ANGLOSPHERICISM:

Once he committed himself, Jay never wavered in his faith that from this struggle would arise a new nation that would extend and enrich the legacy of England's Protestant liberty across the vast expanse of a new continent.

Indeed, there were few patriots who felt as keenly as did Jay a sense of continuity between America's British colonial past and her independent national future. Although himself of French Huguenot stock, Jay always treasured the British heritage in America and the legacy of laws and political institutions it had bequeathed to the young republic. As he wrote to a newspaperman in 1796, "[i]t certainly is chiefly owing to institutions, laws, and principles of policy and government, originally derived to us as British colonists, that, with the favour of Heaven, the people of this country are what they are." And yet, despite the frequent accusations of Anglophilia leveled by his opponents, Jay also understood the importance of America being able to hold her head high not as a nation in name only, but as one ready to chart her own course and earn the grudging respect of the Old World potentates.

With this introduction to Jay in hand, let us turn to consider key elements of his conservative, nationalist statesmanship. First, we shall look at Jay's understanding of the American Revolution, and his determination to maintain as much continuity as possible in the midst of the break with Britain. We will then examine his role in the formation of the new republic, in which he sought to instill in his fellow citizens a dual commitment to law and liberty, thereby resisting the libertinism of radical democracy that the Revolution had unleashed in parts of America. Finally, we will see how Jay's foreign policy sought to make good on America's claim to independence, recognizing the shared interests and culture that continued to unite America and Britain while insisting that America never forfeit her freedom or sacrifice her distinctive interests to those of any other nation. [...]

On Jay's reading, then, the American colonists had initially sought independence not as a good in itself, as it was for radicals like Thomas Paine, but as a means of upholding the traditional laws that served as the bulwark of American liberty. Once the colonies went their separate way in 1776, Jay threw himself enthusiastically into the fight to defend the independence thus declared.

Even then, however, he remained convinced that the preservation of American liberty depended not on abstract ideals or high-minded paeans to the innate goodness of the nation's people, but on the rule of law. Americans, he often observed, were equally capable of "great virtues, and of many great and little vices." "Which will predominate," he wrote to Washington in 1779, "is a question which events not yet produced nor now to be discerned can alone determine," and its answer would depend not on mere good intentions, but on effective government. "The dissolution of our government," Jay observed, "threw us into a political chaos. Time, wisdom, and perseverance will reduce it into form, and give it strength, order, and harmony."

As the Confederation Congress languished in increasing impotence seven years later, he was less optimistic, confessing himself "uneasy and apprehensive; more so than during the war." "The mass of men," he lamented,

are neither wise nor good, and the virtue like the other resources of a country, can only be drawn to a point and exerted by strong circumstances ably managed, or a strong government ably administered. New governments have not the aid of habit and hereditary respect, and being generally the result of preceding tumult and confusion, do not immediately acquire stability or strength.

Too many rabble-rousers in revolutionary America, operating on the thoroughly nonsensical maxim "that government is best which governs least," had tried to sell the American people on the idea that theirs was a revolution not simply against arbitrary or distant government, but against government as such. In one letter to a friend as Shays's Rebellion was unfolding in late 1786, Jay declared, "[i]t is time for our people to distinguish more accurately than they seem to do between liberty and licentiousness. The late revolution would lose much of its glory, as well as utility, if our conduct should confirm the tory maxim, 'That men are incapable of governing themselves.'"

Jay knew history and human nature well enough to recognize that too much assertion of liberty could easily produce its opposite. As he wrote to Thomas Jefferson around the same time, "the charms of liberty will daily fade" for well-intentioned Americans upon seeing the disorder of the new republic,

and in seeking for peace and security, they will too naturally turn towards systems in direct opposition to those which oppress and disquiet them. If faction should long bear down law and government, tyranny may raise its head, or the more sober part of the people may even think of a king.

Jay would later voice similar sentiments in his 1788 Address to the People of the State of New York -- generally hailed as the most important contribution to the great debate over New York's ratification of the Constitution.

Such a turn from liberty to security was precisely the sequence that soon unfolded in France -- a revolution that Jay, unlike Jefferson, was wary of from the beginning. In his first letter on the subject in December 1789, Jay granted that the French Revolution certainly "promises much," and expressed hope it would deliver on that promise. However, he maintained that "there are many nations not yet ripe for liberty, and I fear that even France has some lessons to learn, and perhaps, to pay for on the subject of free government." To a French correspondent a few months later, Jay offered the Burkean admonition (before Edmund Burke wrote his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France): "The natural propensity in mankind of passing from one extreme too far towards the opposite one sometimes leads me to apprehend that may be the case with your national assembly." By 1796, while Jeffersonians still defended France and celebrated her achievements for liberty, Jay observed that the latter stage of the revolution "had, in my eye, more the appearance of a woe than a blessing. It has caused torrents of blood and of tears, and been marked in its progress by atrocities very injurious to the cause of liberty and offensive to morality and humanity."

That the American Revolution did not follow the same destructive course was due in no small part to Jay's tireless efforts to instill a respect for the rule of law in his restless compatriots. As an eminent lawyer in pre-revolutionary America, Jay found himself elevated first to chief justice of New York and later to chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In these roles, Jay was not merely called upon to hear cases, but play an important role as an educator, instructing the American people in the art of self-government through the regular charges to grand juries he was called upon to give when overseeing circuit courts. On his first circuit as Supreme Court justice in March 1790, Jay offered a powerful summary of his political philosophy in his charge to the jurors:

It cannot be too strongly impressed on the minds of us all how greatly our individual prosperity depends on our national prosperity, and how greatly our national prosperity depends on a well organized, vigorous government, ruling by wise and equal laws, faithfully executed; nor is such a government unfriendly to liberty -- to that liberty which is really inestimable; on the contrary, nothing but a strong government of laws irresistibly bearing down arbitrary power and licentiousness can defend it against those two formidable enemies. Let it be remembered that civil liberty consists not in a right to every man to do just what he pleases, but it consists in an equal right to all the citizens to have, enjoy, and to do, in peace, security, and without molestation, whatever the equal and constitutional laws of the country admit to be consistent with the public good.

All the key elements of Jay's Federalist perspective are here: the close connection between individual and national prosperity, the need for a vigorous government to act as a safeguard of liberty, and the vast difference between libertarianism and the ordered liberty that rests on laws enacted by the people.

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