New Jersey

NEW JERSEY

NEW JERSEY. While ranked forty-sixth among the states in size, in 2002 New Jersey ranked ninth in terms of population, with nearly 8.5 million people. New Jersey is by far the nation's most urbanized and most densely populated state, with 1,144 persons per square mile. In contrast, the national population density in 2000 was just 80 persons per square mile.

Between 1991 and 2001, New Jersey saw its population rise steadily, by 0.85 percent per annum. In 2000, 8,414,350 people lived in New Jersey. By July 2001, the state had 8,484,431 residents; New Jersey's population grew faster than any other state in the northeast region during 2000–2001. During those years, the state lost 39,200 inhabitants through domestic migration, but this was offset by the influx of 60,400 international immigrants. As a result, New Jersey ranked sixth among the states in foreign immigration between 2000 and 2001. While the state's population grew, the average household size actually shrank during the 1990s.

New Jersey's radical transformation from rural to industrial society, from vast regions of farmland to suburban sprawl, did not happen quickly but rather very gradually beginning in the seventeenth century.

Colonial Era

New Jersey began as a British colony in 1664, when James, duke of York, granted all his lands between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers to John, Lord Berkeley, and Sir George Carteret. On 10 February 1665 the two new proprietors issued concessions and agreements setting forth their governmental and land policies. Berkeley then sold his interest in the colony in March 1674 to John Fenwick, a Quaker who represented Edward Byllynge, for £1,000. The trustees for Byllynge, including William Penn, tried to establish a Quaker colony in West Jersey, but Fenwick seceded from the Byllynge group and settled at Salem in November 1675, thereby becoming lord proprietor of his tenth of the proprietary lands. In July 1676, the Quintpartite Deed legally separated the lands of New Jersey into east and west; Carteret remained proprietor of East Jersey while Byllynge, William Penn, and two other Quakers became the proprietors of West Jersey. In February 1682, after the death of Carteret, twelve men purchased his lands for £3,400. Following this transaction the Board of Proprietors of East Jersey was formed in 1684; four years later nine men established the Council of Proprietors of West Jersey.

The Crown refused to grant the proprietors of East and West Jersey governmental authority until 1702. Under the new terms of agreement, the British government allowed both groups to retain the rights to the soil and to the collection of quitrents (rents paid on agricultural lands). The boards of proprietors are still in existence and hold meetings at Perth Amboy (for East Jersey) and Burlington (for West Jersey).

Disputes over land titles in the colony resulted in land riots between 1745 to 1755. The English immigrants that settled in East Jersey during the 1660s argued that they did not need to pay proprietary quitrents, since they had purchased the land from indigenous Native Americans. In response to the dispute, James Alexander, an influential councillor of East Jersey, filed a bill in chancery court on 17 April 1745. On 19 September 1745, Samuel Baldwin, one of the claimants to land in East Jersey, was arrested on his land and taken to jail in Newark. One hundred fifty men rescued him from prison. This incident incited sporadic rioting and disruption of the courts and jails in most East Jersey counties. The land rioters did not stop rebelling until 1754, in response to fears of English retaliation, the coming of the French and Indian War, as well as unfavorable court decisions.

From the beginning colonial New Jersey was characterized by ethnic and religious diversity. In East Jersey, New England Quakers, Baptists, and Congregationalists settled alongside Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and Dutch migrants from New York. While the majority of residents lived in towns with individual landholdings of 100 acres, a few rich proprietors owned vast estates. West Jersey had fewer people than East Jersey, and both English Quakers and Anglicans owned large landholdings. Both Jerseys remained agrarian and rural throughout the colonial era, and commercial farming only developed sporadically. Some townships, though, like Burlington and Perth Amboy, emerged as important ports for shipping to New York and Philadelphia. The colony's fertile lands and tolerant religious policy drew more settlers, and New Jersey boasted a population of 120,000 by 1775.

New Jersey's "madness" for "municipal multiplication," notes one recent scholar, could clearly be observed in the colonial partisan politics of many founding town-ships, and is especially evident in the historical balkanization of dozens of large townships that developed along the lower bank of the Raritan. South Amboy, for example, would split into nine separate communities—and, by the end of the nineteenth century, there was very little left of the once-huge township. Similar patterns were duplicated throughout the state, such as in the huge township of Shrewsbury in East Jersey. Eventually that single town-ship would be fragmented into seventy-five separate towns spreading over two counties.

Transportation and growth spurred rivalries between townships. During the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, before the advent of the railroad, South Amboy's growing port served as the link in ferry transportation from Manhattan and Philadelphia. Equally important, a major roadway also took passengers through the township of Piscataway, which then included most of what would become Middlesex and Mercer Counties. After the coming of the railroad, rivalry between South Amboy and New Brunswick eventually altered the role of each township and the relations of power between the two competitive communities.

Hundreds of tales of factional disputes illustrate the pettiness and quarrelsomeness of the issues that came to divide New Jersey's municipalities: struggles involving railroad lands, school district control, moral regulation, and greedy individualism all led to the fracture of townships, towns, and cities. Many factors thwarted the consolidation of large and medium-sized cities, including antiurban prejudices that prevented the early creation of an urban way of life. New Jersey's geography and topography clearly helped shape the state's long tradition of divisiveness and fragmentation. The state's rivers, woodlands, and salt marshes divided towns, boroughs, and villages. Economic considerations and political pressures contributed to the crazy zigzag development of New Jersey's 566 municipalities, as did personal whims and interests. All of these factors combined to draw each boundary line of those hundreds of municipalities as the state's geo-political map was drawn—every line has a story to tell. Hardly ever practical, functional, or straight, the boundary line designs eventually became to resemble, in the words of Alan Karcher, "cantilevered and circumlinear" shapes that formed "rhomboids and parallelograms—geo-metric rectangles and chaotic fractals." As New Jersey evolved, these "often bizarre configurations" became less and less defensible while their boundaries remained "immutable and very expensive memorials" to the designers who concocted them.

From the reunification of East Jersey and West Jersey in 1702 until 1776, the colony was ruled by a royal governor, an appointive council, and an assembly. While the governor of New York served as the governor of New Jersey until 1738, his power was checked and reduced by the assembly's right to initiate money bills, including controlling governors' salaries. From 1763 on, both political factionalism and sectional conflict hindered the role New Jersey played in the imperial crisis that would eventually erupt into the American Revolution. One important pre-revolutionary incident, however, was the robbery of the treasury of the East Jersey proprietors on 21 July 1768, resulting in increased tensions between Governor William Franklin and the assembly. Although most New Jerseyites only reluctantly engaged in brief boycotts and other forms of protest over the Stamp Act and Townshend duties, the colonists of New Jersey found themselves being swept along by their more militant and powerful neighbors in New York and Pennsylvania. Once the Crown had shut down the port of Boston, however, New Jersey quickly joined rank and formed a provincial congress to assume control of the colony. After participating in both sessions of the Continental Congress and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the colony's representatives ratified a state constitution on 2 July 1776.

During the days of the American Revolution, few states suffered as much or as long as New Jersey. In the first few years of war, both British and American armies swept across the state, while Loyalists returned in armed forays and foraging expeditions. Triumphant battles at Trenton on 26 December 1776, Monmouth on 28 June 1778, and Springfield, 23 June 1780, helped ensure American independence. Because of the weak government under the Articles of Confederation, though, New Jersey suffered immensely from the aftershocks of war's devastation and a heavy state debt. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, New Jersey's representative William Paterson addressed the problem of indebtedness by speaking for the interests of smaller states, and advocating the passage of the New Jersey Plan.

Growth of Industry

After the instability of the 1780s, in the Federalist era the young state turned to novel kinds of industrial activities and began to erect a better transportation system to bolster its nascent economy. In November 1791, Alexander Hamilton helped create the Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures, which began operating a cotton mill in the new city of Paterson. As a promoter of national economic growth, Hamilton spearheaded other industrial ventures. After they had purchased land, Hamilton and other New York and New Jersey Federalists incorporated themselves as the Associates of New Jersey Company on 10 November 1804. Hamilton was shot while dueling with Aaron Burr in New Jersey, and died of his wounds; after his death, neither of his ventures proved successful until the 1820s.

During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the nation experienced a transportation revolution, stimulated by capital investment and new manufacturing ventures. Improved roads—especially the Morris Turnpike of 1801—invigorated the state's economy, and steamboats linked New Jersey to the ports of New York and Philadelphia. Furthermore, the construction of the Morris Canal (1824–1838) and the Delaware and Raritan Canal (1826–1838) brought coal and iron to eastern industry, and the Camden and Amboy Railroad was completed in 1834. All these transportation advances increased internal trade and stimulated the infant manufacturing sector and rapid urbanization.

Disputes over school district boroughs, religion, prostitution, gambling, prohibition, exclusivity, zoning and prezoning, and the construction of canals, railroads, roads, and pathways all contributed to New Jerseyites' antiurban bias, myopic sense of community, and preoccupation with the control of property. Every key decision made at the state capital in Trenton regarding taxes, schools, transportation, preservation of natural resources, and a myriad of other issues, observed one political insider, faces the obstacle "that it must accommodate 566 local governments."

Because of these disputes, the number of New Jersey's boroughs rose from 5 to 193 between 1850 and 1917, when more than one hundred of the municipalities still consisted of less than 2,000 inhabitants. After 1930, this fragmentation slowed, with only ten new municipalities created and just three eliminated. New Jersey's communities became more isolated, particularly after the 1947 regulations on zoning took effect.

As the state's political landscape shifted and fragmented over the centuries, in the mid-nineteenth century New Jersey's economic and industrial landscape also underwent massive changes, transforming from a rural farming region into an urban, industrial state. Cities like Camden and Hoboken grew as a result of increased shipping and railroad facilities, while Newark and Jersey City mushroomed with the concentration of specialized industries like leather, shoemaking, and iron. The demand for both skilled and unskilled labor fostered a surge in the urban population of the state's major cities, while the need for cheap, unskilled workers in building and rail construction and factory production was met in part by new waves of immigrants. Starting in the 1840s, Germans, Irish, Poles, and other European immigrants—Protestant, Jewish, and Roman Catholic—added to New Jersey's ethnic and religious diversity. At the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans from the South pushed into the state's already overcrowded urban slums.

The Twentieth Century

New Jersey's political development reflected the changing social and economic climates, and changing demographic patterns. Because New Jersey's state constitution of 1776 envisioned a weak executive with no veto powers, it was not until modern times (like the years under Governor Woodrow Wilson) that the governor wielded more power than the state legislature.

The New Jersey state government has always been sensitive to the demands of business. During the political awakening of the Jacksonian era, the Whig Party forged the first ties between business and state government. Following the Civil War, liberal incorporation laws—and the unremitting pressure industrial giants like Standard Oil and the Pennsylvania Railroad Company placed on legislators—helped establish the corporate control of state politics. Then during the height of the Progressive age at the end of his 1911–1913 governorship, Woodrow Wilson used his newly expanded executive power to begin his assault on these corporations with his "Seven Sisters" monopoly legislation. These political reforms, though, did not prevent the political parties of the early twentieth century from being controlled by urban bosses, such as Frank Hague of Jersey City.

Even with Wilson's gains, it was not until the passage of the new state constitution of 1947 that the governor of New Jersey become a more independent figure with broader discretionary powers. By then, postwar New Jersey had become an even more urbanized and industrialized state, boasting a high standard of living but struggling with a concomitant array of social problems, including environmental pollution, urban decay, racial tension, and rising unemployment among growing minority populations.

With the proliferation of the automobile culture in the 1920s, New Jersey's population quickly decentralized into suburbs along the state's main highways. The rapid suburbanization and population growth (the state had surpassed the seven million mark by 1970), made New Jersey the nation's most urbanized state.

Through the twentieth century, the state developed a varied economic landscape. Its principal industries included recreation facilities, particularly along the Jersey shore; scientific research; chemical and mineral refining; and insurance. By the 1970s, New Jersey led the nation in the production of chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The state had also developed into four distinct topographical areas: the Hudson-to-Trenton great manufacturing hub, with its heavy concentration of chemical and major pharmaceutical, apparel, petroleum, and glass industries; the Atlantic coastal region (from New York Harbor to Atlantic City and Cape May), the state's vacation land; the Pinelands; and the southern, western, and northern regions, composed primarily of farms, forests, and wealthy suburbs.

The removal, relocation, and decentralization of the state's old manufacturing plants away from older areas in or near the major cities caused dramatic shifts in New Jersey's industrial economy, prompting the Trenton legislature to adopt new public policies toward the wholesale, retail, service, transportation, utilities, and finance industries.

Although urban centers declined in the postwar era—Camden by 13.4 percent, Jersey City by 6.7 percent, and Newark by 7.4 percent—commercial activities in the state's tertiary sector provided jobs for an even larger share of the labor force than industry had. Hudson County suffered the heaviest loss of jobs in the state (with just 2.1 percent growth in the 1980s and grim projections into the 1990s). Only two of New Jersey's major cities—Paterson and Elizabeth—experienced significant growth during these years. Another hard-felt drop in urban population would occur in the 1990s among the largest cities: Camden, Newark, Hoboken, Jersey City, Bayonne, Trenton, Passaic, and Paterson. These changes—combined with decreasing fertility rates, reduced movement of jobs from New York and Philadelphia to New Jersey, a marked decline in jobs in the Middle Atlantic states, and the state's transient status—led to New Jersey's population increasing by only 5 percent during the 1980s (from 7,365,011 to 7,730,188).

While many cities' populations plummeted after the 1970s, New Jersey retained the distinction of being America's most suburbanized state. By 1990, with practically 90 percent of its population classified as living in urban areas, New Jersey ranked ninth in the nation for population size. The state had an unemployment rate of just 5 percent in 1990, and boasted a per capita income rate second only to Connecticut.

In 1990, the state's largest ethnic group was Italian Americans, while African Americans constituted about 13 percent and Hispanics another 7 percent of the population. Asians were the fastest-growing racial group in the state in the 1990s, with a 77.3 percent growth rate. Dispersal patterns suggest that more than one in every two New Jersey Asians clustered in just three counties (Middlesex, Bergen, and Hudson), making them the largest minority group in Middlesex and Bergen Counties. Among New Jersey's Asian residents, the Indian Asian population ranked first in size and grew the fastest, followed by the Vietnamese, Koreans, Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese. The Japanese population was the only Asian group to decline in the 1990s.

People of Hispanic descent accounted for more than half of New Jersey's demographic growth in the 1990s. Puerto Ricans constituted the largest Hispanic group, accounting for nearly a third of the state's Hispanic population, with large concentrations in Essex, Hudson, Passaic, and Camden counties. Mexicans comprised the fastest growing group among the state's Hispanic population. Cubans were the only Hispanic group to experience a population decline in the 1990s.

During the 1990s, the proportion of non-Hispanic whites in the state dropped from 74 percent to 66 percent, echoing the nationwide pattern of decline.

The decade of the 1990s proved to be another painful one for New Jersey's cities, with the total value of property dropping slightly even as values in suburban and rural towns continued to escalate. New Jersey attempted to improve its battered image by opening of the Garden State Arts Center and the Meadowlands sports complex. By the end of the 1990s, with a booming national economy and the state's concentration of skilled and specialized labor (especially in biotech and pharmaceuticals), most New Jersey cities began to experience a slight rebound.

New Jersey's Future

The State Plan for the early 2000s sought to channel growth by restricting state infrastructure spending in many rural and suburban areas and focusing instead on urban redevelopment. The recession that gripped the nation in 2001 also affected development schemes, and New Jersey's cities faced a difficult future.

One experiment in redevelopment would be watched closely, to see if former industrial sites could be successfully transformed into residential properties. After decades of decline, the Middlesex County city of Perth Amboy (population 47,000) welcomed $600 million in housing and retail development to be built on former industrial sites. One problem facing many of New Jersey's cities was the brownfields, contaminated vacant or underutilized industrial properties. The state attempted to reward developers interested in cities by reducing the red tape associated with brownfields. Before most other industrial cities in New Jersey, Perth Amboy secured an early federal grant and worked out an arrangement with the state environmental officials.

According to the state Planning Commission chairperson, Joseph Maraziti, the city's redevelopment plan had widespread implications for the entire state. "I have seen an evolution in Perth Amboy, and not just a visual change but a spiritual one.…That is exactly the message of the State Plan. We are trying to revitalize New Jersey's cities and towns. If that does not happen, nothing else in the state will work well." Other older industrial cities like New Brunswick, Jersey City, and Newark were also looking at Perth Amboy's example. They were all hoping that a fifty-year history of urban flight was about to be reversed.

When Governor Christine Todd Whitman gave her state-of-the-state address in early January 2001, New Jersey had the sixteenth largest economy in the world and the second highest per capita income in America. Perhaps her biggest accomplishment as governor was the creation of over 435,000 jobs in the state, but budget deficits accrued and a $2.8 billion budget gap developed under Whitman's Republican administration. With the Garden State Preservation Trust, though, Governor Whitman preserved nearly as much land as the combined administrations of governors Jim Florio, Brendan T. Byrne, William T. Cahill, and Richard J. Hughes. Before stepping down as governor in 2001, Whitman boasted that her administration had already created ten new business incubators and thirty "cyberdistricts" in New Jersey, with a focus on promoting high technology.

At the beginning of 2002, the state under Governor James E. McGreevey faced a $2.9 billion to $5 billion shortfall. To address this shortfall, the governor demanded 5 percent cutbacks in all agencies, and laid off 600 non-union public employees. McGreevey suggested that a Newark sports arena would be a catalyst for development, and proposed a stimulus package that would include public investment in the state's other urban centers, such as Camden, and job training programs to improve the quality of the state's work force.

Despite the governor's optimism, in 2002 New Jersey faced revenue shortfalls, pollution that ranked the worst in the nation, problems with the black business economy in northern New Jersey, issues surrounding the state's redevelopment areas, and problems facing New Jersey's "urban 30" cities.

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Timothy C. Coogan

See also Atlantic City ; East Jersey ; Newark ; Suburbanization ; Urbanization .