Most of the colonies in America, especially the stronger ones, had an aristocratic class, which was often large and powerful, as in the case of Virginia, and which usually centered around the governor, especially if he were appointed from England by the Crown or by a proprietor.But there was very little of this social distinction in New Jersey.Her political life had been too much broken up, and she had been too long dependent on the governors of New York to have any of those pretty little aristocracies with bright colored clothes, and coaches and four, flourishing within her boundaries.There seems to have been a faint suggestion of such social pretensions under Governor Franklin just before the Revolution.He was beginning to live down the objections to his illegitimate birth and Toryism and by his entertainments and manner of living was creating a social following.There is said also to have been something a little like the beginning of an aristocracy among the descendants of the Dutch settlers who had ancestral holdings near the Hudson; but this amounted to very little.
Class distinctions were not so strongly marked in New Jersey as in some other colonies.There grew up in southern Jersey, however, a sort of aristocracy of gentlemen farmers, who owned large tracts of land and lived in not a little style in good houses on the small streams.
The northern part of the province, largely settled and influenced by New Englanders, was like New England a land of vigorous concentrated town life and small farms.The hilly and mountainous nature of the northern section naturally led to small holdings of land.But in southern Jersey the level sandy tracts of forest were often taken up in large areas.In the absence of manufacturing, large acreage naturally became, as in Virginia and Maryland, the only mark of wealth and social distinction.The great landlord was looked up to by the lesser fry.The Quaker rule of discountenancing marrying out of meeting tended to keep a large acreage in the family and to make it larger by marriage.AQuaker of broad acres would seek for his daughter a young man of another landholding Quaker family and would thus join the two estates.
There was a marked difference between East Jersey and West Jersey in county organization.In West Jersey the people tended to become planters; their farms and plantations somewhat like those of the far South; and the political unit of government was the county.In East Jersey the town was the starting point and the county marked the boundaries of a collection of towns.This curious difference, the result of soil, climate, and methods of life, shows itself in other States wherever South and North meet.
Illinois is an example, where the southern part of the State is governed by the county system, and the northern part by the town system.
The lumberman, too, in clearing off the primeval forest and selling the timber, usually dealt in immense acreage.Some families, it is said, can be traced steadily proceeding southward as they stripped off the forest, and started sawmills and gristmills on the little streams that trickled from the swamps, and like beavers making with their dams those pretty ponds which modern lovers of the picturesque are now so eager to find.A good deal of the lumbering in the interior pines tract was carried on by persons who leased the premises from owners who lived on plantations along the Delaware or its tributary streams.These operations began soon after 1700.Wood roads were cut into the Pines, sawmills were started, and constant use turned some of these wood roads into the highways of modern times.
There was a speculative tinge in the operations of this landed aristocracy.Like the old tobacco raising aristocracy of Virginia and Maryland, they were inclined to go from tract to tract, skinning what they could from a piece of deforested land and then seeking another virgin tract.The roughest methods were used;wooden plows, brush harrows, straw collars, grapevine harness, and poor shelter for animals and crops; but were the Virginia methods any better? In these operations there was apparently a good deal of sudden profit and mushroom prosperity accompanied by a good deal of debt and insolvency.In this, too, they were like the Virginians and Carolinians.There seem to have been also a good many slaves in West Jersey, brought, as in the southern colonies, to work on the large estates, and this also, no doubt, helped to foster the aristocratic feeling.
The best days of the Jersey gentlemen farmers came probably when they could no longer move from tract to tract.They settled down and enjoyed a very plentiful, if rude, existence on the products of their land, game, and fish, amid a fine climate--with mosquitoes enough in summer to act as a counterirritant and prevent stagnation from too much ease and prosperity.After the manner of colonial times, they wove their own clothes from the wool of their own sheep and made their own implements, furniture, and simple machinery.
There are still to be found fascinating traces of this old life in out-of-the-way parts of southern Jersey.To run upon old houses among the Jersey pines still stored with Latin classics and old editions of Shakespeare, Addison, or Samuel Johnson, to come across an old mill with its machinery, cogwheels, flywheels, and all, made of wood, to find people who make their own oars, and the handles of their tools from the materials furnished by their own forest, is now unfortunately a refreshment of the spirit that is daily becoming rarer.
