Putting the John Jay Papers to Work                  5

Nacional in Madrid and the Archivo General de Indias in Seville,
among the British Foreign Office records in the Public Office,
London, and in the archives of the French Ministere des Affaires
Etrangeres. Other foreign archives, such as those at The Plague,
Copenhagen, Stockholm, \'ienna, and Lisbon «'ill also be exam¬
ined for correspondence relating to Jay's negotiations as Secretary
of Foreign Affairs.

It is too early for anything like a balanced appraisal of the sig¬
nificance of the John Jay manuscript collection or of the photo¬
copies which are being rapidly accumulated. A few exceptionally
interesting "finds" might well be mentioned by way of a pre¬
liminary report. The first and foremost is Federalist No. 64. The
Iselin Collection contained only one draft of the Federalist papers
—No. 5. But drafts of the other papers which Jay had written—
Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 64—were once known to have been in possession
of the family. Where were the others? Since no drafts of the
Federalist letters are extant in either Hamilton's or Madison's
hand, the location of these Jay letters took on special significance
for our project. Working among the uncatalogued papers of the
New York Historical Society, Catherine Snell Crary, a Research
Associate on the Jay project and a member of the faculty of Finch
College, came across a draft of No. 64. Immediately some ques¬
tions had to be answered. How did No. 64 get into the possession
of the New York Historical Society? Had anyone ever seen it
before outside of the Jay family? W\\v was it uncatalogued?

These are the facts. In 1863, John Jay, distinguished grandson
of the Chief Justice, turned over this draft of No. 64 to the direc¬
tor of the Historical Society to show to .Mr. Henry B. Dawson,
then engaged in editing the Federalist papers. Since the Federalist
letters had been published under the pseudonym "Publius," there
existed at that time a controversy as to the authorship of a number
of the papers. Hamilton in one place attributed the authorship to
Jay, but in the so-called "Benson list," which Hamilton allegedly
wrote two days before his duel with Burr, he claimed that num-