chiefly worried all of them was how to execute the navigation acts,
which, evaded everywhere, were here unscrupulously defied. Another care
of the governors, in which they succeeded but very imperfectly, was to
establish the English Church in the colony. A third was the
disfranchisement of Catholics. This they accomplished, the legislature
concurring, and the disability continued during the entire colonial
period.
Hottest struggle of all occurred over the question of the colony's right
of self-taxation. The democracy stood for this with the utmost
firmness, and even the higher classes favored rather than opposed. The
governors, Cornbury and Lovelace, most frantically, but in vain,
expostulated, scolded, threatened, till at last it became admitted by
law in the colony that no tax whatever could, on any pretext, be levied
save by act of the people's representatives.
Dutch America, it will be remembered, had reached southward to the
Delaware River, and this lower portion passed with the rest to the Duke
of York in 1664. The territory between the Hudson and the Delaware,
under the name of New Jersey, he made over to Lord Berkeley and Sir
George Carteret, proprietaries, who favored the freest institutions,
civil and religious. The population was for long very sparse and, as it
grew, very miscellaneous. Dutch, Swedes, English, Quakers, and Puritans
from New England were represented.
[Illustration: Seal of the Carterets.]
After the English recovery Berkeley disposed of his undivided half of
the province, subsequently set off as West Jersey, to one Bylling, a
Quaker, who in a little time assigned it to Lawrie, Lucas, Penn, and
other Quakers. West Jersey became as much a Quaker paradise as
Pennsylvania. Penn with eleven of his brethren, also bought, of
Carteret's heirs, East Jersey, but here Puritan rather than Quaker
influence prevailed.
[Illustration: Seal of East Jersey.]
The Jersey plantations came of course under Andros, and after his fall
its proprietors did not recover their political authority. For twelve
years, while they were endeavoring to do this, partial anarchy cursed
the province, and at length in 1702 they surrendered their rights to the
Crown, the Jerseys, now made one, becoming directly subject to Queen
Anne. The province had its own legislature and, till 1741, the same
governors as New York. It also had mainly the same political
vicissitudes, and with the same result.
William Penn, the famous
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