“YOU have seen,” William A. Whitehead wrote to his grandchildren, “the pencil sketch of the Custom House….” It was a reminder they may very well have needed, part of a “brief outline of the events” of his own life, in which he set out to convey some faint impression of an island home he’d first … More Peaceable possession
“WE have no time to lose,” wrote the Colonel with urgency. “You must be the Centennial Historian.” The number of days remaining until the grand Exhibition in Philadelphia slipped below a hundred, and Frank M. Etting counted among his many worries the possibility that the department of which he had charge would come up short. … More A creditable show
COPIES of a printed invitation, each one personally addressed and bearing the signature of Frank M. Etting, entered the mails in the fall of 1875, destined for an extensive yet somehow “strictly limited” roster of “American historians, biographers and literati.” The writers receiving this missive numbered around 200 by Etting’s count. Some of them were … More The nameless ties of sympathy
AN air of profound solemnity, “better conceived” (in the words of one spectator) “than described,” surrounded the events of a summer morning in Morristown in 1773. Three score and seven years later, as he pictured the throng that filled the old county courthouse (“a thousand persons were thought to be within its walls”), William A. … More This unhappy affair
IT is a romantic commonplace that a land without lawyers would be “worthy the name of Paradise,” and the pleasant fiction has been often repeated that New Jersey was once such a place.1 Even were it true in the beginning, according to a former attorney general of the state and future federal judge it could … More Of bench and bar
FOUR and a half years as New Yorkers had been enough. In the spring of 1843, William A. Whitehead and his wife Margaret brought with them over the Hudson their home’s furnishings and inhabitants—including William’s 66-year-old mother, a daughter aged seven, a boy six years old and an infant son of six months—to claim residency … More 111–Secret history
SAMUEL Smith, author of New Jersey’s first published history, was born in 1721 into a prosperous Quaker family of Burlington, one of the colony’s two capital cities. His father Richard Smith was a long-serving member of the provincial Assembly and Council. Samuel was to follow him into both.1 His years of service in these capacities, … More 110–First book of chronicles
PROBABLY at the outset of his investigations into New Jersey’s beginnings, and the ways and means in which its colonizers arranged their affairs, a stout printed volume three quarters of a century old became William A. Whitehead’s vademecum. It’s a compilation usually referred to either by the short title Grants and Concessions or by the … More 109–Spirit of the laws
A shrieking gale and an angry sea, seemingly determined to drown Key Biscayne and everyone on it, drove John Dubose to seek safety in an upper story of the Cape Florida lighthouse. Unlike many seafarers who relied on its beacon for guidance, those dwelling on the Cape survived the September 1835 hurricane. Anything not secured … More 108–The fragile thread
WHEN cannon fire and musket shots rang through the streets of Perth Amboy, few civilians were present to hear them. The town’s commanding position, overlooking the Raritan River and Bay, made it a garrison for British and American forces in turn.1 And when Continental commanders learned the King’s army had control of Staten Island, just … More 107–Tides of war