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Papers of the Jay family and of those families related to the Jay family, including Bruen, Butterworth, Chapman, Clarkson, Dawson, Du Bois, Field, Iselin, McVickar, Mortimer, O'Kill, Pellew, Pierrepont, Prime, Robinson, Schieffelin, Von Schweinitz, Sedgwick, and Wurts. In addition to family and personal matters, the correspondence deals with anti-slavery, New York State civil service, repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Civil War, the Blair Bill, international affairs, and New York City and State politics and government. There are letters from numerous prominent persons including George Bancroft, F.A.P. Barnard, Bismarck, William Cullen Bryant, Aaron Burr, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hamilton Fish, Albert Gallatin, Horace Greeley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Irving, Frances Anne Kemble, Jenny Lind, Henry W. Longfellow, Seth Low, James Russell Lowell, John Stuart Mill, Alice Duer Miller, Clement Clarke Moore, J.P. Morgan, Thomas Nast, Commodore Matthew Perry, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Carl Schurz, William H. Seward, William T. Sherman, Charles Sumner, and John Greenleaf Whittier.

Two letters written by Sullivan. The later of the letters, dated 1860, is to the editor and historian Henry Barton Dawson (1821-1869), expressing the writer's happiness that Dawson is "very willing to do justice to the character of my grandfather Genl Sullivan" and enclosing the other letter which is the original draft of one written by the grandson in 1847 to Dr. Alfred Langdon Elwyn (1804-1884) "in answer to strictures published by him on the conduct of Sullivan in the battle of Brandywine." The 1847 letters is a forty page review and defense of General Sullivan's conduct in the Brandywine engagement and it quotes from several contemporary (1777) letters containing data relative to the subject. The letter to Dawson is tipped between the fifth and sixth leaves of the other letter.