So what do you, the reader, know about Pennsylvania/Philadelphia’colonial political/economic development?
Well it was a colony (actually Province in the British lexicon) created by William Penn, who was a Quaker and the province was settled by Quakers, you answer.
When? Way Back, It doesn’t really matter it was before I was born, you reply.
The more precise answer was Penn himself arrived in PA in 1682. In 1682 La Salle sailed down the mighty Mississippi River and claimed land that constituted much of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase for France, Peter the Great became Czar, and Louis XIV moved to his new palace in Versailles in the midst of his chronic series of wars that ruined post-Thirty Years War Europe. In England Charles II the Restoration King roled; he would die in three years, his brother, James II four years after got kicked out in the Glorious Revolution, and the better part of a decade following engaged in using Scotland to reclaim his throne–unsuccessfully (the Battle of the Boyne and all that) and so Louis XIV would find him a place to stay in France. The point is this is a very turbulent period in British (and European) political life. It would, however, conclude in the Act of Union in 1707, that established the foundation of modern Britain.
Penn was thirty-six in 1682, and if memory serves, 1682 is seventy-five years after the founding of Jamestown, Virginia and fifty-three years after Boston’s. Penn arrives in America after Virginia’s Governor Berkeley, the creator of Virginia’s political culture, had been kicked out–in large measure because of how he handled Virginia elites and Bacon’s Rebellion. Virginia had already established its agriculture export tobacco plantation/no wage workforce economic base; and Berkeley institutionalized control over that economic base in the hands of a Royalist-infused political elite. In other words, the essentials of what most of us associate with Early Republic Virginia through to the Civil War in 1861 was already in place by the time William Penn arrived in Pennsylvania. Does the phrase “late start” come to mind?
So the time frame of VA and PA settlement is significantly different, but let’s return to William Penn and the Quaker “thing”. Other than his being a Quaker few readers are likely to know much more about Penn, the founder of today’s commonwealth of Pennsylvania (yes, Virginia is a commonwealth too). We all know Quakers are pacifist, dress simply and plainly, and “free thinkers”–whatever that means. Even that simple introduction alerts the reader these Quakers are likely to be very different from Virginia’s manor-bred and born, well and richly dressed, Royalist aristocratic elites, and accordingly Quakers don’t seem likely to be attracted to Virginia’s Tidewater political culture. Wittingly or unwittingly–the former is more correct–they are going to develop their own. Later on in the chapter we will call it the Midlands culture (stolen as before from Woodard’s American Nations). As to a tobacco plantation economic base, we shall soon discover that Pennsylvania geography and climate had much to say and PA had to develop its own economic base to reflect PA realities.
In two paragraphs the reader is reintroduced to the Starting Question of this book: Why are states and cities so different–and our rejoinder or answer “they were always different from the start”–seems somewhat familiar. Taking our As the Twig is Bent metaphor one more step, we can see Virginia was a cypress tree and Pennsylvania was, and is, an Eastern Hemlock. While some may see this a bit silly, both cypress and hemlocks are trees (i.e. an American state), but there is no mistaking a cypress tree with a hemlock tree once you know the difference between them. By the end of this chapter, I am sure the reader will not mistake Pennsylvania for Virginia. By the 1720;s Pennsylvania will have established its first policy system, infused its Midland political culture in its key policy decision-making structures and institutions, and the relationship of ethnic/economic groups will be in place. By the way, the role of today’s American federal government, will be played by by the British King and Parliament, who as one might suspect often read from two different scripts three thousand ocean miles away.
The nature and configuration of its economic base, and the reasons for it, will be firmly in place also. By the way, seventeen year old Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia from Boston on Sunday, October 6, 1723. Philadelphia by 1730 was America’s second largest urban center (including its two “suburbs”)–Boston was the largest with 13,000 and New York and Philly were neck and neck in second and third place. Virginia, of course had no urban center that exceeded 2,500 by 1775. By 1775, the end of the period under discussion in this module, Philadelphia was America’s largest city–about 40,000. It was the capital city of the Articles of Confederation, and the birthplace of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. Virginia, however, was the state with the nation’s largest population if that makes any sense to the reader; rural and agriculture were still dominant at the time of the American Revolution–and would remain so until 1920 (that’s not a typo). Philadelphia, not Boston or New York City, was the capital of British North America.
In short, whatever it was Penn set up in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, late start and all, it worked very well indeed.
The principal task in this module is to describe the settlement of Pennsylvania/Philadelphia, explain who William Penn was and why he is the Governor Berkeley (or John Winthrop) of Pennsylvania, and how he and his Quaker co-patriots infused the policy system he established (he died in 1718) with his Quaker values and real estate/entrepreneurist privatist foundations. In so doing, from time to time we will hint at why all this is relevant today–and how it will contrast with, not Virginia, but with the guy dominant in the next chapter on Massachusetts–John Winthrop. In the following module, we will move on and describe his policy system based on counties and townships, and a relatively lazy provincial legislature. Government, as we shall discover, was not Pennsylvania’s middle name, i.e. Penn’s provincial legislature contrasted badly with Virginia’s House of Burgesses and Council of State. Both Virginia and Pennsylvania, as we shall later discover couldn’t compete with the Massachusetts provincial legislature–and how the fabled New England “town”, politically correct though it may be, was not all it is often cracked up to be in terms of policy-making.
The reader, I hope, is getting the picture that not only are the states different from the beginning, but getting the sense of how they are different–and why.
No Quakers in the Beginning–First the Swedes, Dutch and Native Americans
When Penn arrived in the Deleware Valley in 1682, what would become Penn’s Pennsylvania was already lightly settled–by Dutch and Swedes (who at that time included Finns). The latter initially settled at close on the Susquehanna close to its coastal mouth. The Dutch had, of course, founded New Netherlands in 1621 by the Dutch West India Company as its fur-trading headquarters. More interested in our present-day Hudson Valley (Henry Hudson had explored it for them in 1609, two years after the founding of Jamestown, Va, the West India Company was less interested in settlement than commerce and trading with the native Americans. In 1636 the former New Netherlands Governor-General, Peter Minuit, anxious to secure the colony’s southern market area for trade, reached a deal with the Queen of Sweden to settle the Susquehanna mouth with allies and the New Sweden Land Company mounted an expedition up the river in 1637 and purchased land from its Indian inhabitants, the Lenni Lenape Tribe (BTW, it was Minuit who purchased Manhattan for the proverbial $24 dollars). The New Sweden Company settled on the land, with forty fine folk, and founded a series of trading forts along the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers, anchored by the largest fort, Fort Christiana–today’s Wilmington Delaware.
The Dutch and Swede joint venture had much in common with the ethos that founded Jamestown, i.e. quick profits and opportunistic wealth. Its colonists, mostly opportunistic male traders amd fur-trappers, were instructed to plant tobacco, seek out wine-making opportunities, and above all, beaver pelts. Unlike the Jamestown English who wasted little opportunity to wage war against the Indians, the most beneficial legacy of the Dutch-Swede joint venture was likely its respectful, non-bellicose treatment of Indians and their leaders. Born more from Dutch/Swedish weakness, the European populations were never more than a handful until the Quakers arrived (in 1644, when only 143 European inhabitants were found in the Valley–by 1654, around 200[99] Susan Klepp, “Encounter and Experiment: the Colonial Period in Randall M. Miller & William Pencak (Eds), Pennsylvania: a History of the Commonwealth (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), p.53). New Netherlands would prosper only with the cooperation of the native tribes, and the latter’s willingness to negotiate.
From this motivation developed a distrustful, but sustainable profit-seeking relationship that established a long-term avoidance of war and outright conquest, and a sustained willingness form both sides to negotiate out their differences. Behind the scenes pressure from the Swedish Crown, who wanted to avoid expensive wars and threaten their Lutheran pieties, kept local negotiators more along the straight and narrow, than the uninvolved British Trade Council in London. I cannot stress too much this flexible, non-war relationship with the Native Americans created an almost existential difference between Jamestown and Virginia and European-Native Americans in middle-America Pennsylvania. Unlike the constant warfare with Indians that Virginia encountered right to the American Revolution, Pennsylvania did not create a local militia for defense until the American Revolution itself. While the relationship would become troubled when later Scots-irish moved west into Pennsylvania’s western counties, the Delaware and Susquehanna Valley enjoyed a complicated but peaceful co-existence with Native Americans. From such a peaceful neighborhood large-scale urbanization and sustained economic-base-building was possible.
Not interested in more than trade, land purchases for relatively small amounts of land, and honoring treaties pretty much created considerable Native American goodwill, but not trust. The Seneca chief Cornplanter recalled the land purchase period: “The great man wanted only a little, little land on which to raise greens for his soup, just as much as a bullock’s hide would cover. Here we first might have observed their deceitful spirit. The bullock’s hide was cut up into little strips, and did not cover, indeed but encircled a very large piece of land” . The Dutch Governor at that time wrote similarly that “the Lenape trust us in no wise, and we trust them still less” [99] Susan Klepp, “Encounter and Experiment: the Colonial Period in Randall M. Miller & William Pencak (Eds), Pennsylvania: a History of the Commonwealth (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), p. 50
If peace in the valley was the most notable contribution of the Dutch-Swede settlement, we might also note the importation of the Swede-Finn log cabin, the extermination of beavers to make beaver hats and by 1642 the “the Great Sickness” among the Lenape (dysentery and yellow fever) that drove the Lenape from the Valley. By 1654 the Dutch and Swedes started infighting, with the quick result of Dutch conquest of the lower Valley. But the Swedes refused to leave and when Penn arrived they had formed communities and numbered over 1000 inhabitants–a sizeable proportion of which settled on what was destined to become Philadelphia’s west Delaware riverbank. The Dutch garnered little from the conquest as in 1664 they were forced to surrender the New Netherlands possessions to the English. In due course the area was granted by the King of England to the Duke of York whose lands formed the core of what would shortly become the Province of New Jersey (1702)–a province that included the Dutch-Swede lower Susquehanna Valley. Despite the shift to the English Duke of York, English settlement of both New Jersey and the lower Susquehanna was minimal. It was only when the Quakers became interested did the area undergo an influx of population.
Enter the Quakers
In 1677 the good ship “Kent” left London on the Thames River heading for North America. Shortly out from the pier it was greeted by the Royal Yacht and from it Charles II yelled out (does British royalty yell or speak authoritatively?) “Are you all aboard good Quakers?” “Yes” came the reply. “We are all good Friends“. True story. The Kent was the second large-scale Quaker expedition to the New World. On Board were 230 Quakers that ultimately for the most part wound up on the East Bank of the Delaware River, in the New Jersey grant to the Duke of York. That area, known at the time as West Jersey, was, not too far in the future, to become the Jersey shore across from Philadelphia. Today it is the New Jersey city of Burlington, present-day suburb in the Philadelphia metro area. For the curious, the first major Quaker expedition (to Salem New Jersey) two years earlier carried 150 settlers. Other ships followed so that by 1681 about 1,400 Quakers had moved into West Jersey. William Penn came on the 1682 “Welcome” with 100 more Quakers (30 died of smallpox on that trip). In 1682 alone twenty-three Quaker-laden ships anchored on the Delaware. After Penn about ninety shiploads followed through 1685. Penn himself estimated the total immigration as about 7,200 [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 419-21.
Why you may ask the sudden Quaker interest in the Delaware River Valley? Perhaps surprisingly, it did not begin with William Penn.
Like present-day Mormons, the Friends were a missionary movement that upon their “founding” by the illustrious preacher, George Fox during the 1640’s (the years of the English Civil War), would soon semi-systematically send preachers, to Ireland, Germany, Scotland and even North America. In North America they were warmly greeted by the Puritans, i.e several were burned at the stake, but in other regions they were treated reasonably–not in Virginia though. In 1671, after his wife’s release from New Castle prison by order of the King, Fox and his wife led a mission to the Barbados and from there to Maryland. On the West River (today’s Patuxent) outside of Annapolis. At a large meeting he address local Quakers and even the Speaker of the Maryland House. He crossed the Chesapeake and held a series of meetings, meeting along the way with Indian leaders–with whom he seems to have made a favorable reception (although, Indians did ambush his mission when it proceeded through the Carolinas, to Georgia. When Fox returned to England, he quelled revolts within the Movement, with important assistance from the rich and influential William Penn. Then he returned to the mission, in Germany, where he was more successful and paved the way for a later Penn promotional campaign that triggered a German migration into Pennsylvania. It was Fox who befriended Charles II who wished the Quakers well as they left on the Kent.
The behind the scene role of George Fox in the founding of Pennsylvania is seldom noted, but it is unlikely the stream of Germans and Welsh that Penn would later recruit to Pennsylvania would have been so easily influenced. Fox to his death in 1691 embraced Penn’s Pennsylvania experiment. The takeaway is that for Fox and other key Quaker founders, colonization and settlement in the new word, much as the Puritans had done in New England, was core to the Quaker Movement. It was only in the new world that the democratic and religious principles of Quakerism could be instituted–and more importantly, practiced–this was the “Holy Grail Experiment” (or the Holy Experiment), which as historian Joseph Illick expresses it, constituted “a whiggish combination of republicanism and religious toleration … and Quaker egalitarianism” [99] Joseph E. Illick, Colonial Pennsylvania: a History (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), p. 10.
The mission formed several Quaker congregations in North America, but it was his devoted assistant William Edmundson, who stayed behind when Fox left in 1673, and prostelyzed in the Middle Colony especially, but his also well known for his debate with Roger Williams in Rhode Island. Edmundson even ventured to Boston, to me he conjures up the role St. Paul played in spreading Christianity to the non-Jews. When Penn planned for Pennsylvania and Philadelphia he set aside land for Fox to settle. Fox and William Penn were close, religiously, and as fiscal and political ally. By remembering to link the two the reader will be sensitive that Penn was an early and founding member of the Quaker Movement–not just a follower. His is a first generation Quaker enthusiasm which is important as we can more easily see the close link of his religion with his city-building and governance–and his straightforward hope to establish what we now call political culture for a new form of political community, a religious utopia, he called his Holy Grail. If Brigham Young was Joseph Smith’s disciple in establishing a new home in a new world, William Penn was to be George Fox’s.
How and why did Penn become mixed up with the Delaware River as the location for his Holy (urban) Experiment? By 1674, two affluent Quakers had taken possession of a proprietary land grant by the Duke of York in his holdings in New Jersey. In a nutshell, they thought they acquired an absolute proprietary interest in West Jersey. It was contested and had to be sorted out in the courts, but in the meantime, Penn became a trustee (but not an investor) on their joint stock corporation board of directors. Penn’s legal training drew him deeply into the administration–and the promotion of West Jersey for settlement. He published promotional pamphlets and drafted legal outlines in how to establish/govern a proprietary settlement. Part of the West Jersey multi-year confusion was that it involved several co-founders with legal interests in the proprietorship.There was no end of troubles in sorting out who could do what, when, and how. It wasn’t until 1681 that matters had cleared sufficiently that the joint stock corporation could administrer its proprietorship–and in the meantime, the area had been settled and populated, and urban centers established .[99] Joseph E. Illick, Colonial Pennsylvania: a History (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), p. 10.
From this frustrating and extended experience Penn came away with the belief that a sole proprietorship, only one controlling interest, was the only way his “Holy Experiment” could work in the new world. The inevitably implication of this decision was that he sought to obtain from Charles II a sole proprietorship, which obviously he was eventually obtained–and that was Pennsylvania. There is one more incredibly important consequence of the decision to use a sole proprietorship for the Holy Experiment: it left only one person in charge of that colony, a corporate enterprise by law directed by one man only–William Penn. As the reader shall discover in future modules, Penn’s near total ultimate authority, his management style, and the inevitable realities of multiple and competing interests and perspectives led to not only a troubled political life in the colony, but also to setting up political structures, including the corporation of Philadelphia, that “bent” the initial policy systems of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia into logical but over time dysfunction governance.The effects of this dysfunction continue to this day–as will be further explained in future modules. To condense this for the reader: STRUCTURES MATTER!
There’s more.
Penn’s timing in securing a sole proprietorship from Charles II was near perfect from Pennsylvania’s future perspective. Charles II came to power in the Restoration (from the Cromwell dictatorship) in 1660-1. Up to that time, there was no coherent or promulgated colonial policy for North America or anywhere. It was what the King or Cromwell said it was, and since 1640 when the Civil War commenced, that took priority. Grants for land, proprietary grants to individuals or a joint stock corporation delated immense powers, virtually unsupervised, and with the inevitable decentralization of 3,000 ocean miles, the individual colonies had enjoyed considerable discretion, verging on autonomy. We saw this in Virginia–and we shall see it again in our Massachusetts chapter. In 1651, and more importantly in 1660, the English Parliament had passed two Navigation Acts which injected the King, Parliament (London) into colonial affairs, and also enacted a series of requirements that promoted English self-sufficiency (the core of mercantilism) by restricting colonial trade to Great Britain, and transport on British ships (it was a predecessor to today’s Jones Act).
The role of the Crown-appointed Royal Governor in the colonies was altered dramatically–especially when in 1675 when London established the bureaucracy to administer the acts: the Lords of Trade, and its Board of Trade bureaucracy. We saw in Virginia this introduced a nearly thirty year struggle between the Virginia Council of State, Burgesses, the Royal Governor–with the Church of England tossed in for good measure. In Massachusetts as we shall see this was an incredibly politically turbulent time, the Governor Andros Affair, which caused a fundamental charter reorganization and profoundly changed the tone and substance between native governance institutions and British rule.
The net effect was to alienate the natives, and to isolate the royal governor and set him in some level of opposition to colonial native legislatures. I won’t even mention the implications of all this on colonial trade–it will be dealt with in our Massachusetts chapter–but one can argue these acts, and the method and style that British colonial administration evolved set the stage for a future American Revolution. So, while the other colonies were reeling from these enactments and their bureaucracies, because of the charter Charles II gave to Penn’s sole proprietorship, Pennsylvania, while required to conform to the Navigation Acts, essentially established Penn and his family and successors as the permanent royal governor. In that a new Pennsylvania had no past history and an period of autonomy, the sole proprietorship charter granted to Penn by Charles II in 1681 bypassed the political turbulence, and the distortions that caused–including serious disruptions in colonial economic growth.
Why did the English King allow Pennsylvania to be an exception to the extensive London-based political control he was inserting into colonial administration? The King did it for personal reasons–and all that brings us to the question who the devil is this William Penn?
The ‘Delaware culture area’ … developed not by some random process of social selection, but from the conscious will and purpose of its Quaker founders. The leading role was played by one founder in particular, William Penn–who served Pennsylvania, Delaware, and also West jersey as lawgiver, social planner, organizer, tireless promoter, and regulator of the immigration process. The cultural history of this region cannot be understood without knowing about the mind and character of this extraordinary man. [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 455-6
Penn was born in London in 1644. His father was an admiral who fought for Cromwell and Charles II. His ancestry devolved from the Normans, as did the aristocracy that emigrated to Virginia and set up the Virginia policy system–in fact he was related to the wife of Governor Berkeley, who BTW called him “cousin”. As payment for his services, both Cromwell and the King awarded Penn’s father with numerous estates, including one in Ireland where Penn was raised. He came from a military family and through much of his teenage years dreamt to be an officer. One of only two portraits of him is in armour and sword. As a military officer he participated in conflict in suppressing a mutiny, and was known in his early years as a skillful swordsmen, duelist, and a bit on the wild side in several dimensions of that expression. So much for innate pacifism–it evidently is an acquired taste. He was deeply religious, so much so his father sent him to Oxford for a secular education. That didn’t work out; Penn was shocked at what he saw there, rebelled, and was tossed out. Returning to Dad and Ireland, Penn quickly discovered Quakerism, converted, and despite Dad’s loving beatings and whippings, he was eventually kicked out of the family; Penn persisted as a Quaker.
To boil things down a bit, Penn rose quickly into the ranks of Quaker leadership–and stayed there for the rest of his life. He was arrested several times, served in the Tower of London, and published an estimated hundred works and pamphlets, including his best, No Cross, No Crown. He inherited his father’s wealth upon the latter’s death, but he remained a tireless preacher, traveling throughout England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Arrested again he was imprisoned in the infamous Newgate prison. While all this would seem evidence of an opposition to the the Crown and Church of England, Penn maintained through it all a close personal relationship with Charles II, and his brother the future, James II. Go Figure. So did George Fox who did him one better by forming at least a professional relationship with Oliver Cromwell.
In any case Penn in his missionary work traveled extensively to Germany, developed close relationships with German pietists (who would later be recruited in droves to Pennsylvania). Penn married well, into wealth and society–his wife was also a religious renegade Quaker. As described earlier, after his West Jersey proprietorship experience, “he petitioned his royal friend Charles II for a colony [to repay considerable sums his father had earlier lent the Crown]. In 1681 Charles overruled his advisors and granted the request. The King named the colony, adding with his own hand the prefix ‘Penn” to the proposed ‘Sylvania’. And, in a few months in late 1681, Penn left for his new homeland–arriving in 1682. [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 456-9 Charles specifically adapted the charter for the colony to allow Penn and his successors to maintain a sole proprietorship–which at least technically, it remained until the American Revolution.
Ron W. Coan 