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V
REPORTS OF AND COMMENTS ON
NEW JERSEY RATIFICATION
18 December 1787-22 January 1788
Moore Furman to Tench Coxe
Trenton, 18 December1
I can with pleasure inform you that this day the Convention of
New Jersey passed and ratified the Constitution of the United States:
Unanimously.
1. RC, Coxe Papers, Tench Coxe Section, PHi. The letter was printed in the
Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer on 21 December (Mfm:N.J. 28-C). Furman, a
Trenton merchant, became the first mayor of Trenton in 1792. Coxe was a Phila-
delphia merchant and Federalist essayist. For other reports of New Jersey's rati-
fication, not printed below, see Mfm:N.J. 28.
James Parker to John Stevens, Sr.
Perth Amboy, 21 December (excerpt)1
I am glad to find the new Constitution ratified, which I think
best upon the whole altho there are some exceptions to be made to
some parts of it, but I think it may well be amended if necessary.
1. RC, Stevens Family Papers, NjHi. Parker, a Loyalist sympathizer, was mayor
of Perth Amboy in the late 1780s.
Pennsylvania Packet, 21 December1
A correspondent hopes that the unanimous ratification of the federal
government, by the State of New Jersey, will satisfy the friends of the
minority in Pennsylvania that there is no despotism in the new Con-
stitution. The yeomanry of New Jersey love liberty. Nearly every
field in that state has been dyed with the blood of its militia, shed in
the cause of freedom, and nearly every farm in the state has been
plundered by the British army during the late war. Certainly a people
who have sacrificed so much for liberty could not have surrendered
it by an unanimous vote. No commercial influence, no terror of an
applauding gallery, no legal sophistry had any weight in the Conven-
tion of that patriotic state in producing the ratification. The men who