This post in an adaptation of the rough draft of the introduction to my work on New Jersey in the Revolution.
European
exploration of New Jersey stretches back nearly five hundred years. The coast of New Jersey was surveyed in 1524
by the Italian explorer and mapmaker, Giovanni da Verrazzano,
sailing under the French flag.
Eighty-five years later, Henry Hudson, exploring for the Dutch East
India Company, further investigated the coast.
In the years following, companies set up small trading posts in New
Jersey. These temporary stations situated
in and around what is now New York City had their start as small Dutch trading
posts in the early part of the 1600s.
Cornelius
Mey (or May), in 1623, attempted to bring settlers up the Delaware River. Mey and the settlers built Fort Nassau in
present-day Gloucester County, approximately five miles south of Camden, on a
creek which is presently called Big Timber Creek.[i] The fort was quickly abandoned, however.
Soon
after, Swedish settlers moved into the area, establishing themselves first in
present-day Wilmington, Delaware, (1638) then branching out across the river
into New Jersey. In 1643, they constructed
Fort Nya Elfsborg on the Delaware River between Salem and Alloway’s Creeks
(present-day Elsingboro Point, N.J.).[ii] By 1655, the Dutch reclaimed control of the
area without a fight from the Swedes, who retained their autonomy. From this time until 1664 New Jersey was part
of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, which included New York City, the entire
Hudson River Valley north to Albany, and large areas of land in New Jersey, as
well as the former Swedish settlements in Delaware. This quickly changed when, on 29 August 1664,
a British fleet sailed into New York harbor and took possession of the Dutch
colony without much resistance.
Following
the English triumph, the Duke of York was granted a Royal Colony, which included
part of present-day New Jersey. To
settle an unpaid debt, he gave some of his land to Sir George Carteret, who
named it New Jersey, in honor of Carteret’s defense of his homeland-isle in
1649 against the Parliamentarians. The
Duke of York then sold off adjoining land to Lord John Berkeley. Carteret and Berkeley became the proprietors
of New Jersey. In 1665 they appointed Philip Carteret as the first governor of the
colony. He landed at a point which he
called Elizabethtown, in honor of the wife of George Carteret.[iii]
The
Dutch briefly regained control of New Jersey in August of 1673, but quickly
surrendered the colony back to the English the following year, signing a treaty
at Westminster, N.J. on 9 February.
Berkeley then sold his share of New Jersey (the western portion) to John
Fenwick and Edward Byllinge. Byllinge
promptly assigned William
Penn, Gawen Laurie and Nicholas Lucas as trustees, and Fenwick’s small portion
was bought out.
New Jersey was formally split into
East Jersey, governed by Carteret, and West Jersey, governed by the Quakers
under Byllinge. The line separating the
two, known as the Provincial Line, ran from a point at Little Egg Harbor diagonally
northwestward, to a point south of the mouth of Dingman’s Creek on the Delaware
River, in Sussex County. Between this
time and 1702, life in East and West Jersey remained largely uneventful, except
at the political level, where governorships and ownerships changed hands a
number of times. In 1702 New Jersey
became a Royal Colony under Queen Anne and was once again joined with the
colony of New York. East and West Jersey
ceased to exist as separate political locales (though the geographical monikers
were used throughout the eighteenth century).
The colony was governed by New York (though it retained its own
legislative assembly) until 1738, when Lewis Morris was named governor of New
Jersey.
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In
1765, Parliament passed, in quick succession, the Stamp Act and the Quartering
Act. The former taxed “every skin or
piece of vellum or parchment, or sheet or piece of paper[…]every pack of
playing cards, and all dice[…]every paper called a pamphlet, and upon
every newspaper, containing public news or occurrences[…and] every almanac,
or calendar.”[i] Though the colonists were used to being
taxed, these new taxes were passed in order to raise money instead of regulate
colonial commerce as taxes had been used in the past. The latter act was passed in order to provide
lodging to the 10,000 British soldiers sent to the colonies for their
protection. It called for the soldiers
to be billeted in barracks or public housing; should that be lacking, the
soldiers should be housed in private buildings.
Furthermore, by the act, the colonies were required to pay to house and
feed the troops. New Jersey housed
soldiers in the barracks at New Brunswick, Perth Amboy, and Elizabeth Town
until 1770 when they were transferred to New York.[ii]
The
combination of these two acts – the precedent of taxing to raise money and
maintaining a standing army, which was against the English Bill of Rights
(1689) – angered and troubled the American colonists. The colonists simmered with complaints until Virginia
passed Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act Resolves.
These declared that according to British law only the Virginia Assembly
had the right to tax Virginians; Parliament, lacking a representative from
Virginia, did not have that right.
The
Massachusetts Assembly also acted by sending a circular to the individual
colonial legislatures calling for a meeting to plan a united effort to resist
the new acts. The New Jersey Legislature,
at Burlington, took up this call on 20 June.
The Speaker of the Assembly, Robert Ogden,[iii]
was able to convince the New Jersey Assembly to refrain from sending
representatives at first. A short time
later, however, at the urging of Richard Stockton, Ogden was forced to call a
special meeting, to be held at Perth Amboy, to appoint delegates to the
requested meeting.[iv] Though not all of the members were present,
Ogden, Hendrick Fisher and Joseph Borden[v]
were appointed to represent New Jersey at the meeting of the colonies.
Before
the meeting of colonial representatives, the people of New Jersey took some actions
of their own. In September the
distributor of stamps for New Jersey, William Coxe, resigned from his position
under pressure, including threats to body and property, from the Sons of
Liberty.[vi] Lawyers from the colony met and agreed to
boycott the stamps. This, in effect,
stopped all legal action in the colony.[vii] Also, before the Congress began, the
graduating students at the College of New Jersey held a protest of their own
against the Stamp Act[viii]
The
Stamp Act Congress, as it became known, convened in October in New York
City. Thirty representatives from nine
colonies attended. [ix] They settled upon fourteen resolutions, which
they submitted to King George III. This
“Declaration of Rights and Grievances” was left unsigned by the speaker of the
Congress, Timothy Ruggles (of Massachusetts) and Robert Ogden. While the Congress had voted to send the
resolutions directly to the king, Ruggles and Ogden believed they should first
be circulated among, and approved by, the individual colonial assemblies.[x] For his efforts, Ogden was burned in effigy
by the people of New Jersey, and resigned his seat in the Assembly on 27
November.[xi]
The
people of New Jersey remained animated while the Stamp Act remained in
place. A report from a paper in New
York, dated 27 February 1766, read: “A large Gallows was erected in Elizabeth
Town, last Week, with a Rope ready fixed thereto, and the Inhabitants there vow
and declare that the first Person that either distributes or takes out a
Stamped Paper shall be hung thereon without Judge or Jury.”[xii] The
following month, King George approved Parliament’s repeal of the Stamp
Act. However, the Declaratory Act,
stating that the king and Parliament “had, hash, and of right ought to have,
full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and
validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the
crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever,” was passed at the same
time.[xiii] During the following year, Parliament and the
colonies were relatively quiet.[xiv]
.....................................
New
Jersey reacted to the Intolerable Acts by electing Committees of Safety and
Correspondence throughout the colony. At
one of these meetings, by the freeholders and inhabitants of the Township of
Lower Freehold, it was resolved
that the cause in which
the inhabitants of the town of Boston
are now suffering is the common cause of the whole Continent of North America; and that unless some
general spirited measures, for the public safety, be speedily entered into,
there is just reason to fear that every Province may in turn share the same
fate with them; and that, therefore, it is highly incumbent on them all to
unite in some effectual means to obtain a repeal of the Boston Port Bill, and any other that may follow it, which shall
be deemed subversive of the rights and privileges of free-born Americans.[i]
They
decided to boycott all goods from Great Britain and the West Indies. A meeting of the freeholders and inhabitants
of Essex County reached a similar conclusion, and called on the freeholders and
inhabitants of the other counties to come together to discuss what measures
could be taken.
A
meeting encouraging the creation of a General Congress for the colonies was
held at the courthouse in Newark on 11 June 1774. As a result of these meetings, delegates were
appointed to a convention which met in New Brunswick beginning on 21 July. Stephen Crane of Elizabethtown was chosen to
preside over the convention. The
convention, which ended on 23 July, consisted of seventy-two delegates. After declaring allegiance to King George
III, they recommended that the people of New Jersey send money to help the
citizens of Boston and also passed a resolution to boycott British goods. [ii] The convention also chose five men as
delegates to a General Congress which would meet in Philadelphia on 5
September. The men chosen were the
aforementioned Stephen Crane, William Livingston and John De Hart each from
Elizabethtown, and James Kinsey and Richard Smith, both from Burlington.
The First Continental Congress
debated reconciliation and independence, but by its close on 26 October, the
fifty-six delegates from twelve colonies (Georgia was not represented) settled
on boycotting British goods and establishing committees of observation and
correspondence in each colony. They
determined to meet again on 10 May 1775.
In the interim, colonists in New
Jersey held a tea party of their own. In
early December the brig Greyhound,
Captain J. Allen, sailed into the Cohansey River after being refused at the
port of Philadelphia. The Greyhound carried a shipment of
tea. The tea was unloaded at Greenwich,
in secrecy, to be stored in the cellar of Dan Bowen’s house on Market
Square. A number of the colonists in
Greenwich soon discovered the deception and a temporary committee was
established to take charge of the tea.[iii]
The committee was chosen on 22
December at Bridgeton to determine what should be done with the tea.[iv]
They could not reach a decision on how to proceed, for the reason that they had
no information on where the tea came from and to whom it belonged. They decided to meet the following morning at
ten o’clock so that information could be gathered. The entire committee did not agree with the
decision, however. Several committee members
and other men met at the house of Lewis and Richard Howell later that night.[v] They dressed as Indians, broke into the
cellar where the tea was stored, removed the boxes of tea to a field, and
burned them. The Reverend Philip Vickers
Fithian, who is said to have taken part in the affair, wrote in his diary the
next day:
Last night the tea was,
by a number of persons in disguise, taken out of the house and consumed with
fire. Violent and different are the
words about this uncommon maneuver among the inhabitants. Some rave, some curse and condemn, some try
to reason; many are glad the tea is destroyed, but almost all disapprove the
manner of the destruction.[vi]
Despite
the attempts of remaining unidentified, lawsuits were filed against some of the
tea-burners for their actions. The
defendants were either found not guilty, or the cases were dropped after New
Jersey severed ties with Britain. The
tea party in Greenwich was closely followed by the closing of the ports of New
York and Philadelphia to British tea shipments.[vii]
The year 1775 brought the reality of
war to the colonies, and New Jersey was not exempt from the action. Conflicts between patriots and loyalists were
reported in the papers, though for the most part in the first year of the war,
New Jersey was limited to greeting delegates of the Second Continental Congress
on their way through the province and prosecuting a war off shore. Before the end of the year, New Jersey would
lose its first soldier in military service.
[ii] Hatfield, 409. Amboy is located on the Raritan River and
Bay, across the Arthur Kill from Staten Island, New York. The first houses were built in Amboy in 1683. The following year, when the Earl of Perth,
one of the Jersey Proprietors, became Lord High Chancellor under King James II,
it was instructed that the town be called Perth. Residents soon took to calling it Perth Amboy
(though it was still sometimes referred to as Amboy during the Revolution). A charter was received in 1718 and by 1762
construction began on the Proprietary House.
Completed in 1764 by the Proprietors of East Jersey, the house was built
for the Royal Governor of the colony, and is the only colonial Governor’s
Mansion still standing today. In 1686,
the capital of East Jersey moved from Elizabethtown (where it had been since
1676) to Amboy, where it stayed until 1776, alternating with Burlington from
1702 onward (“The History of Perth Amboy,” The City of Perth Amboy. http://ci.perthamboy.nj.us/the-history-of-perth-amboy.html
Accessed 22 February 2012.)
[iii] Robert Ogden was born in
Elizabethtown, NJ on 7 October 1716. He
was the second child, first son, of Robert and Elizabeth (Crane) Ogden. He married Phebe Hatfield (1720 – 1796) when
he was about twenty years old. He was a
friend of Governor Belcher, and in 1753 was appointed a clerk of the Chancery. In 1761 he was commissioned a justice and
judge, and later that year a clerk on the Essex County Court (The Ogden Family in America, 79).
[iv] Chroust, 286-7.
[v] Hendrick Fisher (1697 – 1778)
was from Somerset County. He represented
New Jersey at the Stamp Act Congress in 1765 and served on the Committee of
Correspondence and Committee of Safety.
His homestead, built in 1688, still stands at 1960 Easton Avenue in Franklin Township, Somerset County.
On 7 July 1776 Fisher read the Declaration of Independence aloud at the
Frelinghuysen Tavern in Bound Brook, Somerset County (a plaque marks the former
location of the tavern at 213 East Main Street). His house was raided by the British in April
1777, but Fisher was not at home. He is
buried in the family burial ground near the property.
Joseph
Borden (1719 – 1791), of Burlington County, NJ, was the son of the founder of
Bordentown, NJ. He was a judge and a
colonel of the Burlington militia. His
house was burned by the British during the war, but was rebuilt and still
stands at 32 Farnsworth Avenue in Bordentown.
[vi] Chroust, 287. William Coxe
was the son of Col. Daniel Coxe (d. 1739) and was most likely from
Burlington, NJ. He ran a successful
mercantile business in Philadelphia and was twice elected mayor of
Philadelphia, though he refused the appointment both times. He and his wife, Mary Francis, had thirteen
children. Their third child, a son named
Tench (1755 – 1824), had a long political career in the new government after
the Revolution. William took a neutral
stance after his resignation, further angering Governor William Franklin (Coxe
Family Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania).
[vii] Proceedings NJHS; 2Series IV, 190.
[viii] Ryan, 12.
[ix] Georgia, New Hampshire, North
Carolina and Virginia did not send representatives.
[x] Wheeler, 81.
[xi] The misunderstanding may have
cost Ogden a chance to sign the Declaration of Independence. After the war began he was a chairman of the
Elizabethtown Committee of Safety. His sons
and sons-in-law served the patriot cause during the war. He died 21 January 1787 and is buried in the
Sparta (NJ) Presbyterian Churchyard (The
Ogden Family in America, 83).
[xii] Qtd. in Hatfield, 408.
[xiii]
Lillian Goldman Law Library
– Declaratory Act.
[xiv]
Troubles
did not die down completely, however. In
the spring of 1766, Lemuel Blowers and two fellow justices of the peace “beat,
abused and wounded” a recruiting party led by Captain George Etherington in
Morris County. The attack, in which four
of the soldiers were hospitalized, was launched in response to the questionable
enlistment practices of the British. Problems
with the British soldiery continued into 1767.
The officers of the 28th Regiment, led by Colonel John St.
Clair, had secured private quarters in Elizabethtown due to lack of space in
the barracks. Upon their departure, they
demanded reimbursement from the colony for monies spent. Governor Franklin declined to pay the
officers, claiming that such allowances had been discontinued after construction
of barracks. On the 27th, the
night before the regiment was to leave, some of the officers began a riot in
which most of the male inhabitants of the community participated. Windows were smashed, citizens were
confronted by British bayonets and at least one officer was shot. The clash only ended when the soldiers
retreated to transport ships anchored in Raritan Bay, off Amboy (New Jersey History. v. 93, no. 1-2; 16, 20-21).
[i] American Archives Series 4, Volume 1, “Meeting of the Freeholders and Inhabitants of the Township of Lower Freehold, in the County of Monmouth, in New-Jersey,”390
[ii] Wall & Pickersgill, 86.
[iii] Andrews, 8.
[iv]According to Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet (or The General Advertiser) of Monday, 9 January 1775, the following men were chosen for the committee: William Aul, Jonathan Ayers, David Bowen, Joshua Brick, Thomas Brown, John Buck, Thomas Daniel, Daniel Elmore, Joshua Ewing, Thomas Ewing, Joel Fithian, Ezekiel Foster, John Gibbon, Elijah Hand, Ephraim Harris, Gideon Heaton, Abijah Holmes, Michael Hoshell, Abraham Jones, John Laning, Samuel Leak, Jonathan Lore, Daniel Maskell, Thomas Maskell, Benjamin Mulford, Joseph Newcomb, Silas Newcomb, Isaac Preston, Mark Ryley, Joseph Sheppard, Jonathan Smith, John Terry, John Wheaton and Richard Wood.
[v] A monument to the tea-burners stands in Greenwich, NJ today, near the site of the incident. A list of names on the monument includes the following: Ebenezer Elmer (1752 – 1843), Timothy Elmer (1748 – 1780), James Ewing (d. 1780), Thomas Ewing (1748 – 1782), Joel Fithian (1748 – 1821), Philip Vickers Fithian (1747 – 1776), Lewis Howell (d. 1778), Richard Howell (1754 –1802), James Booth Hunt (d. 1824), Andrew Hunter, Jr. (1752 – 1823), Joel Miller (d. 1827), Alexander Moore, Jr. (d. 1786), Ephraim Newcomb, Silas Newcomb (1723 – 1779), Clarence Parvin (1750 – 1788), David Pierson, Stephen Pierson, Henry Seeley, Josiah Seeley (d. 1832), Abraham Sheppard b. c.1755), Henry Stacks, and Silas Whittaker (Whiteker). The monument also reads “AND OTHERS;”Frank D. Andrews lists Enos Ewing and Isaac Preston as tea-burners. Many of these men served during the Revolution. Richard Howell served in the army and was elected New Jersey’s third Governor, serving from 1793 – 1801; he was also the grandfather of Varina Howell Davis, wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Ebenezer Elmer served in the army, represented New Jersey in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1801 – 1807, and served in the War of 1812.
[vii] A poem, by an unknown poet, was published in Greenwich on the Creekby Grace Watson Ewing. It follows: “On the wharf I sit and dream / While the stars throw many a beam - / Make a soft and silver streak / On the stillness of the creek; / And a vessel, through the haze / Of the old colonial days, / Like a spectre seems to ride / On the inward flowing tide; / Like a phantom it appears / Faintly through the many years / That have vanished since it sails / Braved the fierce Atlantic gales / Are they risen from the graves? / Those dark figures, clad as braves, / Of the dusky tribal hosts / That of old possessed these coasts? / Swift they glide from‘neath the trees, / The ill-fated stores to seize. / Noiselessly, with whispered jests, / High they heap the fragrant chests, / ‘Round the gnarled trunk that still / Lifts its limbs on yonder hill; / And, at once a ruddy blaze / Skyward leaps and madly plays, / Snapping, crackling o’ver the pyre, / Till, with patriotic fire, / All that costly cargo doomed, / Unto ashes is consumed! / Back the ship drifts through the haze, / And the figures with the blaze / Fade and vanish from the sight.”
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