Liberty’s Chain

Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York

David N. Gellman

• Publisher: Three Hills
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501715853
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

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 o...

Table of contents

• Jay Family Trees
• List of African American Individuals in Jay Households
• Maps
• A Note to the Reader on Language
• Prologue
• Part One: Slavery and Revolution
• Part Two: Abolitionism
• Part Three: Emancipation
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index