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 surnames of its publishers, Aaron Leaming and Jacob Spicer, both of Cape May County.1
The Grants, Concessions, and Original Constitutions of the Province of New-Jersey came off the Philadelphia presses of William Bradford in 1758. First commissioned by the provincial assembly of New Jersey in 1750, the work had entailed copying and collating of laws, records and other papers, many extant only in manuscript and some nearly a century old.2
The publishers boasted of the valuable matter between its covers, “collected from the Original Instruments, or authentic registers in England and such parts of America where they were to be found.”3 In this way, the Grants and Concessions resembles what would become Whitehead’s own decades-long project, to identify, copy and publish the “materials for history” found in repositories on both sides of the Atlantic: materials through which his native state’s early “settlement and progress” could be illuminated and understood.4
The oldest legislative enactments found in Leaming and Spicer emanated from a 1668 general assembly convened by governor Philip Carteret. The assembly comprised the governor, his council, and (initially) two delegates each from the townships of Bergen, Elizabethtown, Newark, Woodbridge and, jointly, the Monmouth County settlements of Shrewsbury and Middletown. The 1668 acts in their printed state, and as reenacted at intervals into the next century, offered Whitehead a very fragmentary picture of life, law and order in the province. Administrative records, court proceedings, sentences delivered and implemented were at best patchy, if they existed at all. Often, the historian could draw only tentative conclusions from prohibitions that were subsequently repeated, or from the intensification of prescribed punishments.
Such were the laws against drunkenness, the “beastly Vice” as it was consistently called. The original code specified fines of a shilling for the first infraction, two shillings for the second, and two shillings sixpence for each subsequent offence. To “such as have nothing to pay,” corporal punishment was administered, its nature and duration apparently left to the discretion of the court or town constable, while an unruly drunk was “put in the Stocks, until they are Sober, or during the Pleasure of the Officer in chief in the Place where he is Drunk.”5
Intoxication was viewed more severely in an act of 1683, entitled “The Penalty of Drunkards.” It demanded even first-time offenders pay the constable five shillings “to the Use of the Poor of the same Town,” and imposed a six-hour spell in the stocks for those who couldn’t pay. “This increase of punishment,” Whitehead speculated, “would indicate a greater prevalence of the baneful practice,” but as the law also stipulated a ten-shilling fine on officers who neglected “the due Correction” of drunkards, it may have signaled that the existing law proved difficult to enforce.6
Although intemperance was clearly an enduring concern for colonial lawmakers, an outright prohibition on strong drink would never have been seriously contemplated. Even as they tried to combat immoderate drinking, legislators conceded that strong liquors were “Creatures of God, and useful and beneficial to Mankind….”7
Retailers of liquor were licensed from early in the period of English rule, if not before. Pieter Wolfersen van Couwenhoven, a Dutch-born citizen of New York, the former New Amsterdam, was licensed to sell spirits in Elizabethtown in 1666.8 Soon after, each town in the province was made to establish an “ordinary” or public house “for the Relief and Entertainment of Strangers,” and fined 40 shillings a month for failing to do so.9
Keeping an ordinary was associated with a certain level of wealth and status. Keepers could be magistrates and judges in their towns as well: Samuel Moore of Middlesex County, James Grover of Monmouth, Hans Diederick of Bergen, Jasper Crane and Henry Lyon of Essex all held important offices in their communities.10
The dispensing of liquor in small amounts was restricted to licensed ordinaries, under a penalty of ten shillings. This provision aimed to prevent the selling of drink in private houses, but the maximum of two gallons was later halved, owing to “great Exorbitances and Drunkeness observeable in several Towns in this Province….” While the limit on beer, cider and wine remained a gallon, an act of 1683 reduced to a quart the measures of brandy, rum and other spirits that could only be obtained from an ordinary. An excise on vendors of beer, cider, wine and strong drink was passed in 1692, but revoked the next year.11
In a record dating from the brief Dutch interregnum of 1673-74, Whitehead found a count of freeholders living in each East Jersey town. Newark and Elizabethtown emerged as the largest. The totals suggested about 2,500 persons of every sex, race and status living in the province, a number that a decade of immigration and natural increase was to double by Whitehead’s estimate, and double again over the ten years to follow.12 Although the population of the province remained relatively small, and communication across its territory was haphazard, its laws point explicitly to public morality as a serious concern among legislators.
Council minutes suggest some disagreement with the measure–“Every day his [sic: is] holy to the Lord,” it was argued, “hee has no profane Dayes”–but keeping the Sabbath was an ironclad requirement. Anyone discovered on “the Lord’s day” partaking in “servile Work, unlawful Recreations, unnecessary Travels,” or any disorderly conduct could be punished, Whitehead points out, by “confinement in the stocks, fines, imprisonment or whipping.”13
Swearing on any day of the week incurred under the earliest laws a monetary penalty, half of which was paid to the informer. In 1683, West Jersey hiked the price of profanity from one shilling to two, while East Jersey’s fine rose to two shillings sixpence. Failure to pay meant three hours’ confinement in the stocks for an offender above the age of twelve; whipping by the constable or in his presence, if younger.14
To keep the peace, the law codes of both Jerseys hewed to the line of tolerating divergent forms of Protestant worship, but all manner of practices tending to disorder were strongly discouraged, if not forbidden. In East Jersey these included “all Prizes, Stage-Plays, Games Masques, Revells, Bull-baitings, Cock-fightings, which excite People to Rudeness, Cruelty, Looseness, and Irreligion….”15
Far more deeply embedded was the prohibition in the first act of the first assembly, which outlawed resistance “either in Words or Actions” to lawfully constituted authority. In 1675, this was expanded to include “speaking contemptiously [sic], reproachfully, or maliciously” of or to an official. The consequence might be a stiff fine, corporal punishment, or even banishment.16
One wonders at the efficacy of this provision, especially when affairs in the province became ever more fractious; as Whitehead assures us, “Such a law at the present day would send numbers from their homes.” How, too, would any of “the conductors of many of our newspapers” have fared, if prosecuted under the law against publishing “false News … whereby the minds of People are frequently disquieted or exasperated in relation to publick Affairs”? Ten shillings (later doubled) would be the cost of an editor’s first conviction; for the second “to be stockt or whipt, according to the nature of his Offence.”17
Whitehead declared that the relative rarity of incarceration for a crime was “without doubt owing to the want of proper prisons….”18 The proprietors in 1672 had promised to pay for “a Prison and a House for the Keeper,” but only scattered mentions of such a place occur until ten years later, when East Jersey laws at last stipulated that “in every County there shall be a Common Gaol, which shall be for Fellons, Vagrants, and Idle Persons, and safely to keep all Persons committed to Gaol for Debt….” After these facilities were built, the proprietors were accused of having borne none of the expense. Their upkeep was to be one of many fiscal challenges for successive governments.19
In common with other colonies, New Jersey’s earliest laws decreed punishment by death in cases of willful murder, conspiracy, sexual conduct deemed unnatural, witchcraft, and even burglary if the offender was found to be incorrigible. Yet they also affirmed the principle that “no Man’s Life shall be taken away … but by Virtue of some Law,” and then only on the testimony of two or more witnesses.20
The inherent injustice of these and other severe measures lay in the fact that, while making and enforcing them was the prerogative of a few, their effects were felt by the many. Women, children, Indians, servants and slaves were voiceless in the face of legal processes, and if hauled into court might well have no one to speak for them.
Over time, New Jersey laws began to show features of the Black codes enacted in later years to keep its unfree population docile and dependent. Asserting from “daily experience” that slaves and servants trafficked in property stolen from their masters, a 1683 East Jersey act mandated a steep fine on those trading with them. It fined masters as well, who paid a half crown to whoever took up and “whiped” their servants.21
In 1694, slaves were forbidden to hunt without a white man present, to possess a firearm, or to be absent without leave for any duration or at any distance from the habitations of their masters. Two years later, the law commanded that “any Negro, Negroes, or other Slaves” charged with felony or murder be tried “with all conveniency”: a foreshadowing of the next century’s summary judgments, remarked upon by Whitehead, “in which the offence and its consequence are brought into astonishing proximity, burning alive being a punishment frequently resorted to.”22
Early Jersey jurisprudence may have had within it the seeds of a more equitable social order, but the operation of its tribunals inevitably favored those with the liberty and resources to secure acquittal, or to evade at least its harsher punishments. From the eighteenth century through the nineteenth–Whitehead’s own–and indeed to the present, the phantoms of some colonial laws are still abroad in the land.
Copyright © 2026 Gregory J. Guderian
Last revised 2026.02.19
[1] While engaged in “the prosecution of other historical researches,” Whitehead made what is probably his earliest use in print of Leaming and Spicer (without explicitly citing the work) when he reproduced the preamble to a 1686 East Jersey “Act to regulate the passing of Silver.” G. P., “Hard money,” Newark (N.J.) daily advertiser 9 January 1840 2:4. Whitehead’s “Grahame and Bancroft, on the early history of East Jersey,” a series of eight columns printed in the Newark Daily from 12 March to 10 April 1840, refers several times to Leaming and Spicer’s compilation. In one installment of the series, Whitehead pilloried George Bancroft, already a more eminent historian by far, for his failure to make use of material contained in the Grants and Concessions, “with which collection he does not appear to have any personal acquaintance, although without it or reference to the records, it is difficult to imagine how any one, claiming credit for research, could write even a sketch of the early history of N. Jersey.” G. P., “Graham and Bancroft, on the early history of East Jersey. No. IV.,” Newark daily advertiser 27 March 1840 2:1-2.
[2] The grants, concessions, and original constitutions of the Province of New-Jersey. The acts passed during the Proprietary governments, and other material transactions before the surrender thereof to Queen Anne. The instrument of surrender, and her formal acceptance thereof. Lord Cornbury’s commission and instructions consequent thereon. Collected by some gentlemen employed by the General Assembly. And afterwards published by virtue of an Act of the Legislature of the said Province with proper tables alphabetically digested, containing the principal matters in the book. By Aaron Leaming and Jacob Spicer (Philadelphia: W. Bradford [1758]; repr. Somerville, N.J. 1881), hereafter “Grants and concessions.” While “some gentlemen,” principally Samuel Nevill and Samuel Smith, collected the materials, Leaming and Spicer saw the compilation through the press. See New Jersey books 1698–1800. The Joseph J. Felcone Collection(Princeton 1992) 143-152; New Jersey books 1694–1900. A descriptive catalogue of the Joseph J. Felcone Collection (2 vols. Princeton 2023) 1:455-459.
[3] The Pennsylvania journal and weekly advertiser (Philadelphia, Pa.) 27 April 1758 4:1; William Nelson, ed. Documents relating to the colonial history of the State of New Jersey. 20. Extracts from American newspapers, relating to New Jersey. 4. 1756–1761 (Archives of the State of New Jersey, ser. 1, 20. Paterson, N.J. 1898) 194-197.
[4] The phrases are drawn from the title and preface to Whitehead’s first book-length study, which he characterized “rather as furnishing materials for history, than as being in itself complete.” William A. Whitehead, East Jersey under the Proprietary governments: a narrative of events connected with the settlement and progress of the Province, until the surrender of the government to the Crown in 1702 [1703] (Collections of the New Jersey Historical Society, 1. Hereafter “Whitehead, East Jersey”) ([New York] 18461) v, (Newark 18752) v. For Whitehead’s exertions to make colonial documents accessible to historians, see my earlier posts 049–Try, try again and 056–Our man in London.
[5] Grants and concessions 83-72 [i.e. 83-84], 107; G. P., “Glimpses of the past in New Jersey. No. IX.–Early moral laws,” Newark daily advertiser 9 April 1842 2:3 (hereafter “G. P., ‘Early moral laws’”); Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 165, (18752) 241.
[6] Grants and concessions 242, which uses the title “The Penalty of a Drunkard”; see, however, Frederick W. Ricord and Wm. Nelson, edd. Documents relating to the colonial history of the State of New Jersey. 13. Journal of the Governor and Council, 1. 1682–1714 (Archives of the State of New Jersey, ser. 1, 13. Trenton 1890. Hereafter “NJA ser. 1, 13”) 34. Whitehead saw the apparent increase in this vice as “the result probably of the removal of restrictions which had existed on the sale of liquors in small quantities.” Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 165, (18752) 241; cf. G. P., “Early moral laws.”
[7] Grants and concessions 258.
[8] “The records of the city of New Amsterdam,” The historical magazine, and notes and queries, concerning the antiquities, history and biography of America, ser. 2, 1:1-4, 6 (January-April, June 1867) 358n, and see note 9 below.
[9] Grants and concessions 87.
[10] Woodbridge sheriff Samuel Moore established that township’s first ordinary in 1683: William A. Whitehead, Contributions to the early history of Perth Amboy and adjoining country, with sketches of men and events in New Jersey during the provincial era (New York 1856; hereafter “Whitehead, Contributions”) 397. Assemblymen James Grover and Hans Diederick were licensed to keep ordinaries at Navesink in 1667 and Bergen in 1671 respectively; their licenses, with those of Pieter Wolversen van Couwenhoven and eight others, are recorded in William Nelson, ed. Documents relating to the colonial history of the State of New Jersey. 21. Calendar of records in the office of the Secretary of State. 1664–1703 (Archives of the State of New Jersey, ser. 1, 21. Paterson 1899) 29-31, 35, 42-43. The 1669 Newark town meeting that selected Henry Lyon for its treasurer also chose him to keep an ordinary, “and desired him to prepare for it as soon as he Can”; two years later, the Newark ordinary was assigned to constable and rate collector Thomas Johnson. Records of the Town of Newark, New Jersey, from its settlement in 1666, to its incorporation as a city in 1836 (Collections of the New Jersey Historical Society, 6. Newark 1864. Hereafter “Records of the Town of Newark”) 13, 34. (Lyon subsequently removed to Elizabethtown and became a member of the governor’s council.) In 1673, the “good people of Newark” granted Jasper Crane, a leading magistrate, commissioner of highways and deputy to the general assembly, “Liberty to sell Liquors in the Town,” accepting wheat as payment “till the Country Order alter it.” Records of the town of Newark 48; Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 166 n84, (18752) 241 n1.
[11] Grants and concessions 127-128 [i.e. 126-127], 261-262, 318-319, 332-333. G. P., “Early moral laws”; Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 79, 166 and cf. 134 n6, (18752) 85, 241-242 and cf. 189 n1.
[12] The inhabitants of seven East Jersey towns were enumerated in the minutes of the Council of New Netherland for September 1673 (Bergen on the 6th, the other towns on the 14th), found among Dutch-language records in the New York Secretary of State’s office. These were translated and printed by E. B. O’Callaghan, ed. Documents relative to the colonial history of the State of New-York; procured in Holland, England and France, by John Romeyn Brodhead, Esq., agent, under and by virtue of an act of the Legislature, entitled “An Act to appoint an agent to procure and transcribe documents in Europe relative to the colonial history of the State,” passed May 2, 1839 (15 vols. Albany 1856–1887) 2:587, 607, and reprinted in William A. Whitehead, ed., Documents relating to the colonial history of the State of New Jersey, 1. 1631–1687 (Archives of the State of New Jersey, ser. 1, 1. Newark 1880. Hereafter “NJA ser. 1, 1”) 129, 133. See also Whitehead, East Jersey (18752) 76 n1. Already in 1840, Whitehead had obtained a copy of the list of names from Woodbridge, drawn from an earlier translation by Francis Adrian Van der Kemp known as the Albany Records: the names are preserved in Manuscript Group 7, New Jersey Manuscript Collection, 1669–1840, New Jersey Historical Society, IV:80. Lists from other towns followed, and were gathered in a manuscript entitled “Extracts referring to East Jersey taken from Vanderkemp’s translation of the Dutch records in the office of the Secretary of the State of New York at Albany 1843,” in William A. Whitehead Papers, Manuscript Group 177, New Jersey Historical Society, Box 2/9. For details of Whitehead’s engagement with the Dutch materials at Albany, see my earlier post 087–Interregnum. For his estimates of the size and growth of East Jersey towns, see Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 91-94, 131-132, 159-160, (18752) 121-124, 185-187, 233-234.
[13] NJA ser. 1, 13:36-37, 42; Grants and concessions 98, 245-246; Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 78, 167, (18752) 84-85, 242-243. Jeremiah Basse’s first official act as governor, in a 1698 proclamation Whitehead considered to be “of unexceptionable character,” was to admonish “all Justices of the Peace Sheriffs Constables & all other officers within this Province that they take due care that all the laws made & Provided for the suppressing of Vice & encouraging of Religion and virtue particularly the observation of the Lord’s Day be duly put in execution as they will answer the contrary at their peril.” (Emphasis mine.) William A. Whitehead, ed. Documents relating to the colonial history of the State of New Jersey, 2. 1687–1703 (Archives of the State of New Jersey, ser. 1, 2. Newark 1881) 206-207; cf. NJA ser. 1, 13:238, Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 138, 219-220, (18752) 196, 336-337.
[14] Grants and concessions 72 [i.e. 84], 107, 240-241; cf. NJA ser. 1, 13:35, Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 166-167, (18752) 242.
[15] Grants and concessions 237-238, and cf. 162; Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 166, (18752) 242.
[16] Grants and concessions 77-78, 83, 99, 240; Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 165, (18752) 241. After 1683, banishment was no longer an option for punishing resistance to authority.
[17] G. P., “Early moral laws”; Grants and concessions 103; Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 165, (18752) 241.
[18] G. P., “Early moral laws”; Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 165, (18752) 241.
[19] NJA ser. 1, 1:106; cf. Grants and concessions 175; Whitehead, Contributions 367, 380. The Council in May 1683, on a petition of Middlesex County sheriff Samuel Moore “keeper of the Com(m)on Goale for this prvince … setting forth his former great Cost and Charge in keeping and maintaineing the prisoners wth out any allowance for the same,” proposed paying the jailer a salary, “that the office wch is so necessary may not onely be borne wthout Cost or Charge to the officer but a due Encouragemt for such who undertake the same….” In December, it agreed to require a jail in each county, funded by a county tax. NJA ser. 1, 13:84, 113; Grants and concessions 235, 268. For the 1686 complaint against the proprietors, see NJA ser. 1, 13:169.
[20] Grants and concessions 80, 72 [i.e. 84], 104-107. Whitehead’s list of crimes for which a death penalty might be imposed includes references to the Old Testament’s “Levitical code” used by settlers from New England in the framing and phrasing of their laws. These strictures were “modified to some extent by the views of the less rigid immigrants from Europe,” but “continued for the most part in force during the whole period of the proprietary governments.” The descendants of Puritans thus gave to East Jersey “an enduring memorial of the influence they possessed and exercised over their fellow colonists from other quarters….” Whitehead, East Jersey (18461) 163-164, (18752) 238-240.
[21] Grants and concessions 254-255; cf. NJA ser. 1 13:82, 84.
[22] Grants and concessions 340-342, 356-357. For executions performed under the 1714 “Act for Regulating of Slaves,” see G. P., “Glimpses of the past in New Jersey. No. VI.–Slavery,” Newark daily advertiser 29 March 1842 2:3-4, Whitehead, Contributions 318-320.