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 them have an unquestionable resemblance to the pies, if the group now known by that name can be satisfactorily severed from the true Corvinae. In structure the jays are not readily differentiated from the pies; but in habit they are much more arboreal, delighting in thick coverts, seldom appearing in the open, and seeking their food on or under trees. They seem also never to walk or run when on the ground, but always to hop. The body-feathers are commonly loose and soft; and, gaily coloured as are most of the species, in few of them has the plumage the metallic glossiness it generally presents in the pies, while the proverbial beauty of the “jay’s wing” is due to the vivid tints of blue—turquoise and cobalt, heightened by bars of jet-black, an indication of the same style of ornament being observable in the greater number of the other forms of the group, and in some predominating over nearly the whole surface. Of the many genera that have been proposed by ornithologists, perhaps about nine may be deemed sufficiently well established.
| Fig. 1—European Jay. |