THE MIDDLE COLONIES: THE JERSEYS, DELAWARE, AND PENNSYLVANIA—THE QUAKER COLONIZATION—GEORGIA.
The bargainings and conveyancings, the confirmations and reclamations, the setting up and overturning, which, after the conquest of the New Netherlands, had the effect to detach the peninsula of New Jersey from the jurisdiction of New York, and to divide it for a time into two governments, belong to political history; but they had, of course, an important influence on the planting of the church in that territory. One result of them was a wide diversity of materials in the early growth of the church.
Toward the end of the Dutch occupation, one lonely congregation had been planted in that region which, at a later time, when the Dutch church in America had awaked from its lethargy, was to become known as "the garden of the Dutch church."[109:1]
After the extinction of the high theocracy of the New Haven Colony by the merger of it in Connecticut, a whole church and town, headed by the pastor, having secured such guaranty of their political liberty as the unstable government of New Jersey was able to give, left the homes endeared to them by thirty years of toil and thrift, and lifting the ark of the covenant by the staves, set themselves down beside the Passaic, calling their plantation the New-Ark, and reinstituted their fundamental principle of restricting the franchise to members of the church. Thus "with one heart they resolved to carry on their spiritual and town affairs according to godly government." The Puritan migration, of which this was the nucleus, had an influence on the legislation and the later history of New Jersey out of all proportion to its numbers.
Twenty years later the ferocious persecution of the Scottish Covenanters, which was incited by the fears or the bloody vindictiveness of James II. after the futile insurrection of Monmouth, furnished a motive for emigration to the best people in North Britain, which was quickly seized and exploited by the operators in Jersey lands. Assurances of religious liberty were freely given; men of influence were encouraged to bring over large companies; and in 1686 the brother of the martyred Duke of Argyle was made governor of East Jersey. The considerable settlements of Scotchmen found congenial neighbors in the New Englanders of Newark. A system of free schools, early established by a law of the commonwealth, is naturally referred to their common influence.
Meanwhile a series of events of the highest consequence to the future of the American church had been in progress in the western half of the province. Passing from hand to hand, the ownership and lordship of West Jersey had become vested in a land company dominated by Quakers. For the first time in the brief history of that sect, it was charged with the responsibility of the organization and conduct of government. Hitherto it had been publicly known by the fierce and defiant and often outrageous protests of its representatives against existing governments and dignities both in state and in church, such as exposed them to the natural and reasonable suspicion of being wild and mischievous anarchists. The opportunities and temptations that come to those in power would be a test of the quality of the sect more severe than trial by the cart-tail and the gibbet.
The Quakers bore the test nobly. Never did a commercial company show itself so little mercenary; never was a sovereign more magnanimous and unselfish. With the opening of the province to settlement, the proprietors set forth a statement of their purposes: "We lay a foundation for after ages to understand their liberty as men and Christians, that they may not be brought into bondage but by their own consent; for we put the power in the people." This was followed by a code of "Concessions and Agreements" in forty-four articles, which were at once a constitution of government and a binding compact with such as should enter themselves as colonists on these terms. They left little to be desired in securities for personal, political, and religious liberty.[111:1]
At once population began to flow amain. In 1677 two hundred and thirty Quakers came in one ship and founded the town of Burlington. By 1681 there had come fourteen hundred. Weekly, monthly, quarterly meetings were established; houses of worship were built; and in August, 1681, the Quaker hierarchy (if it may so be called without offense) was completed by the establishment of the Burlington Yearly Meeting. The same year the corporation, encouraged by its rapid success, increased its numbers and its capital, bought out the proprietors of East Jersey, and appointed as governor over the whole province the eminent Quaker theologian, Robert Barclay. The Quaker régime continued, not always smoothly, till 1688, when it was extinguished by James II. at the end of his perfidious campaigns against American liberties.
This enterprise of the Quaker purchase and settlement of New Jersey brings upon the stage of American history the great apostle of Christian colonization, William Penn. He came into relation to the New Jersey business as arbiter of some differences that arose between the two Friends who had bought West Jersey in partnership. He continued in connection with it when the Quaker combination had extended itself by purchase over the whole Jersey peninsula, and he was a trusted counselor of the corporation, and the representative of its interests at court. Thus there grew more and more distinct before his peculiarly adventurous and enterprising mind the vision of the immense possibilities, political, religious, and commercial, of American colonization. With admirable business shrewdness combined with courtly tact, he canceled an otherwise hopeless debt from the crown in consideration of the concession to him of a domain of imperial wealth and dimensions, with practically unlimited rights of jurisdiction. At once he put into exercise the advantages and opportunities which were united in him so as never before in the promoter of a like enterprise, and achieved a success speedy and splendid beyond all precedent.