might trade with the West Indies, but should carry only American products there and take away to American ports only West Indian products; moreover, the United States was to export in American vessels no molasses, sugar, coffee, cocoa or cotton to any part of the world. Jay consented to this prohibition under the impression that the articles named were peculiarly the products of the West Indies, not being aware that cotton was rapidly becoming an important export from the southern states. The operation of the other commercial clauses was limited to twelve years. By them the United States was granted limited privileges of trade with the British East Indies; some provisions were made for reciprocal freedom of trade between the United States and the British dominions in Europe; some articles were specified under the head of “contraband of war”; it was agreed that whenever provisions were seized as contraband they should be paid for, and that in cases of the capture of a vessel carrying contraband goods such goods only and not the whole cargo should be seized; it was also agreed that no vessel should be seized merely because it was bound for a blockaded port, unless it attempted to enter the port after receiving notice of the blockade. The treaty was laid before the Senate on the 8th of June 1795, and, with the exception of the clause relating to trade with the West Indies, was ratified on the 24th by a vote of 20 to 10. As yet the public was ignorant of its contents, and although the Senate had enjoined secrecy on its members even after the treaty had been ratified, Senator Mason of Virginia gave out a copy for publication only a few days later. The Republican party, strongly sympathizing with France and strongly disliking Great Britain, had been opposed to Jay’s mission, and had denounced Jay as a traitor and guillotined him in effigy when they heard that he was actually negotiating. The publication of the treaty only added to their fury. They filled newspapers with articles denouncing it, wrote virulent pamphlets against it, and burned Jay in effigy. The British flag was insulted. Hamilton was stoned at a public meeting in New York while speaking in defence of the treaty, and Washington was grossly abused for signing it. In the House of Representatives the Republicans endeavoured to prevent the execution of the treaty by refusing the necessary appropriations, and a vote (29th of April, 1795) on a resolution that it ought to be carried into effect stood 49 to 49; but on the next day the opposition was defeated by a vote of 51 to 48. Once in operation, the treaty grew in favour. Two days before landing on his return from the English mission, Jay had been elected governor of New York state; notwithstanding his temporary unpopularity, he was re-elected in April 1798. With the close of this second term of office in 1801, he ended his public career. Although not yet fifty-seven years old, he refused all offers of office and retiring to his estate near Bedford in Westchester county, N.Y., spent the rest of his life in rarely interrupted seclusion. In politics he was throughout inclined toward Conservatism, and after the rise of parties under the federal government he stood with Alexander Hamilton and John Adams as one of the foremost leaders of the Federalist party, as opposed to the Republicans or Democratic-Republicans. From 1821 until 1828 he was president of the American Bible Society. He died on the 17th of May 1829. The purity and integrity of his life are commemorated in a sentence by Daniel Webster: “When the spotless ermine of the judicial robe fell on John Jay, it touched nothing less spotless than itself.”
See The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay (4 vols., New York, 1890–1893), edited by H. P. Johnston; William Jay, Life of John Jay with Selections from his Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers (2 vols., New York, 1833); William Whitelocke, Life and Times of John Jay (New York, 1887); and George Pellew, John Jay (Boston, 1890), in the “American Statesmen Series.”
John Jay’s son, William Jay (1789–1858), was born in New York City on the 16th of June 1789, graduated from Yale in 1807, and soon afterwards assumed the management of his father’s large estate in Westchester county, N.Y. He was actively interested in peace, temperance and anti-slavery movements. He took a prominent part in 1816 in founding the American Bible Society; was a judge of Westchester county from 1818 to 1843, when he was removed from office by the party in power in New York, which hoped, by sacrificing an anti-slavery judge, to gain additional strength in the southern states; joined the American anti-slavery society in 1834, and held several important offices in this organization. In 1840, however, when it began to advocate measures which he deemed too radical, he withdrew his membership, but with his pen he continued his labours on behalf of the slave, urging emancipation in the district of Columbia and the exclusion of slavery from the Territories, though deprecating any attempt to interfere with slavery in the states. He was a member of the American peace society and was its president for several years. His pamphlet, War and Peace: the Evils of the First with a Plan for Securing the Last, advocating international arbitration, was published by the English Peace Society in 1842, and is said to have contributed to the promulgation, by the powers signing the Treaty of Paris in 1856, of a protocol expressing the wish that nations, before resorting to arms, should have recourse to the good offices of a friendly power. Among William Jay’s other writings, the most important are The Life of John Jay (2 vols., 1833) and a Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War (1849). He died at Bedford on the 14th of October 1858.
See Bayard Tuckerman, William Jay and the Constitutional Movement for the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1893).
William Jay’s son, John Jay (1817–1894), also took an active part in the anti-slavery movement. He was a prominent member of the free soil party, and was one of the organizers of the Republican party in New York. He was United States minister to Austria-Hungary in 1869–1875, and was a member, and for a time president, of the New York civil service commission appointed by Governor Cleveland in 1883.
JAY, WILLIAM (1769–1853), English Nonconformist divine,
was born at Tisbury in Wiltshire on the 6th of May 1769. He
adopted his father’s trade of stone-mason, but gave it up in
1785 in order to enter the Rev. Cornelius Winter’s school at
Marlborough. During the three years that Jay spent there,
his preaching powers were rapidly developed. Before he was
twenty-one he had preached nearly a thousand times, and in
1788 he had for a while occupied Rowland Hill’s pulpit in London.
Wishing to continue his reading he accepted the humble pastorate
of Christian Malford, near Chippenham, where he remained
about two years. After one year at Hope chapel, Clifton, he
was called to the ministry of Argyle Independent chapel in Bath;
and on the 30th of January 1791 he began the work of his life
there, attracting hearers of every religious denomination and
of every rank, and winning for himself a wide reputation as a
brilliant pulpit orator, an earnest religious author, and a friendly
counsellor. Sheridan declared him to be the most manly orator
he had ever heard. A long and honourable connexion of sixty-two
years came to an end in January 1853, and he died on the
27th of December following.
The best-known of Jay’s works are his Morning and Evening Exercises: The Christian contemplated: The Domestic Minister’s Assistant; and his Discourses. He also wrote a Life of Rev. Cornelius Winter, and Memoirs of Rev. John Clarke. An edition of Jay’s Works in 12 vols., 8vo, revised by himself, was issued in 1842–1844, and again in 1856. A new edition, in 8 vols., 8vo, was published in 1876. See Autobiography (1854); S. Wilson’s Memoir of Jay (1854); S. Newth in Pulpit Memorials (1878).
JAY (Fr. géai), a well-known and very beautiful European
bird, the Corvus glandarius of Linnaeus, the Garrulus glandarius
of modern ornithologists. To this species are more or less
closely allied numerous birds inhabiting the Palaearctic and
Indian regions, as well as the greater part of America,
but not occurring in the Antilles, in the southern portion
of the Neotropical Region, or in the Ethiopian or Australian.
All these birds are commonly called jays, and form a
group of the crows or Corvidae, which may fairly be considered
a sub-family, Garrulinae. Indeed there are, or have been,
systematists who would elevate the jays to the rank of a family
Garrulidae—a proceeding which seems unnecessary. Some of
