The American Revolution in New Jersey
222 pages, 6 x 9
7 tables
Paperback
Release Date:01 Apr 2015
ISBN:9780813571911
Hardcover
Release Date:01 Apr 2015
ISBN:9780813571928
The American Revolution in New Jersey
Where the Battlefront Meets the Home Front
Edited by James J. Gigantino
SERIES:
Rivergate Regionals Collection
Rutgers University Press
Winner of the 2016 New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Authors Award for the Edited Works Category
Battles were fought in many colonies during the American Revolution, but New Jersey was home to more sustained and intense fighting over a longer period of time. The nine essays in The American Revolution in New Jersey, depict the many challenges New Jersey residents faced at the intersection of the front lines and the home front.
Battles were fought in many colonies during the American Revolution, but New Jersey was home to more sustained and intense fighting over a longer period of time. The nine essays in The American Revolution in New Jersey, depict the many challenges New Jersey residents faced at the intersection of the front lines and the home front.
Unlike other colonies, New Jersey had significant economic power in part because of its location between the major ports of New York and Philadelphia. New people and new ideas arriving in the colony fostered tensions between Loyalists and Patriots that were at the core of the Revolution. Enlightenment thinking shaped the minds of New Jersey’s settlers as they began to question the meaning of freedom in the colony. Yeoman farmers demanded ownership of the land they worked on and members of the growing Quaker denomination decried the evils of slavery and spearheaded the abolitionist movement in the state. When larger portions of New Jersey were occupied by British forces early in the war, the unity of the state was crippled, pitting neighbor against neighbor for seven years.
The essays in this collection identify and explore the interconnections between the events on the battlefield and the daily lives of ordinary colonists during the Revolution. Using a wide historical lens, the contributors to The American Revolution in New Jersey capture the decades before and after the conflict as they interpret the causes of the war and the consequences of New Jersey’s reaction to the Revolution.
By broadening the geographical and topical coverage of revolutionary New Jersey, this volume makes a substantial contribution to the field with chapters that should prove informative to general readers, students, and academic specialists ... Overall, the works assembled here indicate that New Jersey's revolutionary experience remains fertile ground for new inquiries.
In the case of New Jersey during the Revolution, boundaries between social, economic, political, and military history were (and are) wholly artificial. Gigantino’s authors address different questions, but each convincingly demonstrates that the stories of the home and fighting fronts, in all their various facets, were part of the same narrative. Kudos to James Gigantino and his fellow essayists.
There is still much we can learn about the Revolution in New Jersey and this volume is an important step toward that better understanding.'
Useful to scholars of New Jersey and may provide avenues for broader conversations about the Revolutionary War at home.
JAMES J. GIGANTINO II is the author of The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I A Revolutionary Experience
Chapter 1 A Disproportionate Burden on the Willing
Chapter 2 “Most Boundless Avarice”: Illegal Trade in Revolutionary Essex
Chapter 3 Blasting, Scraping, and Scavenging: Iron and Salt Production in Revolutionary New Jersey
Chapter 4 A Nest of Tories: The American-versus-American Battle of Fort Lee, 1781
Chapter 5 Rochambeau in New Jersey: The Good French Ally
Part II: The Impact of the Revolutionary Experience
Chapter 6 Destitute of Almost Everything to Support Life: The Acquisition and Loss of Wealth in Revolutionary Monmouth County, New Jersey
Chapter 7 Discharging Their Duty: Salem Quakers and Slavery, 1730–1780
Chapter 8 Slavery, Abolition, and African Americans in New Jersey’s American Revolution
Chapter 9 A Loyalist Homestead in a World Turned Upside Down
Notes on Contributors
Index
