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.