William Jay

• William Jay
• Born: June 16, 1789
• Died: October 14, 1858

Jurist and reformer active in antislavery and peace movements, was born in New York City, the younger son of Chief Justice John Jay and Sarah Van Brugh (Livingston) Jay. After graduating from Yale in 1807 he studied law in Albany, but impaired eyesight prevented him from embarking on active legal practice. For a decade he managed the family farm at Bedford, in Westchester County, New York, and throughout his life kept in close touch with agricultural improvements.

In 1818 Jay was appointed judge of the Westchester County Court, and during the quarter century that he served on that bench, mostly as senior judge, he was widely esteemed for his scrupulous exposition of the law. A deep religiosity, which he shared with his family, found expression in a decision he handed down that caught Alexis de Tocqueville’s attention sufficiently for him to comment thereon in his Democracy in America (1835). In that case Jay disqualified a witness for having admitted that he did not believe in the existence of God or in the immortality of the soul.

Jay justified his ruling with the observation that religion was indispensable to republican institutions. Consistently with these views, he enforced strict Sabbath observance. A strong temperance advocate, he used his power on the bench to restrain the liquor traffic and inspired a state law forbidding tavern keepers from supplying liquor on credit. His religious convictions found further expression in a series of pamphlets he published between 1815 and 1823; in these he defended the activities of the various Bible societies, in the founding of which his father had played a major role.

Jay’s charges to the grand jury were noteworthy for the support of First Amendment rights of publication and petition during the growing crisis over slavery. Indeed, he exerted his greatest influence as a moral reformer through his steadfast and courageous opposition to slavery. Again following in the footsteps of his father, who pioneered in the New York manumission movement and had a lifelong aversion to slavery and the slave trade, William Jay started out as an opponent of slavery extension, an opposition he voiced as early as 1819. A strict constitutionalist, he held that although Congress had no power to abolish slavery in the states, it could and should do so in the territories. Focusing on the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and, specifically, on the apprehension in the District of blacks from the free states, he publicly articulated by 1826 a set of so-called “Westchester Resolutions” that drew wide attention.

In the early 1830s, as the antislavery campaign moved into high gear, Jay was associated with the New York wing of the movement headed by Arthur and Lewis Tappan, with the Weekly Emancipator as its vehicle. Jay set forth his views on the slavery problem in the very first issue of that periodical (May 1833). Therein he restated his strict legal stand on slavery. While respecting the reserved powers of the states, he insisted on Congress’s right to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. And opposing the objectives of the Colonization Society, which favored the resettlement of blacks in Africa, he declined to denounce its membership. Shortly thereafter he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, whose constitution mirrored his views on the respective roles of the federal government and the states on slavery. When riotous mobs sought in 1834 to prevent antislavery meetings, Jay accepted a post on the national society’s executive committee, and as foreign secretary kept in touch with the European leaders of the antislavery movement. For a brief time he also served as president of the society’s New York branch. Laboring to place the Protestant Episcopal church in the forefront of the humanitarian movement, Jay scorchingly reproved churchmen who found justification for slavery in the Scriptures.

Believing that abolition societies should concentrate their fire on the slavery issue and not “use abolition as a pack-horse to carry forth in the world some favourite notion having no legitimate connection with the antislavery cause,” Jay felt obliged to abstain from abolition society meetings called to deal with such other reform causes as women’s rights. Breaking over this issue with the American Anti-Slavery Society, he joined with Arthur Tappan, James G. Birney, and Gerrit Smith in organizing the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. A steady stream of pamphlets and tracts from Jay’s pen continued to press the antislavery cause, including one in 1840 defending the right of petition to Congress. Still avoiding direct political action, Jay declined to have his name placed in nomination for governor of New York State by the new Liberty party organized in 1840, or for president in 1844, but the annexation of Texas propelled him into a more active party role. He ran unsuccessfully as the Liberty party’s candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1845. Meantime, his forthright position on slavery had cost him his seat on the bench, when in 1843 he was removed by Governor William C. Bouck.

In conformance with William Jay’s insistence on keeping the antislavery fight within legal and constitutional bounds was his opposition to violence in resolving conflicts whether between individuals or nations. His Essay on Duelling (1830) won him a medal from the Anti-Duelling Association of Savannah, Georgia. An opponent of wars generally, including the Opium War in China, and aggressive American wars particularly, he published in 1842 a book entitled War and Peace: The Evils of the First and a Plan for Preserving the Last (1842), which quickly won him a position of leadership in the American peace movement.

For a decade, Jay served as president of the American Peace Society. Drawing upon his father’s innovative approach to settling international disputes through mixed commissions, Jay therein advocated the inclusion in international treaties of a stipulation for settling future differences by arbitration. His notion commanded wide support among European statesmen and was recommended by Protocol No. 23 of the Congress of Paris (1856). The war with Mexico found Jay a prominent opponent of that conflict. He excoriated America’s role in a widely acclaimed and extensively researched book, A Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War (1849). Also consistent with his views was his criticism of the federal government for its military solution of the Indian problem. Jay opposed the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the extension of slavery in the territories. Disillusioned by the federal government’s disinclination to confront the issue of slavery, Jay nevertheless refused to join the antislavery disunionists. He continued to work toward exposing the role of the federal government, he remarked shortly before his death, not because it would tend “to bring about dissolution, but to render it unnecessary.”

During his crowded career as jurist, pamphleteer, and activist reformer Jay, shortly after his father’s death, found time to publish a two-volume life of John Jay, including carefully selected correspondence and public papers (1832). After several years of failing health Jay died, at sixty-nine, at the family estate in Bedford. His wife, Hannah Augusta (McVickar) Jay, whom he had married September 4, 1812, had predeceased him. His only surviving son was John Jay 2d (1817-94), a lawyer, diplomat, historian, and antislavery leader; his four surviving daughters were Maria Banyer Jay Butterworth, Sarah Louisa Jay Bruen, Eliza Jay Pellew, and Augusta Jay.

Some correspondence of William Jay is in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, and at the John Jay Homestead, Bedford, New York. Other items may still be found among surviving family members and in the papers of leading abolitionists with whom he corresponded, e.g., the Tappan Papers in the Library of Congress. A useful if dated biography is by B. Tuckerman, William Jay and the Constitutional Movement for the Abolition of Slavery (1893), with an appendix containing a bibliography of Jay’s books, pamphlets, and tracts. A list is also to be found in F. B. Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History, 1701-1815, vol. 6 (1885-1912). Some of Jay’s more important writings on slavery were collected by him in Miscellaneous Writings (1853). Affectionate appraisals are found in F. Douglass, Eulogy of the Late Hon. William Jay (1859) and in G. B. Cheever, The True Christian Patriot (1860). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1933).