John Jay

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Preface

The public life of John Jay was so active and varied that it is almost impossible to compress the essential facts into small compass without losing much of their interest and suggestiveness. Moreover, he was by disposition so reticent and unimpulsive, so completely self-controlled, that there is scarcely any material for constructing a history of his inner private life. He was singularly free from those faults which, trivial or serious, attract men's love by exciting their sympathy or pity. Conscientious, upright, just, and wise, John Jay, like Washington, survives in the popular imagination as an abstract type of propriety ; and his fair fame has been a conspicuous mark for all who are offended by hearing an Aristides always called the Just, or who, from an a 'priori notion of history, believe that statesmen have always been as corrupt, civic virtue as tainted, and politics as demoralizing, as they are in our time. In this belief there is undoubtedly much truth, — but there are exceptions to most rules, or rather what is true of a generation in the average is never true of every individual comprised in it, — and a careful study viii PREFACE

confirms the contemporary opinion that the character of Jay was, unfortunately for mankind, exceptional.

Any life of John Jay must, of course, be based on the two volumes of his Life and Letters by his son. Judge William Jay ; but an undue sense of the sanctity of domestic life prevented then the publication of anything not clearly of a public, almost of an official, nature. Subsequently, as the Works and Letters appeared of Washington, John Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Fisher Ames, and the other Revolutionary patriots, and the gleanings of Sparks and others from the government papers, more light was thrown on the motives and movements of the time, and Jay's life was rewritten by Flanders, who dispelled, almost for the first time, the odium, begotten by partisanship of ignorance, that so long assailed the memory of the early Federalists. Certain popular prejudices still survived from the days when blind devotion to France, a veritable " love frenzy," was a test of party fealty, and these prejudices obscured any clear view of the peace negotiations of 1782. Sparks, editing official documents, interjected with misleading positiveness a note that Jay's suspicions of France were unfounded, — and this suggestion, itself unfounded, has until recently been followed implicitly by historians, even by Mr. Bancroft. A hundred

PREFACE ix

years after the event, papers from the French archives published by De Circourt, the correspondence between Vergennes and Luzerne, Fitzherbert and Fox, Oswald and Shelburne, in the " Stevens MSS.," and the revelations in Fitzmaurice's " Life of Shelburne," enabled the Honorable John Jay to prove the absolute correctness of his grandfather's convictions, and the consequent necessity of the course of action he adopted. This new information has not yet been incorporated into any life of Jay.

Within the last year the third volume has been published of Doniol's " La participation de la France dans I'etablissement de I'independance des Etas-Unis," which contains the official documents relating to the treaty of Aranjuez, elucidating with extreme fullness the relations between the courts of Paris and Madrid in the critical years of 1778, 1779. The " Jay MSS.," from which a selection is now preparing for publication, and an elaborate digest, with quotations, of the "Stevens MSS.," have also been studied with minute care ; and to these sources, and to the constant valuable suggestions and criticisms of my uncle, the Honorable John Jay, is due whatever of new or original may

be found here.

GEORGE PELLEW.

New Yobk, March 1, 1890.

Contents

m. Eevoltjtionabt Leader, 1776-1779 ... 53

IV. CONSTBUCTIVE STATESMAN, 1778-1779 . . 68

V. President of Congress, 1779 .... 94

Chapter I 1745-1774

John Jay, the eighth child and sixth son of Peter Jay and Mary, the daughter of Jacobus Van Cortlandt, was born in the city of New York, on the 12th of December, 1745. His father was a wealthy merchant, who retired from business at the age of forty to live at a country house and farm at Eye in Westchester County. The family was of French descent; the great grandfather, Pierre Jay, a Huguenot merchant of La Rochelle, left France on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when the greater part of his property was confiscated, and died in England. The grandfather, Augustus, after many hazardous adventures, settled in New York in 1686, where he married Anna Maria Bayard, a descendant of a Protestant professor of theology at Paris, who had likewise chosen to leave his country for religion's sake, making his home in Holland. Through his wife's relations, the Bayards and Stuyvesants, and his brother-in-law, Stephen Peloquin, a merchant of Bristol, England, Augustus Jay soon formed a large business connection. From Bristol came invoices of kerseys and mohairs, hats, gloves, and beer; to the Barbadoes he shipped flour, bread, pork, and hams, receiving in return cargoes of sugar and rum ; and occasionally his ships made adventures to Surinam. Peter Jay soon became a partner with his father , in 1740 his name appears as one of the aldermen of the city of New York ; and the family was allied with the manorial families of Van Cortlandt and Philipse, to which was soon to be added the most influential of all, the family of Livingston.

From Peter Jay, who seems to have been a typical New York merchant of the last century, "a gentleman of opulence, character, and reputation," ^ his son John inherited many marked traits of character, as is testified by the now yellowing pages of the old merchant's letter book. In letters to his son James,^ in England, even in the brief business-like notices of the death of relations, is shown the piety of the man and of the family : " Let us endeavor to adhere to the worship of God, and, observing his holy ordinances as the rule of our lives, let us disregard the wicked insinuations of

^ Jones, History of New York, ii. 223.

2 Afterwards knighted for his success in raising funds in England for King's College, now Columbia College, a member of the New York Senate, and a physician of distinction in New York.

libertines, who not only deride our most Holy Religion and the professors of it, but also endeavor to gain prosilites to their detestable notions, and so rob the Almighty of the honour and adoration that is due to him from his creatures." ^

Now and then a casual sentence opens a tiny chink through the shutters that close so tightly round that little family circle. " When you come home," his father reminds James, " don't forget to bring me Bishop Patrick's Devout Christian, a book you doubtless well remember, as it contains the family prayers we always use." ^ "I desire you," he says a few months later, " to make me a present ... of a box with five or six groce of neat long pipes, but not very long and weighty, and to your mother an oval tortoise shell snuff box, with a joint to the lid, the length of the box not exceeding six inches." ^ One wonders whether James, when he returned after many years, did remember that snuff box so minutely described, and whether it was the recollection of those " neat long pipes " that made John Jay always so fond of long " Church wardens."

Occasionally politics are mentioned. There is, however, nothing but loyal enthusiasm for the success of the troops during the French war, honest regard for the successive governors, and regret for their mistakes and mischances, especially for the

1 To James Jay, December 7, 1751, Letter Booh of Peter Jay, iii.

« September 2, 1754. » November 26, 1754 fate of Sir Danvers Osborne, " our late new governor," who " very unhappily committed a violence upon himself, and was found in a melancholy situation fastened with his handkerchief." ^ But from the date of the Stamp Act, and the measures restrictive of trade that were passed simultaneously with its repeal, the tone gradually changed. " Our colonists cannot digest the hard measure they are dealt with in Parliament at home, when at the same time they think the sugar islands are greatly indidg'd to their prejudice. . . . The political views of the great, in measures in disfavour of the Colonyes, are to me impenetrable ; they may, for aught I can conceive, tend to very satisfactory ends, but they are considered here by the most judicious in a very different light, as the unhappy occasion of making very bad impressions on the minds of the people, and the laying a foimdation for much trouble, that will sooner or later be the inevitable consequence of too harsh usage. In my situation in life, the measures complained of can very inconsiderably affect me, and thus far they give me no concern, but nevertheless I can't help having a feeling for the great numbers who are likely to suffer by them." ^ The hard times that followed are noticed briefly : " The reasonableness of a general complaint of the difficult times in these Colonyes by the great restrictions lay'd on trade, etc., begins to manifest itself by frequent

1 To David Peloquin, October 24, 1753.

2 To same, May 7, 1765.

failures, and by a shocking general bad pay among the people ; " ^ and as the year advances to its close, the language becomes stronger, and the keeneyed merchant begins to see pretty clearly the meaning of what is taking place. "The general and spirited resentment that prevails in the Colonyes," he writes on November 25, 1765, "gives reason to expect that the enforcing the Stamp Act will be opposed at all events, and then England as well as the Colonyes may both have reason to curse the first promoters of it, who by this impolitick act have effectually united the several Colonyes into the strongest tyes of mutual interest and friendship, which political measures of former Ministrys, we always thought, tended to prevent."^

Peter Jay, then, was a sound Whig from the beginning, and his son naturally took the same independent stand. When the final appeal to arms came, Peter Jay remained true to his Whig principles, though no extremist. " God grant," he wrote to John in the spring of 1776, " that all attempts of the ministerial troops may be frustrated, and be the means of a happy reconciliation," ^ a curiously illogical wish, but one that reflected closely the Whig popular opinion of a few months earlier, and which was, even then, the wish of both father and son, and of a majority of the Congress.

One letter more may be quoted, full of character, and of character that did not die with the

1 To David Peloquin, June 4, 1765. 2 Tq game.

8 April 18, 1776, Jay MSS.

writer. It was written in 1771, to his son John, and is about a dispute with a neighbor, in itself unimportant : —

" Dear Johnnt, — Your brother tells me Mr. Bayard and you have agreed about the road. The settlement of our lott never was an object to me, and had that gentleman condescended to ask me for a road as a matter of favour he should have had it. His attempt to draw me into the measure by regard to my own interest, was a little piece of art which I was determined should not succeed. . . . Design is not his talent, he had better act with candor and openness. His threats of an Act of Assembly and an Application to the Corporation, were better calculated to excite ridicule than fear. I have nothing to ask or fear from any man, and will not be compelled into measures. The truth of his former pretences appears now from his consenting to pay so dearly for a road ; tell him he may have his land and a road too." 1

Piety, independence, and a keen sense of justice were natural birthrights in the Jay family; to these, several generations of successful business men had added the more worldly virtues of prudence and perseverance ; while from his father John Jay seems to have inherited a firmness of character which, in excess, would have been obstinacy, and a strength of feeling seldom suspected because united with unusual self-control. It is also noticeable that of Jay's great grandparents not one was English, three were French and five Dutch, so that 1 To John Jay, 1771, Jay MSS.

he was one of the few men of the Revolution who could say, as he did in 1796, " Not being of British descent, I cannot be influenced by that tendency towards their national character, nor that partiality for it, which might otherwise be supposed to be not unnatural." This fact in itself, combined with the hatred of interference traditional among merchants, may have had no little influence in making John Jay a leader in the American Revolution without his ceasing to be, or rather because he was, a conservative.

The year of his birth he was taken to Rye, and there his early childhood was passed in the old Jay house, which at that time was " a long low building, but one room deep," extended, as the family increased, by some eighty feet in length.^ After surviving an attack of sore throat, of which a younger sister died, and escaping the dreaded small-pox that left his brother Peter and his sister Nancy totally blind, he was taught by his mother " the rudiments of English, and the Latin grammar." " Johnny is of a very grave disposition and takes to learning exceedingly well," wrote his father, when the boy was nearly seven years old ; " he will be soon fit to go to a grammar school ; " ^ and to a grammar school he accordingly went the next year. " My Johnny gives me a very pleasing prospect," wrote Mr. Jay again in the autumn ; " he seems to be endowed with a very good ca-

1 Scharf , Hist, of Westchester Co. ii. 672.

2 To James Jay, July 3, 1752.

pacity, is very reserved and quite of his brother James's disposition for books." ^ The school was kept by the Rev. Peter Stoope, the pastor of the French Huguenot church, then lately joined to the Episcopal communion, at New Rochelle. He was by birth a Swiss, an eccentric man, very absentminded, and wholly devoted to mathematics, so that the parsonage was allowed to fall into decay, and the boys were haK-starved under the management of his wife, " who was as penurious as he was careless." To keep the snow off his bed in winter, John used to stuff the broken panes of his window with bits of wood. But the plain food agreed with him, his health was excellent, and he used to recall afterwards the pleasure he had in the woods picking nuts, which "he carried home in his stockings." French was spoken generally at the parsonage and by the people of the village, who were, as its name suggests, chiefly descendants of French refugees ; thus he easily and early learned the language that was to prove so useful to him. At New Rochelle he stayed for three years, when he was taken home to Rye, and prepared for college by a tutor, Mr. George Murray.

Jay entered King's (now Columbia) College in 1760, when he was but a little over fourteen years old. For admission he was required to read " the first three of Tully's orations, and the six first books of Virgil's ^neid into English, and the ten first chapters of St. John's Gospel into Latin," to be

1 To Messrs. D. & L. Peloquin, October 24, 1753.

well versed in Latin grammar, and to be " expert in Arithmetick as far as Reduction." At that time the college was under its first president, the learned and pious Dr. Samuel Johnson, an old friend of Mr. Peter Jay, whose eldest son Augustus had studied reading and writing at the doctor's parsonage at Stratford. Dr. Johnson was a gentle, studious man, who had been one of the first graduates of Yale College to desert Congregationalism for the Church of England. Single-handed at first, then with one and afterwards two assistants, he instructed the few students of King's College, and was just gaining some success, when he resigned on the death of his wife of the small-pox, which for some years had been epidemic in New York, and for fear of which he scarcely ever ventured out of doors.^ Young Jay early won his regard, and on Dr. Johnson's resignation in 1763 he learned from his father that the doctor wished to hear from him. " I would have you gratify him with a letter, which he has a right to expect from you, and, although I believe things go well in the college now," Mr. Jay suggested with characteristic caution, " yet I would not have you write more than may be communicated out of college." ^ The boy wrote accordingly, and the late president answered promptly, incidentally showing how early, with its unfamiliar strains of wild romance, McPherson's bombastic Ossian charmed the fancy even in America : " I gave

^ Baird, Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson. 2 August, 1763, Jay MSS.

Brooks a much better and more correct copy of what I had added to Ossian's Address to the Sun than what you had before, from which I wish you and all of them would exactly transcribe for the future." 1

Of Jay's college life little is known. During the first two years he lodged at the house of Lawrence Romer, a painter, at "the corner of Verlettenburgh Hill and Broadway," and the last two years he had rooms in the college. He set himself at once, of his own accord, to curing certain defects of utterance and rapid reading, and he made an enthusiastic study of English composition, a study that bore fruit in the graceful and easy, but at the same time often laconic, style for which he was noted, and which in the first Continental Congress at once placed him in " the little aristocracy of talents and letters " with William Livingston and Dickinson.^ "My son John has now been two years at college," wrote Mr. Jay in 1765, " where he prosecutes his studyes to satisfaction. He is indued with very good natural parts, and is bent upon a learned profession. I believe it will be the law." ^ In his last year at college, Jay, then " a youth remarkably sedate and well-disposed," * as his father called him, determined on the law as his profession, and is said to have begun his prepara-

1 From Rev. Dr. S. Johnson, October 27, 1763, Jay MSS.

2 John Adams's Works, x. 79. 8 Ibid., April 14, 1763.

* To David Peloquin, Letter Book, May 16, 1763.

tion for it by carefully reading through Grotius " De Jure Belli et Pacis," and its discussion of international law and so-called natural rights may have seemed to have a bearing on the perplexing and pressing problems of the day. His decision to study law was apparently the result of thought and deliberation, as Mr. Jay wrote to him on hearing of it : " Your observations on the study of the law I believe are very just, and as it 's your inclination to be of that profession, I hope you '11 closely attend to it, with a firm resolution that no difficulties in prosecuting that study shall discourage you from applying very close to it, and, if possible, from taking a delight in it." ^

In 1783 Dr. Johnson was succeeded as president by Dr. Myles Cooper, " a wit and a scholar," said Verplanck, " whose learning and accomplishments gave him personal popularity and respect with his pupils, and of course added authority to his opinions, and those were the opinions and prejudices of the high-toned English University Tory of the last century." ^ Twelve years later, to escape a mob, this good gentleman was forced to leap over the college fence with an undignified precipitation little befitting a poet and a Fellow of Oxford, and he sailed forthwith for England ; but at this earlier time he was not unpopular, and he was always spoken of respectfully by Jay, who might

1 August 23, 1763, Jay MSS.

^ Gulian Verplanck, Address before College Societies, August 2, 1830.

naturally have resented what he then deemed a most unjust punishment in the following matter. One day a number of students in the College Hall began to break the table, — such at least is the traditional description of their nefarious enterprise. The president heard the noise, went in, and asked one student after another, " Did you break the table ? " " Do you know who did ? " All answered " No," until he came to Jay, who was the last but one. To the first question Jay answered like the others ; to the second question, " Yes, sir." "Who was it?" asked Dr. Cooper. "I do not choose to tell you, sir," was the sturdy reply ; and the next and last boy answered as Jay did. These two were called before the professors, when Jay argued ingeniously and reasonably enough that, as information against fellow students was not required by the college statutes, they were not technically guilty of disobedience in not informing; but the professors were unconvinced, and Jay was rusticated only a short time before he was to graduate. His term of suspension over, he returned to coUege, and at the Commencement held in May, 1764, in the presence of General Gage, his majesty's council, and other notables, delivered a dissertation on the blessings of peace, and received his bachelor's degree.

Two weeks after leaving coUege, Jay entered, as a student, the office of Benjamin Kissam, a barrister " eminent in the profession," ^ binding himself 1 Letter Book, May 15, 1764.

an apprentice, on the payment of X200, to serve for five years, with liberty to apply the last two years to the study of the law, and to visit the sessions with only occasional attendance then at the office. This arrangement was a happy ending of much anxiety on the part of Mr. Peter Jay, for the lawyers of New York had a few years before made an agreement to take no one as clerk who proposed to enter the profession, and a new and more liberal agreement " under such restrictions," however, " as will greatly impede the lower class of the people from creeping in," ^ was made only in time to prevent Jay from starting for England to get a professional education there.

" The office duties of clerks at that period," according to Peter Van Schaack, who three years later was studying under William Smith of the same bar, " were immensely laborious ; everything was written, and the drudgery of copying was oppressive. Printed blank forms, which are now used by the profession with so much economy of time and labor, were then unknown. Even the argument of questions of law before the Supreme Court was conducted in writing." ^ The law books of the time were the ponderous tomes of reports and digests that preceded Blackstone's Commentaries, which did not reach America till the third year of Jay's apprenticeship. In this drudgery

1 Letter Book, May 15, 1764.

2 Life of Peter Van Schaack, by Henry Van Schaack, pp. 6,7.

Jay had as companion for a while Lindley Murray, afterwards the famous grammarian, who was soon struck by the unusual qualities of his fellow student, qualities which, as he then noted them, were characteristic of Jay throughout a long life. " He was remarkable," said Murray, " for strong reasoning powers, comprehensive \dews, indefatigable application, and uncommon firmness of mind." ^ With Mr. Kissam, Jay, though very young and only a clerk, was before long on terms of intimacy. Many years afterwards, he had the pleasure of introducing Kissam's son to John Adams, with the remark that the father was " one of the best men I have ever known, as well as one of the best friends I have ever had." ^

In the sixties the must of the Revolution was already fermenting, but politics were apparently ignored by both master and clerk except so far as concerned their legal business. In April, 1766, Mr. Kissam proposes going " on a jaunt " to Philadelphia, if the news of the repeal of the Stamp Act does not arrive in the mean time ; for as, he writes, " on the Repeal of the Stamp Act we shall doubtless have a luxuriant harvest of law, I would not willingly, after the long famine we have had, miss reaping my part of the harvest. ... As soon as it reaches you, I beg you '11 come down, and be ready to receive all business that offers." ^ Kis-

^ Autobiography of Lindley Murray.

2 To John Adams, February 16, 1788, Jay MS&

8 To John Jay, April 25, 1766, Jay MSS.

sam, while absent, wrote to ask about the conduct of the office, and Jay replied in a letter that was, as he expressed it, " free enough in all conscience : " " If by wanting to know how matters go on in the office, you intend I shall tell you how often your clerks go into it, give me leave to remind you of the old law maxim, that a man's own evidence is not to be admitted in his own cause. Why ? Because 't is ten to one he does violence to his conscience. If I should tell you that I am aU the day in your office, and as attentive to your interest as I would be to my own, I suspect you would think it such an impeachment of my modesty as would not operate very powerfully in favor of my veracity. And if, on the other hand, I should tell you that I make hay while the sun shines, and say unto my soul, ' Soul, take thy rest, thy lord is journeying in a far country,' I should be much mistaken if you did not think that the confession looked too honest to be true." ^ The fun of a lawyer of twenty-one in 1766 does not, perhaps, bear quoting, but it shows the familiar, pleasant relationship he had already established with his " master," and the boyish gayety that was so soon, perforce, concealed by an acquired or natural gravity. It was about this time, too, that Jay by a diplomatic, though not insincere, reply got his father's leave to keep a horse. " John, why do you want a horse ?" " That I may have the means, sir, of visiting you frequently." The fact was that

^ Jay, Jjife of John Jay, i. 18.

then, as in after years, Jay suffered from ill health, especially from dyspepsia, and found his best medicine in regular exercise.

In 1768 he was admitted to the bar, and became almost immediately successful, forming at first a temporary partnership with Eobert K. Livingston, afterwards chancellor of the State and secretary for foreign affairs. Benjamin Kissam, when unable to attend to his own business, would often ask Jay to act for him, and a letter of his shows the nature of the cases : " One is about a horse race, in which I suppose there is some cheat ; another is about an eloped wife ; another of them also appertains unto horse flesh. . . . There is also one writ of Inquiry."

The practice of a country lawyer to-day could scarcely be less interesting. Indeed, before the Revolution, so far as can be gathered, the chief law business, even in New York, consisted in suing out writs of ejectment, and in collecting debts due to English merchants. It was seldom that a case arose like that of Zwengler, involving principles of constitutional law, and establishing the reputation of the victorious counsel. One cause only of some consequence is mentioned, in which Jay was engaged, that of a contested election in Westchester Coimty, in which the right of suffrage was discussed, and questions of evidence of more than usual intricacy arose. On this occasion Jay was opposed by his friend Gouverneur Morris. In 1770 Jay speaks of going to Fairfield to try two causes ; ^ and in 1774 he is addressing a jury at Albany. His practice, then, was varied, though he was engaged in no great cases, and was at no time noted for brilliant or " magnetic " oratory. In after years his " quiet, limpid style, without gesture," attracted the attention of the younger Hamilton during the great debates on the ratification of the Constitution in the New York Convention, and, as a young lawyer, he must have been unusually clear-headed and tactful. "All the causes you have hitherto tried," wrote Kissam in 1769, " have been by a kind of inspiration." ^ These two still continued great friends, though sometimes engaged on opposite sides. On one such occasion Kissam, in a moment of embarrassment, complained that he had brought up a bird to peck out his own eyes. " Oh, no," retorted Jay, " not to peck out but to open your eyes."

In November, 1770, a number of lawyers in New York formed "The Moot," a club that met the first Friday of every month for the discussion of disputed points of law. Jay was one of the younger members, together with his college friends, Egbert Benson, in due time judge of the New York Supreme Court ; Robert R. Livingston, Jr. ; James Duane, Jay's colleague in the Continental Congress, and first mayor of New York after the Revolution ; Gouverneur Morris, as yet without that wooden leg which he brandished with such happy effect in the