This action brought up the whole question of the authority of Andros.The trustee proprietors of West Jersey appealed to the Duke of York, who was suspiciously indifferent to the matter, but finally referred it for decision to a prominent lawyer, Sir William Jones, before whom the Quaker proprietors of West Jersey made a most excellent argument.They showed the illegality, injustice, and wrong of depriving the Jerseys of vested political rights and forcing them from the freeman's right of making their own laws to a state of mere dependence on the arbitrary will of one man.Then with much boldness they declared that "To exact such an unterminated tax from English planters, and to continue it after so many repeated complaints, will be the greatest evidence of a design to introduce, if the Crown should ever devolve upon the Duke, an unlimited government in old England."Prophetic words which the Duke, in a few years, tried his best to fulfill.But Sir William Jones deciding against him, he acquiesced, confirmed the political rights of West Jersey by a separate grant, and withdrew any authority Andros claimed over East Jersey.The trouble, however, did not end here.Both the Jerseys were long afflicted by domineering attempts from New York.
Penn and his fellow trustees now prepared a constitution, or "Concessions and Agreements," as they called it, for West Jersey, the first Quaker political constitution embodying their advanced ideas, establishing religious liberty, universal suffrage, and voting by ballot, and abolishing imprisonment for debt.It foreshadowed some of the ideas subsequently included in the Pennsylvania constitution.All these experiences were an excellent school for William Penn.He learned the importance in starting a colony of having a carefully and maturely considered system of government.In his preparations some years afterwards for establishing Pennsylvania he avoided much of the bungling of the West Jersey enterprise.
A better organized attempt was now made to establish a foothold in West Jersey farther up the river than Fenwick's colony at Salem.In 1677 the ship Kent took out some 230 rather well-to-do Quakers, about as fine a company of broadbrims, it is said, as ever entered the Delaware.Some were from Yorkshire and London, largely creditors of Byllinge, who were taking land to satisfy their debts.They all went up the river to Raccoon Creek on the Jersey side, about fifteen miles below the present site of Philadelphia, and lived at first among the Swedes, who had been in that part of Jersey for some years and who took care of the new arrivals in their barns and sheds.These Quaker immigrants, however, soon began to take care of themselves, and the weather during the winter proving mild, they explored farther up the river in a small boat.They bought from the Indians the land along the river shore from Oldman's Creek all the way up to Trenton and made their first settlements on the river about eighteen miles above the site of Philadelphia, at a place they at first called New Beverly, then Bridlington, and finally Burlington.
They may have chosen this spot partly because there had been an old Dutch settlement of a few families there.It had long been a crossing of the Delaware for the few persons who passed by land from New York or New England to Maryland and Virginia.One of the Dutchmen, Peter Yegon, kept a ferry and a house for entertaining travelers.George Fox, who crossed there in 1671, describes the place as having been plundered by the Indians and deserted.He and his party swam their horses across the river and got some of the Indians to help them with canoes.
Other Quaker immigrants followed, going to Salem as well as to Burlington, and a stretch of some fifty miles of the river shore became strongly Quaker.There are not many American towns now to be found with more of the old-time picturesqueness and more relics of the past than Salem and Burlington.
Settlements were also started on the river opposite the site afterwards occupied by Philadelphia, at Newton on the creek still called by that name; and another a little above on Cooper's Creek, known as Cooper's Ferry until 1794.Since then it has become the flourishing town of Camden, full of shipbuilding and manufacturing, but for long after the Revolution it was merely a small village on the Jersey shore opposite Philadelphia, sometimes used as a hunting ground and a place of resort for duelers and dancing parties from Philadelphia.
