There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos

4 Move Over, Betsy Ross

22 There’s More to New Jersey . . . At the time Peter Kalm made his coach trip, New Jersey had a population of about sixty-one thousand. By Kalm’s standards, that was large; by ours, it was astonishingly small. Today sixty-one thousand people is about the average attendance at a football game in the Meadowlands. New Jersey remained largely rural for many generations. The poet John Masefield recalled how, as a young man at the close of the nineteenth century, he would row a boat across the Hudson from Manhattan and climb the Palisades where he could see “undisturbed primeval woods, with lonely farms stretching out beyond into a limitless west.” The writer Earl Schenk Miers recalled that when he grew up in Middlesex County in the twentieth century, farms stretched for miles around his family home. It was not until the post–World War II era that the cities spilled people out into the countryside, making both the city and the countryside worse. If you grew up in New Jersey you probably remember some stretch of rural countryside you knew as a child that is now paved over. Today the land that Hartshorne, Jouet, De Vries, Kalm, and the others knew is pretty much gone; their accounts are now only dead words on old paper. Weep for the New Jersey that we have lost; preserve what remains. 4 Move Over, Betsy Ross Consider the flag of the United States, with its combination of stars and stripes. No matter what our political persuasion , region of the country, or ethnic group, we are united by Old Glory. It conjures up images of marines in World War II raising the flag on Iwo Jima, of Lincoln at Gettysburg, of immigrants coming to Ellis Island to become American citizens, of American astronauts on the moon. Our flag was born when our nation was born—during the American Revolution. We all know, or should know, the important role New Jersey played in the war of independence. Our little state was the crossroads of the Revolution, where George Washington and the Continental Army spent the major portion of the war and where more battles were fought than any other state. Indeed, the Battle of Trenton has been called the Francis Hopkinson This multitalented New Jersey signer of the Declaration of Independence is credited with designing the American flag. Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries – New Jersey Portraits Collection. Move Over, Betsy Ross 23 24 There’s More to New Jersey . . . most important American victory ever, for the simple reason that if we had lost, it is likely there would be no America. On the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1976, Governor Brendan Byrne was in Philadelphia for a commemorative event. In his speech he cracked that during the Revolution, New Jersey did the fighting, while Pennsylvania handled the paperwork. But as a matter of fact, not all our state’s contributions to the struggle were obtained on the battlefield. A New Jersey patriot, Francis Hopkinson of Bordentown (1737–1791), played a role—what the heck, played the essential role in creating our national flag. Who was Francis Hopkinson? He does not fit the image of a hero. John Adams described him in 1776 as a “curious gentleman.” “He is one of your pretty little, curious, ingenious Men. His Head is not bigger, than a large Apple. . . . I have not met with any Thing in natural History much more amusing and entertaining, than his personal Appearance. Yet he is genteel and well bred, and is very social.” Hopkinson was a prolific author, as well as a poet and painter. He also composed music and played several instruments, including the organ and the harpsichord. He wrote the song that is regarded as the first secular art song in America,“My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free.”You get the feeling that if he were alive today, he would have his own Web site, blog, and garage band. Hopkinson had a sharp sense of humor, perhaps best exemplified in his 1778 mock epic poem, “The Battle of the Kegs.” It chronicles how, at one point in the Revolution, British soldiers fired in a panic at barrels floating down the Delaware River, thinking they were somehow dangerous . One stanza went: The cannons roar from shore to shore, The small arms make a rattle; Since wars began I’m...