USA > New Jersey > Essex County > Newark > A History of the city of Newark, New Jersey : embracing practically two and a half centuries, 1666-1913, Volume I > Part 12
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prevent Sundry inconveniences which may grow to this town of Newark, by the inconsiderate receiving and entertaining of strangers amongst us-it is voted, that henceforward no planter belonging to us or within our bounds or limits, receive or entertain any man or woman of what age or quality soever, coming or resorting to us, to settle upon the land; nor shall any person that hath been or shall be received as a planter among us, by right of inheritance or otherwise, sell, give, or in any way alienate, or pass over, lease or lett, any house, or house lot, or any part or parcel of any of them, or any land of what kind or quality soever, to any such person. Nor shall any planter or inheritor permit any such person or persons so coming or resorting, to stay or abide above one month, without license from those the town shall appoint for the purpose, under the penalty of five pounds for every such defect ; besides all damages that may grow up by such entertainments." Nothing could be more rigid than the above ordinance, and the old fellows meant it, every word of it. It was evidently drawn up with great care and with supreme exactitude, and there was some- thing more than religious intolerance behind it. The town wanted no drones or persons of questionable reputation to pervert the youth, or spread discord.
CURING FRIVOLITY AND DISORDER.
The town fathers were also at this time troubled over certain frivolous tendencies among the youth of the town, and the town meeting, in 1681, ruled that no family should harbour or entertain any person or persons in their homes after 9 o'clock at night, or at other unseasonable times (extraordinary occasions excepted) ; nor shall they suffer them disorderly to meet at any place within their power to spend their time, money, or provisions inordinately, in drinking, gaming, or such like; nor shall they suffer any carriage, conference or council, which tends to corrupt one another. All such persons so transgressing shall be liable to such fines the authority shall see fit. Truly, they were sorely worried for the preservation of their precious Puritan ideals.
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In 1685 it was decided to devise a more systematic and expedi- tious way of conducting the town's business. Four regular town meetings a year were fixed: For January, April, July and October, the taxes to be fixed at the last meeting of the year. Notice of the meetings was to be fastened to the meeting house door ten or twelve days in advance. The meetings were to begin at 10 in the morning, and if ten or twelve freeholders, together with the clerk, were present, they were authorized to transact all the town's busi- ness. Special meetings might be called, if necessary. This meant that the people had found it impossible to get anything like a large proportion of the freeholders to attend the meetings, and some plan like the above had to be evolved. This quarterly town- meeting system prevailed after the War for Independence, with little variation.
PASSING OF THE FIRST GENERATION.
By the time the first generation of the founders began to relinquish the control of things to their sons, and the little church- yard on the edges of the Frog Pond had received all that was mortal of these patriarchs, most of whom were well advanced in years when the settlement was started, Newark had a population of about five hundred persons (in 1668). It was compactly built.7 It occupied about ten thousand acres, and the various plantations that had been set close to its borders covered some forty thousand acres more. These last included the estates on the east bank of the Passaic and along the Hackensack, established by the Sand- ford, Kingsland, Berry, Pinhorne and other families who were reckoned as coming under the jurisdiction of the town.
7 Whitehead's "East Jersey Under the Proprietors," pp. 123, 124.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE LORDS PROPRIETORS VERSUS THE PEOPLE. 1668-1702.
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CHAPTER VIII.
THE LORDS PROPRIETORS VERSUS THE PEOPLE. 1668-1702.
T HE solemn promise of the Lords Proprietors, in the original "Concessions" 1 of an annual Assembly, was one of the strongest attractions set forth in that document, to the settlers of Newark, Elizabethtown, Woodbridge, and the other groups of English-speaking people, who responded to the Proprie- tors' call for settlers. It is doubtful, at least, whether the Newark founders would have come into New Jersey at all had it not been for this safeguard of their rights, where they might state their grievances, and demand redress. The struggle for independence virtually began with the very first session of the Assembly in New Jersey, and continued with little cessation down to the very opening of the actual physical conflict in 1776. The student of the history of this State may trace its growing strength with clearness for more than a century, until the question was settled by force of arms. It is not within the bounds of this work to follow it slowly, but to outline the forceful part taken by the people of Newark in the leading features of the struggle.
NEW JERSEY'S FIRST ASSEMBLY.
The first Assembly ever gathered in New Jersey was called to order by Governor Carteret on May 26, 1668, at Elizabethtown, when the representatives of the people from the six communities so far established, sat down together with the Governor and his Council. Thus began the actual organization of what is now the State. This Assembly was organized fifteen years before that in New York was formed, with Pennsylvania a still unbroken wilder-
' A written constitution for the government of the new Colony, one of the very first in all America. It went far beyond the Dutch "Charter of Liberties" granted in 1629. See "The Discovery and Early History of New Jersey," by William Nelson, 1912, pp. 33, 34. See also Chapter III of this work.
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ness and Philadelphia unthought of. The pioneer assemblymen were, as the old records of the Lords Proprietors show: "Burgesses -For Bergen, Gasper Steenmetts and Balthazar Bayard; for Newark on the Pishawack River, Captain Robert Treat and Samuel Swarne [Swain] ; 2 for Elizabethtown, John Ogden, sen'r, and John Brackett; for Woodbridge, John Bishop and Robert Dennis; for Middletown, James Grover and John Boune, and the last consented also to represent Shrewsbury." These men represented something like two thousand settlers. The total white population of New Jersey at that time, including outlying and unrepresented groups, could scarcely have exceeded three thousand.
The Assembly continued for four days and during that time it passed a number of laws strongly flavored with Puritanism, since all the settlements except the ancient Dutch community of Bergen were made up very largely of New England and Long Island members of this sect. The first tax was then levied, for thirty pounds, to maintain the new government, and as each of the six communities was ordered to pay five pounds to make up the total, it would appear that the population was about the same in each. The Assembly adjourned to meet the following November, but discord had already begun; the Assembly and the Governor's Council, the commons and the aristocracy, who were to wrestle throughout the long and weary years until the very eve of the War for Independence, now began their contentions. The second session, like its predecessor, closed in four days, but this time with affairs all awry, and for seven years there were no regular sessions, of which there is reliable record, although the representatives of the people gathered in assembly two or three times to arrange for their common safety, without the sanction of the Governor and his Council.
FIGHT AGAINST QUIT-RENTS BEGUN.
The first real crisis came when the Governor announced that the first payment of quit-rents would be due on March 25, 1670.
" Swain had been named as the "third man," and he acted in the place of Jasper Crane, whom the people had chosen to serve with Treat, but who was absent from that historic gathering.
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This stirred the colonists to a high state of excitement. It will be remembered that the Newark settlers in their earlier interviews with Governor Carteret had striven to have the quit-rent clause in the "Concessions" abrogated and how the latter had declared that he might concede almost anything else but the annual half-penny for each acre, which was a just and proper obligation and must be paid. The enforcement of this clause brought on a storm singularly similar to that caused by the Stamp Act a century later. The men of Newark and all the other settlements, with the possible exception of Bergen, considered that in their payments to the Indians they had discharged all their obligations to both God and man for the land. Their titles thus obtained, they contended, were held by them as a divine right. In the case of those settlements that had received formal grants of their land from Governor Nicholls of New York previous to Carteret's arrival, it was held by the people that these grants gave additional force to the titles obtained from the Indians. There was great confusion at this time and Newark, in 1668, sent Captain Treat and Jasper Crane to New York "to advise with Colonel Lovelace [Governor Nicholls' successor] concerning our standing, whether we are designed to be a part of the Duke's [Duke of York's] colony or no." 3
Governor Carteret strove to adjust these difficulties, but as he and his Council had already aroused the well-founded suspicion that they were engaged in a systematic campaign to evade grant- ing the liberties (promised in the "Concessions") by means of Assembly, his efforts were of little avail. So the settlements, with Newark among the foremost, openly and boldly defied the consti- tuted authorities with quite as much courage as did their descend- ants in 1776, although not resorting to force of arms, Almost simultaneously with the demand for the payment of quit-rents, the Governor declared that no person should be accounted a free- holder thereafter, or have a vote in any election until he should have obtained a patent for his land.
3 Town Minute Book.
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BOLD OPPOSITION TO GOVERNOR CARTERET.
A condition little short of anarchy now prevailed. The men of Newark, Elizabethtown and one or two other places elected delegates to an Assembly, in 1672, without the sanction of the Governor and Council and which sat in March and later in May, 1672. As the Governor refused to recognize this body, the mem- bers took advantage of a certain clause in the "Concessions" and appointed a "President of the Country" in the "absence" of the Governor, who should serve until the latter's "return." This was nothing short of insurrection. The insurgents chose as President, James Carteret, a son of Lord Carteret, who happened to be in the Province at the time and who said he had authority to assume supreme charge from this father, and to oust the Governor if he thought necessary ; but he never produced his credentials. About this time, Governor Philip Carteret sailed for England to obtain support from the Lords Proprietors. The insurgents seized upon officers of the government and cast them into prison.
James Carteret left the Province after about a year. He was a man of no particular force and the only reason the settlers could have had for selecting him as their "President" must have been his blood relationship to one of the Lords Proprietors.
PROPRIETORS UPHOLD GOVERNOR.
The Lords Proprietors supported Governor Carteret and insisted that his authority should be obeyed by the colonists. They refused to abate the quit-rents, and gave orders that all arrears must be paid in three years from 1673, together with such quit-rents as should accrue during those years. It was a hard blow to the people, but most of them submitted after a time, and for longer or shorter periods.
NEWARK'S FIRM STAND.
The people of Newark offered their quit-rent in wheat instead of "lawful money" specified in the "Concessions." The wheat was refused, and thereafter the people of Newark were more or less closely allied with the anti-quit-rent party. Twice they deliber-
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ated with the other settlements with a view to sending representa- tives to England to present their side of the controversy upon the matter of quit-rents and upon many other grievances which the old records do not enumerate. The measures taken by the people of Newark at this time, described in the previous chapter, to fortify the town, were in all probability actuated not alone as a protection against the Indians, but as a means of defense against any demonstration that the Governor and his Council, in those troublous days, might see fit to make. There is no specific author- ity in history for this opinion, but the indignation of the people against the government make this view not only possible but highly probable.
THE DUTCH RECONQUEST, 1673.
The mission to England on the part of Newark and the other towns would in all likelihood have been carried out, had not the Dutch descended upon New York, in July, 1673, and, with a large fleet, ousted the English government's representatives and taken possession of the entire region, in much the summary manner pursued by the English in 1664. They promised not to dislodge the English settlers, however, and their demands for allegiance to the authority of the Netherlands were met with prompt acquiesence on the part of the people of Newark and elsewhere. The settlers' willingness to turn their backs upon the mother country and submit to the authority of her enemy is not hard to explain, for they were little short of desperate over what they considered the oppression of the Lords Proprietors' administration and saw in the new order of things a fair opportunity to get their rights and to permission to return to a comparatively untroubled and untram- meled existence.
The Dutch agreed to give the settlers full confirmation to their lands, and the Newark settlers at once entered into negotia- tions to that end. Officers of the Dutch were sent to Newark to see that all the freeholders, individually, took the oath of allegiance, and there is no evidence that anyone declined to do this.' The
' See Whitehead's "East Jersey Under the Proprietors," p. 77.
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new rulers mapped out a somewhat new form of government, a code, which was tolerant and kindly and seemed to meet with general approval. But it had not been brought down to smooth working order before the Dutch and the English accomplished a peace, and New Jersey and New York returned to English domina- tion, in February, 1674. Governor Philip Carteret returned to power in New Jersey and Andros became governor of New York.
ENGLISH AUTHORITY RESTORED, 1674.
Here was the Duke of York's opportunity to take back from the Lords Proprietors all this splendid territory we now call New Jersey. While there are good reasons to believe that he regretted having given it away in the first place, he now neglected to keep it, even though by the chances of war it had been returned to him. Political reasons probably prevented his retaining it.
Lord Carteret received renewed titles to land from the Duke of York in July, 1674, and with quite as much authority as in the first instance. But this time his holding was limited to approxi- mately the upper half of the Province, Lord Berkeley definitely receiving the lower half for his portion. Carteret was recommis- sioned July 31, 1674.
He now came out with an "explanation" of the "Concessions"; that is, a "declaration of their true intent and meaning." This "explanation" was a more or less drastic abridgment of the original broad and progressive document which had brought the first English settlers here. The people, for instance, were now specifi- cally to take out patents for their land from the Surveyor General. There was deep protest against this in Newark, for the settlers felt, as in the matter of quit-rents, that they had discharged all their obligations for the purchases of the land. Many of them, however, took out the patents at once, paying the necessary charges. There are numerous references in Newark's old Minute Book to the survey of the lands by the Surveyor General of the Province during the second decade of the town's history.
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Soon after Governor Carteret resumed authority, a law was passed fixing the pay of each member of the Assembly and of the Governor's Council at three shillings a day for every day that the Assembly and Council sat, and four shillings for the Governor. One of the many quaint enactments of the Assembly at that time was to the effect that propagators of false news were to be fined ten shillings, and those guilty of slander were to be penalized in the same amount. For the second offense the fine was to be doubled, to twenty shillings.
ATTEMPT TO ABSORB NEW JERSEY IN NEW YORK.
From almost the very day that Philip Carteret resumed his oflice, Andros, Governor of New York, began to manifest an undue interest in the affairs of New Jersey. A well-founded apprehension spread through New Jersey that Andros was seeking to absorb that Province in New York, and that he was inspired to that end by James, Duke of York. In 1680 Lord George Carteret died, and left his estate in the hands of his widow Elizabeth (for whom Elizabethtown had been named). She continued his representative for more than a year, Philip Carteret remaining Governor. Andros now became more meddlesome. On March, 1680, he issued a decree abrogating the government of New Jersey by the Carteret regime, claiming that he had the authority of the King of England for this step, and calling upon the people to submit to his jurisdiction.
The people of New Jersey promptly resented Andros's high- handed procedure, and the inhabitants of Newark showed their temper in a resolution set down in the Minute Book to the effect that: "The town being met together, giving their positive answer to the Governor of York's writ, that they have taken the oath of allegiance to the King and fidelity to the present government, and until we have sufficient order from his Majesty we will stand by the same." This was a defiance of Andros, and equivalent to a declaration that the freeholders of Newark questioned that Andros was clothed with the authority he claimed. These were strenuous
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times for the young settlement, and its fathers demonstrated time and again that they were quite able to meet each emergency as it arose with courage, foresight and wisdom.
Presently, early in April, 1680, it was reported throughout the settlements that Andros was about to move upon their Province and to wrest Governor Philip Carteret's authority from him by force. Men were summoned to resist this usurper and about one hundred and fifty, fully armed, were gathered at Elizabethtown. That Newark sent her share of this, the first draft upon it for fighting men, is certain. Andros appeared, but without show of arms. He presented his ultimatum to Carteret, and presently departed. The Jerseymen remained defiant and refused to yield an inch, and a fortnight or so later, a party of Andros's soldiers from New York came to Elizabethtown in the night (April 30, 1680) and, dragging Governor Carteret from his bed, took him to New York, where he was locked up and so remained for some weeks, until his trial, before judges and jury, with Andros as chief officer of the court. Two or three times the jury reported a verdict of "not guilty" and each time Andros ordered it to retire and prepare a new verdict. But the jury was courageous and refused to bend to the irascible governor's will. Carteret was finally released from prison, the court having decided that he should not resume authority over New Jersey until official instructions had been received from England.
BRAVE DEFIANCE OF ANDROS BY THE PEOPLE.
Andros was not slow to see his chance to push his purpose at this juncture, and on June 2 he appeared before the Assembly at Elizabethtown and advised that body to adopt the laws of the Province of New York as those of New Jersey. But the members bravely stood for their rights and refused to be awed by his letters patent from the King. They answered Andros in a written statement of their position, concluding with, "for the great charter of England, alias Magna Charta, is the only rule, privilege and joint safety of every freeborn English man."
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This was a dramatic moment in New Jersey's history. Newark may glory in the fact that she had two stalwart representatives in that Assembly, Thomas Johnson and John Curtis.
Andros returned to New York, having failed in his purpose of intimidation. Many months later, Carteret, who appears to have remained in the Province awaiting the decision of the Crown, announced, in March, 1681, his receipt of advices, that the Duke of York had wholly discredited Andros, and protesting in unequivo- cal language that he had never authorized that worthy to act for him in the affairs of New Jersey. Carteret at once resumed the reins of government.5
EAST JERSEY UNDER TWENTY-FOUR PROPRIETORS.
On the death of Lord Carteret his share in New Jersey was offered for sale, and in 1681 was purchased by William Penn and eleven others, for £3,400. These twelve presently sold, each one- half of his share, to another, so that the upper half of the Province came under the dominion of twenty-four proprietors.
Lord Berkeley had not from the beginning taken an active part in the development of the Province. He had fallen into disgrace with the English court because of charges of corruption. He tried more than once to rid himself of his holdings in America, and in March, 1673, disposed of his share of New Jersey to two Quakers, John Fenwick and Edward Byllinge. The price paid was £1,000." They desired the section they purchased, West Jersey, as a retreat for the people of their sect from oppression in England. William Penn was deeply interested in their action. The transfer from Berkeley to the two Quakers occurred just before the Dutch conquest, but it was reaffirmed by the Crown after the return to English domination.
& See Whitehead's "East Jersey Under the Proprietors," pp. 89-98.
" See Mulford's "History of New Jersey," pp. 155, 164.
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EAST JERSEY'S POPULATION OVER 5,000 IN 1681.
East Jersey, at the purchase by the twenty-four proprietors, had a population of more than 5,000, two-thirds of whom lived in the towns of Newark, Elizabethtown, Middletown, Piscataway, Woodbridge and Shrewsbury. The capital was established at Perth Amboy and elaborate plans were made for the upbuilding of a great and powerful city, which were never realized. Govern- ment of West Jersey under the Lords Proprietors was much less difficult to administer than in East Jersey. In the former the population was comparatively homogeneous, being composed largely of Quakers and practically all coming direct from England. In East Jersey there were clashing elements-the New England Puritans, the original Dutch settlers with occasional small accessions, chiefly from New York; some Quakers and Baptists, and after the acces- sion of the twenty-four proprietors, many Scotch and English immigrants.7 The latter were for the most part Presbyterians, while there was a sprinkling of Church of England communicants.
KING JAMES' LAST EFFORT TO RECOVER NEW JERSEY.
King Charles II died in 1685, and his successor was the same James, Duke of York, to whom the late King had given the territory of New York and New Jersey and who had given the latter tract to Berkeley and Carteret. We have already seen how James, the Duke, apparently regretting his generosity, had striven to get back control of New Jersey and had been forced by circumstances to relinquish the effort. He was in a measure responsible for the broad and progressive "Con- cessions" which had attracted the first English-speaking set- tlers and which had encouraged them to believe that in this region, at last, they would find comparative if not entire freedom from oppression of every sort. They had been sorely disappointed, as we have seen. And now that James was on the throne, they were to meet even more bitter conditions. James the Duke and James the King were two very different personages.
1 See Tanner's "The Province of New Jersey," Chapter II.
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During the three years after the twenty-four proprietors secured the land, and previous to James' accession, half a dozen different governors and deputy governors were appointed. James watched his chance, and, in 1688, found it possible to have the proprietors appoint Andros, to act as governor of East Jersey while holding the same office in New York and in New England, with his residence in Boston. He was extremely unsatisfactory to the people of East Jersey in this instance, as he had been before, and he retained his office but a single year, leaving it with the people more disturbed and more distrustful of the Crown than ever.
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