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CHURCH AT SHORT HILLS, NEW JERSEY.
Bergen to Elizabeth Town, and, after New Jersey was divided into "the Jerseys," as the shortest way of reconciling the conflicting claims of its proprietors, to Perth Amboy and to Burlington. According to Montesquieu, the people of Bergen, during the century succeeding the final cession of New Netherland to the English, must have been very happy, for their annals are dismally tiresome. It remained, as Knickerbocker described it long afterward, "one of the fastnesses into which the primitive manners of our Dutch forefathers had retreated, and where they are cherished with devout and scrupulous strictness." A people endowed with this broad-based conservatism would naturally take little interest in a rebellion which it was the glory of the litigious Yankee to begin "while actual suffering was yet afar off." The bouwers of Bergen were not the sort of people "to take up arms against a preamble." When the war had become flagrant, there was much division of sentiment among them, and a sufficient sprinkling of Tories to be an affliction to their patriotic neighbors. Colonel Abraham Van Buskirk made himself almost as objectionable to the Whigs of East Jersey as Colonel Oliver De Lancey became to the Whigs of Westchester. In October, 1776, Washington wrote, "To-morrow we evacuate Bergen,—a measure which will at first be condemned and afterward approved." And evacuated Bergen was, as one of the preliminaries of the retreat to the Delaware, the fort on Bergen Neck being garrisoned by the refugees and renamed Fort De Lancey. A curious illustration of the persistency of the Dutch habits in Bergen is furnished in a grave official suggestion of Governor Livingston, of New Jersey, during the Valley Forge winter. "It is well known," remarked that magistrate, "that the rural ladies in that part of New Jersey" ("the county of Bergen") "pride themselves in an incredible number of petticoats, which, by way of house-furniture, are displayed by way of ostentation for many years before they are decreed to invest the fair bodies of the proprietors. Till that period they are never worn, but neatly piled up on each side of an immense escritoire. What I would, therefore, humbly propose to our superiors is to make prize of these future female habiliments, and, after proper transformation, immediately apply them to screen from the inclemencies of the weather those gallant males who are now fighting for the liberties of their country."
The most striking incident in the Revolutionary history of Pavonia was the capture by "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, in 1779, of the British outposts at Paulus Hook, now familiar to everybody as the New-Jersey landing of the Pennsylvania Railroad ferry. Although Lee simply marched into the works and then marched out again with one hun-
