New Jersey Politics and Government: The Suburbs Come of Age

Chapter 2. Foundations

8 Chapter 2 Foundations New Jersey, 1600–1900 I cannot but remember the place New Jersey holds in our early history. . . . Few of the States among the Old Thirteen had more of the battlefields of the country within their limits than old New Jersey. —Abraham Lincoln It was Alexander Hamilton who discovered the uses of New Jersey. —Lincoln Steffens When children study the American Revolution they read of its opening and closing chapters in Massachusetts andVirginia, and they tour Lexington, Concord, Philadelphia, andYorktown. But few travel to New Jersey, the scene of more battles than any other state. It was across New Jersey that George Washington was thrown back from New York to Pennsylvania and his army fought the battles of New Brunswick, Monmouth, and Princeton. It was in Morristown and Somerville that the ragtag Continental army spent three bitter winters, and at the Battle of Monmouth that Molly Pitcher became immortal.The tide of the war turned when Washington crossed the Delaware River from Pennsylvania and captured the Hessian garrison at Trenton. The nation’s first president wrote his farewell address to his troops in a house in Rocky Hill. In this early history are clues to what New Jersey would become, and in critical respects remain, for centuries.As it was for the Revolutionary armies, New Jersey was long“a region that one traverses to go somewhere else,a kind of suburb and No Man’s Land between New York and Philadelphia.”1 The Foundations 9 immense consequences of New Jersey’s location between two of the nation’s most important cities led Benjamin Franklin to call New Jersey a “valley between two mountains of conceit” and a “cask tapped at both ends.” New Jersey’s most famous governor,WoodrowWilson,would complain more than a century later,“We have always been inconvenienced by NewYork on the one hand and Philadelphia on the other.”2 Location contributed powerfully to the lack of a clear state identity, and other factors reinforced it. One was the division of the original British royal land grant into East Jersey and West Jersey.Throughout the colonial period, New Jersey maintained two capitals at which the provincial legislature met alternately—Perth Amboy in East Jersey and Burlington in West Jersey.The counties that originally made upWest Jersey would still be threatening to secede from the state two hundred years later.3 Ethnic and religious diversity complicated the regional cleavage. By the early eighteenth century, there were Dutch settlements in Bergen and Middlesex counties, Scots in Perth Amboy and Freehold, and Germans in Hunterdon County. Puritans from New England founded Newark, Elizabeth , and Woodbridge. Quakers lived along the Delaware River. Presbyterians dominated Princeton and its college, while the Dutch Reformed Church founded New Jersey’s other colonial college, Queen’s College (later Rutgers), at New Brunswick. Among all the colonies, only Pennsylvania ’s population was as diverse. Later waves of immigration made the New Jersey of 1910 the state with the fifth highest proportion of foreignborn residents. Domination by larger neighbors, parochialism, and social cleavages fostered suspicion of centralized authority.The state’s earliest political “parties ” were East Jersey versus West Jersey factions organized by county and concerned mainly with filling patronage jobs.4 The counties would remain the state’s most powerful political units for almost two centuries, and some of America’s hardiest political machines blossomed there. The first state constitution, in 1776, assigned virtually all powers to a legislature dominated by county interests and made the governor little more than a figurehead. In this respect New Jersey was little different from the other original states, but weak state government had incredible persistence . The second constitution, in 1844, in force until 1947, still limited the governor to one three-year term, gave the “chief executive” almost no appointment powers not shared with the legislature, and allowed only the weakest of vetoes. None of these officials had much to do; counties and 1 0 N e w J e r s e y P o l i t i c s a n d G ov e r n m e n t localities raised almost all the money for the limited public purposes citizens saw fit to support.5 In 1960 New Jersey was one of only three states still without a state sales or income tax. New Jersey was also slow to accept its role in the federal union...