Jac-Jay: Jackson through Jay

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


JACKSON, Francis, 1789-1861, Boston, Massachusetts, merchant, social reformer, abolitionist.  President of the Anti-Slavery Society.  Supported the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS).  Generously supported abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp and their anti-slavery newspaper, the Liberator.  American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) Member, Executive Committee, 1840-1861, Vice President, 1840-1861, Treasurer, 1844-1861.  President, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1840-1860.  (The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. II. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 318)


JACKSON, James Caleb, 1811-1895, New York, abolitionist leader.  Member, Executive Committee, 1840-1841, Corresponding Secretary, 1840-1842, American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS).

(Sorin, 1971, pp. 95-96, 130-131; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 547; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 11, p. 752)

JACKSON, JAMES CALEB (March 28, 1811 July 11, 1895), physician, abolitionist, was born in Manlius, Onondaga County, New York, whither his father, James Jackson, a physician, son of Col. Giles Jackson of Tyringham, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, had moved. The mother of James Caleb was Mary Ann (Elderkin) Jackson, granddaughter of a Connecticut Revolutionary officer, Jedidiah Elderkin. Because of impaired health, the elder James Jackson gave up medicine and retired to a farm when his son was about twelve and at seventeen the latter entered Manlius Academy to prepare for college. The death of his father prevented the completion of his academic work, however, and marrying Lucretia Brewster, September 10, 1830, he definitely abandoned all plans for a college education. Having become interested in the anti-slavery movement, he made the acquaintance of Gerrit Smith [q.v.], who advised him to come to Peterboro, New York. There he settled in 1838 and became an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. In the spring of 1840 he was made the secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He assisted Nathaniel P. Rogers in editing the National Anti-Slavery Standard (founded in June 1840) until Oliver Johnson became editor in June 184r. In the fall of 1840 Jackson lectured in western New York. Gerrit Smith invited him to edit a third-party paper and contributed considerably to its support. With Luther Myrick, he founded the Madison County Abolitionist at Cazenovia, New York, in September 1841. After a year this was sold by the publishers and Jackson moved to Utica where for two years he was editor of the Liberty Press. He then went to Albany and purchase d the Albany Patriot, which he edited until 1846, when poor health caused him to sell the paper to William L. Chaplin. In June 1847, at Macedon Lock, New York, he was one of the sponsors of the Liberty League, a fourth party, which had grown out of the Liberty Party.

During the months of his illness he had been under the care of Dr. S. O. Gleason of Cuba, New York. Long interested in medicine, Jackson soon formed a partnership with Gleason and Theodosia Gilbert. At the head of Skaneateles Lake they opened a hygienic institute known as the "Glen Haven Water Cure." In the winter of 1849-50 Gleason withdrew from the partner ship and in the fall of 1858 Jackson himself left Glen Haven and moved to Dansville, New York. There he opened a water cure that became famous as "Our Home Hygienic Institute." In 1879 he turned over the management of it to his son, Dr. James H. Jackson. Possessing religious convictions concerning the necessity of reform, Jackson was unwearied in his search for conditions that needed remedying. He was an active member of the association for dress reform, and he fought against what he considered the evils of rum and tobacco. He held drug medication to be "the popular delusion of the nineteenth century and the curse of the age"; hydropathy became his favorite reform. For many years he was the assistant editor of The Laws of Life, a periodical devoted to hydropathy and the advertisement of "Our Home." He acquired a reputation among his contemporaries as a popular orator and writer. Of his half-dozen popular books on medicine only one now has a claim to notice: How to Treat the Sick Without Medicine (Dansville, New York, 1868), an exposition of his hydropathic practices, briefly summarized as "'Tis Nature cures the sick." From 1886 to 1895 he lived in North Adams, Massachusetts; his death occurred while he was on a visit to Dansville.

[D. W. Elderkin, Genealogy of the Elderkin Family (copyright 1888); W. P. and F. J. Garrison. William Lloyd Garrison I805-1879 (4 vols., 1885-89); J. H. Smith, History of Livingston County, New York (1881); I789-Dansville- 1902 (n.d.), ed. by A. O. Bunnell; Buffalo Courier, July 12, 1895; MS. letters in Gerrit Smith Miller Collection at Syracuse University.]

F. M-n.


JACKSON, William, 1783-1855, Massachusetts, newspaper publisher, abolitionist, temperance activist.  U.S. Congressman, Whig Party.  Vice president, 1833-1836, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.  Founding member, Liberty Party.  President of the American Missionary Society from 1846-1854.

(Dumond, 1961, p. 286; Abolitionist, Vol. I, No. XII, December, 1833; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III; Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 561)

JACKSON, WILLIAM (September 2, 1783-February 27, 1855), tallow chandler, railway promoter, congressman, the son of Timothy and Sarah (Winchester) Jackson, and said to be a descendant of Edward Jackson, one of the earliest settlers of Cambridge, was born in Newton, Massachusetts. Systematic in his reading and study, he supplemented the elementary education which he received in the town schools. At the age of twenty-one, after three years' experience in a manufactory of soap and candles in Boston, he established himself in th e business, in which, in spite of reverses suffered during the War of 1812, he succeeded in laying the foundations of a modest fortune. He served a term as representative of Boston in the Massachusetts General Court in 1819, retiring at this time from active connection with his tallow chandlery. About 1826 he became greatly interested in railroads. Later as a member of the General Court, 1829-1831, he was an active supporter of railroad projects in Massachusetts, lecturing extensively and writing for many newspapers upon this subject for the next eighteen years. Many of his arguments and predictions which now seem conservative were received with ridicule and abuse at that time when many persons considered canals more advantageous. He participated actively in the construction of several Massachusetts railroads including the Western, the Boston & Worcester, the Boston & Albany, and the New Bedford & Taunton.

Jackson was a member of the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth congresses (1833-37), being elected by Anti-Masonic and National Republican support. He refused to be a candidate for a third term. In 1840 he took part in the organization of the Liberty party, and as their candidate was defeated for the lieutenant-governorship in 1842, 1843, and 1844. His antislavery views led him to support the Free-Soil party after its establishment in 1848. Long convinced of the evils of intoxication, he was active in temperance reform, abolishing, as an employer, the custom of furnishing rum to his employees, and adding the extra sum to the wages paid. He was a founder and deacon of the Eliot Church of Newton, and president of the Ameri-can Missionary Association for the first eight years of its existence, 1846-54. His financial concerns late in life were largely confined to the land company which he organized in 1848 for laying out that part of Newton known as Auburndale, and to two banks, the Newton Savings Bank, founded in 1831, of which he was president from 1831 to 1835, and the Newton National Bank, of which he was president from its founding in 1848 to his death. He was married twice: on December 1, 1806, to Hannah Woodward of Newton (d. August II, 1814) by whom he had one son and four daughters, and in 1816 to Mary Bennett of Lunenburg, by whom he had four so ns and seven daughters.

[S. F. Smith, History of Newton, Massachusetts (1880); H. K. Rowe, Tercentenary History of Newton (1930); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Boston Transcript, Daily Evening Traveller, February 28, 1855.]

R. E. M.


JACOBS, Ann Harriet, 1813-1897, author, former slave (Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 64, 184, 348-349, 372, 684-685)


JACOBS, John S., 1815-1873, African American, fugitive slave, abolitionist, author of slave narrative, “A True Tale of Slavery,” in 1861. (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 6, p. 288)


JAMES, Thomas, 1804-1891, African American, former slave, clergyman, abolitionist.  Wrote slave narrative, “Life of Reverend Thomas James, by Himself,” 1886. (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 6, p. 320)


JANNEY, SAMUEL Mcpherson (January 11, 1801-April 30, 1880), author and Quaker minister,

JANNEY, SAMUEL McPHERSON (January 11, 1801-April 30, 1880), author and Quaker minister, was born in Loudoun County, Virginia, son of Abijah Janney, whose ancestors had been identified with the Society of Friends since its beginnings, and his wife Jane (McPherson), also of Quaker stock. At fourteen he left school to work in the counting-house of an uncle at Alexandria, but continued to seek an education; he attended night schools, organized a local scientific society, and wrote regularly for a literary club, meanwhile reading avidly and devoting himself to private study. On March 9, 1826, he marri ed a third cous in, Elizabeth Janney, and in 1830 he became partner in a cotton factory at Occoquan. This never-flourishing venture was abandoned in 1839 and Janney returned to Loudoun County to open a boarding school for girls. Fifteen years later, having paid the debts accruing from his business failure, he retired, to devote himself to literature and philanthropy.

For almost half a century preceding his death he was an eloquent, liberal, and devout minister in the Hicksite division of his sect, influential in its councils, tirelessly active in evangelical work. At the same time, his humanity knew neither creed nor color. He labored to found Sunday schools and day schools for negro children, was among the first to advocate the abolition of slavery within the District of Columbia, and zealously supported emancipation and colonization societies, on one occasion his opinions concerning slavery causing his presentment by a Loudoun County grand jury. With the dual aim of enlightening the white electorate and of furthering anti-slavery sentiment through education, he was earnest in promoting free public schools for Virginia, although his efforts bore little immediate fruit. During the Civil War he supported the Union, but ministered at his home to the wounded of both armies and aided his afflicted neighbors, regardless of their sympathies. His early interest in the Indians led him to serve, at some sacrifice, as superintendent of Indian affairs in the Northern Superintendency (May 1869-September 1871) until enfeebled health caused him to resign.

He had contributed verses to several periodicals before the appearance of his first volume, The Last of the Lenape, and Other Poems, in 1839, and subsequently published others, but his poetical work was mostly undistinguished: his verses, although decorous, correct, and varied,  lack wings. His reputation as an author deservedly rests on his prose works. His biographies The Life of William Penn (1852) and The Life of George Fox (1853), went through repeated editions, and are still esteemed for their scholarship and their valuable material; in them, as well as in his four-volume History of the Religious Society of Friends, from its Rise to the Year 1828 (1860-67), his simple, direct style, careful study, and abundant quotation from original sources show to advantage. His remaining publications, most of them brief, deal with various doctrinal or sociological subjects, but especial mention should be made of his autobiographical Memoirs (1881), which furnishes a clear picture of the author's gentle, modest, and charitable nature.

[Friends Intelligencer, May 22, 29, 1880; Library of Southern Literature, vol. VI (1909); F. V. N. Painter, Poets of Virginia (1907); R. W. Kelsey, Friends and the Indians,1655-1917 (1917); Evening Star (Washington), May 1, 1880.]

A.C.G.


JAY, John, 1745-1829, New York, lawyer, statesman, founding father, diplomat, anti-slavery leader.  President of the Continental Congress.  First Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  Governor of the State of New York, 1795-1801.  New York State’s leading opponent of slavery.  Founder and president of the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves and Protecting such of them as Have Been Liberated, founded 1785.  Attempted to end slavery in 1777 and 1785.  In 1799, he signed into law the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, which eventually freed all the slaves in New York.  This act was arguably the most comprehensive and largest emancipation in North America before the Civil War. 

(Basker, 2005, pp. 64-66, 73-74, 75, 77, 239, 319, 321, 322, 347-348, 350-351; Dumond, 1961, pp. 28, 47, 87; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, pp. 408-411; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 5; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 11, p. 891)

JAY, JOHN (December 12, 1745-May 17, 1829), statesman, diplomatist, was the sixth son, in a family of eight children, of Peter and Mary (Van Cortlandt) Jay, and was born in New York City. He was the younger brother of James Jay [q.v.]. The families of both his father and mother were among the most influential in the colony. His paternal grandfather, Augustus Jay, was a French Huguenot exile who settled in New York about 1686. His father, Peter Jay, was a rich and reputable colonial merchant. John Jay, never of a democratic nature or persuasion, grew up under the most careful family protection. His education went on, with private tutors, under the watchful guidance of his father. Bookish and pious in temperament, the boy is described in contemporary family letters as "serious," "grave," "sedate." Self-confidence and self-satisfaction, rather than ambition, were characteristic of his career. In after life he never once solicited an appointment to public service-except for a successful application for a commission in the New York militia-though he attained, aside from the presidency of the United States, the most important offices which his country could bestow. After graduating from King's College in 1764 he prepared for the bar in the office of Benjamin Kissam of New York. Lindley Murray, a fellow student in the same office, wrote, in his autobiography, of Jay: "He was remarkable for strong reasoning powers, comprehensive view s, indefatigable application, and uncommon firmness of mind" (Pellew, post, pp. 15-1 6). These qualities, with a certain lucidity of literary expression -the styles of Jay and Hamilton were similar -marked him from the beginning as a man of unusual intellectual power. His fellow citizens early sought out his service. As years went on Jay's self-confidence begat a not disagreeable vanity, and literary facility sometimes gave way to pretentious oracular utterance.
Following his admission to the bar in 1768, Jay lived the pleasant life of a serious, well established and well-liked lawyer (he was associated for a time with Robert R. Livingston), prosperously busy, surrounded by friends and clubmates. His was a town-man's life. It drew its principal interest from proper social contacts. There is no indication that he had a liking for sports or strenuous physical exercise, though he was fond of animals, and, of necessity, a horseback rider. Possessed of a fairly wiry and robust constitution, he was nevertheless frequently ailing in health throughout his long life. As a young man he was tall, slender, and graceful, with highly arched eyebrows, a prominent Gallic nose, a pleasing mouth, and a long chin; he had an honest and a refined face, neither grave nor light, with a certain spiritual beauty. He married, on April 28, 1774, Sarah Van Brugh Livingston, the youngest daughter of William Livingston [q.v.], later the revolutionary governor of New Jersey.

Jay's first public employment was as secretary, in 1773, of a royal commission for settling the boundary between New Jersey and New York. The dispute was eventually settled by means of a mixed arbitration, a device which must have appealed to Jay's philosophic disposition; it may have been the example for the mixed commissions which were later such prominent features of Jay's Treaty of 1794 with Great Britain, and were repeated in principle in other American treaties thereafter. The advent of the American Revolution put an end forever to Jay's law practice and started his career of public life. He became a conservative member of the New· York committee (of fifty-one) of correspondence and soon was sent as a delegate of his colony to the first, and later to the second, Continental Congress. As an indefatigable worker in the Congress he reflected the interests of the conservative colonial merchants who were opposed to independence because they feared it might be followed by an upheaval of mob rule and democracy. But once the Declaration was adopted, in Jay's absence attending the New York provincial congress, he threw his life and fortune unreservedly into the scales, and no man became more jealous against any imputation of the permanency or completeness of American independence. Jay's part in the peace negotiations of 1782 testified abundantly to his conviction. In the spring of 1776 his energies were absorbed in affairs of the new state of New York rather than in the second Continental Congress. As a member of the provincial congress, he not only helped to ratify the Declaration of Independence, but also provided the guiding hand which drafted the constitution of the state. He served until 1779 as chief justice of New York, interpreting the constitution which he had drafted. He was also a colonel in the state militia, but never saw active service.

Jay resumed his seat in the Continental Congress in December 1778, and on the tenth of that month was elected president of the Congress, a position which he continued to hold until elected minister plenipotentiary to Spain, September 27, 1779. Jay's career as a diplomatist begins-if we omit his experience as a member of the secret committee of the Second Continental Congress, for corresponding with foreign powers-with his departure for Spain. He was the most able and distinguished man whom the Congress could spare for this important mission to plead for recognition and assistance at the Court of Madrid, taking with him, as he did, the prestige of "the first office on the continent." After a perilous voyage by way of the West Indies, Jay reached Cadiz, with his wife, on January 22, 1780. From the beginning the mission was a hopeless one. Spain had no intention of recognizing the independence of the United States, much less of making an alliance with the insurrectionists, or even of joining with her ally, France, in a Franco-American combination. Floridablanca and tied Vergennes to a secret treaty, by the terms of which France had agreed not to make a peace with Great Britain except jointly with Spain, and with Gibraltar secured for Spain. On the other hand, France had agreed with the United Sta te s not to make peace with Great Britain except jointly with the United States and on the bas is of the absolute and unlimited independence of that republic. Thus was the cause of American independence chained to the European rock of Gibraltar. With Jay the Spanish ministry would go no farther than to continue its policy of secret assistance in munitions and money in order to keep the American insurrection going; and Floridablanca made a "loan" (without ta king titles for payment) of approximately $170,000. This relieved Jay of the cruel by Congress under the unwarranted expectation that he would have meanwhile gotten some money out of Spain. "His two chief points," Floridablanca wrote, concerning Jay, to the Spanish ambassador at Paris, "were : Spain, recognize our independence; Spain, give us more money" (Bemis, Pinckney's Treaty, p. 38).

In the spring of 1782 Jay was summoned to Paris by Franklin to assume his post as joint commissioner for negotiating a peace with Great Britain. Despite "bad roads, fleas, and bugs" he reached the city, after a pleasant journey overland, on June 23. The most controversial question in the study of Jay's diplomatic career is whether he upset the America n diplomatic apple-cart which had been so cleverly trundled along by Franklin in his preliminary conversations with the British peace representatives, before the arrival of Jay. The latter insisted that the British representative, Richard Oswald, be expressly empowered to treat with representatives of the United States of America, not of the "Colonies," which designation had at first seemed sufficient to Franklin, and to Vergennes, whose good faith Jay suspected. Jay privately communicated to Shelburne, the British prime minister, advice to close quickly with the Americans, recognizing them as plenipotentiaries of the United States. His insistence won out in the end, but delayed the negotiations-in the early course of which Franklin had craftily been proposing the cession of Canada, without provoking active opposition-until after the relief of Gibraltar had greatly strengthened the British negotiating position. It is not possible to say that Lord Shelburne would have agreed to Franklin's ideas as to the desirability of ceding Canada, and Shelburne's instructions make it certain that if articles of independence should not have been agreed to, the situation was to remain the same as if the negotiation had never been opened, namely one of warfare against a rebellion of colonies. Whether in that instance the world would have construed unsuccessful negotiations with plenipotentiaries of the United States, as a definitive recognition of American independence is extremely doubtful.

Jay and Adams convinced Franklin that they should sign the preliminary articles of peace, as agreed on with Great Britain, without the privity of the French Minister. In this they certainly violated their own instructions to negotiate only with the full confidence of the French ministry. They did not violate the Franco-American treaty of alliance, for the peace was not to go into effect until preliminaries of peace should also have been ratified between Great Britain and France. France could not make peace till Spain was ready. Undoubtedly the American preliminaries, together with the relief of Gibraltar, opened the way for Vergennes to bring Spain into line. Articles between Spain and Great Britain, and between France and Great Britain, were signed on January 20, 1783, without the cession of Gibraltar. The preliminaries of peace thus became complete. Hostilities ceased. Jay further had participated in the peace negotiations by suggesting to the British the reconquest of West Florida before the armistice; and a secret article was inserted in the preliminaries providing that, in case of such reconquest, the southern boundary of the United States should commence at the latitude of the Yazoo River, instead of thirty-one degrees north latitude. Jay's object in making this suggestion was to keep Spain away from the east bank of the Mississippi by keeping Great Britain in West Florida. In the definitive peace treaty of 1783 this was not included, as Florida had been yielded to Great Britain by Spain.

Jay declined the post of minister to Great Britain after the war, as well as that to France, in order to return home and resume his law practice and the delights of private life. When he arrived in New York, July 24, 1784, he found that Congress had already drafted him into service as secretary of foreign affairs. For the position, which amounted to that of minister of foreign affairs of the United States, Jay was the best qualified man available. He put aside personal desires and accepted the unremunerative responsibility which had been thrust upon him. Jay remained in this office until after the adoption of the Constitution and the organization of the new government. In fact, as secretary ad interim he administered the business of the new Department of State until March 22, 1790, pending the arrival of Thomas Jefferson to be sworn in as secretary. In addition to the negotiation of treaties of commerce with Prussia and Morocco, and discussions of the same with Austria, Denmark, Portugal, and Tuscany, the handling of the hopeless Barbary corsairs question, and negotiation of a consular convention with France, Jay's principal diplomatic problems as secretary of foreign affairs were connected with Great Britain and with Spain. The dispute with the former involved the retention of the Northwest Posts, in which British garrisons had remained in defiance of the terms of the treaty of peace. The British justified their position on the ground that Congress had not complied with its own treaty obligations in respect to facilitating the payment of pre-war debts to English creditors, and to the proper protection of the Loyalists. We know now that, on the day before the proclamation of the treaty of peace by George III, secret orders were sent out from Whitehall not to evacuate the posts. Without going into the controversy which arose, or the mutual recriminations, during a time that Great Britain refused to send a diplomatic representative to the United States, it may be said that Jay-who naturally remained ignorant of secret orders which have only recently been disclosed-was so impressed by the laxity of Congress in enforcing its own obligations that he could not make progress with Great Britain on this issue; it continued into the national period and was not actually settled until Jay's Treaty of 1794.

With Spain the controversy was somewhat similar. Spanish garrisons continued to occupy alleged American soil up to the latitude of the mouth of the Yazoo River, although the boundary of the United States as laid down by the Anglo-American treaty of peace stipulated the line of thirty-one degrees between the Mississippi and the Apalachicola. Spain also closed the navigation of the Mississippi where it flowed between exclusively Spanish banks. In justice to the Spanish contention it should be recognized that Spain's title to the lower east bank of the Mississippi was at least as good as that of the United States, and that her right to close the navigation of the river was not and could not be estopped by anything in the treaty of peace between the United States and Great Britain. A protracted negotiation between Gardoqui, first Spanish diplomatic representative accredited to the United States, and Jay, between 1784 and 1789, reached no settlement of the question. When in Spain, Jay had not believed in acknowledging exclusive Spanish navigation of the Mississippi, even though, upon instructions received from Congress, he had made such an offer as a condition of Spanish recognition of American independence and the making of a treaty. But during the period of the Confederation Jay became convinced, as did Washington, that the only way to come to terms with Spain was to forbear to use the navigation of the river for a period of twenty-five years or so, while the West could fill up with a population of fighting men. He reached an agreement in principle with Gardoqui on that basis, coupled with some articles of alliance by which each guaranteed the territory of the other power. Congress refused to ratify the Mississippi articles, and Jay never revealed the mutual guaranty clauses to Congress once he saw that the main Mississippi article would not succeed.

Jay's position as secretary of foreign affairs was weakened in power and effect by the impotence of the Union under the Articles of Confederation. He became one of the strongest advocates of a new government under a stronger constitution. After the adoption of the Constitution of 1787 he joined with Hamilton and Madison in the writing of the "Federalist" papers. Illness prevented him from contributing more than five essays-on the Constitution and foreign affairs. When Jefferson arrived to take the post of secretary of state, Jay had already been nominated chief justice of the United States.

The first five years were the formative period of the- Supreme Court so far as procedure was concerned. The most important case decided by Jay was Chisholm vs. Georgia, which involved the stability of a state by a citizen of another state. Jay in his decision pointed out that the Constitution specifically gave a citizen of one state the right to sue another state, and that stability and state· sovereignty were incompatible. It v/as a vigorous exposition of nationalism, too vigorous for the day. Georgia lost the case by default, but before any judgment could be executed, her sister states, alarmed, quickly passed the Eleventh Amendment to the Constitution. While chief justice, Jay was frequently consulted by the President on state decisions, and it was he who wrote (albeit subject to Hamilton's suggestions) a first draft of the famous neutrality proclamation of 1793. After the proclamation, actually indited by Edmund Randolph [q.v.],and before the appropriate legislation by Congress for the enforcement of neutrality, Jay, in making a charge to the grand jury at Richmond, May 22, 1793, laid down 'the principle that the proclamation of the President must implicitly be held declaratory of existing law, that is, of the law of nations (Johnston, post, III, 478).

It was while still holding the office of chief justice that Jay was sent on the celebrated diplomatic mission to arrange a peaceful settlement of existing controversies with Great Britain. The war crisis, which arose in the spring of 1794, was caused principally by the British occupation of the Northwest Posts, and the still pending question of private debts to British creditors, together with the spoliations made by British cruisers on American neutral shipping during the Anglo-French war. By this time Alexander Hamilton [q.v.] had come to be the principal influence in Washington's administration. Hamilton's new credit system depended on tariff revenues, and nine-tenths of these came from imposts on imported British goods. War with Great Britain, or even suspension of commercial intercourse for any extended period, such as the Republicans advocated, would have meant, in Hamilton's words, cutting up credit by the roots; the collapse of credit would have brought the downfall of the new government, and with it the possible end of American nationality. Jay spent the summer of 1794 in England coming to an arrangement with Lord Grenville on terms mainly suggested by Hamilton. The resulting treaty might more appropriately have gone down in history as Hamilton's than as Jay's Treaty. Without securing any acknowledgment of the illegality of British maritime procedure under which the spoliations had been made, the United States agreed that all spoliation claims which should not receive ultimate justice after running the gamut of British courts of law, should go to a mixed claims commission for settlement; similarly all British claims for the collection of private debts should go to a mixed commission, and the United States should be answerable for payment of the awards in sterling money; British troops were to evacuate the Northwest Territory; commissions were to settle boundary controversies on the northeast and the northwest frontier; and the free navigation of the Mississippi, with particular trade privileges for British ships, was guaranteed the citizens and subjects of each nation. By refusing to enforce in the face of Great Britain the rules of international law· accepted in the Franco-American treaty of 1778, the United States gave great umbrage to France; this led to a serious but not vital controversy with that country, in which there is something to be said for the French point of view. Jay's Treaty was the price paid by the Federalists for the maintenance of peace and financial stability at a time when both were vitally necessary for the establishment of American nationality under the new Constitution. He was vilified for his part in the negotiation and Hamilton was stoned while speaking in defense of the treaty; but the Senate ratified it, Washington proclaimed it, and history has justified it as a sort of necessary evil.

While chief justice, Jay had already been a candidate of the Federalist party against George Clinton [q.v.] for the governorship of New York, in 1792, and had been defeated by the action of a partisan board of electoral canvassers which threw out many Federalist ballots on technicalities. When he returned home from England in 1795 he found himself already nominated and elected governor. There was little choice but to accept. Jay's two terms, of six years altogether, furnished the state with an upright and conservative administration. Despite the ordinary petty political disputes in which Jay, as a Federalist governor, must needs have his share, no overwhelming political issue arose. In 1800 the victory of the Republicans in the next gubernatorial election was imminent, and Jay had decided to retire from public life. He declined to become a candidate for reelection, and refused to be considered for renomination •as chief justice of the United States. In view of John Marshall's subsequent career in that office, Jay's reasons for declining it are interesting if not amusing: he felt that the Supreme Court lacked "the energy, weight, and dignity which are essential to its affording due support to the national Government" (Johnston, IV, 285).

The presidential election of 1800 afforded an opportunity to test the purity of Jay's political virtue. Believing that the presidency depended on the vote of New York, where the newly elected Republican legislature would be sure to choose Jeffersonian electors, Alexander Hamilton urged Governor Jay to call a special session of the expiring (Federalist) legislature that would choose Federalist electors. Jay refused to countenance this trickery. On Hamilton's letter proposing the plan, he wrote the indorsement: "Proposing a measure for party purposes which I think it would not become me to adopt." The remaining twenty-eight years of Jay's life were spent in complete retirement, saddened by the early death of his wife. He settled down at his 800-acre farm at Bedford, Westchester County, New York. Here he died May 17, 1829. He had two sons, Peter Augustus Jay and William Jay [qq.v.]. Only one of his five daughters married and she had no children that survived.

Jay was a very able man but not a genius. His principal and invaluable contribution to American public life flowed from his character as he steadfastly performed the day's work. He brought consistent intellectual vigor and moral tone into every office which he held. He belonged to a school of rigid self-disciplinarians and high-minded men who invested the foundations of American nationality with a peculiar mantle of righteousness and dignity. He was second to none of the "Fathers" in the fineness of his principles, uncompromising moral rectitude, uprightness of private life, and firmness, even fervor, of religious conviction. A communicant of the Episcopal Church, he did not scruple to unite with his fellow Christians of other denominations. He owned slaves; to emancipate them; and as governor of New York he signed the act for the abolition of slavery in that state. In retirement Jay took an active interest in church affairs; he became president in 1818 of the Westchester Bible Society, and, in 1821, of the American Bible Society. As a political sage in retirement at Bedford he left these lines: "The post, once a week, brings me our newspapers, which furnish a history of the times. By this history, as well as by that of former times, we are taught the vanity of expecting, that from the perfectibility of human nature and the lights of philosophy the multitude will become virtuous or wise, or their demagogues candid and honest" (William Jay, post, I, 431).

[The best biography is by a descendant, George Pellew, John Jay (1890), and is based on the Jay family papers which in their entirety have not been exploited by any non-family writer. A selected part of these was published by H. P. Johnston, Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay (4 vols., 1890-93). There is a group of Jay papers relating to the Treaty of 1794, in the New York Historical Society the son, William Jay, wrote a filial biography, The Life of John Jay (2 vols., 1833), which published for the first time the papers more fully printed oy Johnston. Wm. Whitelock, The Life and Times of John Jay (1887) is not adequate. Jay as chief justice is portrayed in Henry Flanders, The Lives and Times of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the U. S., vol. I (1855). There are two interesting short sketches: W. W. Spooner, Historic Families of America (1907); and Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous People (1922). S. F. Bemis has dealt with Jay's diplomacy in The American Secretaries of State and their Diplomacy, vol. I (1927), in Jay's Treaty; a Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (1923), and Pinckney's Treaty; a Study of America's Advantage from Europe's Distress (1926). An account of Jay's participation in the peace negotiations of 1782, written by a descendant, John Jay, is in Justin Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. VII (1888). For the Supreme Court in Jay's time see Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in U. S. History, I (1922). See also Memorials of Peter A. Jay, Compiled for his Descendants by his Great-grandson, John Jay (1905, reprinted 1929).]

S. F. B.


JAY, John, 1817-1894, New York, diplomat, lawyer.  Grandson of Chief Justice John Jay.  President of the New York Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society in 184.  Active and leader in the Free soil Party and founding member of the Republican Party. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, pp. 413-414; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 10; Drake, 1950, pp. 95, 98)

JAY, JOHN (June 23, 1817-May 5, 1894), lawyer, author, diplomat, grandson of Chief Justice John Jay [q.v.], and the only son who grew to maturity of Judge William Jay [q.v.] and Hannah Augusta (McVickar) Jay, was born in New York City. His early years were spent happily in his grandfather's home at Bedford. Prepared for college at Dr. Muhlenberg's Institute, Flushing, L. I., he was graduated from Columbia in 1836, studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1839, and practised in New· York City for about twenty years. On the death of his father in 1858 he retired from practice to give the rest of his life to the care of the ancestral estate and to public service.

Oppressed or suffering humanity everywhere had his sympathy. While still a student in Columbia College he was manager of the New York Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society. As a young lawyer he was particularly prominent in the seven-years struggle (1846-53) to procure the admission of St. Philip's Church (negro) to the Protestant Episcopal Convention. He served as secretary of the Irish Relief Committee during the potato famine in 1847. After the enactment in 1850 of the Fugitive-Slave Law he acted as counsel for many black fugitives. At a mass meeting in the Broadway Tabernacle, January 30, 1854, he framed the resolutions that were adopted opposing the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In the following year he was an enthusiastic leader in the organization of the new Republican party in New York State. Though he was an exponent of peace like his father, nevertheless when the Civil War became a reality, he declared, in an address to his Mount Kisco neighbors, July 4, 1861, that "a whipped hound should be the emblem of the Northern man who whimpers for a peace that can only be gained by dishonour" (The Great Conspiracy, 1861, p. 48). He favored enlistment of the blacks in the Union army, the proclamation of emancipation, the organization of the Freedmen's Bureau, and the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. On the other hand, he showed a liberal attitude toward the defeated South in favoring an allotment in the National Cemetery at Antietam for fallen Confederate soldiers (Documents of the Senate of the State of New York, 1868, no. 82). As minister to Austria, 1869-74, he had the difficult task of bringing order out of a calumniting chaos in connection with the United States Commission to the International Exhibition held in Vienna in 1873 (see his article, "The American Foreign Service," International Review, May-June 1877). After his return he was appointed chairman of a commission to investigate the New York Custom House for the Treasury Department, he was vice-president of the Civil Service Reform Association of the State of New York, a member, 1884-87, of the state Civil Service Commission, and one of the framers of the state's first civil-service law. A stout defender of the public schools, he assailed the Roman Catholic Church for its attempts "to overthrow our common school system, to tax the people for Romish schools where children will be bent like the twig, moulded in the confessional, educated as subjects of the Pope, owing to him their chief allegiance" (Rome, th e Bible and the Republic, 1879, p. 13). In his presidential address before the American Historical Association (1890), he maintained that the only sure guarantee of America's continued greatness was that every teacher in the common schools should be well grounded in American history. That Jay was well grounded himself is evidenced in all of his writings, especially in an excellent piece of historical research, The Peace Negotiations of 1782 and 1783, published by the New York Historical Society in 1884, and under slightly different titles as a chapter in Volume VII of Justin Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America (1888) and in Papers of the American Historical Association, vol. III (1888). In November 1877 he contributed ''Motley's Appeal to History" to the International Review, an article which precipitated a controversy by its criticism of Grant's administration.

Jay was one of the founders of the Union League Club and its president in 1866 and 1877; he was the first president (1883-94) of the Huguenot Society of America, one of the founders (1852) of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, an active member of the New York Historical Society, the Metropolitan Muse um of Art, and the National Academy of Design. He married, June 23, 1837, Eleanor Kingsland Field, of New York City.

[New York Tribune, New York Times, May 6, and (New York) Evening Post, May 7, 1894; J. T. Scharf, History of Westchester County (1886), vol. I; W. W. Spooner, History Families of America (1907); "Slavery and the War," a collection of twenty-one pamphlets by Jay presented by him to various libraries including the Library of Congress; Annual Report American Historical Association, 1894 (1895); Proceedings Huguenot Society of America, vol. III, pt. I (1896); The Union League Club Dinner Given to Hon. John Jay on His Seventieth Birthday (1887).]

A.E.P.


JAY, Peter Augustus, 1776-1843, anti-slavery activist.  Son of first Chief Justice of the United States and diplomat John Jay.  President of the New York Manumission Society in 1816, and President of the Anti-Slavery New York Public School Society.  Advocated for suffrage for free African Americans.  (Dumond, 1961, p. 103; Sorin, 1971, p. 77; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 11)

JAY, PETER AUGUSTUS (January 24, 1776- February 20, 1843), lawyer, was the eldest child of John Jay and the brother of William Jay [qq.v.]. His mother was Sarah Van Brugh Livingston, daughter of William Livingston [q.v.], later governor of New Jersey, at whose residence, "Liberty Hall," Elizabeth Town, Peter was born and with whom he lived during his childhood years. He attended school in his native town and also at Poughkeepsie, New York, and in 1790 entered Columbia College, where his father had preceded him, graduating in 1794. The appointment, in the year of his graduation, of his father as special envoy to Great Britain, gave the son an opportunity to visit that country as the envoy's secretary, to meet such celebrities as Pitt, Fox, Lord Grenville, and Lord Mansfield, to watch Erskine in a trial at Old Bailey, and to see Kemble and Mrs. Siddons at Drury Lane in The Merchant of Venice. Returning to New York after his father's negotiation of the treaty, he studied law with his cousin, Peter Jay Munro, with whom, upon his admission to the bar in 1797, he formed a partnership, and he ultimately built up a large and lucrative practice. In the autumn of 1802, on account of pulmonary trouble, he again went abroad, this time to southern Europe. Happening to be in Paris when the Louisiana Purchase Treaty was signed, he was entrusted with the transmission not only of that document but of Napoleon's order to evacuate the territory. On his way back he visited La Rochelle, the home of his Huguenot ancestors, who, he found, were remembered, and in his diary he deplores the decline of that once prosperous port. On the voyage across the Atlantic his ship was stopped several times by British frigates, but finally, after nearly forty days, he arrived in New York with the precious documents. The following winter he visited Bermuda and on July 29, 1807, he was married to Mary Rutherford Clarkson, daughter of General Matthew Clarkson [q.v.] of New York City, and they had eight children. He was a prominent member of the Episcopal Church and served it in various capacities. He defended, unsuccessfully, those charged with causing a riot during the Columbia College Commencement exercises at Trinity Church in 1811. From 1812 to 1817 and again in 1823 he was a trustee of the college. He was a Federalist in his early years and always remained one at heart; in New York politics he was anti-Clintonian. He was nominated for Congress in 1812 by the "Peace and Commerce" party, but his election was declared void and another contest the following year resulted in his defeat by a narrow margin. He was nevertheless elected to the state Assembly in 1816 as a Federal Republican and supported legislation for the Erie Canal and the abolition of slavery in New York. In 1820 he was appointed by Governor Clinton, though a political opponent, recorder (criminal court judge) of New York City, holding the office for a year only, but receiving a testimonial from the bar. In
1821 he was a member of the convention which framed New York's revolutionary constitution. He voted against the final draft, naming as its chief defects "making the right of suffrage universal, rendering the Judges of the Supreme Court dependent, and vesting the power of appointment, in almost all instances, in the Legislature" (Memorials, post, p. 150). He was president of the New York Hospital from 1827 to 1833 and in the latte r year served as one of th e commissioners who fixed the boundary bet ween New York and New Jersey. In 1840 he became president of the New York State Historical Society and was instrumental in establishing it in a permanent home. Philip Hone described him as "always wise, always honest, but sometimes a little prejudiced" (Diary, post, I, 55).

[Memorials of Peter A. Jay Compiled for His Descendants by His Great-grandson John Jay (1905); The Diary of Philip Hone (2 vols., 1889), ed. by Bayard Tuckerman; Proceedings New York Historical Society for the Year 1843 (1844); W. W. Spooner, Historic Families of America (n.d.); New York Tribune, February 22, 23, 1843.]

C.S.L.


JAY, William, 1789-1858, Bedford, NY, jurist, anti-slavery activist, abolitionist leader, anti-slavery Liberty Party. Son of first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay. In 1819, he strongly opposed the Missouri Compromise, which allowed the extension of slavery into the new territories. Drafted the constitution of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS).  Corresponding Secretary, 1835-1838, Executive Committee, 1836-1837, AASS.  Vice President, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFASS).  He was removed as a judge of Westchester County, in New York, due to his antislavery activities. Supported emancipation of slaves in the District of Columbia and the exclusion of slavery from new territories, although he did not advocate interfering with slave laws in the Southern states.

(Dumond, 1961, pp. 47, 159, 226, 286, 301; Mabee, 1970, pp. 73, 107, 199, 251, 253, 295; Sorin, 1971, pp. 51, 77-81, 96, 132; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 11; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 473-475; Jay, W., Life and Writings of John Jay, 1833; Jay, W., An Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization and American Anti-Slavery Societies, 1834; Jay, W., A View of the Action of the Federal Government in Behalf of Slavery, 1837; Jay, W., War and Peace, 1848; Jay, W., Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War, 1849)

JAY, WILLIAM (June 16, 1789-October 14, 1858), judge, author, moral reformer, was born in New York City, the son of John Jay [q.v.] and Sarah Van Brugh Livingston, and a brother of Peter Augustus Jay [q.v.]. Following a thorough classical training under Thomas Ellison, rector of St. Peter's Church in Albany, and preparation for college from Henry Davis, afterwards president of Hamilton College, he entered Yale in 1804. After his graduation (1807) he undertook the study of law in the office of John B. Henry, Albany, but impaired eyesight prevented active practice and he turned to agricultural pursuits on his father's 800 acres at Bedford.

In 1818 he was appointed judge of the court of Westchester County, and with one short interruption held that office until 1843, when he was removed through the influence of pro-slavery Democrats. His charges to the jury always commanded attention because of his "full exposition of the law, without the slightest concession to the popular current of the day" (New York Evening Post, October 15, 1858). Active with tongue and pen in championing the cause of emancipation, he was agitating for the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia twenty-two years before congressional action brought it about. The first number of the Emancipator, May 1, 1833, had a contribution from Judge Jay. The same year the New York City Anti-Slavery Society was established with his support, and largely through his persuasive arguments a National Anti-Slavery Convention in Philadelphia inaugurated a country-wide campaign that was based on strictly constitutional grounds. Like Wilberforce he opposed the plan to colonize the former slaves in Africa, declaring that those who favored that plan were not moved by "the precepts of the Gospel" but by "prejudice against an unhappy portion of the human family" (An Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, and American Anti-Slavery Societies, two editions, 1835). To the advocates of gradual emancipation he revealed its dangers, arguing that it must be either "immediate emancipation or continued slavery" (Ibid.). In other pamphlets he reproved certain bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church, of which he himself was a communicant, for their use of the Bible to prop up slavery; and he vigorously assailed the American Tract Society, of which he was a life director, for its attempt to sidestep the slavery issue in the interest of harmony. A collection of his arguments, Miscellaneous Writings on Slavery, was published in 1853. He was far in advance of his age in the advocacy of arbitration to settle international disputes. His pamphlet of 1842, War and Peace: The Evils of the First and a Plan for Preserving the Last, was reprinted as a timely contribution during the World War peace discussion of 1919. The American Peace Society continued him as its president for a decade.

Amid his various humanitarian activities, he took time to write The Life of John Jay: with Selections from his Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers (2 vols., 1833) and in 1850 published Reply to Remarks of Reverend Moses Stuart . . . on Hon. John Jay, and an Examination of his Scriptural Exegesis, Contained in his Recent Pamphlet Entitled "Conscience and the Constitution" (1850). Other writings are essays on the Sabbath as a civil and divine institution, duelling, temperance, Sunday schools and their development, and a commentary (unpublished) on the Old and New Testaments. His pamphlets in support of Bible Societies (he was one of the founders of the American Bible Society in 1816) brought him into acrimonious controversy with Bishop J. H. Hobart [q.v.]. Jay was also a devoted agrarian with an enthusiasm for experiments in tillage, drainage, horticulture, and stock-raising on the Bedford estate. He married, September 4, 1812, Hannah Augusta McVickar, daughter of a New York merchant. John Jay, 1817-1894 [q.v.], was their only surviving son.

[Bayard Tuckerman, William Jay and the Constitutional Movement for the Abolition of Slavery (1893), containing a list of Jay's writings as an appendix; F. B. Dexter, Biographical Sketches Grads. Yale College, vol. VI (1912), also with a list of writings; G. B. Cheever, The True Christian Patriot (1860); Frederick Douglass, Eulogy of the Late Hon. William Jay (1859); A.H. Partridge, "The Memory of the Just": A Memorial of the Hon. Wm. Jay (1860); newspaper obituaries, particularly those in (New York) Evening Post, October 15, and New York Tribune, October 16, 1858.]

A. E. P.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.