Winner of the Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship from the New York Academy of History.

In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic.

Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice.

John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles.

The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.

David N. Gellman is Professor of History at DePauw University. He is the author of Emancipating New York, coauthor of American Odysseys, and coeditor of Jim Crow New York.

This long and detailed study of the Jay family of New York focuses on their attitudes and actions regarding race and slavery. Gellman has done a masterful research job, seemingly reading every document written by or about a Jay; if you are interested in the Jays, it is must-read.

David N. Gellman 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.

Gellman's account kept this reviewer—admittedly not always an enthusiastic reader of studies about white founders—engrossed to the very last page.

Gellman is a crisp writer who directs both his central characters and his large supporting cast with clarity and economy without sacrificing intellectual heft or moral complexity.

Scrupulously documented and lucidly written, this is an eye-opening look at the complex legacy of slavery in America.