Mount Holly was born and lived John Woolman, a
Quaker who became eminent throughout the English speaking world for the
simplicity and loftiness of his religious thought as well as for his
admirable style of expression. His "Journal," once greatly and even
extravagantly admired, still finds readers. "Get the writings of John
Woolman by heart," said Charles Lamb, "and love the early Quakers."
He was among the Quakers one of the first and perhaps the first really
earnest advocate of the abolition of slavery. The scenes of West Jersey
and the writings of Woolman seem to belong together. Possibly a feeling
for the simplicity of those scenes and their life led Walt Whitman, who
grew up on Long Island under Quaker influence, to spend his last years
at Camden, in West Jersey. His profound democracy, which was very
Quaker-like, was more at home there perhaps than anywhere else.

Chapter IX. Planters And Traders Of Southern Jersey

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