was also some disaffection in a part of colonies equalled only by the fate of Arnold's command. In the midst of Warren. Congress, by resolution of these disheartening circumstances, a January 25, 1776, resolved that a plan of storming operations was deter- funeral oration in his honor should mined upon between Arnold and Mont- be delivered, and called Dr. William gomery, which awaited only a favor- Smith, the learned and eloquent head able opportunity for its execution. of the college at Philadelphia, to proThe outer defences of the town were nounce the eulogium. A monument to be attacked on different sides by also was decreed, which was executed— the several American officers, and a a graceful work, under the charge of combined assault to be made upon one Franklin-in Paris, and placed beneath of its most accessible gates. To Mont- the portico of St. Paul's Church, in gomery was assigned one of the south- Broadway, New York, where it arrests erly approaches to the lower town. the eye of the passer by, with its beauThe thirtieth of December brought ty of form and appropriate inscription. with it the coveted opportunity in a In 1818, the remains of the gallant threatening snow-storm. In the night leader were brought from Quebec to of that day, or rather before the dawn repose near this sculptured stone.1 of the next, the forces assembled at their stations. Montgomery led his men, composed of Campbell's New York regiment and a portion of militia from Massachusetts, through a thick snow-storm from Wolfe's Cove, along the side of the cliff beneath Cape Diamond to a point where a fortified block-house stood, protected in front by a stockade. A loaded cannon stood ready charged with grape. It was fired, tradition says, by a drunken sailor, who returned to his post as his comrades fled. However this may be, the disMontcharge was fatally effective. gomery fell, with his aid, Captain Macpherson, and the brave Captain Cheeseman of New York. 1 The tears and eloquence of his country, and its fune real monument, bear witness to the worth of the man and all was paid his memory in the exclamation of Lord North, in Parliament, in a verse of Addison the hero; but perhaps the most significant tribute of "Curse on his virtues, they've undone his country." The remark of Lord North was in reply to the eulogies of Colonel Barré and Burke. "He conquered,” said the latter, "two-thirds of Canada in one campaign." Fox seconded the tribute. It was then that North interposed with his polished remonstrance, admitting indeed, "that he was brave, able, humane, generous; but still he was only a brave, able, humane and generous rebel," adding the line from Cato. Fox then again rose. "He was the less earnest," he said, "to clear him of the imputation, for that all the great assertors of liberty, the saviors of their country, the benefactors of mankind in all ages, had been called rebels; they even owed the constitution which enabled them to sit in that house to a rebellion," closing with a most felicitous quotation from Virgil, an application walls of the temple at Carthage, in a distant land, the The death of Montgomery, the old companion of Wolfe, falling in an attempt to renew his brilliant victory, created an impression through the foe. Sunt lacrymæ rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt." Fox never appeared nobler than in thus erecting in the very sanctuary of Parliament this monument to a fallen JOHN JAY. THE ancestry of Jay, "the Christian | friends was enabled to sail for Charlespatriot" of the Revolution, carries us ton, South Carolina, a region which back to the history of that fatal perse- afforded a home to many of the exiles cution in France, consequent on the whose descendants have adorned the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in annals of that State. Driven from the last quarter of the seventeenth cen- South Carolina, however, by ill health, tury, which sent so many brave and Augustus took refuge in New York, a good men, the very life blood of their friendly haven which had in like mancountry, wanderers about the world, to ner sheltered many of his unhappy taste the hardships of poverty and ex-brethren. The Protestant influences ile in foreign lands. But it frequently of the place furnished a bond of symhappened, that while France was im- pathy, while the commercial activity of poverished by the forced departure of the city afforded a ready means of liveli her choicest spirits, other countries hood to the mercantile adventurer edu gained strength from their presence, cated in a European seaport. Augus while they themselves, after having tus there found employment as super. been tossed on many seas, found at last cargo. In 1692, we hear of his taking the prosperous Lavinian shore. Of passage for Hamburg, in a vessel which those who, under another sun, became was captured by a French privateer founders of families, and we may add and carried into St. Malo, when with founders of the state, none are more other prisoners he was confined in a worthy of distinction than the Jays of dungeon in the district, from which he New York. The Huguenot ancestor managed to escape, making his way in from whom the family is descended safety to Rochelle, to be a second time was Pierre or Peter Jay, a prosperous smuggled out of his native country in a merchant of Rochelle, in France, who foreign vessel. This time he was taken escaped with a portion of his property to Denmark, when his route to America to England, when the persecution be- gave him the opportunity of seeing came no longer endurable, leaving his his father in England. His mother son Augustus, then absent on a foreign was no more, and his younger brother, venture, to provide for his own safety Isaac, was dead from wounds received on his return. The son, following the fighting for the Protestant hero, Wilfather's example, by the aid of his liam, at the Battle of the Boyne. gee A few years after the return of Augustus to New York, he married the daughter of Balthazar Bayard, a refuof an earlier set of French exiles, for conscience sake, who had found his way to America from the new home of the family in Holland. This alliance fairly established the adventurer in the city of his choice. And here we may cite the simple narrative of John Jay, in which these events are recorded, as he looks back with reverential feeling to the American founder of his family. "From what has been said," says he, addressing his children, "you will observe with pleasure and with gratitude how kindly and how amply Providence was pleased to provide for the welfare of our ancestor Augustus. The beneficent care of Heaven appears to have been evidently and remarkably extended to all those persecuted exiles. Strange as it may seem, I never heard of one of them who asked or received alms; nor have I any reason to suspect, much less to believe, that any of them came to this country in a destitute condition." Augustus died at a good old age in 1751, leaving a son Peter, who married a Miss Van Cortlandt, the descendant of a Protestant exile from Bohemia. Having secured a fortune in mercantile life, he purchased the estate at Rye, in Westchester County, still occupied by the family, whither he retired. His eighth child, John, the subject of our notice, was born in the city of New York, December 12, 1745. Piety was a tradition, a habit of daily life in the home of the child, who early exhibited the fruit of the domestic training, ingrafted on his natural qualities, in his reserved, studious disposi tion. The mother's influence, in that beautiful rural dwelling, overlooking the blue waters of the Sound, shaded by the favorite locusts of the region, presents a more than pleasing picture, as she reads "the best authors" to her two children, who were deprived of sight by the smallpox, and teaches the future Chief Justice, a grave, intelligent boy, the elements of his Latin grammar. At eight, the child was sent to the school of the French clergyman at New Rochelle, where he learnt to speak French, and endure the usual privations of the old improvident, badly. managed country boarding-school life. A private tutor subsequently prepared the boy for Columbia, then King's College, where, in due time, he took his degree with distinguished honor, in 1764, in his nineteenth year, under the presidency of the famous Myles Cooper, of Tory memory. Having chosen the profession of the law, he entered the office of Benjamin Kissam, a leading practitioner in the city, with whom he enjoyed a very pleasing intimacy during his clerkship. In 1768 he was admitted to the bar, and entered at once upon an active and profitable practice. Evidence of his standing may be gathered from the fact that he was chosen secretary of the commission appointed by the king to settle the boundary between New York and New Jersey. In 1774, at the age of twenty-nine, he married Sarah, the daughter of William Livingston, afterwards the first governor of New Jersey, at the establishment of independence. |