A Brief History of New Jersey
by Professor Paul G.E. Clemens Rutgers University
New Jersey's history can best be thought of in terms of three long, overlapping eras: First, an initial period of settlement and adjustment that lasted until 1844, and saw the creation of the colonies of East Jersey and West Jersey, their merging as New Jersey, the colonies revolutionary separation from Great Britain, the formation of the state's first constitution, and the modernization of its initial frame of government in 1844 with a new constitution. Second, an era lasting from before the Civil War until the end of World War II, and characterized by the growth of an urban industrial economy, which drew its work force primarily from European immigration. Third, the post-World War II era, marked by a shift of population from cities to suburbs, the emergence of a new style of candidate-oriented (rather than party-oriented) politics, and the rapid growth of the Asian, African American and Hispanic population of the state. Originally, numerous distinct groups of Algonquian-speaking Indians lived in what Europeans would call East and West New Jersey. The Lenape or Delaware (terms adopted after European contact) were woodland Indians who lived by hunting, gathering, fishing, and horticulture. Never numerous, disease and warfare reduced their numbers to less than three thousand by the eighteenth century, and European settlement on their hunting lands forced many to move westward to Pennsylvania. In the nineteenth century, others would migrate to Ontario, Canada, and to what became Wisconsin and Oklahoma, although in the twentieth century there would remain a small, but growing, number of people living in New Jersey who identified themselves as Delawares.
The initial European settlement of the land between the Hudson and Delaware River occurred piecemeal. The Dutch, the Swedes, and then various groups of English moved into the region between the 1630s and the 1670s. The Dutch initially settled at New Amsterdam (Manhattan) and then moved across the Hudson, where they eventually established (1660) a garrison outpost at Bergen; the Swedes moved north from Fort Christina (in Delaware) and in 1643 established an outpost in south Jersey. Connecticut Puritans established Elizabeth-Town in 1664; Baptists and Quakers settled at Monmouth; and yet another group of Puritans in 1666 purchased land from the Lenape Indians that they would rename Newark. English settlement followed England's assertion of its right to the entire New Jersey-New York area--still largely inhabited by various Native American peoples and claimed by the Dutch. In 1664, Charles II, king of England, granted the region to his brother, James, Duke of York, who then sent a fleet to New York and forced the Dutch to surrender their territorial claims. James conveyed his land grant in what would become New Jersey to two English noblemen, George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley, and they, in turn, conveyed their rights to two sets of proprietors. In 1676, the current proprietors agreed to a formal division of the colony; the Carteret claim became East Jersey; and the Berkeley claim, West Jersey. East Jersey remained for several decades a region of scattered English and Dutch settlements, each with its own distinctive ethnic and religious traditions. West
Jersey initially developed under the auspices of Quaker proprietors, with population centering around Burlington. In 1703, the British crown formally reunited East and West Jersey into the single royal colony of New Jersey. Two specific legacies of this initial settlement era shaped much of New Jersey's colonial history. The agricultural promise of the region attracted settlers who profitably mixed livestock and grain production. Wealthier farmers used servants and slaves. Immigrants, drawn by the promise of relatively free, productive land, and a high birth rate pushed the population from about 4,000 European-Americans and AfricanAmericans in 1680, to over 60,000 by the middle of the eighteenth century, and to around 150,000 by the conclusion of the American revolution; slightly less than ten percent of these residents were black, and through mid-century, most of these were slaves. In the first United States Census in 1790, New Jersey was listed as having approximately 184,000 people; of whom about eleven thousand were slaves and almost three thousand were free blacks. The other major legacy of the settlement period was a history of contention. Some of that contention was rooted in the insecurity of land titles; some to the fact that settlers resented paying the rent to the proprietors; and some to the fact that through 1738, the royal governor of New York had jurisdiction over New Jersey as well. New Jersey was also one of the primary sites for the religious revivals that swept through most of the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century; both the Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed churches participated in the New Jersey revivals, and as a result of the Great Awakening, religious leaders founded the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1746 and Queens College (Rutgers) in 1766 for the better training of ministers.
New Jersey did not play a leadership role in the colonial opposition to British imperial policy in the 1760s and early 1770s. The colony protested the British Stamp Act of 1765 and staged its own "tea party" in response to the Tea Act of 1773, but under the leadership of William Franklin, the colony's last royal governor, New Jersey moved more haltingly toward independence than virtually any other colony. The state's Provincial Congress finally ordered Franklin arrested in June of 1776; they then drafted the Constitution of 1776. The Constitution placed most power in the hands of an annually elected legislature and deprived the governor (an office associated with British "tyranny") of most of the traditional prerogatives of executive authority. Not all New Jerseyans followed the revolutionaries into war with Great Britain. The state was the site of some of the key battles of the Revolution and of a protracted civil war between patriots and loyalists; many New Jersey Quakers did their best to remain neutral during the fighting. In the winter of 1776-1777, George Washington’s forces retreated, after their defeat in New York City, across New Jersey into Pennsylvania, and then won a daring counterattack at Trenton in late December and another victory at Princeton in early 1777, before wintering at Morristown. Thereafter, there were dozens of skirmishes and battles in New Jersey, the most notable at Monmouth in 1778, and twice more the Continental Army wintered in the state. With the war over, the New Jersey also played a crucial role in the process that led to the replacement of the Articles of Confederation by a new national Constitution. At the Philadelphia convention of 1787, William Paterson of New Jersey proposed the so-called “small state plan” for legislative representation in the national legislature. Paterson's proposal to give each state equal representation (rather than to base
representation on population) factored into the compromise that created different bases of representation for the Senate (by state) and the House (by population). New Jersey then became the third state to ratify the Constitution. In the decades following the ratification of the Constitution, New Jersey experienced the same rambunctious politics as other states. As criticism of the policies of George Washington's administration grew in the 1790s, New Jersey citizens split between the pro-administration Federalist party and the Democratic-Republican opposition. The rivalry energized the electorate. The Democratic-Republicans responded with the innovative step of calling a statewide convention in 1800 to agree on principles and select candidates and soon thereafter by introducing a legislative caucus to decide on appointments--among the first use of such organizational techniques in the nation. But as Federalist strength melted away nationwide at the conclusion of the War of 1812, the Democratic-Republicans fragmented into local factions. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, new parties, with national affiliation, were organized in New Jersey in support and opposition to the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Jackson's supporters called themselves Democrats; their opponents adopted the name of Whigs--recalling the opposition of Whigs. Both parties were organized through a system of caucuses, conventions, and committees much like political parties are today, both formed key alliances with major economic interests in the state (the Democrats with the Camden and Amboy Railroad), and both routinely gained the support of almost half the electorate in statewide elections. Closely contested elections routinely saw three-fourths of the electorate go to the polls to vote. Once again, New Jersey's experience paralleled that of the nation as a whole.
New Jersey finally caught up with most other states in 1844 by revising it revolutionary-era constitution. The new document made the governorship elective and removed property qualifications from the franchise, but left free black males disfranchised. New Jersey not only took longer to revise its original constitution than most of the other original thirteen states, it also moved more slowly to end slavery than other northern states. It was not until 1804 that the state passed a gradual emancipation act. The act freed children born to slave mothers when the children reached adulthood-but it did not end slavery. Between the early-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, New Jerseyans created and lived in an urban, industrial economy. Machines, driven by water power, steam, and eventually electricity replaced handwork. Artisan shops gave way to factories. Farm villages were transformed into manufacturing cities, and the children of farm families moved to the cities to find wage work. There they were increasingly joined by immigrant workers. By the early twentieth century, New Jersey had become among the most urban, industrial, and ethnically diverse states in the nation. In the colonial era, New Jersey had a modest iron industry, and in the 1790s, the Society of Useful Manufactures had tried to establish British-style textile factories in Paterson, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that an urban manufacturing economy emerged. Following British designs, American manufacturers first began to mass produce textiles, but innovation spread to other industries quickly. Paterson, to take one example, began as a textile center and then in the 1830s became the site of Thomas Rogers' locomotive works; shortly thereafter, John Ryle introduced silk manufacturing to Paterson--the industry with which the city would be associated with for the next century.
Trenton would become known for ceramics and the Roebling iron works; Newark for leather goods, shoes, and beer; New Brunswick for rubber products. Later in the century, Thomas Edison would pioneer the development of the research laboratory at Menlo Park; and large chemical and pharmaceutical enterprises would locate in the state. The growth of an urban, industrial economy was fueled by several factors. In 1831, workers completed the Morris Canal in north Jersey, with the hope of connecting the industries of Essex County with the coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania; the Delaware and Raritan Canal, completed in 1834, was more successful, and merged with the rival Camden and Amboy Rail Road, to control traffic in the New York-Philadelphia corridor. The building of turnpikes, canals, and increasingly railroads connected urban industrial centers to resources and markets and stimulated economic growth. Of perhaps even greater importance was the flow of European immigrants into the state. Immigrants did most of the labor that fueled the industrial economy. New Jersey's economy shaped its political system well into the twentieth century. Politics was decentralized; power resided in counties and cities, not the state, and parties were aligned with agricultural interests in rural counties or business interests in industrial cities. Democrats contested with Republicans (who had emerged as the "Opposition Party" in 1856 and replaced the defunct Whig Party of the 1840s). Both local parties leaned toward the more conservative wings of their national counterparts. When the sectional crisis came, political leaders reluctantly backed the northern war effort, but the state did supply almost 90,000 men to United States army. After the war, politicians kept taxes low, but social reform lagged behind that in other northeastern states, and graft was common.
The themes of reform and boss rule are best reflected in the state's twentieth century politics by the careers of Woodrow Wilson and Frank Hague. Wilson first won national acclaim in 1910 as the progressive (Democratic) governor of the state. Under Wilson, New Jersey compiled a regulatory and reform record that rivaled such other progressive states as New York, Wisconsin, and California, a record that launched his successful drive for the presidency, but Wilson's accomplishments did not end graft and corruption or dilute the power of local political bosses. Hague, who served as the Democratic mayor of Jersey City from 1917 to 1947, and political boss of Hudson County for that same period, used his Irish Catholic power base not only to control local politics but to gain patronage power from both the state and national Democratic Parties. Hague withdrawal from politics after World War II signaled both the eclipse of traditional machine politics in New Jersey and undermining of the urban-industrial economy that had supported such political organization. The post-World War II era witnessed a fundamental reworking of governance in New Jersey. In 1947, a state constitutional convention redrafted New Jersey's frame of government. Legislative terms were lengthened, the governor was made eligible for reelection, the amendment process was simplified, the court system was rationalized, and an anti-discrimination clause was added to the state bill of rights. United States Supreme Court decisions in the mid-1960s forced that state to redraw assembly and senate districts to equalize the population represented by each district; voters amended the state constitution to allow gambling, and in 1978 the first casinos opened in Atlantic City. The ruling by the state supreme court in Robinson v. Cahill promised every child a "thorough and efficient" education and led to New Jersey's first, modest income tax in 1976.
Constitutional change in the post-World II era paralleled dramatic change in where and how New Jerseyans lived. Population moved out of the state's traditional urban-industrial core and to the suburbs. Industries that had fueled New Jersey's nineteenth century economic growth--silk, textiles, steel, ceramics--were devastated during the Great Depression, and never really recovered; the agriculture sector continued to shrink as land was gobbled up for new housing developments and farming moved outof-state. The spread of population was facilitated by the completion of the New Jersey Turnpike in 1953, the final construction of the Garden State Parkway in 1954, and the subsequent building of several interstate highways. By the late 20th century, New Jersey had become the most densely populated state in the nation, and most of its residents lived in the suburbs and worked in light industries or in the service sector of the economy. New sources of immigration, especially from Asia, and the Caribbean, kept the state among the most diverse in the Nation. The post-war transition to a suburban economy was neither smooth nor without costs. Much of New Jersey’s black population lived in its urban centers, drawn there as other immigrant groups had been by the promise of industrial jobs. But unlike other immigrant groups, blacks faced systematic housing and employment discrimination, and when industrial decline and the movement of whites to the suburbs undercut urban economies, blacks were left with even less opportunity. The frustration of discrimination and limited economic prospects boiled over in the urban riots of the mid-1960s, devastating cities like Newark and Plainfield. While New Jersey cities have subsequently profited from a number of high-profile redevelopment projects -- the arts center in
Newark, the aquarium in Camden, minor league baseball in Trenton -- they remained unequal partners in the general prosperity of the state in the late twentieth century. In the three eras of its history, New Jersey has moved from being an ethnically diverse set of farming communities, to a leader in the urban-industrial economy of the nineteenth century, to a state whose high-density population and mix of suburban and urban living defines the direction of much of the rest of the United States.
For further reading John T. Cunningham, This is New Jersey: From High Point to Cape May, 4th ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). Thomas Fleming, New Jersey: A History (NY: W.W. Norton, 1976). Maxine N. Lurie, A New Jersey Anthology (Newark, NJ: New Jersey Historical Society, 1994). Marc Mappen, Jerseyana: The Underside of New Jersey History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Mary R. Murrin and Stanley N. Worton, eds., New Jersey History Series, 11 vol. (Trenton, NJ: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1991-1997) ---Credit: Lurie, Maxine N., and Marc Mappen, eds. /Encyclopedia of New Jersey/. Copyright (c) 2004 by Rutgers, the State University. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.