experiment." They made the difference between Penn's colony and almost
every other government then existing. In their influence and
continuance, until at last they were incorporated in the Constitution of
the United States, they are the chief contribution of William Penn to
the progress of our institutions.
"All Europe with amazement saw
The soul's high freedom trammeled by no law."
The Constitution was drawn up in Articles to the number of twenty-four,
and these were followed by forty Laws.
The Articles provided for a governor, to be appointed by the proprietor,
and for two legislative bodies, a provincial council and a general
assembly. The provincial council was to consist of seventy-two members.
Of these a third were elected for three years, a third for two, and a
third for one; so that by the end of the service of the first third, all
would have a three-year term, twenty-four going out and having their
places filled each year. The business of the council was to prepare
laws, to see that they were executed, and in general to provide for the
good conduct of affairs. The general assembly was to consist of two
hundred members, to be chosen annually. They had no right to originate
legislation, but were to pass upon all bills which had been enacted by
the council, accepting or rejecting them by a vote of yea or nay.
The Laws enjoined that "all persons who confessed the one almighty and
eternal God to be the Creator, Upholder, and Ruler of the world, and who
held themselves obliged in conscience to live peaceably and justly in
society, were in no ways to be molested for their religious persuasion
and practice, nor to be compelled at any time to frequent any religious
place or ministry whatever." All children of the age of twelve were to
be taught some useful trade. All pleadings, processes, and records in
the courts of law were to be as short as possible. The reformation of
the offender was to be considered as a great part of the purpose of
punishment. At a time when there were in England two hundred offenses
punishable by death, Penn reduced these capital crimes to two, murder
and treason. All prisons were to be made into workhouses. No oath was to
be required. Drinking healths, selling rum to Indians, cursing and
lying, fighting duels, playing cards, the pleasures of the theatre, were
all put under the ban together.
Penn's provincial council suggested the Senate of the United States. As
originally established, however, the disproportion of power between the
upper and the lower house was so great as to cause much just
dissatisfaction. The council was in effect a body of seventy-two
governors; the assembly, which more directly represented the people,
could consider no laws save those sent down to them by the council. The
Constitution had to be changed.
One of the good qualities of the Constitution was that it was possible
to change it. It provided for the process of amendment. That customary
article with which all constitutions now end appeared for the first time
in Penn's Frame of Government. Another good quality of the Constitution
was that it secured an abiding harmony between its fundamental
statements and all further legislation. "Penn was the first one to hit
upon the foundation or first step in the true principle, now the
universal law in the United States, that the unconstitutional law is
void."
Whatever help Penn may have had in the framing of this legislation, from
Algernon Sidney and other political friends, it is plain that the best
part of it was his own, and that he wrote it not as a politician but as
a Quaker. It is an application of the Quaker principles of democracy and
of religious liberty to the conditions of a commonwealth. From beginning
to end it is the work of a man whose supreme interest was religion. It
is at the same time singularly free from the narrowness into which men
of this earnest mind have often fallen. Religion, as Penn considered it,
was not a matter of ordinances or rubrics. It was righteousness, and
fraternity, and liberty of conscience.
In this spirit he wrote a letter to the Indian inhabitants of his
province. "The great God, who is the power and wisdom that made you and
me, incline your hearts to righteousness, love, and peace. This I send
to assure you of my love, and to desire you to love my friends; and when
the great God brings me among you, I intend to order all things in such
a manner that we may all live in love and peace, one with another, which
I hope the great God will incline both me and you to do. I seek nothing
but the honour of his name, and that we, who are his workmanship, may do
that which is well pleasing to him.... So I rest in the love of God that
made us."
Now colonists began to seek this land of peace across the sea. A hundred
acres were promised for forty shillings, with a quit-rent of one
shilling annually to the proprietor forever. In clearing the ground,
care was to be taken to leave one acre of trees, for every five acres
cleared. All transactions with the Indians were to be held in the public
market, and all differences between the white man and the red were to be
settled by a jury of six planters and six Indians. Penn also counseled
prospective colonists to consider the great inconveniences which they
must of necessity endure, and hoped that those who went would have "the
permission if not the good liking of their near relations."
There were already in the province some two thousand people, besides
Indians,--a peaceable and industrious folk, mostly Swedes and English.
They had six meeting-houses; the English settlers being Quakers. They
lived along the banks of the Delaware. In the autumn of 1681, the ship
Sarah and John brought the first of Penn's emigrants, and in December
the ship Bristol Factor added others. In 1682, Penn came himself.
The journey at that time was both long and perilous. If it was
accomplished in two months, the voyage was considered prosperous. To the
ordinary dangers of the deep was added the terror of the smallpox.
Scarcely a ship crossed without this dread passenger. William,
accordingly, as one undertaking a desperate adventure, took a tender
leave of his family. He wrote a letter whose counsels might guide them
in case he never returned. "My dear wife and children," he said, "my
love, which neither sea, nor land, nor death itself can extinguish or
lessen towards you, most endearedly visits you with eternal embraces,
and will abide with you forever; and may the God of my life watch over
you, and bless you, and do you good in this world and forever." "Be
diligent," he advised his wife, "in meetings for worship and business,
... and let meetings be kept once a day in the family to wait upon the
Lord, ... and, my dearest, to make thy family matters easy to thee,
divide thy time and be regular; it is easy and sweet.... Cast up thy
income, and see what it daily amounts to, ... and I beseech thee to live
low and sparingly, till my debts are paid." As for the children, they
are to be bred up "in the love of virtue, and that holy plain way of it,
which we have lived in, that the world in no part of it get into my
family." They are to be carefully taught. "For their learning be
liberal, spare no cost." "Agriculture is especially in my eye; let my
children be husbandmen and housewives; it is industrious, healthy,
honest, and of good example." They are to honor and obey their mother,
to love not money nor the world, to be temperate in all things. If they
come presently to be concerned in the government of Pennsylvania, "I do
charge you," their father wrote, "before the Lord God and the holy
angels, that you be lovely, diligent and tender, fearing God, loving the
people, and hating covetousness. Let justice have its impartial course,
and the law free passage. Though to your loss, protect no man against
it; for you are not above the law, but the law above you. Live the lives
yourselves, you would have the people live."
Unhappily, of Guli's children, seven in number, four died before their
mother, and one, the eldest son, Springett, shortly after. Springett
inherited the devout spirit of his parents; his father wrote an
affecting account of his pious death. Of the two remaining, William fell
into ways of dissipation, and Letitia married a man whom her father
disliked. Neither of them had any inheritance in Pennsylvania.
Penn's ship, the Welcome, carried a hundred passengers, most of them
Quakers from his own neighborhood. A third part died of smallpox on the
way. On the 24th of October, he sighted land; on the 27th, he arrived
before Newcastle, in Delaware; on the 28th, he landed. Here he formally
received turf and twig, water and soil, in token of his ownership. On
the 29th, he entered Pennsylvania. Adding ten days to this date, to
bring it into accord with our present calendar, we have November 8 as
the day of his arrival in the province. The place was Upland, where
there was a settlement already; the name was that day changed to
Chester.
Penn was greatly pleased with his new possessions. He wrote a
description of the country for the Free Society of Traders. The air, he
said, was sweet and clear, and the heavens serene. Trees, fruits, and
flowers grew in abundance: especially a "great, red grape," and a "white
kind of muskadel," out of which he hopes it may be possible to make
good wine. The ground was fertile. The Indians he found to be tall,
straight, and well built, walking "with a lofty chin." Their language
was "like the Hebrew," and he guessed that they were descended from the
ten lost tribes of Israel. Light of heart, they seemed to him, with
"strong affections, but soon spent; ... the most merry creatures that
live." Though they were "under a dark night in things relating to
religion," yet were they believers in God and immortality.
"I bless the Lord," he wrote in a letter, "I am very well, and much
satisfied with my place and portion. O how sweet is the quiet of these
parts, freed from the anxious and troublesome solicitations, hurries,
and solicitations of woeful Europe!"
In the midst of these fair regions, beside the "wedded rivers," the
Delaware and the Schuylkill, in the convenient neighborhood of quarries
of building stone, at a place which the Indians called Coaquannoc, he
established his capital city, calling it Philadelphia,--perhaps in
token of the spirit of brotherly love in which it was founded, perhaps
in remembrance of those seven cities of the Revelation wherein was that
primitive Christianity which he wished to reproduce.
Here he had his rowers run his boat ashore at the mouth of Dock Creek,
which now runs under Dock Street, where several men were engaged in
building a house, which was afterwards called the Blue Anchor Tavern.
Penn brought a considerable company with him. In the minutes of a
Friends' meeting held on the 8th (18th) of November, 1682, at
Shackamaxon, now Kensington, it was recorded that, "at this time,
Governor Penn and a multitude of Friends arrived here, and erected a
city called Philadelphia, about half a mile from Shackamaxon."
Presently, the Indians appeared. They offered Penn of their hominy and
roasted acorns, and, after dinner, showed him how they could hop and
jump. He is said to have entered heartily into these exercises, and to
have jumped farther than any of them.
The governor had already determined the plan of the city. There were to
be two large streets,--one fronting the Delaware on the east, the other
fronting the Schuylkill on the west; a third avenue, to be called High
Street (now Market), was to run from river to river, east and west; and
a fourth, called Broad Street, was to cross it at right angles, north
and south. Twenty streets were to lie parallel with Broad, and to be
named First Street, Second Street, and so on in order, in the plain
Quaker fashion which had thus entitled the days of the week and the
months of the year. Eight were to lie parallel with High, and to be
called after the trees of the forest,--Spruce, Chestnut, Pine. In the
midst of the city, at the crossing of High and Broad Streets, was to be
a square of ten acres, to contain the public offices; and in each
quarter of the city was to be a similar open space for walks. The
founder intended to allow no house to be built on the river banks,
keeping them open and beautiful. Could he have foreseen the future, he
would have made the streets wider. He had in mind, however, only a
country town. "Let every house be placed," he directed, "if the person
pleases, in the middle of its plot, as to the breadth way of it, that so
there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards or fields, that
it may be a green country town, which will never be burnt and always
wholesome."
Among those houses was his own, a modest structure made of brick,
standing "on Front Street south of the present Market Street," and still
preserved in Fairmont Park. He afterwards gave it to his daughter
Letitia, and it was called Letitia House, from her ownership.
In the mean time, he was making his famous treaty with the Indians. Penn
recognized the Indians as the actual owners of the land. He bought it of
them as he needed it. The transfer of property thus made was a natural
occasion of mutual promises. As there were several such meetings between
the Quakers and the Indians, it is difficult to fix a date to mark the
fact. One meeting took place, it is said, under a spreading elm at
Shackamaxon. The commonly accepted date is the 23d of June, 1683. The
elm was blown down in 1810. There is a persistent tradition to the
effect that William was distinguished from his fellow Quakers in this
transaction by wearing a sky-blue sash of silk network. But of this, as
of most other details of ceremony in connection with the matter, we know
nothing.
Penn gives a general description of his various conferences upon this
business. "Their order," he says, "is thus: the king sits in the middle
of a half-moon, and has his council, the old and wise, on each hand.
Behind them, or at a little distance, sit the younger fry in the same
figure." Then one speaks in their king's name, and Penn answers. "When
the purchase was agreed great promises passed between us of kindness and
good neighbourhood, and that the English and the Indians must live in
love as long as the sun gave light, ... at every sentence of which they
shouted, and said Amen, in their way." Some earnestness may have been
added to these assuring responses by the Indians' consciousness of the
fact that the advantages of the bargain were not all on one side. The
Pennsylvania tribes had been thoroughly conquered by the Five Nations.
There was little heart left in them. But their condition detracts
nothing from Penn's Christian brotherliness.
In some such manner the great business was enacted. "This," said
Voltaire, "was the only treaty between these people and the Christians
that was not ratified by an oath, and that was never broken." That it
was never broken was the capital fact. Herein it differed from a
thousand other treaties made before or since. In the midst of the long
story of the misdealings of the white men with the red, which begins
with Cortez and Pizarro, and is still continued in the daily newspapers,
this justice and honesty of William Penn is a point of light. That Penn
treated the Indians as neighbors and brothers; that he paid them fairly
for every acre of their land; that the promises which he made were ever
after unfailingly kept is perhaps his best warrant of abiding fame. Like
his constitutional establishment of civil and religious liberty, it was
a direct result of his Quaker principles. It was a manifestation of that
righteousness which he was continually preaching and practicing.
The kindness and courtly generosity which Penn showed in his bargains
with the Indians is happily illustrated in one of his purchases of land.
The land was to extend "as far back as a man could walk in three days."
William walked out a day and a half of it, taking several chiefs with
him, "leisurely, after the Indian manner, sitting down sometimes to
smoke their pipes, to eat biscuit and cheese, and drink a bottle of
wine." Thus they covered less than thirty miles. In 1733, the then
governor employed the fastest walker he could find, who in the second
day and a half marked eighty-six miles.
The treaty gave the new colony a substantial advantage. The Lenni
Lenape, the Mingoes, the Shawnees accounted Penn's settlers as their
friends. The word went out among the tribes that what Penn said he
meant, and that what he promised he would fulfill faithfully. Thus the
planters were freed from the terror of the forest which haunted their
neighbors, north and south. They could found cities in the wilderness
and till their scattered farms without fear of tomahawk or firebrand.
Penn himself went twenty miles from Philadelphia, near the present
Bristol, to lay out his country place of Pennsbury.
Ships were now arriving with sober and industrious emigrants; trees were
coming down, houses were going up. In July, 1683, Penn wrote to Henry
Sidney, in England, reminding him that he had promised to send some
fruit-trees, and describing the condition of the colony. "We have laid
out a town a mile long and two miles deep.... I think we have near about
eighty houses built, and about three hundred farms settled round the
town.... We have had fifty sail of ships and small vessels, since the
last summer, in our river, which shows a good beginning." "I am
mightily taken with this part of the world," he wrote to Lord Culpeper,
who had come to be governor of Virginia, "I like it so well, that a
plentiful estate, and a great acquaintance on the other side, have no
charms to remove; my family being once fixed with me, and if no other
thing occur, I am likely to be an adopted American." "Our heads are
dull," he added, "but our hearts are good and our hands strong."
In the midst of this peace and prosperity, however, there was a serious
trouble. This was a dispute with Lord Baltimore over the dividing line
between Pennsylvania and Maryland. By the inaccuracy of surveyors, the
confusion of maps, and the indefiniteness of charters, Baltimore
believed himself entitled to a considerable part of the territory which
was claimed by Penn, including even Philadelphia. The two proprietors
had already discussed the question without settlement; indeed, it
remained a cause of contention for some seventy years. As finally
settled, in 1732, between the heirs of Penn and of Baltimore, a line
was established from Cape Henlopen west to a point half way between
Delaware Bay and Chesapeake Bay; thence north to twelve miles west of
Newcastle, and so on to fifteen miles south of Philadelphia; thence due
west. The surveyors were Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, and the line
was thus called Mason and Dixon's Line. This boundary afterwards parted
the free States from the slave States. South of it was "Dixie."
Penn now learned that Lord Baltimore was on his way to England to lay
the question before the Privy Council. The situation demanded William's
presence. "I am following him as fast as I can," he wrote to the Duke of
York, praying "that a perfect stop be put to all his proceedings till I
come." He therefore took leave of his friends in the province,
commissioned the provincial council to act in his stead, and in August,
1684, having been two years in America, he embarked for home.
On board the Endeavour, on the eve of sailing, he wrote a farewell
letter. "And thou, Philadelphia," he said, "the virgin settlement of
this province, named before thou wert born, what love, what care, what
service and what travail has there been to bring thee forth and preserve
thee from such as would abuse and defile thee! O that thou mayest be
kept from the evil that would overwhelm thee; that faithful to the God
of mercies in the life of righteousness, thou mayest be preserved to the
end. My soul prays to God for thee that thou mayest stand in the day of
trial, that thy children may be blessed of the Lord, and thy people
saved by thy power. My love to thee has been great, and the remembrance
of thee affects mine heart and mine eye. The God of eternal strength
keep and preserve thee to his glory and peace."
VII
AT THE COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND, AND "IN RETIREMENT"
When Penn left the province in 1684, he expected to return speedily, but
he did not see that pleasant land again until 1699. The fifteen
intervening years were filled with contention, anxiety, misfortune, and
various distresses.
In the winter of 1684-85, Charles II. died, and the Duke of York, his
brother, succeeded him as James II. And James was the patron and good
friend of William Penn. But the king was a Roman Catholic. One of his
first acts upon coming to the throne was to go publicly to mass. He was
privately resolved upon making the Roman Church supreme in England. Penn
was stoutly opposed to the king's religion. In his "Seasonable Caveat
against Popery," as well as in his other writings, he had expressed his
dislike with characteristic frankness. That he had himself been accused
of being a Jesuit had naturally impelled him to use the strongest
language to belie the accusation. Nevertheless, William Penn stood by
the king. He sought and kept the position of favorite and agent of the
court. He upheld, and so far as he could, assisted, the projects of a
reign which, had it continued, would probably have contradicted his most
cherished principles, abolished liberty of conscience, and made an end
of Quakers.
This perplexing inconsistency, which is the only serious blot on Penn's
fair fame, appears to have been the result of two convictions.
He was sure, in the first place, of the honesty of the king; he believed
in him with all his heart. James had been true to the trust reposed in
him by William's father. He had befriended William, taking him out of
prison, increasing his estates, granting his petitions. "Anybody," said
Penn, "that has the least pretense to good-nature, gratitude, or
generosity, must needs know how to interpret my access to the king."
With his advance to the crown James's graciousness had increased. He
kept great lords waiting without while he conversed at leisure with the
Quaker. He liked Penn, and Penn liked him. In spite of the disparities
in their age, rank, and creed, William Penn and James Stuart were fast
friends, united by the bond of genuine affection.
It was characteristic of Penn to be blind to the faults of his friends.
He brought great troubles both upon himself and upon his colony by his
refusal to believe the reports which were made to him against the
character of men whom he had appointed to office: he was unwilling to
believe evil of any man. He fell into bankruptcy, and even into a
debtor's prison, by his blind, unquestioning confidence in the agent who
managed his business. His faith in James was of a piece with his whole
character. He appears to have been temperamentally incapable of
perceiving the unworthiness of anybody whom he liked.
Together with this conviction as to the king's honesty, and bound up
with it, was a like belief in the wisdom of the king's plan. The king's
plan was to remove all disabilities arising from religion. He purposed
not only to put an end to the laws under which honest men were kept in
prison, but to abolish the "tests" which prevented a Roman Catholic from
holding office. And, without tarrying for the action of a cautious
Parliament, his intention was to do these things at once by a
declaration of the royal will. All this was approved by William Penn.