Author Archives: Heather Husted

“Mr. President How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty?” Public domain, original image in Library of Congress

In 1776 with the writing of the first constitution New Jersey opened the door to voting by women, blacks, and aliens by not explicitly limiting voting to white men with property, using the term “inhabitants” instead. An earlier draft of the constitution shows that “he” was initially used to describe the electorate. New Jersey was not alone in this gender neutral description of the electorate; only five of the original states used gender specific language. To vote in a New Jersey election a person had to have lived in the county for one year and be worth fifty pounds. This meant that along with blacks and aliens, unmarried women and widows could vote. Married women were not eligible to vote as all property belonged to their husbands.

Subsequent election laws sometimes referred to the electorate as “he” (1777 and 1783) but in 1790 and 1797 “he or she” pronouns began to be used. There’s evidence that some women voted before 1797 but it was with the passage of the 1797 law that women began to vote in greater numbers.

Political rivalry and the rise of the two party system, combined with remnants of egalitarian possibility from the Revolutionary War is the most likely explanation for the explicit extension of the franchise. In the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War elections were desultory affairs; participation was low, fraud was common, and people were preoccupied rebuilding their ordinary lives.

1789 saw the ratification of the federal constitution and the first statewide Congressional elections. In New Jersey this turned out to be a rough and tumble affair with much fraudulent activity. New Jersey was one of the first states to organize political parties when, during the 1789 elections a group of West Jersey political leaders organized a statewide slate of candidates (this group known as the Junto, later became the Federalist party).

The 1790 law instituted voting at the municipal (rather than the county level) and placed limits on the number of days the polls were open. It was an attempt to prevent fraud and introduce some uniformity and clarity to election laws (even though it didn’t apply to all the counties). It also solidified political advantage by extending the franchise to women in only those counties dominated by Federalists. It was proposed by the Quakers (who lived mostly in West New Jersey, tended to be wealthier, supported the Federalists and had a more progressive view of women’s rights) and affected mostly those counties where Quaker populations were highest. Allowing women to vote would help offset the increasing numbers of voters living in the eastern portion of the state around Essex County. The 1797 law extended the vote to women around the state and also instituted municipal voting statewide.

Why Women Want to Vote. Political cartoon published in Perth Amboy Evening News, 29 Sept. 1915.

These rights were short lived. In the spring of 1807 an election was held in Essex County regarding the siting of a courthouse and jail in either Elizabethtown or Newark. There were many instances of fraud, with both men and women voting “early and often”. The rights of women and free blacks to vote became a convenient scapegoat and a campaign was then begun to limit the franchise. When the Legislature met in the fall they set aside the results of the election and on November 7 1807 they voted to restrict suffrage to white men, but also to remove the property requirement, thus simultaneously extending the suffrage of one group (white men without property) at the expense of other groups (women, free blacks and aliens).

There’s evidence that around ten thousand New Jersey women voted between 1790, when their eligibility was made explicit, and 1807 when their right was rescinded. It would be a long fight before New Jersey women won the right to vote again with the passage of the nineteenth amendment in 1920.

See primary resources in our Votes for Women! guide

Sources:

Klinghoffer, Judith Apter and Lois Elkis. ““The Petticoat Electors”: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1807”. Journal of the Early Republic, 12 (Summer 1992)

Lewis, Jan Ellen. “Rethinking Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1807”. Rutgers Law Review, vol. 63:3

McCormick, Richard P. The History of Voting in New Jersey, 1664-1911. Rutgers University Press, 1953.

Zagarri, Rosemarie. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. University of Pennsylvania, 2007

How to Find New Jersey State Publications Online

November 18, 2019

Heather Husted

Research strategies for finding New Jersey government documents online

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Alcoholic Beverage Control Bulletins reveal social history of New Jersey

May 30, 2019

Heather Husted

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Caitlyn Cook, New Jersey Reference and Digital Librarian in the State Library Information Center, recently digitized the Bulletins of the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) (1933-Current). Like other digitized New Jersey State documents, they are public domain and free to download in the New Jersey State Publications Digital Library.

When federal Prohibition laws were repealed in 1933, New Jersey and other states established commissions to regulate alcohol. The Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control was tasked with supervising the manufacture, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages in the State “in such a manner as to promote temperance and eliminate the racketeer and bootlegger.” Bulletins summarize the results of undercover field investigations by ABC agents, document the testimony of licensees and witnesses, and establish legal precedence. They contain notices to licensees, statistics on Commission activities, and summaries of agency investigations.

From the beginning, the ABC was asked to fill both a both a regulatory and a moral mandate. They were tasked to monitor, investigate, and protect the public from fraudulent practices and criminal enterprises. The mandate also granted the ABC a wide degree of social control over licensees, regulating how licensees could run their businesses, who they could hire, and who they could serve. This authority evolved over time and the Bulletins are key to understanding that history.

Bulletin 188 (dated June 22, 1937) illustrates one of ABC’s political positions. Bartenders at the time had the discretion to refuse service to any person except on the basis of “race, creed, or color.” Many bulletins contain decisions where the ABC upheld the rights of non-white citizens to open and operate licensed establishments and be protected from race-based discrimination. In Bulletin 231 (February 24, 1938), ABC affirmed that a bar could not legally serve non-white patrons in different glasses and at different prices than those offered to white patrons. Commissioner D. Frederick Burnett reminded the questioner of the provisions of the Civil Rights Act and the unlawfulness of bar’s actions, stating:

This means that it is unlawful in this state to refuse the service of liquor to a man merely because of his color. It means that it is unlawful to discriminate by serving beer in thin glasses to the white and in mugs to the colored folk. It means that a licensee cannot lawfully charge more to colored patrons than to those who happened to have been born white. The fact that no prices are posted is immaterial. Discrimination is demonstrated by what is done in the effort to keep the patronage white.

Yet the following year the Commissioner upheld an earlier ruling of a municipality’s right to enact ordinances prohibiting women from being served (see Bulletin 257).

It has been said that “a woman has as much legal and moral right to take a drink as a man”. Re Harris, Bu11etin 16, Item 8. But, really, it is not a right but a privilege. She may lawfully be restricted in that privilege. So may a man. If social policy in a given municipality declares that it is better for the sake of others that she may not drink at the bar- there is nothing arbitrary in the exercise of police power to prevent her. Notwithstanding her modern emergence, the eternal verities remain. We find her at both ends of the human gamut. We prefer to idealize her in the higher register. But we may encounter her in the lower depths. She is the exemplar of refined living. Alas, she is also the more deadly of the species.

Camp Nordlund license — Klapprott vs. Township of Andover

The ABC’s moral mandate impacted New Jersey society in a number of ways. Camp Nordland, a camp which hosted Nazi and KKK sympathizing events in Andover, NJ, had been the subject of public outcry, but the municipality had little legal recourse against the camp’s hateful behavior. When the municipality denied the renewal of the camp’s liquor license, the ABC upheld the municipality’s judgment stating, among other reasons, that “[l]icensed premises will not be tolerated as hot-beds in which to incubate hate and inculcate subversion. There is no room for the swastika. The appeal is denied.” (see 1939 Bulletin 344, the last in a series of ABC rulings regarding Camp Norland). Not long after the ABC ruling, additional violations were uncovered, the camp was raided by the Sussex County Sheriff’s office, the property seized, and camp leaders arrested for various crimes (See the NJ Herald’s article on Camp Nordland for a brief history).

ABC Bulletin 1656 — Item 5. Disciplinary Proceedings – Nuisance (Apparent Homosexuals)

Morality policing led the ABC to wage a destructive campaign against the LGBTQ community and licensees who created establishments to serve them. In its earliest regulations, the ABC named a prohibition against “female impersonators.” Examples appear throughout the Bulletins of bars having their licenses suspended or revoked based on investigators’ reports that a masculine appearing individual demonstrated stereotypically feminine mannerisms. During the 1950s and 1960s, investigations shifted toward identifying “apparent homosexuals,” people whose appearance and mannerisms seemed to defy societal gender norms; Bulletins 1656 and 1557 are two of many examples. This campaign of punishing licensees who allowed perceived LGBTQ persons to gather in their establishments would culminate in a 1967 NJ Supreme Court ruling against the agency (One Eleven Wines & Liquors, Inc. v. Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, 50 N.J. 329). Though this ruling ended the blanket prohibition against LGBTQ persons assembling in and patronizing licensed establishments, Bulletin 1763 makes it clear that the agency would seek to police and prohibit any behavior deemed “offensive to public decency.” The One Eleven Wines and Liquors case would not end discrimination against LGBTQ persons, but it was a significant moment in advancing the rights of New Jersey’s LGBTQ community.

These are but a few examples of the work of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission and its impact on the social and moral history of New Jersey. The entire Bulletin collection is available to review.

Researching New Jersey’s Mental Hospitals

February 11, 2019

Heather Husted

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1849 New Jersey State Asylum Report — 1849 State Asylum Report Title Page

The reports of New Jersey’s State Asylums to the Legislature are now digitized and available online in our New Jersey State Publications Digital Library. These documents are snapshots of how the State perceived, housed, and treated the mentally ill. Researchers of the history of medicine, the history of social movements, and the history of patient rights will find these collections of interest.

On Tuesday February 5, Digital Librarian Caitlyn Cook presented “From Dorothea Dix to the Post-War Era: Historic Reports of New Jersey’s Mental Hospitals.” Cook discussed the unique contents of over seventy years of government documents, during a period when the treatment of mental illness was undergoing profound change.

The State Hospital network included facilities in Trenton, Morristown, Ancora (Hammonton), Glen Gardner, Arthur Brisbane (Farmingdale), and Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital. Our collection is incomplete, but you can browse our print holdings in our catalog under the heading Psychiatric Hospitals – New Jersey or by searching the State Library catalog by facility name. The most complete collections of reports in the Library’s collection are from the Trenton and Morristown facilities and these, as well as Ancora, have been digitized. Additional reports will be digitized over time. We actively collect and will add new state documents to the library’s collection when they are made available to us.

Digitized State Hospital Collections

To date, librarians have digitized the following State Hospital collections.

Annual Reports of the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum at Trenton (later, New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton) 1848–1921 (we are missing 1849, but it is available from Hathitrust)
Annual Reports of the State Asylum for the Insane at Morristown (later, New Jersey State Hospital at Morris Plains, then New Jersey State Hospital at Greystone Park) 1876–1969 (missing 1948-1950, 1961, 1963-1965)
Ancora Psychiatric Hospital (1961-1975)

What do Asylum Reports contain?

Report contents varied widely year to year. A budget statement was always included, but in some years you will find photographs of patient activities and treatment rooms, architectural drawings, and renderings of building works. The other persistent feature of asylum reports are patient statistics; these did vary year to year, but they typically include gender, race, occupation before admission, reason for the illness and its duration, and New Jersey county of origin. The eugenics movement in the early 1900s prompted reporting on patients’ ethnicity, level of education, and literacy. In some years, you will find charts that attempted to correlate diagnosis with ethnicity. Some reports contain pathology reports, x-rays, microscopy, and summaries of autopsies conducted at the hospital, including individual patients’ ages and genders, as well as brief summaries of autopsy findings.

Other Sources for Asylum Research

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of the Trenton Asylum, 1908

Plans of the asylums were included in some reports, but can also be viewed on fire insurance maps. State employees and TESU staff and students can access the interactive database Fire Insurance Maps Online with their state library card. Older fire insurance maps are public domain; freely available digital collections can be accessed from Princeton University and the Library of Congress.

Asylum reports did not name individual patients and will be of limited use to the genealogist. Extant patient records are in the collections of the New Jersey State Archives and are unavailable to the public except under extraordinary circumstances. Records of the chancery court (also held at the State Archives) may contain information about the legal circumstances under which patients were committed.

U. S. Federal Census returns include names of all patients and staff residing on the campus. On some returns, resident occupations and ethnicity were included. To find state asylum listings on the Census, try searching for the superintendent at the time the census was conducted. For example see the 1850 record for asylum superintendent Dr. Horace Buttolph; asylum residents and staff appear on pages 30-35. See Dr. Buttolph’s record in 1870; residents and staff are enumerated on pages 47-64.

About the Digital Publications Library

The New Jersey State Library’s State Publications Collection preserves all works published by the State and its entities, whether print or born digital. The digitization of our extensive print holdings is ongoing. Visit our collections in the New Jersey State Library Digital Publications Library. For questions about asylum reports, state publications, and other digital collections, contact Caitlyn Cook, New Jersey Reference & Digital Librarian, or Deborah Mercer, New Jersey Collections Librarian.

Using Ratables for New Jersey Genealogy

October 3, 2018

Heather Husted

Genealogy Blog Research Library No Comments

What are ratables?

Ratables are lists of heads of household compiled in order to levy a tax. Heads of household were typically males and in some cases widows. These taxes were levied periodically from 1773-1822.

Tax rates were based on a number of variables set by the New Jersey General Assembly, such as how many “improved” (i.e. arable) acres were owned, how many and what type of livestock, whether you owned a carriage, and how many servants and enslaved persons were contracted and owned.

The specifics of what was taxed and at what rate changed when each new tax was issued. Information collected about the taxpayer varied based on what was being taxed for the period of that ratable.

Somerset County 1784 Book 1778 page 10 — A ratable from Somerset County, 1784. Courtesy New Jersey State Archives ; Department of State

What can you do with ratables?

Ratables are an important primary source for pre-1830 genealogy research in New Jersey.

The first set of ratables was issued in 1773-1774, while New Jersey was a province, then regularly until 1822. There was no statewide census of colonial New Jersey. The federal census returns for New Jersey conducted from 1790-1820 are lost; the first available statewide census return for New Jersey is 1830. There are less census returns available for New Jersey than any other state. Genealogy researchers use ratables as a census substitute.

Lists of all known taxpayers in a town and lists of all known taxpayers with the same surname facilitate cluster genealogy, name studies, local history studies, and brick wall research.

Revolutionary Census of New Jersey

There are several published transcriptions and compilations of tax lists. The Revolutionary Census of New Jersey compiled by Kenn Stryker-Rodda is the most used. This index groups individuals by last name from three different ratables: 1773-1774, 1778-1780, and 1784-1786. There is no complete set of ratables for all regions in this time period, so by using these three sets, all townships are covered.

“For the revolutionary period there is at least one list for each of the townships into which the thirteen counties of the colony/state were divided… Two successive lists have been incorporated into this index whenever possible, as individuals were sometimes omitted from a list, and because names were spelled differently even by the same assessor.” (Stryker-Rodda, p. v.)

image of twelve shilling note, printed 1776 — reverse of a New Jersey twelve shilling note, printed in 1776

The index is alphabetical by last name, and includes their township. For the financial details and to see all taxpayers of the same town listed together, you can refer back to the transcriptions of the ratables published in the Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey. A “code” in the front of the book indicates which issue of GMNJ contains the transcription. The New Jersey State Library has a complete set of the Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey available for in-library use.

What can you learn from ratables?

The account of the taxpayer’s property lists several features of his wealth. Tax was calculated by multiplying these numbers by rates. For example, the tax burden for a householder in 1773/1774 ranged from 2 shillings to £4. Those who owned a furnace or glass-house could be taxed up to £10. There are a number of carve-outs and exemptions, similar to modern tax policy.

Information Contained in Ratables
1773-1774	1778-1780	1784-1786
a number without a letter: number of acres of improved land c: number of horses and/or cattle gm: grist mill hh: householder ms: merchant shop rc: riding chair s: servants or enslaved persons sm: single man sm&h: single man who keeps a horse v: vessel (boat)	a number without a letter: number of acres of improved land c: horned cattle ex: exempt h: horse(s) h&l: house and small lot hh: householder p: hog(s) rc: riding chair s: enslaved persons sm: single man who works for hire sm&h: single man who keeps a horse u: acres of unimproved land £: amount out at interest	a number without a letter: number of acres of improved land c: horned cattle ex: exempt gm: grist mill h: horse(s) h&l: house and small lot hh: householder p: hogs

Other Indexes to Ratables

Jackson, Ronald Vern, ed. New Jersey Tax Lists, 1772-1822. five volumes. American Tax List Indices. Salt Lake City, Utah: Accelerated Indexing Systems, 1981. This work is an alphabetical index of taxpayers and includes the taxpayer’s name, town, county, and date they appeared on the tax list. It is not comprehensive, does not include all lists or even all counties. The contents are also searchable as part of Ancestry’s database New Jersey, Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1643-1890.
Norton, James S. New Jersey in 1793: An Abstract and Index to the 1793 Militia Census of the State of New Jersey. Salt Lake City, Utah, 1973. This is a transcription of ratables created as a result of an NJ Law of 30 Nov 1792 “to take a list of all and every free and able-bodied white male Citizen, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five Years.” Those who did not serve and paid a $3 tax, as well as certain occupations, are listed as “exempt.” There are no extant 1793 ratables from Bergen, Cape May, Salem, and Somerset, but the author reconstructed a list of these men from other sources.

Access to Ratables at the New Jersey State Archives

Of the total number of ratables recorded, only about a thousand (4% of the total) still exist. Almost all original extant ratables are in the collections of the New Jersey State Archives and are available on microfilm.

The Tax Ratables Collection Guide published by the New Jersey State Archives lists all extant ratables and microfilm copies available at the NJSA. “This series includes original tax ratables from the period 1773-1822, as well as photocopies of several tax lists currently in the custody of various historical societies.” Ratables are part of the New Jersey General Assembly Collection.

These collection guides (also known as finding aids) include the microfilm reel as well as the citation to GMNJ if a transcription has been published.

Questions about access to microfilmed ratables should be directed to the New Jersey State Archives. Researchers are welcome to browse the print indexes listed above and issues of the Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey in the State Library Information Center on the fourth floor of the New Jersey State Library.