Little of the formal structure of social authority was carried over into the New World. While the plan of East Jersey's Scottish proprietors called for a society based upon large estates farmed by tenants and servants, the East Jersey social order quickly deviated from the proprietary model. In part this was because of the large quantity of available land uninhabited by other Europeans; in part it was required by the process of colonization. To attract settlers to the New World, the proprietors promised all settlers the prospect of landownership after a term of years. When the terms of service of the first settlers expired, some acquired land, and the level of economic dependency in the society declined. While the formal structure of authority in the New World changed rapidly changes in the realm of social attitudes progressed much more slowly. Thus, while every settler was entitled to a free allotment of 30 acres of land, only about one-fourth of the adult male servants ever took up these lands (MS, "New Jersey Deeds," New Jersey State Library). Some of the others left the province, but many sold their rights to the land and remained in the colony, working on the estates or farms of other colonists. As in Scotland, the rate of geographic mobility was very high, as East Jersey Scots moved frequently from hamlet to hamlet. Scottish settlers never adopted an ideology of attachment to particular farms and particular pieces of land as did their English neighbors in the colony, and few farms remained for very long in one family line (MS, "New Jersey Wills," New Jersey State Library). The influence of persisting Scottish social attitudes was augmented by the cultural environment of the New World. Scottish settlers to East Jersey arrived in a colony already inhabited by English settlers, and within this environment traditional hostilities quickly surfaced, resulting in a few instances of riots. Faced with such conflicts Scottish settlers from all regional backgrounds quickly formed unified ethnic settlements and isolated themselves from the larger English communities among which their settlements were interspersed. The religious situation that developed in East Jersey demonstrates the importance that ethnic identity had acquired in the mixed cultural environment. Historically, Presbyterianism, the national church of Scotland, had been strongest wherever cultural conflict was the greatest: in the Border regions, for example, where hostilities between England and Scotland had become a part of regional folklore. In the Borders, the national church was dominant everywhere, and the rhetoric of Presbyterianism was anti-English in tone. In the Northeast, where conflict with the English was less frequent, Presbyterianism had never been strong, and a variety of English religions flourished, including Episcopalianism, Congregationalism, and Quakerism. The New World cultural environment more closely resembled that of the Borders. as English and Scottish colonists lived in close proximity. What became of East Jersey's Scottish Quak...
