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 4
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their native country, going first to Holland. There, while they enjoyed absolute freedom to worship God in their own way, in common with thousands of other reformers of other faiths who had found asylum there from various parts of Europe, they did not relish losing their identity as English and Puritans. For these reasons the Pilgrim Fathers came to America. The Pilgrims never proposed, however, to separate themselves completely from Eng- land and all her institutions, and they intended to support the laws of the mother country, actively when they believed in them and passively when they did not.
In the New Haven Colony, however, the founders asked for nothing from England. They were to get their laws and ordi- nances, their whole theory and practical working scheme of govern- ment, from the Bible. "Wisdom hath builded her house; she hath hewn out her seven pillars," says Proverbs ix, i, and this they took to be God's specific ruling and literally applicable to their own case, and chose seven men who, besides having supreme charge of the affairs of the church, had also the highest civic functions. These "seven pillars" chose the first governor and four deputies to assist him, while they themselves acted as magistrates. There were no juries, because the Mosaic law made no mention of any.
PURITAN INTOLERANCE.
It is not easy for us of this day to comprehend how men of the highest intelligence, some of them eminent students of history and close observers of all existing forms of government, could frame such a commonwealth and seriously expect it to endure. They had fled from intolerance, but no sooner did they have freedom to follow their own devices, untrammelled for a time by the home government, than they drew up the most drastic of laws and enforced them with grim harshness. It was in the very tolerance of the Pilgrims of Plymouth that the New Havenites and others thought they saw the ultimate collapse of that colony as a God-fearing community, so they thought to escape that eventuality by imposing the dictates of their own consciences upon all others who should
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seek to abide among them. In so far as it applied to the State, it was a most pronounced sort of bossism that these reformers had immediately fallen into; a menace that has ever hovered close to the skirts of reform since the world began.
These Puritan reformers were, says Stearns in his History of the First Church of Newark, "full of the spirit of that animating vision which continually floated before their minds, to found a church upon pure principles, and a State which, though separated in its jurisdiction, should act in perfect harmony with the church and be governed in all its procedure by the rules of God's holy word. They seem to have supposed that by bringing up their children in the fear of God and excluding from the exercise of power among them those who were not governed by the same principles, they might continue to be of one heart from generation to generation."
So they erected their colony, the chief towns being New Haven and Milford on one side of New Haven harbor, and Branford and Guilford on the other. This was to be the last attempt but one of the Puritans in America to build up a theocracy. It was to take nearly thirty years to prove that a Kingdom of God on earth, an "Isle of Innocence" could not be made to work in the New Haven Colony ; after which the final attempt was to be made by people of these four towns, in Newark. The towns were well located and they gradually prospered. New drafts of Pilgrims arrived, some from England and others from different sections of New England. Nearly all of them made excellent members of the communities, but not all could subscribe fully to the tenets of the Puritan church as there set up. These chafed under the lack of suffrage, denied them because they were not full church members, according to New Haven Colony doctrine.
PERSECUTION OF THE QUAKERS.
The colony of Connecticut was also growing, but it was more tolerant toward the newcomers, more alive to the changing con- ditions of the times. New Haven eyed Connecticut's increasing
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strength askance. Discussion and dissension arose over the re- straints put upon government by the church. It does not appear that members of the Established Church of England or of the Roman Catholic faith ever sought admission to the New Haven Colony, but the possibility of the coming of Quakers roused it to a pitch of intense excitement and caused the enactment of laws that well serve to illustrate the severity of the government. The persecution of Quakers in the New Haven Colony was nearly as harsh and intolerant as in Massachusetts. If a Quaker came into the colony on business he was to be permitted to despatch it, while accompanied by a guard, and was to be ejected as soon as his business was done. Anyone who harbored Quakers "or other blasphemous hereticks" was to forfeit fifty pounds sterling. If a Quaker showed an inclination not to abide by this law he was to be thrown into prison, severely whipped and put at hard labor for a term to be fixed by the magistrate. For a second offense a Quaker was to be branded with the letter "H" (for "heretic") on the hand, and imprisoned. For the third offense the other hand was to be branded, and for the fourth offense the tongue was to be bored with a hot iron. To bring Quaker books into the colony meant the imposition of a fine of five pounds. Some of these penalties were meted out upon a few. But not many came into the colony, . naturally enough.
These anti-Quaker laws were put in operation in 1658. On the other hand the Colony of Connecticut was becoming even more liberal. She kept her skirts quite clean of severe practises, persecuting no sect, although striving to preserve the purity of her church. Under pressure of the increasing demand for a wider suffrage, Connecticut decided to admit to citizenship "persons of civil, peaceable and honest conversation," reducing the property requirement from thirty pounds to twenty. "The privilege of a freeman," says Cobb in his "The Rise of Religious Liberty in America," "was never made in Connecticut a perquisite of religion,
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nor conditioned on church membership." These conditions in the neighboring colony served to aggravate the discontent in New Haven. A new generation was arising which could not see things in the stern, hard light of its fathers.
1917114
NEW HAVEN COLONY MERGED WITH CONNECTICUT.
In 1662 the New Haven Colony was merged with Connecticut by the King's order. New Haven's theocracy vanished then and there, and those of the latter colony who could not in conscience subscribe to the scheme of government in operation in the former, determined to depart; and thus Newark came to be.
King Charles II had never looked upon New Haven Colony with kindly eyes. Some of its founders and their fathers were among the fiercest of his royal father's foes; they were among the iron men who fought with Cromwell. Moreover, they had long harbored two of the regicides, the judges who pronounced sentence of death upon Charles I. The son no doubt took grim pleasure in wiping their establishment out of existence.
There are signs that the New Haven leaders had begun to realize that their theocracy could not much longer endure exactly as they had planned, it for several years before the consolidation of the two colonies. It is pretty certain, however, that they would all have remained in the new Connecticut had it not been for the fact that that colony, while refusing longer to recognize church membership as a necessary qualification for citizenship, was now permitting those who were not church members a voice in the making of laws that governed the church. This jeopardized the purity of the church, according to the New Haven view, and it was to them an unendurable condition; to accept it would have meant a sacrifice of conscience. True, the Connecticut lawmakers were careful to hedge this innovation about with various restrictions, but the fact remained that while the State retained authority over the church, the State at the same time gave to those outside its religious influence the power to influence it, by right of suffrage.
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PASTOR PIERSON'S ACTIVITIES.
No one man was more active in promoting the religious excite- ment that culminated in removal from the New Haven Colony than the Rev. Abraham Pierson. In 1640 he was the spiritual leader of a company of Puritans that left Lynn, Massachusetts, and founded Southampton, Long Island, for the purpose of rearing a Church- and-State form of government similar to that started two years before at New Haven. It is a question whether the Rev. Pierson's church at Southampton was the first of any denomination on Long Island, or that at Southold, which was also a Puritan organization. In any event, there were very few months' difference between them. Four years later Southampton was annexed to Connecticut, which so displeased Pastor Pierson that he removed to the town of Bran- ford in the New Haven Colony with whose high-minded theocratic views he was far more in sympathy than with the liberalism of Connecticut.
In Branford, Pastor Pierson, with the few followers who had accompanied him from Southampton, with the people of Branford and others from the town of Weathersfield, founded the church society, which later was to be transferred to Newark. This city's original church organization, the First Presbyterian as it is known to-day, is therefore about twenty years older than the city itself. .
EARLY EFFORTS FOR A NEW SETTLEMENT.
As early as 1661, five years before the actual removal from the New Haven region, and a year before the actual absorption of the colony in Connecticut, the leaders among those who were determined not to become part and parcel of the Connecticut commonwealth, were casting about for a place of settlement. In the old Dutch records of New Amsterdam for that year are found copies of letters written to Governor Peter Stuyvesant by a small committee of New Haven men, seeking terms and conditions under which they might take up land in that part of New Netherland that was very soon to be known as New Jersey. Among those who signed these letters were two of the most forceful of Newark's
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founders, Robert Treat and Jasper Crane. They even went to New Amsterdam and saw Stuyvesant, were pleasantly entertained by him and are believed to have visited the Achter Col in Stuy- vesant's barge and gazed upon the land that later was to become Newark.1
In all probability an agreement would have been arrived at in due process of time, but the sudden seizure of New Netherland by the English, in 1664, and the consequent collapse of Dutch sovereignty, made it necessary for the prospective colonizers to begin operations all over again and this time with their own race from across the seas.
The Puritans, especially those in Connecticut and New Haven colonies, had little affection for the Dutch. As early as 1640 a company of New Haven merchants had fitted out a ship and sent it to the Delaware to trade with the Indians and establish trading posts. The Dutch and Swedes, under the direction of the Dutch governor at New Amsterdam, confiscated their ship and goods, destroyed their trading houses and threw them into prison. Nine years later, members of New Haven Colony resolved to set up plantations upon Delaware Bay in the neighborhood of their pre- vious operations. Again a ship was equipped, but it lingered off New Amsterdam, and the energetic Stuyvesant, being apprised of the Puritans' designs upon the Delaware, placed his heavy official hand upon the ship, its papers and crew. He told the ship's com- pany if they did not go back to their homes he would send them to the Netherlands as prisoners if he found any of them on the Delaware. If they resisted arrest there, he told them he would fight them to the last extremity-and they knew he meant it.
Thus this expedition was thwarted. The New Haven Colony was ready to take extreme measures to support its merchants in their claims to land upon the Delaware, if the other New England colonies would unite with them. This the sister colonies refused to do. The merchants' rights to Delaware lands were based upon
' Miss Gall Treat's paper on Robert Treat, read at unveiling of Treat tablet In First Presbyterian Church, Newark, November 4th, 1912.
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a purchase for thirty pounds stirling of large tracts on either side of the river from an English company called the New Albion Com- pany, whose principal, Lord Ploydon, or Ploeydon, claimed to have received a grant from King James the First of the greater part of the territory between Maryland and New England. The Dutch, of course, refused to acknowledge the authority of King James or any other English monarch to the partition of what they believed to be their property by right of Henry Hudson's discovery.
For a time the New Haven merchants despaired of re-estab- lishing their plantations on the Delaware, and it was while they were in a state of quiesence that the colonization movement, which resulted in the actual foundation of Newark, was incubating.
ENGLISH CONQUEST OF DUTCH TERRITORY.
As soon as the English had captured New Amsterdam the whole territory between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers fell into England's hands with no serious resistance, and Colonel Richard Nicholls, previously equipped with the necessary credentials by King Charles II, at the instance of James, Duke of York, became its governor in place of the doughty old Stuyvesant. The English had long claimed the ownership of New Netherland, by the right of discovery of the mainland of North America by John and Sebas- tian Cabot, sailing under the English flag, in 1497 and 1498. The Dutch were well aware of these claims, which may account in some small measure for their failure to colonize New Jersey more exten- sively than they did, fearing perhaps that some day the English might prove powerful enough to enforce the shadowy claims derived from the coastwise cruises of the Cabots.
Whatever we may think of the methods taken by England to possess itself of New Netherland, the virtual end of Dutch rule here marks the beginning of the real development of this wonder- ful country which we now so proudly call New Jersey. King Charles II gave New Netherland, the land between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers, including certain territories on Long Island, to his brother, James, Duke of York. In fact this grant was made
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while the Dutch were still in possession, and Colonel Nicholls was sent out by the Duke to clear the Dutch from his new possessions. While Nicholls' fleet was still on the sea, the Duke executed deeds of lease and release to two of the staunchest defenders of the crown, Lord John Berkeley, Baron of Stratton, and Sir George Carteret of Saltrum in Devon, of all New Jersey, including Staten Island. It was named Nova Caesarea, or New Jersey, since the ancient name of the island of Jersey was Caesarea, and it was the valorous defense of this island against the forces of Parliament in the time of Cromwell that had won for Carteret his high favor with the Duke of York and his brother, the King.
NEW JERSEY AS THE ENGLISH FOUND IT.
But their new possessions were of little value to the two noble- men, as the land then lay ; a fringe of Dutch farms and bouweries along the west bank of the lower Hudson and on Staten Island, a sprinkling of houses along the Passaic and Hackensack valleys, small settlements of Dutch and Swedes on the Delaware, and the great wilderness between, peopled by perhaps two thousand sav- ages. If the Dutch had made little out of these "talents," the two new English owners did not propose to let them remain as it were, "wrapped in a napkin."
THE LORDS PROPRIETORS' "CONCESSIONS."
They must have colonists, and they set about with ingenuity and cleverness to get them. They undoubtedly knew of the troubled conditions in some of the New England settlements, especially of the situation in the recently absorbed New Haven Colony and while they zealously sought colonists at home they also proceeded to make known to the Puritans and others in their country what they had to offer in the way of settling places, what they would take for them, and what restrictions would be put upon the holdings. They did this by means of a printed announcement, whose title was: "The Concession and Agreement of the Lords Proprietors of the Province of New Caesarea or New Jersey, to and with all and every of the Adventurers and all such as shall settle and plant there."
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These Concessions mark the opening of the first era of progress and prosperity in New Jersey. They were fair, for the times, and frank on the face, and the people saw in them something of that which we of to-day are fond of calling the "square deal." The "Concessions" were the constitution upon which the new govern- ment was to be built up and were considered by the settlers as the virtual charter of their liberties, standing over and above all acts of the assembly which were subject to repeal and amendment while the "Concessions" were supposed to remain unchangeable. Unhappily, the "Concessions" did not prove so inviolable as the first settlers hoped.
THE FORM OF GOVERNMENT.
Under the "Concessions" the new province was to have a Gov- nor and a Governor's Council of not less than six nor more than twelve, selected by the Governor; there was also to be an Assembly of twelve, chosen each year by the freemen of the province. The nominating, commissioning and removing of officers was given over to the Governor and his Council. But they were to appoint only freeholders unless the Assembly agreed to the appointment of others. The Governor and Council were to have general supervision over the courts and over all those who were to see to the enforce- ment of the laws of the Province. The Assembly's consent had to be obtained before any tax could be levied upon the people.
FUNCTIONS OF THE ASSEMBLY.
The Assembly, under the "Concessions," was empowered "to pass laws for the good government of the Province, which, with the approbation of the Governor, were to remain in force for one year within which time they were to be submitted for the approval of the Lords Proprietors; to levy taxes, to create ports, to build forts, to raise militia, to suppress rebellion, and make war, to naturalize strangers, and to apportion lands to settlers. Should occasion require, communication could be made by the representa- tives, touching the conduct of the Governor and Council, or any other grievance, directly to the Lords Proprietors." 2
2 Whitehead's "East Jersey Under the Proprietors."
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INDUCEMENTS OFFERED SETTLERS.
Special encouragement was offered to those who should embark with the first governor on the new venture, or meet him on his arrival. General directions as to how towns and boroughs should be laid out were given, and care was to be taken to see that each settler received clear title to his land and was protected in that title. For every acre of land the owner was to pay a half-penny yearly, as quit-rent, but this was not to go into effect until 1670. All settlers who became subjects of England, swearing allegiance to the King and fidelity to the Lords Proprietors, were assured of the full right to liberty of conscience, so long as that liberty was not used "to licentiousness, to the civil injury or outward disturb- ance of others." While the assembly of the Province was to be permitted to appoint as many ministers of the Gospel as it saw fit, and provide out of the general funds for their support (meaning, of course, clergymen of the Established Church of England), groups of settlers might maintain such ministers as they preferred.
It is plain enough from the above summary of the "Conces- sions," that the New Haven men who were now shortly to found Newark under this new government were to set up the last Puritan theocracy under far less favorable conditions than they had known in New England. There they had been surrounded with those of their own religious belief and under a government of their own making. Here they were to share the right to exercise the liberty of conscience with all other decent folk, subject to the whims of that very government from whose tyranny they had fled.
The Lords Proprietors believed themselves not only in absolute possession of the land, but clothed with all authority necessary for the conduct of government. They were not given governmental power by the Duke of York, specifically, although by implication, and it is certain that James never intended that they should exer- cise it to the extent they did. Why he failed to take it from them (and indeed it is believed by many students that it was not possible in law for him to have given it to them anyway) does not appear. A few years after the English conquest of New Nether-
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land the Dutch recaptured it, in 1673, soon after ceding it to Eng- land. The capture by the Dutch wiped out all title to the land held by Berkeley's successors and Carteret. James thus had an excellent opportunity to expunge the clause that gave them this power by implication, in the new patent he gave them. But he did not do this.
THE TROUBLE-MAKING NICHOLLS GRANTS.
Five years before the Dutch reconquest, Governor Nicholls had returned to England and had told James of the richness of his territory and of that which the latter had ceded to Berkeley and Carteret. Indeed, Nicholls when originally sent out to drive the Dutch from New Netherland had been given no intimation by his noble superior, but what the latter intended to retain the entire region for himself ; and soon after his arrival on Manhattan Nicholls had issued a grant for two large and exceedingly valuable tracts in what is now New Jersey, to a few families of English from Long Island, known as the Monmouth and the Elizabethtown purchases.
When the representatives of Berkeley and Carteret arrived they objected to this disposition of part of their land, and a mighty controversy arose, which was not entirely settled at the outbreak of the War for Independence. There was great difficulty in clearing up and properly adjusting the titles to the land as a result of insufficient care in the very beginnings of New Jersey.
THE DUKE OF YORK ANNEXES STATEN ISLAND.
That James, Duke of York, regretted his concession of such a splendid property to Berkeley and Carteret we well know by one transaction, if by no other evidence. At the time of Governor Nicholls' visit to England, in 1668, James withdrew Staten Island from New Jersey, giving as his reason that it was really a part of his own Province, of New York, since "one arm of the Hudson river flowed around it."
All that the Duke required of the two old cavaliers in return for New Jersey was the payment of ten shillings, a rent of one peppercorn for the first year and a rent of 40 nobles annually thereafter "if required."
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After a time the two original proprietors, first Berkeley and later Carteret, disposed of their rights to others. Presently there were two groups of proprietors, one for East and the other for West Jersey. Later the proprietary rights became so involved and inconvenient to handle, and the proprietors so many, while the governmental power was seen to more and more clearly devolve upon the crown, that the proprietors were glad to surrender their rights, in 1702.
THE THREE EPOCHS OF ENGLISH GOVERNMENT IN NEW JERSEY.
English government in New Jersey falls logically into three periods: Government of all the territory by one group of pro- prietors, 1664-1674; by two groups, 1674-1702; and by the crown, 1702-1776. The Colony was divided into East and West Jersey, under what is known as the Quintipartite Deed, July 1, 1676.
It has been necessary to outline the conditions prevailing in New Jersey when the makers of Newark sought asylum in it, both because a clear understanding of the town's establishment and early days can not be gained without it, and because the founding of Newark was practically coincidental with the creation of the Province. New Jersey and Newark began within a year of each other.
CHAPTER IV. PREPARATIONS FOR THE SETTLEMENT.
CHAPTER IV.
PREPARATIONS FOR THE SETTLEMENT.
T HE first governor of New Jersey, Philip Carteret, a fourth cousin of the Lord Proprietor of that name, arrived in August, 1665, with a considerable company. He established himself at Elizabethtown, where he found a few settlers already on the ground, holding a grant for the territory from Governor Nicholls of New York, reference to which was made near the close of the last chapter. Although claiming full title to the land as representative of Lords Berkeley and Carteret, as soon as he found that title in dispute and the claims of those on the ground sus- tained by Governor Nicholls, Philip Carteret decided to lose no time in controversy, little dreaming of the long-drawn-out wrangle that was to follow. He took up land at Elizabethtown as one of the party there before him, as an individual settler, his companions doing likewise. These preliminaries disposed of, the governor despatched his agents into New England with copies of the "Grants and Concessions" already described.
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