Excerpt from The Biographical Encyclopedia of New Jersey of the Nineteenth Century

Planted the colony of New Jersey. I am sure we know more of the lawyers and judges of England prior to the American Revolution than we do of those of our own State. We are much more familiar with the personages who graced the Court of Queen Anne, than with those who flourished here at the same time under the rule of her kinsman, Lord Cornbury. And he continues: I have been astonished, too, to find how few of the names of distinguished Jerseymen are to be met with in the American biographical dictionaries. While they abound with ample not-ices of second and third-rate men of other sections of the country, those who have been truly eminent among us seldom find a place in them. The truth is, our biographical dictionaries have, for the most part, been written by New England men, and, as it would seem, for New England. We ought to have a biographical dictionary of our own, and it may be worthy of consideration, whether a work of this description should not be undertaken under the auspices of our Historical Society. All this, so true in 1849, has gained added import in the quarter of a century and more that has since then elapsed. Eminent men then living are now dead, and the records of their honorable and useful lives, then bright, are now dim or forgotten. And with such forgetfulness a just appreciation of the events in which they were leaders, the history which they helped to form, is impossible. We see only one side; we have the facts, but not the motives. The private lives of statesmen constitute a potent factor in the moulding of States. Much of the history of the past is sealed to us because we have no contemporaneous biographical history to give us the needed comprehension of its inner workings. The lacking quantity that Mr. Field so earnestly deprecates, this work is in a measure designed to present. That it is as complete and satisfactory as it should be, the publisher does not claim. He simply offers it as an earnest effort to bring a valuable contribution to the history of a State, full, both in its past and present, of material for the historian. May, 1877.

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