Early Colonization

The early 1600s saw Dutch and Swedish expansion in the Mid-Atlantic seabord. In 1664, the Dutch territories there were surrendered to Britain. (The next decade of ongoing conflict would result in British control of the Mid-Atlantic - New Amsterdam becoming New York - while the Dutch in turn continued to control territories in the Carribean, the Guyanas, and elsewhere in South America.)

Britain divided the territory into East Jersey and West Jersey, under the control of proprieters, who privately controlled their land. In 1702, the two territories were merged into one, and the Province of New Jersey was then directly ruled by the British Crown until the revolutionary war.

"The Comic Ease of Jailbreaks"
 The new British order was marked from the outset by conflict of its own. Newark and Elizabeth (then Elizabethtown) were the major settlement hubs in northeastern Jersey, and land there was still controlled by Proprietors, who acted as absentee landlords reporting back to the Crown. Throughout the 1740s and 50s, many poor farmers rioted for control of their land.

Historian Gary Horowitz - in a book compiled by the state Historical Commission - explains that the tenant rioters met in taverns to plan their land takeovers. Amos Roberts and Samuel Baldwin, like other riot leaders, farmed on small plots, and were kept poor by Proprietors charging them more than once for use of farmland.

When confronted by sherrifs during their farm takeovers, they would swarm en masse to get arrested friends out of custody. Horowitz notes that the “comic ease of jailbreaks” was typical throughout the decade of land occupations, owing to the consistently-larger numbers of tenants than jailers.

Howard Zinn also notes the New Jersey Land Riots in A People's History of the United States. He cites a first-hand account: “The People in General... went to the Prison, opened the Door, [and] took out Baldwin.”

Two people involved in this anti-arrest were themselves jailed. A colonial report, also quoted by Zinn, says a crowd of several hundred “with axes and other instruments, broke open the prison door, and took out the two prisoners. As also one other prisoner, that was confined for debt, and went away.”

The Proprietors were angry and charged that New Jersey's lower assembly was not doing enough to stop the rioters. By 1755, a mix of arrests and land compromises quelled the uprisings.

The Brotherton Reservation, Other Lenape Communities
In 1758 the Brotherton Reservation was established for native Lenape people remaining in New Jersey, in present-day Shamong, in the middle of the Pine Barrens area. Those who would not go there were largely ignored by the state. This may have been to their advantage. The Christian reservation disbanded in 1801, and the people living there left the state. The families in unrecognized communities towards the Delaware bay were able to remain more stably and relatively less disturbed, in some cases up until the present day.

The Society for Useful Manufactures
In the 1790s, Alexander Hamilton established the Society for Useful Manufactures, SUM, with the goal of harnessing the power of the Great Falls, in present-day Paterson. The SUM established and ran Paterson as a privately-owned venture in its early years, until Paterson was incorporated as a township.

The use of hydropower from the waterfalls let industry grow much more quickly in Paterson than in places that had to wait for steam or coal power to run factories. Many textile mills were built, and the town became known as Silk City, for the high-quality silks that were spun there.