The state of affairs under the next governor, William Denny, is shown by a passage in one of his early messages. “Though moderation is most agreeable to me,” he says to the assembly, “there might have been a governor who would have told you, the whole tenor of your message was indecent, frivolous, and evasive.” Again the instructions were the cause of all trouble. The governor was in duty bound to withhold his assent from every act for the emission of bills of credit that did not subject the money to the joint disposal of the governor and assembly, and from every act increasing the amount of bills of credit or confirming existing issues, unless a provision directed that the rents of proprietary lands were to be paid in sterling money, while the taxes on these lands could not become a lien on the same. The treasury of the province was on the verge of complete bankruptcy, when the governor rejected a bill levying £100,000 on all real and personal property, including the proprietary lands. Seeing no other way out of the dilemma, the assembly amended their bill by exempting the proprietary interests from taxation, but they sought their revenge by sending an agent, Benjamin Franklin, to England to represent their grievances to the crown. Franklin reached London in July, 1757, and entered immediately upon a quarrel with the proprietors respecting their rights, from which he issued as victor. Denny, tired of the struggle, and in need of money, finally disobeyed his instructions, gave his assent to obnoxious bills, and was recalled, to give way to Hamilton, who in 1759 was again installed.
Hamilton went through his second term without strife. There were too many external dangers to engage the assembly’s attention. Parliament, in anticipation of a Spanish war, had appropriated £200,000 for fortifying the colony posts; the assembly took the province’s share of it, £26,000, and made ready to receive the Spanish privateers, to whose attacks by the Delaware the country lay invitingly open. The danger was not so great as it seemed. In 1763 Hamilton was superseded by John Penn, the son of Richard and grandson of William Penn.
During these later years, Pennsylvania could justly be called the most flourishing of the English colonies. A fleet of four hundred sail left Philadelphia yearly with the season’s produce. The colony’s free population numbered 220,000 souls, and of these possibly half were German folk, who had known not a little of Old World oppression; one sixth were Quakers, more than a sixth were Presbyterians, another sixth were Episcopalians, and there were a few Baptists. The spirit and tenets of the first framers of its government, as the Quakers had been, were calculated to attract the attention of oppressed sectaries everywhere, and bodies of many diversified beliefs, from different parts of Europe, flocked to the land, took up their abodes, and are recognized in their descendants to-day. Conspicuous among these immigrants were those of the sect called Unitas Fratrum, United Brethren, or Moravians, who settled principally in the present county of Northampton. Though they labored successfully among the Indians in making converts, it was rare that they succeeded in uniting to their communion any of their Christian neighbors. The Moravians had been preceded by a sect of similar tenets, the adherents of Schwenckfeld. They had come to Pennsylvania in 1732 and mostly settled in the present county of Montgomery. Still earlier a sort of German Baptists, called Dunkers, Tunkers, or Dumplers, coming to America between 1719 and 1729, had found homes in Lancaster County. Another sect of Baptists, the followers of Menno Simon, or Mennonists,—like the Friends, opposed to taking oaths and bearing arms,—had begun to make their way across the ocean as early as 1698, induced thereto by information derived from Penn himself. Like the Dunkers, they chose Lancaster County for their American homes.
But there were other motives than religious ones. There came many Welsh, Irish, and Scotch farmers. The Welsh were a valuable stock; the same cannot be said of the Irish, who began to come in 1719, and continued to arrive in such large numbers that special legislation in regard to them was required in 1729. An act laying a duty on foreigners and Irish servants imported into the province was passed May 10, 1729. This act was repealed, but many features of it were embodied in an act of the following year, imposing a duty on persons convicted of heinous crimes, and preventing poor and impotent persons being imported into the province. It must be acknowledged that the Catholic religion, professed by these immigrants, had not a little to do with the temper of the legislation which restrained them, in a colony which had been modelled on the principles of religious freedom. It was not assuring, on the other hand, for the legislators to discover that the sympathy which the Roman priests showed for the French enemies of the province foreboded mischief.
It has been told in a previous chapter how New Jersey passed from the state of a conquered province to that of a proprietary or settled colony, and how little the change of dynasty in England affected the public affairs of this section of the middle colonies. The proprietors of East New Jersey had grown weary of governing the province, and in April, 1688, had drawn up an act surrendering their share. The revolutionary disturbances in England which soon followed prevented action upon this surrender; but when, at the beginning of the next century, the proprietors of West New Jersey also showed themselves willing to surrender the burden and cares of government to the crown, the Lords of Trade gave it as their opinion that no sufficient form of government had ever been formed in New Jersey, that many inconveniences and disorders had been the result of the proprietors’ pretence of right to govern, and advised the Law Lords to accept the surrender. The proprietors reserved to themselves all their rights in the soil of the province, while they abandoned the privilege of governing. East and West New Jersey, now become again one province, was to be ruled by a governor, a council of twelve members appointed by the crown, and twenty-four assembly-men elected by the freeholders. The governor was given the right of adjourning and dissolving the assembly at pleasure, and of vetoing any act passed by council and assembly, his assent being subject to the approval or dissent of the king.
When surrendering in 1701 their rights of government, the proprietors recommended, for the office of royal governor, Andrew Hamilton, their representative in the colony, in whose ability and integrity they had the fullest confidence, and who during his previous terms as governor had also won the admiration and reverence of the governed. Intrigues against Hamilton, instituted by two influential proprietors, Dockwra and Sonmans, and by Colonel Quary, of Pennsylvania, resulted in Hamilton’s defeat and the appointment of Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, who was already governor of New York. Cornbury published his commission in New Jersey on the 11th of August, 1703, and inaugurated, by his way of dealing with the affairs of the colony, the same series of violent contests between the governor and the people, represented by the assembly, that had served under him to keep New York unsettled. Complaints made by the proprietors against him in England had no effect, although he had clearly violated his instructions, by unseating three members of the assembly; by making money the proper qualification for election to the same, instead of land; and by allowing an act taxing unprofitable and waste land to become a law. His successor, John, Lord Lovelace, appointed early in 1708, arrived in New York early in December of the same year. He had various schemes for the improvement of both colonies, but it is doubtful whether his previous position of cornet in the royal horse-guards had fitted him for administrative and executive work. A disease was, moreover, already fastened upon him, which in a few months carried him off. His successor, Major Richard Ingoldsby, is best described by Bellomont, under whom he had previously served in New York. “Major Ingoldesby has been absent from his post four years,” says Bellomont in a letter to the Lords of Trade, October 17, 1700, “and is so brutish as to leave his wife and children here to starve. Ingoldesby is of a worthy family, but is a rash, hot-headed man, and had a great hand in the execution of Leisler and Milburn, for which reason, if there were no other, he is not fit to serve in this country, having made himself hatefull to the Leisler party.” Cornbury understood the man so fully that he would not allow him to act as lieutenant-governor of either New York or New Jersey, to which office he had been appointed in 1704. Ingoldsby’s commission as lieutenant-governor was revoked in 1706, but he was admitted as a member of the council for New Jersey. It seems that the order revoking the commission was not sent out to New York in 1706, for upon Lord Lovelace’s death he assumed the government, and acted so brutally that, when news of it reached England, a new order of revocation was issued. In the short interval before the arrival of his successor, Governor Robert Hunter, who published his commission in New Jersey in the summer of 1710, Ingoldsby had managed to get into conflict with the assembly, largely formed of members from the Society of Friends, and brought about the state of affairs which we may call usual in all the British colonies ruled by a governor appointed by the king, and by an assembly elected by the people. Hunter must be termed the first satisfactory governor of New Jersey. Early in his administration he met with opposition from those who so far had slavishly followed the royal governor. These opponents were the council of the province, who objected to every measure which Governor Hunter, advised by Lewis Morris and other influential members of the Quaker or country party, deemed necessary for the public good. The council was entirely under the thumb of Secretary Jeremiah Basse, who, having been an Anabaptist minister, agent in England for the West Jersey Society, governor of East and West Jersey, had shared in the obloquy attached to Lord Cornbury’s administration. Public business threatened to come to a standstill, as the home authorities were slow in acting on recommendations to remove the obnoxious members of the council. Hunter constantly prorogued the assembly of New Jersey; “it being absolutely needless to meet the assembly so long as the council is so constituted,” he writes to the Lords of Trade, June 23, 1712, “for they have avowedly opposed the government in most things, and by their influence obstructed the payment of a great part of the taxes.” But it was not until August, 1713, that the queen approved of the removal of William Pinhorn, Daniel Coxe, Peter Sonmans, and William Hall from the council, in whose places John Anderson, a wealthy trader and farmer of Perth Amboy, John Hamilton, postmaster-general of North America, and John Reading, of West Jersey, were appointed. William Morris, recommended in place of Sonmans, had died meanwhile. Sonmans stole and took out of the province all public records, and, having gone to England with his booty, he used the papers to injure Governor Hunter in the estimation of the people of New Jersey, while “our men of noise” agitated against him in the province and in its assembly. No effort was spared to prevent a renewal of Hunter’s commission in 1714, and when he was reappointed notwithstanding, Coxe, Sonmans, and their friends had so inflamed the “lower rank of people that only time and patience, or stronger measures, could allay the heat.” At last it became an absolute necessity to summon the assembly again, and an act “for fixing the sessions of assembly in the Jersies at Burlington” was passed in 1715, which became the cause of incessant attacks upon the governor by Coxe and his party. Hunter, seeing the wheels of government stopped by the factious absence of Coxe and his friends from the legislative sessions, said to the assembly, May 19, 1716: “Whereas, it is apparent and evident that there is at present a combination amongst some of your members to disappoint and defeat your meetings as a house of representatives by their wilful absenting themselves from the service of their country ... I have judged it absolutely necessary ... to require you forthwith to meet as a house of representatives, and to take the usual methods to oblige your fellow members to pay their attendance.” The assembly, like a sensible body, aware that Governor Hunter had always acted with justice and moderation, answered his appeal to them by expelling on the 23d of May their speaker, Coxe, as a man whose study it had been to disturb the quiet and tranquillity of the province, and such other members as did not attend and could not be found by the sergeant-at-arms of the house.
Coxe did not consider himself vanquished. An appeal to the king followed. Coxe charged Hunter with illegal acts of every kind, and his petition was numerously signed; but the council certified that his subscribers were “for the most part the lowest and meanest of the people,” and the king sustained and commended the governor. When, a few years later, Hunter resolved to return to Europe to recover his health at the baths of Aix-la-Chapelle, he could with pride assert that the provinces governed by him “were in perfect peace, to which both had long been strangers.”
William Burnet, who succeeded his friend Hunter, was not so amiable a man, and showed the airs of personal importance too much to suit the Quaker spirit which prevailed among the New Jersey people. He needed money to live upon, however, and there was something of the Jacobite opposition in the province for him to suppress. He had difficulty at first in getting the assembly to pass other than temporary bills; but in 1722 the governor and assembly had reached an understanding, and Burnet passed through the rest of his term without much conflict with the legislature, and when transferred to the chair of Massachusetts, in 1728, he turned over the government in a quiet condition, and with few or no wounds unhealed.
The most notable event during the three years’ term of his successor, Montgomerie, was the renewal of an effort, already attempted in Burnet’s time, but defeated by him, to have New Jersey made again a government separate from New York. “By order of the house 4th 5mo, 1730,” John Kinsey, Junr., speaker, signed a petition to the king for a separate governor. Montgomerie died July 1, 1731, and Lewis Morris, as president of the council, governed till September, 1732, when Cosby, the new governor, arrived. The grand jury of Middlesex tried to further the attempt for a separate government in 1736, but nothing was done till Cosby died, when Morris, whom Cosby had shamefully maligned, received the appointment from a grateful king, and New Jersey was again possessed of a separate governor.
Governor Morris published his commission at Amboy on the 29th of August, 1738; at Burlington a few days later. The council, with the assembly, expressed the thanks and joy of the people in unmeasured terms, prophetically seeing trade and commerce flourish and justice more duly and speedily administered under the new rule. The pleasant relations between the governor and the representatives of the people which these expressions of satisfaction seemed to foreshadow were not to be of long duration. “There is so much insincerity and ignorance among the people, ... and so strong an inclination in the meanest of the people to have the sole direction of all the affairs of the government,” writes Morris to his friend Sir Charles Wager, one of the treasury lords, May 10, 1739, “that it requires much more temper, skill, and constancy to overcome these difficulties than fall to every man’s share.” Under these influences, Morris, the former leader of the popular party, betrayed them, and tried to obey his instructions to the very letter. Following the example set by Cosby, of New York, in regard to the salary of an absent governor and a present lieutenant-governor or president of the council, he began to quarrel with John Hamilton, who as president had temporarily acted as governor. Fortunately for Morris’s reputation, this case did not grow into such a public scandal as the Cosby-Van Dam case, mentioned above, and was quietly settled in the proper way. The assembly, having early discovered that Morris was not an easy man to deal with, tried to discipline him by interfering with the disposal of the revenue granted for the support of the government, and finally refused to pass supply bills unless the governor disobeyed his instructions and assented to bills enacted by them. The wheels of the governmental machinery threatened to come to a standstill for want of money, when Morris, after an illness of some weeks, died at Trenton on the 21st of May, 1746, leaving the government of the province to his whilom adversary. John Hamilton, as president of the council, who was then already suffering from ill health, prorogued the assembly, then sitting at Trenton, and reconvened them at Perth Amboy, his own home. Relieved of their political enemy, Morris, the assembly became more amenable to reason, and during Hamilton’s brief administration “chearfully made provision for raising 500 men” for the Canada expedition, and lent the government £10,000 to arm and equip the New Jersey contingent. Hamilton soon succumbed to his disease, and died June 17, 1747. When John Reading, another member of the council, succeeded to power, his administration of a few months was mainly signalized by riots at Perth Amboy,—in which Reading was roughly handled. These disturbances were caused by an act to vacate and annul grants of land and to divest owners of property which had been bought some years before from the Indians.