John Jay was born on December 23, 1745, in New York City, the sixth surviving child of Peter Jay and Mary Van Cortlandt Jay. His father was a prosperous merchant of French Huguenot ancestry, while his mother belonged to the influential Dutch-descended Van Cortlandt family. The Jays combined commercial wealth, Protestant discipline, and extensive connections within colonial New York’s elite. When John was young, the family moved to an estate at Rye, partly to escape disease in the city and provide space for a large household. Jay’s childhood included close contact with siblings, including two who were blind. Their disabilities reportedly contributed to his seriousness and sense of family obligation. The household’s prosperity depended upon commerce, land, and enslaved labor. Jay first studied with private tutors and then attended King’s College, now Columbia University, graduating in 1764. The college taught classics, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, natural philosophy, and Anglican moral thought. Jay developed a restrained writing style and habits of methodical reasoning rather than the flamboyant oratory of some contemporaries. He read law under Benjamin Kissam, a prominent New York attorney, and was admitted to the bar in 1768. Legal apprenticeship exposed him to property, debt, maritime commerce, and the complex interaction of English and colonial law. He soon formed a practice with Robert R. Livingston Jr., strengthening ties with another major New York family. In 1774 Jay married Sarah Livingston, daughter of Governor William Livingston. Their marriage became an affectionate intellectual partnership and connected him more firmly to Patriot political circles. Before becoming a diplomat, governor, and chief justice, Jay had been shaped by Huguenot and Dutch family traditions, rural and urban New York, elite collegiate education, legal training, religious conviction, and close responsibility toward relatives. His early life fostered both conservatism and reform: he valued order and property while gradually concluding that slavery, in which his own family participated, should be restricted and ended.