Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York

By David N. Gellman

Winner of the Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship from the New York Academy of History.

In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic.

Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice.

John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles.

The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Three Hills
• Release date: Apr 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501715853

Book preview

Cover: Liberty’s Chain, SLAVERY, ABOLITION, AND THE JAY FAMILY OF NEW YORK by David N. Gellman

LIBERTY’S CHAIN

SLAVERY, ABOLITION, AND THE JAY FAMILY OF NEW YORK

DAVID N. GELLMAN

THREE HILLS

AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For Hannah and Ben

You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames.

—Bruce Springsteen

CONTENTS

Jay Family Trees

List of African American Individuals in Jay Households

Maps

A Note to the Reader on Language

Prologue

PARTONE: SLAVERY ANDREVOLUTION

1. Disruptions

2. Rising Stars

3. Negotiations

4. Nation-Building

5. Mastering Paradox

6. Sharing the Flame

PARTTWO: ABOLITIONISM

7. Joining Forces

8. A Conservative on the Inside

9. Breaking Ranks

10. The Condition of Free People of Color

11. Soul and Nation

PARTTHREE: EMANCIPATION

12. Uncompromised

13. Parting Shots

14. Civil Wars

15. Reconstructed

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

The book covers multiple generations of the Jay family, from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. The first page of this family tree centers John Jay, charting the Jay family from his grandfather’s immigration to New York through the generation of John and Susan Livingston’s offspring.

FIGURE 0.1. Jay Family Tree, Part 1: Centering on John Jay, this portion of the tree charts the Jay family from his grandfather’s immigration to New York in the late seventeenth century to John Jay and Susan Livingston’s offspring, born in the late eighteenth century. Courtesy of Beth Wilkerson.

The second half of the chart emphasizes the families of William Jay and his wife Augusta McVickar and that of their son John Jay II and his wife Eleanor Field. The tree descends to encompass writer and reformer John Jay Chapman.

FIGURE 0.2. Jay Family Tree, Part 2: Emphasizing the nineteenth-century families of William Jay and Augusta McVickar and that of their son John Jay II and Eleanor Field, the tree extends to include writer and reformer John Jay Chapman. Courtesy of Beth Wilkerson.

LIST OF AFRICAN AMERICAN INDIVIDUALS IN JAY HOUSEHOLDS

Below is a list of African Americans mentioned in this book, organized by Jay households. Dates of birth and death are included when available. Names of people associated with more than one household are repeated, with key events like manumission or giving birth listed in the household where they occurred. If the person held or attained a status other than enslaved, that is also noted.

Limits in information and the social structures of slavery and gradual emancipation make it difficult, as well as anachronistic, to construct a family tree including all the African Americans working and living in Jay households. Only in some instances, which are covered in the book, is it clear that the people listed here were related. This list should not be considered parallel to the family tree on the preceding pages, although the information should be read in tandem. The organization by Jay household is not meant to suggest that the agency and familial relationships of African Americans in the narrative were not central to their experiences or of lesser importance than relationships among Jay family members. Even so, the structure of the following data speaks to the vulnerability and isolation that shaped lives lived in slavery and afterward.

Augustus and Anne Marie Bayard Jay Household

Ben (transported to Madeira)

Peter and Mary Van Cortlandt Jay Household

Brash (transported to Madeira, 1741), Hannah, Castor, Peter (aka Peet?), Anthony, Moll, Susan, Kingston, Zilpha (free 1781), Old Plato (free 1781; died 1791), Young Plato, Frank, Clarinda, Old Mary (died 1797), Young Mary

Peter Jay and Mary Duyckinck Jay Households

Susan, Peter Johnson (aka Peet; free 1814), Caesar (free 1824), Sylvia (free 1824)

Anna Maricka Jay Household

Hannah (free 1791)

John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay Household

1774–1784: Abbe (died in France 1783), Claas (aka Massey, who departed with British in 1783?), Benoit (born c. 1765, free c. 1784),

1784–1802: Peet, Essex, Maria, Yaff, David, Benny, Phillis, Frank, Plato, Eliza, Caesar, Dinah (and 2-year-old child), Clarinda (married to Pompey; unnamed child died 1792), Zilpah.

John Jay Household

1802–1829: Zilpah (child under 2 years of age died 1811; free 1817), Clarinda (free by 1820), Chester Tilliston, elder (employee), Chester Tillitson, younger (indentured servant), Jack Pine (indentured servant)

Peter Jay Munro Household

Candice (free 1803), Nelly, Charlot

Peter Augustus Jay Household

Caesar Valentine (servant)

William Jay and Augusta McVickar Jay Household

Clarinda (died 1837), Zilpah

Household of John Jay II and Eleanor Field Jay

Zilpah Montgomery (not listed in census as member of household; died 1872)

The eastern seaboard states from Virginia to southern New England contain several sites where members of the Jay family lived, worked, or engaged key correspondents and significant events. These include, from south to north, Fortress Monroe, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; Coatesville, Pennsylvania; New York City, Albany; and Boston.

FIGURE 0.3. Key eastern seaboard sites in the Jay family’s abolitionist and reform worlds. Courtesy of Beth Wilkerson.

The principal sites of the Jays’ activities in their long-standing home county of Westchester are depicted here. In the inset, moving south to north, are New Rochelle, Rye, White Plains, Mt. Kisco, and Bedford, north of which lies the Jay family’s homestead. Other key sites in New York State are marked. Arrayed up the Hudson River are New York City, Fishkill, Poughkeepsie, Kingston, and Albany, and on the westward Erie Canal route are Utica, Peterboro, Auburn, and Rochester.

FIGURE 0.4. Key Westchester County and New York State Jay-connected sites of enslavement, political work, and antislavery activism. Courtesy of Beth Wilkerson.

A NOTE TO THE READER ON LANGUAGE

Language shapes history and our understanding of history. When writing about an institution predicated on racism, choices about language have a bearing on the interpretation advanced by the historian and on the experience of the reader. It is important not to reinforce the language of subjugation, exploitation, and indignity that the past projects into the present. Guided by that principle, I have made some decisions about language that I wish to briefly explain.

My strong preference is to refer to people by their names whenever possible. Since racialized statuses and identities define every single person whose story I share—there is nothing color-blind about American history—I also regularly refer to African Americans, Black people, Black New Yorkers, whites, and white New Yorkers in exactly these terms. This choice reflects not only current and emerging usage standards but also the historical ways in which origins, descent, and physical identifiers shaped life experiences, as enforced by law and culture. When a white person’s ethnicity, religion, or ancestral origin is significant, I have described that person accordingly—for example, as a Huguenot.

When referring to people made subject to the laws, practices, demands, and abuses of the institution of slavery, I often used the word enslaved as both a noun and an adjective. This word draws attention to the fact that a person’s status or subordination was imposed—more to the point, that some people imposed enslavement on others. That such an imposition was a matter of course and custom for many years in many places does not change the importance of drawing attention to that fact. When writing about slavery as an institution, a concept, and a metaphor, I generally use the words slavery and slave. I also use these words when drawing attention to the perspective of the people claiming ownership or enforcing the subordination of a particular individual or group of individuals. The same is true when I use the word master or slaveholder, even though these terms are in no way morally neutral characterizations. All people who claimed ownership of others were also enslavers.

When quoting historical documents, which I do quite a lot, I retained the usage and spelling of the original. Capitalization at the beginning of quotations has been standardized for grammatical consistency but has otherwise been preserved from the original. The language that the people quoted in this book used to describe themselves and others overlaps with but, unsurprisingly, is not identical to our own. The gamut of cruelty, callousness, caring, and commitment expressed by members of the Jay family and others whom I quoted is bound to strike readers in a variety of ways. When writing about themselves and others publicly or privately, authors of whatever race and class often had specific political or moral intent; word choices frequently expressed varying degrees of privilege, habit, and common parlance. I tried to avoid repeating patently offensive language while still presenting evidence of the historical language used to describe enslavement, emancipation, and freedom.

There are two glaring exceptions regarding offensive language. In chapter 12, I quote a diarist who uses a word that drives home racist contempt for John Jay II’s efforts to advance the rights of Black Episcopalians. At the beginning of chapter 10, which focuses on mid-nineteenth-century racism, I reproduce a lightly edited version of a deeply troubling story that abolitionist David Lee Child shared in a November 1841 edition of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. The story hinged on the public use of the same word the diarist in chapter 12 used privately. The word was meant to wound and offend then, as it most assuredly does now. Child forced his readers to confront racial obscenity as a form of aggressively harmful language and action. I quote this language with the same trust that abolitionist Child had in the good faith and solidarity of his readers as they struggled against American racism. Their struggle remains ours.

Prologue

Founding

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.

PART ONE

Slavery and Revolution

CHAPTER 1

Disruptions

Pierre Jay sent his eighteen-year-old son Auguste to Africa in 1683 but, John Jay wrote more than a century later, to what part and for what purpose is now unknown.¹ A prosperous merchant who conducted business from La Rochelle on France’s Atlantic coast, Pierre had cosmopolitan impulses. He previously sent his son for six years of education in England.

Perhaps John Jay did not want to confront the distinct possibility that the Jays’ business in Africa had something to do with slavery. French Protestants, or Huguenots, like the Jays had played a role in the nascent stages of the French slave and West Indian trade; for example, the prominent Huguenot Jean-Baptiste du Casse at one time served as governor of the French Senegal Company. And La Rochelle was France’s leading slave trading port in the late seventeenth century. France, however, was only a minor player in the transatlantic slave trade in the 1680s; La Rochelle usually sent only one or two voyages from Africa to the Caribbean each year during this era, and none listed any Jays as owner or captain. Still, while in Africa, Auguste could have witnessed the embarkation of hundreds of slaves on the Etoile d’Or or the Conquis, two ships likely outfitted in La Rochelle in 1683 and bound for the Americas. Given that Europeans set out for the Americas with more than a million slaves in the seventeenth century alone, Pierre and Auguste surely would have understood the trade in enslaved Africans as one of the investment prospects available for merchants in La Rochelle and elsewhere. Whatever Pierre had in mind for Auguste’s sojourn in Africa, the Jays took part in a process through which Europeans probed for profit on a continent increasingly integrated into a burgeoning Atlantic trading system in which the sale of Africans featured significantly.²

It was events in his native France, however, that soon propelled Auguste across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1685, Louis XIV’s regime renounced the toleration of French Protestantism, prompting the young man to sail westward to the English colonies. In North America, the Jays’ story would intertwine soon enough with the people who survived or whose forebears survived brutal ocean crossing on ships like the Etoile d’Or and the Conquis. Long before John Jay began to ponder the morality of slavery, his grandfather Auguste Jay and his father Peter Jay made their way upward in a society that embraced slavery and its fruits.³

Flight and Arrival

By the time Auguste returned to La Rochelle from Africa in 1685 or 1686, the increasingly tenuous world of French Protestantism had collapsed, its loyal adherents in flight. The circumstances of Huguenot life, however, had not always been so grim. The Edict of Nantes, promulgated in 1598 by the French king Henry IV, allowed French Protestants to continue worshipping under the Calvinist doctrines that had gained currency earlier in the sixteenth century as the Protestant Reformation grew in strength. Yet toleration began to erode in the 1660s. Louis XIV and his ministers calculatedly constricted Huguenot religious and secular life. They forbade Protestant churches from holding national meetings, shuttered churches that could not supply evidence of having opened prior to the 1598 Edict of Nantes, imposed restrictions on Huguenot schools, prohibited Protestants from practicing law, and denied Protestant doctors the right to treat Catholics. Perhaps Pierre Jay decided to send his son for an English education and then to Africa for mercantile work to prepare him for the inevitable and dramatic constriction of Huguenot religious and secular opportunities. In October 1685, Louis XIV intensified anti-Protestant terror already underway by revoking the Edict of Nantes. Although most of Louis’s eight hundred thousand Protestant subjects knuckled under to the effort to compel Catholic conversion, the stream of Huguenots pouring out of France swelled after 1685. In all, an estimated two hundred thousand Huguenots fled France because of Louis XIV’s persecutions—including Pierre Jay and his family.⁴

Before revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Pierre anticipated this final blow, arranging for his family in early 1685 to flee to London, a Protestant city in a Protestant country. According to John Jay’s written account, Pierre was able to send many of the family’s possessions to the English capital and to depart with a cargo of iron. These arrangements allowed the Jays to avoid even temporary penury, unlike some of their less fortunate fellow refugees.⁵

Auguste took a less typical path to safety. Returning to La Rochelle from Africa after his family had already departed and finding the religious situation untenable, he boarded a ship that took him to Charles Town, South Carolina, the primary port of an English proprietary colony barely more than two decades old. Auguste was not alone among Huguenots in seeking refuge outside Europe. Thousands traveled to English and Dutch possessions, with those bound for English colonies often stopping first in England. Of the approximately two thousand Huguenot refugees who came to the North American colonies, about five hundred went to South Carolina, many of them merchants and artisans by trade. The Carolina proprietors had actively recruited Huguenots with French-language pamphlets extolling economic prospects in the colony. Charles Town’s population in 1685 was not even one thousand, so Huguenots quickly made up a significant proportion of the port city’s residents, even as some spread out to the hinterland to take up agricultural pursuits.⁶

Huguenots enjoyed remarkable success in South Carolina, integrating into a political and economic structure increasingly organized around slaveholding. As early as 1700, two-thirds of estates of deceased Huguenots listed slaves. Discrimination against Huguenots was mitigated in part because, as white Protestants, they could identify and be identified as part of the dominant group fending off potential dangers from Native Americans and the emerging Black slave majority. As the colony’s fortunes rose rapidly with the adaptation of rice as a staple crop and the accelerating importation of slaves to do the brutal work of irrigation and harvesting in the swampy lowlands, Huguenots amassed land and slaves at a pace that exceeded that of their English fellow colonists.⁷

Auguste Jay did not stay in South Carolina long enough to enjoy the opportunities pursued by his former countrymen, although his quick departure had no connection to the presence of slavery. Huguenot Calvinist teachings did not prohibit slaveholding among French émigrés; indeed, part of the appeal for the Huguenot arrivals in South Carolina was the chance to acquire land and slaves. Had Auguste remained in Charleston, given his family’s wealth and connections, as well as his talent, he likely would have experienced material success along with the fellowship of French expatriates. According to family lore, however, Auguste had a great dislike of the hot climate of South Carolina; he found prospects wanting in the recently established city of Philadelphia, which lacked a Huguenot community, and chose to settle instead in New York. Along with Boston, New York was a major destination of French Protestant refugees.⁸

His new and permanent home, although not destined to become a plantation slave society like South Carolina, incorporated enslaved Africans from its early decades as a Dutch colony. Enslaved people were a critical part of the labor force both during the Dutch and the early English period, and the system of slavery grew more stringent in the years following the English capture of New Netherland in 1664. By the time Auguste arrived in the 1680s, freedom through conversion to Christianity and working for the Dutch West India Company was but a memory, and the path to Black freedom had begun to narrow. The numbers of slaves and their percentage of the total population, meanwhile, were also on the rise—from approximately eight hundred people of African descent in 1664, making up one-tenth of the colonial population, to more than two thousand slaves in 1698, or approximately 12 percent of the population.⁹

Ascent, Assimilation, Enslavement

Auguste, who changed his name to Augustus, correctly anticipated that New York was the kind of place where a well-connected Huguenot merchant with an English education might succeed. But he had certainly not picked a stable or simple society as a place to begin his ascent. From its earliest Dutch days, the colony exhibited a diversity that contemporaries could hardly fail to notice and that has caught the attention of historians ever since. Dutch authorities, some more grudgingly than others, supervised a province containing Belgian Walloons, English Puritans, Scandinavians, Germans, Sephardic Jews, as well as African slaves.

New York in the 1680s roiled with religious and ethnic conflict that echoed the contests for authority that had sent Augustus and his fellow Huguenots into exile. James II, the newly installed king of England, was a Catholic determined to impose imperial order, though not his religious faith, over many of his North American colonies. His plan included creating a single Dominion of New England, which would place every colony north of Pennsylvania under a unified administrative structure. This reorganization stoked resentment among colonists who were highly suspicious of the motives of the Catholic king and who resented the loss of autonomy that the Dominion entailed. When news filtered back from England of the so-called Glorious Revolution, in which James’s daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange crossed the English Channel to reclaim the realm for Protestantism and parliamentary government, American colonists, including New Yorkers, wasted little time toppling the colonial officials whom James had set over them.¹⁰

The political crisis that ensued in New York revealed the deep ethnic fissures and religious passions that Augustus Jay would have to interpret and negotiate to succeed in his new home. A militia captain and merchant named Jacob Leisler, himself a militant German Calvinist immigrant, jumped headlong into the political vacuum. He saw himself as an avenger and guardian against the sort of anti-Protestant atrocities perpetrated by the likes of Louis XIV on the Huguenots. He and his more politically radical colleague Jacob Milbourne rallied poorer, more ordinary Dutch inhabitants to their banner, some of whom continued to harbor resentment at the increasing English cultural dominance in the province. The anti-elite tone of the Leisler movement alarmed the merchant class, including many merchants of Dutch ancestry. During Leisler’s Rebellion, Huguenots, like the Dutch, split along lines of class and wealth—the poorer Huguenots identifying with Leisler’s anti-Catholicism, the richer ones disturbed by the populism that led to the violent harassment of New York City’s merchant elite. These elites were well pleased when the new monarchs William and Mary rejected any affinity for the Leislerians; indeed, the king’s newly appointed governor saw to it that Leisler and Milbourne were hung for their transgressions, a far cry from the result that the impassioned Protestant leaders had imagined. Commercial, political, and social stability—not a pan-Atlantic Protestant religious campaign—animated the English crown in the wake of James II’s failed regime.¹¹

Augustus’s economic ambitions and his social affiliations in the coming years suggest that this victim of Catholic persecution was less interested in settling religious or cultural scores than in taking advantage of opportunities for commercial success and social mobility. In 1697, Augustus married Anna Marie Bayard, whose uncle Nicholas Bayard had been one of Leisler’s staunchest detractors and who bore the brunt of lower-status Dutch residents’ resentment for Leisler’s ultimate undoing. Of French Protestant extraction, the Bayards had settled in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century before coming to New York. Anne Marie was a grandniece of the famed former Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant, who had owned many slaves. It was a match that brought Augustus wealth, status, and affiliation with some of the most important families in the colony.¹²

Augustus, like other Huguenots, was also able to take advantage of the international Huguenot trading networks that the post–Edict of Nantes diaspora facilitated even as he assimilated into English New York. In the eighteenth century, the Jays would enjoy a particularly close trading relationship with Stephen Peloquin of Bristol, England, who had married Augustus’s sister in England. Augustus’s marriage into the Anglicizing Dutch elite did not compromise such networks, but rather expanded them in an age when having cultural and familial ties made it much easier to maintain the trust and credit necessary for fruitful long-distance commercial relationships.¹³

Yet, like many French Protestants in the Anglo-American colonies, Augustus did not feel constrained by a loyalty to explicitly Huguenot institutions. The Huguenot church, of which Augustus was a member, actually grew by 1695 to be the second largest in New York City, two years before his marriage to Anna Marie. Even so, their wedding took place in the Dutch church, a sign of his denominational flexibility; the couple baptized some of their children in the French and others in the Dutch church. In the 1720s, Augustus broke with the Huguenot church after a scandal involving its minister Louis Rou. Rou married a fourteen-year-old after his first wife passed away, a move that provoked attempts by lay leaders to remove him and provided the pretext for Jay to decamp to the Trinity Church. Established in 1697, Trinity served as the flagship of New York’s established Anglican Church and became one of Manhattan’s landmark structures. Augustus embraced his new religious affiliation, serving as a member of Trinity’s vestry from 1727–1746, further confirming his elite status and cultural anglicization.¹⁴

In the years before Augustus joined Trinity, the Anglican congregation had attempted to bring Africans into the congregation. Elias Neau operated a school from 1703 until his death in 1722 for the purpose of converting slaves to Christianity under the auspices of the Anglican Church’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). Like Jay, Neau was a Huguenot refugee who came to Manhattan to pursue his ambitions as a merchant. He found his way into the Anglican Church after surviving the harrowing experience of being captured by French privateers, serving as an enslaved oarsman on a French galley ship, and then spending more than two years in a French prison. When Neau finally returned to New York, his strong religious convictions led him to become an official representative of the SPG and to launch his school.

Although Neau was hardly an abolitionist pioneer, his story indicates the potential and the limitations of liberalizing approaches to slavery among the geographically mobile, culturally malleable class of mercantile New York Huguenots like Jay. Both African slaves and European masters had reasons to be skeptical of the school. Slaves found that the binary cosmology of sin and salvation resonated poorly with the Akan spiritual worldview that many brought with them from West Africa. Masters feared the spread of notions of spiritual equality to their slaves and worried that converts to Christianity might claim a right to freedom. Neau, himself a slave owner, worked with the provincial legislature to pass a law affirming that baptism did not make slaves free. Yet Neau’s persistence in spreading the gospel to slaves showed some results. He reported instructing more than two hundred enslaved students during his two decades of teaching. No other New York church in these decades or for many years afterward took a similar interest in the spiritual lives of slaves. Although Jay’s name does not appear on the list of masters whose slaves attended the school or received baptism, his wife’s uncle Col. Bayard had a slave catechized by Neau. Tantalizing but inconclusive as to Augustus’s opinions about slave conversion is a December 1722 appeal by officers of Trinity Church for the SPG to dispatch a new catechist to replace the recently deceased Neau. The request drew attention to a vast increase of Children & Indians & Negro servants who cannot without such assistance be so well instructed in the Principles of Christianity.¹⁵ The Jays’ new church was not indifferent to the spiritual identity of nonwhites while not questioning the institution of slavery itself.

Neau’s mission notwithstanding, the priorities for white New Yorkers regarding slavery were profit, exploitation, and control. As in South Carolina, New York Huguenots embraced slaveholding. French Protestants in the rural Westchester County town of New Rochelle, founded by Huguenots, and those in New York City were more likely to hold slaves than were Dutch and English New Yorkers. In 1698, slaves comprised more than 18 percent of the population of New Rochelle, where almost one-quarter of the white households owned slaves. In New York City, half the Huguenot households owned slaves. The disproportionate percentage of Huguenots who were merchants might account for their high levels of participation in the ranks of slaveholders. Slaveholding may be seen as reflecting the widely held desire among Huguenots to join other New Yorkers in holding important levers of economic advancement and social status.¹⁶

The spectacular rise of sugar production in the West Indies during the early decades of the eighteenth century gave the Manhattan port a significant boost, to the benefit of merchants such as Augustus Jay. New York businesses supplied the grains, meat, and naval stores that West Indians demanded and refined sugar. Merchants, including Augustus Jay, profited from the business generated by such exchanges; an estimated 50 percent of ships embarking and entering into Manhattan’s harbor in the early eighteenth century came or went to the West Indies, and others carried goods between colonies that would eventually find their way to the sugar-producing islands. Even a merchant primarily oriented toward European trade would gain from the increased wealth and the multiplication and broadening of opportunities that a lively West Indian trade generated for the city.¹⁷

The slave trade itself also was a source of profit. Augustus served a merchant apprenticeship with Frederick Philipse, a prominent member of the ethnically Dutch, Anglicized elite and a member of the governor’s council who had butted heads with Jacob Leisler. Philipse owned slave ships that made nine African voyages between 1685 and 1700. In most instances, his vessels traveled all the way to Madagascar and the southeast coast of Africa and then delivered their human cargo to New York and elsewhere. Philipse boarded approximately twelve hundred slaves to the Americas during this period, of which one-sixth may have died along the way.¹⁸

In one dramatic documented instance, Augustus Jay facilitated, or at least attempted to, Philipse’s enterprises off the East African coast, scheming to mix the legal business of slave trading with the illegal business of trading with pirates. Philipse enlisted Augustus Jay to help him sell some of the nonhuman East India trade goods that he had acquired from his pirate connections. Frederick Philipse’s son Adolph, aboard the New York Merchant, met Augustus, who was on board Philipse’s ship the Frederick, to make a nighttime transfer of cargo. Augustus then sailed to Hamburg, Germany, where the dubious cargo would have been sold, if not for the intervention of a British diplomat there. Meanwhile approximately seventy slaves sailed legally to New York.¹⁹

This was the world in which Augustus Jay made his fortune, one built on networks of trust, trade, and even intrigue. Whatever the extent of his involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, the burgeoning trade with the West Indies presented Augustus with opportunities to import slaves from the Caribbean as part of his mercantile business. In 1717, a ship he owned with three others brought four slaves into New York. Another ship, the Mary, which he co-owned with his son-in-law Pierre Valette and two others, carried sixty-four slaves from Jamaica in four voyages, two in 1725 and two in 1727. The last of these voyages alone brought thirty slaves. The human cargo’s arrival in spring and summer may have made the adjustment from the climate of the tropics to that of the mainland less severe, but yet another departure and sea-borne exposure added to the suffering of the enslaved.²⁰

Augustus’s trans-shipment of Jamaican slaves met a demand for slave labor and a sustained eighteenth-century quest by New York merchants for slave trade profits. In the six decades prior to the American Revolution, an estimated 151 slaving voyages connected New York to Africa, 60 of which likely imported slaves from Africa into New York, with others transporting slaves to the West Indies. Most of the voyages bringing Africans directly to New York occurred from the late 1740s forward. Commerce with the sugar islands of the West Indies was undeniably a huge economic boon, but only a tiny proportion, likely less than 2 percent, of New York shipping tonnage involved trade with Africa. Still, in large cargoes from Africa or small lots from the West Indies, this trade made a significant impact on the size and composition of the province’s slave population. Likely, more than 7,000 slaves entered New York between 1701 and 1774, perhaps 2,800 of whom came straight from Africa.²¹ Those who remained in New York City or were born to enslaved parents there suffered from the port’s brutal working conditions and from minimal attention to their nutritional and health needs. The majority, who worked in the countryside, could anticipate a life of drudgery in the house and field under the watchful eyes of their white masters.²²

Like most slave regimes, New York’s was built on conflict and the sharpening of lines. Only people of African descent and, at least in theory, Indians born out of state could be enslaved. Indentured servants had time-limited contracts and protection from abusive masters that slaves did not enjoy. Slaves could not engage in commerce or gather together in groups of more than three. They could be publicly whipped and in certain cases executed. Legislators limited manumissions and curtailed interactions between slaves and free Blacks.²³

If there was any illusion that slaves accepted the full raft of legal disabilities imposed on them by New York’s white authorities or their masters’ exploitive ownership, that illusion was dramatically shattered in April 1712. An estimated twenty-four Manhattan slaves launched the first major slave insurrection in mainland English North America. Under the leadership of men recently imported from Africa’s Gold Coast, the slaves put an outhouse to flames and then assaulted the whites who rushed to fight the fire, using guns and blades they had secretly accumulated. Two Huguenots were among the nine whites killed, including Augustus Grasset who was run through the neck with a knife.

After subduing the rebels, some who escaped capture through suicide, authorities undertook a brutal judicial repression. A dragnet of arrests led to more than twenty executions, most by hanging, but also by burning at the stake of one slave, the starvation in chains of another, and even the breaking of a slave named Clause on the wheel. In the revolt’s aftermath, city and provincial authorities tightened already stringent laws and added further impediments to manumission. Many white New Yorkers blamed the Huguenot-turned-Anglican catechist Neau for stoking the flames of resistance and sought to limit his future enrollment by restricting the ability of slaves to move around the city at night, the only time they had to attend his school. Although teaching Christianity to slaves retained enough support to keep the school open, no one in authority in New York raised the more basic question about whether people, converted or otherwise, should be slaves at all.²⁴

Bound and Unbound

As Augustus and Anna Marie Jay’s children came of age, the family continued to integrate into a provincial elite and an economic order dependent on slavery in myriad ways. Augustus’s second daughter Marie married Pierre Valette, whose brother was a wealthy Jamaican. Augustus’s third daughter François and his only son Peter married siblings in the Van Cortlandt family, prominent New Yorkers to whom they were already related through their mother. Jacobus Van Cortlandt, the father of spouses Frederick (Françoise) and Mary (Peter), traded for West Indian slaves, selling them in New York City and to nearby farmers. The Van Cortlandts in turn were related to the Philipse family, one of the province’s wealthiest families, with extensive slaveholdings in New York, as well as the West Indies, and, as we have seen, for a time a vigorous presence in the Africa–to–New York slave trade.²⁵

By the time Peter Jay married Mary Van Cortlandt in 1728, he was already active in his father’s international trading business, having traveled to England and elsewhere in Europe to strengthen ties with the family’s transatlantic connections. He soon would also join his father in the Trinity vestry.²⁶ Peter’s ledger from 1725 shows trading activities with Bristol, England; Jamaica; Surinam; and Barbados. Foodstuffs were a key part of his business, as was bringing finished goods from England to the New York and New Jersey hinterland. The Indian trade in animal skins also figured in his exchanges.

Peter Jay joined his father and brothers-in-law Pierre Valette and Frederick Van Cortlandt in at least one investment that brought slaves into New York. Between 1730 and 1733, their co-owned vessel, the Dolphin, carried forty-seven enslaved people northward from Jamaica, Barbados, Curaçao, and Antigua. Customs records show that the Dolphin imported two more slaves in 1740. As on Augustus’s sloop the Mary in the 1720s, the slaves trans-shipped on the Dolphin were likely recent arrivals from Africa, enduring one more disorienting leg of their brutal journey. Thrown in with trade goods such as casks of rum and sugar, human cargo originally shipped to the Americas from the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra, or West Central Africa were another means by which merchants like the Jays could elevate their profits by filling their brig with return goods from the West Indies.²⁷

The trans-shipping of slaves was not a passive investment. Indeed, Peter’s role in trafficking in children found its way into his ledger. An entry from the mid-1720s noted a payment for 15 Spanish Pistols & a Negro Boy from Jamaica. The Spanish coins could presumably be used in another transaction, but he may have kept the boy for his own household. Peter also appears to have facilitated the sale of a Negro girl to a Martin Hoffman in Esopus, a town up the Hudson River in Ulster County. If not central to their business, the mercantile economy that slavery and the slave trade made possible was central to Peter’s and Augustus’s prosperity.²⁸

Services provided by the enslaved were also essential features of life among the city’s mercantile elite. As the proportion of Black Manhattanites increased to 20 percent of the population during the first decades of the eighteenth century and surged past two thousand in total, they formed a network of dockworkers, artisanal laborers, and domestic servants. In an age where something as simple as getting water for tea required a trip to the pump and some heavy lifting, and virtually every act of cooking and cleaning had to be done by hand, there was no end to the work that a master could command a slave to do. The Jays and Van Cortlandts were surely no different in this regard from other white Manhattanites of means. Peter’s ledger records a payment due to his father-in-law Jacobus Van Cortlandt for one year’s Lodging & boarding & Washing of himself, his white Servt: & three Negro slaves.²⁹

Slaveholders like the Jays, Philipses, Roosevelts, and DeLanceys, however, did not and could not exert unlimited control over their slaves. Mobility was a key aspect of their utility. Not only did slaves have to get to and from places of work but they also had to run errands; fetch wood, water, and foodstuffs for their masters; dispose of waste; and carry messages on their masters’ behalf. When there was less work to be done, in the evenings and on Sundays, slaves, ignoring laws to the contrary, gathered to socialize with one another and with other members of the lower class in this polyglot Atlantic port. Slaves caroused with alcohol to lift their spirits and divert their psychological and physical pain, but they also plotted organized theft and fencing rings. African New Yorkers also maintained communal and religious rituals of their own, some around burial rites and others involving the maintenance of organized secret societies, an adaptation of West African practices.³⁰

The irrepressible human urge to defy authority made Manhattan’s slaves an incendiary and potentially revolutionary threat to the comfortable world that the Jays and their more prominent relatives had made for themselves. After a series of fires broke out in March 1741, authorities uncovered what they believed to be a widespread conspiracy among the city’s slaves not only to burn down the city but also to seize control of it. In the most lurid version, the slaves planned to kill their male masters and take their former female masters for wives.

Conditions in New York earlier in the winter of 1741 had stoked white fears of vulnerability to this sort of challenge from the margins of society. The colony’s elites were riven by political factions over how much authority the royal governor should exercise. The winter of 1740–41 had choked with ice the harbor and rivers on which the city relied for trade, setting everyone further on edge. Meanwhile, Great Britain and Spain had been at war since 1739, making New York a target of the British Empire’s Catholic rival. Just two years before, South Carolina’s slaves, taking advantage of English–Spanish tensions, launched a rebellion. The suspicious fires in March 1741 sparked an intensive investigation for the culprits.³¹

A special court was called to track down and punish the alleged plotters, and it quickly seized on four key leaders among the Black population: Caesar Varick, Prince Auboyneau, Quaco Roosevelt, and Cuffee Philipse. The court, led by city recorder Daniel Horsmanden, pieced together a conspiracy that would also ensnare white tavern keeper John Hughson and, ultimately, John Ury, supposedly a crypto-Catholic priest with base sectarian motives, as white masterminds of the alleged plot. The trials produced terrifying results. By the time the investigation ended, New York’s authorities had executed thirty slaves and transported more than eighty out of the colony.³² Peter Jay’s slave Brash was one of those sent to the Portuguese-held island of Madeira.

The stories of Brash and of Augustus Jay’s slave Ben reveal how difficult it is to separate fact from judicially coerced fiction, while at the same time indicating that Manhattan’s urban milieu provided opportunities to defy the law and perhaps contemplate rebellion. On June 25, 1741, Brash informed a judge that, a year before, Ben had brought him to Hughson’s home, where Brash learned from the two of them of a plan to rise against the town, to burn the houses and to kill the people. Hughson, according to Brash’s testimony, got Ben and Brash to swear that they would set their master’s houses on fire, and murder their masters and mistresses, having them kiss a book that he produced for the purposes of this bloody oath. Ben recruited a slave named Jack to the plot and later four others whom he named as well. Hughson wanted Ben and Brash to steal weapons from their masters, but the best Brash came up with was a knife from another master’s cook.³³

Brash’s admission may have saved his life, which is one of the reasons to suspect its veracity. By the time he confessed, sixteen slaves already had been hung or burned at the stake for their