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 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 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 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
FORMED in 1807 to map the nation’s shorelines and chart its coastal waters, the United States Coast Survey was beset for much of its early life by military, political and economic pressures, slowing and sometimes halting the progress of the first scientific agency ever established by the federal government. But the value of its aims … More 106–Between the lines
“LIFE to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.” So heavy was the gloom that descended upon poor Tom Sawyer, before his inborn cleverness got other boys believing that to whitewash thirty yards of fence was anything but drudgery. Facing a similar task, William A. Whitehead seems to have found nothing about life burdensome. … More 105–Whitewash
ONE could fairly call William A. Whitehead a “provincial” historian, on the premise that he devoted a large share of his adult life to chronicling the past of one small American state–often of mere parts of it. Indeed, Whitehead might have humbly accepted the title, and not just because so much of his attention was … More 104–Foreign affairs