Domestic Order and Disorder

John Jay spent his last two decades surrounded by family and people devoted to his comfort. The eight hundred acres at Bedford contained orchards, wheat fields, and Merino sheep, and the household included three generations of Jays (see figure 5). William had married Augusta McVickar, the daughter of a New York City merchant, three years after scuttling his apprenticeship as an attorney and returning home. The couple had five children, four girls and a boy, between 1813 and 1823. John expanded the three-story home to make room for the growing family. William invested himself in the sprawling farm’s operations and also began to involve himself in reform causes at the local and the national level. Their older sister Nancy, unmarried, took on managerial responsibilities. Widowed eldest sister Maria Jay Banyer lived in Albany, maintaining close ties. Younger sister Sally lived with Maria, though she also spent time in Bedford and New York City. Peter Augustus Jay worked as an attorney in New York City, while John’s older brother Blind Peter remained ensconced on the Rye estate their father had established in the 1740s; the 1810 census recorded six enslaved people in his household.³

The number of enslaved people in the Bedford household dwindled to two. Yet, mastery remained a puzzle that John Jay could only partially solve. Slavery’s long legal twilight during the gradual emancipation era complicated conflicts between enslavers and enslaved and across generations.

In the fall of 1809, John banished the teenage Zilpah from his household after she became pregnant, selling her to his sister-in-law Judith Livingston Watkins for a projected period of several years. Judith had relocated from the western part of the state and now resided in New York City with her adult son. Clarinda, Zilpah’s mother who was born as a slave to John’s father Peter, remained behind in Bedford; whether she took some comfort from knowing Zilpah’s new mistress, the ache of parental helplessness was strong.⁴

John likely experienced a very different mix of emotions. He may have been angry at Zilpah’s perceived moral lapse. But given his desire a decade before to send away Dinah’s child, it is also fair to say that Jay did not welcome his slaves’ attention being diverted from waiting on the Jay family. John’s reverential children may not have openly objected to their father’s decision; it is noteworthy that the household sought a replacement for Zilpah, with Nancy Jay wanting “to get a little Girl,” denoting the category into which she placed the teenage Zilpah in her mind and perhaps wanting to socialize a new generation of servants. As with the biblical Zilpah of Genesis, masters passed around servants to suit their own needs. For Clarinda, of course, no substitution could fill the void created by her own child’s forced departure.⁵

Clarinda looked for a way to undo what John Jay had done. Zilpah’s child died—a tragedy that Clarinda tried unsuccessfully to turn into an opportunity. As John recounted, after the news reached Bedford, “Clarinda became importunate for her return to us. the answr. she recd. was in the negative, and in decided terms.” Then in the spring of 1811, with the departure from the Bedford household of a servant named Rosanna, Clarinda tried again. In a letter to Peter Augustus, written in a tone at once emphatic and willfully reserved, John described Clarinda’s effort to engineer the return of her daughter: “On the going away of Roasanna, she renewed her solicitations that we should take Zilpha [sic] to supply her place. she was alone—Zilpha was the only child she had left. she had been deprived of the others & &.”⁶

Clarinda took considerable psychological, emotional, and even material risks in confronting her master. She was a slave and, as far as she knew in 1811, would always be a slave. She had been enmeshed with the Jay family since birth; her relationships with the family were among the most enduring she had ever known. She had been named Zilpah after an older Jay family slave, who if not Clarinda’s actual mother, had played a mothering role. Banishment or even punishment would have deeply disrupted her modest circumstances. Consciously or subconsciously, Clarinda may have suspected that the Jays would not punish or dispatch her for speaking so bluntly. But no enslaved person could know that for sure.

Through a combination of calculation and defiance, she stated her case. It was a case that frankly demanded that her masters face up to the sufferings and traumas of slavery. She had her own family, an independent set of emotional attachments that mattered deeply to her. She was a mother with but one remaining child. Cruel fate, which her master recorded with the emotional distancing technique of “& &”, had denied her the opportunity to enjoy life with her other children.

Although John refused to dwell on the details of everything that was wrong about Clarinda’s life, he acknowledged the legitimacy of her claim. He informed his son Peter of his response to Clarinda’s petition: “These Considerations have weight, and your sister & myself concur in opinion that she should be gratified, provided (as they promise) Zilpa [sic] should behave in a satisfactory manner, of which however there are doubts. we have concluded to make the Experiment, and therefore must give you the Trouble of managing the Business.” Thus, like the British Parliament in 1766 repealing the Stamp Act but asserting its constitutional dominion through the Declaratory Act, John granted Clarinda’s wish while asserting his own continued sovereignty.

John explained to his son exactly what procedures had to be followed to bring Zilpah back to Bedford. He no longer owned Zilpah, so John sought instead “to hire her by the month as long as she shall behave tolerable well.” It was the Watkins family, her legal masters, not Zilpah who received her meager wage of $3 per month. Jay also offered to cover the cost of her clothing. John also made it clear that it was he, not Clarinda and Zilpah, who exercised choice in this matter. As John wrote his son, “We are told of a black woman here who would probably answer our purpose, & is willing to come, but as Clarinda behaved well, and is distressed at the Idea of living separate from her Daughter, we shall postpone engaging any person until we hear from you.” His handling of Zilpah’s case, in John’s mind, expressed magnanimity, not any legal obligation or personal need; it was not like the cases his son or his nephew dealt with on behalf of the NYMS in which Black men and women gained their actual freedom. Within the boundaries of New York’s emancipation regime, John Jay believed that slaves remained slaves, and masters remained masters.⁷

A simmering crisis on his older brother Peter’s Rye estate, however, forced the patriarchal gradualist John Jay to realize that the rules of slavery were changing faster than the law required. Seventy-seven-year-old Blind Peter was losing control. In April 1811, several days before John announced that he would accede to Clarinda’s wish to bring Zilpah back to Bedford, Peter Augustus reported that the enslaved on the Rye estate had “become more & more ungovernable.” Four months later, Peter Augustus analyzed the situation in Rye with remarkable candor to his sister Maria: “Uncle cannot perceive that it is necessary to treat Slaves at the present day in a Manner different from that they were accustomed to fifty Years ago.”⁸

Peter Augustus did not specify what sort of treatment Uncle Peter fruitlessly attempted, but a vast gulf separated the world into which the elder Peter was born and raised and that of his final years. When Uncle Peter was growing up, slaves arrived from Africa and the West Indies in Manhattan’s harbor; now the sale of slaves into and out of the state was restricted, and the gradual emancipation process had become a fixture of the legal landscape. When Uncle Peter was seven, authorities had burned slaves at the stake for an alleged plot to seize New York City. Now his nephew Peter Augustus was a legal counselor for the Manumission Society that prosecuted masters for cruelty to their slaves and lobbied for revisions to the law to further protect slaves from abusive masters.⁹

Those enslaved in Rye may have consciously thought about such changes, or they may have just taken advantage of the weakening grip of a blind man well into his eighth decade. Managing the master–slave relationship in 1811 required a certain deftness and flexibility that took into account, if not for moral reasons than for practical ones, the narrowing parameters of slave ownership and the personalities of the individual slaves. Caesar and Peet had considerable leverage.

When John Jay visited his brother, he conveyed the constraints of the particular situation in practical terms as they discussed men whom John knew well from their earlier service to him. No sooner had John’s carriage pulled up to the house than his brother inquired about “parting with Peet.” John acknowledged the benefit of disposing of troublesome servants but could not advise such a course. John cautioned against dispatching Peet, a man who had so many useful skills. Peet should either “be kept satisfied” or allowed to select another master. John also advised his brother to encourage Caesar toward continued cooperativeness by offering him wages. This was a modern strategy of financial incentives of which Peter was dubious, but John was doubtful that “a new set” of servants could be found to satisfy his brother.

The year before, in 1810, Caesar had killed a man: he fatally struck a vagrant traveler who became obstreperous on being denied lodging at the Rye estate. Despite its grim outcome, this act of violence was also one of loyalty. That is how Peter Augustus seemed to view the incident. In earlier times, it may also have been seen as dangerously erratic—a cause for sale to a far-away location. But now, John coaxed his brother into paying Caesar as a means of keeping him happy. Or perhaps John simply understood that in an era where law and custom conspired to shrink the pool of slaves in New York, the mercurial Caesar was, for his brother, better than no slave at all. John summed up his visit by noting, “The whole of the Business is perplexing, and I fear will become more so.”¹⁰

The situation of Caesar and Peet changed less than two years later when their master Peter Jay died. In accordance with his will, written many years before, his widow Mary Duyckinck Jay inherited his slaves and therefore the delicate negotiation for their loyalty. Peet seized on the death of his master to request his freedom from the widowed Mary. As Peter Augustus reported to John, “He behaves very well but is extremely anxious to have his Liberty.” Mary was willing to negotiate. Not wanting to forfeit his service and under no legal compulsion to fulfill Peet’s request, the widow was inclined “to manumit him & to pay him a reasonable sum” annually, “provided he will remain with her during her life.” Before acting, however, she consulted John Jay, who, with his brother’s passing, owned their father’s Rye property.¹¹

On December 27, 1813, Mary Duyckinck Jay granted Peet, whose name was recorded by local authorities as Peter Johnson, his freedom. Peter Johnson’s demand was short of a revolutionary seizure of freedom, and Mary’s action was well short of a principled renunciation of slavery itself. The end result, nonetheless, was freedom willingly granted to a person who willfully asserted his desire for liberty. To assert his new identity, Peet became Peter, casting aside the diminutive and misspelled version of his former master’s name. Johnson is more ambiguous—an ordinary English surname that, intentionally or not, echoed the first name of the extended Jay family’s patriarch.¹²

Yet, even as times changed, the Jays still practiced their customary paternalism. In 1813, Nancy brought Clarinda with her to visit family and friends in Rye because Clarinda’s sister Mary “had passed the winter there.” Without further comment, John noted to his youngest daughter Sally that Mary and Clarinda “had not seen each other for a great many years.”¹³ Having benefited from a world in which the Jays were free to divide family members, at least in this one brief instance the Jays could bring them together too.

In the Bedford household, John Jay, with the help of his sons, forged long-term service arrangements as alternatives to slavery. Most of the servants who passed through the farm during this era were free and sometimes white. Coaxing lower-class Manhattanites up to the country for service roles could be challenging. In 1813, John bought, presumably on an indenture contract, an African American boy named Chester, whose father, Chester Tilliston, worked as a free man on the Bedford property. That same year, William located in New York City a twenty-year-old immigrant named Joseph Cusno from Sicily who came with strong references. The new servant was to receive $10 a month or $100 year, but what may have made him particularly appealing to William was his willingness “to do whatever you please.” Curiously, William identified Cusno as “a Mulatto Man,” perhaps trying to fit the servant’s unusual backstory into a more customary frame or perhaps just describing the man’s dark features. Be that as it may, Cusno entered into a relationship unlike any of the African Americans in the household. Serving as the family waiter—viewed as a more skilled role than that performed by female house servants—Cusno carved out his own domestic space, receiving a loan from John to purchase a nearby stone house.¹⁴

The indenture of the “free black Boy” Jack Pine, through an agreement with his father Caesar Pine, also bespoke a labor market and racial order in flux, with John’s contribution to Jack’s well-being the subject of explicit negotiation. The six-year arrangement reached between John Jay and Caesar Pine included John’s pledge to provide Jack with schooling and $25 in discharge wages. The acquisition of Jack Pine was not an extension of slaveholding by other means: Jay acted in loco parentis. As indicated by a letter he wrote to Caesar Pine more than three-and-a-half years into Jack’s indenture, the boy’s actual father retained influence over Jack’s situation. Jay reported to Caesar Pine that Jack “has in general behaved as well as could be reasonably expected from a Boy of his age.” Jay also acceded to the father’s request that the boy remain “until he shall be of age.” To implement that plan with legal precision, John asked that Caesar inform him “exactly how old” Jack was. He also assured Pine that Jack’s educational and religious development would continue to be part of the deal and praised Caesar for talking to his son about some “misconduct at New York.”¹⁵

Underlying Jay’s responsible and respectful language to Mr. Pine lay the stark inequalities of life during the gradual emancipation era. In Jay’s Westchester County, as elsewhere in New York State, Black family members frequently lived apart from one another. An increasing number of white households included free Black servants. Some, like Zilpah, stayed in households after manumission. Others, like Jack Pine, served indentures. One statistic that changed surprisingly little was the percentage of free Blacks who lived in free Black-headed households. For the southern six counties of New York State, this percentage only increased from 57.9 percent to 59.9 percent from 1800 to 1820. In Westchester County, the rate of free Blacks living in Black-headed households remained below 50 percent for this same period. Often, husbands and wives, parents and children, lived separately to meet white labor demands and because of the dearth of black opportunity and resources. And although it is true that Jay did bring Zilpah and Clarinda back together, as well as Chester Tilliston and his son (but not their wife and mother), the availability of Black children for indenture reflected a skewed labor market during an era where apprenticeship and indentured servitude had gone into decline in the broader economy. Moreover, the gradual emancipation legal regime, by extending the obligations of free offspring to serve their mother’s masters into adulthood, normalized the notion of indentured Black labor and family separation.¹⁶

Freedom’s opportunities and limitations continued to register in Jack Pine’s life. In January 1824, three years after the end of his initial indenture, Jack signed on to work for John Jay at a rate of $80 a year, with Jack responsible for his own expenses. Whether he agreed to work again for the Jays because he lacked better options or because he found it to be a relatively good situation, Jack Pine soon changed his mind. Five months later, Jack left John’s employ, moving elsewhere in Westchester County to be with his mother.¹⁷ Jack Pine, born free in the nineteenth century, lived in a world of greater choice than that of Clarinda, Caesar, Peter Johnson, or Zilpah. Nonetheless, structures of inequality shaped the lives of all Black New Yorkers.

Setting Limits

Amid a changing labor market and shifting social norms, the NYMS mounted an effort in the 1810s to end slavery in the state, as well as to close egregious legal loopholes. The NYMS continued to pursue legal cases on behalf of individual African Americans illegally held in slavery and to formally register manumissions.¹⁸ By late 1811, the society also determined to lobby the state legislature for the “general abolition of slavery.” During this era, Peter Jay Munro and Peter Augustus Jay each did stints as president of the NYMS (Munro, 1810–11; Jay, 1816). The NYMS had a well-placed ally in Governor Daniel D. Tompkins. The Republican, who served as the state’s chief executive from 1807–17, was an NYMS member. In 1812, Tompkins announced as a priority an accelerated timetable for emancipation. Although over the next five years, the state assembly proved willing to lower the effective age of emancipation for the children of enslaved mothers, the state senate did not concur.¹⁹

During this period, the Jay cousins had a chance to participate directly in the legislative process; Peter Jay Munro represented Westchester County in 1815, and Peter Augustus Jay represented New York City in 1816. Neither man could have been heartened by what they saw in Albany. In 1811 and 1813, Republican legislators sought to make it more difficult for free African Americans, who generally supported Federalist candidates, to vote. Under the 1811 “Act to prevent frauds and perjuries at elections, and to prevent slaves from voting,” Black men had to prove their status as free people, obtaining the necessary paperwork for a fee and facing stiff penalties if the certification was successfully challenged on Election Day. In 1815, Munro found himself on the losing side of this ongoing battle. Republicans enacted a law targeting Black voting rights in New York City, where tightly contested elections could turn on African American votes. The new statute imposed a series of fees and registration requirements to affirm a prospective Black voter’s freedom, to verify sufficient property holdings to meet state franchise requirements, and to prove residency.²⁰

When Peter Augustus Jay came to Albany in January 1816, he had his work cut out for him. He sought to reverse the anti-Black voting rights tide and to reform the laws governing slavery. Jay proposed a reformulation of the law governing slaves and the children of slaves still obligated to serve under the gradual abolition formula. One provision of Jay’s bill extended to African American servants the same legal rights as apprentices to bring their masters to court when those masters were alleged to have violated state laws governing their conduct. This provision would not have been without consequence: the most powerful lever the NYMS had in providing legal aid to African Americans was holding masters to the letter of the law. This bill also included the requirement that masters provide those African Americans serving masters until adulthood receive a modicum of schooling and literacy training; failing to do so would lower the age at which the servant became fully free. The assembly initially rejected the provision, but by narrow majorities reinstated the clause and passed the bill. The state senate, however, buried the reform measure.²¹

Peter Augustus Jay’s attempt to repeal the blatantly discriminatory 1815 law applying special rules to African American voters in New York City did not get nearly as far. This time it was the assembly’s turn to delay action. Peter Augustus’s efforts did not go unnoticed in the press, however, but not always in a good way. One newspaper reprinted a Republican representative’s rumors of voter fraud, in which Black men were allegedly being brought from New Jersey to vote in New York City; the representative compared Black voters to “dogs” who did the bidding of their “former master[s]” at the polls.”²² Jay had not won the day, but he had clearly raised the ire of Republicans.

During the frustrating 1816 session, Peter Augustus garnered one small victory. The previous year, the Yonkers Overseers of the Poor had won dispensation from the state to recoup expenses for two aged former slaves, who had been freed by statute after being confiscated from loyalist Frederick Philipse during the American Revolution. The paltry sum of $3 per month provided by the state in such cases did not come close to the actual cost of their maintenance. After being put on a committee to entertain the renewed petition for additional state support, Jay successfully advanced a bill to cover the full costs of subsidizing the dwindling number of former slaves who had received their freedom by confiscation.²³ Peter Augustus thus applied to state law the support of elderly slaves that was a point of pride in the family’s personal practice.

Peter Augustus decided not to run for the legislature in 1817. Broader political conditions, however, finally produced victory for the idea that New York State should set a specific date for slavery’s formal end. His successor as president of the NYMS, Cadwallader D. Colden, released a statement for the new year affirming that the time was right for “the consummation of their great object, the final abolition of slavery in this state.” Colden expressed his trust that the legislature could work out the details but insisted that “an atonement for long injustice” posed no danger or economic risk to the state. The previous fall, Governor Tompkins had been elected vice president of the United States under James Monroe. As Tompkins prepared to leave Albany for his new post in February 1817, he appealed for action. The legislature responded favorably. The March 31 law declared all slaves free as of July 4, 1827. The law also shortened the mandatory period of service for children born to enslaved mothers to twenty-one years. Despite incorporating the symbolism of Independence Day, the law was hardly revolutionary: the youngest slaves completely liberated by the act, those born just before the 1799 gradual abolition law went into effect, would be twenty-eight at the time of their manumission. Others would remain in service for years to come, subject to the risk of abuse, illegal transport, and just plain exploitation. Even so, New York vaulted ahead of all states with gradual emancipation regimes by affixing a terminal date for legalized slavery.²⁴

Peter Augustus Jay operated under no illusion that the work of abolitionists was done with enactment of New York’s 1817 law. Almost all of the core functions of the NYMS remained vital—providing education to Black children, enforcing state laws, and combating the illegal transportation and sale of slaves out of state. But the spirit of the new law converged with the family’s relationships to its remaining slaves.

John Jay’s handling of Zilpah’s manumission hints that he was following the progress of the 1817 bill while reaffirming his personal gradual emancipation ethic of calibrating what loyal slaves and masters owed one another. In March 1817, John recalled that Zilpah was fast approaching her twenty-fifth birthday and that the original terms of her sale to his sister-in-law called for Zilpah’s freedom at age twenty-five. He asked Peter Augustus to inform Mrs. Watkins of the impending transition and to pay Zilpah’s wages to her owner one final time. “Zilpha [sic] will then be free, and we shall engage her in our Service at the same wages”—wages that were a fraction of those offered to his waiter Joseph Cusno a few years before. John accurately assumed that he would retain Zilpah’s service because she and Clarinda would not wish to part. But beyond that, his plan expressed continued faith in the moral efficacy not only of his own actions but also of the gradual emancipation regime itself. Twenty-five was the age at which female slaves covered by the 1799 gradual abolition law received their legal discharge from service to their mother’s masters. Zilpah, having been born prior to July 4, 1799, was not subject to that law. Jay acted of his own volition, not by legal compulsion, to privately apply the 1799 formula to her. The new law that the state legislature was hammering out would not have freed Zilpah for another ten years. That Jay had likely misestimated Zilpah’s actual age underscores his eagerness to follow the gradual emancipation formula in her case.²⁵

A change in legal status did not make master–servant relationships any less fraught. In March 1818, approximately a year after Zilpah became free, Nancy Jay reported to her older sister Maria Jay Banyer that “Zilpha [sic] wishes” their younger sister Sally “was home with all her heart.” Nancy understood that Zilpah was not merely expressing fondness or currying favor. For Nancy wrote with some puzzlement, “What is the reason I do not know, but” Zilpah “does much better under her [Sally’s] directions than mine.”²⁶ Even after many years, servants and masters remained strangers to one another. When Sally died only a few weeks later, it was not only her blood relatives who felt the sting.

How, when, and why Clarinda achieved her freedom is far more opaque. At some point between 1810 and 1820, Clarinda’s status changed from slave to free according to the federal census. She had labored far too long for John to claim that she had to pay back her purchase price. She was also considerably older than the gradual emancipation formula that Jay applied to Zilpah. Perhaps John made a silent or merely verbal adjustment to her status. Clarinda would for the rest of her life serve the family and be a reminder of the family’s slaveholding past.²⁷

During this period, some of Peter’s fellow gradual abolitionist wavered on Black rights to citizenship. In December 1818, Peter served as one of New York’s delegates to a special meeting of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race. Peter chaired a committee considering how the organization might lobby Congress to deploy diplomatic leverage inducing Spain and its American colonies to renounce the African slave trade. He also served on another committee charged with considering whether the group should embrace an emerging initiative supported by the some of the nation’s leading public figures to colonize free Blacks from the United States on the west coast of Africa.

Peter Augustus Jay refused to merge the campaign to eradicate slavery in the United States with the notion that the only future for free Black people lay on the other side of the ocean. The Jay-chaired committee on diplomacy with Spain recommended that Congress impress on the newly independent nations of the hemisphere that they could not fight for their own liberty while depriving through the slave trade “men … entitled to the same rights as they.” The committee on colonization, having sampled pro-colonizationist ideas, took note of the criticisms leveled at colonization by African Americans. It stated that “they have not been able to discern … any thing friendly to the abolition of slavery in the United States” from this new movement. It also calculated that the cost of transporting the current free Black population of the United States to Africa would be exorbitant. All evidence also suggested that conditions in Africa were utterly inhospitable for a colony. Domestically, colonization would thwart the “certain progress of those principles, which, if uninterrupted, will produce their universal emancipation.” Free Blacks in the slave states would become the targeted victims of colonization, marginalized and bullied to leave the country.

Peter Augustus and his colleagues convinced the convention to include a strong rebuke of colonizationism in the Circular Address distributed to member manumission societies. The remarks condescendingly expressed doubts about the preparation of African Americans for self-governance and took an agnostic stance on emigration to Haiti being “encouraged by the government there.” But overall the convention clung to optimistic assumptions that slavery and racism were in retreat.²⁸

Missouri Calling

The Missouri Crisis tested assumptions about the relationship between the American Revolution and the slow-but-steady antislavery approach. In February 1819 Congressman James Tallmadge Jr., from Duchess County, New York, tried to incorporate the gradual emancipation formula into national policy and in so doing touched off a national crisis. Rather than admit Missouri with a constitution that allowed for slavery, Tallmadge proposed banning slave importation and freeing slaves born in the new state at age twenty-five. This attempt to phase out slavery in the new states to be carved out of the Louisiana Purchase touched off a heated political stalemate. Starting in late summer, abolitionists and other opponents of slavery’s expansion from Maryland to Maine sought to demonstrate public support for restricting slavery in Missouri and to stiffen the resolve of their representatives in advance of the next meeting of Congress.²⁹

Peter Augustus Jay joined the anti-Missouri fray in New York City. On November 16, 1819, he addressed the controversy at a packed meeting chaired by his father-in-law and early member of the NYMS, Matthew Clarkson. Congress, Peter Augustus told the gathering of two thousand, had the necessary authority to block the extension of slavery and to make support of this goal a condition for admitting new states. He also discussed “in a feeling manner, the cruelties of slavery” and “the evils which would ultimately result to this country if not prohibited.” Jay successfully motioned for the meeting to approve a set of resolutions emphatically opposing the admission of Missouri as a slave state and taking a strong position against the institution of slavery more generally. The preamble labeled “the existence of slavery in the United States … a great political as well as moral evil.” The federal government ought “to prohibit the admission of slavery into any state or territory hereafter to be formed or admitted into the Union.”³⁰

At virtually the same moment that Peter helped mobilize opposition to slavery in Missouri, his father inserted himself into the debate. On November 17, John Jay penned a letter to Elias Boudinot in response to an antislavery circular produced in New Jersey earlier in the month. He surely anticipated that Boudinot, a former Federalist congressman and cofounder of the American Bible Society, would make this letter public.³¹ After a long silence on most political subjects including slavery, Jay felt compelled to make his own position plain. Slavery “ought not to be introduced nor permitted in any of the new states, and … ought to be gradually diminished and finally abolished in all of them,” declared the retired founder.

To bolster his stance, the former chief justice of the US weighed in on the constitutionality of Congress’s imposition of antislavery conditions on Missouri’s admission. He read the slave trade clause of the US Constitution as denying Congress the power to interfere with the “migration and Importation” of slaves into “existing States” prior to 1808. According to Jay, Congress retained the power to prevent the importation of slaves into new states at any time. He argued that, after 1808, congressional regulation of the spread of slavery applied to all states “whether new or old.” The retired nationalist asserted the primacy of the federal government to blunt the spread of slavery and implied congressional authority to ban the interstate slave trade as well.

John Jay’s critique of slavery also emphasized the egalitarianism implications of American independence. He explained why Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution used the phrase “such Persons” instead of “Slaves” when describing the importation of people: slavery was “Tolerat[ed]” at the time despite “its Discordancy with the Principles of the Revolution.” Nonetheless, the institution was known to be “repugnant” to the values ennunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Jay then copied directly into his letter the famous phrases from the Declaration’s preamble: “We hold these Truths to be self evident—that All Men are created equal—that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unaleienable Rights—that among them are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The egalitarian spirit of the revolution and opposition to Missouri’s admission as a slave state were then one and the same.³²

The seventy-four-year-old Jay’s brief published remarks on Missouri leant support to northern congressmen, senators, and state legislators already digging their heels in against their southern opponents. Although one of Jay’s Federalist contemporaries Rufus King played a key role in the US Senate fight against slavery in Missouri, having a figure of Jay’s even greater stature cast aside his typical reticence made a strong statement. The publishers of a thirty-five-page pamphlet of anti-Missouri speeches rushed to append the Jay–Boudinot correspondence to the back of their publication under the heading, “The following letter contains the opinion of that great Civilian John Jay on the Constitutional authority of Congress …” The New-England Galaxy & Masonic Magazine opted for the more understated heading “Letter from the Venerable John Jay.” Newspapers in Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, and New Jersey also republished part or all of Jay’s letter.³³

John Jay wrapped the mantle of the American Revolution around the anti-extension cause in a way that few other men could. He was a highly placed witness to the founding era and a constitutional expert. With his own state’s and his household’s course fixed on a path toward final abolition, the New Yorker regarded gradual emancipation as a safe, effective, and replicable means of achieving the broader goal of ending American slavery.³⁴

Missouri also kindled the antislavery fire of William Jay. In 1819, William shared his own opposition to “the extension of slavery” in a letter to Boudinot, with whom he had collaborated on the establishment of the American Bible Society. The son expressed himself in more colorfully unrestrained and more religious tones than his father: “If our country is ever to be redeemed from the curse of slavery the present Congress must stand between the living and the dead and stay the plague.” It was not the laws of the country but those of God that slavery’s expansion violated. The peril was both practical and moral. Once planted in the West, slavery would be difficult to eradicate, “poisoning the feelings of humanity” and undermining “civil society.” This letter was the first written evidence of his opposition to slavery. William’s understanding of the stakes in Missouri expressed apocalyptic tones not found in his father’s constitutional analysis of the problem. In a private letter, however, written in December 1819 to anti-extension pamphleteer Daniel Raymond, John stated clearly that there was no way to expand slavery “without doing violence” to the nation’s “principles” and “depressing” its “power and prosperity.” The Missouri question was a subject father and son surely discussed at their shared Bedford home.³⁵

The objections of the Jays and New Yorkers of various partisan stripes came to naught. Congress struck a deal to admit Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state. The compromise also established the 36° 30’ latitude as the northern boundary to slavery in future states carved from the Louisiana Purchase. Most New York congressmen opposed the Missouri Compromise.³⁶

The question of free Black civil rights extended the Missouri Crisis despite this congressional deal. As William noted in his private diary’s 1820 installment on the year’s political events, Missouri produced a state constitution that defiantly added racial discrimination on top of slavery. He commented, “As if to insult the advocates of the rights of man & to burlesque all profession of liberty & equality so liberally made by the southern slave holders,” Missouri’s “constitution renders it penal for a free negro, to enter the State.” He also observed, “This prohibition, being in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees to citizens of the several states, equal rights, with the citizens of those states in which they may happen to reside.” Despite overwhelming opposition in his home state of New York, in 1821 another compromise eked through Congress, fig-leaf language requiring Missouri to agree to abide by the US Constitution.³⁷

The Missouri Crisis exposed the degree to which regional assumptions about the progress of antislavery were misplaced. In the mind of all three Jays, to oppose slavery in Missouri was to stand for the country’s interests and principles. Yet the resistance of southerners in Congress to those notions and the compromises that ensued indicated that the nation’s viability did not depend on extending the principles of the Declaration of Independence nor on disseminating the northern gradual emancipation model. Indeed, the Missouri Crisis revealed that preserving the republic, at least for the time being, depended on forsaking these principles.³⁸ Political upheaval in New York would soon show that the Jay family’s assumptions about gradualism’s progress toward equal citizenship were not supported at home either.

Peter Augustus Jay’s Constitutional Crisis

For more than two months in 1821, some of the state’s leading politicians and jurists met in Albany to rewrite John Jay’s 1777 New York State constitution—and in the process to define the racial boundaries of New York’s emerging democracy. Peter Augustus Jay, who was designated to eventually assume title of the family’s Rye property, and Peter Jay Munro served as two of the three delegates from Westchester County. The cousins took different political routes to the convention. Munro had recently declared the Federalists moribund and aligned with the Bucktails, Martin Van Buren’s ascendant faction determined to break the political dominance of his Republican rival, Governor DeWitt Clinton. His cousin Peter Augustus Jay, by contrast, was a member of the shrinking remnant of New York Federalism courted by Clinton. Indeed, Clinton had become Jay’s political patron. The governor had assisted Jay to become recorder for the City of New York in 1819, a job that involved overseeing tax assessments. Jay, however, was removed from office in the spring of 1821, a casualty of political infighting and the state’s complicated system of making public appointments.³⁹

Peter Augustus arrived in Albany in late August for a convention dominated by anti-Clinton Bucktail delegates. Van Buren’s Bucktails set about to expand the electorate and sweep away anomalous provisions that they believed weakened legislative authority and concentrated power in a small number of hands.⁴⁰ Jay hewed to a more conservative philosophy suspicious of expanding the franchise by diluting property-holding standards. He had no patience, however, for using a race as a tool for defining who should vote and who should not.

Nothing that Peter Augustus observed during the initial weeks of the convention made him optimistic about what it would accomplish. On September 12, the convention received an appeal from free Black men in New York City that the new constitution protect them from the kinds of procedural roadblocks to Black voting that previous state legislatures had enacted. Through his long service to the NYMS, Jay had become familiar with the petitioners, and he moved that their position be considered. At the same time, the committee on voting rights presented their plan to restrict voting to white men only, part of a larger proposed overhaul of voter eligibility.⁴¹

A week later, on September 19, the convention debated the committee’s full report, which eliminated property-holding thresholds set by the 1777 state constitution at one level for general assembly elections and at a significantly higher level for gubernatorial and state senatorial elections. The proposed new standard approached universal suffrage for adult males. Under the new schema, taxpayers of even the most modest means, members of the militia, and those who worked on the public roads instead of paying taxes would become enfranchised.⁴² The committee simultaneously proposed to bar all Black men from voting.

Proponents of a glaring racial exception to vastly expanded male suffrage justified their proposal in avowedly racist terms. Committee member John Z. Ross of Genesee County, in the far western section of the state, argued that “civil government” need not be bound by doctrines of “natural equality.” In Ross’s words, Blacks were “a peculiar people, incapable … of exercising that privilege [of voting] with any sort of discretion, prudence, or independence.” On practical grounds, Ross feared that allowing African Americans to vote in New York “would serve to invite that kind of population to this state, an occurrence which I should most sincerely deplore.”⁴³

Biding his time while others spoke, Jay then rose from his desk in the second row of the right wing of the chamber to denounce the proposed denial of voting rights to African Americans. Jay rebutted a variety of aspersions directed at Blacks. He noted that the widely understood mandate of the convention was to expand suffrage, not restrict it before asking, “What crime have” African Americans “committed for which they are to be punished?” He reminded his colleagues that less than a year before the convention, the state legislature overwhelmingly encouraged its congressional delegation to reject the admission of Missouri as a slave state; legislators had deemed unacceptable the violation of the federal Constitution’s “privileges and immunities” clause by Missouri’s provision to deny the right of free Black citizens to move there. New York now proposed to violate the principle. The language under consideration would mean that free Blacks from Pennsylvania with the right to vote would lose the franchise on relocating to New York. If New York put the racial bar in place “you will hear a shout of triumph and a hiss of scorn from the southern part of the union, which I confess will mortify me—I shall shrink at the sound, because I fear it will be deserved.”

Jay confronted the racist defense of disfranchisement head-on. Natural inferiority, he asserted, was a “universally exploded” concept. Jay did concede the existence of behavioral differences between free Blacks and whites, but he attributed them entirely to the malign influences of slavery, and he assured the convention that “this state of things is fast passing away.” Jay noted, “Schools have been opened for them, and … in these schools there is discovered a thirst for instruction, and a progress in learning, seldom to be seen in the other schools of the state.”

He also minimized the practical threat of Black voters. To protect against what? Jay conceded that if he were a southerner he would not support “an immediate and universal emancipation” because of its presumed danger. By contrast, New York’s black population remained static, even as the white population soared. Disfranchisement would represent a gratuitous fulfillment of “an unreasonable prejudice” at the price of sullying the New York constitution “with a provision odious and unjust.”⁴⁴

The next day, Jay once again marshaled his evidence in favor of Black rights. He dismissed the analogies to other groups barred from voting under certain circumstances. Clergy could resign from their posts at will, while “the disability of the black man is to be annexed to his blood, is never to be removed, and is to be inseparable from him and his posterity to the latest generation.” Indians legally belonged to their own “independent nations,” not to the general citizenry, and, as such, did not enjoy the franchise; even so, Jay pointed out, an individual Indian could be naturalized as a citizen just like a European immigrant. Black people, thus, bore the brunt of a unique discrimination.

Proponents of denying voting rights to free Blacks in New York argued from a false premise about slavery’s southern trajectory: “I am told, sir,” he declared, “that the southern states are about to emancipate their slaves, and that we shall then be overrun by an emigration of free blacks.… Happy should I be, sir, if this intelligence were confirmed.” The harsh reality, commented Jay, was that “southern planters were adopting measures to rivet more firmly the fetters of slavery, but never that they were beginning to break them.” The South had laws to forbid the preaching of Christianity, the spreading of literacy, and the manumission of slaves. Jay now feared that his fellow convention delegates wished to rivet the fetters of prejudice more tightly to Black New Yorkers as well.

Jay attacked the attempt to rewrite the franchise rules as based on prejudice instead of “reason.” He summarized his opponents’ argument: “I will not eat with you, nor associate with you, because you are black; therefore I will disfranchise you. I despise you, not because you are vicious, but merely because I have an insuperable prejudice against you;—therefore I will condemn you, and your innocent posterity, to live forever as aliens in your native land.” Jay could not believe that the convention would defy the principle of “natural equality of all men, merely to gratify odious, and I hope, temporary prejudices.”⁴⁵

His attempt to block the worst excesses of racialized democracy were at least temporarily successful. Following Jay’s remarks, the convention removed the word “white” from the draft provision defining voter eligibility by a 63–59 margin. His cousin Peter Jay Munro, who remained silent during the debates, joined this narrow majority, as did a substantial number of Bucktail Republicans and several Federalist delegates.⁴⁶

Jay’s victory on voting rights made him no less gloomy—with good reason, as it turned out. He preferred not only to keep racially exclusive language out of the constitution but also to keep in the old property-holding standards for voting rights. The Bucktail majority, however, had come to bury that remnant of the colonial and revolutionary era. On October 3, he informed his father, “In the convention there is manifestly a jacobinical party. They have decided in favor of universal suffrage.”⁴⁷ He remained loyal to a bygone Federalist political order, in which Black men with little or no property should have no more or no less opportunity than whites with little or no property.

His opponents, in contrast, sought to make white skin the functional equivalent of property ownership. These delegates refined their approach rather than abandoning the quest to color-code the franchise. The revised constitutional language introduced to the convention on October 4 affixed a property-holding requirement on Black males of $250 freehold property, even as the convention prepared to drop any such standard for white voters. The new clause prompted a new round of race-baiting. After Olney Briggs of Schoharie County called on October 6 for the convention to revive the much more clear-cut whites-only voting standard, Jay spoke out once more in more personal terms that brought the country’s historical legacy and religion directly into the conversation.⁴⁸

Sounding annoyed, even weary, Jay responded to the renewed assault on Black rights. His brief, graceful remarks invoked the responsibilities of fathers and sons. He wished to know on what basis delegate Briggs assailed African Americans: “It was true they were now in some measure a degraded race; but how came they so? Was it not by our fault, and the fault of our fathers? And because they had been degraded, the gentleman from Schoharie was for visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children.” Jay detected “too much pride of democracy” in the attempt of whites to elbow Blacks aside from a position of equality. Turning from earthly politics to heavenly justice, Jay asserted, “However we may scorn, and insult, and trample upon this unfortunate race now, the day was fast approaching when we must lie down with them in that narrow bed appointed for all the living.” In death, all lay in the ground, and “the servant is free from his master.” He then intoned, “We are all the offspring of one common Father, and redeemed by one common Saviour—that gates of paradise are open alike to the bond and the free.” He labeled Brigg’s proposal “repulsive.”⁴⁹

Jay’s rhetoric conveyed a fundamental refusal to repudiate racial equality and expressed a desire to apportion fairly the responsibility for the condition of Black New Yorkers. Jay anticipated that African American degradation would be perpetuated by Black children in an environment of discrimination. Yet Peter faced up to white culpability by pointedly asking of this degradation, “Was it not our fault, and the fault of our fathers?” He accepted guilt and responsibility for what men like his father had done by perpetuating slavery. God, the Father, recognized none of these man-made racial distinctions, the kind that racial barriers to voting tried to make permanent. Such provisions were contemptible in this life and the next. White man’s democracy, in the final analysis, expressed immoral, ungodly arrogance. Peter’s father had grasped this conundrum himself four decades earlier when he criticized a slaveholding country’s “impious prayers” for liberty.

Having read Peter’s speech in the newspaper, John Jay commented in a letter to his son, “In my opinion [it] does you Credit.”⁵⁰ These brief words offered a paternal blessing to Peter’s critique and his cause, tacitly accepting the premise that his own generation had not done enough. At the Albany convention, Peter not only bore the futile burden of defending his father’s fading constitutional and social order but he also strove to compensate for the racial legacy that order had bequeathed to contemporary New York.

At the 1821 convention, however, the Jays’ version of piety did not reign. Briggs, in withdrawing his motion to resurrect a straightforward whites-only standard, sneered at Jay’s high-mindedness: “He would ask that honourable gentleman whether he would consent to lie down, in life, in the same feather bed with a negro?” and “whether it would elevate a monkey or a baboon to allow them to vote?” Martin Van Buren less crudely justified the principle of discrimination; he claimed the $250 property-holding requirements for Blacks “held out inducements to industry.” A 2:1 majority favored plowing under the old 1777 property standards for whites while using property holding as a way of minimizing the number of Black voters. In a series of votes on suffrage, Jay and Munro found themselves in the minority each time. The gambit of Republicans like Van Buren had been to expand suffrage while punishing the Federalist- leaning Black constituency.⁵¹

Peter Augustus Jay found himself much less isolated on the question of whether to use the New York constitution to lock in the 1817 emancipation law or even to accelerate its goal of ending slavery. James Tallmadge, who as a congressman had sparked the Missouri Crisis debate only a few years before, argued that the 1817 law, because it still permitted virtual ownership of the children of slaves well into the 1840s, should be amended constitutionally to terminate slavery completely by 1827. Some delegates responded hostilely to any measure that would accelerate Black freedom, while others worried that the constitution should remain silent on slavery, lest the document embarrass future generations. More than two-thirds of the delegates, including Jay and the silent Munro, voted against the attempt to include antislavery principles in the constitution. Whatever “sins” the “fathers” had committed, for the Jay cousins, gradualism was not one of them. They preferred to let the emancipation process follow its already prescribed statutory course.⁵²

For Jay, the convention had been a jarring confirmation that his views and temperament had no place in contemporary electoral politics. On November 8, 1821, just two days before the convention closed, Peter wrote his wife Mary, “I have been almost daily in hope of getting away from this place.… my political life is ended.” The delegates approved the constitution by an overwhelming 98–9 vote, Jay joining the tiny minority. His cousin Peter Jay Munro, who had allied with anti-Clinton Republicans the year before, voted with the majority, declining to offer symbolic opposition to the new era of white man’s democracy.⁵³

He had little time to wallow in defeat. Only sixteen days after the close of the convention, he joined the company of his fellow abolitionists at a New York City session of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Even in this venue, Peter found himself called on to beat back racially exclusionary sentiments, as once again the national organization took up the question of establishing a faraway African American colony. As part of a five-man committee, Jay reaffirmed the convention’s 1818 rejection of African colonization. The committee found the barriers to such a plan “insurmountable.” It also rejected the notion of sending freed people to a colony in western territory belonging to the United States. Because the Black colonists, according to the report, lacked the benefits of “education” necessary to govern such a colony, their lives would hardly be better in the middle of Indian country. Sovereignty issues also undermined such a plan because, according to the committee, the colony either must become a US state or a separate country. Sounding a Jeffersonian note, the committee imagined rivalry with neighboring white territories producing “bloodshed” and even “servile war” because such a colony would attract “runaway slaves.” The committee insisted that working toward ending slavery itself was the nation’s most appropriate course. The report was accepted by the convention.⁵⁴

The organization remained committed to a national program of gradual emancipation. The convention issued “A Plan for the General Emancipation of Slaves” that expressed the Jays’ long-standing gradualist assumptions. It explicitly rejected a sudden and complete liberation of slaves while acknowledging the “immense debt” that the nation owed African Americans. Accordingly, the convention imagined making southern slaves into serfs with “an interest in the land they cultivate” during a period long enough to “fit” them “for the enjoyment and exercise of rational liberty.” Children would be educated; no one could be sold out of the county where they lived. Though the convention again did not rule out Haiti as a destination for resettlement, its bedrock position was that a northern-style gradual emancipation regime would be the best method for the nation to patiently undo the proverbial Gordian knot of slavery. In articulating this plan, the delegates did not fully accept the lessons of the Missouri Crisis or the Albany constitutional convention: slavery’s southern defenders had no interest in any emancipation plans, nor did northern politicians have any interest in equal citizenship or racial uplift.⁵⁵ Despite the evidence, the delegates clung to a vision of gradual social transformation whose limitations in the North were already becoming alarmingly apparent.

William’s Quests

Politics and philanthropy created their share of frustrations and challenges for Peter Augustus Jay. Nonetheless, he had a successful corporate legal practice in New York City and a roster of causes to absorb his energies during the 1810s and 1820s. He was a pillar of the establishment even if he was now estranged from electoral politics.⁵⁶

Living in his father’s house with his growing family, William’s path to making his own public mark was less certain, although not without possibility. In 1816, he joined with Peter Augustus in helping launch the American Bible Society (ABS). To John Jay’s sons and to John Jay himself, the mass distribution of the holy scripture was a tool for national and even global transformation. William successfully made a motion to the ABS Board of Managers that every clergyman in the country be asked to promote the organization from their pulpits. With New York poised to become the London of America, a national organization to disseminate the scriptures run by laymen with management and business skills was needed. William contemplated an enterprise “well suited for a great society, embracing all ranks and denominations, and extending its care … over the whole union.” A national moral problem required a nationally organized solution.⁵⁷

Still, doubts about his moral worthiness plagued John Jay’s younger son. On Christmas Day 1817, William reflected, “Few families have so much cause for gratitude to the giver of all good as this, & we are bound to remember that from those to whom much has been given, much will be required.” Six days later on New Years’ Eve, he more gloomily indicated in his diary that he had accomplished little in his first twenty-nine years.⁵⁸

Family tragedy added to the burden. Less than five months after his New Year’s Eve reflection on his meager contributions, his younger sister Sally died at the age of twenty-six, perhaps of a ruptured appendix. William took her death hard, recording, “I live in constant expectation of death.”⁵⁹ Making sense of his own life had grown at once more difficult and more urgent. He felt the need to address human suffering in acute spiritual terms.

Two weeks after Sally’s death, William paid a visit to a destitute local Black family. Four children, one of whom was crippled, and two adults lived in one tiny room, with rags covering the glassless windows. William spoke of religion with Dick, the bedridden father, who was stricken with consumption, readying the poor man to meet his maker. Jay exclaimed to his diary, “Who has made me to differ from this miserable object!” He vowed to repay God for his own good fortune “by my constant endeavour, to do what ever my conscience tells me, is pleasing to him.” Dick’s plight drove home to Jay his own authority and autonomy to act as a redeemer, rather than to suffer as a victim. He could and must strive on behalf of others, even as he learned from their suffering about the vagaries of fate.⁶⁰ If he stopped to think that the destitute Black family’s condition was embedded in a longer history of ongoing racial injustices in this era of gradual emancipation, he did not say.

William found a focal point for his moral energies when, soon after his sister’s death, he returned to his legal vocation by becoming a Westchester County judge in the spring of 1818. He benefited from the favor of Governor Clinton, much as his older brother had. Governor Clinton later elevated him to chief judge in the county in 1820. Jay regarded his judicial service in moral and spiritual rather than political terms. As he reflected in his diary, being on the bench “puts it in my power to do much good, by an impartial administration of Justice & it tends in some degree to increase personal influence; & this influence properly exerted may produce beneficial results”—among these “the opportunities this office may afford me, of honouring my Maker, & commending his religion to my fellow men.”⁶¹

The bench, however, was not a pulpit. William got a firsthand, eye-opening look at human depravity that confirmed the importance of moral reform. In June 1819, he described in his diary another judge’s conviction of a defendant accused of lacing a man’s flour at the mill with arsenic. At the pronouncement of the verdict, the guilty man displayed “one of the most frightful countenances I have ever beheld—despair, rage & malignity were strongly depictured in his features.” Equally disturbing, his judicial colleague’s remarks when sentencing the man to fourteen years in prison brought the courtroom audience to tears but evoked no reaction from the condemned man.

A year-and-a-half later, William tried a case in North Salem that caught his particular attention because it perverted his strong sense of paternal moral probity. One party to a landlord–tenant dispute induced his own son to perjure himself and had lined up other children to similarly perjure themselves. “Greatly shocked,” he recorded in his diary. “If anything can add to the detestable depravity of this man, of this Father, thus the corruptor of his children, it is that he is a professing christian, & an officer of a baptist church in North Salem!”⁶² In William’s moral universe the only thing worse than a failure to execute paternal responsibilities was the failure to live up to Christian ones, lessons he would apply later in his blistering critique of southern slavery.

The Westchester County Court did not deal lightly with crimes against property. A conviction for petty larceny could send a man to prison for five months, grand larceny or robbery to the state prison for several years and even a decade of hard labor. Such punishments indicate the distinction authorities made between judicially enforced coerced labor, which was deemed legitimate, and the permanent bound servitude that William would increasingly regard as the height of immorality. Hard labor punished a man’s actions, slavery a man’s lineage—the difference between justice and injustice.⁶³

Service on the bench did not absorb all his moral—or moralistic—energies. William also displayed a zest for religious politics. To his children’s pleasure, the elderly John Jay succeeded Elias Boudinot as president of the ABS in 1821.⁶⁴ While the founding father may have been a superb unifying symbol and occasional spokesman for a group seeking to bind together disparate denominations for the grand purpose of Bible distribution, New York’s Episcopal bishop John Henry Hobart objected to the distribution of unannotated Bibles by a nondenominational organization. In 1823, William and the bishop entered into a nasty pamphlet war.

Criticism from a leading official of the Jay family’s own denomination brought out the filio-pietistic warrior in William. The tenacity with which he defended his father’s role in the ABS indicated both the sort of zeal the younger son increasingly brought to moral reform and the central role his father played in his own moral identity. William, writing under the pseudonym “A Churchman,” granted his own bishop no quarter. The birth of the ABS from the ashes of the War of 1812 and the unprecedented cooperation in this work by “expiring saints” like John Jay provided evidence of God’s approval. Moreover, for William, empirical evidence told the successful tale: there were 300 North American affiliates of the ABS and translations of the Bible into more than 130 languages and dialects. Thus, wrote William, while lay Episcopalians took the lead in this holy work, Hobart’s resistance produced “Schism, unkindness, mutual reproaches, and unholy passions.” William insisted that, in contrast, his father invested his well-earned prestige in this noble religious endeavor.⁶⁵

William’s dogged religious reform advocacy went beyond such polemics. In 1827, he wrote a prize-winning essay on Sabbath observance that coupled his Christian ecumenicalism with his desire for the “peace and good order of society” that he and his colleagues sought to enforce from the bench. The benefits of Sabbath observance as a means for diffusing morality widely were clear: “A periodical cessation from labour had permitted all classes of society regularly to assemble for religious worship and instruction.”⁶⁶ Piety preempted punishment in this world and the next.

Antislavery Redirection

Some injustices required political intervention that went far beyond piety or punishment. During this period, William for the first time publicly invested his reform energies in combating slavery on the national stage. Exposure to Frenchmen Henri Gregoire’s critique of racism and English Quaker’s Elizabeth Heyrich call for immediate abolition may have deepened William’s dislike of slavery during the 1820s. But the plight of a Westchester County man prompted to William’s action. In July 1826, Gilbert Horton, a free Black sailor was arrested near the Washington, D.C., wharves by a justice of the peace who presumed him to be a fugitive slave and had him thrown in jail.⁶⁷

When William Jay got wind of Horton’s plight, he organized a public meeting to petition DeWitt Clinton, urging the governor to contact federal officials. At the behest of Jay’s committee, Clinton sent an emphatic letter to President John Quincy Adams asserting that whatever laws Horton was held under did not apply to a free citizen of New York State and demanding Horton’s release. Adams reported to Clinton that Horton had already been released by Washington, D.C., officials. Jay assumed that this action was taken in anticipation of presidential pressure on the unfortunate inmate’s behalf.⁶⁸

The Horton case had a ripple effect. The seizing of Horton on the wharves of Georgetown raised questions not just about how the nation’s capital administered its fugitive slave laws but also about whether there should be slavery in Washington, D.C., at all. Several petitions poured into Congress from Pennsylvania calling for abolition in the nation’s capital, along with petitions from the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, North Carolina, Maryland, and the District of Columbia itself.⁶⁹

William Jay enthusiastically supported D.C. abolition. He anticipated that Westchester County’s petition for abolition in the capital city “will probably cause an explosion, but I have no doubt that the ultimate result will be good.”⁷⁰ Because Congress might ignore mere petitions, Jay enlisted New York’s political leaders in the cause of abolishing slavery in the nation’s capital. In January 1828, he wrote New York state senator Walker Todd urging that New York’s state legislators instruct their US senators to support abolition in the capital. Jay laid out the justification for such a step in clear terms. He first asserted the constitutionality of congressional action: Congress had “unrestricted” authority to govern the capital city. It was no different for a congressman to vote for abolition in Washington, D.C., than for a Westchester County assemblyman to do the same in New York. Jay described the laws governing slavery in Washington as “savage in the extreme, & far more fit for the meridian of Constantinople, than for that of the capital of a great christian republic.” Drawing and quartering slaves found guilty of murder in that faraway capital was barbaric; in the United States, a free person might lose his liberty for something so trivial as “Jail fees!” That slave traders marched coffles of slaves past the US Capitol was a shocking contradiction of the rhetoric of liberty pronounced in the halls of Congress.

Despite his moral abhorrence of slavery, Jay still remained satisfied with the classic gradualist formula. In his letter to State Senator Todd, Jay cited a petition proposing an emancipation law for Washington, D.C., that would make children born after July 4, 1828 “free at the age of 25 years,” along with a repeal of the statue holding accused runaways liable for jail fees and a ban on slave markets in the nation’s capital. The petition Jay quoted to Todd, nonetheless, conceded the right of congressmen to bring their slaves in and out of the district.⁷¹

William Jay’s conception of reform in 1826 had not yet caught up with his moral outrage. He moved from defending a single man to supporting an emancipation formula that did not even go as far as the 1817 New York law that established July 4, 1827, as the date all slaves would be free. He was still living in his father’s world in which slaves became former slaves and masters became former masters only with the passage of time.

Still, William’s desire for the federal government to act against slavery in one ten-mile by ten-mile district expressed a fundamental abolitionist precept. Just as John Jay’s 1819 letter on the Missouri Crisis asserted the federal government’s authority to ban slavery from its territories and regulate the movement of slaves, William and his fellow activists on the D.C. question operated on the assumption that slaveholders could claim no special protections under the Constitution outside of states where the laws explicitly protected the institution. Lord Mansfield’s Somerset formulation about the difference between natural and positive law lived on in a new nation and in a new age.⁷²

Last Rites

Even at life’s end, race, hierarchy, obligation, and memory defined the transition from slavery to freedom in the Jay family. At the Jay family property in Rye, emancipation came three years ahead of the state’s formal emancipation of all slaves on July 4, 1827. In 1823, Peter Augustus, who had recently assumed from his father formal ownership of the Rye estate, witnessed a will written by his uncle’s widow Mary D. Jay that stated, “I direct that my slaves be duly manumitted and I bequeath to Caesar and Sylvia fifty dollars each.” (The 1820 US Census lists three enslaved people in the household.) Mary died the next year. The $50 gifts to Caesar and Sylvia were dwarfed by the $500 gifts she bestowed on two of her nieces. In her mind, what she owed her Black servants was not the same as what she wished her own blood relatives to have.⁷³ Yet she projected an obligation to their future, in accordance with her brother-in-law John Jay’s long-standing notions of racialized propriety and loyalty.

John Jay’s solicitude for select former slaves persisted late into his own life as well. In a November 1824 letter to Peter Augustus, John issued very specific orders regarding Mary, Clarinda’s sister. In a tone that indicated he expected to be obeyed, John wrote, “I … desire you when here to have Old Mary comfortably provided for in every Respect at my Expense” while she lived out her life as a boarder with someone named Selvy. The elder Jay continued, “As she is a poor woman she will doubtless require frequent payments. Monthly ones may therefore be proper.”⁷⁴

The portrait of life at Bedford recorded by an 1826 visitor was of pleasant, even idyllic ease for the aging founder. In a diary entry from July of that year, attorney Henry Van Der Lyn described John Jay rising from his “large arm chair” on the piazza to welcome his guests into the parlor. Although he “looks thin & infirm … his memory hearing & understanding” were all good. A servant brought him a pipe, from which he took one drag. The property and the company exuded permanence and well-established gentility. A stone schoolhouse was going up behind the “Mansion” where the household’s Jay grandchildren were to be educated. William was away when Van Der Lyn visited; nevertheless, “the Ladies in their successful efforts to entertain us by their diversified & agreeable conversation, evinced that unaffected address which is only acquired by an early intercourse with the best society.” Van Der Lyn left the Jay house in the afternoon, too soon to witness the twice-daily ritual of John leading the household, including the servants, in prayer. The long-retired statesman lived in enviable circumstances.⁷⁵

Despite his family’s and his servants’ attentions, John’s final years were a struggle, as his physical decline became more acute. In March 1827, after providing Peter with a detailed description of their father’s afflictions, William commented, “We have been all too actively engaged in ministering to our beloved parent to dwell much on the event which we fear is approaching.” Yet even though a doctor told William that his father’s prospects were “hopeless,” John continued to show resiliency in the face of infirmity.⁷⁶

To the end, John Jay also continued to think of service in racialized ways, even as he adjusted to the latest methods of recruitment. In March 1828, William wrote Peter’s son John Clarkson Jay in New York City, “Your Grandfather desires me to request to you, to call on Mr. Paton, who keeps the intelligence office in the New York Institution, Chamber Street, & inquire whether he can immediately send us a coloured woman of good character who can cook, & will assist in ironing.” David Paton and his wife directed the operations of the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestics, the organization referred to in that letter and founded in 1825 as a clearinghouse for upright servants. It sought to stimulate loyal service through personal vetting and by offering Bibles, tracts, and monetary rewards. This mix of material and moral incentives attempted to replicate institutionally the ties forged across time by the Jays to certain servants and slaves—including Clarinda and Zilpah, who remained with John Jay to the end.⁷⁷

Well into his six-page last will and testament, dictated on April 18, 1829, John Jay stated, “Clarinda has for a long course of years been in my service. She was born in my fathers family. She is to[o] far advanced in years to be long able to provide for herself. The proportion of my estate given to my son William induces me to commit her to his care to be by him comfortably maintained during her life.” To his “domestics” more generally, Jay offered praise for their “good will and fidelity” and “recommend[ed] them to my children for such kind offices as may occasionally be indicated by circumstances and Christianity.”⁷⁸ He trusted his survivors, including William, who inherited the Bedford home and farm, would know what to do.

Less than a month later, on May 14, 1829, John Jay died. Barely able to talk, with thoughts of his maker, he was surrounded by family in his Bedford home. Three years before, Thomas Jefferson, whose famous words about equality Jay had quoted during the Missouri Crisis, had died. The nation that the New Yorker and the Virginian had done so much to found was expanding economically and territorially, accompanied by new democratic visions, expectations for spiritual reformations, and the existence of slavery.⁷⁹ Neither emancipation in the North, nor personal charity, nor compromise in Washington, nor veneration of the founders’ legacy, however, could quell the fire bells.