Why are states and cities so different–that is the question we started on our history.
Let’s keep that in mind as we look in some detail how Pennsylvania’s First Policy System Played out during 1701 to 1750.
To help the reader, we have advised her that our history revealed to me that American state and local economic development in aggregate was driven bu several dynamics: economic base, climate and geography which we collapse into regions, political culture of its elite and masses, population change through migration/immigration/exit, and our three hierarchies of competition (cities, hinterland, global). All of these combine at any one point of time to create a “policy system” from which are produced our economic development strategies, programs, and activities.
The more simpler bottom line is that because of all these drivers and dynamics each state and city will travel through its semi-unique path through history so that as we look about today, no matter how much they seemingly share, each city and state is different and accordingly produces its own variant of economic development–and presumably many other policy areas as well. To help the reader keep that in mind, from time to time we will compare Pennsylvania’s first policy system, with Virginia’s. As you might expect, they will exhibit some shared commonalities, but there the reader will not mistake one for the other. They each start out as two very different policy systems.
To add a bit of detail, the first policy system is the single most critical policy system. As cities/states evolve through history that create periodically new policy systems, but they have not, at least not yet, completely thrown out past policy systems. The one that surprisingly endures, albeit largely unnoticed today, is the first policy system which poured the foundation and created the core institutions and political structures that however amended or reformed still pour their “new wine” into the same “old bottle”. Somehow, someway those political and policy-making structures, like cockroaches and weeds find a way to survive. After awhile we kind of take them for granted, because, without realizing it the past becomes so interwoven with the present, it is indistinguishable. As the Twig is Bent, so Grows the Tree. We like old trees; they have character; they a visible evidence that we can hope. Whatever produced that twisted and mal-formed beautiful work of nature (in our case man) made it through and there it is today–Each city and state is, after all, our city and state, created by past and present citizens and residents–and will be handed over to future ones.
So enuf with the romanticism and the perspective advanced in our history–just a jog to provide a context to the first half of eighteenth century colonial Pennsylvania, its first policy system, as we try to demonstrate its present-day relevance and continuity..
Isolating One Dynamic: Variation in British Colonial Governance:
Sole Proprietorship Contrasted with Direct Crown Administration by a Royal Governor
Virginia was founded by the Jamestown Company, a corporation that had received a charter from the Crown. That Corporate-run Colony was intended to produce a profit for the company, and if at all, only secondarily to promote settlement in the New World. Unfortunately for the Jamestown Company, it succeeded in the latter and failed miserably in the former. It went bankrupt in 1724 and was replaced by a Crown-appoint Royal Governor who ran the colony, sort of, straight to the Revolutionary War–which may offer a clue as to how well that went.
As we now know, Pennsylvania was governed by the sole proprietorship of William Penn and his descendants. Penn created his own family-owned corporation and it ran Pennsylvania, for the most part, straight through the American Revolution–which may offer a clue as to how well that went also. The starting point for this module, however, is 1701 when Pennsylvania’s first policy system commences. At that point, so early on, Pennsylvania will not resemble Virginia’s–and by 1750, it really won’t compare well to Virginia. Pennsylvania started out different from Virginia, and evolved in different ways. The Twig was bent by 1701, and that was all it took.
That the Pennsylvania twig was bent was due more than anything to several realities: Pennsylvania and Virginia were situated in two different regions (geography, topography and climate), two different periods of time (nearly seventy-five years apart), the political cultures they forged, and their chief architects were different. William Berkeley the Royal Governor and William Penn, the sole proprietor who was in the midst of pursuing his Holy Experiment, in much the same way as Monty Python pursued his Holy Grail. Penn would live in Pennsylvania only about three years, and for all practical purposes was given the boot twice–although the sole proprietorship bumbled on till the end in 1776. BTW, William Berkeley and William Penn were cousins, and they knew each other. Berkeley was dead by the time Penn got started in Philadelphia.
Penn bent the Pennsylvania twig by defining and running his sole proprietorship to pursue different goals and instilled different values and governance to further those objectives. Penn mixed Quaker religious values with his personal mercantilist profit expectations, and his Holy Experiment revolved around a religion-based moral settlement, that somehow was to make him money. The two sets of tension-filled values and goals worked ok at first, especially in how they handled affairs with the Native Americans. Penn bought the land, not stole it, and for better or worse, the Lenapi tribe sold it. Virginia didn’t handle it that way and fought brutal Indian wars, off and on, through its entire colonial history. This is not an insignificant matter either morally or for the purposes of this history–there is a reason why Virginia plantation owners were frequently referred to as “Colonel”, and why Thomas Jefferson’s father was a renowned Indian fighter and surveyor–the former was required to do the latter. Pennsylvania, as we shall discover in this module, did not have any form of a militia until the end of the module–not so Virginia.
In any event, by the time Penn sighed the 1701 Charter of Privileges, which set up the first Pennsylvania policy system, Penn had polarized his Quaker political and demographic base, and his political governance, outlined in his Frames of Government had incorporated key Quaker religious values into his political structures–and his inadvertent but determined intention of copying, transferring the the New World, the political-economic institutions and provincial structures o English governance poured the foundations for Pennsylvania provincial and sub-provincial governance along different lines than the Jamestown Company had poured theirs.
Since the Jamestown Company was not especially interested in settlement or governance of Virginia, it did little to interfere with the settlement patterns of its opportunistic entrepreneurs that planted tobacco, America’s first economic cluster. Penn, however, consciously chose to diversity his economy, recruited and sold land to create an agricultural hinterland, centered around a great commercial urban center, Philadelphia. His plans looked good on 1681 paper, and they are still in the current day textbooks, but he also sold the land for profit to his “First Purchasers”, and they wound up doing wherever their entrepreneurial bent took them–and make no mistakes, whatever else they were, Quakers had within their community a very developed self-made entrepreneur class. In order to recruit these folk and entice them into the Holy Experiment, Penn had to sign into the land sales contract terms and conditions which in essence created a First Purchaser democracy in provincial and local governance–nothing of the sort had happened in Virginia–just the opposite.
From the very first year in Pennsylvania, the First Purchasers polarized into pro-proprietor and anti-Penn groupings–and Penn’s inconsistent management style, his desire for personal profit at the perceived expense of the First Purchasers redefined what Penn’s city of Brotherly Love was intended to be. The two groupings somehow managed to combine a mutual desire for a limited government with a nasty, brutish and very religious-based partisan politics–sort of the dark side of the “Quaker force”. The dark side won and in 1701 Penn signed the Charter of Privileges and like the Dodge City sheriff, left town, never to return. Berkeley was kicked out also, but when he left he left behind a county-level plantation-owner oligopoly in charge of the Virginia legislature. Over the next one hundred years, that Legislature either fought the imposed Crown-appointed royal governor, or more often, the royal governor either went native or cut his deal with the legislature, leaving more often than not, a frustrated London. In Pennsylvania, the Crown discovered it could play off the domestic legislature, and the sole proprietor–and the sole proprietor was either a buffer to the Crown serving as its lightning rod, or something useful to prop up. But the sole proprietorship took some of the rough edges out of British Navigation Acts and colonial governance; Pennsylvanian democracy fought against the sole proprietor, not the Crown.
Hidden-in-plain sight is the 1701 Charter created a single chamber (lower) Legislature, and the Proprietorship held sway over the Executive, and the first battleground was the third branch, the judicial,initially controlled by the sole proprietorship–who BTW also controlled the system of sub-provincial local government as installed by Penn. It was the politics of the actual configuration and control over political structures which consumed a great deal of the first policy system’s attention. The eventual winner, it took forty-seven years, was the single chamber legislature–and that is most of what we will talk about in this module. There is, however, two 800 pound gorillas that entered into the struggle during his period, actually three: Immigration, which led to economic and political development, and mankind’s old friend and ofttimes hobby, war.
But before we start discussing them, we must complete our discussion of the sole proprietorship–by recognizing that it too had to confront these three 800 pound gorillas. After all, the sole proprietorship was legally the boss, the conceptual owner of every inch of land in the colony, and the royal governor rolled up into one corporate entity. It was the Executive Branch and had to get its pound of flesh if it were to sign off on what the Legislature wanted. But here we must alert the reader to its fatal flaw, it was a “personalistic” governance–far different from that of the King and the Crown. The Penn family, and the politics, personalities, and the (economic) priorities of the ruling family caused its actions, non-actions, either of which were reacted to by the Legislature. Two important Penn-family shifts or disruptions that greatly affected the partisanship and policy of its citizens and policy system were: (1) the death of Penn and his wife (by 1726), and (2) the ascension of his sons, and successors–who whatever else they were or did–abandoned Quakerism, leaving the management of the Holy Experiment to a colonial-era political party that for most of this period dominated the single-chamber Pennsylvania legislature. That by 1730 or so, Pennsylvania Quakers were a minority of the colony’s population and growing smaller with each passing year, opens up a host of thoughts and questions,
To grapple with these dynamics, 8oo pound gorillas, and still to keep our focus on our original purposes and introductory context, requires us to deal with matters one by one. Hence the module will first discuss (1):
Ron W. Coan 