Read Online America's Secret Aristocracy by Stephen; Birmingham - Free Book Online Page A

ballroom chairs, for royal courts and courtiers and thrones where turbaned Nubians waved peacock-feathered fans. She seems to have been born with presence, with an ability, wherever she went, to take the center of the stage and hold the spotlight, and whatever her new marriage consisted of, she was determined that she and her husband were going to be in the thick of things—important things, national things, international things. She had brought into the marriage her Livingston dowry and her Livingston name, which could only help further her ambitions. For herself and her husband, she set her sights on the top. A favorite gesture was to touch her adoring husband’s dark coat sleeve and whisper gently but urgently, “Come, John!”
    Only a few months after the Jays’ wedding, in 1774, Sarah’s father, the steadfast Whig, was appointed to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia and, at Sarah’s urging, her husband was also invited to join this gathering of colonial notables who were convening to explore ways and means to settle their disputes with the Crown. It was a classic case of the ancient maxim that the son-in-law also rises.
    Jay had remained reluctant to support the growing tide of opinion that advocated America’s separation from the British Empire even if it meant violence. But Sarah Jay urged him that it was his patriotic duty, his historic calling, his God-given obligation to serve the country of his birth in its time of need.
    At twenty-eight, he was one of the Congress’s youngest members, and even to have joined this anti-Royalist body called for no small amount of courage. In the Congress, his father-in-law saw to it that he was given the important task of drawing up an address to the people of Great Britain listingthe colonies’ grievances against George III. At that delicate stage of British-American negotiations, any expression of opposition to the king could have meant an invitation to the gallows, but Jay brought it off and returned from Philadelphia to find himself a colonial hero.
    At the Second Continental Congress, a year later, Jay addressed similar statements of grievances to the governments of Canada, Jamaica, and Ireland. In preparing these documents, it was clear that Jay had become a master of a kind of eloquent, drumrolling political rhetoric that was designed to stir men’s souls. “Though vilified as wanting spirit,” he wrote, “we are determined to behave like men; though insulted and abused, we wish for reconciliation; though defamed as seditious, we are ready to obey the laws, and though charged with rebellion, will cheerfully bleed in defense of our sovereign in a righteous cause.”
    Jay was in Philadelphia when the news of the events in Lexington and Concord swept through the colonies. The great war had begun. In the summer of 1776, Jay was attending the provincial congress of New York and therefore missed the opportunity to affix his signature to the Declaration of Independence. But he was chairman of the committee that drafted the New York State Constitution and shortly afterward was named the first chief justice of the state. In 1778, he returned to the Continental Congress and, in December of that year, was elected its president. Sarah was delighted.
    Seventeen seventy-nine was a year of ferocious fighting, and Spain had entered the fray, loaning the colonists 219 bronze cannon, 200 gun carriages, 30,000 muskets, 55,000 rounds of ammunition, 12,000 bombs, 4,000 tents, and 30,000 uniforms, and would supply the revolutionaries with more than five million dollars in aid before the war was over. Britain had reacted angrily, and George III had offered the Spanish king the territories of Florida and Gibraltar, as well as cod-fishing rights off Newfoundland, if Spain would withdraw her support of the Americans. With Spanish sympathies hanging in the balance, it was decided that an emissary must immediately be sent to Spain to