Posts Categorized: Archives and Special Collections

John Jay’s son William became one of America’s most important abolitionists. A year after his death in 1858, his fellow abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, delivered this twenty-four page eulogy to honor him at the Shiloh Presbyterian Church in New York City.

Sarah Jay’s handwritten record of the guests who came to dine at the Jays’ New York City house from 1787 into 1789, when her husband was U. S. Secretary for Foreign Affairs, is the most famous American “society”-type document of the eighteenth century.

This is John Jay’s official commission as the first Chief Justice of New York State. It was signed in Marbletown, New York on October 17, 1777, the day after the British burned Kingston, New York State’s first capital, to the ground.

Signed on March 4, 1686, this document certified the right of John Jay’s grandfather, a French Huguenot refugee, to live and conduct business in the English colony of New York. It is, in all likelihood, the oldest surviving Jay family document of American origin.