Bergen County Divided: Loyalties Split

# Bergen County Divided: Loyalties Split

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the colonies were not unified in their desire for independence. Nowhere was this more painfully evident than in Bergen County, New Jersey, where the fabric of community life began to tear along lines that few had anticipated. By 1773, as colonial grievances against British taxation and governance intensified in the wake of the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and the mounting crisis over Parliamentary authority, the residents of Hackensack and its surrounding towns found themselves caught in an agonizing struggle — not only against distant British power but against one another. What made Bergen County's division so wrenching was that it did not pit strangers against strangers. It set neighbor against neighbor, congregant against congregant, and in some cases, family member against family member.

The roots of the divide ran deep into the county's religious, ethnic, and economic soil. Bergen County had long been home to a substantial Dutch Reformed population, descendants of the original Dutch settlers who had shaped the region's culture for over a century. This community, centered around the Reformed churches of Hackensack and its environs, increasingly gravitated toward the patriot cause. One of the most influential voices urging them in that direction was Reverend Dirck Romeyn, a Dutch Reformed minister who used his pulpit not merely for spiritual guidance but as a platform for political conviction. Romeyn framed the struggle against British overreach in moral and providential terms, arguing that resistance to tyranny was consistent with the community's faith and values. His sermons galvanized many Dutch Reformed families, giving the patriot movement in Bergen County a spiritual backbone that lent it both emotional power and communal cohesion.

On the other side stood many Anglican families, whose religious ties to the Church of England often reinforced their political loyalty to the Crown. These families frequently maintained commercial relationships with New York City, just across the Hudson River, where British authority remained strong and where trade networks depended on imperial stability. For these residents, loyalty to Britain was not merely sentimental — it was practical, woven into the livelihoods and social connections that sustained their families. The proximity of New York City made Bergen County a uniquely contested space, a borderland where British influence could be felt daily and where Loyalist sympathies had powerful material reinforcement.

As the crisis deepened, patriot leaders moved to organize resistance and assert local governance. Judge John Fell, a respected Bergen County jurist, took a leading role in this effort, helping to establish and guide the Bergen County Committee of Safety. This body was tasked with coordinating patriot activity, enforcing boycotts of British goods, and monitoring Loyalist sympathies within the population. But the Committee's authority was far from universally accepted. A substantial portion of the county's residents viewed it as an illegitimate body that overstepped its bounds, and town meetings that had once been routine exercises in local governance became heated confrontations where the very definition of loyalty and liberty was contested.

The division was further complicated by the experiences of those who had no voice in the political debate yet whose lives were profoundly shaped by it. Enslaved individuals like Sam of Hackensack inhabited this fractured landscape with their own set of fears and calculations. For enslaved people, the rhetoric of liberty that echoed through patriot speeches carried a bitter irony, and the upheaval of war created both dangers and desperate possibilities. Their presence in the historical record, though often reduced to fragments, reminds us that the Revolution's meaning was never singular — it was experienced differently depending on where one stood in the social order.

Bergen County's fracture mattered far beyond its own borders. It illustrated a reality that the broader narrative of the Revolution sometimes obscures: that independence was not a foregone conclusion embraced by a united populace but a contested, painful process that divided communities from within. The split in Bergen County foreshadowed the brutal guerrilla warfare that would consume the region throughout the war, as Loyalist and patriot militias raided each other's farms, seized property, and turned the county into one of the most bitterly contested landscapes of the entire conflict. Understanding what happened in Hackensack helps us see the Revolution not as a simple story of colonial unity against British oppression but as a civil war within communities, where the costs of choosing a side — or trying not to — were deeply and personally felt.