In Service to the New Nation: An Interview with Robb K. Haberman of The John Jay Papers Project
Interviewed by Helena Yoo Roth
Few political leaders in the revolutionary and early nationals eras were more influential than John Jay (1745-1829). A New Yorker born and bred and a 1765 graduate of the nascent King’s College, this austere lawyer of Huguenot and Dutch descent went on to lead a life marked by continuous service and a steadfast devotion to his family, state, and country. The John Jay Papers Project based at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University has documented Jay’s life through a series of published volumes containing his personal correspondence and public papers. As the project now draws to a close, it continues this work with In Service to the New Nation: The Life & Legacy of John Jay, a two-day virtual conference scheduled for January 22-23. Today on the blog, Gotham editor Helena Yoo Roth speaks with Robb K. Haberman, associate editor of the John Jay Papers, about the upcoming event and the pivotal role of John Jay in the nation’s founding.
Dr. Haberman, congratulations on the recent publication of Volume Six (1794-1798) of The Selected Papers of John Jay! Can you give us an overview of what this volume covers?
Thanks so much! My co-editors (Elizabeth M. Nuxoll, Mary A. Y. Gallagher, Jennifer E. Steenshorne, Brant M. Vogel) and I are thrilled that the latest volume of The Selected Papers of John Jay appeared in the fall. It is interesting that this volume covers the most widely-discussed event in Jay’s public career — the 1794 Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation signed with Britain, commonly referred to as the Jay Treaty — as well as a lesser-known period of Jay’s lifetime — his tenure as governor of New York. Volume Six offers detailed documentation of the treaty negotiations that took place between Jay and his British counterpart William W. Grenville and sheds new light on how Jay’s social activities in London played an important role in aiding his diplomatic efforts. The volume also documents the opening three-and-a-half years of his governorship and how Jay’s Federalist administration dealt with the serious challenges posed by multiple epidemics of yellow fever that swept New York City and the outbreak of the Quasi-War with France. It is interesting to note that in the midst of New York’s intensely partisan atmosphere, Jay frequently put aside party differences and made efforts to work closely with his Democratic-Republican opponents in order to govern more effectively.
When completed, The Selected Papers of John Jay will total seven volumes published from 2010 to 2021. However, the work of preserving and editing began many decades before. Can you tell us a bit about the history of the John Jay Papers Project, starting in the 1950s?
The earliest efforts to compile and organize Jay’s public and private papers actually began while he was still alive. The first published collection of Jay’s papers was written by his son William Jay and appeared as a heavily edited two-volume work, The Life of John Jay: With Selections from his Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers (1833). Over a century later, Columbia University acquired an extensive collection of John Jay documents — including his Circuit Court Diary and draft of Federalist 5 — that had belonged to Eleanor Jay Iselin, a Jay descendant. Columbia University history professor Richard B. Morris led the efforts to expand the holdings of the Library’s Jay materials in the 1960s and 70s and collected thousands of copies of other Jay documents located in dozens of national and international repositories and libraries.
Morris recognized that although Jay was a key founding figure who made significant contributions to the early United States, his work as a statesman, political theorist, diplomat, and politician remained largely unknown and understudied because a modern edition of his personal and public papers was not yet available. So in addition to compiling documents, Morris and his team of editors undertook an edition of Jay’s unpublished papers that appeared in two volumes and covered the first four decades of his lifetime. With generous support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the current John Jay Papers Project housed at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library started in the late 1990s. Elizabeth M. Nuxoll serves as our chief editor and under her direction the editing team continues Morris’s earlier work of collecting, transcribing, and annotating documents and producing the seven volumes of The Selected Papers of John Jay that are printed by the University of Virginia Press.
The John Jay Papers Project has also increased access to the volumes by making the materials available via digital platforms. The John Jay Papers Image Database contains a treasure trove of source materials for scholars and researchers interested in finding out more about Jay and his family. Launched in 2004, this database contains over 13,000 copies of original Jay documents and is free, open-access, and term-searchable. In addition to their print formats, the Jay volumes have been made available on the Rotunda: American Founding Era Collection as The Selected Papers of John Jay Digital Edition since 2015. In celebration of the recent Constitution Day, the National Archives and Records Administration added the volumes one – five of The Selected Papers of John Jay to its database Founders Online and in future will add the upcoming volumes six and seven.
As documentary editing practices have changed in recent decades, what are some of the ways that the editorial team for The Selected Papers of John Jay have adapted?
From the outset, the Jay Papers Project has adhered to a set of editorial guidelines for the purpose of transcribing and annotating texts as literally as possible. The expanded use of digital and hybrid publications, alongside continuing print publications, has given the Jay editors much to think about in terms of how their work will be presented in varying formats. The editors are particularly proud that the transcribed documents and papers from The Selected Papers of John Jay Digital Edition and Founders Online contain hyperlinks connecting readers to the original materials located in The John Jay Papers Image Database. Readers therefore have the opportunity to read original documents alongside the transcribed versions provided by the editors.
The Jay Papers has also had to demonstrate a great deal of flexibility in matters of document selection and volume organization. The initial plan for the series was to produce six chronologically-based volumes and have the final volume focus on Jay’s domestic life with selections of his family papers and personal correspondence. However, a good deal of the Jay family correspondence, including the letters of Sarah Livingston Jay, contained discussions of political matters, and therefore deserved to be included in the chronological volumes. It was decided that all of the series should be reorganized in a chronological format and include a healthy dose of family correspondence throughout the volumes. Volume Seven, which will come out in the late summer of 2021 will now cover the final years of Jay’s governorship and his three decades of retirement. Moreover, the wealth of existing materials coupled with the subsequent finding of new documents led us to re-conceptualize how the volumes should be organized. For instance, a cache of over 230 documents focusing on the correspondence of William Jay and Peter Augustus Jay went up for auction in 2017. The Jay editors were fortunate that the successful bidder granted them access to the papers in the ensuing months. The material located therein provided us with valuable insight into how Jay’s family viewed New York’s elections and state politics during the early 1800s.
The panel sessions for the John Jay Papers Conference look very exciting. In particular, I am really struck by the innovative ways that scholars are addressing issues of race, gender, slavery, and family through their close study of the John Jay Papers. Please give Gotham readers a sneak peek into your line-up!
Visit the event website for the full conference program and registration information.
The upcoming event In Service to the New Nation: The Life & Legacy of John Jay celebrates the near completion of the John Jay Papers Project. The event includes a keynote address “Life in an Age of Conflicts and Extremes” by Professor Joanne B. Freeman of Yale University and conference panels with presentations by historians, independent scholars, archivists, and documentary editors on an array of topics and themes, many of which reflect recent approaches to investigating the revolutionary and early national eras. The conference sessions include three traditional panels “Diplomacy and Politics,” “Family, Slavery, and Abolition,” and “Navigating Networks and Publics,” and a roundtable panel “The Future of Documentary Editing and The Founding Era.”
Alongside the conference, there will also be an online exhibit with more than seventy-five documents, images, and artifacts from Columbia University Libraries related to John Jay. What is one particular item that you would like to bring special attention to? What is its significance?
Notes on the back of the letter from Alexander Hamilton to John Jay, May 7, 1800. Courtesy of RBML.
One item that I find both historically significant and intriguing is a letter that Alexander Hamilton sent to him on May 7, 1800 while Jay was serving out his final years as Governor of New York. Hamilton wrote to Jay because he was concerned with the likelihood that Thomas Jefferson would emerge victorious in the upcoming presidential contest. Hamilton therefore proposed that Jay prevent a transfer of national power from the Federalist to the Democratic-Republican Party by adopting a new method for selecting the state’s presidential electors. Yet, Jay refused to go along with Hamilton’s scheme thereby demonstrating his commitment to constitutionalism and his priority of principles over party. Surprisingly, Jay remained mum on this issue and never openly responded to Hamilton’s request in either conversation or correspondence. One of the only references that Jay made to this event is the brief endorsement written on the reverse of Hamilton’s letter in which Jay penned the following remark: “Gen. Hamilton 7 May 1800 proposing a measure for party purposes wh I think it wd. not become me to adopt--”.
John Jay wore many hats during the Revolutionary and Early Republic eras and served the public in a variety of positions: a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, a diplomat to Spain and Britain, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, and governor of New York. Which role, would you say, did Jay himself enjoy the least?
Jay’s judicial duties as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court involved extensive travel and required that he spend several months away from his home and family. His letters and circuit court diary detail that Jay suffered physical ailments caused by riding countless miles on horseback and that he dreaded the horrible food and poor accommodations that awaited him at public houses and inns. The memories of the arduous conditions associated with travelling on the road loomed large. In December 1800, John Adams asked that Jay serve another term as chief justice. Jay refused the President’s request, citing the hardships that he had previously experienced while serving in this post.
You have spent many years in the company of John Jay and his family, friends, allies, and rivals. What has surprised you most?
Before I joined the Jay Papers, I had pictured Jay as a very serious and stuffy person and considered him not to be a fun individual to hang out with. Reading his personal papers and diary, however, show a very different side of Jay — one filled with wit, humor, and a love of gossip.
In his Circuit Court Diary of the early 1790s, Jay wrote several entries that mention meetings with friends and colleagues where they would indulge in conversations that can be described as gossip or loose talk. Jay enjoyed sharing and being privy to intimate knowledge about historical events and family affairs. Yet years of service as a wartime official, diplomat, and civil servant had accustomed him to being under surveillance. So although Jay did engage in gossip, he usually exercised prudence when committing his thoughts to paper. For instance, Jay’s diary tells us about a gathering at Judge Lowell's home in Roxbury, where he and Lowell were joined by Attorney General Gore and Justice Cushing. Jay notes that the assembled company shared "much interesting conversation which I think had better not be written.” While passing time with Judge Charles Chauncey in New Haven, Jay mentions that he, "Learnt sundry anecdotes not proper to be written, but to be remembered.” And here Jay stokes our curiosity further by listing the topics: Jefferson and Madison, the President and Vice President, and the French aristocracy. Jay did occasionally record at length the content of his more intimate conversations. For instance, he jotted down in his diary the many failures that dogged Samuel Adams, the scandalous marriages of New Hampshire’s Wentworth family, and the cowardly conduct of General Philemon Dickinson who fled the field of battle at Monmouth.
John Jay, Circuit Court diary entry, May 4, 1792. Courtesy of RBML.
While such conversation might be interpreted as merely loose talk that is more a reflection of Jay’s inquisitive mind than part of an agenda for cultivating national loyalty and support for the federal government, I think that this type of talk served to create greater bonds of personal trust between the chief justice and local officials.
Join Robb K. Haberman and the John Jay Papers Project for In Service to the New Nation January 22 & 23!
Robb K. Haberman is an associate editor of The Selected Papers of John Jay and an associate editor for Gotham.
Helena Yoo Roth is a PhD candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY and an associate editor for Gotham.