New Jersey

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NEW JERSEY

New Jersey became a royal province in 1702 when the proprietorships of East Jersey and West Jersey were brought under the control of the English crown. The white population of the colony at the time of the merger was fifteen thousand inhabitants, and by 1750 it had quadrupled to roughly sixty thousand. Most of the population farmed in Hunterdon, Burlington, Monmouth, and Essex Counties along the widely traveled corridor connecting New York City and Philadelphia.

Throughout the colonial period New Jersey remained one of the most diverse colonies in British America. While the largest ethnic group in the colony remained the English, Dutch remnants of the colony of New Netherland were spread out across the New York City hinterland counties of Bergen and Somerset. Scots-Irish settled in large numbers in Morris County and Germans occupied the northwestern counties of Hunterdon and Sussex. The southern portion of the state was largely English Quaker with a smattering of Swedes, Germans, and non-Quaker English in the mix.

On the eve of the American Revolution, the diminishing numbers of Delaware (Lenni-Lenape) Indians were confined to the sparsely populated Pine Barren region where they were ministered to and educated by Quakers and Presbyterian missionaries such as John and David Brainerd. In 1775 New Jersey had ten thousand slaves, most of whom worked for masters in the northern counties. This made New Jersey the second-largest slaveholding colony north of Maryland, trailing only New York in this category.

New Jersey became a state of the United States of America when its new constitution was put into practice officially on 17 July 1776. After over a decade of internal conflict in the colony between the royal governor William Franklin and the largely Patriotic assembly, the revolutionaries gained control of the colonial government, ousted Franklin from office in June 1776, threw their support behind the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, and began to frame a new constitution. Though New Jersey and its delegates did not take a leadership role in the Continental Congress, the state would play an important part in the Revolutionary War. Several major battles of the war were fought on New Jersey soil, including the much-celebrated conflicts at Monmouth, Princeton, and Trenton. During the war, the Continental Congress met in Princeton in 1783 and in Trenton the following year.

New Jersey established a government with a two-house legislature (known as the General Assembly) and invested most of the state's political power in this branch. The powers of the governor's office were severely limited by the framers because of fears, common in most former British colonies, that strong executive branches were prone to tyranny. It is noteworthy that the New Jersey Constitution was the only state constitution in the United States that offered limited suffrage to women. Single women (married women were represented by their husbands) who owned property were permitted to vote until this right was revoked by the state legislature in 1807.

Following the war New Jersey would play a pivotal role in the framing of the United States Constitution. The state was the first to appoint delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and was the third state to ratify the new Constitution. During the convention, William Paterson, a member of the New Jersey delegation, proposed what became known as the "New Jersey Plan" for the organization of the United States legislature. The plan, which was eventually rejected, gave each state in the Union equal representation in both houses of the federal Congress.

In 1790 the total population of New Jersey (white men and women and slaves) stood at 184,139. In 1800 the population was 211,149; in 1810 it was 245,562; in 1820, 277,575 persons resided in the state; and in 1830 the population had reached 320,823. The most concentrated area of population remained the central corridor connecting New York City and Philadelphia. New Jersey's population growth in this period occurred more through natural increase than through in-migration to the state, although this trend would change considerably later in the century.

Roughly 90 percent of New Jersey's population was of European ancestry. Most residents lived on medium-sized farms of less than two hundred acres. From the colonial period through the beginning of the nineteenth century, agriculture drove the New Jersey economy. New Jersey agriculture was quite diverse, but grain production and the rearing of livestock were most prevalent. New Jersey residents farmed for subsistence purposes, but the majority of landholders oriented their agricultural practices to meet the demands of markets in Europe and the West Indies.

In 1800 there were just over 12,000 slaves in New Jersey, but that number began to decline rapidly after the passage of the 1804 law that initiated the process of gradual emancipation in the state. By 1820 free blacks outnumbered slaves and by 1830 only 2,246 slaves resided in New Jersey. The Native American population had dwindled to only a few hundred by the turn of the nineteenth century.

bibliography

Clemens, Paul G. E., and Peter O. Wacker. Land Use in Early New Jersey: A Historical Geography. Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1995.

Gerlach, Larry R. Prologue to Independence: New Jersey in the Coming of the American Revolution. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1976.

McCormick, Richard P. New Jersey: From Colony to State, 1609–1789. Rev. ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981.

Pomfret, John E. Colonial New Jersey: A History. New York: Scribners, 1973.

Wacker, Peter O. Land and People: A Cultural Geography of Pre-industrial New Jersey Origins and Settlement Patterns. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975.

John Fea

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation