John Jay guided US spying,
treaty negotiations during Revolution

To build a successful nation takes the work of many talented men and women. John Jay was among those figures in the earliest days of the nation. He not only served as the nation’s first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court but also served as a lawmaker, diplomat, governor, spymaster, and one of the architects of the Constitution.
Jay was born into a wealthy merchant family in New York City in December 1745.  He was one of ten children. His grandfather had immigrated to the American colonies in the late 1600s as a Protestant refugee fleeing religious oppression in France.

He was periodically taught at home for most of his childhood and briefly studied at a boarding school.  At age 14, he enrolled in King’s College (which is now Columbia University).  He graduated at age 18 in 1764 and began working as a clerk for a prominent local attorney where he trained to be an attorney.  He earned a masters degree in 1767 and was admitted to the state bar in 1768.

Jay set up his own law practice in 1771 as tensions between and the colonies simmered.  By 1774, the Committees of Correspondence were established in the colonies as a means of passing information and ideas between leading colonists and legislators.  Jay soon became secretary for the committee in New York.  That year, he also married Sarah Livingston with whom he would have six children.

With the Revolutionary War approaching, Jay took an increasingly prominent role.  In 1774, he was elected to serve as a delegate to the First Continental Congress, which met to protest British actions against in the wake of the Boston Tea Party and organize boycotts against Britain.

The next year, he became a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, just after fighting had broken out between the British and the colonists in Massachusetts.  Jay was initially reluctant to pursue independence, believing that reconciliation with Britain was still possible.  He had a long interest in protecting property rights and respected the British system, but he increasingly came to believe that British were threatening the rights of the colonists.  He also helped write the Olive Branch Petition in 1775, a last-ditch effort by the Continental Congress to preserve the peace, which again fell on deaf ears in London.

By 1776, war was spreading across the colonies, and he returned to New York  as Congress’s debates turned toward independence.  Jay did not see combat during the American Revolution.  However, his role was a critical part of the effort.  He led the counterintelligence efforts of the Americans against the British.  In 1776, he led the New York Committee for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies.  This effort included recruiting spies, organizing scouting activities, and compiling intelligence activities on the British and Loyalists, as New York City was occupied by the British for most of the war.  This helped Gen. George Washington organize an effective spy network throughout the war that alerted Continental forces to possible British plans. 

At one point, Jay’s team was able to uncover and stop a British attempt to assassinate Washington.  For his efforts, many historians called Jay the Father of American Counterintelligence.  Years later, Jay told tales of his work in espionage to American writer James Fenimore Cooper, which inspired him to write his famous 1821 novel The Spy.

He was elected Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court in 1777.  In December 1778, Jay returned to the Continental Congress.  Though no formal government for the newly independent existed yet, but Congress had assumed the role of the national government.  Delegates elected him president of the Congress, but it was a role without any political authority and simply put him in charge of directing debates on the floor of Congress.  He served in the position for a year.

In 1779, Congress appointed Jay as ambassador to Spain, which had just allied with against in the Revolutionary War.  The support of the Spanish government and military proved extremely important to countering British naval actions in the Mississippi River.  Three years later, with the end of formal fighting in the United States after the Battle of Yorktown, Jay was sent to serve as part of the American peace delegation with Ben Franklin and John Adams.  The Treaty of Paris of 1783 that emerged secured British recognition of American independence, with a border at the , and other provisions that offered great promise to the new nation.  Jay returned to great acclaim and prepared to work in the new national government to protect America’s new independence.