Friday, May 8, 2009

Civil War related divides . . .

New Jersey was once divided into East Jersey and West Jersey, as I have discussed here before. That eventually evolved into North and South Jersey. But in the early years of our republic, this divide was quite apparent when it came to slavery.


1) The slavery rates were much lower in South Jersey during the first three generations of the life of the nation (1790 to 1860). At the beginning of this period 92.6% of New Jersey's slaves were in the northern counties. By 1840 it was over 99%.

2) The 1860 popular vote for Lincoln
in the Southern Counties as a whole was 55%, but was only 45% in the Northern Counties.


So although some people like to take the Mason Dixon Line and extend it across South Jersey, this early divide was really a kind-of-reverse Mason-Dixon Line.

Why was this? Too complicated, I would recommending further reading the linked westjersey.org site to get the answer.

But there will always be "Central" people trying to dispute that history. It all reminded me of the below clip, which inspired this post:


The above video takes about 4 seconds to begin playing.
The full above episode can be found at:
http://www.hulu.com

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