Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Russell graduated from Brown University (then Rhode Island College) in 1791. He studied law and was admitted to the bar, but did not practice. He engaged in mercantile pursuits for a number of years.
"Jonathan Russell and the Capture of the Guerriere," by Lawrence S. Kaplan in The William and Mary Quarterly,Third Series, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Apr., 1967), published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, discusses the circumstances of Russell's authorship of a patriotic poem about the famous sea battle found in Russell's private papers (now mainly at Brown University's Library). The article quotes the entirety of the poem, dates it to approximately 1812, and speculates that Russell was motivated to write this anti-British work by the humilation he had suffered while at the Court of St. James.
Russell was one of the five commissioners who negotiated the treaty of peace at Ghent with Great Britain in 1814, ending the War of 1812. He returned to the United States in 1818 and settled in Mendon, Massachusetts.
In 1822, Russell authored a pamphlet accusing John Quincy Adams, one of Russell's former fellow-negotiators at Ghent in 1814, of having favored British interests in those treaty talks. Russell intended the pamphlet to further Henry Clay's presidential hopes as against Adams. Adams' responsive pamphets were so devastating in impugning Russell's veracity that they engendered the phrase "to Jonathan Russell" someone, meaning to destroy someone's reputation and political career.
Russell died in Milton, Massachusetts and was interred in the family plot on his estate in Milton.
