Today in New Jersey history:
March 12, 1664: King Charles II of England granted his brother James, Duke of York, the Dutch colony of New Netherland. The Dutch surrendered to James’s English fleet without a fight when it showed up on the doorstep of the colony’s capital, New Amsterdam, on August 28. James’s deputy governor of the newly named New York, Richard Nicolls, quickly issued land grants or... “patents” to draw English settlers from New England and Long Island to the new lands across the river from Manhattan. Although Nicolls was unaware of the fact, James had already granted New Jersey, also known as Nova Caesaria, to two of his supporters, Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret They, in turn, divided the colony into Eastern and Western portions, with Carteret owning the East and Berkeley the west. The dividing line was unsurveyed and vague. Neither man would ever visit New Jersey.
March 12, 1822: Timothy Webster was born in Newhaven, England. Webster emigrated with his family to Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of eight and lived there until he became a detective for the Pinkerton agency in 1853. With the outbreak of the Civil War, he served as a Union spy but was discovered, tried, convicted and hanged in Richmond in 1862, the first American executed as a spy since Nathan Hale.
