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Why Study Camden County History?
Camden County, New Jersey, provides an ideal subject for the study of the development of American metropolitan communities. It contains one large central city that for most of the county's history was the center of economic and political life and culture. Nearby, urbanized suburbs developed along old turnpikes and railroad lines. Later, the railroads and the automobile created an outer ring of sprawling suburban neighborhoods expanding into the countryside. Throughout much of the county's history, the suburbs and countryside were integrated closely into a Philadelphia- Camden City metropolitan region. All roads and rails led to the Delaware riverfront, where county residents could take a ferryboat (or, after 1926, the bridge) across the river to Philadelphia for business, government, and entertainment.
Over time, changes in America's industrial economy and society brought about a decline of the central city. Simultaneously, urban middleclass residents and businesses moved to the surrounding suburbs. Gradually, the center of county life shifted from city to suburbs, and in the process the traditional metropolitan community began to break down. The evolving community had decidedly new ethnic, racial, and cultural characteristics. Once composed almost entirely of European Americans, Camden City became home primarily to residents of African, Hispanic, and Asian descent by the end of the twentieth century. As the former residents moved to the suburbs, where they settled among older rural European American neighborhoods, walls of mistrust arose between an increasingly impoverished and crime-ridden urban center and the prospering middle-class suburban regions.
At first view, it would seem that racial, economic, and cultural polarization caused the breakdown of the Camden County metropolitan community. Yet the process was far more complicated. In fact, as the county developed, the urban riverfront and suburban countryside became inseparable, and it is this intimate connection between city and suburb that explains the sometime turbulent evolution of a multicultural society.
Multicultural Society
During its long history, first as part of old Gloucester County and then as a separate governmental entity, Camden County has been home to every ethnic and cultural group in American history: European, African, Latino, Caribbean, Asian, and Native American; Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. All took part in shaping the county's history. At the same time, the county experienced every type of residential neighborhood, workplace, and way of life known to the American historical experience. From the nation's beginning, the tiny seventeenth-century community on the eastern shore of the Delaware River was part of the first pluralistic society that formed in the Middle Atlantic colonies of West New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Throughout the centuries, the county continued in this tradition, becoming by the close of the twentieth century one of the most ethnically diverse and culturally pluralistic communities in the United States.
For most of the county's history, Anglo-American Protestant culture dominated its society, politics,and economy. The original Native American (Indian) way of life soon disappeared, leaving only traces. African Americans, brought to the county as slaves, preserved remnants of their culture in remote rural black enclaves. Later, German, Irish, Italian, Polish, and Russian American Catholics and Jews conformed to the dominant Anglo- American Protestant institutions in order to obtain economic and political advantage. Likewise, Hispanic, Central and East Asian, Pacific, and Caribbean Americans, who came to the county toward the close of the twentieth century, also adopted them.
While acknowledging the imprint of Anglo-American Protestant values and institutions on Camden County, a multicultural approach to its history recognizes the county's rich diversity. The concept of a metropolitan county composed of different cultural and ethnic groups can be a valuable method with which to analyze the American historical experience in local community building. More important, it enables the people of Camden County to begin the new millennium with a better understanding of how their individual cultures contributed to the formation of the place where they make their lives today.
A Birthplace of U.S. History
Another compelling reason to study Camden County's history is its role in the creation of the United States. Located on the eastern side of the Delaware River, opposite the historic Pennsylvania port city of Philadelphia, Camden County has a recorded history that extends back more than three centuries, making it one of the oldest colonial settlements in America. First as part of Gloucester County (1686) and then as a separate political entity (1844), Camden County stood near the center of every major historical development in Philadelphia that shaped the formation of an independent United States.
Camden County's origins can be traced to the period in the seventeenth century when Western European trading nations aggressively sought the resources of the North American seacoast. This competition brought Dutch fur traders, Swedish and Finnish farmers, Scottish-Irish Presbyterians, and English Anglican and Quaker colonists to the Delaware Valley. These first European Americans encountered and destroyed the local Native American culture and introduced black slavery (and, indirectly, African American cultures) to the southeastern bank of the Delaware River. At the same time, struggles in Western Europe for more religious and political freedom extended to the Delaware River as the first British settlers brought a charter assuring fundamental rights and liberties for the colonists.
The future Camden County became more closely connected to the wider American historical experience at the end of the eighteenth century, when its location directly across the river from the temporary national capital in Philadelphia placed it at the crossroads of the American Revolution and near the birthplace of the United States. British and Hessian troops and American volunteers foraged, camped, and at times fought in the area. Whig and Tory factions struggled to preserve the identity of their local communities.
After the war, between 1781 and 1800, the county reflected the nation-building process going on in Philadelphia. If local leaders on the Philadelphia side of the Delaware River followed Federalist principles of centralized government and developed an urban commercial town, those on the east side advanced the idea of the yeoman farmer embodied in Jeffersonian Republican ideals of an agrarian, democratic society and a decentralized government of independent freeholders.
Camden County as a Reflection of U.S. History
In old Gloucester County during the first decades of the nineteenth century, the debate between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans over the nature of U.S. government and institutions became a bitter political contest that contributed eventually to the creation of Camden County. Incorporation of the City of Camden along the Delaware riverfront in 1828 had given rise to conflicts between urban manufacturing interests and an older agrarian commercial section. Construction of the first steam railroad in the county a few years later exacerbated the growing separation of rural agricultural and urban industrial sections. All along, Irish and German Catholic immigrants arrived to build the railroads and work in the factories, presenting the first challenge to the traditional Protestant agricultural leadership. Differences between the political leaders of the riverfront city and its immediate suburbs, versus the old elites of the more rural countryside, strongly influenced the partition of Gloucester County in 1844 and the establishment in 1851 of Camden City as the seat of the new county. Yet turnpike and railroad construction in the years before the Civil War made the rural countryside and the riverfront city increasingly interdependent. In many ways already, Camden County had become a metropolitan community.
The Civil War put Camden County at the nexus of the American historical experience once more. The older agrarian section held traditional social and economic ties to the slave-owning agricultural South; and, despite a strong Quaker antislavery tradition, many county residents sympathized with the states' rights position of the rebellious Confederacy. Nevertheless, the industrial and manufacturing areas of Camden County's urban riverfront, and particularly the Irish and German immigrants, showed strong Unionist tendencies as they helped to build the Northern war machine. Now tied to the city financially, economically, and socially, the nearby rural suburbs and more distant farming hamlets supported the Union cause as well. The Civil War also provided a catalyst to organize countywide business and financial interests. During the war and immediate postwar era, local businessmen from all sections of the county consolidated small banks to provide capital for the increasingly complex and large-scale operations of textile, chemical, oilcloth, iron forging, shipbuilding, and, most important, food canning and agricultural industries.
Late-nineteenth-century industrialization brought waves of southern, southeastern, and eastern European immigrants to the Delaware Valley, predominantly Catholic or Jewish Poles, Russians, and Italians. Most settled on the Philadelphia side of the river, but thousands entered Camden County to work in riverfront factories or on commercial farms and orchards in the countryside. New immigration changed the county's ethnic and religious character and threatened its cultural homogeneity. Camden County's dominant Anglo-American Protestant leadership responded with the first Greater Camden Movement, a program to integrate the newcomers more fully by promoting urban jobs and ownership of houses in the railroad or trolley commuter suburbs. The process worked. On the eve of America's entry into World War I, Camden County appeared to be an orderly community of working middle-class neighborhoods, businesses, and cultural institutions. The new immigrants participated enthusiastically in this Greater Camden society.