Pennsylvania all through the colonial period. In the midst of the worst horrors of the French and Indian wars, however, the conscientious objectors roused themselves and began preaching and exhorting what has been called the mystical side of the faith. Many extreme Quaker members of the Assembly resigned their seats in consequence. After the Revolution the spiritual party began gaining ground, partly perhaps because then the responsibilities of government and care of the great political and religious experiment in Pennsylvania were removed. The spiritual party increased so rapidly in power that in 1827 a split occurred which involved not a little bitterness, ill feeling, and litigation over property. This division into two opposing camps, known as the Hicksites and the Orthodox, continues and is likely to remain.
Quaker government in Pennsylvania was put to still severer tests by the difficulties and disasters that followed Braddock’s defeat. That unfortunate general had something over two thousand men and was hampered with a train of artillery and a splendid equipment of arms, tools, and supplies, as if he were to march over the smooth highways of Europe. When he came to drag all these munitions through the depths of the Pennsylvania forests and up and down the mountains, he found that he made only about three miles a day and that his horses had nothing to eat but the leaves of the trees. Washington, who was of the party, finally persuaded him to abandon his artillery and press forward with about fifteen hundred picked men. These troops, when a few miles from Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), met about six hundred Indians and three hundred French coming from the fort. The English maintained a close formation where they were, but the French and Indians immediately spread out on their flanks, lying behind trees and logs which provided rests for their rifles and security for their bodies. This strategy decided the day. The English were shot down like cattle in a pen, and out of about fifteen hundred only four hundred and fifty escaped. The French and Indian loss was not much over fifty.
This defeat of Braddock’s force has become one of the most famous reverses in history; and it was made worse by the conduct of Dunbar who had been left in command of the artillery, baggage, and men in the rear. He could have remained where he was as some sort of protection to the frontier. But he took fright, burned his wagons, emptied his barrels of powder into the streams, destroyed his provisions, and fled back to Fort Cumberland in Maryland. Here the governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia as well as the Pennsylvania Assembly urged him to stay. But, determined to
make the British rout complete, he soon retreated to the peace and quiet of Philadelphia, and nothing would induce him to enter again the terrible forests of Pennsylvania.
The natural result of the blunder soon followed. The French, finding the whole frontier of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia abandoned, organized the Indians under French officers and swept the whole region with a devastation of massacre, scalping, and burning that has never been equaled. Hurons, Potawatomies, Ojibways, Ottawas, Mingoes, renegades from the Six Nations, together with the old treaty friends of Penn, the Delawares and Shawanoes, began swarming eastward and soon had killed more people than had been lost at Braddock’s defeat. The onslaught reached its height in September and October. By that time all the outlying frontier settlers and their families had been killed or sent flying eastward to seek refuge in the settlements. The Indians even followed them to the settlements, reached the Susquehanna, and crossed it. They massacred the people of the village of Gnadenhutten, near Bethlehem on the Lehigh, and established near by a headquarters for prisoners and plunder. Families were scalped within fifty miles of Philadelphia, and in one instance the bodies of a murdered family were brought into the town and exhibited in the streets to show the inhabitants how near the danger was approaching. Nothing could be done to stem the savage tide. Virginia was suffering in the same way: the settlers on her border were slaughtered or were driven back in herds upon the more settled districts, and Washington, with a nominal strength of fifteen hundred who would not obey orders, was forced to stand a helpless spectator of the general flight and misery. There was no adequate force or army anywhere within reach. The British had been put to flight and had gone to the defense of New England and New York. Neither Pennsylvania nor Virginia had a militia that could withstand the French and their red allies. They could only wait till the panic had subsided and then see what could be done.
One thing was accomplished, however, when the Pennsylvania Assembly passed a Quaker militia law which is one of the most curious legal documents of its kind in history. It was most aptly worded, drafted by the master hand of Franklin. It recited the fact that the province had always been ruled by Quakers who were opposed to war, but that now it had become necessary to allow men to become soldiers and to give them every facility for the profession of arms, because the Assembly though containing a Quaker majority nevertheless represented all the people of the province. To prevent those who believed in war from taking part in it would be as much a violation of liberty of conscience as to force enlistments among those who had conscientious scruples against it. Nor would the Quaker majority have any right to compel others to bear arms and at the same time exempt themselves. Therefore a voluntary militia system was established under which a fighting Quaker, a Presbyterian, an Episcopalian, or anybody, could enlist and have all the military glory he could win.
It was altogether a volunteer system. Two years afterwards, as the necessities of war increased, the Quaker Assembly passed a rather stringent compulsory militia bill; but the governor vetoed it, and the first law with its volunteer system remained in force. Franklin busied himself to encourage enlistments under it and was very successful. Though a philosopher and a man of science, almost as much opposed to war as the Quakers and not even owning a shotgun, he was elected commander and led a force of about five hundred men to protect the Lehigh Valley. His common sense seems to have supplied his lack of military training. He did no worse than some professional soldiers who might be named. The valley was supposed to be in great danger since its village of Gnadenhutten had been burned and its people massacred. The Moravians, like the Quakers, had suddenly found that they were not as much opposed to war as they had supposed. They had obtained arms and ammunition from New York and had built stockades, and Franklin was glad to find them so well prepared when he arrived. He built small forts in different parts of the valley, acted entirely on the defensive, and no doubt checked the raids of the Indians at that point. They seem to have been watching him from the hilltops all the time, and any rashness on his part would probably have brought disaster upon him. After his force had been withdrawn, the Indians again attacked and burned Gnadenhutten.
The chain of forts, at first seventeen, afterwards increased to fifty, built by the Assembly on the Pennsylvania frontier was a good plan so far as it went, but it was merely defensive and by no means completely defensive, since Indian raiding parties could pass between the forts. They served chiefly as refuges for neighboring settlers. The colonial troops or militia, after manning the fifty forts and sending their quota to the operations against Canada by way of New England and New York, were not numerous enough to attack the Indians. They could only act on the defensive as Franklin’s command had done. As for the rangers, as the small bands of frontiersmen acting without any authority of either governor or legislature were called, they were very efficient as individuals but they accomplished very little because they acted at widely isolated spots. What was needed was a well organized force which could pursue the Indians on their own ground so far westward that the settlers on the frontier would be safe. The only troops which could do this were the British regulars with the assistance of the colonial militia.
Two energetic efforts to end the war without aid from abroad were made, however, one by the pacific Quakers and the other by the combatant portion of the people. Both of these were successful so far as they went, but had little effect on the general situation. In the summer of 1756, the Quakers made a very earnest effort to persuade the two principal Pennsylvania tribes, the Delawares and Shawanoes, to withdraw from the French alliance and return to their old friends. These two tribes possessed a knowledge of the country which enabled them greatly to assist the French designs on Pennsylvania. Chiefs of these tribes were brought under safe conducts to Philadelphia, where they were entertained as equals in the Quaker homes. Such progress, indeed, was made that by the end of July a treaty of peace was concluded at Easton eliminating those two tribes from the war. This has sometimes been sneered at as mere Quaker pacifism; but it was certainly successful in lessening the numbers and effectiveness of the enemy.
The other undertaking was a military one, the famous attack upon Kittanning conducted by Colonel John Armstrong, an Ulsterman from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the first really aggressive officer the province had produced. The Indians had two headquarters for their raids into the province, one at Logstown on the Ohio a few miles below Fort Duquesne, and the other at Kittanning or, as the French called it, Attique, about forty miles northeast. At these two points they assembled their forces, received ammunition and supplies from the French, and organized their expeditions. As Kittanning was the nearer, Armstrong in a masterly maneuver took three hundred men through the mountains without being discovered and, by falling upon the village early in the morning, he effected a complete surprise. The town was set on fire, the Indians were put to flight, and large quantities of their ammunition were destroyed. But Armstrong could not follow up his success. Threatened by overwhelming numbers, he hastened to withdraw. The effect which the fighting and the Quaker treaty had on the frontier was good. Incursions of the savages were, at least for the present, checked. But the root of the evil had not yet been reached, and the Indians remained massed along the Ohio, ready to break in upon the people again at the first opportunity.
The following year, 1757, was the most depressing period of the war. The proprietors of Pennsylvania took the opportunity to exempt their own estate from taxation and throw the burden of furnishing money for the war upon the colonists. Under pressure of the increasing success of the French and Indians and because the dreadful massacres were coming nearer and nearer to Philadelphia, the Quaker Assembly yielded, voted the largest sum they had ever voted to the war, and exempted the proprietary estates. The colony was soon boiling with excitement. The Churchmen, as friends of the proprietors, were delighted to have the estates exempted, thought it a good opportunity to have the Quaker Assembly abolished, and sent petitions and letters and proofs of alleged Quaker incompetence to the British Government. The Quakers and a large majority of the colonists, on the other hand, instead of consenting to their own destruction, struck at the root of the Churchmen’s power by proposing to abolish the proprietors. And in a letter to Isaac Norris, Benjamin Franklin, who had been sent to England to present the grievances of the colonists, even suggested that “tumults and insurrections that might prove the proprietary government unable to preserve order, or show the people to be ungovernable, would do the business immediately.”
Turmoil and party strife rose to the most exciting heights, and the details of it might, under certain circumstances, be interesting to describe. But the next year, 1758, the British Government, by sending a powerful force of regulars to Pennsylvania, at last adopted the only method for ending the war. Confidence was at once restored. The Pennsylvania Assembly now voted the sufficient and, indeed, immense sum of one hundred thousand pounds, and offered a bounty of five pounds to every recruit. It was no longer a war of defense but now a war of aggression and conquest. Fort Duquesne on the Ohio was taken; and the next autumn Fort Pitt was built on its ruins. Then Canada fell, and the French empire in America came to an end. Canada and the Great West passed into the possession of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Chapter VII. The Decline Of Quaker Government
When the treaty of peace was signed in 1763, extinguishing France’s title to Canada and turning over Canada and the Mississippi Valley to the English, the colonists were prepared to enjoy all the blessings of peace. But the treaty of peace had been made with France, not with the red man. A remarkable genius, Pontiac, appeared among the Indians, one of the few characters, like Tecumseh and Osceola, who are often cited as proof of latent powers almost equal to the strongest qualities of the white race. Within a few months he had united all the tribes of the West in a discipline and control which, if it had been brought to the assistance of the French six years earlier, might have conquered the colonies to the Atlantic seaboard before the British regulars could have come to their assistance. The tribes swept westward into Pennsylvania, burning, murdering, and leveling every habitation to the ground with a thoroughness beyond anything attempted under the French alliance. The settlers and farmers fled eastward to the towns to live in cellars, camps, and sheds as best they could.* Fortunately the colonies retained a large part of the military organization, both men and officers, of the French War, and were soon able to handle the situation. Detroit and Niagara were relieved by water; and an expedition commanded by Colonel Bouquet, who had distinguished himself under General Forties, saved Fort Pitt.
* For an account of Pontiac’s conspiracy, see “The Old Northwest” by Frederic A. Ogg (in “The Chronicles of America”).
At this time the Scotch-Irish frontiersmen suddenly became prominent. They had been organizing for their own protection and were meeting with not a little success. They refused to join the expedition of regular troops marching westward against Pontiac’s warriors, because they wanted to protect their own homes and because they believed the regulars to be marching to sure destruction. Many of the regular troops were invalided from the West Indies, and the Scotch-Irish never expected to see any of them again. They believed that the salvation of Pennsylvania, or at least of their part of the province, depended entirely upon themselves. Their increasing numbers and rugged independence were forming them also into an organized political party with decided tendencies, as it afterwards appeared, towards forming a separate state.
The extreme narrowness of the Scotch-Irish, however, misled them. The only real safety for the province lay in regularly constituted and strong expeditions, like that of Bouquet, which would drive the main body of the savages far westward. But the Scotch-Irish could not see this; and with that intensity of passion which marked all their actions they turned their energy and vengeance upon the Quakers and semicivilized Indians in the eastern end of the colony. Their preachers, who were their principal leaders and organizers, encouraged them in denouncing Quaker doctrine as a wicked heresy from which only evil could result. The Quakers had offended God from the beginning by making treaties of kindness with the heathen savages instead of exterminating them as the Scripture commanded: “And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.” The Scripture had not been obeyed; the heathen had not been destroyed; on the contrary, a systematic policy of covenants, treaties, and kindness had been persisted in for two generations, and as a consequence, the Ulstermen said, the frontiers were now deluged in blood. They were particularly resentful against the small settlement of Indians near Bethlehem, who had been converted to Christianity by the Moravians, and another little village of half civilized basketmaking Indians at Conestoga near Lancaster. The Scotch-Irish had worked themselves up into a strange belief that these small remnants were sending information, arms, and ammunition to the western tribes; and they seemed to think that it was more important to exterminate these little communities than to go with such expeditions as Bouquet’s to the West. They asked the Governor to remove these civilized Indians and assured him that their removal would secure the safety of the frontier. When the Governor, not being able to find anything against the Indians, declined to remove them, the Scotch-Irish determined to attend to the matter in their own fashion.
Bouquet’s victory at Bushy Run, much to the surprise of the Scotch-Irish, stopped Indian raids of any seriousness until the following spring. But in the autumn there were a few depredations, which led the frontiersmen to believe that the whole invasion would begin again. A party of them, therefore, started to attack the Moravian Indians near Bethlehem; but before they could accomplish their object, the Governor brought most of the Indians down to Philadelphia for protection. Even there they were narrowly saved from the mob, for the hostility against them was spreading throughout the province.
Soon afterwards another party of Scotch-Irish, ever since known as the “Paxton Boys,” went at break of day to the village of the Conestoga Indians and found only six of them at home–three men, two women, and a boy. These they instantly shot down, mutilated their bodies, and burned their cabins. As the murderers returned, they related to a man on the road what they had done, and when he protested against the cruelty of the deed, they asked, “Don’t you believe in God and the Bible?” The remaining fourteen inhabitants of the village, who were away selling brooms, were collected by the sheriff and put in the jail at Lancaster for protection. The Paxtons heard of it and in a few days stormed the jail, broke down the doors, and either shot the poor Indians or cut them to pieces with hatchets.
This was probably the first instance of lynch law in America. It raised a storm of indignation and controversy; and a pamphlet war persisted for several years. The whole province was immediately divided into two parties. On one side were the Quakers, most of the Germans, and conservatives of every sort, and on the other, inclined to sympathize with the Scotch-Irish, were the eastern Presbyterians, some of the Churchmen, and various miscellaneous people whose vindictiveness towards all Indians had been aroused by the war. The Quakers and conservatives, who seem to have been the more numerous, assailed the Scotch-Irish in no measured language as a gang of ruffians without respect for law or order who, though always crying for protection, had refused to march with Bouquet to save Fort Pitt or to furnish him the slightest assistance. Instead of going westward where the danger was and something might be accomplished, they had turned eastward among the settlements and murdered a few poor defenseless people, mostly women and children.
Franklin, who had now returned from England, wrote one of his best pamphlets against the Paxtons, the valorous, heroic Paxtons, as he called them, prating of God and the Bible, fifty-seven of whom, armed with rifles, knives, and hatchets, had actually succeeded in killing three old men, two women, and a boy. This pamphlet became known as the “Narrative” from the first word of its title, and it had an immense circulation. Like everything Franklin wrote, it is interesting reading to this day.
One of the first effects of this controversy was to drive the excitable Scotch-Irish into a flame of insurrection not unlike the Whisky Rebellion, which started among them some years after the Revolution. They held tumultuous meetings denouncing the Quakers and the whole proprietary government in Philadelphia, and they organized an expedition which included some delegates to suggest reforms. For the most part, however, it was a well equipped little army variously estimated at from five hundred to fifteen hundred on foot and on horseback, which marched towards Philadelphia with no uncertain purpose. They openly declared that they intended to capture the town, seize the Moravian Indians protected there, and put them to death. They fully expected to be supported by most of the people and to have everything their own way. As they passed along the roads, they amused themselves in their rough fashion by shooting chickens and pigs, frightening people by thrusting their rifles into windows, and occasionally throwing some one down and pretending to scalp him.
In the city there was great excitement and alarm. Even the classes who sympathized with the Scotch-Irish did not altogether relish having their property burned or destroyed. Great preparations were made to meet the expedition. British regulars were summoned. Eight companies of militia and a battery of artillery were hastily formed. Franklin became a military man once more and superintended the preparations. On all sides the Quakers were enlisting; they had become accustomed to war; and this legitimate chance to shoot a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian was too much for the strongest scruples of their religion. It was a long time, however, before they heard the end of this zeal; and in the pamphlet war which followed they were accused of clamorously rushing to arms and demanding to be led against the enemy.
It is amusing now to read about it in the old records. But it was serious enough at the time. When the Scotch-Irish army reached the Schuylkill River and found the fords leading to the city guarded, they were not quite so enthusiastic about killing Quakers and Indians. They went up the river some fifteen miles, crossed by an unopposed ford, and halted in Germantown ten miles north of Philadelphia. That was as far as they thought it safe to venture. Several days passed, during which the city people continued their preparations and expected every night to be attacked. There were, indeed, several false alarms. Whenever the alarm was sounded at night, every one placed candles in his windows to light up the streets. One night when it rained the soldiers were allowed to shelter themselves in a Quaker meeting house, which for some hours bristled with bayonets and swords, an incident of which the Presbyterian pamphleteers afterwards made much use for satire. On another day all the cannon were fired to let the enemy know what was in store for him.
Finally commissioners with the clever, genial Franklin at their head, went out to Germantown to negotiate, and soon had the whole mighty difference composed. The Scotch-Irish stated their grievances. The Moravian Indians ought not to be protected by the government, and all such Indians should be removed from the colony; the men who killed the Conestoga Indians should be tried where the supposed offense was committed and not in Philadelphia; the five frontier counties had only ten representatives in the Assembly while the three others had twenty-six–this should be remedied; men wounded in border war should be cared for at public expense; no trade should be carried on with hostile Indians until they restored prisoners; and there should be a bounty on scalps.
While these negotiations were proceeding, some of the Scotch-Irish amused themselves by practicing with their rifles at the weather vane, a figure of a cock, on the steeple of the old Lutheran church in Germantown–an unimportant incident, it is true, but one revealing the conditions and character of the time as much as graver matters do. The old weather vane with the bullet marks upon it is still preserved. About thirty of these same riflemen were invited to Philadelphia and were allowed to wander about and see the sights of the town. The rest returned to the frontier. As for their list of grievances, not one of them was granted except, strange and sad to relate, the one which asked for a scalp bounty. The Governor, after the manner of other colonies, it must be admitted, issued the long desired scalp proclamation, which after offering rewards for prisoners and scalps, closed by saying, “and for the scalp of a female Indian fifty pieces of eight.” William Penn’s Indian policy had been admired for its justice and humanity by all the philosophers and statesmen of the world, and now his grandson, Governor of the province, in the last days of the family’s control, was offering bounties for women’s scalps.
Franklin while in England had succeeded in having the proprietary lands taxed equally with the lands of the colonists. But the proprietors attempted to construe this provision so that their best lands were taxed at the rate paid by the people on their worst. This obvious quibble of course raised such a storm of opposition that the Quakers, joined by classes which had never before supported them, and now forming a large majority, determined to appeal to the Government in England to abolish the proprietorship and put the colony under the rule of the King. In the proposal to make Pennsylvania a Crown colony there was no intention of confiscating the possessions of the proprietors. It was merely the proprietary political power, their right to appoint the Governor, that was to be abolished. This right was to be absorbed by the Crown with payment for its value to the proprietors; but in all other respects the charter and the rights and liberties of the people were to remain unimpaired. Just there lay the danger. An act of Parliament would be required to make the change and, having once started on such a change, Parliament, or the party in power therein, might decide to make other changes, and in the end there might remain very little of the original rights and liberties of the colonists under their charter. It was by no means a wise move. But intense feeling on the subject was aroused. Passionate feeling seemed to have been running very high among the steady Quakers. In this new outburst the Quakers had the Scotch-Irish on their side, and a part of the Churchmen. The Germans were divided, but the majority enthusiastic for the change was very large.
There was a new alignment of parties. The eastern Presbyterians, usually more or less in sympathy with the Scotch-Irish, broke away from them on this occasion. These Presbyterians opposed the change to a royal governor because they believed that it would be followed by the establishment by law of the Church of England, with bishops and all the other ancient evils. Although some of the Churchmen joined the Quaker side, most of them and the most influential of them were opposed to the change and did good work in opposing it. They were well content with their position under the proprietors and saw nothing to be gained under a royal governor. There were also not a few people who, in the increase of the wealth of the province, had acquired aristocratic tastes and were attached to the pleasant social conditions that had grown up round the proprietary governors and their followers; and there were also those whose salaries, incomes, or opportunities for wealth were more or less dependent on the proprietors retaining the executive offices and the appointments and patronage.
One of the most striking instances of a change of sides was the case of a Philadelphia Quaker, John Dickinson, a lawyer of large practice, a man of wealth and position, and of not a little colonial magnificence when he drove in his coach and four. It was he who later wrote the famous “Farmer’s Letters” during the Revolution. He was a member of the Assembly and had been in politics for some years. But on this question of a change to royal government, he left the Quaker majority and opposed the change with all his influence and ability. He and his father-in-law, Isaac Norris, Speaker of the Assembly, became the leaders against the change, and Franklin and Joseph Galloway, the latter afterwards a prominent loyalist in the Revolution, were the leading advocates of the change.
The whole subject was thoroughly thrashed out in debates in the Assembly and in pamphlets of very great ability and of much interest to students of colonial history and the growth of American ideas of liberty. It must be remembered that this was the year 1764, on the eve of the Revolution. British statesmen were planning a system of more rigorous control of the colonies; and the advisability of a stamp tax was under consideration. Information of all these possible changes had reached the colonies. Dickinson foresaw the end and warned the people. Franklin and the Quaker party thought there was no danger and that the mother country could be implicitly trusted.
Dickinson warned the people that the British Ministry were starting special regulations for new colonies and “designing the strictest reformations in the old.” It would be a great relief, he admitted, to be rid of the pettiness of the proprietors, and it might be accomplished some time in the future; but not now. The proprietary system might be bad, but a royal government might be worse and might wreck all the liberties of the province, religious freedom, the Assembly’s control of its own adjournments, and its power of raising and disposing of the public money. The ministry of the day in England were well known not to be favorably inclined towards Pennsylvania because of the frequently reported willfulness of the Assembly, on which the recent disturbances had also been blamed. If the King, Ministry, and Parliament started upon a change, they might decide to reconstitute the Assembly entirely, abolish its ancient privileges, and disfranchise both Quakers and Presbyterians.
The arguments of Franklin and Galloway consisted principally of assertions of the good intentions of the mother country and the absurdity of any fear on the part of the colonists for their privileges. But the King in whom they had so much confidence was George III, and the Parliament which they thought would do no harm was the same one which a few months afterwards passed the Stamp Act which brought on the Revolution. Franklin and Galloway also asserted that the colonies like Massachusetts, the Jerseys, and the Carolinas, which had been changed to royal governments, had profited by the change. But that was hardly the prevailing opinion in those colonies themselves. Royal governors could be as petty and annoying as the Penns and far more tyrannical. Pennsylvania had always defeated any attempts at despotism on the part of the Penn family and had built up a splendid body of liberal laws and legislative privileges. But governors with the authority and power of the British Crown behind them could not be so easily resisted as the deputy governors of the Penns.
The Assembly, however, voted–twenty-seven to three–with Franklin and Galloway. In the general election of the autumn, the question was debated anew among the people and, though Franklin and Galloway were defeated for seats in the Assembly, yet the popular verdict was strongly in favor of a change, and the majority in the Assembly was for practical purposes unaltered. They voted to appeal to England for the change, and appointed Franklin to be their agent before the Crown and Ministry. He sailed again for England and soon was involved in the opening scenes of the Revolution. He was made agent for all the colonies and he spent many delightful years there pursuing his studies in science, dining with distinguished men, staying at country seats, and learning all the arts of diplomacy for which he afterwards became so distinguished.
As for the Assembly’s petition for a change to royal government, Franklin presented it, but never pressed it. He, too, was finally convinced that the time was inopportune. In fact, the Assembly itself before long began to have doubts and fears and sent him word to let the subject drop; and amid much greater events it was soon entirely forgotten.
Chapter VIII. The Beginnings Of New Jersey
New Jersey, Scheyichbi, as the Indians called it, or Nova Caesarea, as it was called in the Latin of its proprietary grant, had a history rather different from that of other English colonies in America. Geographically, it had not a few attractions. It was a good sized dominion surrounded on all sides but one by water, almost an island domain, secluded and independent. In fact, it was the only one of the colonies which stood naturally separate and apart. The others were bounded almost entirely by artificial or imaginary lines.
It offered an opportunity, one might have supposed, for some dissatisfied religious sect of the seventeenth century to secure a sanctuary and keep off all intruders. But at first no one of the various denominations seems to have fancied it or chanced upon it. The Puritans disembarked upon the bleak shores of New England well suited to the sternness of their religion. How different American history might have been if they had established themselves in the Jerseys! Could they, under those milder skies, have developed witchcraft, set up blue laws, and indulged in the killing of Quakers? After a time they learned about the Jerseys and cast thrifty eyes upon them. Their seafaring habits and the pursuit of whales led them along the coast and into Delaware Bay. The Puritans of New Haven made persistent efforts to settle the southern part of Jersey, on the Delaware near Salem. They thought, as their quaint old records show, that if they could once start a branch colony in Jersey it might become more populous and powerful than the New Haven settlement and in that case they intended to move their seat of government to the new colony. But their shrewd estimate of its value came too late. The Dutch and the Swedes occupied the Delaware at that time and drove them out. Puritans, however, entered northern Jersey and, while they were not numerous enough to make it a thoroughly Puritan community, they largely tinged its thought and its laws, and their influence still survives.
The difficulty with Jersey was that its seacoast was a monotonous line of breakers with dangerous shoal inlets, few harbors, and vast mosquito infested salt marshes and sandy thickets. In the interior it was for the most part a level, heavily forested, sandy, swampy country in its southern portions, and rough and mountainous in the northern portions. Even the entrance by Delaware Bay was so difficult by reason of its shoals that it was the last part of the coast to be explored. The Delaware region and Jersey were in fact a sort of middle ground far less easy of access by the sea than the regions to the north in New England and to the south in Virginia.
There were only two places easy of settlement in the Jerseys. One was the open region of meadows and marshes by Newark Bay near the mouth of the Hudson and along the Hackensack River, whence the people slowly extended themselves to the seashore at Sandy Hook and thence southward along the ocean beach. This was East Jersey. The other easily occupied region, which became West Jersey, stretched along the shore of the lower Delaware from the modern Trenton to Salem, whence the settlers gradually worked their way into the interior. Between these two divisions lay a rough wilderness which in its southern portion was full of swamps, thickets, and pine barrens. So rugged was the country that the native Indians lived for the most part only in the two open regions already described.
The natural geographical, geological, and even social division of New Jersey is made by drawing a line from Trenton to the mouth of the Hudson River. North of that line the successive terraces of the piedmont and mountainous region form part of the original North American continent. South of that line the more or less sandy level region was once a shoal beneath the ocean; afterwards a series of islands; then one island with a wide sound behind it passing along the division line to the mouth of the Hudson. Southern Jersey was in short an island with a sound behind it very much like the present Long Island. The shoal and island had been formed in the far distant geologic past by the erosion and washings from the lofty Pennsylvania mountains now worn down to mere stumps.
The Delaware River flowed into this sound at Trenton. Gradually the Hudson end of the sound filled up as far as Trenton, but the tide from the ocean still runs up the remains of the Old Sound as far as Trenton. The Delaware should still be properly considered as ending at Trenton, for the rest of its course to the ocean is still part of Old Pensauken Sound, as it is called by geologists.
The Jerseys originated as a colony in 1664. In 1675 West Jersey passed into the control of the Quakers. In 1680 East Jersey came partially under Quaker influence. In August, 1664, Charles II seized New York, New Jersey, and all the Dutch possessions in America, having previously in March granted them to his brother the Duke of York. The Duke almost immediately gave to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, members of the Privy Council and defenders of the Stuart family in the Cromwellian wars, the land between the Delaware River and the ocean, and bounded on the north by a line drawn from latitude 41 degrees on the Hudson to latitude 41 degrees 40 minutes on the Delaware. This region was to be called, the grant said, Nova Caesarea, or New Jersey. The name was a compliment to Carteret, who in the Cromwellian wars had defended the little isle of Jersey against the forces of the Long Parliament. As the American Jersey was then almost an island and geologically had been one, the name was not inappropriate.
Berkeley and Carteret divided the province between them. In 1676 an exact division was attempted, creating the rather unnatural sections known as East Jersey and West Jersey. The first idea seems to have been to divide by a line running from Barnegat on the seashore to the mouth of Pensauken Creek on the Delaware just above Camden. This, however, would have made a North Jersey and a South Jersey, with the latter much smaller than the former. Several lines seem to have been surveyed at different times in the attempt to make an exactly equal division, which was no easy engineering task. As private land titles and boundaries were in some places dependent on the location of the division line, there resulted much controversy and litigation which lasted down into our own time. Without going into details, it is sufficient to say that the acceptable division line began on the seashore at Little Egg Harbor at the lower end of Barnegat Bay and crossed diagonally or northwesterly to the northern part of the Delaware River just above the Water Gap. It is known as the Old Province line, and it can be traced on any map of the State by prolonging, in both directions, the northeastern boundary of Burlington County.
West Jersey, which became decidedly Quaker, did not remain long in the possession of Lord Berkeley. He was growing old; and, disappointed in his hopes of seeing it settled, he sold it, in 1673, for one thousand pounds to John Fenwick and Edward Byllinge, both of them old Cromwellian soldiers turned Quakers. That this purchase was made for the purpose of affording a refuge in America for Quakers then much imprisoned and persecuted in England does not very distinctly appear. At least there was no parade of it. But such a purpose in addition to profit for the proprietors may well have been in the minds of the purchasers.
George Fox, the Quaker leader, had just returned from a missionary journey in America, in the course of which he had traveled through New Jersey in going from New York to Maryland. Some years previously in England, about 1659, he had made inquiries as to a suitable place for Quaker settlement and was told of the region north of Maryland which became Pennsylvania. But how could a persecuted sect obtain such a region from the British Crown and the Government that was persecuting them? It would require powerful influence at Court; nothing could then be done about it; and Pennsylvania had to wait until William Penn became a man with influence enough in 1681 to win it from the Crown. But here was West Jersey, no longer owned directly by the Crown and bought in cheap by two Quakers. It was an unexpected opportunity. Quakers soon went to it, and it was the first Quaker colonial experiment.
Byllinge and Fenwick, though turned Quakers, seem to have retained some of the contentious Cromwellian spirit of their youth. They soon quarreled over their respective interests in the ownership of West Jersey; and to prevent a lawsuit, so objectionable to Quakers, the decision was left to William Penn, then a rising young Quaker about thirty years old, dreaming of ideal colonies in America. Penn awarded Fenwick a one-tenth interest and four hundred pounds. Byllinge soon became insolvent and turned over his nine-tenths interest to his creditors, appointing Penn and two other Quakers, Gawen Lawrie, a merchant of London, and Nicholas Lucas, a maltster of Hertford, to hold it in trust for them. Gawen Lawrie afterwards became deputy governor of East Jersey. Lucas was one of those thoroughgoing Quakers just released from eight years in prison for his religion.*
* Myers, “Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West Jersey, and Delaware”, p. 180.
Fenwick also in the end fell into debt and, after selling over one hundred thousand acres to about fifty purchasers, leased what remained of his interest for a thousand years to John Edridge, a tanner, and Edmund Warner, a poulterer, as security for money borrowed from them. They conveyed this lease and their claims to Penn, Lawrie, and Lucas, who thus became the owners, as trustees, of pretty much all West Jersey.
This was William Penn’s first practical experience in American affairs. He and his fellow trustees, with the consent of Fenwick, divided the West Jersey ownership into one hundred shares. The ninety belonging to Byllinge were offered for sale to settlers or to creditors of Byllinge who would take them in exchange for debts. The settlement of West Jersey thus became the distribution of an insolvent Quaker’s estate among his creditor fellow religionists.
Although no longer in possession of a title to land, Fenwick, in 1675, went out with some Quaker settlers to Delaware Bay. There they founded the modern town of Salem, which means peace, giving it that name because of the fair and peaceful aspect of the wilderness on the day they arrived. They bought the land from the Indians in the usual manner, as the Swedes and Dutch had so often done. But they had no charter or provision for organized government. When Fenwick attempted to exercise political authority at Salem, he was seized and imprisoned by Andros, Governor of New York for the Duke of York, on the ground that, although the Duke had given Jersey to certain individual proprietors, the political control of it remained in the Duke’s deputy governor. Andros, who had levied a tax of five per cent on all goods passing up the Delaware, now established commissioners at Salem to collect the duties.
This action brought up the whole question of the authority of Andros. The trustee proprietors of West Jersey appealed to the Duke of York, who was suspiciously indifferent to the matter, but finally referred it for decision to a prominent lawyer, Sir William Jones, before whom the Quaker proprietors of West Jersey made a most excellent argument. They showed the illegality, injustice, and wrong of depriving the Jerseys of vested political rights and forcing them from the freeman’s right of making their own laws to a state of mere dependence on the arbitrary will of one man. Then with much boldness they declared that “To exact such an unterminated tax from English planters, and to continue it after so many repeated complaints, will be the greatest evidence of a design to introduce, if the Crown should ever devolve upon the Duke, an unlimited government in old England.” Prophetic words which the Duke, in a few years, tried his best to fulfill. But Sir William Jones deciding against him, he acquiesced, confirmed the political rights of West Jersey by a separate grant, and withdrew any authority Andros claimed over East Jersey. The trouble, however, did not end here. Both the Jerseys were long afflicted by domineering attempts from New York.
Penn and his fellow trustees now prepared a constitution, or “Concessions and Agreements,” as they called it, for West Jersey, the first Quaker political constitution embodying their advanced ideas, establishing religious liberty, universal suffrage, and voting by ballot, and abolishing imprisonment for debt. It foreshadowed some of the ideas subsequently included in the Pennsylvania constitution. All these experiences were an excellent school for William Penn. He learned the importance in starting a colony of having a carefully and maturely considered system of government. In his preparations some years afterwards for establishing Pennsylvania he avoided much of the bungling of the West Jersey enterprise.
A better organized attempt was now made to establish a foothold in West Jersey farther up the river than Fenwick’s colony at Salem. In 1677 the ship Kent took out some 230 rather well-to-do Quakers, about as fine a company of broadbrims, it is said, as ever entered the Delaware. Some were from Yorkshire and London, largely creditors of Byllinge, who were taking land to satisfy their debts. They all went up the river to Raccoon Creek on the Jersey side, about fifteen miles below the present site of Philadelphia, and lived at first among the Swedes, who had been in that part of Jersey for some years and who took care of the new arrivals in their barns and sheds. These Quaker immigrants, however, soon began to take care of themselves, and the weather during the winter proving mild, they explored farther up the river in a small boat. They bought from the Indians the land along the river shore from Oldman’s Creek all the way up to Trenton and made their first settlements on the river about eighteen miles above the site of Philadelphia, at a place they at first called New Beverly, then Bridlington, and finally Burlington.
They may have chosen this spot partly because there had been an old Dutch settlement of a few families there. It had long been a crossing of the Delaware for the few persons who passed by land from New York or New England to Maryland and Virginia. One of the Dutchmen, Peter Yegon, kept a ferry and a house for entertaining travelers. George Fox, who crossed there in 1671, describes the place as having been plundered by the Indians and deserted. He and his party swam their horses across the river and got some of the Indians to help them with canoes.
Other Quaker immigrants followed, going to Salem as well as to Burlington, and a stretch of some fifty miles of the river shore became strongly Quaker. There are not many American towns now to be found with more of the old-time picturesqueness and more relics of the past than Salem and Burlington.
Settlements were also started on the river opposite the site afterwards occupied by Philadelphia, at Newton on the creek still called by that name; and another a little above on Cooper’s Creek, known as Cooper’s Ferry until 1794. Since then it has become the flourishing town of Camden, full of shipbuilding and manufacturing, but for long after the Revolution it was merely a small village on the Jersey shore opposite Philadelphia, sometimes used as a hunting ground and a place of resort for duelers and dancing parties from Philadelphia.
The Newton settlers were Quakers of the English middle class, weavers, tanners, carpenters, bricklayers, chandlers, blacksmiths, coopers, bakers, haberdashers, hatters, and linen drapers, most of them possessed of property in England and bringing good supplies with them. Like all the rest of the New Jersey settlers they were in no sense adventurers, gold seekers, cavaliers, or desperadoes. They were well-to-do middle class English tradespeople who would never have thought of leaving England if they had not lost faith in the stability of civil and religious liberty and the security of their property under the Stuart Kings. With them came servants, as they were called; that is, persons of no property, who agreed to work for a certain time in payment of their passage, to escape from England. All, indeed, were escaping from England before their estates melted away in fines and confiscations or their health or lives ended in the damp, foul air of the crowded prisons. Many of those who came had been in jail and had decided that they would not risk imprisonment a second time. Indeed, the proportion of West Jersey immigrants who had actually been in prison for holding or attending Quaker meetings or refusing to pay tithes for the support of the established church was large. For example, William Bates, a carpenter, while in jail for his religion, made arrangements with his friends to escape to West Jersey as soon as he should be released, and his descendants are now scattered over the United States. Robert Turner, a man of means, who settled finally in Philadelphia but also owned much land near Newton in West Jersey, had been imprisoned in England in 1660, again in 1662, again in 1665, and some of his property had been taken, again imprisoned in 1669 and more property taken; and many others had the same experience. Details such as these make us realize the situation from which the Quakers sought to escape. So widespread was the Quaker movement in England and so severe the punishment imposed in order to suppress it that fifteen thousand families are said to have been ruined by the fines, confiscations, and imprisonments.
Not a few Jersey Quakers were from Ireland, whither they had fled because there the laws against them were less rigorously administered. The Newton settlers were joined by Quakers from Long Island, where, under the English law as administered by the New York governors, they had also been fined and imprisoned, though with less severity than at home, for nonconformity to the Church of England. On arriving, the West Jersey settlers suffered some hardships during the year that must elapse before a crop could be raised and a log cabin or house built. During that period they usually lived, in the Indian manner, in wigwams of poles covered with bark, or in caves protected with logs in the steep banks of the creeks. Many of them lived in the villages of the Indians. The Indians supplied them all with corn and venison, and without this Indian help, they would have run serious risk of starving, for they were not accustomed to hunting. They had also to thank the Indians for having in past ages removed so much of the heavy forest growth from the wide strip of land along the river that it was easy to start cultivation.
These Quaker settlers made a point of dealing very justly with the Indians and the two races lived side by side for several generations. There is an instance recorded of the Indians attending with much solemnity the funeral of a prominent Quaker woman, Esther Spicer, for whom they had acquired great respect. The funeral was held at night, and the Indians in canoes, the white men in boats, passed down Cooper’s Creek and along the river to Newton Creek where the graveyard was, lighting the darkness with innumerable torches, a strange scene to think of now as having been once enacted in front of the bustling cities of Camden and Philadelphia. Some of the young settlers took Indian wives, and that strain of native blood is said to show itself in the features of several families to this day.
Many letters of these settlers have been preserved, all expressing the greatest enthusiasm for the new country, for the splendid river better than the Thames, the good climate, and their improved health, the immense relief to be away from the constant dread of fines and punishment, the chance to rise in the world, with large rewards for industry. They note the immense quantities of game, the Indians bringing in fat bucks every day, the venison better than in England, the streams full of fish, the abundance of wild fruits, cranberries, hurtleberries, the rapid increase of cattle, and the good soil. A few details concerning some of the interesting characters among these early colonial Quakers have been rescued from oblivion. There is, for instance, the pleasing picture of a young man and his sister, convinced Quakers, coming out together and pioneering in their log cabin until each found a partner for life. There was John Haddon, from whom Haddonfield is named, who bought a large tract of land but remained in England, while his daughter Elizabeth came out alone to look after it. A strong, decisive character she was, and women of that sort have always been encouraged in independent action by the Quakers. She proved to be an excellent manager of an estate. The romance of her marriage to a young Quaker preacher, Estaugh, has been celebrated in Mrs. Maria Child’s novel “The Youthful Emigrant.” The pair became leading citizens devoted to good works and to Quaker liberalism for many a year in Haddonfield.
It was the ship Shields of Hull, bringing Quaker immigrants to Burlington, of which the story is told that in beating up the river she tacked close to the rather high bank with deep water frontage where Philadelphia was afterwards established; and some of the passengers remarked that it was a fine site for a town. The Shields, it is said, was the first ship to sail up as far as Burlington. Anchoring before Burlington in the evening, the colonists woke up next morning to find the river frozen hard so that they walked on the ice to their future habitations.
Burlington was made the capital of West Jersey, a legislature was convened and laws were passed under the “concessions” or constitution of the proprietors. Salem and Burlington became the ports of the little province, which was well under way by 1682, when Penn came out to take possession of Pennsylvania.
The West Jersey people of these two settlements spread eastward into the interior but were stopped by a great forest area known as the Pines, or Pine Barrens, of such heavy growth that even the Indians lived on its outer edges and entered it only for hunting. It was an irregularly shaped tract, full of wolves, bear, beaver, deer, and other game, and until recent years has continued to attract sportsmen from all parts of the country. Starting near Delaware Bay, it extended parallel with the ocean as far north as the lower portion of the present Monmouth County and formed a region about seventy-five miles long and thirty miles wide. It was roughly the part of the old sandy shoal that first emerged from the ocean, and it has been longer above water than any other part of southern Jersey. The old name, Pine Barrens, is hardly correct because it implies something like a desert, when as a matter of fact the region produced magnificent forest trees.
The innumerable visitors who cross southern Jersey to the famous seashore resorts always pass through the remains of this old central forest and are likely to conclude that the monotonous low scrub oaks and stunted pines on sandy level soil, seen for the last two or three generations, were always there and that the primeval forest of colonial times was no better. But that is a mistake. The stunted growth now seen is not even second growth but in many cases fourth or fifth or more. The whole region was cut over long ago. The original growth, pine in many places, consisted also of lofty timber of oak, hickory, gum, ash, chestnut, and numerous other trees, interspersed with dogwood, sassafras, and holly, and in the swamps the beautiful magnolia, along with the valuable white cedar. DeVries, who visited the Jersey coast about 1632, at what is supposed to have been Beesley’s or Somer’s Point, describes high woods coming down to the shore. Even today, immediately back of Somer’s Point, there is a magnificent lofty oak forest accidentally preserved by surrounding marsh from the destructive forest fires; and there are similar groves along the road towards Pleasantville. In fact, the finest forest trees flourish in that region wherever given a good chance. Even some of the beaches of Cape May had valuable oak and luxuriant growths of red cedar; and until a few years ago there were fine trees, especially hollies, surviving on Wildwood Beach.
The Jersey white cedar swamps were, and still are, places of fascinating interest to the naturalist and the botanist. The hunter or explorer found them scattered almost everywhere in the old forest and near its edges, varying in size from a few square yards up to hundreds of acres. They were formed by little streams easily checked in their flow through the level land by decaying vegetation or dammed by beavers. They kept the water within the country, preventing all effects of droughts, stimulating the growth of vegetation which by its decay, throughout the centuries, was steadily adding vegetable mold or humus to the sandy soil. This process of building up a richer soil has now been largely stopped by lumbering, drainage, and fires.
While there are many of these swamps left, the appearance of numbers of them has largely changed. When the white men first came, the great cedars three or four feet in diameter which had fallen centuries before often lay among the living trees, some of them buried deep in the mud and preserved from decay. They were invaluable timber, and digging them out and cutting them up became an important industry for over a hundred years. In addition to being used for boat building, they made excellent shingles which would last a lifetime. The swamps, indeed, became known as shingle mines, and it was a good description of them. An important trade was developed in hogshead staves, hoops, shingles, boards, and planks, much of which went into the West Indian trade to be exchanged for rum, sugar, molasses, and negroes.*
* Between the years 1740 and ’50, the Cedar Swamps of the county [Cape May] were mostly located; and the amount of lumber since taken from them is incalculable, not only as an article of trade, but to supply the home demand for fencing and building material in the county. Large portions of these swamps have been worked a second and some a third time, since located. At the present time [1857] there is not an acre of original growth of swamp standing, having all passed away before the resistless sway of the speculator or the consumer.” Beesley’s “Sketch of Cape May” p. 197.
The great forest has long since been lumbered to death. The pines were worked for tar, pitch, resin, and turpentine until for lack of material the industry passed southward through the Carolinas to Florida, exhausting the trees as it went. The Christmas demand for holly has almost stripped the Jersey woods of these trees once so numerous. Destructive fires and frequent cutting keep the pine and oak lands stunted. Thousands of dollars’ worth of cedar springing up in the swamps are sometimes destroyed in a day. But efforts to control the fires so destructive not only to this standing timber but to the fertility of the soil, and attempts to reforest this country not only for the sake of timber but as an attraction to those who resort there in search of health or natural beauty, have not been vigorously pushed. The great forest has now, to be sure, been partially cultivated in spots, and the sand used for large glass-making industries. Small fruits and grapes flourish in some places. At the northern end of this forest tract the health resort known as Lakewood was established to take advantage of the pine air. A little to the southward is the secluded Brown’s Mills, once so appealing to lovers of the simple life. Checked on the east by the great forest, the West Jersey Quakers spread southward from Salem until they came to the Cohansey, a large and beautiful stream flowing out of the forest and wandering through green meadows and marshes to the bay. So numerous were the wild geese along its shores and along the Maurice River farther south that the first settlers are said to have killed them for their feathers alone and to have thrown the carcasses away. At the head of navigation of the Cohansey was a village called Cohansey Bridge, and after 1765 Bridgeton, a name still borne by a flourishing modern town. Lower down near the marsh was the village of Greenwich, the principal place of business up to the year 1800, with a foreign trade. Some of the tea the East India Company tried to force on the colonists during the Revolution was sent there and was duly rejected. It is still an extremely pretty village, with its broad shaded streets like a New England town and its old Quaker meeting house. In fact, not a few New Englanders from Connecticut, still infatuated with southern Jersey in spite of the rebuffs received in ancient times from Dutch and Swedes, finally settled near the Cohansey after it came under control of the more amiable Quakers. There was also one place called after Fairfield in Connecticut and another called New England Town.
The first churches of this region were usually built near running streams so that the congregation could procure water for themselves and their horses. Of one old Presbyterian Church it used to be said that no one had ever ridden to it in a wheeled vehicle. Wagons and carriages were very scarce until after the Revolution. Carts for occasions of ceremony as well as utility were used before wagons and carriages. For a hundred and fifty years the horse’s back was the best form of conveyance in the deep sand of the trails and roads. This was true of all southern Jersey. Pack horses and the backs of Indian and negro slaves were the principal means of transportation on land. The roads and trails, in fact, were so few and so heavy with sand that water travel was very much developed. The Indian dugout canoe was adopted and found faster and better than heavy English rowboats. As the province was almost surrounded by water and was covered with a network of creeks and channels, nearly all the villages and towns were situated on tidewater streams, and the dugout canoe, modified and improved, was for several generations the principal means of communication. Most of the old roads in New Jersey followed Indian trails. There was a trail, for example, from the modern Camden opposite Philadelphia, following up Cooper’s Creek past Berlin, then called Long-a-coming, crossing the watershed, and then following Great Egg Harbor River to the seashore. Another trail, long used by the settlers, led from Salem up to Camden, Burlington, and Trenton, going round the heads of streams. It was afterwards abandoned for the shorter route obtained by bridging the streams nearer their mouths. This old trail also extended from the neighborhood of Trenton to Perth Amboy near the mouth of the Hudson, and thus, by supplementing the lower routes, made a trail nearly the whole length of the province.
As a Quaker refuge, West Jersey never attained the success of Pennsylvania. The political disturbances and the continually threatened loss of self-government in both the Jerseys were a serious deterrent to Quakers who, above all else, prized rights which they found far better secured in Pennsylvania. In 1702, when the two Jerseys were united into one colony under a government appointed by the Crown, those rights were more restricted than ever and all hopes of West Jersey becoming a colony under complete Quaker control were shattered. Under Governor Cornbury, the English law was adopted and enforced, and the Quakers were disqualified from testifying in court unless they took an oath and were prohibited from serving on juries or holding any office of trust. Cornbury’s judges wore scarlet robes, powdered wigs, cocked hats, gold lace, and side arms; they were conducted to the courthouse by the sheriff’s cavalcade and opened court with great parade and ceremony. Such a spectacle of pomp was sufficient to divert the flow of Quaker immigrants to Pennsylvania, where the government was entirely in Quaker hands and where plain and serious ways gave promise of enduring and unmolested prosperity.
The Quakers had altogether thirty meeting houses in West Jersey and eleven in East Jersey, which probably shows about the proportion of Quaker influence in the two Jerseys. Many of them have since disappeared; some of the early buildings, to judge from the pictures, were of wood and not particularly pleasing in appearance. They were makeshifts, usually intended to be replaced by better buildings. Some substantial brick buildings of excellent architecture have survived, and their plainness and simplicity, combined with excellent proportions and thorough construction, are clearly indicative of Quaker character. There is a particularly interesting one in Salem with a magnificent old oak beside it, another in the village of Greenwich on the Cohansey farther south, and another at Crosswicks near Trenton.
In West Jersey near Mount Holly was born and lived John Woolman, a Quaker who became eminent throughout the English speaking world for the simplicity and loftiness of his religious thought as well as for his admirable style of expression. His “Journal,” once greatly and even extravagantly admired, still finds readers. “Get the writings of John Woolman by heart,” said Charles Lamb, “and love the early Quakers.” He was among the Quakers one of the first and perhaps the first really earnest advocate of the abolition of slavery. The scenes of West Jersey and the writings of Woolman seem to belong together. Possibly a feeling for the simplicity of those scenes and their life led Walt Whitman, who grew up on Long Island under Quaker influence, to spend his last years at Camden, in West Jersey. His profound democracy, which was very Quaker-like, was more at home there perhaps than anywhere else.
Chapter IX. Planters And Traders Of Southern Jersey
Most of the colonies in America, especially the stronger ones, had an aristocratic class, which was often large and powerful, as in the case of Virginia, and which usually centered around the governor, especially if he were appointed from England by the Crown or by a proprietor. But there was very little of this social distinction in New Jersey. Her political life had been too much broken up, and she had been too long dependent on the governors of New York to have any of those pretty little aristocracies with bright colored clothes, and coaches and four, flourishing within her boundaries. There seems to have been a faint suggestion of such social pretensions under Governor Franklin just before the Revolution. He was beginning to live down the objections to his illegitimate birth and Toryism and by his entertainments and manner of living was creating a social following. There is said also to have been something a little like the beginning of an aristocracy among the descendants of the Dutch settlers who had ancestral holdings near the Hudson; but this amounted to very little.
Class distinctions were not so strongly marked in New Jersey as in some other colonies. There grew up in southern Jersey, however, a sort of aristocracy of gentlemen farmers, who owned large tracts of land and lived in not a little style in good houses on the small streams.
The northern part of the province, largely settled and influenced by New Englanders, was like New England a land of vigorous concentrated town life and small farms. The hilly and mountainous nature of the northern section naturally led to small holdings of land. But in southern Jersey the level sandy tracts of forest were often taken up in large areas. In the absence of manufacturing, large acreage naturally became, as in Virginia and Maryland, the only mark of wealth and social distinction. The great landlord was looked up to by the lesser fry. The Quaker rule of discountenancing marrying out of meeting tended to keep a large acreage in the family and to make it larger by marriage. A Quaker of broad acres would seek for his daughter a young man of another landholding Quaker family and would thus join the two estates.
There was a marked difference between East Jersey and West Jersey in county organization. In West Jersey the people tended to become planters; their farms and plantations somewhat like those of the far South; and the political unit of government was the county. In East Jersey the town was the starting point and the county marked the boundaries of a collection of towns. This curious difference, the result of soil, climate, and methods of life, shows itself in other States wherever South and North meet. Illinois is an example, where the southern part of the State is governed by the county system, and the northern part by the town system.
The lumberman, too, in clearing off the primeval forest and selling the timber, usually dealt in immense acreage. Some families, it is said, can be traced steadily proceeding southward as they stripped off the forest, and started sawmills and gristmills on the little streams that trickled from the swamps, and like beavers making with their dams those pretty ponds which modern lovers of the picturesque are now so eager to find. A good deal of the lumbering in the interior pines tract was carried on by persons who leased the premises from owners who lived on plantations along the Delaware or its tributary streams. These operations began soon after 1700. Wood roads were cut into the Pines, sawmills were started, and constant use turned some of these wood roads into the highways of modern times.
There was a speculative tinge in the operations of this landed aristocracy. Like the old tobacco raising aristocracy of Virginia and Maryland, they were inclined to go from tract to tract, skinning what they could from a piece of deforested land and then seeking another virgin tract. The roughest methods were used; wooden plows, brush harrows, straw collars, grapevine harness, and poor shelter for animals and crops; but were the Virginia methods any better? In these operations there was apparently a good deal of sudden profit and mushroom prosperity accompanied by a good deal of debt and insolvency. In this, too, they were like the Virginians and Carolinians. There seem to have been also a good many slaves in West Jersey, brought, as in the southern colonies, to work on the large estates, and this also, no doubt, helped to foster the aristocratic feeling.
The best days of the Jersey gentlemen farmers came probably when they could no longer move from tract to tract. They settled down and enjoyed a very plentiful, if rude, existence on the products of their land, game, and fish, amid a fine climate–with mosquitoes enough in summer to act as a counterirritant and prevent stagnation from too much ease and prosperity. After the manner of colonial times, they wove their own clothes from the wool of their own sheep and made their own implements, furniture, and simple machinery.
There are still to be found fascinating traces of this old life in out-of-the-way parts of southern Jersey. To run upon old houses among the Jersey pines still stored with Latin classics and old editions of Shakespeare, Addison, or Samuel Johnson, to come across an old mill with its machinery, cogwheels, flywheels, and all, made of wood, to find people who make their own oars, and the handles of their tools from the materials furnished by their own forest, is now unfortunately a refreshment of the spirit that is daily becoming rarer.
This condition of material and social self-sufficiency lasted in places long after the Revolution. It was a curious little aristocracy–a very faint and faded one, lacking the robustness of the far southern type, and lacking indeed the real essential of an aristocracy, namely political power. Moreover, although there were slaves in New Jersey, there were not enough of them to exalt the Jersey gentlemen farmers into such self-sufficient lords and masters as the Virginian and Carolinian planters became.
To search out the remains of this stage of American history, however, takes one up many pleasant streams flowing out of the forest tract to the Delaware on one side or to the ocean on the other. This topographical formation of a central ridge or watershed of forest and swamp was a repetition of the same formation in the Delaware peninsula, which like southern Jersey had originally been a shoal and then an island. The Jersey watershed, with its streams abounding in wood duck and all manner of wild life, must have been in its primeval days as fascinating as some of the streams of the Florida cypress swamps. Toward the ocean, Wading River, the Mullica, the Tuckahoe, Great Egg; and on the Delaware side the Maurice, Cohansey, Salem Creek, Oldman’s, Raccoon, Mantua, Woodberry, Timber, and the Rancocas, still possess attraction. Some of them, on opposite sides of the divide, are not far apart at their sources in the old forest tract; so that a canoe can be transported over the few miles and thus traverse the State. One of these trips up Timber Creek from the Delaware and across only eight miles of land to the headwaters of Great Egg Harbor River and thence down to the ocean, thus cutting South Jersey in half, is a particularly romantic one. The heavy woods and swamps of this secluded route along these forest shadowed streams are apparently very much as they were three hundred years ago.
The water in all these streams, particularly in their upper parts, owing to the sandy soil, is very clean and clear and is often stained by the cedar roots in the swamps a clear brown, sometimes almost an amber color. One of the streams, the Rancocas, with its many windings to Mount Holly and then far inland to Brown’s Mills, seems to be the favorite with canoemen and is probably without an equal in its way for those who love the Indian’s gift that brings us so close to nature.
The spread of the Quaker settlements along Delaware Bay to Cape May was checked by the Maurice River and its marshes and by the Great Cedar Swamp which crossed the country from Delaware Bay to the ocean and thus made of the Cape May region a sort of island. The Cape May region, it is true, was settled by Quakers, but most of them came from Long Island rather than from the settlements on the Delaware. They had followed whale fishing on Long Island and in pursuit of that occupation some of them had migrated to Cape May where whales were numerous not far off shore.
The leading early families of Cape May, the Townsends, Stillwells, Corsons, Leamings, Ludlams, Spicers, and Cresses, many of whose descendants still live there, were Quakers of the Long Island strain. The ancestor of the Townsend family came to Cape May because he had been imprisoned and fined and threatened with worse under the New York government for assisting his fellow Quakers to hold meetings. Probably the occasional severity of the administration of the New York laws against Quakers, which were the same as those of England, had as much to do as had the whales with the migration to Cape May. This Quaker civilization extended from Cape May up as far as Great Egg Harbor where the Great Cedar Swamp joined the seashore. Quaker meeting houses were built at Cape May, Galloway, Tuckahoe, and Great Egg. All have been abandoned and the buildings themselves have disappeared, except that of the Cape May meeting, called the Old Cedar Meeting, at Seaville; and it has no congregation. The building is kept in repair by members of the Society from other places.
Besides the Quakers, Cape May included a number of New Haven people, the first of whom came there as early as 1640 under the leadership of George Lamberton and Captain Turner, seeking profit in whale fishing. They were not driven out by the Dutch and Swedes, as happened to their companions who attempted to settle higher up the river at Salem and the Schuylkill. About one-fifth of the old family names of Cape May and New Haven are similar, and there is supposed to be not a little New England blood not only in Cape May but in the neighboring counties of Cumberland and Salem. While the first New Haven whalers came to Cape May in 1640, it is probable that for a long time they only sheltered their vessels there, and none of them became permanent settlers until about 1685.
Scandinavians contributed another element to the population of the Cape May region. Very little is definitely known about this settlement, but the Swedish names in Cape May and Cumberland counties seem to indicate a migration of Scandinavians from Wilmington and Tinicum.
Great Egg Harbor, which formed the northern part of the Cape May settlement, was named from the immense numbers of wild fowl, swans, ducks, and water birds that formerly nested there every summer and have now been driven to Canada or beyond. Little Egg Harbor farther up the coast was named for the same reason as well as Egg Island, of three hundred acres in Delaware Bay, since then eaten away by the tide. The people of the district had excellent living from the eggs as well as from the plentiful fowl, fish, and oysters.
Some farming was done by the inhabitants of Cape May; and many cattle, marked with brands but in a half wild state, were kept out on the uninhabited beaches which have now become seaside summer cities. Some of the cattle were still running wild on the beaches down to the time of the Civil War. The settlers “mined” the valuable white cedar from the swamps for shingles and boards, leaving great “pool holes” in the swamps which even today sometimes trap the unwary sportsman. The women knitted innumerable mittens and also made wampum or Indian money from the clam and oyster shells, an important means of exchange in the Indian trade all over the colonies, and even to some extent among the colonists themselves. The Cape May people built sloops for carrying the white cedar, the mittens, oysters, and wampum to the outside world. They sold a great deal of their cedar in Long Island, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Philadelphia finally became their market for oysters and also for lumber, corn, and the whalebone and oil. Their sloops also traded to the southern colonies and even to the West Indies.
They were an interesting little community, these Cape May people, very isolated and dependent on the water and on their boats, for they were completely cut off by the Great Cedar Swamp which stretched across the point and separated them from the rest of the coast. This troublesome swamp was not bridged for many years; and even then the roads to it were long, slow, and too sandy for transporting anything of much bulk.
Next above Cape May on the coast was another isolated patch of civilization which, while not an island, was nevertheless cut off on the south by Great Egg Harbor with its river and marshes, and on the north by Little Egg Harbor with the Mullica River and its marshes extending far inland. The people in this district also lived somewhat to themselves. To the north lay the district which extended to Sandy Hook, also with its distinct set of people.
The people of the Cape became in colonial times clever traders in various pursuits. Although in one sense they were as isolated as islanders, their adventurous life on the sea gave them breadth of view. By their thrift and in innumerable shrewd and persistent ways they amassed competencies and estates for their families. Aaron Leaming, for example, who died in 1780, left an estate of nearly $1,000,000. Some kept diaries which have become historically valuable in showing not only their history but their good education and the peculiar cast of their mind for keen trading as well as their rigid economy and integrity.
One character, Jacob Spicer, a prosperous colonial, insisted on having everything made at home by his sons and daughters–shoes, clothes, leather breeches, wampum, even shoe thread–calculating the cost of everything to a fraction and economizing to the last penny of money and the last second of time. Yet in the course of a year he used “fifty-two gallons of rum, ten of wine, and two barrels of cyder.” Apparently in those days hard labor and hard drinking went well together.
The Cape May people, relying almost entirely on the water for communication and trade, soon took to piloting vessels in the Delaware River, and some of them still follow this occupation. They also became skillful sailors and builders of small craft, and it is not surprising to learn that Jacocks Swain and his sons introduced, in 1811, the centerboard for keeping flat-bottomed craft closer to the wind. They are said to have taken out a patent for this invention and are given the credit of being the originators of the idea. But the device was known in England in 1774, was introduced in Massachusetts in the same year, and may have been used long before by the Dutch. The need of it, however, was no doubt strongly impressed upon the Cape May people by the difficulties which their little sloops experienced in beating home against contrary winds. Some of them, indeed, spent weeks in sight of the Cape, unable to make it. One sloop, the Nancy, seventy-two days from Demarara, hung off and on for forty-three days from December 25, 1787, to February 6, 1788, and was driven off fifteen times before she finally got into Hereford Inlet. Sometimes better sailing craft had to go out and bring in such distressed vessels. The early boats were no doubt badly constructed; but in the end apprenticeship to dire necessity made the Cape May sailors masters of seamanship and the windward art.*
* Stevens, “History of Cape May County,” pp. 219, 229; Kelley, “American Yachts” (1884), p. 165.
Wilson, the naturalist, spent a great deal of time in the Cape May region, because of the great variety of birds to be found there. Southern types, like the Florida egret, ventured even so far north, and it was a stopping place for migrating birds, notably woodcock, on their northern and southern journeys. Men of the stone age had once been numerous in this region, as the remains of village plats and great shell heaps bore witness. It was a resting point for all forms of life. That much traveled, adventurous gentleman of the sea, Captain Kidd, according to popular legend, was a frequent visitor to this coast.
In later times, beginning in 1801, the Cape became one of the earliest of the summer resorts. The famous Commodore Decatur was among the first distinguished men to be attracted by the simple seaside charm of the place, long before it was destroyed by wealth and crowds. Year by year he used to measure and record at one spot the encroachment of the sea upon the beach. Where today the sea washes and the steel pier extends, once lay cornfields. For a hundred years it was a favorite resting place for statesmen and politicians of national eminence. They traveled there by stage, sailing sloop, or their own wagons. People from Baltimore and the South more particularly sought the place because it was easily accessible from the head of Chesapeake Bay by an old railroad, long since abandoned, to Newcastle on the Delaware, whence sail- or steamboats went to Cape May. This avoided the tedious stage ride over the sandy Jersey roads. Presidents, cabinet officers, senators, and congressmen sought the invigorating air of the Cape and the attractions of the old village, its seafaring life, the sailing, fishing, and bathing on the best beach of the coast. Congress Hall, their favorite hotel, became famous, and during a large part of the nineteenth century presidential nominations and policies are said to have been planned within its walls.
Chapter X. Scotch Covenanters And Others In East Jersey
East Jersey was totally different in its topography from West Jersey. The northern half of the State is a region of mountains and lakes. As part of the original continent it had been under the ice sheet of the glacial age and was very unlike the level sands, swamps, and pine barrens of West Jersey which had arisen as a shoal and island from the sea. The only place in East Jersey where settlement was at all easy was along the open meadows which were reached by water near the mouth of the Hudson, round Newark Bay, and along the Hackensack River.
The Dutch, by the discoveries of Henry Hudson in 1609, claimed the whole region between the Hudson and the Delaware. They settled part of East Jersey opposite their headquarters at New York and called it Pavonia. But their cruel massacre of some Indians who sought refuge among them at Pavonia destroyed the prospects of the settlement. The Indians revenged themselves by massacring the Dutch again and again, every time they attempted to reestablish Pavonia. This kept the Dutch out of East Jersey until 1660, when they succeeded in establishing Bergen between Newark Bay and the Hudson.
The Dutch authority in America was overthrown in 1664 by Charles II, who had already given all New Jersey to his brother the Duke of York. Colonel Richard Nicolls commanded the British expedition that seized the Dutch possessions; and he had been given full power as deputy governor of all the Duke of York’s vast territory.
Meantime the New England Puritans seem to have kept their eyes on East Jersey as a desirable region, and the moment the Connecticut Puritans heard of Nicolls’ appointment, they applied to him for a grant of a large tract of land on Newark Bay. In the next year, 1665, he gave them another tract from the mouth of the Raritan to Sandy Hook; and soon the villages of Shrewsbury and Middletown were started.
Meantime, however, unknown to Nicolls, the Duke of York in England had given all of New Jersey to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. As has already been pointed out, they had divided the province between them, and East Jersey had fallen to Carteret, who sent out, with some immigrants, his relative Philip Carteret as governor. Governor Carteret was of course very much surprised to find so much of the best land already occupied by the excellent and thrifty Yankees. As a consequence, litigation and sometimes civil war over this unlucky mistake lasted for a hundred years. Many of the Yankee settlers under the Nicolls grant refused to pay quitrents to Carteret or his successors and, in spite of a commission of inquiry from England in 1751 and a chancery suit, they held their own until the Revolution of 1776 extinguished all British authority.
There was therefore from the beginning a strong New England tinge in East Jersey which has lasted to this day. Governor Carteret established a village on Newark Bay which still bears the name Elizabeth, which he gave it in honor of the wife of the proprietor, and he made it the capital. There were also immigrants from Scotland and England. But Puritans from Long Island and New England continued to settle round Newark Bay. By virtue either of character or numbers, New Englanders were evidently the controlling element, for they established the New England system of town government, and imposed strict Connecticut laws, making twelve crimes punishable with death. Soon there were flourishing little villages, Newark and Elizabeth, besides Middletown and Shrewsbury. The next year Piscatawa and Woodbridge were added. Newark and the region round it, including the Oranges, was settled by very exclusive Puritans, or Congregationalists, as they are now called, some thirty families from four Connecticut towns–Milford, Guilford, Bradford, and New Haven. They decided that only church members should hold office and vote.
Governor Carteret ruled the colony with an appointive council and a general assembly elected by the people, the typical colonial form of government. His administration lasted from 1665 to his death in 1682; and there is nothing very remarkable to record except the rebellion of the New Englanders, especially those who had received their land from Nicolls. Such independent Connecticut people were, of course, quite out of place in a proprietary colony, and, when in 1670 the first collection of quitrents was attempted, they broke out in violent opposition, in which the settlers of Elizabeth were prominent. In 1672 they elected a revolutionary assembly of their own and, in place of the deputy governor, appointed as proprietor a natural son of Carteret. They began imprisoning former officers and confiscating estates in the most approved revolutionary form and for a time had the whole government in their control. It required the interference of the Duke of York, of the proprietors, and of the British Crown to allay the little tempest, and three years were given in which to pay the quitrents.
After the death of Sir George Carteret in 1680, his province of East Jersey was sold to William Penn and eleven other Quakers for the sum of 3400 pounds. Colonies seem to have been comparatively inexpensive luxuries in those days. A few years before, in 1675, Penn and some other Quakers had, as has already been related, gained control of West Jersey for the still smaller sum of one thousand pounds and had established it as a Quaker refuge. It might be supposed that they now had the same purpose in view in East Jersey, but apparently their intention was to create a refuge for Presbyterians, the famous Scotch Covenanters, much persecuted at that time under Charles II, who was forcing them to conform to the Church of England.
Penn and his fellow proprietors of East Jersey each chose a partner, most of them Scotchmen, two of whom, the Earl of Perth and Lord Drummond, were prominent men. To this mixed body of Quakers, other dissenters, and some Papists, twenty-four proprietors in all, the Duke of York reconfirmed by special patent their right to East Jersey. Under their urging a few Scotch Covenanters began to arrive and seem to have first established themselves at Perth Amboy, which they named from the Scottish Earl of Perth and an Indian word meaning “point.” This settlement they expected to become a great commercial port rivaling New York. Curiously enough, Robert Barclay, the first governor appointed, was not only a Scotchman but also a Quaker, and a theologian whose “Apology for the True Christian Divinity” (1678) is regarded to this day as the best statement of the original Quaker doctrine. He remained in England, however, and the deputies whom he sent out to rule the colony had a troublous time of it.
That Quakers should establish a refuge for Presbyterians seems at first peculiar, but it was in accord with their general philanthropic plan to help the oppressed and suffering, to rescue prisoners and exiles, and especially to ameliorate the horrible condition of people confined in the English dungeons and prisons. Many vivid pictures of how the Scotch Covenanters were hunted down like wild beasts may be found in English histories and novels. When their lives were spared they often met a fate worse than death in the loathsome dungeons into which thousands of Quakers of that time were also thrust. A large part of William Penn’s life as a courtier was spent in rescuing prisoners, exiles, and condemned persons of all sorts, and not merely those of his own faith. So the undertaking to make of Jersey two colonies, one a refuge for Quakers and the other a refuge for Covenanters, was natural enough, and it was a very broad-minded plan for that age.
In 1683, a few years after the Quaker control of East Jersey began, a new and fiercer persecution of the Covenanters was started in the old country, and shortly afterwards Monmouth’s insurrection in England broke out and was followed by a most bloody proscription and punishment. The greatest efforts were made to induce those still untouched to fly for refuge to East Jersey; but, strange to say, comparatively few of them came. It is another proof of the sturdiness and devotion which has filled so many pages of history and romance with their praise that as a class the Covenanters remained at home to establish their faith with torture, martyrdom, and death.
In 1685 the Duke of York ascended the throne of England as James II, and all that was naturally to be expected from such a bigoted despot was soon realized. The persecutions of the Covenanters grew worse. Crowded into prisons to die of thirst and suffocation, shot down on the highways, tied to stakes to be drowned by the rising tide, the whole Calvinistic population of Scotland seemed doomed to extermination. Again they were told of America as the only place where religious liberty was allowed, and in addition a book was circulated among them called “The Model of the Government of the Province of East Jersey in America.” These efforts were partially successful. More Covenanters came than before, but nothing like the numbers of Quakers that flocked to Pennsylvania. The whole population of East Jersey–New Englanders, Dutch, Scotch Covenanters, and all–did not exceed five thousand and possibly was not over four thousand.
Some French Huguenots, such as came to many of the English colonies after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes of 1685, were added to the East Jersey population. A few went to Salem in West Jersey, and some of these became Quakers. In both the Jerseys, as elsewhere, they became prominent and influential in all spheres of life. There was a decided Dutch influence, it is said, in the part nearest New York, emanating from the Bergen settlement in which the Dutch had succeeded in establishing themselves in 1660 after the Indians had twice driven them from Pavonia. Many descendants of Dutch families are still found in that region. Many Dutch characteristics were to be found in that region throughout colonial times. Many of the houses had Dutch stoops or porches at the door, with seats where the family and visitors sat on summer evenings to smoke and gossip. Long Dutch spouts extended out from the eaves to discharge the rain water into the street. But the prevailing tone of East Jersey seems to have been set by the Scotch Presbyterians and the New England Congregationalists. The College of New Jersey, afterward known as Princeton, established in 1747, was the result of a movement among the Presbyterians of East Jersey and New York.
All these elements of East Jersey, Scotch Covenanters, Connecticut Puritans, Huguenots, and Dutch of the Dutch Reformed Church, were in a sense different but in reality very much in accord and congenial in their ideas of religion and politics. They were all sturdy, freedom-loving Protestants, and they set the tone that prevails in East Jersey to this day. Their strict discipline and their uncompromising thrift may now seem narrow and harsh; but it made them what they were; and it has left a legacy of order and prosperity under which alien religions and races are eager to seek protection. In its foundation the Quakers may claim a share.
The new King, James II, was inclined to reassume jurisdiction and extend the power of the Governor of New York over East Jersey in spite of his grant to Sir George Carteret. In fact, he desired to put New England, New York, and New Jersey under one strong government centered at New York, to abolish their charters, to extinguish popular government, and to make them all mere royal dependencies in pursuance of his general policy of establishing an absolute monarchy and a papal church in England.
The curse of East Jersey’s existence was to be always an appendage of New York, or to be threatened with that condition. The inhabitants now had to enter their vessels and pay duties at New York. Writs were issued by order of the King putting both the Jerseys and all New England under the New York Governor. Step by step the plans for amalgamation and despotism moved on successfully, when suddenly the English Revolution of 1688 put an end to the whole magnificent scheme, drove the King into exile, and placed William of Orange on the throne.
The proprietaries of both Jerseys reassumed their former authority. But the New York Assembly attempted to exercise control over East Jersey and to levy duties on its exports. The two provinces were soon on the eve of a little war. For twelve or fifteen years East Jersey was in disorder, with seditious meetings, mob rule, judges and sheriffs attacked while performing their duty, the proprietors claiming quitrents from the people, the people resisting, and the British Privy Council threatening a suit to take the province from the proprietors and make a Crown colony of it. The period is known in the history of this colony as “The Revolution.” Under the threat of the Privy Council to take over the province, the proprietors of both East and West Jersey surrendered their rights of political government, retaining their ownership of land and quitrents, and the two Jerseys were united under one government in 1702. Its subsequent history demands another chapter.
Chapter XI. The United Jerseys
The Quaker colonists grouped round Burlington and Salem, on the Delaware, and the Scotch Covenanters and New England colonists grouped around Perth Amboy and Newark, near the mouth of the Hudson, made up the two Jerseys. Neither colony had a numerous population, and the stretch of country lying between them was during most of the colonial period a wilderness. It is now crossed by the railway from Trenton to New York. It has always been a line of travel from the Delaware to the Hudson. At first there was only an Indian trail across it, but after 1695 there was a road, and after 1738 a stage route.
In 1702, while still separated by this wilderness, the two Jerseys were united politically by the proprietors voluntarily surrendering all their political rights to the Crown. The political distinction between East Jersey and West Jersey was thus abolished; their excellent free constitutions were rendered of doubtful authority; and from that time to the Revolution they constituted one colony under the control of a royal governor appointed by the Crown.
The change was due to the uncertainty and annoyance caused for their separate governments when their right to govern was in doubt owing to interference on the part of New York and the desire of the King to make them a Crown colony. The original grant of the Duke of York to the proprietors Berkeley and Carteret had given title to the soil but had been silent as to the right to govern. The first proprietors and their successors had always assumed that the right to govern necessarily accompanied this gift of the land. Such a privilege, however, the Crown was inclined to doubt. William Penn was careful to avoid this uncertainty when he received his charter for Pennsylvania. Profiting by the sad example of the Jerseys, he made sure that he was given both the title to the soil and the right to govern.
The proprietors, however, now surrendered only their right to govern the Jerseys and retained their ownership of the land; and the people always maintained that they, on their part, retained all the political rights and privileges which had been granted them by the proprietors. And these rights were important, for the concessions or constitutions granted by the proprietors under the advanced Quaker influence of the time were decidedly liberal. The assemblies, as the legislatures were called, had the right to meet and adjourn as they pleased, instead of having their meetings and adjournments dictated by the governor. This was an important right and one which the Crown and royal governors were always trying to restrict or destroy, because it made an assembly very independent. This contest for colonial rights was exactly similar to the struggle of the English Parliament for liberty against the supposed right of the Stuart kings to call and adjourn Parliament as they chose. If the governor could adjourn the assembly when he pleased, he could force it to pass any laws he wanted or prevent its passing any laws at all. The two Jersey assemblies under their Quaker constitutions also had the privilege of making their own rules of procedure, and they had jurisdiction over taxes, roads, towns, militia, and all details of government. These rights of a legislature are familiar enough now to all. Very few people realize, however, what a struggle and what sacrifices were required to attain them.
The rest of New Jersey colonial history is made up chiefly of struggles over these two questions–the rights of the proprietors and their quitrents as against the people, and the rights of the new assembly as against the Crown. There were thus three parties, the governor and his adherents, the proprietors and their friends, and the assembly and the people. The proprietors had the best of the change, for they lost only their troublesome political power and retained their property. They never, however, received such financial returns from the property as the sons of William Penn enjoyed from Pennsylvania. But the union of the Jerseys seriously curtailed the rights enjoyed by the people under the old government, and all possibility of a Quaker government in West Jersey was ended. It was this experience in the Jerseys, no doubt, that caused William Penn to require so many safeguards in selling his political rights in Pennsylvania to the Crown that the sale was, fortunately for the colony, never completed.
The assembly under the union met alternately at Perth Amboy and at Burlington. Lord Cornbury, the first governor, was also Governor of New York, a humiliating arrangement that led to no end of trouble. The executive government, the press, and the judiciary were in the complete control of the Crown and the Governor, who was instructed to take care that “God Almighty be duly served according to the rites of the Church of England, and the traffic in merchantable negroes encouraged.” Cornbury contemptuously ignored the assembly’s right to adjourn and kept adjourning it till one was elected which would pass the laws he wanted. Afterwards the assemblies were less compliant, and, under the lead of two able men, Lewis Morris of East Jersey and Samuel Jennings, a Quaker of West Jersey, they stood up for their rights and complained to the mother country. But Cornbury went on fighting them, granted monopolies, established arbitrary fees, prohibited the proprietors from selling their lands, prevented three members of the assembly duly elected from being sworn, and was absent in New York so much of the time that the laws went unexecuted and convicted murderers wandered about at large. In short, he went through pretty much the whole list of offenses of a corrupt and good-for-nothing royal governor of colonial times. The union of the two colonies consequently seemed to involve no improvement over former conditions. At last, the protests and appeals of proprietors and people prevailed, and Cornbury was recalled.
Quieter times followed, and in 1738 New Jersey had the satisfaction of obtaining a governor all her own. The New York Governor had always neglected Jersey affairs, was difficult of access, made appointments and administered justice in the interests of New York, and forced Jersey vessels to pay registration fees to New York. Amid great rejoicing over the change, the Crown appointed the popular leader, Lewis Morris, as governor. But by a strange turn of fate, when once secure in power, he became a most obstinate upholder of royal prerogative, worried the assembly with adjournments, and, after Cornbury, was the most obnoxious of all the royal governors.
The governors now usually made Burlington their capital and it became, on that account, a place of much show and interest. The last colonial governor was William Franklin, an illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, and he would probably have made a success of the office if the Revolution had not stopped him. He had plenty of ability, affable manners, and was full of humor and anecdote like his father, whom he is said to have somewhat resembled. He had combined in youth a fondness for books with a fondness for adventure, was comptroller of the colonial post office and clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, served a couple of campaigns in the French and Indian Wars, went to England with his father in 1757, was admitted to the English Bar, attained some intimacy with the Earl of Bute and Lord Fairfax, and through the latter obtained the governorship of New Jersey in 1762.
The people were at first much displeased at his appointment and never entirely got over his illegitimate birth and his turning from Whig to Tory as soon as his appointment was secured. But he advanced the interests of the colony with the home government and favored beneficial legislation. He had an attractive wife, and they entertained, it is said, with viceregal elegance, and started a fine model farm or country place on the north shore of the Rancocas not far from the capital at Burlington. Franklin was drawing the province together and building it up as a community, but his extreme loyalist principles in the Revolution destroyed his chance for popularity and have obscured his reputation.
Though the population of New Jersey was a mixed one, judged by the very distinct religious differences of colonial times, yet racially it was thoroughly Anglo-Saxon and a good stock to build upon. At the time of the Revolution in 1776 the people numbered only about 120,000, indicating a slow growth; but when the first census of the United States was taken, in 1790, they numbered 184,139.
The natural division of the State into North and South Jersey is marked by a line from Trenton to Jersey City. The people of these two divisions were quite as distinct in early times as striking differences in environment and religion could make them. Even in the inevitable merging of modern life the two regions are still distinct socially, economically, and intellectually. Along the dividing line the two types of the population, of course, merged and here was produced and is still to be found the Jerseyman of the composite type.
Trenton, the capital of the State, is very properly in the dividing belt. It was named after William Trent, a Philadelphia merchant who had been speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly and who became chief justice of New Jersey. Long ages before white men came Trenton seems to have been a meeting place and residence of the Indians or preceding races of stone age men. Antiquarians have estimated that fifty thousand stone implements have been found in it. As it was at the head of tidewater, at the so-called Falls of the Delaware, it was apparently a center of travel and traffic from other regions. From the top of the bluff below the modern city of Trenton there was easy access to forests of chestnut, oak, and pine, with their supplies of game, while the river and its tributary creeks were full of fish. It was a pleasant and convenient place where the people of prehistoric times apparently met and lingered during many centuries without necessarily having a large resident population at any one time. Trenton was so obviously convenient and central in colonial times that it was seriously proposed as a site for the national capital.
Princeton University, though originating, as we have seen, among the Presbyterians of North Jersey, seems as a higher educational institution for the whole State to belong naturally in the dividing belt, the meeting place of the two divisions of the colony. The college began its existence at Elizabeth, was then moved to Newark, both in the strongly Presbyterian region, and finally, in 1757, was established at Princeton, a more suitable place, it was thought, because far removed from the dissipation and temptation of towns, and because it was in the center of the colony on the post road between Philadelphia and New York. Though chartered as the College of New Jersey, it was often called Nassau Hall at Princeton or simply “Princeton.” In 1896 it became known officially as Princeton University. It was a hard struggle to found the college with lotteries and petty subscriptions here and there. But Presbyterians in New York and other provinces gave aid. Substantial assistance was also obtained from the Presbyterians of England and Scotland. In the old pamphlets of the time which have been preserved the founders of the college argued that higher education was needed not only for ministers of religion, but for the bench, the bar, and the legislature. The two New England colleges, Harvard and Yale, on the north, and the Virginia College of William and Mary on the south, were too far away. There must be a college close at hand.
At first most of the graduates entered the Presbyterian ministry. But soon in the short time before the Revolution there were produced statesmen such as Richard Stockton of New Jersey, who signed the Declaration of Independence; physicians such as Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia; soldiers such as “Light Horse” Harry Lee of Virginia; as well as founders of other colleges, governors of States, lawyers, attorney-generals, judges, congressmen, and indeed a very powerful assemblage of intellectual lights. Nor should the names of James Madison, Aaron Burr, and Jonathan Edwards be omitted.
East Jersey with her New England influence attempted something like free public schools. In West Jersey the Quakers had schools. In both Jerseys, after 1700 some private neighborhood schools were started, independent of religious denominations. The West Jersey Quakers, self-cultured and with a very effective system of mental discipline and education in their families as well as in their schools, were not particularly interested in higher education. But in East Jersey as another evidence of intellectual awakening in colonial times, Queen’s College, afterward known as Rutgers College, was established by the Dutch Reformed Church in 1766, and was naturally placed, near the old source of Dutch influence, at New Brunswick in the northerly end of the dividing belt.
New Jersey was fortunate in having no Indian wars in colonial times, no frontier, no point of hostile contact with the French of Canada or with the powerful western tribes of red men. Like Rhode Island in this respect, she was completely shut in by the other colonies. Once or twice only did bands of savages cross the Delaware and commit depredations on Jersey soil. This colony, however, did her part in sending troops and assistance to the others in the long French and Indian wars; but she had none of the pressing danger and experience of other colonies. Her people were never drawn together by a common danger until the Revolution.
In Jersey colonial homes there was not a single modern convenience of light, heat, or cooking, and none of the modern amusements. But there was plenty of good living and simple diversion–husking bees and shooting in the autumn, skating and sleighing in the winter. Meetings and discussions in coffeehouses and inns supplied in those days the place of our modern books, newspapers, and magazines. Jersey inns were famous meeting places. Everybody passed through their doors–judges, lawyers, legislators, politicians, post riders, stage drivers, each bringing his contribution of information and humor, and the slaves and rabble stood round to pick up news and see the fun. The court days in each county were holidays celebrated with games of quoits, running, jumping, feasting, and discussions political and social. At the capital there was even style and extravagance. Governor Belcher, for example, who lived at Burlington, professed to believe that the Quaker influences of that town were not strict enough in keeping the Sabbath, so he drove every Sunday in his coach and four to Philadelphia to worship in the Presbyterian Church there and saw no inconsistency in his own behavior.
Almanacs furnished much of the reading for the masses. The few newspapers offered little except the barest chronicle of events.