USA > New Jersey > The New Jersey coast in three centuries; history of the New Jersey coast with genealogical and historic-biographical appendix, Vol. I > Part 10
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This answer was prepared by William Livingston and William Smith, Jr., who were counsel for the four hundred and forty-nine freeholders and inhabitants whose names it contained. Livingston was a law pupil of Al- exander, and although not then thirty years of age he had already at- tained a high position at the bar of New York. Smith was also a brilliant man, then almost twenty-three years of age. He was even then assisting in the preparation of the first digest of the colonial laws of New York, and he subsequently wrote a history of the province.
The "Answer to the Bill in Chancery" was read in town meeting August 27, 1751. Lewis Morris was Governor of the province at the time. He was clothed with chancery powers (irregularly, as asserted by some ), and he was a large property holder under proprietary title. For this reason he was viewed with distrust by the associates, but he was prevented from adjudicating the case, his death occurring before it was called. His successor, Jonathan Belcher, became a resident of Elizabeth Town before the "Answer" was framed, and he was so closely identified with the people in their resistance to the proprietors that his sense of propriety would not allow him to sit in the case. The French and Revolutionary wars soon
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followed, and in the awakening of new issues the Elizabeth Town land litigation was finally lost to sight.
Recurring to the "Bill in Chancery" and the "Answer" thereto, it remains to be said, with reference to the "Rioters" therein mentioned, that at various times, and particularly in 1747, people holding land titles under the Nicolls grant became deeply outraged by their inability to procure justice in the local and provincial courts, and in their embittered feeling they frequently undertook the defense of their rights, expelling proprie- tary tenants vi et armis from lands covered by the Nicolls grant. An in- stance is afforded by an affidavit made by Solomon Boyle, May 13, 1747, in which it is recited that the house of one Dalrymple was broken into by persons armed with clubs, who forcibly expelled him, with his wife and children, from the premises.
The interest of Lord Berkeley in the Jersey province was vested ill John Fenwick and Edward Billinge, who purchased it March 18, 1673, paying therefor one thousand pounds sterling. Both of the new owners were members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who sought to found an asylum for their oppressed brethren. Fenwick received the conveyance in trust for Edward Byllinge, and a dispute as to the terms having arisen, William Penn was called in as an arbitrator. He gave one-tenth of the province and a considerable sum of money to Fenwick, and the remainder of the territory was adjudged to be the property of Byllinge. Contentions as to territorial limits and gubernatorial jurisdic- tion soon arose, and by an "Indenture Quintipartite," executed July I, 1676, the province was divided into two parts, known, respectively, as East Jersey, which was left to Carteret, and West Jersey, which went to Berkeley's successors. The division line was designated as one straightly drawn from the most northerly point of the Duke of York's grant "unto the most southwardly point of the east side of Little Egg Harbor." Un- certainty with regard to the point on the Delaware river intended by the Duke of York to be the northernmost boundary of his grant gave rise to dispute not only between the respective proprietors of East Jersey and West Jersey, but also between the provinces off New Jersey and New York. George Keith ran a division line in 1687, which was accepted in the following year by Robert Barclay and Daniel Coxe, respectively Gov- ernor of East Jersey and West Jersey, but was not adopted by the proprie- tors. This line formed the southwestern boundary of Monmouth county, and is yet the southwestern boundary of Ocean county, with the exception that, in 1891, Little Egg Harbor became a part of the latter named. The proprietors subsequently (in 1743) repudiated this line and ran another,
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which bore farther westwardly, but the original line has been retained as a boundary by two different counties in the State.
There is no more overshadowing name in the early history of Western (and now! Southern) New Jersey than that of John Fenwick-a soldier, a lawyer, a preacher, a man of many parts. A victim to persecution, yet his name is held to the present day in reverence, and that, too, in places where the once mighty name of his great persecutor, Governor Andros, has been forgotten.
Fenwick was born at Stanton, Northumberland, England, in 1618, and was a lawyer by profession. When the civil war broke out, he threw in his lot with the Parliamentary forces and became a captain in a cavalry regiment. After peace was restored he resumed the even tenor of pro- fessional life until he embraced the principles of the Society of Friends, and then his life troubles commenced. He seems to have suffered im- prisonment for his religious views, and to have been molested even in the prosecution of his business. His condition, however, was no more than that of other members of the Society. Wherever they appeared they were made to feel the brunt of the law, and, as most of the early brethren were also preachers of the Word, it was an easy matter for the law to reach them.
The hope of the Quakers, as they were even then called, lay across the sea, but the news of the reception of the early missionaries in Boston, in 1656, showed that the Puritanism of New England was as bitterly op- posed to them as was the Puritanism of old England and, a year later, it seems that the Dutch Dictator in New Netherland was equally emphatic in his opposition. After the "Glorious Restoration" of King Charles in 1660, the Quakers in England fared a little better, but the Privy Council was an uncertain body, and there was no telling how soon an era of per- secution should begin. So the dream came of founding a settlement across the sea for the Society, such as the Puritans had founded in New England, only it should be a settlement where religious toleration should prevail in the widest sense --- a sense unknown in Massachusetts and Con- necticut, or even in Rhode Island.
When, in 1665, Lord Berkeley offered his West Jersey possessions for sale, Fenwick saw an opportunity for putting his theories into practice, and, with Edward Billinge, he formed what would now be called a syndi- cate, and acquired possession of the territory. The agreement was that Fenwick was to have one-tenth of the land, and he selected, as per deed, what is now the counties of Salem and Cumberland. So far as we can see he had little or no money to invest in the enterprise, but his influence in the Society was great, his own honesty of method and purpose were
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fully recognized, and he sold portions of his land readily to his fellow members and to intending colonists.
In 1675 the first colony reached the Delaware and included Fenwick, John Pledger, Samuel Nicolson, James Nevil, Edward, Robert and Samuel Wade, Robert Windham and Richard Hancock and their families, all people of excellent character. Fenwick's wife never crossed the Atlantic, but he brought with him three daughters-Elizabeth and her husband, John Adams, Anne, who soon after married Samuel Hedge, and Priscilla, who became the wife of Edward Champney. The party landed in De- cember, 1675, at a place now called Salem Creek, and some three miles in- land selected a site for a village, to which they gave the name of New Salem. It was an unfortunate selection, as may be judged from the pop- ular name the place received of "Swamp Town." Fenwick lost no time in making his preliminary arrangements. He held a council with the Indian chiefs who had any claim to the lands, and entered into a treaty with them, thereby securing the friendship of the red men, and he issued a proclamation ordaining that within the limits of his patent the most com- plete civil and religious liberty should be guaranteed to all settlers. Rich- ard Hancock, the surveyor of the colony, at once laid out the town of New Salem into lots, and there Fenwick built himself a house. To his daughter, Mrs. Adams, he gave a tract of two thousand acres of land, and to Priscilla, then Mrs. Champney, was given a similar stretch of terri- tory. To Elizabeth, who seems to have been his favorite, he gave a tract on her marriage to Samuel Hedge, and the property was long known as Hedgefield.
Having thus set his house in order, Fenwick proceeded to govern ac- cording to his light, but soon found that the bed of authority was not one of roses, and perplexities and troubles of all sorts gradually encom- passed him. By order of Governor Andros, Fenwick was arrested in his own house in the middle of the night, charged with infringing upon the dignity and prerogatives of that high and mighty individual, and carried to New York, where he suffered imprisonment for a time. Soon after his release he disposed of his territory and governing rights to William Penn, after reserving one hundred and fifty thousand acres for himself and family. By this act the whole of West Jersey passed under one gov- ernment, and, although Fenwick was elected a member of its Assembly, he seems to have taken little interest in public affairs. His spirit appears to have been crushed by the treatment he received at the hands of Andros, and he retired to the home of his daughter, Anne Hedge, and there he died, in 1683.
In February, 1682. East Jersey was purchased by William Penn and
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eleven other Quakers for three thousand four hundred pounds. The first Governor under the new proprietors was Robert Barclay, a Scotchman, and one of the twelve purchasers. But the number of proprietors, the fre- quent sub-divisions and transfers of shares, and various other difficul- ties in the way of good government, soon involved the province in trouble, and in 1702 all the proprietors surrendered the rights of govenment to the Crown.
In the Cape May region, the early settlers made payment for their lands to the Indians as well as to the proprietors (as was universally done throughout the province) and some were so careful as to make payment to the Indians even after they had derived proper proprietary title.
About 1690, and probably prior to that year, John Townsend settled near the present site of Ocean View, where he cleared land and built a cabin and a mill. His wife, Phoebe, was the first white woman buried in Upper township, Cape May county. Townsend was an Englishman who was banished from New York for harboring Quakers. His descendants are now very numerous.
Edward Billinge, one of the original proprietors, died in 1687, and his interest was purchased by Daniel Coxe, of London, England, who had already become a large proprietary owner. In 1691 John Worlidge and John Budd came from Burlington and laid a number of proprietary rights commencing at Cohansey, in Cumberland county, and going down to Cape May. They set off ninety thousand acres of land to Daniel Coxe, and this was the first proprietary survey made in the county. Daniel Coxe, who was physician to King Charles II and subsequently to Queen Anne, was exact in his dealings with the Indians ( from whom he made purchase after he had obtained proprietary rights from the Crown) and liberal with those who purchased lands from him, and he was never involved in any disputes with his associates as to the location of his surveys. Notwith- standing the vastness of his American possessions (which included large tracts in the Carolinas) and the fact that he was nominally governor of the province ( 1687-1691) he never visited the country. He finally became involved in difficulties with his agents and servants, and deter- mined upon making sale of his interests in Jersey. Accordingly, for a consideration of nine thousand pounds sterling, he made conveyance of nearly all his holdings and his governmental rights to the West Jersey Society, comprising forty-eight numbers, devising a portion to his son, Colonel Daniel Coxe, who came to Burlington in 1709. But few land titles had been made under the Coxe proprietorship, and the West Jersey Society accomplished the real settlement of the region through its sales, which extended over a period of sixty-four years.
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In 1713 David Jamison made a map of the county of Cape May, showing the Coxe surveys. From the same map and from a deed executed by Lewis Morris in 1706, it appears that a tract of three hundred acres. described as Egg Island, near the mouth of Maurice river, was laid off to Thomas Budd among the first surveys. Of this place Dr. Beesley wrote in 1857 that "Since this survey was made, the attrition of the waters has. «destroyed almost every vestige of it, scarcely enough remaining to mark the spot of its former magnitude."
In 1629, in the Cape May region, a tract of land sixteen miles square was purchased from nine Indian chiefs by Godyn and Bloemart, two di- rectors of the Dutch West India Company, and this is supposed to have been the first real estate transaction in what is now Cape May county.
Some Swedish settlers occupied a portion of the Cape May county between 1638 and 1654, and Swedish agents made a land purchase about. 1641. The Dutch, however, regained their supremacy, and the Swedes were absorbed by the English soon after the coming of the latter. Under the English proprietary rule, Daniel Coxe became the owner of a large portion of the territory, and the later titles were derived from him or through his assigns, the West Jersey Society.
CHAPTER VI.
COLONIAL GOVERNORS-SWEDISH, DUTCH AND ENGLISH.
The first white man who really exercised the authority of a ruling power over New Jersey was Peter Minuit, one of the most picturesque characters that the history of the New Netherland brings before us. He had one quality which few of his contemporaries and few of his official successors possessed, and that was honesty. Even the doughty Stuyvesant was not above reproach in this regard, if we may credit some of the stories which have come down to us, such as his deal with the ferry men on the North river. But, so far as record or traditions go, Peter Minuit never soiled his hands or laid his reputation open to attack by appropriating what was not his own to his own uses. Whatever he wanted he paid for ; like most of the Dutchmen associated with him, he drove a hard bargain, but when one was settled he met its requirements like a just man. He it was, for instance, who negotiated with the Indians for the sale of Manhattan Island, and settled with the redskins for acquiring that piece of property in exchange for goods worth somewhere about twenty-five dollars. He seems to have beat the red men down to the last bead-but when the bar- gain was concluded he was careful to see to it that even the last bead was handed over to the keeping of its new owners.
Peter Minuit was born in Wesel, Prussia, in 1580. He seems to have resided there until he had almost attained middle life, and to have reached the dignity of solid, sedate and successful citizenship, as is amply testified by the fact that he was chosen a lay officer in the local church. About 1620 he removed to Holland and engaged in business. He also by this move extended his reputation for business prudence, probity and success, and so in 1625, when the directors of the West India Company in Amster- dam desired to send out to their New Netherland possessions a man in whom they could repose implicit confidence, they selected Minuit. So he accepted the appointment, receiving almost unlimited governing powers, and was in fact the first real governor of the territory. He certainly ruled well. He laid the beginning of New Amsterdam, built a trading port
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there, extended its trading facilities, sent every ship that came to him back to Holland loaded with peltries and with valuable wood, kept the In- dians in good humor, and entered into a trading treaty with the Plymouth colony which helped along the business and promoted good feeling. Under him the population and the trade of the place steadily increased, and the directors in the homeland kept constantly asking for more, which he re- sponded to as far as possible. His success brought its own reward-envy. We need not go into details, which practically have little concern for 11s, but we are concerned with the result-the recall of Minuit in 1631 by the company-for that led to his work in New Jersey and on the shore of Delaware Bay.
Reaching Holland after an exciting voyage, and after being virtually detained a prisoner in Plymouth, England, Minuit tried to meet his tra- ducers and be reinstated in his position (a position which even then had not been filled) but he failed in both of these purposes. Disgusted with his treatment, he offered his services to the Swedish government, then smitten with the colonizing fever, and found immediate response. The charter of the Swedish West India Company, originally issued in 1623, was renewed, and in 1637 Minuit sailed away at the head of an expedition bound for the Delaware. This expedition purchased from the Indians the land from Cape Henlopen to the Falls at Trenton, built Fort Christiana, near the present city of Wilmington, and had trading posts at Swedes- borough and other places on the Jersey shore. The Dutch in New Am- sterdam protested against this movement and against Minuit's guberna- torial authority, but he kept in the even tenor of his way, and under him the Swedish possessions slowly but steadily increased in power, wealth and population, unmolested by any outside influence. New Sweden was a successful colony, envied in many respects, even by New Amsterdam, and affairs went well with it until Minuit's death in Fort Christiana, in 1641.
Even at the sacrifice of a little of that continuity which should be a principle of historical writing, we may here follow the story of the govern- ment of New Sweden after its founder and mainstay had passed away. Minuit was succeeded as governor by Peter Hollander. He seems to have been an enterprising sort of gentleman, liberal in his ideas, and an expan- sionists as far as territory was concerned, for he added considerably, on paper at least, to the dominions of New Sweden. But his reign only lasted for some eighteen months, and Colonel John Printz then assumed authority and maintained his high and honorable office for some thirteen years (1641-1654). These were not years of peace and quietness exactly, the claims of the Dutch and pretensions of the English affording consid-
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erable annoyance; but Printz was a statesman as well as a soldier, and under him New Sweden advanced with rapid strides in all material things. He welcomed many boatloads of new arrivals from Sweden; he held his own family well with the Indians, built trading posts wherever he felt the necessity of trade demanded it, and practically controlled the traffic on the Delaware River by his fortifications at its mouth. He won a monopoly of the Indian trade of the region, and sent to Sweden many rich cargoes of furs; but the trouble was, the more liberal the dividend the more anxious did the home authorities become for more. His great- est trouble was to keep within due limits the Dutch claims upon his baili- wick, and that duty kept him busy for some years. But the Dutch saw that he meant business from the time he tore down a placard bearing the arms of the States General on some land which had been bought by the authorities in New Amsterdam from the red men. Printz claimed that the land belonged to New Sweden, and trampled the emblem of Dutch sovereignity contemptuously under foot. Peter Stuyvesant, in 1648, even had to bow under the effects of his ire, for in that year he repulsed a force of Dutchmen that attempted to build a trading port on the Schuylkill, and he zealously watched the advances of even the individual Dutch traders in his domains, and burned or harried their posts without mercy. Even in the territory on the Schuylkill, which the Dutch claimed by right of purchase, he had a fortification erected, and there announced his defiance of their claims and his contempt for their authority. Even Stuyvesant found himself no match for such a man, and was glad in 1651 to journey from New Amsterdam to seek an audience with him, and to negotiate a treaty of peace and alliance, and to acknowledge the integrity of New Sweden. This treaty continued in full force until 1654, when Printz, for some reason not now very clear, returned to Sweden and gave up his colonial aspirations.
John Claesson Rising, a clerk in a commercial college at Stockholm was sent over in 1654 as Colonel Printz's successor, but the wily Stuy- vesant, who had been simply watching his opportunity, made short work of the question of sovereignty with him. Rising started in on his role as a ruler with considerable vim, and would have none but Swedes on guard. He ignored the Printz-Stuyvesant treaty, expelled the Dutch from Fort Casimir, forced the Dutch colonists who desired to remain in New Sweden to take an oath of allegiance to his government; denied the English any rights at all in his territory, even the right of settlement, and concluded a new treaty with the Indians, whom he relied upon as his most effective aids should he ever be required to measure his strength with either Dutch or English. All this was more than Stuyvesant could stand, so he organ-
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ized an expedition in August, 1655, wended his way to New Sweden, and in a most summary fashion wiped it out, added this territory to that of the then High Mightinesses, required all who remained to take an oath of allegiance to the Dutch regime, and compelled those who did not to return to Europe. Rising returned to Stockholm with his aspirations of greatness shattered, and whatever notions he may have had of his own ability as a ruler sadly broken and shaken. A man who loses an empire is never regarded as an ornamental character, and although he offered heroically to lead a new expedition to the Delaware, and promised faith- fully on paper to recover what had been iost, the Swedish government re- fused to listen to him seriously, and so, bit by bit, he sank back into the obscurity out of which he was never worthy of being lifted, and we hear of him no more. New Sweden, too, passes from view as a geographical entity, and henceforth becomes simply a theme for diplomatic discussion between Holland and Sweden. But the settlers remained, and their de- scendants even to the present day remain, and the Swedish element has won for itself a grand name all along the Delaware for its share in the work of upbuilding the nation, in fighting for its liberty and its integrity, and in aiding in all pertaining to its development in agriculture and com- merce.
But we must return to the Dutch who, even in spite of the treaty of 1651, never fully gave up their claim that New Sweden was an integral part of the New Netherland.
We do not find that Wouter Van Twiller, who succeeded Peter Minuit as director of New Netherland, even bothered his head about New Jersey. He seemed to concentrate his thoughts in the opposite channel, and to have tried to extend his territory rather in the other direction, seemingly more anxious to acquire what is now Connecticut and make New Nether- land sovereign over all that country and up to the limit of the soil of the Plymouth colony. But Van Twiller as a ruler was a failure. He was a merchant rather than a statesman, and his main business in America was to add to his personal wealth. That he accomplished, and many a rich piece of farming land became his personal possession, and he waxed rich. Still, the colony increased in wealth and importance under his rule, al- though his government was carried on upon the lines of a merchant rather than those of a legislator. Had he been permitted to remain, he might have added to the colonial wealth as well as to the Van Twiller private purse, and extended his operations into New Jersey, which must have seemed at times an inviting field for his energy, as he surveyed the land- scape from the fort at New Amsterdam. It may be he intended to turn some day in that direction, and would have done so had he been permitted
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to bring his plans and meditations and schemes to full fruition in his own way.
But envious people regarded, Van Twiller's growing personal wealth with jealousy, and he was relieved of his power by their "High Mighti- nesses" in Holland, who, in 1638, sent William Kieft to rule in his stead. In estimating the value of Van Twiller's character and work in New Netherland, modern historians invariably color their views, sometimes unconsciously, from the pages of Washington Irving's "Knickerbocker," where the doughty Governor is handed down to posterity in a full-length picture, as it were, as "Walter the Doubter." But while the genius of Irving has thus, as it were, forced his view of Van Twiller, intended only as a caricature, into the pages of history, it should not be accepted above its historic worth, the worth of any piece of caricature, written or pictorial. There seems no doubt that Van Twiller was an able administrator, a man of considerable energy and firmness, and that his administration greatly added to the extent and value of the West India Company's property in New Netherland, while his own investments, however brought about, showed that he fully believed in its continued prosperity.
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