The serious illnesses of his wife and both parents prompted John Jay to quit Philadelphia in early May 1776. In his absence from Congress, James Duane and other conservatives kept prodding him about the radical bent of Congress, about the resolution for the setting up of state governments, which Jay himself had anticipated, and about the rising tide of proindependence sentiment. Come back, we need you, Duane and South Carolinian Edward Rutledge urged, the latter beseeching Jay to support “the Sensible part of the House” opposing independence.

Jay did not come back. Instead, elected to the Third New York Provincial Congress, he began to attend its sessions the last week of May. At once he was placed on one committee to draft a law relating to the perils to which the colony was exposed by “its intestine enemies” and on another to act on the congressional mandate to form a new government.1 Subversive as both these actions were, in fact, Jay believed the delegates had no mandate to declare independence. On 11 June, four days after Richard Henry Lee’s congressional resolution affirming that the United Colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states,” Jay, mindful of the results of the recent elections, moved in the provincial congress “that the good people of this Colony have not, in the opinion of this Congress, authorized this Congress, or the Delegates of this Colony, in the Continental Congress, to declare this Colony to be and continue independent of the Crown of Great Britain.”2 This resolution inhibited the New York delegation from voting on the issue of independence, even if the delegates had been inclined to cast their votes in the affirmative.

Jay himself remained in New York, where his presence was urgently needed, and thus he was absent on 2 July when the decisive vote on independence took place in Congress. As he explained in a letter to Rutledge, he was engaged by “plots, conspiracies, and chimeras dire.” State business came first. “We have a government, you know, to form; and God only knows what it will resemble.”3