Definition
John Jay (1745–1829), a New York lawyer, served as president of the Continental Congress, helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris of 1783 and then ran foreign affairs for the Confederation Congress. In 1785 and 1786 he sought a trade treaty with Spain by offering to give up American use of the Mississippi River for decades, but Congress split North against South and the plan died. He wrote five of the eighty-five Federalist Papers, and in 1789 Washington named him the first Chief Justice of the United States. After he negotiated Jay's Treaty with Britain in 1794, he left the Court to serve as governor of New York from 1795 to 1801, and in 1799 he signed the state's gradual emancipation law, though he himself held enslaved people.
Why it matters on the AP exam
Jay's career links three Period 3 topics: the weak Confederation, the ratification debate and the foreign-policy fights of the 1790s. His offer to Spain made many southerners and westerners distrust a government they thought served northern merchants, and it was Pinckney's Treaty of 1795, not any agreement Jay made, that opened the Mississippi. To Democratic-Republicans he became the face of Federalist friendship with Britain, and crowds burned him in effigy after his treaty with Britain became public. His support for gradual emancipation in New York also fits questions on the growing regional differences over slavery after the Revolution.
Connections
- Jay's Treaty: the 1794 treaty with Britain that he negotiated as Chief Justice
- The Federalist Papers: he wrote five of the eighty-five essays
- Federalists: he was one of the leading supporters of the Constitution
- Pinckney's Treaty: the 1795 treaty with Spain that opened the Mississippi, which Jay had offered to give up