USA > New Jersey > Scheyichbi and the strand : or, early days along the Delaware ; with an account of recent events at Sea Grove ; containing sketches of the romantic adventures of the pioneer colonists ; the wonderful origin of American society and civilization > Part 7
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The "holy experiment" had been established, and thus far was success- ful ; troubles and trials came at length, but new precedents met novel emergencies, and staid historians who describe the time break forth
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in poetic rhapsody to tell of the happiness of the people. "The people rejoiced under the reign of God." "Everything went well in West New Jersey."
Meantime, the trustees of Sir George Carteret grew tired of Colonial burdens and trials without return, and proposed the sale of East New Jersey. The estate was purchased by William Penn and eleven others, the first and second days of February, 1682, for three thousand four hundred pounds ; possession was taken in November, 1682, by Deputy Governor Thomas Rudyard, for the Association. New Jersey was now entirely in the possession of Friends, but in East Jersey were found a large number of "sober professing people" of the Calvinist persuasion, and sound policy seemed to require a more varied board of propri- etaries. Accordingly, each Friend selected a partner, and, to the twenty-four, a new patent was issued by the Duke of York. The King also confirmed all the transactions by declaration in November, 1683. The partners were not all Quakers, but one of them, who was a Friend, the able Robert Barclay, of Urie, Scotland, was made Governor, and afterwards became Governor for life.
While important events thus followed each other in New Jersey, William Penn secured his grant of Pennsylvania, and, late in the autumn of 1682, he held a meeting at Shackamaxon to which the Indians of Pennsylvania were invited, and where the spirit moved Penn to preach a Quaker sermon,-the same gospel George Fox announced to Cromwell, and which Mary Fisher delivered among the armies of the Turks and bore to the Sultan, "Commander of the Faithful." "We are all one flesh and blood," said Penn. "We will live in love with William Penn and his children as long as the moon and the sun shall endure," answered the " savages;" and they kept their word, and long treasured the tradition of that day's speech from Onias, the great Father of the Quekels. Says Bancroft, "Not a drop of Quaker blood was ever shed by an Indian."
But the affairs of Pennsylvania became too vast for personal super- intendence, and the agents of Penn in the purchase of lands, in making of treaties, often forgot his gospel and disregarded the wishes of his gentle soul. In time "the world's people" rolled in on Pennsylvania like a flood; professing obedience to Biblical law, and denouncing "vengeance on the heathen," they themselves selfishly trampled on all law, human and divine, and, under the hypocrite's cloak of zeal for the glory of God, defied the rights of Penn and his assigns, overrode the laws of the Province, intruded without warrant upon the lands of the tribes, and imbrued their hands in the blood of the Indian with every circumstance of base atrocity, even to those who knelt at the name of Jesus and shared with the Moravian saints the bread and wine of the Christian Sacrament. In 1682, Penn promised the Indians, " No advan- tage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be openness and love."
BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF SEA GROVE. FROM THE OCEAN. I876.
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THE CRUEL POLICY OF THE STUARTS.
In 1685, the agents of Penn shamefully defrauded the tribes of their lands to the Susquehanna, and, in 1764, John and Richard Penn, the sons of " Father Onias," sanctioned Lieutenant-Governor Cadwallader's offer of one hundred and fifty dollars for the scalp of an Indian, and one hundred and thirty-four dollars for scalps which bore the hair of a squaw! The Pennsylvania Quakers, many of them, labored faithfully and not in vain in the cause of justice and mercy, as they had light, but the student who seeks the logical issue of the principles of Fox and Penn starts back in grief and horror from the blood-stained soil of Pennsylvania, to follow the record of events east of the Delaware.
Theological predestination means political democracy. Quakerism is the democracy intended, and yet predestination alone separates the Friend and the Calvinist. "The nearer the relation, the worse the quarrel," and in all the weary years, from George Fox, in 1649, to the death of Charles II., in 1685, Presbyterians in England were the perse- cutors of Friends ; and in Massachusetts the Puritans ordered that the ears of the Quakers be cut off, and their tongues bored with a red-hot iron. They were Calvinists who, in Boston, in 1659, put Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson, and William Leddra to death on the gallows for preaching Quakerism in Massachusetts, and hung Mary Dyar on Boston Common, the same year, for the same offense !
Cromwell died, the Stuarts were restored, Charles II. reigned for the quarter of a century; the zealous fanaticism of the Calvinist Round- heads was succeeded by the superstition of the divine right of kings, the last deepened by the excesses of the first. Monarchy was absolute in church and state in the last days of Charles II., "Independents" were marked for destruction, and " Presbyterians,"-they who since the time of Edward VI. had originated each struggle for popular freedom, they who always dreamed of republics, whose creed taught insubordination as a dogma,-what had they to expect? It was in Scotland that the policy of the Stuarts bore its ripest fruit ; there the crime of Cromwell in the execution of King Charles I. was ten thousand times revenged. Of the Cameronians, of the Covenanters, of the Scottish Presbyterians, what can be said? Nothing exceeded the cruelty, the brutality, the mad, exterminating barbarity visited upon them, except, forever, the fortitude with which they confronted those who slew them! The magistrates of Boston, in 1659, were tender nursing mothers-angels of mercy-compared to Claverhouse and Lauderdale and Jeffreys, the minions of episcopacy and the king.
Atrocity incited insurrection, but the adherents of Monmouth were borne down, and the penalties of treason superadded to the inflictions of persecution. All who had ever communed with rebels were con- demned; twenty thousand lives awaited the executioner, safe only in the forbearance of the informers. In the name of law, the common dragoons, the rank and file of the soldiery, were made magistrates and
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judges over families of rank and wealth and women of culture, as well as the peasantry of the mountains. The discretion of the ruffians themselves furnished the instructions of this banditti, but royal mercy moderated their rigor. Summary murder was forbidden, and women were to be allowed to die without dishonor; no other restriction was imposed. To whom, among the bloodhounds of vengance, should a maiden make her complaint of outrage, and when have the dead returned to convict their assassins ?
There was not room in jail for all the Covenanters; the prisoners were sold into plantation slavery, and the price of blood shared by royal favorites. Presbyterians were hunted like vermin, with dogs and guns, by mounted men led on by swarming spies; it was death to house them, death to throw them bread, death to listen to complaints of theirs ; did a wife, a husband, a father, a child, a parent, comfort their own kind, death was the doom of both the sufferer and the friend. It was more than human nature could endure, and the bewildered, de- spairing victims of an infernal crusade turned at bay and threatened retaliation. Such is the courage of the hunted, bleating ewe, when bloody wolves rage round the mangled flock. The threat of resistance was answered by the order for massacre. As they labored, as they prayed, as they journeyed, as they fled, the Covenanters were shot down; their estates were plundered, their houses burned, their families hurried away to distant colonies.
James II. came to the throne; he only added the aggravation of a delusive pretense of clemency to the miseries of the people. The victims of cruelty sought in flight safety from death; every day com- panies of fugitives were arrested by the troops ; juries of soldiers trying them beside the highways, they were condemned in a body and shot in heaps together. Beside the sea women were tied to stakes at ebb of tide, far out upon the strand; the pitiless tide returned by slow degrees, and, mocked by the ribaldry of the troops, who laughed at the amusing spectacle, they were gradually and agonizingly drowned. The dungeons were crowded with men; for food, for water, for air, they prayed in vain; starved, choked with thirst, or suffocated, they died in breathless torture. But the Government of England was not merciless. When the dungeons would hold no more, living or dead; when the assassin tired of murder ; when only suspicion indicated a victim ; when a whim suggested forbearance, then shipload after shipload, in crowds the wretched, plundered, ill-provided exiles were sold and exported to America. Still monarchy and episcopacy laid their hands upon them as they left their native land; some of the men were allowed to retain a single ear, but others were deprived of both, while upon the cheeks of fair women and matrons the branding-iron was often deeply set, while a royal mandate crossed the Atlantic to forbid mercy or mitigation of their slavery.
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THE TEACHING OF THE INWARD LIGHT.
Now how might the Quaker exult in his happy home between the Delaware and the sea, and, secure in the immunities of his own freedom, reflect that the Lord had revenged his wrongs upon those who had joined with the multitude to do him evil ! Had the FRIEND been other than " friendly," now was the time to satiate his malice, for the groans of his tormentors were in his ears, his eyes witnessed the full measure of their suffering.
But what revenge may men take to whom the INWARD LIGHT dic- tates a rule of action ? During the reign of Charles II., James, then Duke of York, was the friend of Admiral Penn, and, just before the admiral's death, pledged him the same regard for William Penn, his son. When the duke came to the throne as James II., William Penn had great influence. The king, a bigoted Roman Catholic himself, stood in need of toleration in England, where the Established Church, though persecuting the Covenanters to the death, hated Romanism more. The Papist king persecuted Protestant dissenters to win the political favor of the Church of England. The plea of Penn was for toleration, not for himself alone, but for all; he averted persecution from Roman Catholics on the one hand, and restrained as far as in him lay the storm of rage which overwhelmed the Presbyterians. He was accused of Jesuitism, popery, and treason in consequence, and, though disproving every charge, became suspected by men of all parties be- cause he was active in defense of the common rights of each.
When Penn moved in the purchase of New Jersey, it was not merely as an asylum for Friends, but to provide a home for all who suffered for conscience. No sooner was New Jersey under Quaker control than a fair and reasonable description of it was published, and an account of its free and tolerant institutions forwarded therewith to Scotland. The Quaker founded a State in freedom, and made it the home and asylum of those who had deprived him of liberty and life. And this was the revenge of the men with broad-brimmed hats, who " theed and thoud" alike the plowboy and the monarch. To be true to principle regardless of persons, to resist not evil, but return good for evil,-such has been the teaching of the INWARD LIGHT. In Judea or New Jersey the gospel was the same: "Do good unto them who despitefully use you." Well had the Quaker heeded the teacher, and well had he comprehended the lesson !
Convinced of the purpose of the Government of England "to sup- press Presbyterian principles altogether," and perceiving that "the whole force of the law of this kingdom is (was) leveled at the effectual bearing them down," the ruined Scotch Presbyterians, in whose souls a sense of duty to God forbade conformity to human assumptions, were ready, as soon as the way opened, to abandon even "bonnie Scotland," since apostasy alone could ransom their lives in their native land. A number of Scottish Covenanters arrived in East Jersey in 1682.
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SCHEYICHBI AND THE STRAND.
George Scot, of Pitlochie, was a leader among the emigrants. " A re- treat, where by law a toleration is allowed," said he to his neighbors and fellow-suffering countrymen, " doth at present offer itself in Amer- ica, and is no where else to be found in his Majesty's dominions." To America, to East New Jersey, came George Scot and family, and about two hundred others, in 1685. During the following year, after the Duke of Argyle had been put to death under mere pretense of law, Lord Neill Campbell, the brother of the murdered nobleman, be- came, by purchase from Sir George Mackenzie, one of the Proprietors of East New Jersey. Lord Campbell sent over a large number of set- tlers, and, coming himself for a time, acted for some months as the Chief Magistrate. Lord Campbell was succeeded in office by Alex- ander Hamilton; the power of the Proprietaries was inconsiderable. Monarchy had no call to the New World, there it existed only by its feudal shadaw; feudalism was already outworn in Europe, and of the outworn shadow Proprietary Government "was that shadow's shade."
But what need of thrones, of nobles, of titles, of cumbrous institu- tions to this people? They who held themselves as sons of God, co- heirs with Christ; whose glory was foreordained in the eternal coun- cils of the Almighty, and their names written in the " Lamb's Book of Life," from the foundation of the world-the elect, the redeemed, the sanctified, the persevering saints; the children of the COVENANT! Virtue, education, courage, experience, they had them all; religion in- spired them, the love of liberty controlled them ; nature gave them the harbors of Scotland, the fertility of England, and the climate of France ; with the forests, the game, the fish, the fruits, and the freedom of America, beside the " curious clear water" which flowed in abun- dant brooks and rivulets along the healthful vales of New Jersey. The ocean rolled between them and persecution, between them and every hostile tribe abode peaceful Quakers, who practiced a blessed white magic upon the wildmen, and transformed them to philanthropists. There was a world of room, great flocks of sheep pastured beside the roads of imperial width, and troops of horses fit to mount the squad- rons of a king bred and multiplied uncared for in the woods. Not thus grew the many children of the Scottish Calvinists, as in New England free schools were soon provided for, and education and moral training cared for the coming generation.
Indians, Puritans, Quakers, and Covenanters held in peace and uni- versal prosperity the soil of New Jersey. Toleration is a narrow word: they met on the broad platform of equal rights, of judgment, and mutual union for the common weal and wealth. America welcomed every sect, predominant bigotry became impossible. The pioneers of New Jersey were strong souls with varied thoughts; there moderate counsel has prevailed, and seeking to preserve the rights of each, the
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PRIMITIVE GOVERNMENT IN NEW JERSEY.
people have maintained the noblest freedom, and fostered the prosperity and happiness of all.
James II., fickle and inconsistent in everything but personal selfish- ness and the greed for arbitrary power, had no sooner reached the throne than he undertook to make the colonies " more dependent." In New York the honest advice of Penn, which was demanded in 1682 by the duke, won for that State her "charter of liberties," but James, as king, trampled upon his engagements as duke; tyranny returned in New York, and the Proprietaries of New Jersey were compelled to surrender their rights of jurisdiction. Sovereignty over New Jersey was merged in the crown in 1688. For three years after 1689 East New Jersey had "no government whatever." For twelve years the whole of the province was without settled administra- tion or recognized Governors. The Proprietors, anxious to preserve the forms of law, tried in vain to exercise a power they had renounced, but, divided among themselves, they but divided the people, the courts and the records shared the confusion, politicians pushed their disagree- ments, but the virtue of the people preserved society.
The crimes of James II. against the Dissenters failed to secure for him, as a Papist monarch, the alliance of the Church of England; in revenge, he proclaimed equal franchises to every sect ; toleration was to weaken the episcopacy, and reconcile the English to Rome; it brought William of Orange to the throne of Britain, in 1688, and drove James II. into poverty and exile. The advent of William was a great revolution in England : it secured toleration for all Protestants, and established the rights of the subject on the basis of English law.
When, in 1702, Queen Anne came to reign, matters in New Jersey were still unsettled, the law officers of the crown questioned the selfish arrangements of those who had for gain bought out original Proprie- taries, and Parliament threatened interference in a province " where no regular government had ever been established." The Proprietaries, to avoid litigation which might have endangered their ownership of land as well as their pretended rights as Governors, surrendered their claims to jurisdiction, unreservedly, before the Privy Council of England, April 17, 1702. As simple owners of land, the Proprietaries managed to retain their full rights, and became merged in the landholders of the province, their titles descending unimpaired to their assigns and heirs. After the surrender of the Proprietary, the whole of New Jersey was governed by a royal Governor, it never again obtained a charter ; power was monopolized by officers under royal instructions, and toleration denied Papists ; "no printing-press might be kept," or any publication made without license ; meantime, the traffic " in merchantable negroes " was stimulated by every means in the power of the provincial govern- ment, under instructions from the throne. Thus the power of monarchy found the refugees in the forest; but Quakers, Puritans, and Presby-
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terians united in a stubborn, able, and yet orderly struggle for former freedom. Peacefully but sternly the debate had begun, to end in making New Jersey a sovereign state, in an independent confederacy.
The disputes as to jurisdiction, titles, etc., between the Duke of York and the proprietors of West Jersey-the trustees of Edward Byllinge- were decided by Sir William Jones, in 1680, in favor of the proprietors ; but the duke, in his new patent, unwarrantably made Byllinge heredi- tary Governor. The nomination was unprovided for in the constitution of West Jersey, but to avoid further trouble a precedent was made, and Byllinge elected; he, however, continued in London, having little in- fluence in the province.
In 1687, Byllinge died, and Doctor Daniel Coxe, of London, him- self a principal West Jersey proprietor, bought the claims of the heirs of the Governor, and undertook to organize a government, by adopting the constitution of England in place of the original Quaker Conces- sions. Near Town Bank, Cape May, on Coxehall Creek, Dr. Coxe built " Coxe Hall" for a residence ; on the draft of a primitive survey, made in 1691, the edifice appears, adorned with a tower or spire, quite in contrast with the original cluster of whalemen's cottages, not far away. The above-mentioned survey was made by John Worlidge and John Budd, who, coming down from Burlington, laid off ninety-five thousand acres of land in Cape May County for Dr. Coxe. The people were not inclined to co-operate with the new Governor in his designs, and he labored in vain to establish the feudalism of England on the shores of the Delaware; still he continued to speculate in Indian lands, and a few of the original settlers of Cape May secured their estates directly from his agents.
Dr. Coxe was a man of vast enterprise and unbounded yet not un- reasonable ambition, and was concerned in the attempt to found an English province in Louisiana, which was rendered futile by French pre-occupation. In 1692, the "West Jersey Society," an organization of forty-eight persons combined for the purpose, bought of Dr. Coxe, on the 20th of January, the whole of his claims to lands and jurisdic- tion, paying therefor the sum of nine thousand pounds sterling. The Society put their newly acquired lands in market, in tracts to suit, at moderate rates, much to the public benefit ; as they sold in fee simple, independent landlords and small farmers became numerous, and the foundation of a democratic state was laid in a freeholding population.
§ Prominent in geographical position, remarkable in its natural feat- ures, and especially fortunate in climate, Cape May attracted the notice of the earliest navigators of the adjacent seas, and was soon celebrated by the explorer and naturalist. In 1641, the site of Sea Grove or its vicinity was referred to as a promontory, and Campanius wrote of dangerous shoals off Cape May, no longer in existence. Whatever improvements natural causes have made in the mouth of the Delaware, the sands have
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EARLY HISTORY OF CAPE MAY.
been piled over against Henlopen, and with the shoals have gone the dunes, or beaches, which made the point a promontory.
The historian of Cape May finds no records of white men before 1685; then Caleb Carman was appointed Justice of the Peace, and Jonathan Pyne made Constable by the Assembly of New Jersey, thus indicating a pre-existing population. Cape May was cut off from the north by vast, dense, impassable cedar-swamps, extending from the sea-shore to the bay, and must, in prehistoric days, have been a wild and almost inaccessible place. The earliest known inhabitants of Cape May were, of course, Indians, and, according to Captain Samuel Argall, in 1610 they were numerous. As a fishing station, the cape may have been occupied at any time for the last three hundred years, and the pirate and slave-hunter preceded even the fishermen.
The history of the Delaware valley indicates clearly that the first residents of Cape May were refugees,-persons who, to escape servi- tude, oppression, or debt, domiciled in the wilderness. The Swedes, who sometimes visited the cape for eggs and to kill geese, solely for their feathers, had in their colony men bound to penal slavery ; some of them became fugitives among the Indians. When, in 1642, the New Haven colony on Varcken's Kill was broken up, some of its members remained on the Delaware, and subsequently New England vessels harbored at Cape May, fishing and trading for furs,-an illicit business for them in the judgment of the Dutch and Swedes. One such vessel was robbed and her crew murdered by the Nanticokes, near Swaanen- dael, in the spring of 1644. She had spent the winter at Cape May, and went over for beaver-skins. From New Sweden, from New Am- stel, from the colony at the Horekill, as may be recalled, varied causes at different times scattered the people; most of them fled to Maryland, many crossed into New Jersey, and some, doubtless, reached Cape May.
In his "Early History of Cape May County," Maurice Beesley, M.D., referring to the probabilities of prehistoric settlement, writes : "It would seem probable, inasmuch as many of the old Swedish names as recorded in Campanius, from Rudman, are still to be found in Cumberland and Cape May, that some of the veritable Swedes of Tinicum or Christiana might have strayed or have been driven to our shores. When the Dutch Governor, Stuyvesant, ascended the Dela- ware in 1654 (5), with his seven ships and seven hundred men, and sub- jected the Swedes to his dominion, it would be easy to imagine in their mortification and chagrin at a defeat so bloodless and unexpected, that many of them should fly from the arbitrary sway of their rulers, and seek an asylum where they could be free to act for themselves without restraint or coercion from the stubbornness of Mynheer, whose victory, though easily obtained, was permanent, as the provincial power of New Sweden had perished forever."
Pieter Heyser began whaling in Delaware Bay in 1630. When it
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SCHEYICHBI AND THE STRAND.
became a regular business at Town Bank is uncertain; there was a fisherman's colony there from New Haven and Long Island of consid- erable numbers, and living in houses, before 1691: outstaying the whales, they took up farms, resorted to other pursuits, made themselves homes, and founded some of the best families in New Jersey. The first account of a visit to Cape May was published in a " Description of New Albion," written by Sir Edmund Plowden, under the name of " Beauchamp Plantagenet," which appeared in London in 1648. Plow- den reproduced a letter from Lieutenant Robert Evelyn. " Master Evelyn" left England with an expedition for the Delaware in 1634, and probably made his exploration of the cape soon after. Others had observed Cape May,-Hudson in 1609; Argall, 1610; Cornelius Hen- dricksen, 1616; Dermer, 1619; Cornelius Jacobsen, May (1614?), 1620; Hossett and Heyes, 1630, and De Vries in 1631; besides a party of eight, sent to explore the bay, in 1632, by Governor Harvey, of Vir- ginia, who were killed by Indians.
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