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Six months later, the American Revolution had its prologue a few blocks from Kissam’s John Street office at New York’s old City Hall on Wall Street, where Federal Hall now stands. In the first year of his four-year apprenticeship, Parliament passed the Stamp Act. of the Intellectual Source from whence the Current flows.” Fellow clerk Lindley Murray, whose school grammars and readers later sold in the millions, remembered Jay as “remarkable for strong reasoning powers, comprehensive views, indefatigable application, and uncommon firmness of mind.”īut Jay’s placid interval was short-lived. Your “Whirl of Imagination,” he wrote his clerk, “bespeaks the Grandeur. The boy struggled to keep the snow off his bed by blocking up his broken window with scraps of wood.Īfter entering six-year-old King’s College (later Columbia) at 14 (the normal age) and spending four happy years among his 20-odd fellow collegians, Jay-six feet tall, stick-thin, round-shouldered, fine-boned, with a sensitive mouth and thoughtful, melancholy eyes-began his law studies as a clerk for kindly Benjamin Kissam, who perceived at once the young man’s talent.
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His eccentric schoolmaster treated his pupils “with little food and much scolding,” Jay’s son and biographer William reports. Though Jay’s father had grown rich as a merchant, married a Van Cortlandt heiress, and counted most of the colony’s Dutch and Huguenot establishment as his relatives, and though he and his wife were loving parents, Jay’s childhood after he went to boarding school at age eight in the French-speaking Huguenot town of Nouvelle Rochelle had its share of privations. Shortly after John’s birth on Manhattan’s Pearl Street in 1745, his father moved his brood to a farm bordering Long Island Sound in Rye, an easier setting for his two blind children. Before he was born, smallpox had blinded an elder brother and sister, for whom, he later wrote, “this world has not been a Paradize” of his four other siblings, one was retarded and another emotionally disturbed. As the first chief justice both of New York and of the United States, as president of Congress and governor of his state, as secretary for foreign affairs and, most important, as the diplomat who stamped his vision on America’s foreign policy for generations to come, he had tried to ensure for his countrymen the peace, order, and stability that had seemed to him fragile and elusive from the moment he was born.Ī sense of life’s fragility hung over Jay’s childhood already at six and seven, his father described him as “very grave” and “very reserved,” though “indowed with a very good capacity.” He grew up with a keen sense that his Huguenot ancestors-refugees, like the Plymouth Pilgrims, from religious tyranny-had fled to the New World in the nick of time after France began persecuting Protestants in 1685. What would lead him, in the hale prime of life, to retire instead to the plain yellow house he’d just built on a hilltop at the remote northern edge of Westchester County, two days’ ride from Manhattan, where visitors were few and the mail and newspapers came but once a week? After 27 years at the forge of the new nation’s founding, why would so lavishly talented a man give up his vital role on the world stage for the quiet life of a gentleman farmer?īut just that option-the chance for every man to sit quietly under his vine and his fig tree, with none to make him afraid-is what he had labored more than a quarter-century to bring about, and he felt he had achieved it. First chief justice and Federalist Papers coauthor John Jay’s greatest legacy was setting the future course of American foreign policy.įew could fathom why 55-year-old John Jay turned down President Adams’s nomination to rejoin the Supreme Court when his two terms as New York’s governor ended.