be indulged by my Executors in the choice of their future masters” among his children. If either of these women chose to serve one of the sons—Peter, James, John, or Frederick—that man would pay up to ₤30 to the estate per enslaved woman. As a result of the third codicil, John Jay received Plato, though while the future master was overseas, Plato could decide for which of Peter’s other children he would work. Peter bequeathed “my Negro Slave Mary to Such of my children as She Shall elect to live with,” with the estate providing “reasonable compensation” if she proved to be expensive to support. He went even further on this score; if none of his children would support Mary, the executors should use interest from the estate to pay for her “maintenance.” Presumably, others belonged to the residual estate.²⁰ As with his other wealth, notions of loyalty and legacy intermixed when thinking about human property

In response, John once again assumed the stance of guardian and protector of their well-being, an enlarged echo of his father’s concerns. He asked Frederick to assure Plato that “I shall remember and reward his attachmt. to my Father by making his Life as easy and happy as” possible, while “Zelpha & Mary may also entertain the same Expectations.” More broadly, John asked Frederick to “comfort all the old Servants by letting them perceive that tho they have lost a kind & indulgent master, yet that his Children remember their Services and will not permit the Ev[ening] of their Lives to be involved in Distress.” He also instructed Frederick how to deal with Claas, a family slave who had spent the war behind loyalist lines in New York City: “If New York shd. be evacuated and Claas remain there, treat him kindly for his Mothers Sake.” John’s phrasing indicated that he was neither overly disturbed by Claas’s temporary disloyalty nor particularly concerned by the possibility that the slaves would make that disloyalty permanent by departing with the British.²¹

Slavery and the Peace of Paris

Jay and other Americans made the moral link between the Revolution and slavery, but John Jay’s consultations on slavery in the Paris peace negotiations exposed the reality that slaves remained valuable property in which his countrymen retained a keen interest. Because slaves had emphatically inserted themselves in the war, their disposition became a feature of the peace. The Laurens Plan to arm South Carolina slaves had been an attempt to play catch-up. Even before independence the British had tried to induce the Virginia slaves of patriot masters to flee. Offering freedom to those running away from rebellious owners subsequently became official continental British war policy. Thousands of slaves would take advantage of these opportunities to secure freedom on their own terms.²²

After the British defeat at Yorktown, the formerly enslaved crowded behind loyalist lines, shielded for the time being from the claims of their once and would-be masters. As a delegate charged with formulating a formal peace treaty with the British, Jay found himself with a job to do that included advancing the demands of slaveholders. “Equity” in this arena, then, meant something quite different from freeing people, regardless of what he had told Egbert Benson about the piety of passing laws for emancipation. Indeed, resolving the status of these African Americans and their potential evacuation put to the test the expressed antislavery inclinations of all four US peace commissioners who made it to Paris—Jay, along with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Laurens. As negotiations of a preliminary peace agreement proceeded, the fate of Black people living among British forces and loyalists became a complicated question of compensation and of good faith. It also became a bargaining chip.

The US Peace Commission tilted in geographical origin toward the North; South Carolina’s Laurens did not arrive until late November 1782, having been held captive in the Tower of London for more than a year. Virginian Thomas Jefferson, the planned fifth commissioner, never embarked for Europe. Adams from Massachusetts, Franklin from Pennsylvania, and Jay from New York hammered out a broad framework and established the principle of US independence well before the subject of slavery entered into the negotiations. The primary priorities of the Americans were to ensure that the British acknowledged US independence before, rather than as a consequence of, peace talks and on establishing the widest possible boundaries of postwar US territory. Jay in particular was determined to ignore congressional instructions to keep their French allies close at hand in negotiations. He suspected that French and Spanish diplomatic priorities diverged substantially from US interests, especially with regard to the future sovereignty of lands in the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys and navigation rights on the Mississippi River. From the summer into the fall, with Franklin and Jay serving as the sole members of the commission in Paris, the subjects of slaves allegedly pilfered by the British did not come up. Meanwhile, Franklin identified the access of New England fisherman to the banks of Newfoundland as an early priority, an issue with relevance to the northernmost colonies alone.²³

Yet as negotiations progressed toward a preliminary peace document, Jay, Franklin, and Adams, who arrived on October 26, showed themselves quite willing to interject slavery into the conversation. In September 1782, the Continental Congress, on the motion of James Madison, instructed Secretary of Foreign Affairs Robert R. Livingston “to obtain as speedily as possible authentic returns of the Slaves and other property which have been carried off or destroyed in the course of the War by the Enemy” and to forward that information to the US negotiating team in France. Meanwhile, Livingston was to apprise the US representatives “that many thousands of Slaves and other property … have been carried off.” Moreover, “the great loss of property which the Citizens of the United States have sustained by the Enemy will be considered by several States as an insuperable bar” to compensating Americans who cast their lot with the crown for property confiscated during the war. Livingston duly complied by sending off the congressional resolution to Paris, where it was received by mid-November. Jay and Adams wasted little time introducing congressional concerns into negotiations with their British counterparts. While British representative Richard Oswald asserted to the US delegation that anybody sold to the West Indies from Savannah must have been slaves belonging to loyalists, he confessed privately to British colonial secretary Thomas Townshend that he did not know this to be true. More importantly, Oswald understood that the Americans themselves felt aggrieved, which severely complicated British efforts to insist on the compensation for or return of loyalist property.²⁴

Franklin also stressed to Oswald that Americans did not take lightly the manner in which the British had carried off those claimed as slaves. In a November 26 letter to Oswald, Franklin quoted the congressional resolution directly but also, at length, a Pennsylvania law calling for the detailed accounting of British depredations, including the specific demand “that all Losses of Negro or Mulatto Slaves and Servants, who have been deluded and carried away by the Enemies of the United States, and which have not been recovered or recompenced, shall be comprehended within the Accounts and Estimates” compiled. Even counties not actually “invaded” by British forces and therefore not suffering destruction of other property should account for “Damages suffered by the Losses of such Servants and Slaves” who joined the British.

For Franklin, the carrying off of American slaves fit into a larger pattern that made the British and loyalists look “odious.” Any treaty provision compensating loyalists for their own losses would only stir deep resentment among patriotic Americans. Although the American negotiators preferred to frame the controversy as if the British had plundered slaves from American owners, Franklin here tacitly acknowledged the more searing truth: African Americans freed themselves. Otherwise, how to account for the claim that they were “deluded” or that slaves found their way behind British lines from counties into which the British had not entered?²⁵

Jay, Adams, and Franklin willingly pressed British representatives on the matter of slaves now behind British lines. But not until late November, during the final day of negotiations, did this grievance translate into language proposed for inclusion in the actual Preliminary and Conditional Articles of Peace. In this final session, the newly arrived South Carolinian Henry Laurens played a key role, acting in concert with and enjoying the full support of his fellow delegates. The seventh article of the preliminary treaty established the terms meant to govern the process of British evacuation. As previously drafted, the article called for the release of prisoners by both sides and the withdrawal “with all convenient speed” of British land and sea forces. The British assented to Laurens’s request for the insertion of language explicitly barring the “carrying away any Negroes, or other Property of American Inhabitants”—language consistent with the tenor of the recent back and forth between US and British representatives.²⁶

In British negotiator Richard Oswald, the Americans in general and Laurens in particular had a sympathetic partner on the issue of slavery. Oswald and Laurens had enjoyed a business connection for several years before the war, and the two men sought to continue that relationship in the wake of the peace treaty. During Laurens’s term as a prisoner in the Tower of London, Oswald had visited the South Carolinian several times. Oswald himself owned many people on a plantation in the British colony of East Florida.²⁷ The mutual desire to reconstruct British mercantile relations between Laurens and his South Carolina peers with Oswald required the rebuilding of trust and good faith. A provision barring the British as they evacuated from taking African American demonstrated that good faith.

This insertion, however, was not a mere afterthought reflecting a special concern of the South Carolina plantation master or the self-interested courtesy of one slaveholder for another.²⁸ Jay and his colleagues were united in support of it. The four Americans entered the final day of talks hoping to use the removal of slaves by the British as a bargaining chip to resolve some final sticking points in their favor. They came to the session asking for even sterner and explicit language demanding “Compensation … for the Tobacco, Rice, Indigo and Negroes &c. seized and carried off” by the British in “the States of Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia.”

Franklin took the lead in assimilating southern grievances into the broader case that he and his colleagues wished to make against holding Americans liable for debts to British merchants. The Pennsylvanian’s notes explained the logic and “Facts” behind the Americans’ desire for a treaty article on compensation to despoiled Americans. The premise of selling British imports on credit to Americans was that American planters would be able to pay back their debts “by the Labour of their Negroes and the Produce of that Labour.” But the seizure of American property, including “even the Negroes,” undermined the ability of American planters to pay their debts. Franklin deployed an analogy that his alter ego, Poor Richard of almanac fame, would have approved: “If a Draper who had sold a Piece of Linnen to a Neighbor on Credit, should follow him, take a Linnen from him by Force, and then send a Bailiff to arrest him for the Debt,” that clearly would be considered unjust. That was the position Americans, particularly southern planters, found themselves in, the British wishing them “to pay for what they had been robb’d of.”

Although the Americans did not get the explicit language about slaves that they wanted inserted into Article 5, the commissioners had made their point. On this final day of negotiation, the British acceded to American demands on the Newfoundland fisheries and allowed restrictions to be placed on the amount of time loyalists would have to seek restitution for their lost property. In return, the Americans backed off of their opposition to English creditors by making Article 4 a commitment in principle to allowing creditors on all sides to collect debts.²⁹ The Americans had used British promises of freedom to Black slaves as leverage against the British, couching the defense of American slave property as a matter of simple fairness and homespun logic; they did so as part of a strategy to protect that property during the ensuing period of British withdrawal from American territory and to strengthen their hand on other key issues.

The commissioners, including John Jay, expressed satisfaction with what they had accomplished together. The same day that the negotiation of the preliminary articles concluded, Adams recorded his pleasure with how matters played out then and overall. He credited the late-arriving Laurens with the Article 7 “Stipulation, that the British Troops should carry off no Negroes or other American Property,” a proposition to which the commissioners “all agreed” but “which would most probably in the Multiplicity & hurry of Affairs have escaped Us.” Adams highly praised Jay’s work during the lengthy process, believing that New Yorkers deserved credit as “Le Washington de la Negotiation” (see figure 2). Franklin was also grateful for his colleagues. He commented to Livingston that the commissioners’ threat “to produce an Account of the Mischiefs done” by the loyalists to American property had forced the British team to back down on claims they wished to make on behalf of these same loyalists and that the treaty forbade the British from taking “Plunder” with them as they evacuated the United States.³⁰

In a letter written to Livingston not long afterward and marked “Private,” Jay expressed his own contentment with how the negotiations had played out. The New Yorker remarked to his dear friend Livingston that the British had “yield[ed] in more than perhaps they wished” and generally acted in good faith. To ensure that the peace held, Jay cautioned against “improper Exultation” by Americans or the making of further “extravagant Demands.” Hinting at some internal disagreement between Jay and his fellow commissioners about how subsequent negotiations of a final treaty might proceed, he noted, “Some of my Colleagues flatter themselves with the Probability of obtaining Compensation for Damages,” which, though he did not say so explicitly, might include the loss of slaves. Jay claimed not to mind attempting to gain compensation from the British, “but I confess I doubt its Success, for Britain has no money to spare, and will think the Confiscation [of loyalist property] should settle that account, for they do not expect that Retribution will be made to all [loyalists].” But overall, Jay proclaimed, “Our affairs have a very promising Aspect, and a little Prudence will secure us all that we can reasonably wish [or] expect.” Reading between the lines, Jay approved of the principle that the British should not evacuate former slaves and take other American property, though he did not regard such issues as an obstacle to concluding a permanent peace.³¹

In the interval between the provisional and the final treaty, Jay and his fellow diplomats would receive pressure from home to take a more aggressive stance on the dispensation of American slaves sheltered by the British. Much to the chagrin of George Washington and other American slaveholders, Manhattan, which the British occupied while awaiting a final treaty, became a haven of last resort for African Americans from up and down the East Coast who had availed themselves of the British offer of freedom. British commander Guy Carleton took the position that the departing Blacks were already free when he arrived in New York, based on promises that British officials had made to them; he also maintained that it could not possibly have been the intent of the British peace commissioners that he return to slavery men and women who might face severe reprisals from their masters. Carleton fulfilled his promise to record their names in order to prepare the way for future monetary compensation. But Carleton also credited the testimony of the refugees themselves as to their free or slave status and treated as free all who could claim they had been behind British lines for a year or more.³²

South Carolinian Laurens having already departed Paris, Franklin, Adams, and Jay dutifully presented American grievances. Jay and his brother Frederick had a small stake in the evacuation question, even if John did not say so in any of his French correspondence. Among the slaves ultimately listed in the British evacuation records, the so-called Book of Negroes, would be a former slave of Frederick’s, departing Manhattan on October 31, 1783, and a man named Massey (perhaps a renamed or misrecorded Claas), who embarked with the British on November 19. Months before these departures occurred, Jay and his colleagues sought “speedy and effectual Measures be taken to render that Justice to the Parties interested which the true Intent and Meaning of the Article in question plainly dictates.” During negotiations over the definitive final treaty, the Americans also proposed adding a sentence to Article 7 stating that “all Destruction of Property, or carrying away of Negroes or other Property belonging to the American Inhabitants, contrary to the above Stipulation, shall be duly estimated and compensated to the owners.” This attempt to tack on language to that document that would financially account for the British evacuation of Blacks and other American property failed.³³

British officials viewed Carleton’s logic that the British must honor their promise of freedom to runaway slaves as “solid & founded in Equity.” (Jay may have recalled this last word from his thoughts on emancipation he shared with Egbert Benson in 1780.) Ultimately, upward of three thousand African Americans embarked from Manhattan to Nova Scotia. They were part of a wave of more than thirteen thousand Blacks, some still held as slaves by loyalists, who embarked from Savannah, Charleston, and New York in 1783.³⁴

The treaty negotiations integrated slavery’s conflicts and contradictions into the very achievement of independence. All four American commissioners, not just Jay, held antislavery views. Adams, who had the least personal experience with slavery, was receptive to Enlightenment critiques and in the Continental Congress found himself unsympathetic when southern colleagues sought accommodations for the institution. Franklin had been a slaveowner and profited as printer from the sale of advertisements for runaway slaves but, in the 1770s, haltingly incorporated antislavery views into his political repertoire. In 1772, Franklin submitted an essay in the London Chronicle that closely paraphrased statistics provided to him by Quaker antislavery pioneer and fellow Pennsylvanian Anthony Benezet. Although Franklin’s article focused on the evils of the slave trade, it also expressed a desire for gradual emancipation. Even Henry Laurens, a wealthy South Carolina planter who in a previous career as a slave trader had participated in selling more than ten thousand human beings, had and would continue to express antislavery ideas. He sometimes wrote about the well-being of his slaves back home in America in solicitous tones that resembled Jay’s patrician attitudes. When Laurens arrived in Paris, his grief over the death of son John, with whom he had cooperated on a scheme to free and arm Black soldiers, was still fresh. Less than three months after the preliminary peace treaty, Laurens wrote letters to a fellow South Carolinian concerning the need to plan for a future abolition.³⁵

Thus, emancipation was not an unimaginable or infinitely distant concept for any of the commissioners. Yet Jay and his colleagues set aside antislavery inclinations and aspirations in their talks with the British to pursue specific American material interests. Property rights in man mattered to the new nation, as did national sovereignty. The abolition of slavery, were it to take place, should not be the product of revolutionary chaos taken advantage of by the enslaved and their British enablers. The British did not have a right, the commissioners believed, to interfere in the domestic arrangements of the United States, even though it had limited leverage to prevent the British from doing so in actual practice. In the meantime, the incorporation of slaveholder grievances in the Anglo-American treaty expressed an important national and diplomatic principle. That Jay himself would inherent that principle as an unwelcome, even debilitating, burden in the coming years is not something he anticipated in 1783.³⁶

Abbe’s Ghost

The final months of 1783 should have been a joyous time for the Jay household. On September 3, Jay and his fellow US peace commissioners signed the official treaty with Britain. Three weeks before, Sally Jay gave birth to another daughter, Ann, who joined the one-and-a-half-year-old Maria as part of their growing family in Europe.³⁷ Apparently taking the conventional male view of the time that he had little to offer in the way of service to a new mother and young children, John departed for England to attend to family business and to seek some rest and relaxation.

Then Abbe, who had served Sally Jay in Europe without noted incident, shattered the household’s equilibrium by running away. Suddenly, Sally, John, Peter Jay Munro, and even Benjamin Franklin and his grandson William Temple Franklin were forced to consider how Abbe, a Black female slave, viewed her situation and what frustrations and anxieties motivated her. As Abbe revealed her resentment and even desperation, whites used to exercising their command over her and people like her demonstrated how poorly they understood Abbe, a person from whom they expected self-abnegating service, not self-assertion. Abbe’s tale, then, is one of resistance and the life-threatening limits of paternalistic benevolence, two core issues of American slavery played out in the unlikely setting of early 1780s France.³⁸

A difficult relationship with a French nurse named Louisson hired to take care of Sally and John’s two young daughters was the immediate precipitant of Abbe’s departure.³⁹ Louisson took offense at Abbe’s alleged incivility toward her, a problem that the Frenchwoman took up with Sally herself. Louisson, in Sally’s telling of the story, wished that Abbe could be “dismiss[ed]” but promised to tolerate Abbe’s rudeness and not quit her post because even her mistress abided Abbe’s “impertinent” behavior. Sally attributed Abbe’s departure to “her extreme jealousy of Louisson” and “the inticements of an English washer-woman who promised to pay her if she would assist her in washing.”

Lacking Abbe’s own written account of her motives, we are left to guess how much credit to give to Sally’s explanation. A difficult, even jealous, relationship with a rival French servant seems plausible, but this tension may have been exacerbated by the fact that Abbe observed two key differences between her and the other female servants: those servants received monetary compensation for their work and could choose to leave or turn down jobs if they desired. Abbe, in contrast, was bound to her mistress. In the face of the stress she felt, Abbe may have found the inducement of wages from the English washerwoman an appealing chance to show her disfavor and to try out another life role, humble to be sure, yet different from being someone’s slave. Abbe took her clothes and left the household.⁴⁰

Under French law, Abbe may have been entitled to her freedom all along. Precedents dating to the sixteenth century established France as free soil, and French West Indian slaves brought to Europe by their masters had successfully petitioned for their freedom in the 1780s. French authorities, however, were far more interested in eliminating the presence of Blacks in France than in freeing slaves. Thus, the 1770s brought new regulations attempting to quarantine colonial slaves in dépôts on arriving in France with their Caribbean masters. Importantly, the 1777 law explicitly banned “foreigners” from entering France with Blacks and imposed a fine for all violations. In addition, the law, which avoided the use of the word slave in order not to tread directly on free-soil principles, indicated that the servants covered by the law would retain the same status under which they arrived, in essence trying to forestall freedom suits. This “legal morass” still left enough ambiguity to allow some slaves to obtain their freedom by court petition.

One way or another, the Jays’ ownership of Abbe lacked legal legitimacy. But no one seemed concerned with the legal details in Abbe’s case. She had violated American law and custom; Blacks were to some extent illegal aliens under the law, and powerful whites wished to make sure that she understood that such transgressions would not be tolerated.⁴¹

Rather than wait for John Jay’s direction from England, indeed wanting not to trouble John with a problem that could be solved locally, Benjamin Franklin intervened quickly to restore order. At Sally’s prompting, the eminent American diplomat contacted a police lieutenant, who went to the English washerwoman’s residence, seized Abbe, and placed her in jail. Franklin had been in France long enough to know that technically Abbe potentially had a stronger legal position than her masters, but he was a prominent person who knew how to work the system far better than she.⁴² Abbe’s pique was no match for white people’s power, influence, and authority.

Abbe’s white masters struggled to determine an appropriate outcome beyond the intimidation of imprisonment, believing that identifying the cause of her grievances should shape in some way a resolution to the predicament. Abbe’s resentments likely went deeper than an impulsive desire to vex her masters. She surely felt humiliated by her status as a slave among servants and had had enough of life far away from her American home.

These motivations registered, albeit dimly, with the Jays. The attempt by John’s teenage nephew Peter Jay Munro to act as an emissary shed some light on Abbe’s state of mind, without suggesting a satisfactory way forward. His first visit to prison found Abbe defiant. The sixteen-year-old proposed that he play the role of peacemaker between his aunt and the slave, offering to ask Sally to let Abbe rejoin the household. To this Abbe responded “that instead of desiring that, she would run-a-way again … & that she wd. remain where she was ‘till” John returned from England “or ‘till she might be sent to America instead of returning home to be laughed at & work too.” This answer, as filtered through Peter and Sally, indicated that Abbe understood that John Jay alone possessed the authority to address her situation. Moreover, her life in France had exposed her to humiliation; a white servant without such a deep connection to the family as she had occupied a higher status and commanded more respect than she did. She also told Peter Jay Munro that she “hop’d” Sally “was then Content” allowing herself to be “intirely govern’d by Louisson.” Subsequent attempts by Peter to broker a solution proved even more fruitless as they “increased her Ideas of her own importance,” and she became increasingly “sullen.”⁴³ Abbe was tapping deeply into a reservoir of resentments.

John and Sally Jay did not exhibit an inclination to peel back the layers of meaning behind Abbe’s actions; they assumed that a measured approach to discipline would return her to the family and to her senses. From London, where John learned of Abbe’s revolt, he presumed that it “was not resolved upon in a sober moment” but was perhaps a product of drunken misjudgment. Otherwise, John wrote to Franklin’s grandson, “I cannot conceive of a motive.” But, at least subconsciously, he did in fact conceive of a motive—Abbe’s desire to be free. John noted, “I had promised to manumit her on our Return to America, provided she behaved properly in the mean Time.” He had, in other words, already entered into a sort of negotiation with her, and what struck him as odd was the seemingly impulsive way in which she misplayed her far weaker hand. Jay presumed she would and should continue to endure her degradation calmly and that his authority would remain unquestioned.⁴⁴

At some level, Abbe understood John more clearly than he understood her. After all, she insisted to Peter Jay Munro that she wished to deal directly with John. Perhaps she sensed from his promise of freedom in America that he was on her side and was, in any case, the only one with the full authority to make her life better. In this she was not entirely wrong. For in John’s letter to William Temple Franklin, he stated, “Amidst her Faults, she has several good Qualities, & I wish to see her happy and contented on [her] own account as well as our’s.” John hoped to mend the rift, and even after Abbe ran away, he did not take the offer of eventual manumission off the table. Indeed, Jay’s initial response was not especially vindictive, although it was certainly condescending in tone and blame-shifting in its implications. His feeling was that “she should be punished, tho’ not vigorously.” His parting verdict on Abbe’s actions was “too much Indulgence & improper Company have injured her—it is a Pity.” Sally reached a similarly self-serving conclusion after Peter Jay Munro reported Abbe’s sarcastic refusal of amnesty, writing that being underworked had “been of great dis-service to her.” Abbe’s servitude and the fact that she had been dragged overseas did not figure into Sally’s thinking.⁴⁵

John and Sally agreed that leniency rather than hard work had triggered the slave’s recalcitrance, but their calculation of how much pressure should be applied to Abbe differed. John supported Benjamin Franklin’s recommendation that they simply ignore her imprisonment “for 15 or 20 days.” John assumed that if she was “separated from Wine and improper Company” but given “all the Necessaries of Life,” she would in “Sobriety Solitude and want of Employment” become “more obedient to Reason.” Sally had her doubts from the start, writing John, “I’m so afraid of her suffering from the Cold,” and she dispatched their nephew to periodically check on Abbe’s well-being.⁴⁶ As it turned out, Sally’s fears were well placed. Her male counterparts’ counsel that they outwait Abbe’s alleged irrationality proved to be tragic.

Abbe fell ill, prompting Sally Jay to have her brought home, thereby ending a confinement of dubious legality. Sally urgently contacted William Temple Franklin for his assistance in getting her out of jail. Even while writing in the formal third person, Sally’s fear for Abbe’s life was palpable. She wrote that her servant “is very ill & extremely desirous to return & Mrs. Jay fears a delay may be dangerous.” Wanting to put a braver face on matters to her husband, she drafted a letter to John the same day reporting that Abbe had “beg’d” to return and “as I fear’d she would not receive benefit from the society she had [in prison], I granted her request, & am glad to find her penitent & desirous to efface by her future Conduct the reproach her late misstep has merited.” Abbe probably was scared and lonely, feelings that triggered an expression of regret. She also was very sick, with a cold so severe that Sally insisted that she stay in bed, with the “hope she’ll recover in a week or two.”⁴⁷ Instead of recovering, Abbe died.

Abbe’s protest cost her life. In some sense, then, John’s puzzlement over why she would risk the freedom he meant to give her by running off was well placed. John wished her to be, in his phrase, “obedient to Reason” and therefore to wait patiently in subservience for the gift of liberty he intended to bestow. Sally wished her to remain loyal, attached to the family as Sally was attached to her, in a sort of familiar, mutual dependence. Master and mistress alike, however, underestimated the fullness of her desire for respect, her desire not to be mocked, and her need to have an outlet for emotions and rational goals that they expected her to suppress.

On hearing the news of Abbe’s death, John focused far more on comforting his wife for her emotional trauma than on grieving the enslaved women’s fatal trauma. To be sure, he “lament[ed] Abbys death” and remarked that “it would have given me great Pleasure to have restored her in Health to our own Country.” But his paramount concern was for Sally. She had dealt not only with Abbe’s illness but also with the discomfort of their young daughters, recently inoculated against smallpox. He wished her to take “Consolation” in having done the right thing by bringing Abbe home and tending to her illness. Knowing “the Variety as well as Degree of Emotions which you have lately experienced … makes me extremely anxious to be with you,” he wrote. In the meantime, he urged her to remain calm and to reflect “that People passing thro’ this World are not to expect to have all the Way strewed with Roses.” “Let us,” he advised, “be grateful for Blessings & resigned to adverse Incidents.” No guilt, no remorse should cloud Sally’s thoughts about Abbe’s life. The dirt barely shoveled over a foreign grave, Sally should regard Abbe’s death as an “adverse Incident” put into a larger frame.⁴⁸

For those serving the Jay household, including the enslaved Benoit, Abbe’s death was something more daunting. Her passing was a genuinely frightening, deeply disorienting event. When Peter Jay Munro reported their response to John, the young man’s sneering and callousness exemplified how different the ideas of justice and tragedy were for servants and masters living under the same roof. Peter wrote to his uncle that Abbe had “never kept the Servants in such awe as since her Death.” According to him, “her Friend Ben does not stir without a Candle,” calling out in French “C’est elle!” when hearing “the least noise.” A female servant (possibly Louisson) “was terribly frightened at seeing herself in the Glass”—to which Peter sniggered, “I think with reason.” When snow fell off the roof, these staff had to be convinced that a “Spirit” was not the cause. Peter went on that “nightly some thing happens which frightens them, and sets us a laughing.”⁴⁹

The fear that Abbe’s ghost haunted the household suggests a belief that Abbe’s death was unnatural. Her soul was literally restless, her time on earth cut short by events gone morally awry or at least before she had time to get her spiritual affairs in order. Benoit may have been trying subconsciously to communicate that someone in the household, either Sally or the French servants, had wronged Abbe. Louisson, who had a tempestuous relationship with Abbe, may have expressed guilt through her reaction—fearing the sight of her own image and sharing in Benoit’s broader fear of Abbe’s restless spirit. Another way of reading this reaction is that they saw in Abbe’s sad fate a reminder of their own vulnerability to a potentially lethal combination of their unchecked emotions, their master’s discipline, and plain bad luck. The servants’ reactions, which they did not attempt to keep secret from their masters, should not be dismissed as superstition without meaning. As Peter Jay Munro put it, Abbe exercised more power as a dead person than as a living one, a fact that a more mature person might have found sad rather than humorous.⁵⁰

Homeward Bound

John Jay did not believe in ghosts, nor was he one to favor gratuitous jokes, particularly regarding a subject as serious as death. The lawyer-turned-diplomat also did not like loose ends or unfinished business, and he thought himself a pious person committed to justice. Preparing to leave Europe in 1784, Jay sought to wrap up his personal and financial affairs. Among Jay’s unfinished business was the future status of Benoit. Three months after Abbe’s death, John put in writing the terms that would define Benoit’s future. To what degree John and Benoit discussed the terms, whether Benoit initiated these discussions, or whether either of them understood the relevance of French law, Jay did not say. Master and slave would navigate their future through a legal bond—the slave’s good behavior secured by a written promise of freedom in three years. Unlike his expressions of responsibility for his family’s aged and infirm slaves and former slaves back in New York, Jay did not claim to be acting toward Benoit out of benevolence for the weak. He was obligated, he wrote, to strike a deal with Benoit because justice demanded that he restore the slave to his naturally free state once he had worked off his purchase price.⁵¹

Having lost control of Abbe, Jay constructed an orderly alternative—or so it seemed. Yet Benoit slipped out of the Jay archive silently, apparently not returning to the Americas with the Jays. No one in the Jay entourage recorded a falling out or running away or a sale. His master, by contrast, came back to the United States with a sense of how slavery might be unwound over time—without the bloodshed or the compulsion of war—but as a matter of morally sanctioned, legally binding contracts, rather than as a product of revolutionary political and social disorder.⁵²

Matthew Ridley, an English-born Maryland merchant who socialized with the Jays in Paris, offered an astute observation about slavery and emancipation during this era of wartime upheaval. “Time,” Ridley wrote to Sally’s sister Kitty Livingston, “might reconcile you to the flight of the Slaves—It is however painful reflection to a generous mind & ought never to have been introduced.” He then observed that eliminating slavery presented a particularly thorny problem because “of all Reformations those are the most difficult to ripen when the Roots grow as it were in the pockets of Man.”⁵³