icial mention of the
new title of the future government.[4] When the convention reassembled
on the first day of the following August it appointed John Jay
chairman of a committee to report the draft of a state constitution.

[Footnote 4: _Memorial History of the City of New York_, Vol. 2, p.
608.]

Jay was then thirty-one years old, a cautious, clever lawyer whose
abilities were to make a great impression upon the history of his
country. He belonged to a family of Huguenot merchants. The Jays lived
at La Rochelle until the revocation of the Edict of Nantes drove the
great-grandfather to England, where the family continued until 1686,
when Augustus, the grandfather, settled in New York. It was not a
family of aristocrats; but for more than a century the Jays had ranked
among the gentry of New York City, intermarrying with the Bayards, the
Stuyvesants, the Van Cortlandts and the Philipses. To these historic
families John Jay added another, taking for his wife Sarah Livingston,
the sister of Brockholst, who later adorned the Supreme Court of the
United States, and the daughter of William, New Jersey's coming war
governor, already famous as a writer of poems and essays.

Jay's public career had begun two years before in connection with the
revolutionary Committee of Fifty-one. He did not accept office because
he loved it. He went into politics as he might have travelled on a
stage-coach at the invitation of a few congenial friends, for their
sake, not for his own. When he took up the work of organisation,
therefore, it was with no wish to become a leader; he simply desired
to guide the spirit of resistance along orderly and forceful lines.
But soon he held the reins and had his foot on the brake. In drafting
a reply to resolutions from a Boston town meeting, he suggested a
Congress of all the Colonies, to which should be referred the
disturbing question of non-importation. This letter was not only the
first serious suggestion of a general Congress, placing its author
intellectually at the head of the Revolutionary leaders; but the
plan--which meant broader organisation, more carefully concerted
measures, an enlistment of all the conservative elements, and one
official head for thirteen distinct and widely separated
colonies--gradually found favour, and resulted in sending the young
writer as a delegate to the first Continental Congress.

It was in this Congress that Jay won the right to become a
constitution-maker. Of