Planters And Traders Of Southern Jersey
Most of the colonies in America, especially the stronger ones,
had an aristocratic class, which was often large and powerful, as in
the case of Virginia, and which usually centered around the
governor, especially if he were appointed from England by the Crown
or by a proprietor. But there was very little of this social
distinction in New Jersey. Her political life had been too much
broken up, and she had been too long dependent on the governors of
New York to have any of those pretty little aristocracies with
bright colored clothes, and coaches and four, flourishing within her
boundaries. There seems to have been a faint suggestion of such
social pretensions under Governor Franklin just before the
Revolution. He was beginning to live down the objections to his
illegitimate birth and Toryism and by his entertainments and manner
of living was creating a social following. There is said also to
have been something a little like the beginning of an aristocracy
among the descendants of the Dutch settlers who had ancestral
holdings near the Hudson; but this amounted to very little.
Class distinctions were not so strongly marked in New Jersey as in
some other colonies. There grew up in southern Jersey, however, a
sort of aristocracy of gentlemen farmers, who owned large tracts of
land and lived in not a little style in good houses on the small
streams.
The northern part of the province, largely settled and influenced by
New Englanders, was like New England a land of vigorous concentrated
town life and small farms. The hilly and mountainous nature of the
northern section naturally led to small holdings of land. But in
southern Jersey the level sandy tracts of forest were often taken up
in large areas. In the absence of manufacturing, large acreage
naturally became, as in Virginia and Maryland, the only mark of
wealth and social distinction. The great landlord was looked up to
by the lesser fry. The Quaker rule of discountenancing marrying out
of meeting tended to keep a large acreage in the family and to make
it larger by marriage. A Quaker of broad acres would seek for his
daughter a young man of another landholding Quaker family and would
thus join the two estates.
There was a marked difference between East Jersey and West Jersey in
county organization. In West Jersey the people tended to become
planters; their farms and plantations somewhat like those of the far
South; and the political unit of government was the county. In East
Jersey the town was the starting point and the county marked the
boundaries of a collection of towns. This curious difference, the
result of soil, climate, and methods of life, shows itself in other
States wherever South and North meet. Illinois is an example, where
the southern part of the State is governed by the county system, and
the northern part by the town system.
The lumberman, too, in clearing off the primeval forest and selling
the timber, usually dealt in immense acreage. Some families, it is
said, can be traced steadily proceeding southward as they stripped
off the forest, and started sawmills and gristmills on the little
streams that trickled from the swamps, and like beavers making with
their dams those pretty ponds which modern lovers of the picturesque
are now so eager to find. A good deal of the lumbering in the
interior pines tract was carried on by persons who leased the
premises from owners who lived on plantations along the Delaware or
its tributary streams. These operations began soon after 1700. Wood
roads were cut into the Pines, sawmills were started, and constant
use turned some of these wood roads into the highways of modern
times.
There was a speculative tinge in the operations of this landed
aristocracy. Like the old tobacco raising aristocracy of Virginia
and Maryland, they were inclined to go from tract to tract, skinning
what they could from a piece of deforested land and then seeking
another virgin tract. The roughest methods were used; wooden plows,
brush harrows, straw collars, grapevine harness, and poor shelter
for animals and crops; but were the Virginia methods any better? In
these operations there was apparently a good deal of sudden profit
and mushroom prosperity accompanied by a good deal of debt and
insolvency. In this, too, they were like the Virginians and
Carolinians. There seem to have been also a good many slaves in West
Jersey, brought, as in the southern colonies, to work on the large
estates, and this also, no doubt, helped to foster the aristocratic
feeling.
The best days of the Jersey gentlemen farmers came probably when
they could no longer move from tract to tract. They settled down and
enjoyed a very plentiful, if rude, existence on the products of
their land, game, and fish, amid a fine climate--with mosquitoes
enough in summer to act as a counterirritant and prevent stagnation
from too much ease and prosperity. After the manner of colonial
times, they wove their own clothes from the wool of their own sheep
and made their own implements, furniture, and simple machinery.
There are still to be found fascinating traces of this old life in
out-of-the-way parts of southern Jersey. To run upon old houses
among the Jersey pines still stored with Latin classics and old
editions of Shakespeare, Addison, or Samuel Johnson, to come across
an old mill with its machinery, cogwheels, flywheels, and all, made
of wood, to find people who make their own oars, and the handles of
their tools from the materials furnished by their own forest, is now
unfortunately a refreshment of the spirit that is daily becoming
rarer.
This condition of material and social self-sufficiency lasted in
places long after the Revolution. It was a curious little
aristocracy--a very faint and faded one, lacking the robustness of
the far southern type, and lacking indeed the real essential of an
aristocracy, namely political power. Moreover, although there were
slaves in New Jersey, there were not enough of them to exalt the
Jersey gentlemen farmers into such self-sufficient lords and masters
as the Virginian and Carolinian planters became.
To search out the remains of this stage of American history,
however, takes one up many pleasant streams flowing out of the
forest tract to the Delaware on one side or to the ocean on the
other. This topographical formation of a central ridge or watershed
of forest and swamp was a repetition of the same formation in the
Delaware peninsula, which like southern Jersey had originally been a
shoal and then an island. The Jersey watershed, with its streams
abounding in wood duck and all manner of wild life, must have been
in its primeval days as fascinating as some of the streams of the
Florida cypress swamps. Toward the ocean, Wading River, the Mullica,
the Tuckahoe, Great Egg; and on the Delaware side the Maurice,
Cohansey, Salem Creek, Oldman's, Raccoon, Mantua, Woodberry, Timber,
and the Rancocas, still possess attraction. Some of them, on
opposite sides of the divide, are not far apart at their sources in
the old forest tract; so that a canoe can be transported over the
few miles and thus traverse the State. One of these trips up Timber
Creek from the Delaware and across only eight miles of land to the
headwaters of Great Egg Harbor River and thence down to the ocean,
thus cutting South Jersey in half, is a particularly romantic one.
The heavy woods and swamps of this secluded route along these forest
shadowed streams are apparently very much as they were three hundred
years ago.
The water in all these streams, particularly in their upper parts,
owing to the sandy soil, is very clean and clear and is often
stained by the cedar roots in the swamps a clear brown, sometimes
almost an amber color. One of the streams, the Rancocas, with its
many windings to Mount Holly and then far inland to Brown's Mills,
seems to be the favorite with canoemen and is probably without an
equal in its way for those who love the Indian's gift that brings us
so close to nature.
The spread of the Quaker settlements along Delaware Bay to Cape May
was checked by the Maurice River and its marshes and by the Great
Cedar Swamp which crossed the country from Delaware Bay to the ocean
and thus made of the Cape May region a sort of island. The Cape May
region, it is true, was settled by Quakers, but most of them came
from Long Island rather than from the settlements on the Delaware.
They had followed whale fishing on Long Island and in pursuit of
that occupation some of them had migrated to Cape May where whales
were numerous not far off shore.
The leading early families of Cape May, the Townsends, Stillwells,
Corsons, Leamings, Ludlams, Spicers, and Cresses, many of whose
descendants still live there, were Quakers of the Long Island
strain. The ancestor of the Townsend family came to Cape May because
he had been imprisoned and fined and threatened with worse under the
New York government for assisting his fellow Quakers to hold
meetings. Probably the occasional severity of the administration of
the New York laws against Quakers, which were the same as those of
England, had as much to do as had the whales with the migration to
Cape May. This Quaker civilization extended from Cape May up as far
as Great Egg Harbor where the Great Cedar Swamp joined the seashore.
Quaker meeting houses were built at Cape May, Galloway, Tuckahoe,
and Great Egg. All have been abandoned and the buildings themselves
have disappeared, except that of the Cape May meeting, called the
Old Cedar Meeting, at Seaville; and it has no congregation. The
building is kept in repair by members of the Society from other
places.
Besides the Quakers, Cape May included a number of New Haven people,
the first of whom came there as early as 1640 under the leadership
of George Lamberton and Captain Turner, seeking profit in whale
fishing. They were not driven out by the Dutch and Swedes, as
happened to their companions who attempted to settle higher up the
river at Salem and the Schuylkill. About one-fifth of the old family
names of Cape May and New Haven are similar, and there is supposed
to be not a little New England blood not only in Cape May but in the
neighboring counties of Cumberland and Salem. While the first New
Haven whalers came to Cape May in 1640, it is probable that for a
long time they only sheltered their vessels there, and none of them
became permanent settlers until about 1685.
Scandinavians contributed another element to the population of the
Cape May region. Very little is definitely known about this
settlement, but the Swedish names in Cape May and Cumberland
counties seem to indicate a migration of Scandinavians from
Wilmington and Tinicum.
Great Egg Harbor, which formed the northern part of the Cape May
settlement, was named from the immense numbers of wild fowl, swans,
ducks, and water birds that formerly nested there every summer and
have now been driven to Canada or beyond. Little Egg Harbor farther
up the coast was named for the same reason as well as Egg Island, of
three hundred acres in Delaware Bay, since then eaten away by the
tide. The people of the district had excellent living from the eggs
as well as from the plentiful fowl, fish, and oysters.
Some farming was done by the inhabitants of Cape May; and many
cattle, marked with brands but in a half wild state, were kept out
on the uninhabited beaches which have now become seaside summer
cities. Some of the cattle were still running wild on the beaches
down to the time of the Civil War. The settlers "mined" the valuable
white cedar from the swamps for shingles and boards, leaving great
"pool holes" in the swamps which even today sometimes trap the
unwary sportsman. The women knitted innumerable mittens and also
made wampum or Indian money from the clam and oyster shells, an
important means of exchange in the Indian trade all over the
colonies, and even to some extent among the colonists themselves.
The Cape May people built sloops for carrying the white cedar, the
mittens, oysters, and wampum to the outside world. They sold a great
deal of their cedar in Long Island, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
Philadelphia finally became their market for oysters and also for
lumber, corn, and the whalebone and oil. Their sloops also traded to
the southern colonies and even to the West Indies.
They were an interesting little community, these Cape May people,
very isolated and dependent on the water and on their boats, for
they were completely cut off by the Great Cedar Swamp which
stretched across the point and separated them from the rest of the
coast. This troublesome swamp was not bridged for many years; and
even then the roads to it were long, slow, and too sandy for
transporting anything of much bulk.
Next above Cape May on the coast was another isolated patch of
civilization which, while not an island, was nevertheless cut off on
the south by Great Egg Harbor with its river and marshes, and on the
north by Little Egg Harbor with the Mullica River and its marshes
extending far inland. The people in this district also lived
somewhat to themselves. To the north lay the district which extended
to Sandy Hook, also with its distinct set of people.
The people of the Cape became in colonial times clever traders in
various pursuits. Although in one sense they were as isolated as
islanders, their adventurous life on the sea gave them breadth of
view. By their thrift and in innumerable shrewd and persistent ways
they amassed competencies and estates for their families. Aaron
Leaming, for example, who died in 1780, left an estate of nearly
$1,000,000. Some kept diaries which have become historically
valuable in showing not only their history but their good education
and the peculiar cast of their mind for keen trading as well as
their rigid economy and integrity.
One character, Jacob Spicer, a prosperous colonial, insisted on
having everything made at home by his sons and daughters--shoes,
clothes, leather breeches, wampum, even shoe thread--calculating the
cost of everything to a fraction and economizing to the last penny
of money and the last second of time. Yet in the course of a year he
used "fifty-two gallons of rum, ten of wine, and two barrels of
cyder." Apparently in those days hard labor and hard drinking went
well together.
The Cape May people, relying almost entirely on the water for
communication and trade, soon took to piloting vessels in the
Delaware River, and some of them still follow this occupation. They
also became skillful sailors and builders of small craft, and it is
not surprising to learn that Jacocks Swain and his sons introduced,
in 1811, the centerboard for keeping flat-bottomed craft closer to
the wind. They are said to have taken out a patent for this
invention and are given the credit of being the originators of the
idea. But the device was known in England in 1774, was introduced in
Massachusetts in the same year, and may have been used long before
by the Dutch. The need of it, however, was no doubt strongly
impressed upon the Cape May people by the difficulties which their
little sloops experienced in beating home against contrary winds.
Some of them, indeed, spent weeks in sight of the Cape, unable to
make it. One sloop, the Nancy, seventy-two days from Demarara, hung
off and on for forty-three days from December 25, 1787, to February
6, 1788, and was driven off fifteen times before she finally got
into Hereford Inlet. Sometimes better sailing craft had to go out
and bring in such distressed vessels. The early boats were no doubt
badly constructed; but in the end apprenticeship to dire necessity
made the Cape May sailors masters of seamanship and the windward
art.*
* Stevens, "History of Cape May County," pp. 219, 229; Kelley,
"American Yachts" (1884), p. 165.
Wilson, the naturalist, spent a great deal of time in the Cape May
region, because of the great variety of birds to be found there.
Southern types, like the Florida egret, ventured even so far north,
and it was a stopping place for migrating birds, notably woodcock,
on their northern and southern journeys. Men of the stone age had
once been numerous in this region, as the remains of village plats
and great shell heaps bore witness. It was a resting point for all
forms of life. That much traveled, adventurous gentleman of the sea,
Captain Kidd, according to popular legend, was a frequent visitor to
this coast.
In later times, beginning in 1801, the Cape became one of the
earliest of the summer resorts. The famous Commodore Decatur was
among the first distinguished men to be attracted by the simple
seaside charm of the place, long before it was destroyed by wealth
and crowds. Year by year he used to measure and record at one spot
the encroachment of the sea upon the beach. Where today the sea
washes and the steel pier extends, once lay cornfields. For a
hundred years it was a favorite resting place for statesmen and
politicians of national eminence. They traveled there by stage,
sailing sloop, or their own wagons. People from Baltimore and the
South more particularly sought the place because it was easily
accessible from the head of Chesapeake Bay by an old railroad, long
since abandoned, to Newcastle on the Delaware, whence sail- or
steamboats went to Cape May. This avoided the tedious stage ride
over the sandy Jersey roads. Presidents, cabinet officers, senators,
and congressmen sought the invigorating air of the Cape and the
attractions of the old village, its seafaring life, the sailing,
fishing, and bathing on the best beach of the coast. Congress Hall,
their favorite hotel, became famous, and during a large part of the
nineteenth century presidential nominations and policies are said to
have been planned within its walls.
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