9. Land Conflicts in New Jersey

Land conflicts in New Jersey during the colonial period stemmed from its unique status of having numerous resident proprietors. Other proprietary colonies had one or a few feudal owners, remotely resident in England. Both West and East New Jersey, however, had numerous resident proprietors alert to their own interests, and when the provinces became a united Crown colony, the proprietors’ title to land still remained.

The bulk of the problem centered in East New Jersey, where the proprietors tended to hold onto their granted titles and tried to enforce quitrents rather than subdivide and sell the land quickly. The proprietors had trouble with two types of settlers: the recipients of the old Richard Nicolls patent during the mid-seventeenth century, and squatters, who believed no more was required for owning the land than settling and purchasing the tract from the Indians. The Nicolls patentees were largely in Elizabethtown, while the small farmers and squatters were farther west in the Oranges and in Hunterdon and Morris counties.

The East New Jersey Council of Proprietors began a concerted attempt to enforce their titles and quitrents during the late 1720s. Leading the proprietors were Lewis Morris and James Alexander. The proprietors received a severe setback when their attempt to eject an Elizabethtown settler was defeated after a jury trial in Lithgow v. Schuyler (1734). Foiled in their attempt to oust the Nicolls patentees, the proprietors decided to try to collect quitrents, which had accumulated to a total of 10,000 pounds in arrears.

The West New Jersey proprietors also began to crack down on squatter-settlers, especially in Hunterdon County. When agents of proprietor Daniel Coxe, Jr., tried to collect quitrents, the Hunterdon settlers drove them off with arms, and threatened Coxe with assassination if he should persist in his harassment. The conflict intensified when Lewis Morris, the leader of the proprietors, became royal governor in 1738.* Morris quickly appointed his son, Robert Hunter Morris, to be chief justice of the province, and his daughter’s father-in-law, Richard Ashfield, to be receiver general of quitrents. The upper house was also packed by Lewis Morris with his fellow proprietors.

The determined Morris decided, in the 1740s, to try the Elizabethtown land cases in the Court of Chancery, where he himself was presiding judge. In reply, the Elizabethtown settlers petitioned the king about their grievances, but to no avail. Morris and the proprietors also began winning many ejectment cases against settlers on the fringe of Elizabethtown, as well as against squatters farther west who had purchased Indian titles. The Chancery case against the Elizabethtown settlers was filed in 1745, and the settlers appeared to be in dire straits. At this point, with tensions at fever pitch, one of the Elizabethtown leaders, Samuel Baldwin, was arrested for cutting timber on his own—but allegedly proprietary—land. The people’s anger exploded and a mob broke open the Newark jail and rescued Baldwin.

Four months later, Nehemiah Baldwin and others of the rioters were arrested in their turn. In response, a crowd armed with clubs appeared and rescued Baldwin. Shortly afterward, a mob of three hundred appeared at the Newark jail, facing thirty armed militia. Threatening to kill every militiaman if fired upon, the triumphant crowd succeeded in breaking in and rescuing all the prisoners.

The new Assembly of February 1746 sympathized with the rioters. In his opening address to the legislature, Governor Morris thundered that the riots were virtually “high treason” and “likely to end in rebellion.” Morris called for severe measures to quell the “revolution.” Morris and the proprietors introduced in the Council an amazing bill, modeled on an English law of 1715, providing that if twelve or more persons should meet and refuse to disperse if so ordered by a government official, they would then be declared felons and be summarily put to death.

The confrontation between the two forces continued to mount. The rebels presented a petition to the legislature, citing their Indian titles and calling for a stay of all judicial processes against them, while proprietor Samuel Nevill denounced the petition as infringing the Crown’s prerogative and its sovereignty over the soil of New Jersey. In a sense, Nevill was correct. The opposing libertarian theory of land ownership, espoused by the squatters, was eloquently set forth by a sympathizer in a New York newspaper. Going beyond Roger Williams’ simple theory of Indian ownership to what was essentially the John Locke labor theory of original landed property, the writer declared that, although the earth “was made for equal use of all, it may nevertheless be appropriated by every individual. This is done by the improvement of any part of it lying vacant, which is thereupon distinguished from the great common of nature, and made the property of that man, who bestowed his labor in it; from whom it cannot afterward be taken, without breaking through the rules of natural justice; for thereby he would actually be deprived of the fruits of his industry.”*

At this crucial point, Lewis Morris died. The proprietary still ran the governor’s post, however, since acting governor John Hamilton was none other than the president of the East New Jersey Council of Proprietors. Hamilton demanded a bill to suppress the rioters, but the Assembly paid no heed to his request. Instead, rioting spread during the summer throughout the province, and especially in Hunterdon County. The Assembly also refused to raise troops for war with France; John Low, Essex representative and a riot leader, pointing out that the armed force would soon be employed to suppress the riots at home. Threats of assassination were again made against Samuel Nevill, and the Somerset County jail was broken open by a mob and several prisoners released. Rioting was rapidly merging into open revolution. Governor Hamilton responded by intensifying the tyranny suffered by the settlers and the rest of the populace. Thus, he ordered the sheriff to arrest any tumultuous assembly and to keep them in jail until trial. And Robert Hunter Morris vainly asked the Crown to send troops from England to suppress the tenant rebellion.

In the spring of 1747 the successful rioters intensified their rebellion and began to assume the offensive. In Morris County, they began driving proprietors from their homes. In the spring Assembly, Hamilton admitted that the attempts at suppression had only succeeded in redoubling the rioting. Here was another example in history of the near impossibility of a government, relying only on its own resources, suppressing a popular revolution. The Assembly again ignored Hamilton’s threat to import counterrevolution by bringing in British troops. As the Assembly adjourned, the encouraged rioters broke into even more widespread rebellion, expecting that ultimately the king would be pressured into getting rid of the problem by granting the settlers their lands. In July, one of the most serious of the riots broke out in Perth Amboy, the main center of the resident Eastern proprietors. John Bainbridge, Jr., had been arrested for taking part in the Somerset County outbreak and was imprisoned in Perth Amboy jail. At this point, a rescue party of 150, armed with clubs and led by Edmund Bainbridge, Simon Wyckoff, and Amos Roberts, appeared at the courthouse, knocked down the sheriff and the mayor, broke open the jail, and jubilantly rode off with the prisoner.

The government called a grand jury for Middlesex County and Judge Samuel Nevill, one of the leading proprietors, charged the jury to indict twenty of the rioters for high treason. The jury, however, “would hardly indict them for a riot.”

Within the midst of this revolutionary atmosphere, Jonathan Belcher assumed the post of governor. Belcher, a professional royal bureaucrat who had been governor of Massachusetts for a dozen years, could be expected, as a native of Massachusetts, to be unsympathetic to quitrents and feudal proprietorships. While sympathetic to the liberal position, Belcher denounced the rioters, who effected another dramatic jail rescue in Essex County soon after the governor assumed office. But Belcher’s momentary annoyance did not push him into a reactionary program; instead, he spoke in kindly fashion to a delegation of the rebels.

The Assembly was under firm control of the liberals, while the Council had been packed with proprietary appointees. The Council repeatedly urged harsh suppression of the rioters, and the proprietors called for making rioting a crime of high treason. The Assembly, while refusing to take such measures, was in an uncomfortable position; while liberal on the land question, it was too moderate and cautious to be radical or principled on the issue. When the radical rebels, after effecting a jail rescue in Hunterdon County in the autumn of 1747, proposed a great open march on the government in Burlington to demand defense against the depredations of the proprietors, the frightened Assembly joined the Council in denouncing such a march as an insult and contempt of the laws. Chagrined at this desertion by the supposedly sympathetic Assembly, the rebel settlers canceled the march. Indeed, the middle-of-the-road Assembly agreed to pass a very mild bill to suppress the riots—but without funds to enforce it—in exchange for a government pardon for all recanting rioters.

The rebels were now faced with a situation all too common to revolutionary movements throughout history: they could easily defend themselves from their enemies, but not from their friends. Once again, a revolution confronted a betrayal by its supposed leaders. If the rebels were to submit to the amnesty, they would lose their essential revolutionary momentum. Two hundred rebels prepared to ask forgiveness before the Essex County court, but their leader, Amos Roberts, managed to persuade them by his eloquence to stand fast. As a result, only twenty-three rebels took advantage of the proffered pardon. The stunned leader of the proprietors, James Alexander, proposed that the Council alone, if necessary, pass a law declaring that all nonrepentant rebels be summarily convicted of all crimes for which they stood indicted. A fantastic breach indeed of Anglo-Saxon legal procedures!

Belcher blandly refrained from suppressing the rebels, who continued to chop down timber allegedly belonging to his proprietary. Finally, however, in the fall of 1748, the weak and uncertain Belcher allowed himself to be pressured into arresting the great rebel leader Amos Roberts for high treason. Here, indeed, was a direct challenge to the power of the revolution. The same evening a mob gathered at the Newark jail, shunted the deputy sheriff aside, and freed the imprisoned Roberts. Belcher then asked the Assembly to curb this “sort of open rebellion” against the Crown.

The rebels increasingly justified themselves on the squatter-and-Indian grant theory, thus alienating the wealthier and more respectable Nicolls patentees, who, after all, depended for their theoretical argument on earlier, though less arbitrary, grants from the Crown. The great armed rebellion reached its height in the autumn of 1748 and spread into the proprietary timberlands of Pennsylvania. As one councillor of New Jersey exclaimed in horror: “All laws are laughed at and disregarded, and they with force cut, carry and transport timber in the face of the magistrates and defy them...”

Amos Roberts now headed a virtual people’s government in competition with the official one. He divided his domain into three wards, established courts to settle disputes, and elected militia officers. The oligarchy asserted that Roberts had also appointed assessors and collectors to obtain taxes, but the rebels themselves indignantly denied this claim—apparently they thought tax collecting a rather reprehensible act. The fervor and determination of the radical-liberal revolutionaries performed the function of pushing the vacillating Belcher and the Assembly into line. Headed by a leading rioter, Assemblyman John Low, the Assembly voted overwhelmingly to do nothing to suppress the rebels, and Belcher began to listen sympathetically to the arguments of the rebel John Bainbridge. Belcher was also helped to his new position by the threat of an Assembly leader that he would never receive a penny’s salary if he complained to the Crown against the rebels. The Council, stronghold of the proprietary oligarchs, then itself petitioned the king, which petition included a criticism of Belcher’s actions.

The timorous opportunist Belcher, ever ready to bow to the winds of pressure, now hastened to urge the Assembly to vote money to protect the jails, and threatened that, should there be any further riots, he would call in troops from another colony and set up a military dictatorship. The Assembly kept its head, even in response to his presumptuous demand, and declared the colony much too poor to afford more taxes to protect the jails. It blandly suggested an extension of the amnesty offer to the rebels. Belcher’s reaction was a letter to the king, but very weakly done and not sent in collaboration with the Council.

The British government, however, was coming into different hands, and by spring 1749 was beginning to pursue a much more energetically imperialistic policy toward the colonies. The Board of Trade was under new control; more important, the minister of foreign affairs in charge of the colonies was now no longer the Duke of Newcastle. Heading colonial policy as secretary of state for the Southern Department, from 1724 to 1748, Newcastle had been charmingly lax and had left the colonies more or less alone. But now Newcastle was succeeded by an energetic imperialist, the Duke of Bedford, who scorned Belcher and sided wholly with the feudal proprietors.

In this auspicious atmosphere for counterrevolution, Chief Justice Robert Hunter Morris sailed to London to plead the proprietary cause. The Board of Trade’s report to the Privy Council was virtually copied from Morris’ account. But Belcher’s representations managed to mollify the board; its final recommendations in the summer of 1751 merely suggested an impartial investigating commission, a reprimand to the Assembly, and an extended amnesty. Belcher and the Assembly were greatly relieved, especially since the board had been on the point of doing something drastic: freeing the New Jersey governor from salary paid by the Assembly, or reuniting New Jersey with New York, or sending in British or New York troops to quell the rioters. Meanwhile, the riots themselves had died down as the leaders had fled the colony to escape the expected royal reprisals.

Governor Belcher, however, was getting into dire financial straits; continual conflict between Assembly and Council had blocked the legislature from voting him any salary. The Assembly shrewdly decided to gain Belcher’s support and strike a stunning blow at the proprietary at the same time, by voting to raise funds through a tax on unimproved lands. This, of course, would hit precisely at the arbitrary monopoly of unsettled lands in the hands of the proprietors. The Assembly tried to get Belcher to sign the bill and simply ignore defeat in the Council, but Belcher, though sympathetic, could not take such a revolutionary step.

By the 1752 session, no taxes had been paid in New Jersey for sixteen years and the treasury was empty and the government heavily in debt. The Assembly then decided to levy a tax on all land, including the unimproved, and on this more moderate bill the Council and Assembly compromised and agreed. The year 1752 also saw the resolution of New Jersey’s great land conflict. With the Crown out of the picture, the rebels began to take action again—and effected a jail rescue in April. The Crown having, in effect, decided against them, the proprietors decided to let well enough alone, to be content with their unsettled lands, and not to stir up revolutionary ferment. Furthermore, their Chancery suit would be decided by Belcher, who would undoubtedly find for the tenants. The proprietors then decided to drop the whole matter; the great counterrevolutionary attempt to impose feudal overlordship on settlers of the land in New Jersey had finally collapsed. The rebels and the Assembly by their determined pressure, combined with the partial assistance of the governor, had finally triumphed.

*Morris was the first to be royal governor of New Jersey alone; before him the royal governors were only ancillary to their post as governors of New York.

*The Reverend Daniel Taylor of Newark also wrote a Brief Vindication of the Purchasers Against the Proprietors, taking a similar view.