William Jay and the Constitutional Movement for the Abolition of Slavery. Bayard Tuckerman

Чтение книги онлайн.

      ILLUSTRATIONS.

      WILLIAM JAY.

      CHAPTER I.

      BIRTH AND EDUCATION OF WILLIAM JAY.—HIS EARLY PHILANTHROPIC INTERESTS.—APPOINTED JUDGE OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

      William Jay, the second son of John Jay, the first Chief-Justice of the United States, and his wife, Sarah Van Brugh Livingston, was born in the city of New York the 16th of June, 1789. New York was then the seat of the Federal Government, and the year is memorable as that in which the National Constitution superseded the Articles of Confederation, while the inauguration of Washington marked a new era in American history.

      During the absence of John Jay in England, while negotiating the "Jay treaty," he was elected Governor of New York, and returned home to assume that office in 1795.

      William, then eight years old, was placed at school with the Rev. Thomas Ellison, the rector of St. Peter's Church, Albany. There he received an old-fashioned training. In 1801 he wrote to his father: "Mr. Ellison put me in Virgil, and I can now say the first two eclogues by heart, and construe and parse and scan them." And later on: "I learn nothing but Latin." Among his schoolmates was J. Fenimore Cooper, who afterwards drew a portrait of their old instructor in one of his "Sketches of England," addressed to Jay:

      "Thirty-six years ago you and I were schoolfellows and classmates in the house of a clergyman of the true English school. This man was an epitome of the national prejudices and in some respects of the national character. He was the son of a beneficed clergyman in England, had been regularly graduated at Oxford and admitted to orders; entertained a most profound reverence for the King and the nobility; was not backward in expressing his contempt for all classes of dissenters and all ungentlemanly sects; was particularly severe on the immoralities of the French Revolution, and though eating our bread, was not especially lenient to our own; compelled you and me to begin Virgil with the eclogues, and Cicero with the knotty phrase that opens the oration in favour of the poet Archias, 'because these writers would not have placed them first in the books if they did not intend people to read them first'; spent his money freely and sometimes that of other people; was particularly tenacious of the ritual and of all the decencies of the Church; detested a democrat as he did the devil; cracked his jokes daily about Mr. Jefferson, never failing to place his libertinism in strong relief against the approved morals of George III., of several passages in whose history it is charitable to suppose he was ignorant; prayed fervently on Sunday, and decried all morals, institutions, churches, manners, and laws but those of England from Monday to Saturday."

      Still, Jay and Cooper were indebted to Ellison's thoroughness in the classics for much of the mental training, the correct taste, and the pure English which marked their subsequent intellectual efforts.

      Jay was prepared for college by Henry Davis, afterwards president of Hamilton College. The boy as he appeared at this time was thus described by his cousin, Susan Sedgwick: "As I look back to that fresh spring-time of life, there rises clearly before me a vigorous, sturdy boy, full of health and animation, with laughing eyes, cheeks glowing and dimpled, and exhibiting already marked traits: with a strong will, yet easily reduced by rightful authority; in temper quick, even to passion, but never vindictive; the storm easily raised as soon appeased, thus foreshadowing him at that later period, when, however capable of self-control, his fearless resistance to wrong and uncompromising advocacy of right partook of the same vehement character, happily expressed by his friend, Mr. Fenimore Cooper, who, in reference to his then recently published denunciation of the evils of war, addressed him playfully, 'Thou most pugnacious man of peace.'"

      William entered Yale College in January, 1804, in his fifteenth year. Upon the college roll during his four years were names afterwards well known in our history. There were trained side by side boys who were soon to be arrayed against each other in religion, politics, and in the momentous conflict of slavery with freedom, which, passing from the senate to the field, their sons and grandsons were to terminate by the sword. From the State of South Carolina came John C. Calhoun, who significantly chose for the subject of his graduating oration, "The Qualifications Necessary for a Perfect Statesman;" Christopher Edward Gadsden, afterwards bishop of his native State; and Thomas Smith Grimké, eminent at the bar, in scholarship and philanthropy. Among the Northern students was the Rev. John Pierpont, known as the reformer and poet, who at the age of seventy-six went to the front during the Civil War as chaplain of a Massachusetts regiment; Hon. Henry Randolph Storrs, of New York, the jurist; Rev. Dr. Nathaniel William Taylor, of the Calvinistic school of Edwards and Dwight; Dr. Thomas H. Gallaudet, of Huguenot descent, who devoted himself to the education of deaf-mutes; Dr. Alexander H. Stevens, of New York; Rev. Dr. Samuel Farmer Jarvis, the learned professor of oriental literature; Rev. Dr. Gardiner Spring, of New York, the famous Presbyterian divine; the Hon. William Huntington, of Connecticut; Jacob Sutherland, of New York; and James A. Hillhouse, of New Haven, one of the most scholarly of our poets, whose generous hospitality at his beautiful home, Sachem's Wood, with its avenue of stately elms planted by his father and himself, was for many years the delight of his friends. At Yale Jay met Cooper again, and strengthened a friendship which lasted through life. It was during a visit at Bedford, about 1825, while sitting on the piazza with Chief-Justice Jay, smoking and talking of the incidents of the Revolution, that Fenimore Cooper learned the adventures of a patriotic American, who was apparently attached to the royal cause, but who constantly warned of danger the Continental Army in Westchester and was especially useful during the sitting of the State convention at White Plains. The services and escapes of this man were СКАЧАТЬ