Somerset, New Jersey: Fill & Download for Free

Were actually working on this project here in Somerset, New Jersey.Check out our progress at Self Driving Vehicle

I haven't lived in Somerset since 1978, but some things don't change. The Somerset Diner on Easton Avenue across from the JFK Blvd intersection was open late back then, and it's still open late (24x7, actually) now.

New Jersey is north of the Mason-Dixon line, so it’s basically always been considered a northern state. It also supported the Union during the Civil War.That said, the argument could be made that New Jersey, despite its geographical location, was politically more akin to border states like Delaware and Maryland than to states like Pennsylvania, especially since it had only outlawed slavery by the 1840s. It generally leaned Democratic, and had strong economic ties to the South.There was a bit of pause when the first waves of secession occurred. New Jersey was an agricultural state, sure, but it also had important industrial centers and did rely on trade of those manufactured products for its livelihood. It had close economic ties with the South, importing cotton and exporting manufactured goods.In the antebellum system of protective tariffs, New Jersey did quite well with this, since the South was encouraged to buy up domestic manufactures. When secession occurred, there was a bit of a debate as to whether it would be smarter to align its destiny with its economic lifeline—the South—rather than risk being shut off from those markets by a potential Confederate victory.As to geographic divisions in New Jersey, the more industrialized North tended to lean Democratic, while the more rural South tended to lean Republican.Prior to the 1860 election, New Jersey had three Republicans and two Democrats elected to the House of Representatives.Republicans had NJ-1 (Atlantic, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Salem counties), NJ-2 (Burlington, Mercer, Monmouth, and Ocean), and NJ-5 (Essex, Hudson, and Union counties).Democrats had NJ-3 (Hunterdon, Middlesex, Somerset, and Warren), and NJ-4 (Bergen, Morris, Passaic, and Sussex).I’ve made a brief mockup of the pre-1860 district map:This was the shift in 1860:So the Newark area went Democrat.I should note that all of the Democrats elected to the U.S. House in 1860 were specifically Anti-Lecompton Democrats—members of Stephen Douglas’s faction of the Democratic party that opposed the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution in Kansas. Though the Lecompton Constitution was defeated in 1858 in Congress, Anti-Lecomtpon Democrats still remained as a term for pro-Douglas Democrats that tended to support popular sovereignty and weren’t opposed to slavery per se, but rejected the notion of a federal slave code.So there was a fairly strong North-South divide within New Jersey between Democrats and Republicans, with Republicans dominating the more agrarian South and Democrats being more popular in the somewhat more urbanized, industrial North which was closer to (similarly Democratic) New York City.