New Jersey: A History of the Garden State

335 Pages·2012·4.02 MB·English

by  Maxine N. Lurie

NEW JERSEY
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N E W J ERSE Y
A History of the Garden State
Edited by
Maxine N. Lurie and Richard Veit
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
New Jersey : a history of the Garden State / edited by Maxine N. Lurie and
Richard Veit.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8135-5409-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8135-5410-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. New Jersey — History. I. Lurie, Maxine, N., 1940 – II. Veit, Richard Francis,
1968 –
F134.N49 2012
974.9 — dc23 2012005542
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Rutgers University Press recieved a grant for this publication from the
New Jersey Historical Commission, an agency of the New Jersey Department
of State. In addition, this publication was made possible, in part, by a grant
from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National
Endowment for the Humanities. Other generous donors include Seton Hall
University, the Society for the Colonial Wars of New Jersey, the General Society
of Colonial Wars, Th omas Higgins, Barry Kramer, Robert E. Mortensen, and
Anne Moreau Th omas.
Th is collection copyright © 2012 by Rutgers, Th e State University
Individual chapters copyright © 2012 in the names of their authors
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without writt en permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University
Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. Th e only exception to this
prohibition is “fair use” as defi ned by U.S. copyright law.
Visit our website: htt p://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
Manufactured in the United States of America
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction: New Perspectives on
New Jersey History 1
Marc Mappen
1 Sett ing the Stage: Archaeology and the
Delaware Indians, a 12,000-Year Odyssey 6
Richard Veit
2 Colonial Period: Th e Complex and Contradictory
Beginnings of a Mid-Atlantic Province 33
Maxine N. Lurie
3 Revolution and Confederation Period: New Jersey
at the Crossroads 64
John Fea
4 New Jersey in the Early Republic 90
Graham Russell Gao Hodges
5 New Jersey in the Jacksonian Era, 1820 – 1850 115
Michael Birkner
6 Civil War and Reconstruction:
State and Nation Divided 145
Larry Greene
7 Th e Garden State Becomes an Industrial Power:
New Jersey in the Late Nineteenth Century 175
Paul Israel
8 Th e Progressive Era 202
Brian Greenberg
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vi Contents
9 Depression and War 236
G. Kurt Piehler
10 Suburbanization and Decline of the Cities:
Toward an Uncertain Future 264
Howard Gillette Jr.
List of Contributors 287
Index 291
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PREFACE
Th e two of us proposed this volume for several reasons. First, as teachers of
New Jersey history, we perceived the need for a one-volume book on the
state that could be used in our courses as well as in those taught by oth-
ers in community colleges and universities. Second, it was clear that much
had been writt en and that the interests of scholars had changed in the more
than thirty-fi ve years since the last brief history of the state appeared. Obvi-
ously, it was time for an update and a synthesis of the new material. Th ird,
the citizens of New Jersey need an overview of the state’s past so that they
can understand where it has been and, perhaps, bett er conceive where it
ought to go in the future. At the same time, another purpose has been to
place the history of the state in a national context for New Jersey residents
and those outside the state. Writing in 1978, John Cunningham described
New Jersey as “A Mirror on America.” We concur that through the study of
our state we can bett er understand the history of the nation.
Of course, scholars have been studying and writing about New Jersey
since Samuel Smith published Th e History of the Colony of Nova Caesaria in
1765. Th e nineteenth century saw the publication of several classic histories,
such as Th omas Gordon’s A Gazett eer of the State of New Jersey (1834) and
William Barber and Henry Howe’s Historical Collections of the State of New
Jersey (1845 and later editions), with its large number of lithographs. Later
in the nineteenth century substantial historical and genealogical volumes
treated particular counties. It was also during this period that the New Jer-
sey Historical Society began publishing its journal, originally titled Pro-
ceedings and much later simply New Jersey History. Many of the nineteenth-
century histories were focused on famous individuals, the American
Revolution, church and congregational histories, and, later, the Civil War
experiences and service of New Jerseyans. Charles Conrad Abbott began
writing about Native Americans, but many topics, most notably social his-
tory, women’s history, and the history of minority groups, particularly Af-
rican Americans, were largely overlooked. Authors were oft en journalists,
jurists, and religious fi gures, as history was just beginning to professionalize
as a fi eld.
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viii Preface
In the early twentieth century, several important regional and statewide
histories were published, including New Jersey: A Guide to Its Present and
Past (Federal Writers Project, 1932), A. M. Heston, South Jersey (1924), and
Francis Bazley Lee, New Jersey as a Colony and as a State (1902). In the mid-
twentieth century Richard P. McCormick and John Cunningham brought
to the fore a more sophisticated and, in the case of Cunningham, popu-
lar view of New Jersey’s history. Harold Wilson compiled an exceptional
historical outline of the state (1950); in the 1960s, the state’s Tercentenary
Commission published numerous volumes refl ecting the true diversity of
New Jersey’s history; and in 1975 Peter O. Wacker added his Land and Peo-
ple, now a classic work, to the literature on the state.
Among recent publications there are the collections of essays edited
by Barbara Mitnick, New Jersey and the American Revolution (2005), Marc
Mappen, Th ere Is More to New Jersey than the Sopranos (2009), and Max-
ine N. Lurie, New Jersey Anthology (2010); Howard Green’s collection of
documents, Words Th at Make New Jersey (2006); and two reference works,
the Encyclopedia of New Jersey (2004) and Mapping New Jersey (2009). But
the most recent one-volume history of the state, Th omas Fleming’s New Jer-
sey: A Bicentennial History, was published in 1977, and the general works by
John Cunningham, You, New Jersey, and the World (1998) and New Jersey:
A Mirror on America (last updated in 2006), are aimed at a K – 12 audience.
As editors of this volume, our intention is to provide a work that, in the
tradition of Fleming and Cunningham, covers the scope of New Jersey’s
past from the earliest inhabitants to the twenty-fi rst century, while incor-
porating recent scholarship, issues such as gender, race, and class, and so-
cial and cultural history as well as politics. We have been lucky in obtaining
the help of excellent scholars who have contributed essays about their areas
of expertise. Th e chapters that follow refl ect their hard work, for which we
thank them, and their endnotes document relevant recent scholarship on
the state and the nation. We hope that this book is seen, as it is meant to be,
as part of a long line of distinguished work on the state’s history. We hope
that it will catch the interest of our students and the public, and inspire
other scholars to add to the body of work on the Garden State.
Maxine N. Lurie
Richard Veit
November 2011
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank the following people for their generous assistance
with this book.
For help with images: Gregory D. Latt anzi, New Jersey State Museum;
William Sauts Bock; Joanne Nestor, New Jersey State Archives; John Beek-
man, Jersey City Free Public Library; Ruth Janson, Brooklyn Museum;
Liz Kurtulik, Art Resource; Mark Renovitch, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presi-
dential Library and Museum; Joseph Myers, Coopers Ferry Partnership;
Michael Siegel, Rutgers University Cartography Lab; Joseph Seneca and
Richard Hughes, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy,
Rutgers University; and Dr. Joseph Salvatore, Naval Air Station Wildwood
Aviation Museum.
Th e Rutgers University Special Collections and University Archives for
help with research, images, and much more: David Kuzma, Fernanda Per-
rone, Ronald Becker, Bonita Craft Grant, Th omas Frusciano, Michael Jo-
seph, Al King, Erica Gorder, and others on the staff .
For assistance with grant applications: Robert Apgar, Sara Cureton, and
Niquole Primiani.
And of course all those at Rutgers University Press who have helped,
including Marlie Wasserman, Allyson Fields, Anne Hegeman, and Mari-
lyn Campbell, as well as Gretchen Oberfranc for her work in copyediting
this volume.
Funding for this book has been provided by the New Jersey Council for
the Humanities, the New Jersey Historical Commission, Seton Hall Univer-
sity, the Society for the Colonial Wars of New Jersey, the General Society of
Colonial Wars, Th omas Higgins, Barry Kramer, Robert E. Mortensen, and
Anne Moreau Th omas.
ix
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