Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania

Sources

Proprietorship. Pennsylvania, like Maryland, New York, and the Carolinas, was a proprietary colony, the gift of the monarch to an individual or group of individuals. In the case of Pennsylvania the land north of Maryland and west of the Jerseys repaid a debt that the Crown owed to the Penn family. Adm. Sir William Penn aided the Stuart princes in exile during the English Civil War. The admiral’s son, William, was a friend of both Charles, who would be restored to the throne in 1660 as Charles II, and his younger brother James, Duke of York, later James II. William Jr. had also become a Quaker, a religious sect feared and persecuted in England. With the grant of territory in 1681 Charles II had repaid a debt without it actually costing him anything

PROMOTIONAL LITERATURE

One of the ways that proprietors and land speculators lured settlers to America was through published descriptions of the richness of the lands. Some descriptions were clearly fantastic, promising health, wealth, and happiness with little work. Women usually made only half of what men made in wages, and the marrying age for women was in their early twenties. Notwithstanding the facts, Gabriel Thomas, hoping to lure both men and women to Pennsylvania, wrote in 1698:

They pay no Tithes [church taxes] and their Taxes are inconsiderable.... I shall add another reason why Womens Wages are so exorbitant: they are not yet very numerous, which makes them stand upon high Terms for their several Services in Sempstering [seamstress], Washing, Spinning, Knitting, Sewing, and in all the other parts of their Imployments... moreover they are usually Marry’d before they are Twenty Years of Age, and when once in that Noose, are for the most part a little uneasie, and make their Husbands so too, till they procure them a Maid Servant to bear the burden of the Work, as also some measure to wait on them too.

The Christian children born here are generally wellfavoured, and Beautiful to behold; I never knew any come into the World with the least blemish on any part of its Body, being in the general, observ’d to be better Natur’d, Milder, and more tender Hearted than those born in England.

Source: “An Historical and Geographical Account of Pensilvania and of West-New-Jersey, by Gabriel Thomas, 1698,” in Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey and Delaware 1630–1707, edited by Albert Cook Myers (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), pp. 329, 332.

since he had never invested in American lands. He also provided a means of getting rid of Quakers because Admiral Penn gave the proprietorship to his son. Penn and his heirs were granted large powers over their new land, but they found, as did the Lords Baltimore and the Carolina proprietors, that having this authority on paper and being able to exercise it were different things. Politically, the proprietors and the settlers were often at odds. Penn, a genuine reformer and true believer in religious toleration for most groups, understood that his family’s fortune depended upon his attracting settlers to his colony. Promotional literature extolled the richness of the land, healthiness of the air, and convenience of river transportation and ocean access for trade. But Penn also promised personal and religious freedoms, thereby attracting not only Quakers but also other persecuted minorities. Upon his death in 1718 the proprietorship descended to his son, Thomas.

Philadelphia. William Penn realized that his colony needed a port city that would attract merchants and artisans as well as provide a market where farmers could sell their goods. It helped that many of those who became Quakers in England had urban backgrounds and skills. The model he did not want to follow was overcrowded, dirty, disease-ridden, and dangerous London. To this end Philadelphia (the name means “brotherly love” in Greek), unlike Boston or New York, was a planned city, and Penn sent commissioners to find a good location and provide the knowledge necessary to lay out his “green country town.” They chose a peninsula between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, thus giving water access both to the Atlantic Ocean and to the hinterland. The peninsula lent itself to the grid plan that Penn and his surveyor, Thomas Holme, chose as the best way to order the city. A one-hundred-foot-wide street in the middle (Market) intersected another one-hundred-foot-wide street that ran lengthwise (Broad) with smaller streets at regular intervals. Rather than honor human beings, the streets were either named after trees (Chestnut, Walnut) or given numbers (First, Second). The middle of town had a square. In 1683 the town had 600 people and 100 houses; two years later there were 357 houses, “divers of them large, well built, with good Cellars, three stories, and some with balconies.” The town also had seven “ordinaries,” inns which served food, rented rooms, and most important, gave men a place to drink. Philadelphia would become the major port and largest city in British America on the eve of the Revolution with some 31,500 people, of whom about 850 were blacks, slave and free.

Quakers. The people called the Society of Friends, or Quakers, began in England in the early 1650s, when George Fox, a cobbler and shepherd, received what he felt to be an immediate awakening to the Inner Light, Truth, and God. These were years of civil strife in England, and Fox’s message was one of pacifism. The Friends were also evangelical, spreading the good news of their beliefs and calling on those around them to renounce the Church of England, or state church, and follow them. The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought to power those who saw Quakers as a threat to the church and the state. Fox and many of those around him spent time in jail. Some of the wealthier and more well connected followers, such as William Penn, began to look for a place of refuge where Quakers could worship as they liked—without baptism, liturgy, and ministers—but also where they could make decent livings for their families. They first looked to West New Jersey, part of the holdings of James, Duke of York. James had given this land away already, but Quakers still settled there. The proprietorship of Penn held out more promise in the long run. He arrived at his colony in 1681 with other Friends, and his land policies encouraged wealthy Quaker merchants and farmers to come to America. English, Irish, and Welsh Quakers flocked to Pennsylvania. They quickly established meetings (congregations) along the lines that Fox had laid out in England. Tightly

organized, Quaker meetings did well in Pennsylvania. The Quaker elite also kept its power base in the legislature, the only colony where Quakers were politically important. They managed to keep Pennsylvania out of the colonial wars until they were forced to compromise in the 1750s. Their basic tolerance of other religious and ethnic groups made Pennsylvania attractive to Europeans. It was the fastest growing colony of the eighteenth century.

Diversity. The area of land that became Pennsylvania had hosted European settlement long before Penn was granted his charter. New Sweden, founded in 1638, was conquered by the Dutch in 1655. After the conquest Dutchmen, Germans, and Scandinavians settled in the region. In 1685, four years after Penn’s grant, he wrote, “The People are a Collection of divers Nations in Europe: As, French, Dutch, Germans, Swedes, Danes, Finns, Scotch, Irish and English; and of the last equal to all the rest.” These people were also of various religions that included Swedish Lutherans, Dutch Reformed, German Lutherans, Anglicans, Quakers, Anabaptists, and Presbyterians. In the eighteenth century German Mennonites and Moravians, Presbyterian Scots, and Welsh Baptists filed into Pennsylvania’s backcountry. Indentured servants served as laborers in Philadelphia and on the farms in the counties that supplied the city. While there were no large settlements of Roman Catholics or Jews, there were enough individuals to hold small religious services in private homes. In 1744 the Maryland physician and gentleman Alexander Hamilton, traveling north for his health, “dined att a tavern with a very mixed company of different nations and religions. There were Scots, English, Dutch, Germans, and Irish; there were Roman Catholicks, Church men [Church of England], Presbyterians, Quakers, Newlightmen [evangelicals], Methodists, Seventh day men, Moravians, Anabaptists, and one Jew. The whole company consisted of 25 planted round an oblong table in a great hall.” Pennsylvania’s ethnic diversity created the audience and the market for a German-language press. The large numbers of non-English speakers in Pennsylvania had some, such as Benjamin Franklin, worried. In the end he was unable to convince the legislature to take steps against immigrants. Most realized, as had Penn, that a province’s prosperity lay in its people. An open and tolerant society brought in people to work the land and provide the grains and beef upon which Pennsylvania’s economy was built. They in turn provided the markets for goods made by artisans in the colony and merchandise imported from Britain through the great and wealthy merchants of Philadelphia. Finally, Pennsylvania was also home to those who had never wanted to come at all—African slaves. While Quakers became increasingly uncomfortable with slavery from the 1750s onward, they were slave owners up until the eve of the Revolution. Non-Quakers had fewer doubts about the morality of owning other human beings. Pennsylvania did not take any censuses during the colonial period. Estimates from the 1770s and data from the first federal census of 1790 place the white population at about three hundred thousand and the black at about ten thousand.

Sources

Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, The Quakers (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988);

Joseph Illick, Colonial Pennsylvania: A History (New York: Scribners, 1976);

Sally Schwartz, “A Mixed Multitude”: The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 1987);

Jean R. Soderlund, “Black Importation and Migration into Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1682–1810,” The Demographic History of the Philadelphia Region 1600–1860, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, edited by Susan E. Klepp, 133 (1989): 144–153.