George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 2, 17th edition.

[316] number of representatives of the people; freedom from

Chap XV.} 1665

taxation except by the colonial assembly; a combined opposition of the people and the proprietaries to any arbitrary impositions from England; freedom of judgment, conscience, and worship, to every peaceful citizen; these were the allurements to New Jersey. To the proprietaries were reserved a veto on provincial enactments, the appointment of judicial officers, and the executive authority. Lands were promised at a moderate quitrent, not to be collected till 1670. The duke of York, now president of the African Company. was the patron of the slave-trade; the proprietaries, more true to the prince than to humanity, offered a bounty of seventy-five acres for the importation of each able slave That the tenure of estates might rest on equity, the Indian title to lands was in all cases to be quieted.

The portion of New Netherland which thus gained popular freedom, was at that time almost a wilderness. The first occupation of Fort Nassau in Gloucester, and the grants to Godyn and Blomaert, above Cape May. had been of so little avail that, in 1634, not a single white man dwelt within the Bay of the Delaware. The pioneers of Sir Edmund Ployden, and the restless emigrants from New Haven, had both been unsuccessful. Here and there, in the counties of Gloucester and Burlington, a Swedish farmer may have preserved his dwelling on the Jersey side of the river; and, before 1664, perhaps three Dutch families were established about Burlington; but as yet West New Jersey had not a hamlet. In East Jersey, of which the hills had been praised by Verrazzani, and the soil trodden by the mariners of Hudson, a trading station seems, in 1618, to have been occupied at Bergen. In December, 1651, Augustine Herman purchased, but hardly took possession