Talk:List of governors of New Jersey

Acting Governors

I noticed that User:ZackDude added John Bennett and Richard Codey as "Acting Governors." I don't believe listing every acting Governor would be wise or informative. For example - if Governor McGreevey went to New York for a turkey sandwich, Senate President Richard Codey would again become Acting Governor until Jim McGreevey got back from lunch. If in fact any Governor under the 1947 constitution left the state, even briefly, there would be a de jure Acting Governor, and the list of people who were chronologically Governor and Acting Governor would be long, burdensome and uninformative. I propose to use the same standards for Acting Governors as are used for Regents: "It should be noted that those who held a regency briefly, for example during surgery, are not necessarily listed, particularly if they performed no official acts; this list is also not complete." Thus, DiFrancesco is notable and list-worthy, wheras Bennett and Codey will probably be forgotten as Acting Governors during their brief tenures so far. --Hcheney 04:31, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC) in User talk:ZackDude

It's true that John Bennett and Richard Codey were acting governors for a few days (72 hours for bennett) before mcgreevey was sworn in... however i do believe this is important and bennett did accomplish things in those 72 hours such as i believe he made a state of the state address and they both were individually sworn in formally... while they may not count to people as actual governors of new jersey i still think it's important for people to know this information. If you want you can put a note of some kind saying they were only governors for a short time or put them on a different type of list. (User:ZackDude 05:24, 10 Feb 2004 in User talk:Hcheney)

I believe former Assembly Speaker Jack Collins (R-Salem) was acting governor when DiFrancesco and Whitman went together to the National Governors Association. I'm going to do some more research to find out exactly how many acting governors there were under the 1947 consitution. If we do not set an exclusionary bar for listing acting governors, then all acting governors should be listed. --Hcheney 21:53, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I'm gonna have to disagree nine months later. Y'see, Bennett and Codey were acting governors because there was no governor. Whitman had left and the new Senate was split, so there were 2 Senate Presidents, and 2 co-acting governors. They agreed to split the job for 3 days each. As opposed to your Jack Collins example, this was not just a technicality. Certainly you'll agree that Codey's current tenure "counts". Jonpin 16:38, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

So is the current acting governor still a member of the state Senate or doese he resign from that ???????? NJ needs a LT gov or something

Yes (still President of the Senate), no (doesn't have to resign), and ABSOLUTELY (NJ needs a lieutenant governor). Jonpin 16:38, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

Not only does he not have to resign, if he resigns as Senate President (or whatever position his elected position is) he would no longer be acting governor. In the November 2005 Elections, the Constitutional amendment creating a position of Lieutenant Governor was approved. The first LG will be elected in 2009. Additionaly (either as a result of the constitutional amendment or a nother piece of legislation passed), if the position of governor becomes vacant before the first LG is elected, the succession rules would take effect; however, the person who would previously have become Acting Governor, would now resign his previous position and become Governor. Had this been the case 4 years ago. DiFrancesco would have become Governor after Whitman's resignation and would have served until McGreevey became governor (i.e. Codey and Bennett would not have split the interim week as Acting Governor). The new Governor's Senate or Assembly seat would become vacant and either legislative body would have to elect a new leader. New Jersey's present system (along with those states that elect a Governor and LG on seperate ballots) allows for the successor to be of a different party than the Governor that resigned. I'm not sure if in 2009 the Governor and LG in NJ will be elected on the same or seperate tickets.Aronk 22:33, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Andrew Hamilton

Hi, I haven't changed the article because you may have a better source than me but my understanding was that in 1702 Andrew Hamilton, Governor of East Jersey, was re-appointed by Parliament as Governor of NJ after it became a Royal Colony. You show a new Governor of NJ from 1703, this may be right I don't know the dates but it might be worth checking if Andrew hamilton served during 1703. AllanHainey 13:40, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

No, Andrew Hamilton (New Jersey) was reappointed in 1699. In fact, he died on April 20, 1703. See [1]. AndyZ 23:59, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Acting Governor is no more

See this article from the Star-Ledger newspaper http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1136871415215330.xml&coll=1 which reports that the Acting Governor moniker has been phased out and that Richard Codey is/was the Governor of New Jersey not Acting Governor

How should we deal with this?? Pretend that Codey's (for his current time as Governor) and DiFrancesco's title has always been "Governor" with the footnote (as I did as an initial revision) or some other idea? Any thoughts? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.218.29.233 (talk • contribs) .

Numbering of governors

Should the first line in this article be removed or edited to reflec that DiFrancesco and Codey (second time) are now numbered Governors?

does "Governor' need to be listed for each Governor

We all know that NJ is a strange state, but do we have to list in the last column "Governor" for each governor. Can't we just list notes, if they are necessary?Aronk 18:00, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

bios of old guvs

I want people to be aware of this extremely informative book:

New Jersey Historical Commission. The Governors of New Jersey 1664-1974: Biographical Essays. Trenton, NJ, The Commission, 1982. Paul A. Stellhorn and Michael J. Birkner, Editors.

It's located at this link. I'll be adding stubs for missing guvs based on the info in it when I have time, and I invite others to do the same while we're working on this article. Crzrussian 15:50, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I added it onto Template:NJCOTW. Since this week this article is the current New Jersey collaborative effort of the week, hopefully we can take care of all of the non-existant articles on this article. AndyZ 00:52, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

New Jersey Opposition Party

For a short time, the American Party (part of the Know-Nothing nativist movement) and the Republicans, joined forced to defeat the Dems, and called themselves "New Jersey Opposition". Was this an actual party? If so, should Newell's party designation be listed as such? Please see http://www.njstatelib.org/NJ_Information/Digital_Collections/Governors_of_New_Jersey/GNEWE.pdf for a more full description. After looking at the bio of his successor, Charles S. Olden at http://www.njstatelib.org/NJ_Information/Digital_Collections/Governors_of_New_Jersey/GOLDE.pdf, it appears that they indeed called themselves that, and we should reflect it on the list. Anyone object? -- Sholom 04:12, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Richard Ingoldesby

Now that WP:NJCOTW is drawing to a close, it seems as if many governor articles have been created. In fact, Richard Ingoldesby is the last one of today's did you knows. AndyZ 00:00, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Retroactivity

As per the new law, Codey and DiFransesco are now "Governors" and not just "Acting Governors", does this apply beyond the 1947 constitution to the several "Acting Governors" under the 1844 one? 68.39.174.238 12:14, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

The law is retroactive to January 1, 2001, only. Noted in the lead. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 06:31, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

sexual harassment?

Isn't it a bit misleading to describe McGreevey's resignation as due to a "sexual harassment incident"? john k 06:15, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Golbez's changes

Whoa. I've been working on this article for a while now, and was planning on closing its peer review and taking it to WP:FLC today, but instead I arrived here to find the article completely transformed by Golbez (talk · contribs), without discussion, from this (which I thought was looking pretty good) to this. Now, while these changes aren't necessarily bad, I'm not thrilled with seeing all the work I've done completely changed in a few hours without any prior discussion.

Some changes pop out right away as questionable.

• Why was the lead rewritten so it violates the WP:BOLDTITLE guideline again, even though fixing that was an improvement explicitly made at the peer review?
• Why remove the wikitable that was at the top of the page, ranking political parties by number of governors?
• Why is the image of Jon Corzine duplicated next to the lead now?
• Why remove the images of Aaron Ogden, A. Harry Moore, and Thomas Kean without explanation?
• Why completely change the footnote system previously in use (a, b, c, d) in favor of a different one (N1, N2, N3, N4) – and without removing all the letters?
• Why condense the actual list of governors into one list instead of the previous three separate lists for governors under each constitution?
• Why remove George B. McClellan from the table of governors who've held other high offices? Why isn't being the Democratic Party's presidential nominee notable enough for a mention?
• Why are acting governors and unelected governors no longer denoted as such?

I'd like to change at least some things back, but I'd appreciate an explanation for the aforementioned changes. Thanks in advance. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 03:58, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

• I did the peer review and was also startled to see these changes. Would User:Golbez kindly revert them and discuss here first with the main contributor, User:A Stop at Willoughby and any others who might be interested? It's important to reach consensus before making sweeping changes such as these. Finetooth (talk) 04:25, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

I brought the article up to the existing FL standard. You did do good work on it, and I kept a lot of it, just moved it around, and cleaned up the tables vastly (huge swathes of color have been out of vogue for a while) and revamped the footnotes, adding tons where none existed previously.

In order:

• BOLDTITLE states, "Sometimes, information about the article format is given in the page title. For example, “List of …” or “Comparison of …”. In such cases, only the subject itself should be boldface." This article fits that.
• Some time ago, I realized that the table gave undue weight. It could list 10 governors of one party who served a year each, and one governor of another who was re-elected ten times. I'm not sure it communicates any extra information to the reader to do a simple count of number of governors per party. If there's any interesting trends in party movements, they can be noted in the text. FLC has, so far, agreed.
• Whoops, I meant to move it, not copy it. (I really meant to add Christie's image there, but the only image we have of him isn't great, so I decided to go with the incumbent for as long as we can)
• There were too many images on the right. They were intruding well below the main table. We don't have an image for every governor (if we did, they'd be in the table), so we put a few on the right to illustrate the more well-known governors, plus ones in between to just fill in the gaps to make it fit the page. The page was full with this many (There's now a temporary gap which Corzine will fill in about a week) I have no problem with trying to add more, but it was a matter of making the image column fit the page, and omitting the governors that I could get away with omitting.
• Because it's better. The ref system is vastly superior to the old ref/note system. I know the hell it is to keep refs and notes managed, and the new system makes it so much easier. As for not removing the letters, an oversight on my part. They're gone now.
• Because there's no point in having three lists. It is one office, having a different constitution doesn't require a new table. It is easily handled with a footnote, as it is in the other FLs in this topic. The only current exceptions I'm aware of are territorial governors (which makes sense), and the President of Pennsylvania, which is presently in a separate table I believe because terms were kind of fluid, and there were no parties.
• McClellan didn't serve in a higher office. I've kept those tables to just congress, cabinet, executive, and ambassadorships. WP:OWN, maybe, but no one's really complained til now. :) None of the other lists thus far have included major party nominees; should this standard change, I'd be welcome to go along with it, but I don't know if it's really been brought up, and as it is I'd prefer they be omitted. A party can pick anyone, but winning is something else.
• They are dashed, indicating they are not numbered; the footnote explains for each one that they were an acting governor. The unelected governors are numbered because, well, they are now, as of 2006, and the footnote expands on that.

Having justified the specified changes, which changes would you want to revert? --Golbez (talk) 04:35, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

My point is that Wikipedia generally proceeds by discussion leading to consensus. When you make sweeping changes to any article that others have worked hard on, you are dismissing their work and their views as unimportant or, at least, not as important as your views. If your views are indeed correct, by making sweeping changes you also miss an opportunity to teach. In addition, it is not clear to me that you are right on every point listed above. For example, the MOS:BOLDTITLE problem reappeared when you linked Governor of New Jersey; it's not that Governor of New Jersey should not be linked; it's that it should not be double-bolded. Since that change, someone has fixed it again so that it is not double-bolded. We get the best results by pooling our abilities and cooperating; every editor needs an editor. Finetooth (talk) 05:17, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

I tend to teach by doing. In retrospect, perhaps I should have explained everything I was doing on the PR before I did it, but I had a few free hours and decided to go ahead and do it, rather than wait. I could do it faster and better than he could, because I've done it a half dozen times before. (PS: if my half dozen/dozen discrepancy is confusing, I've made about a dozen featured governor lists, but many are older; only about a half dozen, from Alabama to Delaware, are up to the current standard. Pennsylvania and New York are notably aged) Apart from the boldtitle aspect, am I wrong in any other point listed above? Oh, and as for "generally proceeds by discussion leading to consensus," Wikipedia also proceeds by being bold. Finally, "We get the best results by pooling our abilities and cooperating; every editor needs an editor." -- this is true, but on the other hand, why does that mean that I must defer to Willoughby on this? Does not he need an editor as well? --Golbez (talk) 05:31, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

From your peer review: "I wouldn't imitate them slavishly because if you look closely you'll probably find things that could be improved, but they are valuable models nonetheless." The article, as it was, barely resembled those. It had the deprecated party table, garish coloring, inadequate footnotes, deficient sourcing, and a poor layout. None of these are Willoughby's fault. They existed before he came along. He polished it, but I pushed it over the next hurdle. It needed to be revamped to quality standards, and I know those standards inside and out. I am always open to new ideas; the "Terms" column was once new and I hated it, but after a few days I realized it was a good thing. Same deal with the smaller colors, I don't exactly recall if that was my idea or something I saw, but it certainly was a change to the original template. Could you please elaborate on what think would improve it? Peer review this version, perhaps, or the Alabama list, which is what I consider the best of them. --Golbez (talk) 05:46, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Golbez, I respect your judgment about and expertise with the governors' lists. My intuition tells me that most of your changes are apt to be improvements. I'll look at them more closely later today because I'd like to learn more about featured lists; I've been the main contributor to several featured articles but no featured lists. Editors often ask for peer reviews of lists, and while I'm willing to do what I can, I'm not as sure about FLC as I am about FAC. The big cross-over is probably the Manual of Style, which I know pretty well, but it doesn't help much with table layout or list standards. We could, by the way, use your help at PR, if you've ever got the time and inclination to review. Finetooth (talk) 18:32, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

<outdent>List of Governors of Alabama is excellent and looks like a good model for similar articles. Here are my further thoughts on the recent changes to the New Jersey governors' list.

• The title bolding and linking is complicated by the need to bold the main words of the title and the desire to link to an essential related article. I can't think of a solution that isn't awkward in some way. This might work: "The Governor of New Jersey is the head of the executive branch of New Jersey's government and the commander-in-chief of the state's military forces. The Governor of New Jersey has a duty to enforce state laws... ".
• The "undue weight" argument about the table of governors by party sounds logical except that I doubt that in real life the "time-in-office" total would be proportionally much different from the "number-of-governors" total. If it is significantly different in some states, that would be interesting and worth mentioning. Would it be helpful to add how many years (through 2010) each party has held the governor's office in New Jersey? I agree with you that it would be better to present this information as text rather than in a separate table. The statistics could be added to the last sentence of the lead.
  • I just think it vastly overweights the importance of party. It doesn't really confer that much information to tell someone that there have been 25 Democrats elected, 15 Republicans elected, etc. when that's just a simple synthesis from the main table. As for the number of years served, again, I think that's giving too much importance to the party. Also, there's the matter of figuring out if we count repeat terms, multiple terms, acting governors, etc... it just doesn't add anything substantive to the article, in my opinion. If you really need to know how many Ds or Rs there are, it's a simple count; if you want to know more about the party history of the office, then that should be handled in prose, because it can't be handled in a simple table. --Golbez (talk) 22:48, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
• I agree that the images on the right should not overlap two tables. The current version looks fine to me, and there appears to be room for a few more mug shots if needed.
• As I mentioned to Willoughby in the peer review, I'm only vaguely familiar with some of the notes-and-references systems I see in articles. I don't think I've ever objected to any system, per se, as long as it did the job, followed Manual of Style guidelines, and was internally consistent. Your system satisfies all of these criteria. I thought Willoughby's did too, and I don't know which, if either, is better. In what way(s) does your system make it easier to maintain the refs?
  • Because it uses <ref, which is vastly simpler to use than {ref. {ref should be completely phased out, in my opinion, I can't picture it having a use now that we have <ref. Also, it makes it much easier to nest references; I don't do that in this article yet, I haven't gathered all of the references yet. --Golbez (talk) 22:48, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
• I agree that a single table of governors is better than three.
• I agree that being nominated for president is not the same as winning a high office. McClellan's nomination might be worth mentioning in a footnote.
  • A good compromise would be to include him in the portrait gallery; he certainly is well-known enough. --Golbez (talk) 22:48, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
• I agree that your number-and-dash system is an improvement.
• I agree wholeheartedly that the new color scheme is superior.

Sorry if I sounded a bit huffy yesterday. It was late in the evening of a long day. Do you think the article is now ready for FLC? Should Willoughby close the PR and nominate the list? Finetooth (talk) 22:06, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Sorry I was huffy too. It's just that when I know I've done something right and someone tells me to revert it out of courtesy, it rang a bit wrong. No, it's not ready for FLC yet; all of the footnotes remain to be sourced, and I need to do a few more passes of fact verification for start/end dates and the like. And also it has that table at the top. :) --Golbez (talk) 22:48, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

I also apologize for possibly coming across as less than cordial. I just found it kind of jarring to see the article completely changed so suddenly. Response to content issues below. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 01:29, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I've examined all the issues more closely and looked at Golbez's most recent changes.

• You know, I think the bold isn't necessary at all. The current version is acceptable; as Finetooth wrote above, the other possible solutions simply look awkward.
• I disagree that it's giving the issue undue weight, but I will eliminate the table and replace it with prose.
• Ah. No problem.
• Yes, but a few of the images can be restored for sure given the space remaining. I'm not sure why Golbez chose to remove the images that he did, but a couple of them I would like returned.
  • When doing this, my general plan has been to 1) First, find out which governors have pictures. Of those, 2) Pick the most famous ones. Where there are gaps, 3) Pick one for each 'ten' of governors. i.e. one from the 1-10, one from 11-20, etc. So the ones I trimmed were ones that were too close together, like 33rd and 34th or whatever. It's purely arbitrary. :) When picking which of a group to drop, I kept the more photogenic one. --Golbez (talk) 01:53, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
• I'm okay with the new notes system. Thanks for removing the useless letters.
• Fair enough, although I found the existence of three separate tables useful. One note is that term lengths and term limits changed after each new constitution.
• I understand your logic in removing McClellan from the "other high offices" table, but I feel strongly that it deserves mention in the article, and not solely as a footnote. Perhaps the image caption compromise is a good idea.
• Fair enough; the numbers-and-dashes system is acceptable.

I'll get to work on it right now. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 01:29, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

A few more issues

Well, I made several changes and I think the article looks pretty decent right now. A couple of issues I noticed this go 'round:

• It looks like there are some notes in the "references" section. Was this intentional or accidental? If it was accidental, I'll go ahead a fix them.
  • The notes and references were entirely a work in progress; as I said, the heavy lifting was done, but those require a much finer hand. --Golbez (talk) 06:28, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
    • Noted. Thanks for fixing it. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 17:58, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
• I'm really not happy with a the "Terms" column added to the main list table. Because of the radical differences in term lengths between William Livingston's day and Jon Corzine's, I think this statistic kind of misrepresents the situation. Readers are likely to see these misleading numbers than they are to figure out the number of years served in their heads. Maybe this should be changed to "years in office"? I know the Alabama article does it differently, but that one doesn't deal with numbers like nine-and-a-half. Speaking of which, I think all the fractions in the column don't look good either.
  • I didn't like it at first in the others, but I think it's turned out to be useful for two reasons: One, it gives a central location for all footnotes, so you don't have to scan the entire line for them; and two, it does indicate quickly that, when a governor was there for 12 years, he was elected 12 times or three times. Years in office wouldn't really add anything; it would simply synthesize something the reader could come up with by doing simple math. The fractions are intended simply to indicate when a term was shared between governors, something else that a mere counting of years wouldn't easily do. They can get complex, but so far they've done well (Arkansas was the worst, where a replacement was elected then quit (so he served two half-terms). So do I do 1 1/2, 1/2, 1 1/2? No, that doesn't add up. The final solution was to 'add' them, so it was 1+1/2 for the first guy, then 1/2+1/2 for the middle guy, and 1/2+1 for the last guy.)
  • An alternate solution is something that I've seen on the List of Presidents of the United States, where there's a term column that lists each distinct term, and thus presidents can be in multiple terms, or multiple presidents in a term. However, that removes the column's value as a footnote repository, and it can make things a little more difficult to do. I might experiment with it someday, but this is the best we have at the moment. --Golbez (talk) 06:28, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
    • Agreed. I still don't like it, but this is the better solution at this point. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 17:58, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
• I would also question the necessity of having "none" in the lt. gov. column for every single governor up until Christie. Seems excessive.
  • Yeah, that concerned me as well. The model for that was, again, Alabama, but it makes more sense there since the Lt. Gov position was in and out the whole time. There's two options. If we keep it like this, the table could be made sortable; if we make it so that it's a giant rowspan, then it looks far nicer but the table ceases to be sortable. Personally, I don't see the hype in being able to sort a table like this; apart from alphabetical or sorting all of the members of one party together, you gain nothing, so I'd be willing to try out the rowspan. --Golbez (talk) 06:28, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
    • I very much like your rowspan solution. Good work. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 17:58, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Thoughts? A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 03:17, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to disappear from the conversation since I think my job as peer-reviewer is done. Before I go, I have to raise one more quibble. If you keep the fractions, they should all be in the same font size; some are big like 1/5, whereas others are small like ½." Please ping me on my talk page if anything else comes up that I can help with. Also, please let me know when this goes to FLC. Finetooth (talk) 04:39, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, sadly that is something I haven't had to deal with yet. New Jersey, in its wisdom, decided to have an unprecedented (at least in my work here) five governors share one term, and sadly, ASCII fractions only go up to 1/4. I'd like to keep it the way it is for now while we try to figure out if that whole section can be presented easier. --Golbez (talk) 06:28, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Dickerson

There appears to be a gap between when William Pennington resigned to take the federal judgeship (June 19, 1815) and when Mahlon Dickerson was elected governor (October 26, 1815). No source I've found so far mentions any vice-president who was in charge for those four months. Any ideas? --Golbez (talk) 16:39, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

OK, googling around I've found a William Kennedy who acted as governor during that time. --Golbez (talk) 16:41, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Good catch. I created an article on him, so William Kennedy (New Jersey) is now a blue link. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 18:35, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

I found who filled the gap between Mahlon Dickerson and Isaac Williamson: [2] Jesse Upson was vice president of the legislative council at that time; he must have been acting governor. However, I can only find one source on the web that explicitly states this, [3], and that's not exactly a great source. So I'm not sure what to do here; at the very least, he deserves a footnote, but otherwise I'm not sure - I'm wary to declare him a governor without an actual source explicitly saying so, like we have for Kennedy. I also found a list of 'acting' governors (i.e. when the governor was out of state); I'll see if I can work these into footnotes. They obviously don't warrant full listings. --Golbez (talk) 01:18, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps he deserves a footnote, but only if it can be verified in a reliable source that he acted as governor. Unlike the gap during which Kennedy acted as governor, this gap was only five days in length, so the identity of the man acting as governor during that time is not particularly crucial. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 01:53, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

True, but still deserving of mention. After all, we mention the guy who was governor for 90 minutes. :) --Golbez (talk) 03:21, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Touché. No luck on my end, either, finding anything about Upson. I suppose the present form of the footnote is the best we can get. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 04:41, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Almost ready

I think it's almost ready, I cleaned up the refs today and noticed someone had added party numbers to the legend on the WV list, which is a genius move that lets us keep the number of governors per party, without dedicating a table to it. It also makes the legend look nicer. There's one major thing that needs doing: An article on William Kennedy. It's a blacklink right now because there's a half dozen William Kennedys, none of which are the one we need, so I opted not to link it right now. Does anyone want to write an article on him? A stub would be fine. --Golbez (talk) 21:59, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

There's also the matter of Isaac Halstead Williamson's party; he can't be a Democrat the whole time, it wasn't founded til 1824. The NJlib biography says he was initially a Federalist, but switched to Dem-Rep before becoming governor. But the Dem-Rep party also died out during his term, so the question is, when was he what? --Golbez (talk) 08:27, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

I've done some research and done the best I can with that one. --Golbez (talk) 08:47, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

As Golbez indicates, the NJlib biography article that's used as a major source for Williamson's separate biography article states that he was a Federalist up to the War of 1812, but he left that party over their war opposition and was elected to the General Assembly in 1815 as a Democratic-Republican. Up to the 1844 election, the General Assembly chose the Governor. The Democratic-Republican Party were the majority party in the General Assembly from the War of 1812 through the 1824 election, and they would have selected a member from their own majority to replace Dickerson as Governor. After the 1824 federal election, the Democratic-Republicans essentially split into two factions - those that supported Jackson became Jacksonian Democrats (the forerunner of the Democratic Party) and those that supported John Quincy Adams became National Republicans (or Anti-Jacksonians) and later formed the nucleus of the Whig Party. The NJlib biography specifies that Williamson supported John Quincy Adams in the 1824 and 1828 elections. The National Republican Party controlled the General Assembly in the late 1820's and they would have probably replaced Williamson with someone else in their majority if he wasn't a member of their faction or didn't support their agenda. After he was replaced as Governor in 1829 when the Jacksonian Democrats gained control of the General Assembly, the NJlib biography indicates that by 1833 he was a member of the Whig Party. Thus, instead of Williamson being listed as a "Federalist" during his entire term as Governor, he should be listed as a Democratic-Republican through at least 1824, and then he could be listed as a National Republican through the end of his term, or he could still be listed as one of the last remaining ambiguous Democratic-Republicans that remained in office during this period of party realignment. If there aren't any evidence based objections, this party affiliation change should be made to this list. For what it's worth, the Political Party Strength in New Jersey article lists Williamson as a Democrat during his entire term, which also should be slightly revised to reflect the correct party affiliations of the period.Deanbrook (talk) 03:12, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Final party issue: The first three "Federalist" governors predate the Federalist Party, founded in 1792. Now, they were obviously of the pro-admin faction, but I can't find a specific source saying so. I'm willing to just throw it up as a valid assumption. On the other hand, pro-admin was not a party, just a faction, so perhaps it's more kosher to say "no parties". --Golbez (talk) 09:28, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

The proper term would be Independent :)XavierGreen (talk) 17:45, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

You can't be independent of parties when no parties exist. =p --Golbez (talk) 18:03, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Wouldnt everyone be independent then?XavierGreen (talk) 20:07, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Independent of what? If you asked someone before parties if they were independent, would they know what that meant? =p There were still factions, pro-admin and anti-admin, and people back then are typically labeled one of those... but on the Delaware list, we say 'no parties'. Hm. --Golbez (talk) 21:40, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Well, we (Wikipedia) refer to George Washington as independent even though he definitely sympathized with the Federalist faction. But in this case, I guess sticking with "Federalist" is sufficient. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 18:39, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Footnotes with missing hyperlinks

Some footnotes are missing hyperlinks and even make unclear which source they are referring to, e.g. Lundy et al., Report p. 124. Could anyone please format them properly? --Синкретик (talk) 11:43, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Those refer to the 'general' sources above them. So in that case, "Report p. 124" refers to Report of the Adjutant-General of the State of New Jersey for the year ending October 31st, 1906. "Lundy et. al. (1921)" refers to the link by Lundy et. al. dating from 1921. Perhaps "General" should be renamed "Bibliography" but that's what's happening there. --Golbez (talk) 14:11, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

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