New Jersey, Scheyichbi, as the Indians called it, or Nova Caesarea, as it was called in the Latin of its proprietary grant, had a history rather different from that of other English colonies in America.Geographically, it had not a few attractions.It was a good sized dominion surrounded on all sides but one by water, almost an island domain, secluded and independent.In fact, it was the only one of the colonies which stood naturally separate and apart.The others were bounded almost entirely by artificial or imaginary lines.
It offered an opportunity, one might have supposed, for some dissatisfied religious sect of the seventeenth century to secure a sanctuary and keep off all intruders.But at first no one of the various denominations seems to have fancied it or chanced upon it.The Puritans disembarked upon the bleak shores of New England well suited to the sternness of their religion.How different American history might have been if they had established themselves in the Jerseys! Could they, under those milder skies, have developed witchcraft, set up blue laws, and indulged in the killing of Quakers? After a time they learned about the Jerseys and cast thrifty eyes upon them.Their seafaring habits and the pursuit of whales led them along the coast and into Delaware Bay.The Puritans of New Haven made persistent efforts to settle the southern part of Jersey, on the Delaware near Salem.They thought, as their quaint old records show, that if they could once start a branch colony in Jersey it might become more populous and powerful than the New Haven settlement and in that case they intended to move their seat of government to the new colony.But their shrewd estimate of its value came too late.The Dutch and the Swedes occupied the Delaware at that time and drove them out.Puritans, however, entered northern Jersey and, while they were not numerous enough to make it a thoroughly Puritan community, they largely tinged its thought and its laws, and their influence still survives.
The difficulty with Jersey was that its seacoast was a monotonous line of breakers with dangerous shoal inlets, few harbors, and vast mosquito infested salt marshes and sandy thickets.In the interior it was for the most part a level, heavily forested, sandy, swampy country in its southern portions, and rough and mountainous in the northern portions.Even the entrance by Delaware Bay was so difficult by reason of its shoals that it was the last part of the coast to be explored.The Delaware region and Jersey were in fact a sort of middle ground far less easy of access by the sea than the regions to the north in New England and to the south in Virginia.
There were only two places easy of settlement in the Jerseys.One was the open region of meadows and marshes by Newark Bay near the mouth of the Hudson and along the Hackensack River, whence the people slowly extended themselves to the seashore at Sandy Hook and thence southward along the ocean beach.This was East Jersey.
The other easily occupied region, which became West Jersey, stretched along the shore of the lower Delaware from the modern Trenton to Salem, whence the settlers gradually worked their way into the interior.Between these two divisions lay a rough wilderness which in its southern portion was full of swamps, thickets, and pine barrens.So rugged was the country that the native Indians lived for the most part only in the two open regions already described.
The natural geographical, geological, and even social division of New Jersey is made by drawing a line from Trenton to the mouth of the Hudson River.North of that line the successive terraces of the piedmont and mountainous region form part of the original North American continent.South of that line the more or less sandy level region was once a shoal beneath the ocean; afterwards a series of islands; then one island with a wide sound behind it passing along the division line to the mouth of the Hudson.
Southern Jersey was in short an island with a sound behind it very much like the present Long Island.The shoal and island had been formed in the far distant geologic past by the erosion and washings from the lofty Pennsylvania mountains now worn down to mere stumps.
The Delaware River flowed into this sound at Trenton.Gradually the Hudson end of the sound filled up as far as Trenton, but the tide from the ocean still runs up the remains of the Old Sound as far as Trenton.The Delaware should still be properly considered as ending at Trenton, for the rest of its course to the ocean is still part of Old Pensauken Sound, as it is called by geologists.
The Jerseys originated as a colony in 1664.In 1675 West Jersey passed into the control of the Quakers.In 1680 East Jersey came partially under Quaker influence.In August, 1664, Charles IIseized New York, New Jersey, and all the Dutch possessions in America, having previously in March granted them to his brother the Duke of York.The Duke almost immediately gave to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, members of the Privy Council and defenders of the Stuart family in the Cromwellian wars, the land between the Delaware River and the ocean, and bounded on the north by a line drawn from latitude 41 degrees on the Hudson to latitude 41 degrees 40 minutes on the Delaware.This region was to be called, the grant said, Nova Caesarea, or New Jersey.The name was a compliment to Carteret, who in the Cromwellian wars had defended the little isle of Jersey against the forces of the Long Parliament.As the American Jersey was then almost an island and geologically had been one, the name was not inappropriate.
