Key figures: Jacob Green, Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant, John Cleves Symmes, William Livingston
Summary
The New Jersey Constitution of 1776 was the frame of government adopted by the Provincial Congress of New Jersey on July 2, 1776—two days before the Continental Congress in Philadelphia approved the Declaration of Independence. Drafted in only a few days by a committee chaired by the Reverend Jacob Green, it was among the first state constitutions written after the collapse of royal authority, and it replaced the colonial government of the last royal governor, William Franklin, who had been arrested and removed weeks earlier.
Framed hastily amid the wartime emergency, the document was ratified by the Provincial Congress itself without any popular vote and was regarded by its authors as a temporary charter; a proviso declared it null and void should the colonies reconcile with Great Britain. It nonetheless endured for sixty-eight years, until 1844. Its most consequential feature was an unusually broad suffrage clause that, by enfranchising “all inhabitants” worth £50, extended the vote to unmarried women and free people of color—making New Jersey the only Revolutionary-era state in which women legally voted, a right later stripped away in 1807.
A Hasty Wartime Frame of Government
The Provincial Congress convened at Burlington in June 1776 as royal government disintegrated across the colony. On June 21 it voted to draft a constitution, appointing a committee that the Presbyterian minister Jacob Green chaired and on which Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant and John Cleves Symmes served. The committee completed a draft in roughly two days, and the full Congress adopted it on July 2, 1776. Composed under the pressure of an approaching British campaign, the constitution was brief and conservative in structure, leaving the existing colonial court system and the body of English common law largely intact.
The frame established a bicameral legislature—a Legislative Council and a General Assembly—elected annually, in which nearly all governing power was concentrated. Executive authority rested in a governor chosen each year by joint ballot of the two houses; the office carried no veto over legislation and little independent power, a deliberate reaction against the royal governors the Revolution had just displaced. The governor also presided as chancellor and, with the Legislative Council, formed the colony’s highest court of appeals. The constitution was preceded by no separate declaration of rights, though it guaranteed religious liberty to Protestants and barred any religious establishment.
Two features underscored its provisional character. The Congress adopted and ratified the document itself, submitting it to no popular referendum, and it attached an explicit reconciliation clause: “if a reconciliation between Great Britain and these colonies should take place… this charter shall be null and void—otherwise to remain firm and inviolable.” Independence two days later rendered the escape clause moot.
The Franchise Clause and Women’s Suffrage
The constitution’s enduring historical significance rests on Article IV, its suffrage provision. It granted the vote to “all inhabitants of this Colony, of full age, who are worth fifty pounds proclamation money, clear estate in the same, and have resided within the county in which they claim a vote for twelve months immediately preceding the election.” Framed in terms of property and residence rather than sex or race, the clause enfranchised propertied unmarried women—married women, under the common-law doctrine of coverture, could not own property in their own names—and free Black residents who met the £50 threshold.
New Jersey was the only one of the thirteen original states whose founding constitution permitted women to vote, and later election statutes reinforced the practice: a 1790 law governing seven southern counties referred to voters as “he or she,” and a 1797 statute used the same gender-neutral phrasing statewide. Women and free Black men are documented casting ballots in the decades that followed. In 1807, however, amid disputes over electoral fraud, the state legislature passed a law restricting the franchise to tax-paying white male citizens—a measure of doubtful constitutionality that nonetheless stood, ending the nation’s first experiment in female suffrage more than a century before the Nineteenth Amendment.
Significance
The New Jersey Constitution of 1776 illustrates both the improvisation and the latent radicalism of American state-building at independence. Written in days by men bracing for invasion, it prioritized continuity of ordinary government over bold institutional design, retaining common law, courts, and a bicameral legislature while stripping the executive of the powers that had made royal governors objects of colonial resentment. Yet its broadly worded franchise—likely as much an accident of hurried drafting as a considered act of inclusion—produced the era’s single instance of lawful voting by women and free people of color, a precedent later abolitionists and suffragists would invoke. Its long, unamended life until 1844, despite its makeshift origins, also demonstrated how a provisional revolutionary charter could harden into a durable frame of government.