The Frederick Douglass Game

 

John Jay Portrait

"Prayers to Heaven for Liberty Will Be Impious": John Jay Speaks

I am John Jay of New York — first Chief Justice of the United States, a writer of the Federalist, Governor of my state, and, from 1785 until I took the bench in 1789, president of the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves. I helped build the Constitution that men now hold up as slavery's shield. I ask you to hear me out, because I know what was in that room, and I know what was in my own heart when I signed my name to the American cause.

What I Wrote When No One Was Listening

In September of 1780 I sat in Spain, begging a monarch for money to fund our revolution, and I wrote home to my friend Egbert Benson about the only thing I could not stop turning over: "Till America comes into this Measure, her Prayers to Heaven for Liberty will be impious. This is a strong Expression, but it is just."

I meant every word of it then and I mean it now. Impious. Not impolitic. Not unfortunate. Blasphemous. A nation on its knees asking God for freedom while its hand is clamped over another man's mouth is not praying — it is performing. Five years later I put it to Dr. Richard Price more plainly: that men should pray and fight for their own freedom and yet keep others in slavery is inconsistent, unjust, and perhaps impious. And to Richard Lushington: to contend for our own liberty and deny that blessing to others involves an inconsistency not to be excused.

Not to be excused. Hear that, gentlemen who quote me at your dinner tables. 

My Own Hands Were Not Clean

Gradual Abolition Act

I will not stand here and pretend to a purity I never possessed. I owned men, and I defended it this way: I purchase slaves and manumit them at proper ages, when their faithful services have afforded a reasonable retribution. Read that sentence again and notice what it does. It makes a man pay for his own freedom in advance, in labor, to the very person who had no right to take it. Yet I wrote into Benoit's manumission paper that the children of men are by nature equally free and cannot without injustice be held in slavery. I knew the principle. I applied it on my own schedule.

So when the abolitionist in this hall says gradualism is a comfortable bed for a guilty conscience, he is describing me. I do not deny the charge. I offer it as testimony. If a man who saw the wrong that clearly still moved that slowly, what shall we say of a nation that has now had seventy years and grown only more defiant?

The Constitution Is Not a Tomb

They tell you the Constitution settles it. I was there. We wrote a frame of government, not a scripture, and we built into it the means of its own amendment because we knew we were fallible men working under the pressure of the hour. In 1799 I signed New York's Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, because law is a thing that can be changed by men who decide to change it.

So do not hide behind my generation. We failed to finish it. That work now falls to you, and there is no clause anywhere that excuses you from it.

AI DISCLOSURE: AI was used extensively in this assignment. I did ample research across multiple sources about the figure I chose, John Jay. I then personalized this research by adding my point of view, for example, things I found surprising or interesting about what I learned. I then used Claude AI to help me draft a script and then clean up the text for grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I also asked the tool to help me shape it into the form of a blog post. I then edited the text, added links, and added images and captions.