Prologue

“Posthumous fame is in no other respect valuable than as it may be instrumental to the good of the survivors.” When forty-four-year-old John Jay penned this reflection in 1790, he had already earned his place as one of the most influential members of the revolutionary generation. The inaugural chief justice of the newly formed US Supreme Court had ample reason to believe he would remain famous long after his own death. He had served as president of the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War. As a leading political figure in New York, he helped author the state’s first constitution. Alongside John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, Jay played a crucial role in negotiating the treaty that concluded the War for Independence.

After returning from his diplomatic triumph in Europe, John Jay was entrusted with the nation’s fledgling foreign policy operations by the Continental Congress. The frustrations posed by the Articles of Confederation of performing this task prompted him to join with George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton in what historian Joseph Ellis has labeled “the quartet”—the moving force behind calling a national convention to supplant the Articles and to ratify the resulting United States Constitution. A few years later, Jay negotiated a treaty with Britain that forever after bears his name; the Jay Treaty averted a potentially disastrous war with the former mother country. In 1795, his fellow New Yorkers elected him as their governor. During his second term, he had the honor of approving a law to gradually abolish slavery in the North’s largest slave state.¹

Slavery and fame—or, better yet, slavery and infamy. The enslavement of millions of human beings and the founding of the nation are inextricably bound. One need look no further than the US Constitution. The 1787 document made ominous references to “three fifths of all other persons” counting toward congressional appointments and to the need for Congress to “suppress Insurrections.” The bedrock of our laws required that people “held to Service” who had fled across state borders be returned to their masters’ states. The same seminal document also forbade Congress until 1808 at the earliest from banning the “Importation of such Persons as any of the States … think proper to admit.” All these phrases referred to the enslaved. Quietly but unmistakably, the founders etched Black bondage into the nation’s charter.² But Americans can—and have since then—amended the Constitution. Abolition, equal protection, and voting rights amendments removed chattel slavery from the living document. The lives of the founders themselves, however, were written in indelible ink. What good would their memory be to their survivors? What value is their memory to us—Americans and world citizens of every color, identity, and creed?

Because of slavery, the biographical record threatens to transform the founders’ fame into infamy at almost every turn. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other revered southern founding fathers owned slaves: hundreds of men, women, and children were the chattel property of these apostles of liberty. Thomas Jefferson’s role in fathering several children by his slave mistress Sally Hemings is virtually a historical subfield of its own, its combination of sex and hypocrisy serving as a metaphor for our nation’s entire shameful history of racial injustice.³

The Mason-Dixon Line, meanwhile, did not and does not secure the North’s revolutionary legacy from slavery’s disgrace. Every colony that became a state legally enforced the enslavement of people of African descent. Northern colonial economies reaped profits from the slave trade and provisioned slave colonies.⁴ Once again, such facts force us to reconsider the founders’ biographies. Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin not only owned slaves but also helped keep his renowned newspaper operation profitable by advertising slaves for sale and rewards for capturing runaways. Alexander Hamilton’s twenty-first-century Broadway revival as the honor-obsessed forward-thinking founding father whose hip-hop storytelling embodies a city’s and nation’s multicultural dreams poses far more questions than it answers about the revolution and slavery.⁵

And John Jay? He owned slaves, as did his father, his grandfather, his father-in-law, and most if not all of the elite New York merchants and landholders to which he was related by blood, marriage, and class.⁶ The ties of the founding and the founders to slavery proved to be inextricable.

In the years following John Jay’s death, his heirs demanded that slavery end. John Jay’s second son, William Jay, and his grandson and namesake, John Jay II, embraced the new movement for immediate abolition in the 1830s, promoted the cause of national Black freedom for decades, and challenged the North’s racial caste system. Just two years before the outbreak of the Civil War, the nation’s foremost African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared in his eulogy for William, “In the great cause of universal freedom his name was a tower of strength, and his pen a two edged sword.” Soon after, the editors of DeBow’s Review, a leading mouthpiece of southern nationalism, offered John Jay II’s antislavery invective during the fateful 1860 presidential race as proof of why southerners should exit the Union.⁷ In the mid-nineteenth century, the Jay name became, for many friends and foes, synonymous with abolitionism even as it remained intimately associated with the founding.

Even so, members of the family knew full well the Jays’ connection to enslavement. Zilpah Montgomery, who began life as the daughter of a family slave and was a slave herself until John Jay freed her, served the Jay family for decades and on her death in 1872 was interred in the Jay family burial plot. Zilpah’s mother Clarinda had served the family as a slave and later as a freed person until 1837. The former slave Caesar Valentine worked in the household of John Jay’s oldest son, the abolitionist Peter Augustus Jay, receiving a modest annuity on Peter’s death in 1848. Fugitives making their way northward to freedom turned to the Jays for help. Generations of Jays formed a bond, albeit a lopsided one, to enslaved people and formerly enslaved people. The Jays did not imagine slavery as something that only took place in a distant region or at a distant time.

Yet the later Jays did not regard their principled, even daring, antislavery activities as a repudiation of their founding father, even as their abolitionism complicated the meaning of the nation’s origins and their family story. As his successors knew, despite being a slaveholder, John Jay had been an abolitionist too. In 1785, he became the founding president one of the world’s first antislavery organizations, the New-York Manumission Society. In 1799, as already noted, he served as governor while the state enacted a gradual emancipation law. And in 1819, in one of the last political statements of his long life, Jay opposed the admission of Missouri as a slave state—a striking contrast to Thomas Jefferson’s response during the same crisis.

To be sure, slavery deeply compromised the founders’ legacy. Yet the beliefs and actions of several founders regarding slavery, especially John Jay’s, complicated the interpretation of that legacy even before the last major founders passed away. He embraced a gradual emancipation ethos that, although it was freighted with unfairness, moved steadily forward. This approach stood in contrast to Washington’s grand “imperfect” gesture of liberating his slaves at his death and to Jefferson’s disturbing moral retreat.⁸ Unlike these three founders, Jay’s historically minded heirs, traditionalists in so many other ways, would seek to identify the family name with immediate emancipation and racial equality, even though that cause threatened to radically transform and even to destroy the nation that John Jay had played a central role in creating. Their father and the laws of New York ensured that they owned no slaves to free.

The Jay story invites, indeed demands, that Americans treat the founders as a part of, rather than set apart from, subsequent conflicts over slavery.⁹

To link together this narrative chain of slavery and liberty, documents from John Jay’s long career as a public servant proved valuable, but I relied far more heavily on family documents—especially letters written by, to, and in between generations of Jays.¹⁰ Although the Jays’ style of letter writing was not generally confessional in nature, they freely shared their opinions about policies, politicians, and publications. They also corresponded frequently with their abolitionist colleagues and contemporaries. Their correspondence illustrates an abiding web of family and activist connections, distinctive personalities, and motivations emerging against an American historical landscape that from the colonial era to the industrial revolution, from the American Revolution to Reconstruction, underwent massive upheavals. The religious, political, and personal motives they ascribed to themselves and others do not have to be accepted at face value. But patterns of continuity and change abound. William Jay and John Jay II, the family’s most vociferous abolitionists, published essays and articles that contributed vitally to the antislavery struggles, reform movements, and political contests of their times. Placed into conversation with the rich scholarship of slavery and abolition, the Jays’ private correspondence and public advocacy shed new light on the transitions from the practice of gradual emancipation to the demand for immediate abolition, from the commitment to peace to the embrace of war, and on the waxing and waning of nationalism as a force of liberation.

Getting at the motivations and personalities of enslaved and freed family servants is much more difficult, requiring the historian to read between the lines and against the grain in the vast trove of Jay documents. What their white masters and employers said about their Black slaves and servants or about slavery and racism does not directly convey African American life in and around the Jay household. As the narrative will make plain, the Jays’ criticisms and blunt attacks on unjust institutions and their championing of various forms of emancipation were neither divorced from nor a straightforward reckoning of the experiences of the enslaved and emancipated people in their midst. Although the Jays forged meaningful alliances with African American antislavery activists, those who served the family achieved much more modest forms of respect. Paternalism and personal loyalty never produced anything like equality within the Jays’ households.¹¹

For all that the Jays have to tell us about slavery, emancipation, and race in America, as well as about the first century of politics in the United States more broadly, the historical and biographical record is stunningly thin—dots are left unconnected when not outright neglected. John Jay has gotten more and broader attention than his ancestors and descendants, but engagement with his life as a slaveholder and abolitionist has been fleeting by critics and celebrants alike. Historians and biographers sometimes gesture to the fact that, whatever his achievements and shortcomings regarding slavery, his sons carried the antislavery banner forward. What that entailed for the better part of the nineteenth century is a story with which the Jays themselves, especially William Jay and John Jay II, wrestled.¹² The fight against slavery threatened to destroy the nation on which their family fame rested. Thus, to some contemporaries, the Jays’ abolitionism seemed to betray John Jay’s founding legacy. This book is no simple story of sons finishing the work their fathers started.

Indeed, telling the story requires resisting the temptation to assemble a series of discrete lives into neatly sequenced narratives. That is not how the Jays experienced the history they helped make. Their stories and those of the African Americans in their midst were enmeshed. To shift the metaphor, this is not the story of a relay race, baton smoothly passed from one hand to another; members of the household ran alongside one another, albeit at different speeds to different finish lines. Fathers, sons, mothers, and daughters experienced the same events from distinct perspectives, the same moments in time coming at separate phases of long lives. They watched each other, collaborated with each other, and learned from each other. Decades after family patriarch John Jay died, his survivors looked back over their shoulders for approval and repurposed family stories for public justification, for personal self-understanding, and with the hopes of shaping American historical memory.¹³

The Jays are abiding characters in each others’ biographies, much as the colonial and revolutionary past shaped and marked the history of the nineteenth century and beyond. The moral incompatibility of slavery with the nation’s founding ideals clashed—in ways that the Jays found impossible to ignore—with slavery’s economic and political compatibility to the nation’s development. For long stretches, antislavery radicalized a conservative family. Timing and temperament determined how individual members of the family experienced and made sense of this tension between radicalism and conservatism.

The narrative unfolds in three parts. The first section, “Slavery and Revolution,” traces the long arc of the Jay family’s rise to prominence. It begins in colonial New York, where enslaved Africans provided luxury and wealth to the upwardly mobile, like John’s grandfather Auguste, a French Protestant refugee; it ends in the 1820s, when, in part due to the efforts of members of the Jay family, slavery all but disappeared from the Empire State but sowed political division in the new nation. The American Revolution propelled John Jay to the top ranks of his state’s and his nation’s leadership. Intensified currents of egalitarian thought and slave resistance forced Jay to negotiate conflicting impulses toward slavery in his political and personal life. Imagining himself a kindly patriarch to loyal slaves, he bristled when the enslaved asserted their own needs. Yet he increasingly, if inconsistently, embraced antislavery principles in various public roles, identifying gradual emancipation as an effective method of ending slavery within his state and in his household. In national office, he tacked between compromise in the interest of national unity and censuring slaveholders who sought to assert their interests in matters of foreign policy. Meanwhile, a new generation of Jays engaged in their own antislavery activism through the New-York Manumission Society and in political life. As John Jay manumitted the last of the people he held in bondage, new issues emerged. Slavery’s expansion westward, plans to colonize African Americans in West Africa, the right of Black men to vote, and the kidnapping of free people of color signaled that the gradual abolition of slavery in the North and constitutional compromises left gaping moral holes.

The subject of the middle part, “Abolitionism,” is the radical antislavery movement of the 1830s and 1840s, as William Jay and John Jay II embraced the call for slavery’s immediate end. William lived in his father’s house, employed former family slaves, worshiped in his father’s beloved Episcopalian church, and authored a laudatory biography of his father. Supported and pushed by his own son, John Jay II, William relentlessly articulated the case against slavery throughout this period. Navigating the choppy waters of the antislavery movement politics and the nation’s increasingly partisan, white man’s democracy, William entered into and then exited from the William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society. He also formed lasting alliances with other leading abolitionists like Lewis Tappan and Gerrit Smith. The prestige accrued from his family’s connection to the founding made William a prized antislavery spokesman, as well as a puzzle to fellow conservatives surprised by this radical turn. William and his son, meanwhile, increasingly advocated for racially egalitarian positions, attacking the moral compromises of northern religious leaders, particularly within the Episcopalian church. William also issued strong historical critiques of national policies toward slavery and slaveholding and helped publish a seminal first-person slave narrative. Although his patriarchal assumptions undermined his alliance with the Garrisonians, these same assumptions fueled his critique of what he saw as slavery’s fraudulent paternalism. By the time of the Mexican War, William Jay had staked out a position as a powerful critic of territory-hungry, militarized nationalism, a morally tattered cloak for the spread of what he regarded as an irreligious southern slaveholding regime. The Jays’ abolitionism bred hostility among their Westchester County neighbors and provoked consternation among their Manhattan social peers, but it provided the family with a coherent identity and sense of purpose.

The final section, “Emancipation,” traverses a series of crises that shattered the nation, ended slavery, and, ultimately, allowed the Jay family to once again secure itself a place among America’s political and social elite. From the late 1840s to the eve of the Civil War, work on behalf of fugitive slaves and unrelenting critiques of political compromise with the Slave Power—slaveholding interests and their enablers in government and society—continued to make the Jays seem like gadflies to mainstream political and cultural elites. These commitments also brought the Jays, particularly John, into alliance with Black activists. The emergence of the Republicans as a mainstream political party, meanwhile, gave the Jays and some of their antislavery allies a new vehicle that might legitimize their radical opposition to slavery. Whereas William remained a provocateur even in death, John Jay II invested his hopes in the party of Lincoln, if not always in Lincoln himself. The new patriarch of the Jay family had great expectations for the Civil War as an abolitionist project that he hoped would propel him into a position of influence in government. The war alternately thwarted and rewarded John Jay II: political setbacks, a brutal Manhattan race riot, contempt from his neighbors at the family’s country homestead, and up-and-down news from the warfront were balanced by the Emancipation Proclamation, the mustering from New York of African American regiments, and the Thirteenth Amendment.

Reconstruction beckoned as a confirmation of radical abolitionist dreams of national transformation, but while Jay served as a European ambassador, the project collapsed. Rather than rage against or fully recognize the extent of that collapse, Jay, ever the restless reformer, threw himself into new causes fueled by a mix of long-standing family prejudices against Catholics and a nationalism that recalled memories of his grandfather’s nation-building, rather than his father’s distrust of politics and morally compromised nationalism. With slavery legally abolished and the last former slave buried in the family’s churchyard plot, the Jays’ abolitionism became part of a heroic past rather than an animating force in a nation where whites continued to brutally enforce racial subjugation.

From the colonial era to the post-Reconstruction age of Jim Crow, I examine how the Jays transmitted and transformed deeply held political, religious, and moral values.¹⁴ For the Jays, combating slavery did not entail repudiating their wealth, privilege, or historical reputation; instead, they leveraged their prestige and education to advocate, instigate, and organize. Their approach had distinct limitations and sustained tragic blind spots, but it also allowed the Jays to make tremendous contributions to a great and necessary cause.

This story reveals much about some of the most critical issues in American history—slavery, race, and freedom, of course, as well as such perpetually charged concepts as patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. The Jay narrative makes manifest the dangers of conflating patriotism with morality and then choosing the former over the latter. The Jay story also reveals the protean nature of conservatism when facing America’s greatest evils, while illustrating the radical implications of any public embrace of racial equality. The story of whites and Blacks in the Jay household also makes clear that northern slaveholding founders were hardly immune to self-serving illusions. The lingering costs of emancipation weighed far more heavily on the emancipated than their former owners. Even so, the post-independence era of gradual emancipation inculcated antislavery values and instincts that served as powerful resources that the Jay family drew on to the considerable benefit of the abolitionist movement. As a result, at many crucial moments in the tumultuous nineteenth century, the Jays chose the path of greater rather than lesser resistance to slavery’s pervasive power.

A narrative of enslavers, enslaved, and abolitionists, of private people and public lives, this book provides new ways of thinking about an American past fraught with challenges constituent of our times. Taking the long view—from as far back as the late seventeenth century and as far forward as the early twentieth century—does not absolve the failures of the founding. Yet working across generations demands far more than moral score keeping. The Jays thought critically about the founding, about slavery, and about their own obligations. To be sure, the way the family remembered and interpreted the past reflected changing political conditions and shifting psychological needs. Letting a heroic past obscure injustice was as tempting for various Jays as it remains for Americans today. Yet, when they were at their best, members of this remarkable, influential family resisted this seduction and instead demanded justice.

Another word for “posthumous fame” is history.¹⁵ Across parts of four centuries, the Jays made history and made use of history, demonstrating the vitality and the elusiveness of liberty’s legacy.