Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman M. Scott Heerman (bio) Keywords Slavery, Abolition, Jay family, John Jay, John Jay II, William Jay Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York. By David N. Gellman. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022. Pp. 519. Cloth, $36.95.) David Gellman's Liberty's Chain is an elegantly written study of slavery across several generations of the Jay family of New York, which offers an important intervention into several literatures on race and slavery in U.S. history. The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on one generation of the Jay family from the 1770s to the 1870s. Its main subjects are John Jay (1745–1829), William Jay (1789–1858), and John Jay II (1817–1894), allowing Gellman to focus on the history of slavery in the founding generation, through the era of gradual emancipation in the U.S. North, and [End Page 337] ultimately into the Civil War era. Across this long arc Gellman "shed[s] 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 for liberation" (4). Each of the three sections is a masterful study in its own right, and by putting them together Gellman narrates the history of slavery and emancipation between U.S. independence and its Civil War like only a skilled scholar can, probing complex dimensions of gradual emancipation, immediate abolitionism, and the meaning of race in the nation at large. Gellman opens with the observation that "the enslavement of millions of human beings and the founding of the nation are inextricably bound" (2). He builds on a generation of scholarship on slavery in the founding generation and in the North, but charts new territory by foregrounding both the lives of the Jays and of the Black workers, free and enslaved, in their New York households. Using this framework he shows how relationships across race and gender lines in the domestic sphere shaped, or clashed with, the wider political landscape. His model approaches the history of slavery in the Jay family as a series of "concentric circles" and the "personal relationships with actual slaves and former slaves formed the core," followed by the regional conditions, national policy, and then international forces and intellectual and cultural trends (74). This approach shows that the great national paradoxes were also personal ones, and it reveals how enslaved, indentured, and formerly enslaved African Americans shaped the wider political landscape across generations. Gellman opens his analysis in earnest in the Age of Revolutions, where John Jay stood out as one of the leaders of the Revolutionary generation. He charts both Jay's marriage into the Livingston family, affording him access to a powerful family network, and his rise in New York politics. Jay was an enslaver in these years, and enslaved people helped propel his upward mobility. Gellman foregrounds a paradox between "the moral incompatibility of slavery with the nation's founding ideals" stressing they clashed in ways that "the Jays found impossible to ignore" (5). Readers follow Jay to Paris where he helped broker the Treaty of Paris (1783), which required British agents to return enslaved people to their owners, or to provide compensation. During these critical years, Jay's father died, leaving him an inheritance of enslaved people, which only heightened the tensions between liberty and slavery (51). [End Page 338] That kind of political and personal paradox is not all that remarkable, except for the fact that Jay was a committed abolitionist. Jay was at the leading edge of gradual emancipation, and Gellman unpacks how the war years gave him the language to contemplate and articulate and alternative to a slaveholding world (29). In 1785 Jay became the president of the newly minted New York Manumission Society and supported the eventual passage of the 1799 Gradual Emancipation Law, which freed children of enslaved women after they served a twenty-eight-year indenture. In these chapters, Gellman gives us a picture of how northern...