American Revolution in Lenapehoking
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Philadelphia's importance and central location in the colonies made it a natural center for America's revolutionaries. The city hosted the First Continental Congress before the war; the Second Continental Congress, which signed the United States Declaration of Independence, during the war; and the Constitutional Convention (1787) after the war. Several battles were fought in and near Philadelphia as well.
Since the early days of New Jersey as a political entity, New Jersey (as well as the rest of Lenapehoking) has been characterized by ethnic and religious diversity. New England Congregationalists settled alongside Scots Presbyterians and Dutch Reformed migrants. While the majority of residents lived in towns with individual landholdings of Template:Convert, a few rich proprietors owned vast estates. English Quakers and Anglicans owned large landholdings. Unlike Plymouth Colony, Jamestown and other colonies, New Jersey was populated by a secondary wave of immigrants who came from other colonies instead of those who migrated directly from Europe. New Jersey remained agrarian and rural throughout the colonial era, and commercial farming only developed sporadically. Some townships, such as Burlington on the Delaware River and Perth Amboy, emerged as important ports for shipping to New York City and Philadelphia. The colony's fertile lands and tolerant religious policy drew more settlers, and New Jersey boasted a population of 120,000 by 1775.
New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Delaware were among the Thirteen Colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution. During the American Revolutionary War, British and American armies crossed New Jersey numerous times, and several pivotal battles took place in the state. Because of this, New Jersey today is often referred to as "The Crossroads of the Revolution." The winter quarters of the revolutionary army were established there twice by General George Washington in Morristown, which was called the military capital of the revolution. New York City suffered a great fire while under British occupation, and battles took place in New York as well as New Jersey, while Washington and his army famously camped out at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania.
The American Declaration of Independence took place at Philadelphia in the summer of 1776. New Jersey representatives Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, and Abraham Clark were among those who signed the United States Declaration of Independence.
1776 was a messy year in Lenapehoking, with battles being fought across the land, near both the Hudson and Delaware rivers. The Battle of Long Island, the largest battle of the American Revolutionary War, was fought in August 1776 entirely within the modern day borough of Brooklyn. After the battle, in which the Americans were routed, leaving subsequent smaller engagements following in its wake, the city became the British military and political base of operations in North America. The city was a haven for Loyalist refugees, as well as escaped slaves who joined the British lines for the freedom promised by the Crown. As many as 10,000 escaped slaves crowded into the city during the British occupation. When the British forces evacuated in 1783, they transported 3,000 freedmen for resettlement in Nova Scotia. They resettled other freedmen in England and the Caribbean.
The New Jersey Constitution of 1776 was passed July 2, 1776, just two days before the Second Continental Congress declared American Independence from Great Britain. It was an act of the Provincial Congress, which made itself into the state Legislature. To reassure neutrals, it provided that it would become void if New Jersey reached reconciliation with Great Britain.
The only attempt at a peaceful solution to the war took place at the Conference House on Staten Island between American delegates including Benjamin Franklin, and British general Lord Howe on September 11, 1776. Shortly after the British occupation began the Great Fire of New York occurred, a large conflagration which destroyed about a quarter of the buildings in the city, including Trinity Church.<ref>Trinity Church bicentennial celebration, May 5, 1897 By Trinity Church (New York, N.Y.) p. 37</ref>
On December 25, 1776, the Continental Army under George Washington crossed the Delaware River. After the crossing, he surprised and defeated the unprepared Hessian troops in the Battle of Trenton. Slightly more than a week after victory at Trenton, on January 3, 1777, American forces gained an important victory by stopping General Cornwallis's charges at the Second Battle of Trenton. By evading Cornwallis's army, Washington made a surprise attack on Princeton and successfully defeated the British forces there. Emanuel Leutze's painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware became an icon of the Revolution.
American forces under Washington met the forces under General Henry Clinton at the Battle of Monmouth in an indecisive engagement in June 1778. Washington attempted to take the British column by surprise; when the British army attempted to flank the Americans, the Americans retreated in disorder. The ranks were later reorganized and withstood the British charges.
In the summer of 1783, the Continental Congress met in Nassau Hall at Princeton University, making Princeton the nation's capital for four months. It was there that the Continental Congress learned of the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783), which ended the war.
On December 18, 1787, New Jersey became the third state to ratify the United States Constitution, which was overwhelmingly popular in New Jersey, as it prevented New York and Pennsylvania from charging and keeping tariffs on goods imported from Europe. On November 20, 1789, the state became the first in the newly formed Union to ratify the Bill of Rights.
The 1776 New Jersey State Constitution gave the vote to "all inhabitants" who had a certain level of wealth. This included women and blacks, but not married women, because they could not own property separately from their husbands. Both sides, in several elections, claimed that the other side had had unqualified women vote and mocked them for use of "petticoat electors" (entitled to vote or not); on the other hand, both parties passed Voting Rights Acts. In 1807, the legislature passed a bill interpreting the constitution to mean universal white male suffrage, excluding paupers. (This was less revolutionary than it sounds: the "constitution" was itself only an act of the legislature.)<ref>Klinghoffer and Elkis ("The Petticoat Electors: Women's Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807", Journal of the Early Republic 12, no. 2 (1992): 159–193.)</ref>
In 1785 the assembly of the Congress of the Confederation made New York the national capital shortly after the war. New York was the last capital of the U.S. under the Articles of Confederation and the first capital under the Constitution of the United States. In 1789 the first President of the United States, George Washington, was inaugurated; the first United States Congress and the Supreme Court of the United States each assembled for the first time, and the United States Bill of Rights was drafted, all at Federal Hall on Wall Street.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> By 1790, New York had surpassed Philadelphia as the largest city in the United States.
Philadelphia served as the temporary capital of the United States after New York did, from 1790 to 1800, while the Federal City was under construction in the District of Columbia.<ref>Insight Guides: Philadelphia and Surroundings, pages 30–33</ref> In 1793, the largest yellow fever epidemics in U.S. history killed at least 4,000 and up to 5,000 people in Philadelphia, roughly 10% of the city's population.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
The Pennsylvania state government left Philadelphia in 1799, and the federal government was relocated to Washington, DC in 1800 with completion of the White House and Capitol. The city remained the young nation's largest with a population of nearly 50,000 at the turn of the 19th century; it was a financial and cultural center. Before 1800, its free black community founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the first independent black denomination in the country, and the first black Episcopal Church. The free black community also established many schools for its children, with the help of Quakers. New York City soon surpassed Philadelphia in population but, with the construction of roads, canals, and railroads, Philadelphia became the first major industrial city in the United States.
Under New York state's "gradual abolition law of 1799", children of slave mothers were born free, but were held in indentured servitude until their late 20s. Together with slaves freed by their masters after the Revolutionary War and escaped slaves, gradually a significant free-black population developed in Manhattan. Under such influentional United States founders as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay the New York Manumission Society worked for abolition and established the African Free School to educate black children.<ref name="Divided">New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War online exhibit, New-York Historical Society, (November 17, 2006 to September 3, 2007, physical exhibit), accessed 2012-05-10</ref> It was not until 1827 that slavery was completely abolished in the state, and free blacks struggled afterward with discrimination. New York interracial abolitionist activism continued; among its leaders were graduates of the African Free School. The city's black population reached more than 16,000 in 1840.<ref>Leslie M. Harris, "African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863", Department of History, Emory University</ref>
