4                                  Richard B. Morris

collection—originals and photocopies, which are to be made avail¬
able at the Columbia University Libraries for the legitimate re¬
search needs of scholars; (2) the publication of at least one
substantial volume of highly significant but hitherto unpublished
Jay Papers, with appropriate editorial apparatus; (3) the produc¬
tion of a definitive monograph on American foreign policy in some
area of Jay's major activities; and (4) the conducting of an inten¬
sive search (in cooperation with the project for the writing of the
history of the Supreme Court under the Oliver Wendell Holmes
devise) for papers relating to the legal and judicial career of Jay,
\^'hich should provide an important and fresh collection of docu¬
ments for research in early American legal and constitutional his¬
tory and contribute to our knowledge of the formative years of
the Supreme Court.

The original acquisition prompted the investigation; the organ¬
ization and underwriting of the project has set the inquiry in mo¬
tion; and now an exciting search is under way in this country and
abroad to acquire photocopies of papers to, from, and about Jay.
As of December 15, 1959, it is estimated that the project has
already collected photocopies of over six thousand items, mainly
from such repositories in the United States as the National Ar¬
chives, the Library of Congress, the New York Historical Society,
the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library, the State
Library at Albany, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and
the Huntington Library. The Jay Papers project is working in
close collaboration with other similar enterprises, notably with
the Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton publication programs. These
other projects have a good many Jay items, the Adams Collection
alone containing some five hundred of them. In turn, our own
Jay Collection possesses numerous unpublished letters from other
founding fathers, which are being made available to editors of
these other scholarly publication programs.

Searchers engaged abroad in quest of Jay papers have already
located a substantial cache of them in the Archivo Historico