The Competent are forgotten

Joey Carlson
MSMU Class of 2025

(7/2023) John Jay was an exact contemporary (1745 – 1829) of the Founding Fathers we know well (Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, etc.), and at the time, no American would have held Jay in any lower regard than those three I just mentioned. He was a prominent Federalist, the party in favor of a strong central government and opposed to American involvement in the French Revolution, alongside John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Though strong men of quiet virtue certainly held stature at our nation’s founding, they are typically forgotten by history; history which often loves the outrageous and the controversial.

Posterity does not remember John Jay for two reasons. The first is that, unlike his contemporaries, he was not a prolific author. He was certainly intelligent, but he had what we might today call a judicial temperament, and he was not bombast and voluminous like Hamilton, or an idealist like Jefferson. Rather he was simple, honest, and competent, as well as intelligent, and a private man. He burned many of his private letters to his wife, and for these reasons, there is simply less to read by Jay. If people have read Jay, they have read one of his five (out of ninety-five) Federalist Papers. The second reason Jay has been forgotten is because he never became President of the United States, the reason for which was in fact because of Jay’s honesty and competence. George Washington sent Jay to negotiate with the British in 1794, and Jay managed to secure an impossible treaty. The United States as a young nation had zero bargaining power, and had it not been for Jay, we would have had, essentially, a more devastating War of 1812 only 17 years earlier. Jay ought to have been hailed as a hero for securing an impossible peace, but upon his return he found that the nation abhorred him. Jay’s public opinion had been decided from the moment the American people discovered that they were making deals with that tyrant, King George. So, the Federalists opted for a candidate with greater swing-state appeal, John Adams.

When history remembers great American foreign diplomats, what is forgotten is that John Jay was our first Secretary of Foreign Affairs (he was responsible for securing funds from the Spanish government in 1780). Additionally, the first acting Secretary of State was actually John Jay. He was also President of the Second Continental Congress in 1779, but is forgotten beside John Hancock for the latter’s larger personality. John Jay was not present for the signing because his home state of New York was preparing for siege by the British, and so he joined a list of Founding Fathers who were not able to sign the Declaration including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and George Mason. Jay was selected to be our nation’s first head Supreme Court Justice, setting a strong precedent for the Court against political interventionism. It was incredibly difficult work and not at all prestigious, but Jay did the job well, just as he did everything well. He retired after six years and became the second Governor of New York from 1775 till 1801.

John Jay has received much attention in recent years as our nation has grappled with the fact that the same men who endorsed this statement, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," also owned people. Jay was born into a family with a deep history of owning slaves (his father owned a number of slave ships), but Jay, as a man of principle, was an abolitionist, successfully passing the gradual emancipation laws in New York that Jefferson was not able to accomplish in Virginia. Of course, Virginia was probably the most difficult State to attempt emancipation in, but many forget that New York had more slaves than any other Northern State. Sadly, however, Jay’s record here is not clean; he is not like George Wythe who died freeing his slaves. He owned five people even into his waning years as Governor, and on multiple occasions, he hunted down slaves who attempted to escape, not understanding why they would want to leave.

Jay had an incredibly close relationship with his wife and kids, with his wife even going with him to Europe on diplomatic missions. Jay was President of the American Bible Society, and especially after his wife died, was a deeply religious man. It was his Christian Faith that fueled his abolitionist views, and it was his Christian Faith that drew him to be a Revolutionary in the first place. Almost all the people he grew up with in New York were royalists, and most of them moved to and died in England. However, by 1776, Jay had already spent a lifetime trying to build a robust idea of American rights, and he was not willing to go back on his principles, even in the face of being ostracized or killed.

There is a final anecdote for our partisan times. In the election of 1800, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans were faced off in a role defining Presidential election. The main candidates were the incumbent John Adams for the Federalists, and Thomas Jefferson for the Democratic Republicans. John Jay was governor of New York, whose electoral votes had surprisingly swung for Jefferson. Adams sent a frantic letter to his fellow party member Jay, asking him to switch from electoral vote to popular vote so that he would have a better chance of winning (this was all apparently an issue from the beginning). Adams thought it was "no time to be scrupulous" in the face of such important issues, asking him to cheat for the sake of the nation. Jay did not even reply.

John Jay, a man of competency and quiet virtue, deserves a position beside Thomas Jefferson and the like; in the grand scheme of things, he is probably better off than Jefferson anyways. History may not remember such men, but God certainly does, and we should all prefer virtue to fame in every case.

Read other articles by Joe Carlson