A Keg Tapped at Both Ends (2)

The New Jersey legislature began by ratifying the Declaration of Independence, then concerned itself with debts, then the railroads, then corporations, and now -- with debt, again.

The New Jersey legislature ratified the Declaration of Independence in the Indian King Tavern of Haddonfield, then moved to Princeton, and since then has been in Trenton. The Statehouse in Trenton is the second oldest in the nation, after the one in Annapolis, although it has grown like a snail with the original building nestled inside many additions. In one sense it is totally unique; it's the only state capitol in the nation where you can look out a window and see another state. It's right on the water's edge of the Delaware, a hundred yards from the Hessian barracks that Washington surprised in 1777.

In its early years the legislature concerned itself with raising troops and paying for them during the Revolution. After that, it spent a great deal of time settling debts. From that began the traditional rivalry, even hostility, between the northern and southern halves of the state. The northern half, with many Dutch settlers spilling over from New York, was mainly a population of debtors; debtors like inflation, because it cheapens the cost of their repayments. The southern half of New Jersey, mainly Quaker in settlement, was where the creditors lived; creditors like to see sound currency, hate inflation. The Mason Dixon line, extended, crosses New Jersey. However, it was the northern half of the state which favored the Confederacy during the Civil War, while the Quakers in the south were strongly opposed to slavery. Irritation over Atlantic City gambling was only one of various issues which prompted South Jersey to try to secede; the proposition was actually on the ballot in the late Twentieth Century. Up until 1966 the Republicans always dominated the Senate, but that was because each of the 21 counties had its senator. Then, it was ingeniously designed that the state would be re-divided into 40 numerically equal legislative districts; the Senate has had a Democrat majority more or less ever since, in spite of Republican majorities in the overall state elections. The legislative districts are re-apportioned every ten years with the new census; it is close to the truth that the gerrymandering of that reapportionment effectively forecloses the politics of the legislature for the following decade.

Over time, the early legislature began to devote most of its time to incorporation because there were no universal corporation laws, and during the early Industrial Revolution lots of new businesses sought the authority to limit investor liability. Each corporation had its own deal, its own set of rules and conditions. Along came the first railway, Stevens's idea of the Amboy and Camden Railroad. The New Jersey legislature, no doubt suitably persuaded by private arrangements, not only gave the Amboy and Camden permission to use eminent domain to acquire its right of way, it conferred a perpetual tax exemption, and perpetual monopoly. For fifty years, the legislature then concerned itself with hardly anything except railroad matters.

Perpetual is a pretty unambiguous adjective, of course, and it might be an interesting topic in judicial gymnastics to observe how the state would get itself out of an impossible economic straight-jacket. That proved unnecessary however, when the proprietors of the Stanhope Railroad slipped exemptions and enabling legislation into one of the thousands of corporation bills which flooded through the legislature, unread by anyone. After the Governor who also hadn't read the bill, signed this sleeper into law, the uproar was predictably loud and accusatory. In a sense, the wrangle about New Jersey railroads was not settled by the legislature but by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which crossed the Delaware at Trenton, and went south to Philadelphia along the Pennsylvania side of the river. New Jersey preferred to get a new constitution with a new organization of matters, but one thing about New Jersey never seems to change. Between eleven and twelve thousand bills are still introduced, every year. It's remarkable that New Jersey accomplishes this by having the legislature sit for 30 or 40 afternoons a year, usually Monday and Thursday, from November to May. We are a nation of laws and not of men, but it would be hard to praise the application of that truism in New Jersey, where quite obviously the Governor does most of the deciding.

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