Although one of the smaller colonies in physical terms, New Jersey contained a variety of ethnic and racial groups, produced a considerable amount of wheat and other foodstuffs, and had a complex and contentious political history. Italian traveler Giovanni da Verrazano explored the New Jersey coast in 1524, and in 1609 Henry Hudson, an English mariner employed by the Dutch East India Company, sent a party to explore Sandy Hook Bay. Until the mid-17th century, however, the Delaware, or Lenape, Indians dominated present-day New Jersey. They numbered between 2,000 and 3,000 people and subsisted mainly by hunting and fishing. There was little friction between the Lenape and the first European explorers; the Dutch and Swedish colonists were more interested in establishing trading partnerships than in acquiring land, and the Lenape valued the trade for European goods.
In the 1640s Dutch settlers began to move southward from New Netherland (present-day New York), while Swedish settlers moved northward from New Sweden (present-day Delaware). As European settlements expanded and colonists sought to appropriate valuable farmland, their relations with the Lenni Lenape deteriorated. Two Indian wars, Governor Kieft’s War (1641-45) and the Peach War (1655), weakened the Dutch settlements, but in 1655 the Dutch nevertheless forced the outnumbered and militarily weak Swedish population to submit to Dutch government. The region’s European population remained tiny, however: about 200 Dutch, 100 Swedish, and an undetermined number of English settlers from New England.
When England conquered New Netherland in 1664, it also laid claim to the area that would become New Jersey. King Charles II (1660-85) patented the region to his brother James, who deeded it to two friends, John, Lord Berkley and Sir George Carteret. The result was a colony where New Jerseyans could elect an assembly. The establishment of the most democratic system in the English empire attracted a large number of Puritans and Dutch Protestants to settle in New Jersey. These religious dissenters, however, posed a problem for Carteret and Berkley when they resisted the ruling and taxation authority of the
Restorationists. Faced with this dilemma, Berkley later sold his half-share in the colony to two Quakers, John Fenwick and George Billing. In 1676 the colony was divided in half. Fenwick and Billing established West Jersey, while East Jersey was settled slightly later by a group of two dozen proprietors who had purchased shares from Carteret. West Jersey was more religious and egalitarian in tone than East Jersey, while East Jersey was more hierarchical and commercially oriented, but they resembled each other as much as they differed. A mixture of Quaker enthusiasm and economic ambition propelled both settlements.
West Jersey’s early decades were stormy. Fenwick and Billing soon quarreled over the terms of their partnership. They submitted the dispute to a Quaker arbitration team, which determined that Fenwick owned 10 shares in the colony while Billing owned 90. William Penn, one of the arbitrators, became Billing’s trustee; the territorial dispute marked Penn’s first involvement in American colonization. Fenwick founded Salem, the first English town in New Jersey, in November 1675. Billing subdivided and sold most of his shares, expanding the proprietary group from two to about 120 investors. Approximately half of these investors immigrated to New Jersey, and by 1682 perhaps 2,000 English Quakers had settled there. The colony’s government remained highly unstable, however. Fenwick had initially tried to exercise gubernatorial powers, but his right to do so was disputed by Billing, the other West Jersey proprietors, and the royal governor of New York. Further rifts soon developed within the large and unwieldy group of proprietors; they worsened after 1685, when some shares in the colony’s government passed out of Quaker hands. In 1687 Dr. Daniel Coxe, an English speculator, purchased title to the West Jersey government from Billing, and in 1693 Coxe sold it to the West Jersey Society, a corporation that speculated in lands and political interests in the Jersey colonies and Pennsylvania.
The first European settlers in East Jersey were Dutch and English families from New England, Long Island, and New Netherland. When England acquired New York and New Jersey in 1664, there were already 33 families of European immigrants living in Bergen, opposite Manhattan Island. Between 1664 and 1666 English Quakers and Puritans streamed into East Jersey and founded several more towns. In 1681 Carteret’s widow sold title to the colony to a group of 12 proprietors (later expanded to 24) who were predominantly Scottish and Quaker and included William Penn. The new proprietors encouraged emigration from Scotland to East Jersey and in 1683 established the town of Perth Amboy. There was continual friction between the proprietors and the English settlers, however; the proprietors challenged the settlers’ land titles, while the settlers resented the proprietors’ attempts to collect quitrents and dominate the colony’s government. Simmering social and political tensions erupted in a wave of riots between 1698 and 1701.
In 1702 the West Jersey Society and the defeated proprietary government of East Jersey ceded political power to the Crown. The Crown united West and East Jersey as a single colony, New Jersey. Although subject to the royal governor of New York, New Jersey elected its own legislature, which met alternately in Burlington and Perth Amboy. In spite of the Crown’s hopes, the unification of New Jersey did little to stabilize its government. Lingering tensions between the original sections, between various religious denominations, and between resident and nonresident proprietors continued to haunt the colony. In 1738 the Crown appointed Lewis Morris, a hotheaded and opportunistic New York politician, to be the first separate governor of New Jersey. Political autonomy did not bring New Jersey peace, however; Morris was unpopular and, like the New York governors who preceded him, fought bitterly with the colonial legislature over the division of political power. Basic disputes about land titles, the supply of paper money, and the location of boundary lines between East and West Jersey and between New Jersey and New York complicated daily life in the colony until the American Revolution. In contrast, local government, based on a combination of town meetings and county courts, was fairly placid.
New Jersey was one of the less populous English colonies in North America. Its non-Indian population numbered about 14,000 in 1702; by then, few Native Americans remained in the colony. New Jersey’s European population, however, was exceptionally diverse, including English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Swedish, and German settlers, as well as Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Quakers. Most colonists farmed, producing grain, vegetables, hemp, flax, livestock, and lumber for export. Coastal residents fished as well. Although some of the Scottish proprietors created large estates and attempted to introduce tenant farming, family farms of 100-200 acres were the rule. New Jersey was overwhelmingly rural; even its twin market and political centers, Burlington and Perth Amboy, numbered only about 500 people each in the 18th century. Puritans from New England and Dutch settlers from New York founded primary schools in several East Jersey towns, but there were few schools in West Jersey until the 19th century.
By 1760 New Jersey’s population had grown to 93,800, but its rural townships were still overshadowed by the emerging cities of New York City and Philadelphia. Elizabethtown, Trenton, and New Brunswick gradually overtook Burlington and Perth Amboy as the colony’s internal commercial centers. Trenton, founded in 1709 at the head of the Delaware River, was particularly important as a transshipment point for exports from New Jersey’s agricultural hinterland; it also attracted skilled artisans. Iron mining, which had begun on a small scale in the 17th century, became a more important industry after 1750, when Britain lifted the import duty on iron. In the late colonial period some affluent New York and Philadelphia families built country estates in New Jersey, beginning the region’s long tradition as a suburban retreat.
By 1750 African and African-American slaves made up about 7 percent of New Jersey’s population; in 1775, approximately 10,000 African Americans (mostly slaves) lived in New Jersey. New Amsterdam (New York City), as a port, was an early center of the slave trade, and Dutch farmers and other immigrants from New York brought slaves with them when they settled in New Jersey. The colony’s slave population was concentrated in East Jersey, especially along the New York border. Most New Jersey slaves labored on large farms; in southern New Jersey some affluent settlers established estates that resembled Chesapeake area plantations. Quaker West Jersey, on the other hand, generally frowned on slavery. In the 1740s West Jersey and Pennsylvania Quakers began to debate the morality of slavery, and in 1754 John Woolman published a pamphlet, Some Consideration on the Keeping of Negroes, in which he argued that slavery harmed both master and slave.
New Jersey’s religious life was complex. West Jersey was originally founded as a refuge for English Quakers, and Scottish Quakers played a prominent role in the settlement of East Jersey. However, Quaker influence diminished over time as non-Quakers purchased proprietary shares and a flood of immigrants from New England, Britain, and Germany diluted the Quaker population. The Great Awakening, a series of religious revivals that swept through the American colonies in the late 1730s and early 1740s, affected New Jersey’s Presbyterian congregations profoundly and influenced the Congregationalists, Baptists, and Dutch Reformed to a lesser extent. In New Jersey as in New England, the Great Awakening divided many congregations and communities; these rifts were gradually healed as the most committed Old Light leaders passed away and were succeeded by more accommodating clergy. The Great Awakening also led to the founding of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton College), a successor to the New Light Log College, in 1746. The college’s innovative curriculum, which included an expanded emphasis on natural and moral philosophy, drew many students from other colonies by the 1760s. By the eve of the Revolution, the Presbyterians had displaced the Quakers as the dominant religious denomination in New Jersey.
Further reading: Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683-1765 (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton
University Press, 1985); John E. Pomfret, Colonial New Jersey: A History (New York: Scribner, 1973).
—Darcy R. Fryer
World History
