The View From 1776

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Most Americans who are aware of John Jay know him only as our first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  His services to the nation and to New York state were much greater than that.  He was, among other roles, President of the Continental Congress before the War of Independence, Ambassador to Spain, the negotiator of the treaty that ended the war on very favorable terms to the United States, and governor of New York, as well as our nation’s first Secretary of Foreign Affairs.

In the early years of the United States, under the Articles of Confederation, Mr. Jay was effectively the government.  As the British and French ambassadors wrote to their governments, Jay in his capacity as Secretary of Foreign Affairs, was the only government officer available full time for conducting the business of the nation.

This situation arose because, under the Articles of Confederation, there was no President.  The states comprising the Confederation remained independent and sovereign, except in such matters as they might agree upon in periodic assemblies of Congress.  When Congress was not in session, which was most of the time, John Jay was the only officer available for the day-to-day conduct of government affairs.

Jay was entrusted by Congress with this responsibility, because his intelligence and judgment were exemplary and his conduct was scrupulously honest and never self-serving.  As a devout Christian, Jay believed his role on earth to be preparing to face his Maker’s judgment.

Reader Breda Moran emailed to ask for sources of biographical information about John Jay after reading my two earlier postings about Jay (here and here).

Compared to the other founders, Jay has had relatively little biographical attention.

One biography is Walter Stahr’s “John Jay: Founding Father.” This is a general-purpose work covering all aspects of Jay’s life, including his service as Governor of New York and as our first Chief justice of the Supreme Court.

For a much more detailed ( and harder to follow) history of the 1783 treaty, see Richard B. Morris’s “The Peacemakers: The Great Powers & American Independence.”

For a reasonably accurate picture of the people who founded the nation, including Jay, see Joseph Ellis’s “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.”

Finally, “Selected Letters of John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay: Correspondence by or to the First Chief Justice of the United States and His Wife,” complied and edited by Louisa North and one of her colleagues at the John Jay Homestead from among the huge trove of documents in Columbia University’s Jay archives.

Of this work, Walter Stahr wrote: “This is a great little book: a selection of letters to or from John and Sarah Jay, carefully transcribed and thoughtfully introduced. Many of these letters have never been published before, and through them we get a much stronger sense of the Jay family than we have had before. Sarah, in particular, emerges page by page as a smart, savvy, capable woman, handling the family finances and politics in her husband’s frequent absences.”

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