Jonathan Belcher, after being removed in 1741[489] from the executive office of Massachusetts, had gone to England, where, with the assistance of his brother-in-law, Richard Partridge, the agent at court for New Jersey, he obtained the appointment of governor of this province. When he first met the council and assembly of New Jersey, on the 20th of August, 1747, he said to them, “I shall strictly conform myself to the king’s commands and to the powers granted me therein, as also to the additional authorities contained in the king’s royal orders to me, and from these things I think you will not desire me to deviate.” Belcher had not yet had occasion to arouse the anger of the assembly, when the latter, at their first session, of unusual long duration (fourteen weeks), already showed their distrust of him by voting his salary for one year only, and not “a penny more” than to the late governor, who had “harast and plagued them sufficiently.” Belcher was too well inured to colonial politics openly to manifest his anger at such treatment, or to tell the assembly that he considered them “very stingy,” as he called them in a letter to Partridge. His administration gave evidence of his ability to yield gracefully up to the limits of his instructions; but when a conflict with his assembly could not be avoided, he faced it stubbornly. On the whole, his rule resulted in a much-needed quiet for the province, which was only briefly disturbed by the riots already mentioned, which had begun before Belcher’s arrival. The members of the assembly, who depended largely for their election on the votes of these rioters, sympathized with the lawless element in Essex and other counties; but in the end wiser counsels prevailed, and the disturbances ceased.
In another part of the province the dispute over the boundary line with New York, as it affected titles of land, was also a source of agitation, which in Belcher’s time was the cause of constant remonstrance and appeal and of legislative intervention, but he left the question unsettled, a legacy of disturbance for later composition.
Age and a paralytic disorder, which even the electrical apparatus that Franklin sent to Belcher could not remove, ended Belcher’s life on the 31st of August, 1757, leaving the government in the hands of Thomas Pownall, who, on account of Belcher’s age and infirmity, had been appointed lieutenant-governor in 1755. Pownall was at the time of Belcher’s death also governor of Massachusetts. After a short visit to New Jersey he found “that the necessity of his majesty’s service in the government of the Massachusetts Bay” required his return to Boston, and his absence brought the active duties of the executive once more upon Reading, as senior counsellor, who, through age and illness, was little disposed towards the burden.
The arrival, on the 15th of June, 1758, of Francis Bernard, bearing a commission as governor, relieved Reading of his irksome duties. Bernard had, during his short term, the satisfaction of pacifying the Indians by a treaty made at Easton in October, 1758. The otherwise uneventful term of his administration was soon ended by his transfer to Massachusetts. His successor, Thomas Boone, after an equally short and uneventful term, was replaced by Josiah Hardy, and the latter by William Franklin, the son of the great philosopher. The latter had secured his appointment through Lord Bute, but nothing can be said in this chapter of his administration, which, beginning in 1762, belongs to another volume.[490]
The possible injury which a development of the manufacturing interests in the colonies might inflict on like interests in Great Britain agitated the mind of the English manufacturer at an early date. Already in Dutch times this question of manufactures in the province of New Netherland had been settled rather peremptorily by an order of the Assembly of the Nineteen, which made it a felony to engage in the making of any woollen, linen, or cotton cloth. The English Parliament, perhaps influenced by the manufacturers among their constituents, or not willing to appear as legislating in the interest of money, declared, in 1719, “that the erecting of manufactories in the colonies tends to lessen their dependence on Great Britain,” and a prohibition similar to that of the Dutch authorities was enacted. During the whole colonial period this feeling of jealousy interfered with the development of industries and delayed their growth. Whatever England could not produce was expected to be made here, such as naval stores, pearlash and potash, and silks; but the English manufacturer strenuously set himself in opposition to any colonial enterprise which affected his own profits.
Shipbuilding and the saw-mill had early sprung from the domestic necessities of the people. The Dutch had made the windmill a striking feature in the landscape of New York. The people of Pennsylvania had been the earliest in the middle colonies to establish a press, and it had brought the paper-mill in its train, though after a long interval; for it was not till 1697 that the manufacture of paper began near Philadelphia, and not till thirty years later (1728) was the second mill established at Elizabethtown in New Jersey. The Dutch had begun the making of glass in New York city, near what is now Hanover Square, and in Philadelphia it was becoming an industry as early as 1683; though if one may judge from the use of oiled paper in the first houses of Germantown, the manufacture of window-glass began later. Wistar, a palatine, erected a glass-house near Salem, in West New Jersey, in 1740, and Governor Moore, of New York, in 1767, says of a bankrupt glass-maker in New York that his ill success had come of his imported workmen deserting him after he had brought them over from Europe at great cost.
The presence of iron ore in the hills along the Hudson had been known to the Dutch, but they had made no attempt to work the mines, relying probably to some extent upon Massachusetts, where “a good store of iron” was manufactured from an early date. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, when the ore was tried, the founders discovered the iron to be too brittle to encourage its use. Lieutenant-Governor Clarke tried to arouse interest for the iron industry in 1737, and induced the general assembly to consider the advisability of encouraging proprietors of iron-works; but the movement came to nothing, and Parliament did what it could to thwart all such purposes by enacting a law “to encourage the importation of pig and bar iron from his Majesty’s Colonies in America, and to prevent the erection of any Mill or other Engine for Slitting or Rolling of Iron; or any plating Forge to work with a Tilt Hammer; or any Furnace for making Steel in any of the said Colonies.” When this act was passed in 1750 only a single plating-forge existed in the province of New York, at Wawayanda, Orange County, which had been built about 1745, and was not in use at the time. Two furnaces and several blomaries had been established about the same time in the manor of Cortland, Westchester County, but a few years had sufficed to bring their business to a disastrous end.
In 1757 the province could show only one iron-work at Ancram, which produced nothing but pig and bar iron. At this same establishment, owned by the Livingstons, in the present Columbia County, many a cannon was cast some years later to help in the defence of American liberties. In 1766 we find a little foundry established in New York for making small iron pots, but its operations had not yet become very extensive.
The first iron-works in New Jersey seem to have been opened by an Englishman, James Grover, who had become dissatisfied with the rule of the Dutch and the West India Company, and had removed from Long Island to Shrewsbury, New Jersey, where he and some iron-workers from Massachusetts set up one of the first forges in the province.
In 1676 the Morris family, which later became so prominent in colonial politics, was granted a large tract of land near the Raritan River, with the right “to dig, delve, and carry away all such mines for iron as they shall find” in that tract. The smelting-furnace and forge mentioned in an account of the province by the proprietors of East New Jersey, in 1682, employing both whites and blacks, was probably on the Morris estate. The mineral treasures of the province, however, remained on the whole undiscovered at the end of the century; but in the following century several blomary forges and one charcoal-furnace were erected in Warren County, the latter of which was still running twenty-five years ago. Penn had early learned of the richness of his province in iron and copper, though no attempt was made to mine them till 1698. At this early period Gabriel Thomas mentions the discovery of mineral ores, which were probably found in the Chester County of that day, and the first iron-works in the province were built in that region. Governor Keith owned iron-works in New Castle County (Delaware) between 1720 and 1730, and had such good opinion of the iron industry in the colonies that he considered them capable of supplying, if sufficiently encouraged, the mother country with all the pig and bar iron needed.