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 13
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American history. But even that war, brutal and far-reaching as it was, did not arouse excitement all through the Colonies. New York managed to keep clear of it, thanks to the influence of Sir William Johnston, which prevented the Six Nations from entering into any active share in Pontiac's conspiracy, and New Jersey knew nothing of it except from rumor. The enforcement of the navigation laws interfered with trade in the coast towns, but did not concern in the least the farmer of his fields, and even George Washington, in his retirement, wrote that year to a friend in Eng- land that affairs were so quiet in the Colonies that there was nothing to write about.
But in 1763 events were shaping themselves steadily to bring to the front, by the foremost of issues, the theory of separation from the Mother Country, and that, too, in the Mother Country itself. September 22, George Grenville, then at the head of the Whig ministry in England, after consultation with Lord North, directed one of his associates in the Cabinet to have the proper officials prepare "the draft of a bill to be presented to Parliament for extending the stamp duties to the Colonies." The meas- ure was prepared, accepted by Grenville, and on March 22, 1765, the bill was passed in Parliament. The provisions were to become effective in the following October. The news did not reach America until early in May, and with it came, unspoken, the decree of separation. While the act was pending, while its provisions were under discussion, warning enough had been sent across the sea from the Colonies as to the temper of the colonists and their position in the matter, but Grenville-the real originator of the independence of the colonies-was obstinate and foolish, his associates were hardly competent to act as country "squires," and the ministry which succeeded was, as a contemporary said," a collection of blind cats." As a result of the strong opposition, the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, but with a rider in the shape of a resolution declaring the full authority of Parliament over the Colonies, and in 1767 Charles Townsend introduced the Tea Act, and this, with such measures as the Mutiny Act, showed that Parliament, or the Ministry at its head, was determined on making the Colonies a source of supply to the British Treasury, and stripping the col- onists of every real vestige of political power. Grenville, in office or out of it, was fully informed of the crisis which his Stamp Act had aroused in America, but he had no thought except that all opposition could and should be ruthlessly crushed out. He went to his grave, in 1770, with that notion firmly impressed on his mind, and so was spared the pain of seeing the outcome of his taxation policy in the immortal Declaration of 1776 and the birth of a New Nation. 1
It was at the beginning of the crisis that William Franklin assumed
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the Governorship of New Jersey. Had he inherited any of the practical wisdom of his father he would have understood the people among whom his lot was cast a little better than he did ; as it was, he proved blinder than even those who; on the banks of the Thames, concocted measures for humiliating and plundering the colonists. A word of warning from him might have proved of great service in making the English government appreciate and weigh the sentiment of the colonists, but the warning was never given, seemingly because he saw no occasion for it. He had no toleration with rebellion, had no conception of any outcome of the popular discontent but submission, and seemed to be so toplofty in his own ideas of his personal greatness and the invulnerability of the regime he repre- sented, that he was disposed to treat with scant courtesy even such pro- tests as reached him in due form and after the usual process prescribed by law. Had he acted differently he would have left a more loveable memory in American history. It is not likely, however, that his position one way or other would have swayed events to any great extent. The march of progress was on; a link in the immutable chain of human events was being forged, and the inexorable finger of destiny kept pointing at the anvil until a treaty of peace was signed in 1783, and the colonies were declared free, independent, sovereign states, soon afterward to be welded into a nation.
But in 1763, when William Franklin assumed his Governorship, the hold of Great Britain upon the entire North American continent seemed stronger than ever it had been. The long struggle with France, with its wonderful story of intrigue, defeat, disaster, victory, romance, persever- ance, trickery and deceit, was over, and Britain was mistress of the con- tinent. France had ceded Canada, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton to the conqueror, and Louisiana to Spain, so she was bereft of all the possess- ions for the retention and extension of which she had so long struggled and to which she had devoted so vast a share of her national resources in blood and treasure and founded her aspirations for colonial greatness-for the development of a "New France" across the sea. The territory which she ceded to Spain was at the time an indefinable quantity, but it gave her even then the supremacy of the Gulf of Mexico, of the known course of the Mississippi, and of a territory most of which was untrodden by white men except a few missionaries and a handful of pioneers. Over that ter- ritory, or most of it, the red men alone held sway. Varied, rich and ex- tensive as the Spanish possessions were, they proved of little practical value to that country, even then in its decadence. Britain was mistress, although her actual settlements were confineil practically to a strip along
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the seaboard and the St. Lawrence. Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia touched the eastern bank of the Mississippi, the opposite bank belonged to Spain, and Spain even claimed and exercised sovereignty over the entire river. Florida, ceded to Great Britain in 1763 by Spain, was regarded simply as one vast and useless swamp. The northern boundary of Vir- ginia and the western boundary of Pennsylvania were practically on the frontier, although to the north of the one as far as Lake Superior and west of the other to the Mississippi extended an empire whose extent and re- sources and opportunities were supposed to be vast but were practically un- known. Roughly speaking, in what is now the United States the Mis- sissippi formed a dividing line between the Spanish and the British terri- tory when the peace of 1763 had eliminated the power of France. To Spain, its vast empire, whose western boundary was unknown, was but a negligible quantity and returned nothing substantial; it was hardly even used to any extent for colonizing. In the British portion it may be said that all west of latitude 82 degrees was almost equally unknown, but along the coast were thriving towns and settlements and colonies and com- monwealths, and from them colonizing parties and individual settlers were constantly setting forth, pressing yearly further and further west, fighting the red men and clearing the way for the teeming population which within a century was to build up in that territory great and prosperous cities and convert hunting grounds and deserts into fertile fields and thriving villages.
In the final struggle with France, the American colonies rendered splendid service to the Mother Country, and while the crown provided the colonial troops with arms, ammunition and provisions, the pay and clothing of the quota of men demanded from each Colony, as well as the expense of levying and drilling, were borne by their respective Colonies. William Pitt, the greatest of the premiers of Great Britain, to whose energy the termination of the French empire in America was due, promised that such charges would be refunded by Parliament, but the promise was never fulfilled.
But a wave of loyalty was then passing over the Colonies, and little was thought of the expense in view of the benefit to be secured by the suc- cess of the campaign against France. New Jersey was especially en- thusiastic. Her quota to the fighting forces should have been 500 men, but its extent was on the surface at least left to her own volition, and her Assembly responded by raising double that number, and maintaining that strength in 1758, 1759 and 1760, and in the two years following 600 men, besides a company of veterans which was retained for garrison duty. She paid a bounty of twelve pounds for recruits, built suitable barracks at
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Burlington, Trenton, New Brunswick, Perth Amboy and Elizabethtown, and carried on her share in the campaign at a cost to her treasury of something like two hundred thousand pounds. What a change within three or four years, when Governor Dinwiddie was praying for assistance from the Colonies in a previous campaign, and met with a faltering and unwilling and disheartening response. Even in the details of this story lay a significant lesson for the home Government and the Royal Governors, yet it passed unheeded.
But the French war was one in which the Colonists had a greater in- terest than they imagined. Not one of the single Colonies in 1760 was in complete accord with the mother country. There was in each some matter of policy or an impost which aroused and maintained a feeling of unrest and defiance, but, situated as they were, with Indians constantly reddening their frontiers and making forays on the older settlements; with the French blocking progress on the west and holding the St. Lawrence and all to the north of it, ready and alert to take every advantage to extend and strengthen its hold; with the carrying trade, the means of communica- tion and of commerce with the outer world, practically in the hands of the mother country; with jealousy and even dislike marking the inter- course, such as it was, between the scattered Colonies -- Colonies, seem- ingly, without any prospect of a community of interest-the only general feeling that existed, that of opposition to the policy of the mother country, not, it should be remarked, of opposition to the mother country itself, would never have culminated in open resistance and a demand for separa- tion. Parkman, in his volumes on "Montcalm and Wolfe," brings this out with unmistakable clearness when he says (Vol. I., Page 5) "If by dip- lomacy or war she (France) had preserved but the half, or less than half, of her American possessions, then ha barrier would have been set to the spread of the English speaking races, there would have been no Revolu- tionary War, and for a long time, at least, no independence."
The French war, too, proved an excellent training school for many of those who were afterward to practice the art of war in the holy cause of independence. There Washington and others became veteran soldiers, and there New Jersey's revolutionary hero, William Maxwell, prepared himself for the splendid service he rendered his country and his common- wealth when the time came to throw down the gauntlet, and deeds super- seded words, resolutions and petitions in the struggle with Great Britain.
When the French war terminated, as has been said, a wave of loyalty spread over the country, which it would have been well for her had Britain taken advantage of with any degree of statesmanship. The splendid help which the Colonies had rendered to the subjugation of France's New
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World Empire, its splendid fighting force, its freely voted supplies, esti- mated at £3,500,000, its privateers, which sailed on every sea and wiped cut the commerce of France, practically turned the fortunes of the war, and gave Great Britain her first real claim to the sovereignty of the seas, all demanded recognition, substantial recognition, and the recognition asked in America was simply the right to manage local affairs and taxa- tion.
But in Britain this loyalty, this service, this sacrifice, were all speedily forgotten; the wealth of the Colonies had been made apparent by the sac- rifices the colonists had so freely made, and the predominant idea among the statesmen in London was that America should be made to recoup the British Treasury for the outlay expended in the war, not alone this war in America but the war anywhere; that the American Colonies, in fact, should help pay the debts of the mother country. It was the old dream of getting gold from America, the dream which inspired the Spaniards to fit out the little fleet of Columbus, which aroused the cupidity of Pizarro, the fiendishness of Cortez, and which had animated DeSoto and most of the early discoverers. It was gold in the mines, in the temples, in the homes, on the persons of the people, they sought; gold was their ultimate, their real, and their sole object in crossing the sea, and some of them obtained it by fair means, but most of them by foul. America, to British statesman, was still a hunting place for gold, and they sought to obtain it, not by arms or direct spoliation; not by means of vulgar robbery and heartless murder as in Peru; but by the more genteel and modern method of stamps and taxes.
It was at the flood-tide of this wave of loyalty that William Franklin appeared in New Jersey, armed with his commission as Governor, and settled down at Trenton. The prevailing sentiment of loyalty in a great degree was emphasized by the news of the Indian outbreak under Pontiac, which Parkman has so graphically detailed in two of his monumental volumes on early American history. The extent of this outbreak-"con- spiracy," Parkman has called it-the reckless bravery of the Indians, the influence, audacity and skill of their leader, and the rumors of massacre, burnings and cruelties, created more alarm than any previous rising, all the more so because it was unexpected. With the passing of the French regime it was not anticipated that the Indians would dare attempt any movement in force against the Colonies.
The general alarm excited even New Jersey, although it had no ex- posed frontier like that of New York and of Pennsylvania, and Governor Franklin ordered the local militia to be in readiness. So far as the Prov- ince itself was concerned, the Indians gave little actual trouble, although,
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as a memorial to the Governor from the Assembly in 1764 said, "whether they (the Indians) had actually any design upon this Province or not, their hostilities in the neighborhood of our frontier, and, in one doubtful instance, over the line, were inducements to place a frontier guard of two hundred men for the winter past." The real battleground of the con- spiracy, however, was to be on the remote frontier of the settlements, and to aid him in the work of suppression, General Amherst, commanding the forces, asked for troops from the Colonies, the number from New Jersey being fixed at 600. Governor Franklin in a message to the As- sembly recommended that this quota he raised, but the legislature only agreed to furnish 200 men for local defense, contributing £10,000 for their support and equipment.
The trouble seems to have been the old colonial jealousy. It was thought by the New Jersey legislators, and not alone by them, that the trouble, while most visible along Lake Erie and the Ohio River, and although mainly menacing New York and Pennsylvania, was one in which the entire English population was concerned, and there was a feeling that New England was being permitted to escape what was felt to be its share of the burden and the sacrifice. In time the quota was agreed to, but only after a wrangle between the Governor and the Assembly in which the Council, virtually the Governor, used the executive power of veto and prorogation.
It does not seem that Franklin's behavior in this crisis added to his personal popularity. It was felt that he was simply an alien; that he was in the colony but not of it. At the same time the proceedings appeared to increase his own notions of his personal importance and magnify his ideas of the substantial nature of the power which he represented and the supremacy of his own prerogatives over the wishes and policies of the representatives chosen by the people and forming the General Assembly. He had one advantage-his position, his powers, his prerogatives were clear cut and distinct, and he had the authority of the home government and Parliament behind him, as well as the somewhat doubtful wisdom of the Lords of Trade, while the powers of the Assembly were at best ill- defined, and so muddled by parliamentary interference and gubernatorial weakness, or avarice, or impotency or craftiness, or all combined, as to be but little understood, or, even when understood, of but little value against the exercise of the executive power. On one point only was the voice of the Assembly potent, and that was in regard to the raising of money. The law that faced Franklin, as it faced all the Governors since the days of Carteret, declared illegal the imposition of "any tax, custom, subsidy. tollage, assessment or any duty whatsoever upon any color or pretense,
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how specious soever" without the consent of the General Assembly. Par- liament by an act of 1698, had practically nullified this, but the nullifi- cation was but little heeded, and even Franklin had to go through the formality of asking the consent of the Assembly for the money necessary to raise and equip the 600 troops which the Province sent to the frontier to aid in the overthrow of Pontiac and his confederated braves.
It was on this point, however,-the question of taxation without con- sent, -- that the great crisis was to arise, and it became acute very soon after the power of Pontiac's outbreak was broken at Bloody Bridge. It is not proposed here to follow in detail all the measures and discussions in London on the subject of taxation in America, or even to follow up the story of the reception which the news of all that silly statesmanship met with the colonies. Such details belong to general rather than to local history. Suffice it to say here, that the infamous Stamp Act was passed with practical unanimity in both houses of Parliament, in spite of the strong protest (protests, rather), uttered on behalf of the Colonies by Ben- jamin Franklin. The result was the meeting of the first Colonial Congress, at New York, October 7, 1765. Then followed a Declaration of Rights, the voluntary or compulsory resignation of the stamp agents, the destruction of the stamped paper sent over, wherever it could be seized, and the de- velopment of a determined opposition to the measure. Without admitting it, the Colonies in 1765 were practically in a condition of open rebellion, although the only active tangible rebels were the Sons of Liberty, an asso- ciation mainly composed of the young and ardent spirits of the time. As a result of this opposition the Stamp Act was repealed. But Parlia- ment, led by successive ministries, still held to the theory that it had a right to levy taxes in America or in any British Colony. The news of the repeal of the Stamp Act caused great rejoicing throughout the Colonies, but the joy was shortlived. British troops, or troops in the pay of Britain, began to flock into the country, and their maintenance was in itself a grievous and burdensome tax. While the presence of the soldiery was regarded as a threat, a manifestation of force, to which the colonists were unaccustomed, the system of billeting the troops upon the people was re- pugnant to all inflicted with the presence of the military, and again the crisis became acute. Great Britain continued to dispatch her soldiers across the sea, however, in spite of remonstrances and protests, and the crisis continued even although by 1773 all the taxes were withdrawn ex- cepting one on tea. That impost was in itself a trifling one, and possibly had it been imposed earlier it might have been permitted to become oper- ative. But the principle was now at stake, and the people, aroused by the presence of the military and the threat implied, determined to resist
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even that picayune impost. Then followed the incident now known as "the Boston Tea Party," when, on December 16, a party of Boston citi- zens disguised as Indians threw a cargo of the taxed tea into Boston Harbor. There was also a somewhat similar tea party in New York Harbor, and a cargo of tea was seized in Charleston and permitted to go to waste, while yet another cargo, at Philadelphia, was saved only by the skipper returning with it to sea.
Such acts were those of open rebellion, but even then the idea of separation from the mother country does not seem to have been general, and many good patriots hoped that events would so shape themselves that the discontent would be allayed. But Britain's lawmakers stumbled on blindly, and a bill which passed Parliament in 1774 forbidding any vessel to enter Boston Harbor for trading purposes-a poor punishment for the tea party-virtually decided the matter and forced the issue. A second Colonial Congress was called, which met in Philadelphia in Sep- tember, 1774. Massachusetts was then in open rebellion, and was prom- ised aid from her sister Colonies. Then came General Gage upon the scene with ten thousand troops and instructions to crush out whatever looked like rebellion. The Bay State responded by raising an army of twelve thousand men, and the struggle was on.
We must now turn to New Jersey and follow its part in these mo- mentous occurrences in more detail, not only because it is our immediate province, but because in many respects it assumed a prominence in them and in the subsequent armed resistance which at times made her in reality the very keystone of the arch which liberty was then erecting. The battle of Trenton made the Union a possibility, and retrieved the disaster at Brooklyn with its subsequent loss of New York.
The organization known as the Sons of Liberty had been extended to New Jersey, and its members soon proved that they were as watchful of the rights and interests of the people as were their brethren in New York or Connecticut. They bent their energies to rendering the pro- visions of the Stamp Act of no avail, and it was through their instru- mentality that William Coxe, who was appointed as stamp officer for New Jersey was induced "voluntarily" to resign. Most of those who were appointed to aid in the distribution, to sell the stamped papers, followed suit, while those who did not were carefully watched. Every means were employed to prevent the circulation of the stamps, and every arrange- ment to make them available was frustrated by the vigilance of these en- thusiastic devotees of liberty. In Salem, for instance, as soon as it was learned that John Hatton had applied for an appointment in connection with their distribution, he was waited upon, argued with, and finally
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agreed to withdraw. All this took place before one of the obnoxious stamps had reached this side of the Atlantic, but it was a wise and salutary proceeding. for had the traffic once been permitted it would have been stopped only with difficulty and attendant confusion; besides, the precedent would have been established, and victory in the question at issue would have remained with Britain.
But, as a result of the agitation and preparation, of appeal by voice or by letter, when early in October, 1765, the "Royal Charlotte," con- voyed by a war vessel, sailed up the Delaware, the news that she had on board the consignment of stamps for New Jersey, Maryland and Penn- sylvania sent every flag to half-mast, while the bells in most of the churches were tolled as for a funeral. The stamps were never used; and it was with a sigh of relief that Hughes, the agent in Philadelphia to whom they had been consigned, saw them safe on a war vessel. An adverse fate met the stamps everywhere. New England threw them into the sea or burned them. New York seized them and locked them up; all over the country, the bells on the churches on November I, the day the stamp duties became legal, sounded a muffled peal, and from New Hampshire to Georgia flags were half masted-a sign of mourning for the departure of liberty-and not a few newspapers suspended publication. For once the Colonies were united, for once they showed that they had learned the value of unity and fully realized that their only hope for liberty lay in united action. "Join or die," became one of the mottoes of the inchoate nation.
There was, however, a spirit of wisdom in all this determined oppo- sition to the circulation of the stamps. The impost, however unpopular and however opposed, was still one of the laws of the land, and without strict compliance with its mandates the legal business of the Colonies could not legally be carried on. A deed without the prescribed stamp, for instance, had no standing before a court of law, neither had a will any force, or an agreement any validity. But even in the comparatively few cases where the, lawyers were willing to fulfill all possible legal re- quirements, their clients refused to pay for the stamps, and so the legal machinery was, in many instances, brought to a complete standstill. Meet- ings of the members of the New Jersey bar were held to consider the ad- visability of discontinuing practice altogether until the matter of the Stamp Act was settled one way or another. Such a step might have meant confusion and distrust everywhere, and introduced what would nowadays be called a spirit of anarchy. So the lawyers decided to con- tinue business, to use no stamps, and abide the results. But the opposi-
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