Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

arms, and threatened Coxe with assassination if he should persist in his harassment.
The conflict intensified when Lewis Morris, the leader of the proprietors,
became royal governor in 1738.* Morris quickly appointed his son,
Robert Hunter Morris, to be chief justice of the province, and his daughter's
father-in-law, Richard Ashfield, to be receiver general of quitrents. The upper
house was also packed by Lewis Morris with his fellow proprietors.
The determined Morris decided, in the 1740s, to try the Elizabethtown
land cases in the Court of Chancery, where he himself was presiding judge.
In reply, the Elizabethtown settlers petitioned the king about their grievances,
but to no avail. Morris and the proprietors also began winning many ejectment
cases against settlers on the fringe of Elizabethtown, as well as against
squatters farther west who had purchased Indian titles. The Chancery case
against the Elizabethtown settlers was filed in 1745, and the settlers appeared
to be in dire straits. At this point, with tensions at fever pitch, one of the
Elizabethtown leaders, Samuel Baldwin, was arrested for cutting timber on his
own—but allegedly proprietary—land. The people's anger exploded and a
mob broke open the Newark jail and rescued Baldwin.
Four months later, Nehemiah Baldwin and others of the rioters were
arrested in their turn. In response, a crowd armed with clubs appeared and
rescued Baldwin. Shortly afterward, a mob of three hundred appeared at the
Newark jail, facing thirty armed militia. Threatening to kill every militiaman
if fired upon, the triumphant crowd succeeded in breaking in and rescuing all
the prisoners.
The new Assembly of February 1746 sympathized with the rioters. In his
opening address to the legislature, Governor Morris thundered that the riots
were virtually "high treason" and "likely to end in rebellion." Morris called
for severe measures to quell the "revolution." Morris and the proprietors
introduced in the Council an amazing bill, modeled on an English law of
1715, providing that if twelve or more persons should meet and refuse to disperse
if so ordered by a government official, they would then be declared
felons and be summarily put to death.
The confrontation between the two forces continued to mount. The rebels
presented a petition to the legislature, citing their Indian titles and calling for
a stay of all judicial processes against them, while proprietor Samuel Nevill
denounced the petition as infringing the Crown's prerogative and its sovereignty
over the soil of New Jersey. In a sense, Nevill was correct. The opposing
libertarian theory of land ownership, espoused by the squatters, was eloquently
set forth by a sympathizer in a New York newspaper. Going beyond
Roger Williams' simple theory of Indian ownership to what was essentially
the John Locke labor theory of original landed property, the writer declared
that, although the earth "was made for equal use of all, it may nevertheless be
* Morris was the first to be royal governor of New Jersey alone; before him the royal
governors were only ancillary to their post as governors of New York.
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