Conclusion: The Flawed Antislavery Legacy of Hamilton and Jay

Neither Jay nor Hamilton was determined to abolish slavery as a primary goal of the newly formed Union. Political conservatives who to some extent accepted the proslavery argument that the enslaved were both property and human beings, they hesitated to disrupt the nation’s fragile harmony by demanding the national government’s interference with Southern slavery. Both statesmen held a few slaves. My analysis rejects the current popular view that Hamilton was an antislavery crusader. Nevertheless, Chernow and Miranda’s interpretation of Hamilton has dominated the public sphere as well as the academic ivory tower during the twenty-first century. Ironically, tickets to the Broadway musical Hamilton are the most expensive in US history, despite its message about a virtuous poor boy who succeeded because of sheer brilliance and fought against oppression. Hamilton apparently considered slave ownership part of the right to property, in accordance with English common law. (He seldom referred to “natural rights,” probably considering the term unduly inflammatory.) Hamilton never publicly addressed the issue of African American bondage, except indirectly in supporting ratification of Jay’s Treaty in 1795. Hamilton, like Jay, was a member and briefly president of the New York Manumission Society. However, Quakers were the society’s most active members, and neither Hamilton nor Jay distinguished himself as a leader. As governor of New York from 1795 to 1801 Jay did nothing to advance a gradual emancipation bill, although he signed it when the legislature passed it in 1799. A private letter that he wrote in 1819 and out of public life, opposing the Missouri Compromise and insisting that Congress had the power to abolish the interstate slave trade and prohibit slavery in all states entering the Union after 1789, was his strongest public stand against enslavement. The letter found its way into the newspapers without his permission. Although holding positions of great power during the 1790s as the foremost Cabinet member, and afterward commander of the US Army, Hamilton had no personal motive to arouse sectional hostilities over slavery and diminish his influence and his party’s reputation. In 1801, he thwarted the efforts of the New-York Manumission Society to emancipate the slaves of Mme. Volunbrun, a white Haitian slaveholder who fled with them to New York in 1796, abnegating his duties as legal counselor for the NYMS. In 1802, he went so far as to defend a slave trafficker whom the NYMS sought to have punished for illegally conducting the slave trade. Unfortunately, in light of the apathy of even reputed antislavery zealots like Jay and Hamilton, civil war alone ultimately abolished slavery. Thus, neither Hamilton nor Jay deserves the reputation as antislavery heroes which historians have often bestowed upon them without carefully examining their actual historical roles.