PENNSYLVANIA

As the second most populous state in the Union from 1810 to 1860 after New York, Pennsylvania was at the center of its political and industrial development. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States were ratified in the "Keystone State's" capital of Philadelphia and the Continental Congress met there. As the nation's capital from 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the site of its most bitter political struggles between the Federalists and their Republican rivals. Because of its diverse population and active partisan press, Pennsylvania was among the first states to pioneer a modern two-party system, where each party ran a slate of candidates, had regular campaign workers, and tried to balance tickets ethnically and geographically.

With its large number of electoral votes—fifteen in 1800 (third to New York and Massachusetts) and 28 by 1828 (second only to New York), Pennsylvania was a critical political battleground during the early Republic. In the election of 1800, when Pennsylvania almost did not cast its electoral votes as a lame-duck Federalist state senate and House of Representatives could not agree. Although the Republicans had overwhelmingly won the election, Federalists still controlled the Senate. Only when Jefferson's election was clear did the state cast eight votes for him against seven for Adams. Pennsylvania also made political history in 1824 by holding the first convention to nominate presidential and vice-presidential candidates: Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun were chosen to repudiate William Crawford, the last candidate officially selected by a national caucus. Pennsylvania had twenty-eight electoral votes.

Begun in 1682 as a "holy experiment" and founded by Quaker William Penn, Pennsylvania was the world's only society to date to combine pacifism with almost complete toleration of all religious groups. Penn aggressively recruited German as well as English settlers. As a result, the colony received an influx of mainstream Lutherans and Reformed Calvinists, who comprised over 90 percent of the Germans, along with pacifist groups such as the Amish, Schwenkfelders, Dunkards. Many Germans remained socially insular, continuing to speak their language even into the twentieth century. The presence of the smaller groups can still be noticed in the Ephrata Cloisters, Moravian Bethlehem, and the farm communities of Amish, who dress traditionally and do not use automobiles or electricity.

Pennsylvania prospered as the breadbasket of North America. By 1776 Philadelphia, closer to the West Indies than New York or Boston, which both had a half-century head start, was British North America's largest city, with about thirty thousand inhabitants. Dotting a prosperous countryside were iron forges, supported by the rich deposits of iron ore of the colony. Under the leadership of printer Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia developed such institutions and public improvements as the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company, paved streets, and the College of Pennsylvania.

Although Quakers numbered but a small minority, they continued to rule Pennsylvania with German support until the French and Indian War. Following the defeat of General Braddock near present-day Pittsburgh in 1755, native Americans attacked all along the frontier. These Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee, Minisink, and other groups had been dispossessed by a series of treaties made with Pennsylvania but enforced by the Iroquois, who were glad to have a pacifist society on their southern border. The Pennsylvania hinterland was devastated, and towns as far east as Bethlehem and Reading became centers of refugees. After the war ended in 1763, a confederation of native Americans led by Pontiac once again pushed back the settlers searching for fertile lands.

Aware that the province needed to defend itself, several Quakers resigned from the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1756. Until the American Revolution, two major factions blamed each other for the province's lamentable defense. Quakers and their supporters, led by Benjamin Franklin, tried to have Pennsylvania made a royal province; they were opposed by the Proprietary Faction, who blamed the pacifist Quakers for Pennsylvania's defense problems. Meanwhile, the Paxton Boys in 1763 took out their anger by massacring some of the many Christian Indians converted mostly by the Moravians. The frontier people had no use for either faction. When Britain imposed taxes and increased trade regulation in the 1760s, while the other colonies protested, the major political groups in Pennsylvania courted royal favor.

Because the governing elite of Pennsylvania was heavily Loyalist or neutral, Pennsylvanians opposed to British policy and supporting independence had to effect the most radical internal revolution of any British colony. In 1776 a coalition of representatives composed primarily of farmers, Philadelphia working people, at the prompting of a Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, ousted the government and established a new constitution. It allowed all male taxpayers over the age of twenty-one to vote, the most liberal franchise in the country. On the other hand, a test oath, requiring voters to swear allegiance to the constitution, disfranchised perhaps half the state's population, including Quakers, who would not swear oaths. Representation favored the more radical western counties. Voters annually elected an assembly (enlarged from 30 to 74), which had to take its laws back to the people for final approval the next year. In the nation's first experiment with rotation in office, representatives could serve for only four years out of seven, to keep them from aggrandizing power. The only check on the assembly was the council of censors, which could call attention to the assembly's abuses and recommend changes in the constitution. The president merely presided over the assembly.

Pennsylvania saw considerable action during the Revolution. In September 1777, British forces from New York under General William Howe defeated Washington's army at Brandywine and then Germantown, occupying the city as the continentals suffered from cold and food shortages at Valley Forge, twenty miles up the Schuylkill River. Although the redcoats left the following year, fighting remained endemic along the western and northeastern Pennsylvania frontiers, where the British supported Indians against settlers who sought their lands. In the Wyoming Valley in the northeast, around present-day Wilkes-Barre, Connecticut settlers claiming the land for their state, with support from the Revolutionary government, battled Pennsylvania settlers, who received aid from the British and Iroquois. Congress ultimately granted the land to Pennsylvania, but intermittent fighting and conflicting land claims continued in the region until the early nineteenth century.

Support for the radicals declined during the Revolution, as they levied high taxes and seized production to help the war effort. Riots broke out in Philadelphia to protest profiteering and toleration of Loyalists. Pennsylvania soldiers mutinied twice: in 1781 to be released from their enlistments, and in 1783 to be paid, an action that chased Congress out of Philadelphia for two years. By 1786 conservative Philadelphia businessmen were firmly in control, and in 1790 the state promulgated a new constitution: a governor, senate, and assembly checked each other, the governor appointed the judiciary, and Philadelphia returned to its colonial government—a self-perpetuating board of aldermen.

Pennsylvania ratified the U.S. Constitution in 1787, the second state to do so. Its population grew from 433,611 in 1790 to 602,365 in 1800, to 810,019 in 1810, to 1,049,458 in 1820, and to 1,348,233 in 1830. In 1780 Pennsylvania was the first state to legislate the gradual abolition of slavery: children of slave mothers were born free, subject to an indenture until age 28. As a result, Pennsylvania's slave population declined from 3,707 in 1790 to 1,706 in 1800, to 795 in 1810, to 611 in 1820, to 403 in 1830, to 64 as late as 1840, and finally to none by 1850. Meanwhile, the state's free black population rose from 6,531 in 1790 to 14,564 in 1800, to 23,215 in 1810, to 30,202 in 1820, and to 37,930 in 1830. Much of this growth occurred in the southeastern part of the state because of the ease with which both free blacks and escaping slaves could cross over from Maryland and Delaware. Philadelphia had the nation's wealthiest and best established black community. When white churches there refused to admit blacks or seated them in segregated sections, the Reverend Absalom Jones began St. Thomas' Episcopal Church, and the Reverend Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church, both in 1794. Within a year, almost half of Philadelphia's black churchgoers belonged to these congregations. Though the 1790 constitution granted blacks the right to vote, even such worthies as businessman James Forten were intimidated from exercising their franchise before the constitution of 1838 limited voting to white males.

At the first federal census of 1790, Pennsylvania's three main ethnic groups were English and Welsh (30 percent), Scots (7 percent), Irish (7 percent), Scots-Irish (15 percent), and German (38 percent). Some 26,000 Irish immigrants came to the state in the late eighteenth century, and more after a hiatus during the Napoleonic Wars. Still, there were only 10,000 Catholics in the entire state as late as 1830, mostly in Philadelphia, as many of the Irish were either Presbyterians or anticlerical. The population rose largely through natural reproduction, though there were a handful of German, English, French, and Italian immigrants. Most of Pennsylvania's Native Americans left the state following the American Revolution; under a thousand Iroquois led by Cornplanter lived on the state's one remaining reservation in the northwest.

By 1800 Pennsylvania was the second most populous state after New York, and it led the nation in industry, whereas New York led in commerce. Production tended to be scattered throughout the state rather than concentrated at a handful of sites, like the Lowell Mills of Massachusetts. Philadelphia, the state's largest city with 41,000 inhabitants in 1800, grew to 80,462 by 1830. Lancaster was the second largest with 4,292 inhabitants in 1800, growing to 7,704 in 1830. Pittsburgh, which had only 1,565 people in 1800, was the second largest city by 1830 with 12,568 people. Prominent sites of industry were the textile mills at Manayunk (several miles north of Philadelphia), where rapid running water provided power; Coatesville in the southeast, where Rebecca Lukens (the foremost female entrepreneur in the nation) ran Lukens Steel; Milford in the northeast, where Cyrille Pinchot made a fortune in the lumber business; and numerous rural forges that exploited the state's rich iron deposits.

Collective leadership and state funding were essential to Pennsylvania's economic rise, for the mountainous terrain in the state could be overcome only by roads, bridges, canals, and railroads. Beginning in the 1780s, when sales of Pennsylvania grain to the West Indies brought the post-Revolutionary depression to a quick close, Pennsylvania pioneered new economic institutions that were later adopted by the entire nation. In 1780 Philadelphia merchants established the Bank of Pennsylvania, followed by the Bank of North America, the first banks in the United States. While the Constitutional Convention was sitting in 1787, they founded the Society for the Encouragement of Manufacturers, which offered bounties to develop useful technology. America's first steamboat, designed by John Fitch, plied the Delaware River from 1787 to 1789. Other Pennsylvania firsts included the first turnpike, which connected Philadelphia and Lancaster with a sixty-five-mile road of macadam (crushed stone) to the first stock exchange (1791), and the first insurance company (1792). The first approximation of a labor union, the Franklin Typographical Society of Philadelphia, a printers' collective, organized the new nation's first strike in 1786. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared strikes unconstitutional in 1805.

For most of the 1790s, nonpartisan Governor Thomas Mifflin kept the peace between the Federalists and Republicans on the state level, greatly helped by sales of public lands, which reduced state taxes to the vanishing point. The national Federalist party, however, had not learned the art of coalition building and compromise and provoked the Whiskey Rebellion (1794) and Fries's Rebellion (1798) by imposing a tax on whiskey. In response to the Whiskey Rebellion, protestors closed courts that tried delinquents, tarred and feathered excise officers, and burned distilleries whose owners paid the tax. About five hundred men attacked the house of excise collector John Neville, a native Virginian and thus doubly hated by the western Pennsylvanians; two were killed and six wounded although Neville escaped with his life. Over six thousand "rebels" then marched on Pittsburgh, but they dispersed when President Washington led thirteen thousand federal troops to the region.

Four years later, John Fries led a mob of mostly Pennsylvania German protestors and rescued people who refused to pay their taxes from a jail in Bethlehem. Although called rebels and charged by the government with treason, the perpetrators were continuing the tradition of tax resistance that brought forth the American Revolution itself.

The 1790s were eventful in Philadelphia as well. The new Walnut Street prison sought to rehabilitate, rather than simply incarcerate, the disorderly. It introduced forced labor in a carefully regulated environment, setting a precedent for the Eastern State Penitentiary, founded in 1821, which placed culprits in solitary confinement to give them time to reflect on their crimes. Eight yellow fever epidemics, brought by refugees from the Haitian Revolution, struck the city between 1793 and 1805, killed thousands, and caused thousands more to flee. African Americans distinguished themselves by caring for the sick.

In the early nineteenth century, Pennsylvania was firmly dominated by a Republican party whose main support came from farmers. By the War of 1812, however, they too had adopted the Federalist position that the state should support vigorous economic growth. Bridges spanned the Schuylkill River at Philadelphia and the Susquehanna at Harrisburg, which replaced Philadelphia as the state capital in 1811. At the end of the war, Pennsylvania had forty-one banks. By 1830 the legislature had chartered over two hundred turnpike companies, which crisscrossed the state with over three thousand miles of paved roads. Canals enabled the burgeoning anthracite coal industry to supply other states and Europe, especially the one connecting northeastern Pennsylvania with the Atlantic. In the late 1820s the first Pennsylvania railroads began shipping coal; in 1832 the first passenger line connected Philadelphia and Germantown. Responding to the state-built Erie Canal in New York, the legislature appropriated funds for a seven-hundred-mile transportation network of roads, railroads, and canals to assure that Pennsylvania's booming industrial and agricultural production would reach lucrative markets.

Not surprisingly, the most distinguished Pennsylvanians of the early Republic were business rather than political leaders. Robert Morris, superintendent of finance during the Revolution, founded the Bank of the United States with his partner, Thomas Willing, who directed it. Albert Gallatin, secretary of the Treasury under Jefferson and Madison, founded the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia. This bank, under the capable control of Nicholas Biddle in the 1820s, successfully regulated the nation's money supply between the panics of 1819 and 1837. Writers Charles Brockden Brown and Hugh Henry Brackenridge wrote some of America's earliest novels, reflecting the merits and shortcomings of democracy in Philadelphia and western Pennsylvania, respectively. From the early nineteenth century Pennsylvania became more noted for the collective effort and economic energy of its people, and beginning in the 1830s the state would be deeply wracked by conflicts between business and labor, white and black, and immigrants and the native born.

See alsoFranklin, Benjamin; Fries's Rebellion; Immigration and Immigrants: Germans; Pietists; Quakers; Valley Forge; Whiskey Rebellion .

bibliography

Brunhouse, Robert. The Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1776–1790. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1951.

Frantz, John B., and William Pencak, eds. Beyond Philadelphia: The American Revolution in the Pennsylvania Hinterland. University Park: Penn State Press, 1998.

Higginbotham, Sanford W. The Keystone in the Democratic Arch: Pennsylvania Politics, 1800–1816. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1952.

Klein, Philip S. Pennsylvania Politics: A Game without Rules, 1817–1832. Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1940.

Miller, Randall, and William Pencak, eds. Pennsylvania: History of a Commonwealth. University Park: Penn State Press, 2002. Especially chaps. 2–4.

Tinkcom, Harry M. The Republicans and Federalists in Pennsylvania, 1790–1801. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1950.

William Pencak