Thanks Gareth,
I was able to get this working and it was a stupid issue on my end - Folder/file permissions!
I had copied and tried to mimic the way Essential includes the individual jquery files. I didn't catch it right away but the jquery folder and files didn't allow access to anyone but my account on Ubuntu.
Now that I fixed the file permissions things are working as expected. Thanks for you help in guiding the proper inclusion of the files.