John Jay – President of the Continental Congress (1778–1779)

On a gray December afternoon in 1778, a slender man with a narrow, thoughtful face and a faint scar along his cheekbone took the chair at the front of a crowded hall in Philadelphia. Outside, the city still bore the marks of recent occupation: broken shutters, gouged doorframes, the memory of redcoats. Inside, the delegates of the Continental Congress shuffled papers, murmured, coughed into handkerchiefs. A flag with thirteen stars hung at one end of the chamber, newly familiar and not yet mythic. The war had entered its fourth year. France was now an ally. The British had shifted their focus south. Money was short; patience, shorter. At the front of the room, the man in the chair—John Jay of New York—rapped for order. The title attached to him was “President of the Continental Co ...