Our county’s namesake is a keeper

So, I wondered, what about John Jay?

Here we are in the midst of what may be the most remarkable self-assessment any nation has ever gone through, reviewing what we thought our history books had told us, questioning the wisdom that had been passed down, trying to get a handle on the especially difficult issues of race and slavery, so what about the Founding Father our county is named for?

This is, after all, the only Jay County in the United States of America.

There’s a John Jay School of Criminal Justice, and there’s our much-prized John Jay Center for Learning.

But what about the man?

And, in particular, what about the man and the issue of slavery?

Good questions, and these days when you have good questions you find yourself going to Wikipedia and Google.

So, what do they have to tell us?

Turns out, he was a pretty remarkable guy.

Did he own slaves? Yup.

Though these days we think of the Deep South as the land of slavery, Jay’s state of New York allowed slavery too. According to Wikipedia, Jay continued to own slaves until 1800, when he held five people in bondage as property.

But as a person of his times he must have been enormously conflicted.

While he was a slaveowner, he was founder and president of something called the New York Manumission Society.

And what in the heck is “manumission”? It’s an archaic and long forgotten term for “benevolently” releasing one’s slaves to freedom. One could wonder what might ever be benevolent about slavery, but any path toward freedom was better than none.

In other words, John Jay was a man of his era while simultaneously pushing against the norms of his era.

He opposed slavery, but he owned slaves. He opposed emancipation, but saw manumission as a half-step toward a more moral universe.

And, conflicted as he might have been, he changed his bit of the world.

Manumission — the gradual emancipation of slaves — became the law in 1799 when Jay was governor. By 1827, all of the slaves in New York State were free.

I don’t know about you, but I find that a pretty impressive bit of information.

Here is a man in the 18th century, when slavery in America was the norm, who knew it was wrong — even as he engaged in it — but worked through the levers of government to change things nearly four decades ahead of the Emancipation Proclamation.

As icons are shattered, as a million moral misjudgments come home to roost, there’s a bit of comfort in knowing that our guy — though not perfect — was trying to find a way to do the right thing;

John Jay, thanks.

As Founding Fathers go, you’re a keeper.