(An early Quaker meeting. Quaker meetings involved long periods of silence, interspersed with preaching by members of the congregation.)

We look at the early history of New Jersey, a colony beset by constant legal headaches, and finally give a proper introduction to the Quakers, the next big group of settlers in America.

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Transcript and Sources:

Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 19: New Jersey, New Jersey.

Last time, we talked about the English takeover of the Dutch trading colony of New Netherland. All of that land was given by King Charles to his brother James, as a proprietary colony, New York. But James quickly divided his new lands. In particular, he gave the southern portion of New Netherland, the land in between the Delaware and Hudson rivers, to two of his close friends. This became the colony of New Jersey, which is the subject of today’s episode.

Now, the story of New Jersey is, above all else, a story of obscure legal technicalities. It’s all very convoluted. I’ve cut out as much of the irrelevant details as I can, but let me give you a very brief summary of how things will go, just so you know what to look out for. These two proprietors held on to New Jersey for about a decade, a decade which was marked by ongoing disputes over land rights. When the English retook the region after its brief recapture by the Dutch, one of the proprietors sold his rights to the colony to some Quakers. They then split the province into two, with the Quakers taking West Jersey. West Jersey soon became the launching pad for a big Quaker migration. The other original proprietor soon died, and his rights to East Jersey were sold off to a different group of men, also mostly Quakers. Then at the end of the 1680s, both Jerseys got absorbed into the Dominion of New England which I’ve been mentioning.

Got it? Good. Let’s get going.

First, we need to talk about the geography of New Jersey a bit, because even if you know where New Jersey is on a map, its split nature might not be immediately apparent. You see, New Jersey is really two different regions smooshed together into a single unit. The grant that James gave to his friends was not very well thought out.

In the northeast, New Jersey borders New York City. Literally, New Jersey is only like a half mile away from the heart of Manhattan. As a result, that part of New Jersey is really just an extension of New York City, separate from it only because of arbitrary historical circumstance.

On the other hand, the southwestern part of New Jersey borders the Delaware Bay, with the states of Pennsylvania and Delaware on the opposite side. The Delaware Bay is the one big body of water between the Chesapeake and New York City. It’s smaller than the Chesapeake, and instead of being fed by numerous rivers, it’s only fed by one big one: the Delaware River. The area surrounding the river and the bay is known as the Delaware Valley, and that’s what I’ll be calling the region in general.

I’ve mentioned a few times before that an important factor in colonization was finding good harbors. Whether it’s the Chesapeake or New York Harbor or Boston Harbor, settlements formed around these bodies of water, with colonists then moving outwards, creating distinctive cultural regions. Well, the Delaware Bay was another one of these harbors, although at this time it was still thinly populated.

Anyway, the point is that New Jersey was divided between two separate settlement regions, New York City in the northeast, and the Delaware Valley in the southwest. And that’s true even today. Half of the state has economic ties to New York and the other half has ties to Philadelphia.

The Delaware had been visited by European explorers a few times in the 1500s, but our story really begins with Henry Hudson. You remember him, from a few episodes ago, right? He was the English explorer who wound up leading an expedition for the Dutch. He reached the Delaware Bay in 1609, before setting off to chart other portions of the coast. As a result of his voyage, the Dutch claimed the region, and it became a part of the colony of New Netherland.

From early on, the Delaware Valley was noted as a promising location for settlement, but it wound up playing second string to New Amsterdam, which was seen as even more promising. The Dutch did maintain a small presence in the region, to enforce their claim on the territory, but it was very minimal. A fort, a few settlements. That’s all.

Weirdly enough, it wasn’t the Dutch or the English who would plant the first noteworthy settlements in the Delaware Valley. It was Sweden. You see, the Swedes, who weren’t a particularly maritime people, for some reason decided to get in on colonization. They hired one of the former directors of New Netherland, Peter Minuit [min-WAY] to betray the Dutch and help them set up their own colony. Their settlement, New Sweden, was founded in 1638. The Dutch protested at this invasion of their territory by Sweden, which was supposed to be an ally, but they didn’t take any immediate action.

Minuit himself died later that year in a shipwreck, but the settlement he founded, Fort Christina, lived on. Within a decade, there were some 300 people living there, and the Swedish presence was being extended northwards towards what is now the city of Philadelphia, further up the Delaware River. Finally, under Director Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch took action against this irritant. In 1655 Stuyvesant personally led a flotilla of seven ships south to New Sweden. That was enough to count as overwhelming force and the Swedes surrendered without a fight. The settlers were allowed to stay, but New Sweden itself disappeared forever, after only 17 years in existence.

There is one interesting legacy from New Sweden, though. You see, along with the Swedes there were also some Finnish migrants who had settled in New Sweden. These Finns brought with them a unique building style: the log cabin. Log cabins were easy to build given the abundant forests in America and so the technique spread to other ethnic groups in the colonies. Eventually, of course, the log cabin became a famous symbol of frontier life, and many politicians, including several presidents, played up the fact that they were born in log cabins to show their connection to the common man. So the log cabin comes from Finns living in a Swedish colony that was conquered by the Dutch before it was conquered by the English. That’s a very American story, right there.

Anyway, the Delaware Valley was back in the hands of the Dutch, and they sent some settlers to the region, but their control was even more short lived than Sweden’s had been. Less than ten years later, all of New Netherland was conquered by the English. As we know, that land was given to the king’s brother James, and he decided to give the southern part of New Netherland to two of his close friends and advisors, as a reward for their service.

The first friend was a man named George Carteret [KAHR-ter-it], who had also recently become one of the Lords Proprietor of Carolina. The second friend was John Berkeley, the older brother of Governor William Berkeley of Virginia and another one of Carolina’s proprietors.

However, although these two men were given this territory by James, it didn’t become a separate province, at least not technically. It was still part of the lands held by James. Think of it as a colony within a colony, rather than a separate entity. This meant that Berkeley and Carteret probably didn’t actually have the right to set up their own government. The King could allow James to set up a government in New York, but that didn’t mean that James could then allow others to set up their own governments within his lands. It didn’t work like that.

But although Berkeley and Carteret were technically just landowners, they acted as if they were lords of their own province and they had no hesitation about setting up a government. I mean, whatever the legal technicalities, they still had the support of the royal family.

They named as governor Philip Carteret, a cousin of George Carteret. He was only 26. He left for New Jersey with a few dozen settlers in 1665, the year after the English had taken it from the Dutch. The region was still sparsely populated by Europeans, with only a few hundred residents, now including some Puritans. The Puritans were living in self-governing towns much like those of New England.

The proprietors wrote a constitution for their province, which was on the whole quite standard. They promised general freedom of religion, so long as you believed in God, much like in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. This was becoming a standard practice in the American colonies, as you’ve no doubt noticed, at least outside of New England. Partly this was due to the horrors of the English Civil War, partly due to the need to attract any and all settlers, and partly due to a general ideological shift. But in any case, within a few decades tolerance had become the prevailing idea in the colonies, although there were often limits. Carteret and Berkeley also pledged to give New Jersey an elected Assembly. All freemen could vote, not just landowners.

The first assembly met a few years later, in May 1668. It consisted of Governor Carteret, seven councilors, and 10 elected representatives from a handful of towns. There were no formal election procedures in place, so each town basically did its own thing, whatever the local constable decided was best.

This assembly was somewhat dominated by the Puritans, but it adjourned after only four days of business. Apparently the delegates were anxious to get home. They met again later that year, but then they weren’t called again until 1671, and after that not until 1675.

From the start New Jersey was beset by legal problems. Partly the problem that I’ve already mentioned, that the proprietors were setting up a dubious government, but also to do with land rights. You see, before word reached America that New Jersey had been created, the governor of New York had begun giving out land grants to people for areas in New Jersey, not knowing that it was about to become a separate colony. These new settlements were given special concessions, like exemption from taxation for seven years, and the right to elect their own assembly.

Governor Carteret, of course, acted as though the creation of New Jersey had erased those agreements. The settlers of these towns, some of them Puritans from Long Island, of course disagreed, and the dispute between the two sides became ongoing. The men of the towns in question refused to pay taxes or to swear oaths of loyalty. They were worried that if they acknowledged New Jersey, not only would they have to submit politically, their rights to their land might come into question as well. Plus, as Puritans, they were wary of outside authority in general.

The dispute dragged on for several years. To defend their position, the recalcitrant colonists even held an unauthorized assembly in 1672, which tried to depose the governor. Much like the Puritans of Long Island, the Puritans in New Jersey were unusually cantankerous and defensive of what they saw as their rights and privileges.

But in the end, orders from England quashed their drive for independence. James the Duke of York denied the validity of the grants of land they had been given, and so they had no choice but to submit to New Jersey, since all of their legal claims had just gone up in smoke. The settlers were allowed to continue on unmolested, so long as they obeyed and paid their taxes. However, the independence of the towns was nevertheless curtailed.

Right after these disputes were resolved, the Third Anglo-Dutch war reached America.

When the Dutch retook New York in 1673, New Jersey was taken too, though not for long. It fell back into English hands the next year. This meant that all the legal agreements for New York and New Jersey had to be redone, which was mostly not a big deal, but there was one big change: John Berkeley decided to bow out as proprietor and sell his share to a Quaker named Edward Byllinge. And instead of being managed jointly, as under Berkeley and Carteret, New Jersey was split in two, with Carteret getting the half closer to New York, and Byllinge getting the half along the Delaware, thus neatly dividing the province between those two geographic regions I mentioned at the start. These became known as East Jersey and West Jersey, although really the two halves were in the northeast and southwest. They were of roughly equal size, but the part near New York was of course much more populated.

Now, although Byllinge was supposed to be the purchaser of East Jersey, the whole thing became a tangled mess, thanks to delays and to disagreements between Byllinge and some of his associates. There’s really no need to get into all of that legal tedium, just know that in the end there wound up being a number of proprietors sharing in the colony, all of them Quakers.

Among these proprietors was William Penn. William Penn is an extremely important figure in American colonization, since he founded the adjacent colonies of Pennsylvania and Delaware the next decade. I’ll give him a more proper introduction next episode. Just remember that he’s involved in West Jersey too.

Penn and the others were looking to turn the region into a Quaker refuge. So I think it’s finally time to give the Quakers a proper introduction, since it’s the Quakers who will wind up dominating the whole Delaware Valley region. What the Puritans were to New England, the Quakers were to this area. They weren’t the first migrants, but they were the biggest group of migrants.

Now I’ve talked about the Quakers a bit before. They’ve been on the fringe of our story as oddball extremists rejected by pretty much everyone, often living in marginal areas like North Carolina because they were chased out of everywhere else.

The Quakers, or as they call themselves the Religious Society of Friends, emerged in the chaos of the English Civil War, one of the many radical Christian sects forming at that time. The 1640s were an extraordinarily vibrant period in terms of new movements, whether religious, political, or philosophical, as we’ve seen. The old order had apparently been overthrown, and everyone was rushing to build the new one.

The central figure in the origins of Quakerism was a man named George Fox. George Fox was born in 1624 to a Puritan family. He came of age during the English Civil War and as a highly religious young man he wandered around England, searching for answers to the various questions that were gnawing at his soul, but he found the beliefs of all the preexisting denominations terribly unsatisfying. Finally, in the midst of a gloomy depression, he had a series of revelations, direct encounters with God. This sense of personal closeness with the divine became the heart of Quakerism.

According to Fox, every single person, man or woman, Christian or not, had within themselves the Light of Christ, or the Inner Light. The Inner Light is something like a longing for God, or our conscience, or our inner goodness, or even a bit of God himself within us. This divine spark meant that everybody was capable of direct, unmediated access to God. Everybody could receive revelations.

The authorities saw this doctrine as dangerous in several ways. First, it seemed to place individual revelation above everything else, even the Bible. And in fact several Quakers infamously burned Bibles in the 1650s. Also, the idea that we have a bit of God within us, or that we can bring ourselves towards perfection through revelation seemed arrogant and blasphemous. It was basically the opposite of original sin, after all.

As a result, after he began preaching, Fox wound up in jail for a year. After his release in 1651, he traveled to the north of England, which at the time was rural and poor. There, he met up with many like-minded individuals, whose spirituality had been progressing in a similar direction. He began to preach and he found rapid success. Within just a few years he was sending missionaries across Britain and Europe, even to Istanbul to try to convert the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Unlike the Puritans, who were all English, the Quakers became more diverse, drawing in Welsh, Irish, and continental European converts. By 1660 there were some 50,000 Quakers.

However, the radicalism of the Quakers attracted many enemies and they were frequently persecuted. Apart from the problems with their doctrine, early Quakers often flouted social conventions. They experienced ecstatic convulsions while worshipping, shaking on the ground like they were having a fit. Hence the name “Quaker”. A few Quakers went naked in public. They refused to swear oaths, which caused legal problems, as you may remember from Episode 6, when Quakers in Maryland led a campaign to eliminate such oaths. They refused to use respectful titles such as “My Lord” for their social superiors, instead addressing everyone as “Friend”. They let women preach. The Quakers weren’t total egalitarians bent on overthrowing all social norms and hierarchies, but to outsiders it certainly seemed that way.

And so they were persecuted, both under Cromwell and after the Restoration. According to the writer Pink Dandelion, one prominent Quaker “was sentenced to a public flogging, the branding of his forehead with ‘B’ for blasphemer, and the boring of his tongue.” 11,000 were imprisoned under Charles II and hundreds died in jail.

The Quakers not only faced persecution in England, they faced persecution in America as well, though not all the time. Legal difficulties aside, Quakers were accepted in Maryland. Less so in Virginia because they refused to associate with the established Anglican church. That’s why a number of Quakers wound up in North Carolina. The Puritan colonies, of course, were wholly unwelcoming, except for Rhode Island. Four Quaker missionaries were even executed by Massachusetts after they kept returning despite being repeatedly banished. And the Dutch tried to kick them out of New Netherland, you’ll remember. It was hard to be a Quaker.

But by the 1660s the Quakers were beginning to smooth down their rough edges, becoming less disruptive and less of an apparent threat to order. Bible burning and public nudity were out, at least. Nevertheless, they were still persecuted for a while after that. Many Quakers were still thrown in jail or had their property seized for refusing to pay tithes to the Anglican church.

So what was this second, calmer phase of Quakerism like? What were their beliefs? Well, they weren’t particularly systematic in their theology, but you can think of Quakerism as having many of the same individualist, reforming impulses that motivated the Puritans, only taking them in a different direction.

Like the Puritans, the Quakers were very concerned with salvation and with the individual conscience, but in a different way. This is putting it crudely, but you could say that while both groups believed in a radical and simplified form of Christianity, the Puritans paired that belief with an essentially negative view of human potential, while the Quakers paired that belief with a positive view of humanity. Or you could say that the Puritans were Old Testament while the Quakers were New Testament.

According to David Hackett Fischer, Quakers “rejected the Calvinist ideas of inexorable predestination, unconditional election and irresistible grace”. In other words, unlike the Puritans, who believed that whether or not you were saved was determined before you were born, the Quakers held that everyone could be saved. And like I said earlier, that meant everyone, at least in principle, although in practice they didn’t always live up to that. Quakers only began to admit black members in the 1780s, and even then they were segregated.

Women were treated relatively equally by the Quakers, and almost half of all Quakers were women, which was unusual for that kind of movement at the time. They could even become missionaries. There was a Quaker saying, “In souls there is no sex.” Men and women weren’t social equals, exactly, but they were spiritual equals and women weren’t seen as “lesser”. “Separate but equal” might be the best way to think of it.

Compared to the other colonizers of America, the Quakers may seem modern in some respects. They were pacifists. They treated their children gently rather than with harsh discipline and they believed that love should precede marriage. But in other ways, they were of their time. Repeated adultery resulted in getting your face branded with a big letter “A”. And according to Fischer, the punishment for sodomy was “to be imprisoned for life, and whipped every three months.”

Overall, the Quakers were less hierarchical or authoritarian than the other settler groups. Or at any rate there was little deference given to one’s social superiors on an individual level. Quaker communities could still be quite controlling in the sense that you had to obey the will of the group or risk excommunication.

In many respects they aimed at even greater simplicity than the Puritans did. They believed in austerity and plainness, in their food, in their clothes, and in their sex lives. Not only were they forbidden from wearing fancy clothes or wigs, they were even forbidden from buying and selling fancy clothes. And Quakers tried to restrict lustful behavior, even within marriage. You could have sex, but only within certain bounds. Partly as a result, fertility was lower among Quakers than among Puritans, and their population grew more slowly when they came to America.

This simplicity didn’t just apply to daily life, it also applied to religion. According to Fischer, Quakers “repudiated all sacraments, ceremonies, churches, clergy, ordinations and tithes”. They didn’t even have any proper ministers. Or rather, everyone was a minister, capable of receiving divine revelation and sharing it with others.

As a result of all this, Quaker meetings were radically different from other sorts of Christian services. They took place in plain white rooms, brightly lit by a large number of windows. There were no sermons, no rituals, or anything like that. Instead, the meetings were a mix of silence and intermittent preaching. Anyone who wanted to preach, anyone who felt the spirit move them, was free to do so, man or woman. The rest of the time was spent in silent contemplation. It was thanks to the time you spent in silence that when you spoke, your words came from God. Sometimes no one said anything at all. This went on for some three hours.

However, obviously this sort of free-wheeling attitude can easily descend into chaos if even a single person proves too disruptive. So over time the Quakers developed social structures to make the whole process more collective. There were still no ministers or anything, but elders came to play more of a guiding role, both during the meetings and in the community at large. Revelation became less about individuals connecting with God, and more about the members of a community as a whole connecting with God.

The Quakers also began to create a formal set of institutions to handle issues like church membership, charity towards poor Quakers, and so on. Business that was about organization rather than about religion directly. Meetings were at the center of this. Everything was done through meetings. Each group held local meetings every month, and those local meetings sent representatives to regional meetings held quarterly, and on top of that there were annual meetings held in London to coordinate the Quakers as a whole. Plus there were meetings of the men, meetings of the women, meetings to fight persecution, you name it.

These meetings were all about collective decision-making and they were run similarly to normal worship. There were few formal rules. Simply, everyone at the meeting could speak up when they had a mind to, until a consensus was reached. No votes were ever taken. This collective will was thought to represent the will of God. In the words of a modern Quaker work, “Our meetings for church affairs, in which we conduct our business, are also meetings for worship based on silence, and they carry the same expectation that God’s guidance can be discerned if we are truly listening together and to each other, and are not blinkered by preconceived opinions.” Dandelion calls it “a vote-less way of doing church business based on the idea of corporate direct guidance”. Whatever it was, it worked, at least for awhile.

Okay. So that’s the Quakers in a nutshell. They’re a surprisingly hard people to summarize. But let’s get back to New Jersey. Now that West Jersey was in the hands of Quaker proprietors, it didn’t take long for the first wave of Quaker colonists to set off. In fact, they left in 1677, before the sale of the colony had actually gone through. The numbers weren’t that large, though. Only 1400 or so settlers in those first few years. Nothing like the Puritans 45 years ago.

In 1677, the proprietors of West Jersey, along with many of the colonists about to set sail, signed off on the “Laws, Concessions, and Agreements of the Proprietors, Freeholders and Inhabitants of the Province of West New-Jersey, in America”, a constitution for the new colony. This was an unusually open constitution. The lower house of the assembly had all legislative power and instead of a governor there was to be a 10 man council chosen annually by the assembly. There was even a provision which allowed the residents of the colony to come and watch the assembly in action as it debated bills and passed legislation.

However, due to complicated legal reasons this constitution never actually went into effect, and West Jersey wound up being ruled by a governor rather than a council. Continued legal disputes meant that the colony’s constitution was in a state of flux throughout the 1680s. Elections were held and the Assembly was powerful, but the overall governmental structure was still uncertain.

In the end, West Jersey got absorbed by the Dominion of New England at the end of the decade, which put an abrupt halt to all of the legal wrangling. West Jersey would become independent again a few years later, but we won’t be getting back to it for a while. For now, all you really need to know is that Quakers are moving into the Delaware Valley.

So that’s the beginnings of West Jersey. Let’s finish off this episode by going back to the other half of New Jersey, which was still controlled by George Carteret.

After all the land disputes that had roiled the colony in its first few years, the power of the governor and council was strengthened at the expense of the assembly, to keep the Puritans and everyone else away from the real levers of power. That settled things down for a few years, and business continued as normal. Assemblies were elected and did normal assembly things and so on. But once again problems cropped up.

In 1680, George Carteret died. This set off a crisis between New York and East Jersey. You see, the governors of New York had always resented the loss of New Jersey. Without New Jersey, New York had basically no coastline at all, just Long Island and New York City itself. The existence of East Jersey also made it harder for New York to suppress smuggling. So after the death of George Carteret, the governor of New York, Edmund Andros, sent men into East Jersey and had Philip Carteret, who was still serving as governor, beaten and seized. Andros summoned an assembly in East Jersey and declared himself to be in charge of the province.

Andros’s men took Carteret back to New York to face trial over whether or not he had the authority to govern East Jersey or whether he was actually in rebellion against New York. Remember that New Jersey’s government was in fact on shaky legal ground. But either way Carteret was acquitted by a jury, much to Andros’s consternation. And then Andros’s actions were denounced by James, and he was recalled back to England to answer for what he’d done.

That may have been small consolation to Philip Carteret though. He died a few years later, apparently from injuries sustained during his capture.

While that was happening, back in England the heirs of George Carteret, the old proprietor, were sorting out his estate, including his patent for East Jersey. His right to the colony passed to his wife and a number of trustees, to be sold off in order to pay off debts. The rights were purchased by a group of twelve men, including several of the proprietors of West Jersey, with twelve more men joining the group at a later date. Many of these men were Quakers, but others were Roman Catholic or Presbyterian, or something else altogether.

Needless to say, with 24 proprietors, this all soon devolved into a legal morass. Different proprietors had different shares with different privileges, or overlapping claims to the same land, thanks to poorly done surveys, not to mention all the people who were already living there. The residents still felt like they didn’t or at least shouldn’t owe allegiance or pay taxes to these late coming interlopers. The proprietors, on the other hand, said that if you didn’t recognize their authority you didn’t count as a freeman and thus couldn’t vote.

Basically, it was a mess. A mess that wouldn’t get fully sorted for another century.

Nevertheless, in 1683 the proprietors of East Jersey managed to draft a constitution, known as The Fundamental Constitutions for the Province of East New Jersey in America. Like those other Fundamental Constitutions in Carolina, the constitution in East Jersey never really went into effect, since it was also too unwieldy.

For the most part it was pretty standard. Governor plus council plus assembly. Freedom of religion. Etc. There is one notable feature worth mentioning: the very complicated method of selecting representatives to the assembly.

There wasn’t really a normal election. Instead, the names of every man eligible to hold office were placed into a box, and then a 10 year old boy would pick out 50 of the names. Then those 50 names would be put into another box. The 10 year old would then pick out half of those 50 names. These 25 men would be the ones who could be chosen as a representative. The other 25 men whose names were still in the box were the only voters. So basically 25 randomly selected men choosing from another group of 25 randomly selected men.

The idea behind this random selection, or sortition, was to avoid the problems with normal elections, where an office-seeker might be in it more for personal gain than for the common good. With this sort of semi-random process, delegates to the assembly could never become professional politicians. They would always be of the people.

This was a rather convoluted and archaic way of doing things, reminiscent of ancient Athens or something like that. Sortition wasn’t uncommon in the ancient or medieval worlds, but it was falling out of favor by the early modern era, for whatever reason, and it never got off the ground in America. There is still a similar process in jury selection, but that’s about it. From time to time people still propose reintroducing sortition to America, but those ideas have never gone anywhere. Elections are far too entrenched.

In any case, the men of the colony told the proprietors that this was a bad idea, and the proprietors didn’t press the issue. Instead, East Jersey stuck with a normal, American way of doing things. And that’s why this podcast is the History of Elections in America, and not the History of Sortition in America.

So that’s the first two decades of New Jersey’s history: a bunch of boring legal disputes. Well, one governor did get kidnapped by another governor, so at least there’s that. But really, the main thing is the arrival of the Quakers.

Next episode, we’ll continue the story of the Quakers in America, with a look at Pennsylvania, which will rapidly overshadow West Jersey in importance. Plus the beginnings of Delaware, a tiny colony which has never overshadowed anything. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

If you like the podcast, please rate it on iTunes. You can also keep track of Early and Often on Twitter, at earlyoftenpod, or read transcripts of every episode at the blog, at earlyandoftenpodcast.wordpress.com. Thanks for listening.

Sources:

The Colonial Period of American History Volume III by Charles M. Andrews

The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction by Pink Dandelion

Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer

The Concessions and Agreements of the Proprietors, Freeholders and Inhabitants of the Province of West New-Jersey, in America

The Fundamental Constitutions for the Province of East New Jersey in America

The Quakers in America by Thomas D. Hamm

Colonial Pennsylvania: A History by Joseph E. Illick

The History of Voting in New Jersey: A Study of the Development of Election Machinery 1664-1911 by Richard P. McCormick

American Nations by Colin Woodard