NJNew Jersey History

Close to 300 documented military engagements were fought on New Jersey ground during the Revolution, more than in any other state, and the Continental Army wintered at Morristown twice. The reason is geometry: the province sat between the two ports that mattered, so whoever wanted New York or Philadelphia had to march across it. That has never really stopped being true, and it explains a great deal about how the fourth smallest state ended up with more than nine million residents.

Lenapehoking

The Lenape lived along the Delaware, the Raritan, the Passaic and the Hackensack in villages organized by matrilineal clan, speaking Munsee in the north and Unami toward the south. They burned the understorey to keep hunting ground open and worked the oyster beds of Raritan and Delaware bays so heavily that the shell middens are still archaeological sites. Agreements they understood as permission to share land were written down by colonists as outright purchases, and the gap between those two readings did most of the dispossessing.

In 1758 the colony bought out the remaining Lenape claims and set aside roughly 3,000 acres at Brotherton in Burlington County, now Indian Mills, the first Indian reservation established in what became the United States. The residents sold up and left for New York in 1802. Three Lenape communities, the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape, the Ramapough Lenape and the Powhatan Renape, are recognized by the state today.

Swedes, Dutch and a duke's gift

Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed past in 1524 and Henry Hudson entered the bay for the Dutch in 1609. The Dutch worked the fur trade from New Netherland and chartered Bergen in 1660, the first permanent European town in the province. Meanwhile Swedes and Finns had been settling the lower Delaware since 1638 as New Sweden, building Fort Nya Elfsborg near Salem in 1643; the Dutch conquered them in 1655, and the English conquered the Dutch in 1664.

The Duke of York, who had just been handed the whole territory by his brother Charles II, promptly gave the land between the Hudson and the Delaware to Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley. The name honours Jersey, the Channel island where Carteret had held out for the Crown during the English Civil War. Berkeley, who never visited, sold his share to Quakers in 1674, which set up the split that followed.

Two Jerseys and a line nobody could agree on

The Quintipartite Deed of 1676 formally divided the province. East Jersey, capital at Perth Amboy, drew Scottish Presbyterians, New England Puritans and Dutch farmers. West Jersey, capital at Burlington, was Quaker, and its Concessions and Agreements of 1677, drafted with William Penn's help, guaranteed trial by jury and freedom of conscience years before Pennsylvania existed.

The boundary between them was supposed to run from Little Egg Harbor to a point on the Delaware, and surveyors kept failing to make it stick. The Keith Line of 1687 and the Lawrence Line of 1743 disagreed, both left traces in modern county boundaries, and the province's north-south cultural divide has outlived the deed by three centuries. The two proprietary governments surrendered to the Crown in 1702 and became a single royal colony that kept both capitals and alternated its assembly between them. New Jersey shared a governor with New York until 1738, when Lewis Morris finally became its own.

The crossroads of the Revolution

Washington's army was chased across the state in November 1776 and looked finished. On the night of 25 December he recrossed the Delaware, took the Hessian garrison at Trenton the next morning, held the Assunpink Creek bridge on 2 January and beat a British force at Princeton on 3 January 1777, three weeks that saved the war effort. The winters at Morristown followed, and the one of 1779 to 1780 was harsher than Valley Forge, with snow deep enough to stop supply wagons for weeks.

• Trenton, 26 December 1776. Roughly 900 Hessians captured in under two hours.
• Princeton, 3 January 1777. Washington slipped around the British left overnight and struck at dawn.
• Monmouth Court House, 28 June 1778. The longest single day battle of the war, fought in extreme heat.
• Springfield, 23 June 1780. The last serious British attempt to push inland from New York.

At the Constitutional Convention, William Paterson presented the New Jersey Plan on 15 June 1787, insisting that every state get equal weight regardless of size. He lost the vote and won the argument: the Great Compromise gave each state two senators. New Jersey ratified the Constitution on 18 December 1787 as the third state, and on 20 November 1789 became the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights. Its own 1776 constitution enfranchised all inhabitants worth fifty pounds, and unmarried women and some free Black residents voted here for three decades until the legislature restricted the franchise to white male taxpayers in 1807.

A free state that took its time

New Jersey passed a gradual abolition act in 1804, the last northern state to act, and it freed no one immediately. Children born to enslaved mothers after 4 July 1804 owed service until 25 if male and 21 if female, and the 1860 census still listed eighteen people in the state as apprentices for life. Lincoln lost the popular vote here in 1860 and lost the state outright in 1864 to George McClellan, who was living in Orange. The legislature rejected the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 before ratifying it the following January, then ratified the Fourteenth and tried to rescind it, and rejected the Fifteenth before reversing course in 1871. Some 88,000 men from the state served in the Union army even as its politics resisted the war's purposes.

Falls, filaments and transistors

Alexander Hamilton picked the 77-foot Great Falls of the Passaic in 1791 for the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, and Pierre L'Enfant laid out the raceways for what became Paterson, the first planned industrial city in the country. It made cotton, then locomotives, then so much silk that it was simply called Silk City, and its 1913 strike pulled in more than 20,000 workers and the Industrial Workers of the World.

Thomas Edison opened his Menlo Park laboratory in 1876, recorded sound in 1877, demonstrated a workable incandescent lamp on 31 December 1879, moved to a larger complex in West Orange in 1887 and built the Black Maria, the first film studio, in 1893. Fort Lee was the centre of American filmmaking before Hollywood took it. At Bell Labs in Murray Hill, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley demonstrated the transistor in December 1947, and at the Holmdel horn antenna in 1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found a persistent hiss they first blamed on pigeons and then identified as the cosmic microwave background.

The twentieth century left harder marks too. The Hindenburg burned at Lakehurst on 6 May 1937. Newark's uprising in July 1967 killed 26 people over five days and accelerated a decade of disinvestment. The New Jersey Turnpike opened in 1951 and the Garden State Parkway was finished in 1957, wiring suburbanization into the map. Voters approved casino gambling for Atlantic City in a 1976 referendum and the first casino opened in May 1978, two years before Congress created the Pinelands National Reserve, the first of its kind, protecting about a million acres of pitch pine and aquifer in the middle of the busiest corridor in America.

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