Jersey
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| New Jersey |
Once the paradox of salt water in the lower reaches of the Delaware and Hudson rivers has been noticed, it gets easier to understand current theory that southern New Jersey was once an island. Like Long Island, it was separated from the mainland by a sound, but in this case the sound silted up from Trenton to New Brunswick, creating the peninsula of "West" Jersey by uniting the island with the mainland. The colony was even named after the island of Jersey off the coast of England, a gesture for Sir George Carteret, who was given the American area out of gratitude for his military efforts in that other Jersey. Furthermore, Cape May was probably another island later joined to the larger one by the conversion of silted ocean into the bogs of the Maurice River. Cape May started as a whaling community, populated by Quakers from New York and New England, always maintaining something of a social distance from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The long Atlantic beaches of New Jersey now repeat the geological process, with barrier islands generated by the ocean separating by a brackish bay from the mainland, and the bay then slowly silting up. In a larger sense, the process consists of the former mountains of Pennsylvania crumbling into the ocean.
It should be no surprise, therefore, that southern New Jersey is flat, broken up by turgid meandering streams which empty in both directions. The head of Timber Creek, which flows into the Delaware, is only eight miles from the head of the Mullica River, which flows to the ocean. During the Revolutionary War, the British found it to be extremely dangerous to sail up these winding creeks, since at any moment they might make a sharp turn and be facing a battery of cannon. The system quickly grew up that buccaneers would build ships out of the heavy oak forests and sail them out to Barnegat Bay, hence out one of the inlets of the barrier islands and into blue water. The financiers of Philadelphia, many of them with names now in the Social Register, would sail up the Delaware River creeks, and walk a mile or two to privateer headquarters on the Atlantic creeks. Auctions were conducted, in which the ships were examined, the captain interviewed, and the crew observed in target practice. If you bought a small share you would be rich when the ship returned, and if it never returned, well, you invested in a different one. New Jersey is indignantly of the opinion that these privateers were mainly responsible for winning the Revolution, but given little credit for it. Many more British sailors were lost to the privateers than soldiers were lost to Washington's troops, and the economic loss to Great Britain of the ships and cargoes eventually became serious. Since much of the profit from privateering was recycled into the American war effort by Robert Morris, the British found themselves facing an enemy much more formidable than just the ragged frozen troops at Valley Forge on the Schuylkill. Meanwhile, William Bingham was conducting much the same privateering operation with Morris from Martinique, but that's another story.
In later centuries, the traditions and geography of the Jersey Pine Barrens suited themselves to smuggling and bootlegging during the era of alcohol Prohibition, and even after Repeal, high taxes on liquor kept bootlegging profitable. Even in the 1950s, there were divisions of FBI men prowling the woods of South Jersey, on the lookout for trucks carrying bags of cane sugar, or coils of copper tubing. Even today, when housing developments have started to invade the forests, the hard-ball politics of the South Jersey region reflect a culture formerly thought more characteristic of South Philadelphia.
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