| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

William Jay: Abolitionist and Anticolonialist. By Stephen P. Budney. (Westport: Praeger, 2005. viii, 170 pp. $44.95, ISBN 0-275-98555-5.)
Stephen P. Budney's insightful biography of William Jay (1789–1857) extends the historiography of abolitionism beyond well-worn tales of Garrisonian reformers in antebellum New England. The son of New York founding father John Jay (himself an abolitionist and slave owner), William grew up in a rapidly changing social and political world. Abolitionism provided a foundation for his quest to build a moral republic.	1
One strength of Budney's book is its focus on Jay's federalism. By the time Jay became an abolitionist, his father's federalism had been eclipsed by the democratizing forces of American politics. Yet, as Budney pointed out, federalism provided a moralistic foundation for abolitionists like Jay. Jay long believed that "republics depended upon a virtuous citizenry that would subsume its own interests for the good of the body politic" (pp. 3–4). Jay was also a conservative abolitionist; federalism's emphasis on citizen virtue and respect for governing institutions allowed Jay to embrace antislavery activism without betraying his family's heritage. Federalism also provided Jay insight on antislavery policy. Jay grew up in early national New York at a time when gradualist abolition policies ascended. Though he might have examined better the contradictions of gradualism in New York, Budney rightly claimed that scholars have not fully examined Federalist antislavery legacies.	. . .

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