Born on 12 December 1745, John Jay was an active leader of the Revolution and a key figure in the founding of the nation. During the period of the early Republic he served in Congress, as a diplomat, as chief justice of the United States, and as governor of New York. He was also a co-author of the Federalist Papers and president of the New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves.
Jay's grandfather was a Huguenot who had been imprisoned in France before escaping to America. His father, Peter Jay, was a successful merchant; his mother, Mary Van Cortlandt, came from a Dutch patroon family in the Hudson Valley, one of the most aristocratic families in the American colonies. Jay graduated from King's College (now Columbia University) in 1764 and was admitted to the bar four years later. By the eve of the Revolution, he was a prosperous and effective lawyer, who, unlike most New York attorneys, and most members of the wealthy landed gentry, was a committed Whig. In 1774 he increased his status and access to power by marrying Sarah Livingston, daughter of one of the leading families in New Jersey, whose father, William, would be a signer of the Constitution and a governor of his state. The couple would have seven children, including William Jay, a future judge and abolitionist.
In 1774 Jay was elected to New York City's Committee of Correspondence and later as one of the colony's five delegates to the First Continental Congress. Jay was relatively conservative within the Congress, but went along with, and supported, the more radical members who denounced acts of Parliament as "unconstitutional" and urged local militias to arm themselves. Jay drafted the Address to the People of Great Britain, which Congress used to justify its radical moves. Here he rejected the idea that Parliament could tax the colonists or subordinate them within the imperial economy. Americans, he asserted, would never become the "hewers of wood or drawers of water" for their English cousins.
Jay had returned to New York by early 1776 and was a member of the colonial legislature. In that position he opposed declaring independence but after July 1776 was fully committed to the Revolution and independence. He helped obtain munitions for the troops, investigate traitors, and organize spies. More important, in 1777 he helped write New York's first constitution. Like many others in the founding generation, Jay had experience with constitution-making well before the United States wrote its constitution in 1787. The New York document of 1777 was the only constitution of the period to have no religious tests for officeholding, reflecting his French Huguenot background and his respect for religious freedom. On the other hand, the constitution also required that foreigners seeking naturalization as citizens of New York renounce allegiance to any foreign "prince or potentate," an anti-Catholic measure that reflected his Huguenot ancestry and his family's memory of Catholic persecution.
With the adoption of the New York Constitution, Jay became chief justice of the state's Supreme Court while at the same time serving as a delegate to the Continental Congress. He was elected president of the Congress in 1778 and helped negotiate the treaty that led to the French alliance. In 1779 Congress made him minister plenipotentiary to Spain, where he arrived with his wife in 1780. This first diplomatic mission for Jay was mostly a failure. Spain refused to give him diplomatic status, recognize the new American nation, or acknowledge Americans' navigation rights on the Mississippi. The government in Madrid feared—correctly, as it would turn out—that American independence would be the first step leading to the destruction of Spain's New World empire.
In the spring of 1782 Benjamin Franklin asked Jay to come to Paris to help negotiate the treaty of peace with England. Jay declined to formally meet with the English envoys, however, because their credentials directed them to meet with representatives of the American "colonies" and not with the United States. Franklin ultimately joined Jay in taking this position, and the British acquiesced, getting new instructions from London. This position put him at odds with America's French allies, who urged a more speedy negotiation. Jay soon came to suspect that France was attempting to negotiate a separate peace with England, and on his own, without consulting Franklin, contacted an official in Britain to derail this possibility. Ultimately, Jay, Franklin, and John Adams, who had just arrived from the United States, negotiated a separate peace with England that recognized American nationhood and secured rights to all British possessions on the continent south of Canada, including all territory bordering the Mississippi River. The skillful negotiations of Jay, Adams, and Franklin led in 1783 to the comprehensive Treaty of Paris signed by Britain, France, Spain, and the world's newest nation, the United States of America.
Jay triumphantly returned to his homeland and was immediately appointed secretary for foreign affairs in the government under the Articles of Confederation, which had been ratified in his absence. This made the American ministers to France (Thomas Jefferson) and England (John Adams) his subordinates. Despite the weakness of the Confederation government, in 1786 Jay negotiated a trade agreement with Spain, known as the Jay-Gardoqui Treaty, in which the United States agreed to give up any navigational rights on the Mississippi for thirty years. This was perhaps Jay's greatest mistake in this period, because it infuriated Southerners, who believed the New Yorker had sacrificed their vital interest in access to the Mississippi in return for trading rights that helped only the Northeast. Congress did not ratify the treaty, but Southerners continued to mistrust Jay for the rest of his career.
Throughout the convention period Jay remained frustrated by the weakness of the national government. Thus he enthusiastically supported the Constitutional Convention of 1787, although he was not a delegate. After the convention he joined James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in writing essays to gain support for the new Constitution in New York. These became The Federalist Papers. Jay became ill shortly after the project began and wrote only five of the essays. When the Constitution was ratified, the new president, George Washington, nominated Jay to be the first chief justice of the United States. He held that post until 1795, but his legacy was minimal. His most important decision, in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), in which he interpreted the Constitution to allow a citizen of one state to sue another state, outraged almost all the states and led to the Eleventh Amendment (1798), which reversed this ruling.
More significant than his jurisprudence was Jay's diplomacy. In 1793 he drafted Washington's Proclamation of Neutrality as war broke out in Europe. In 1794 he went to England at Washington's request and successfully negotiated what became known as Jay's Treaty. Under this treaty England finally vacated forts on the American side of the Great Lakes; the treaty also helped the United States obtain British support for access to the Mississippi. However, the settlement signaled a tilt toward Britain in its emerging conflict with France, and supporters of Jefferson attacked it as pro-British and pro-North. Ultimately, however, the Senate ratified most of the treaty.
While in England Jay had been elected governor of New York, and when he returned to the United States he resigned from the Supreme Court to become chief executive of his home state. He held this position for two terms, retiring in 1801. While governor he signed into law a gradual abolition act (1799) that led to the end of slavery in the state. In 1800 he refused to follow Hamilton's suggestion that he alter the way the state chose its presidential electors, in order to secure the electors for Adams. The end result was that New York, and the election, went to Jefferson. The lame duck Adams offered the chief justiceship to Jay, but he declined. Adams then gave the position to John Marshall. Jay then retired to his home in Westchester County, after more than twenty-five years of public service at home and abroad. He died 17 May 1829.