"I have tried in vain," he wrote, "to get a room exclusively to myself, and hope to be able to do so in a few days, but at a high rent which I am unable to bear. Then I may set up a bed in it, and have a chair or two and a table, and so be made comfortable. Now I am very uncomfortable, for I have no particular place allotted me. I feel like an intruder everywhere; sleeping in other people's beds, and sitting in other people's rooms. I am writing on other people's paper with other people's ink. The pen is my own. That and the clothes I wear are all that I can claim as mine here."
Released in 1802, he lived with his wife in a small house on the outskirts of the city, where he died in 1806 aged seventy-two.
It was often proposed in Congress to appropriate some of the money belonging to the industrious and frugal people of the United States to pay the debts of this rash speculator; and many writers since have censured the government for not doing something for his relief. The simple and sufficient answer is, that Congress has no constitutional power to apply the people's money to any such purpose. The government holds the public treasure in trust. It is a trustee, not a proprietor. It can spend public money only for purposes which the constitution specifies; and, among these specified purposes, we do not find the relief of land speculators who build gorgeous palaces on credit.
JOHN JAY,
THE FIRST CHIEF-JUSTICE.
It was the tyranny of Louis XIV., King of France, that drove the ancestor of John Jay to America. Pierre Jay, two hundred years ago, was a rich merchant in the French city of Rochelle. He was a Protestant—one of those worthy Frenchmen whom the revocation of the Edict of Nantes expelled from the country of which they were the most valuable inhabitants. In 1685, the Protestant Church which he attended at Rochelle was demolished, and dragoons were quartered in the houses of its members. Secretly getting his family and a portion of his property on board of a ship, he sent them to England, and contrived soon after in a ship of his own, laden with a valuable cargo, to escape himself.
It was not, however, from Pierre Jay that our American Jays were immediately descended, but from Augustus, one of his sons. It so happened that Augustus Jay, at the time of his father's flight, was absent from France on a mercantile mission to Africa, and he was astonished on returning to Rochelle to find himself without home or family. Nor was he free from the danger of arrest unless he changed his religion. Assisted by some friends, he took passage in a ship bound to Charleston in South Carolina which he reached in safety about the year 1686. Finding the climate of South Carolina injurious to his health, he removed to New York, near which there was a whole village of refugees from his native city, which they had named New Rochelle, a village which has since grown to a considerable town, with which all New Yorkers are acquainted. His first employment here was that of supercargo, which he continued to exercise for several years, and in which he attained a moderate prosperity.
In 1697 Augustus Jay married Ann Maria Bayard, the daughter of a distinguished Dutch family, who assisted him into business, and greatly promoted his fortunes. The only son of this marriage was Peter Jay, who, in his turn, married Mary Van Cortlandt, the child of another of the leading Dutch families of the city. This Peter Jay had ten children of whom John, the subject of this article, was the eighth, born in New York in 1745. In him were therefore united the vivacious blood of France with the solid qualities of the Dutch; and, accordingly, we find in him something of the liveliness of the French along with a great deal of Dutch prudence and caution.