Jay, John, and Slavery

By: David Quigley

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Jay, John, and Slavery

John Jay (1745–1829)
was the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

He served two terms as governor of New York and, along with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, wrote The Federalist Papers. Jay helped establish central patterns in the constitutional, diplomatic, and political life of the United States. In his half-century-long public career, Jay's ideas about African Americans and his beliefs about slavery set him apart from most of his fellow founding fathers. At times downright contradictory, Jay's public statements about race and slavery revealed a Revolutionary who struggled for decades with the full implications of the American War of Independence.

John Jay's father had been one of colonial New York's leading slaveholders, and Jay himself owned slaves into the nineteenth century. As early as the 1777 state constitutional convention in Kingston, Jay argued for the inclusion of a gradual manumission clause in the founding compact. One year after the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed that all men were “created equal,” Jay fought to make that doctrine a reality in his home state. While he was unable to convince his fellow delegates in Kingston, Jay was insistent during the American Revolution on the need for gradual emancipation. For the next two decades, as most other states north of the Mason-Dixon Line abolished slavery, Jay struggled to bring emancipation to New York.

In the wake of American success in the War of Independence and the end of British rule in Manhattan, a number of leading New Yorkers came together in the mid-1780s to organize formal opposition to the continued existence of slavery in the state. Jay contributed to the 1785 formation of the New York Manumission Society, and his colleagues elected him as the first president. Along with Hamilton, Jay saw slave emancipation as a central goal of post-Revolutionary society. His interpretation of the recently completed Revolution led him to the conclusion that American society had to renounce slavery. Jay would remain long involved with the New York Manumission Society and its work at both the city and state levels. He was a founder of the African Free School in Manhattan. For Jay, the school's educational work offered the best chance of cultivating a respectable class of black New Yorkers and overcoming long-standing racial prejudice among white Manhattanites. George Washington appointed Jay chief justice of the new Supreme Court in 1789. As the new government convened in lower Manhattan, Jay helped reconcile local and national elites. One of his first steps as chief justice was to resign from the presidency of the New York Manumission Society.

Involvement with the society became one of the defining features of Jay's career as a politician in New York. When he ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1792, his opponents attacked his involvement with the group throughout the campaign. New York State politics was deeply divided over issues of race and slavery in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In 1795 Jay was elected to the first of two terms as governor; wary of leading the charge for emancipation, in 1796 Jay deferred to sympathetic legislators to propose an act providing for gradual manumission.

Throughout his long public career Jay remained committed to a gradualist approach to the abolition of slavery. He often commented on what he perceived to be the relatively benign system of slavery in New York; he himself owned slaves from 1777 through the early nineteenth century. As late as 1798, even as he helped lead gradual emancipation through the legislature, Jay owned six slaves. He never voiced a sense of urgency with regard to emancipation, preferring to advocate gradualism as the answer to the problem. As an Episcopalian, Jay maintained a clear sense of himself as distinctly more moderate than Quakers and others who sought an immediate end to slavery.

Beyond local New York politics and his position as chief justice, Jay played a crucial role in the nation's early diplomacy. He was a leading member of the American delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Paris, ending the War of Independence in 1783. Working alongside both northern and southern leaders, Jay advanced a series of proposals designed to limit the slave trade and allow for the emancipation of a number of North American slaves. In particular, he opposed the contention that slaves who had run off with the British should be returned to their nominal American owners.

In 1793 Jay traveled to London as a special minister for the U.S. government. The wars of the French Revolution were beginning, and international conflict threatened American interests across the Atlantic; the preceding two years had witnessed the British seizure of three hundred American ships. Jay negotiated an agreement with the British, which the Senate ratified in 1795. The pact, known as Jay's Treaty, emboldened Republican opposition to the Federalists and made Jay a deeply polarizing figure in national politics. One key dimension of southern and Republican opposition to Jay's Treaty was its abandonment of the interests of American slaveholders; Jay had been unable to secure British compensation for slaves seized and liberated during the American Revolution. Southern supporters of slavery led verbal attacks on Jay and the Federalists in 1795.

John Jay's sons, Peter and William, emerged as leading critics of slavery in the early nineteenth century. Peter Jay was an especially forceful critic of the decision of the 1821 New York State Constitutional Convention to link mass enfranchisement of poor whites to a racially discriminatory property qualification aimed solely at African Americans.

In 1791 Jay wrote to his son Peter, “Mankind is the same in all ages, however diversified by color, manners, or customs.” This belief in fundamental human equality seems to have grown stronger over the course of John Jay's public career, inspiring him to work for gradual emancipation and setting him apart from most of the other founding fathers.

See also American Revolution; Black Loyalists; Education; Episcopalians (Anglicans) and African Americans; Gradual Emancipation; Hamilton, Alexander, and African Americans; Madison, James, and African Americans; New York African Free Schools; New York Manumission Society; Race, Theories of; and Supreme Court.

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