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

DePauw University historian Gellman (Emancipating New York) delivers a comprehensive account of slavery’s place in the lives of four generations of founding father John Jay’s family. He begins with Jay’s Huguenot grandfather, Augustus Jay, who arrived in New York in the 1680s, and notes that the family’s ownership of enslaved people was a marker of their “social ascendancy.” Though John Jay owned slaves and remained “largely silent” on the issue while advocating for ratification of the U.S. Constitution, his involvement in foreign affairs fostered his abolitionist leanings, according to Gellman. In 1785, Jay cofounded “one of the world’s first anti-slavery organizations”; he also enacted a gradual emancipation law as governor of New York in the 1790s. In the 1830s and ’40s, Jay’s son William Jay and grandson John Jay II were “radicals” who called for “slavery’s immediate end.” Interwoven with the Jay family biography are intriguing and tragic details about the people they enslaved, including a woman named Abbe who fell ill and died after she was jailed for running away from John Jay’s household in France. Scrupulously documented and lucidly written, this is an eye-opening look at the complex legacy of slavery in America. (Apr.)