IF ADMIRAL PENN HAD PERSISTED IN DISOWNING HIS SON WILLIAM
When an English father, irascible and opinionated, disowns and turns out
of doors a son who has not only disobeyed him but proved false to the
traditions and obvious interests of the family, he is very apt to adhere
to his action. A very great deal turned upon a case, once, in which an
English father, after making a very firm show of disowning his son, at
last relented and took him back to his heart.
Pennsylvania, to wit, turned upon it; and all the amazing success of
William Penn's great experiment in colonization. There has never been
anything quite like that success in the world's history, for the great
trek of the already established American population in the nineteenth
century was a readjustment, an extension, rather than a colonization in
the true sense. The planting of Pennsylvania was a true colonization.
Not only did it amount to the creation of a great and model
commonwealth, full-fledged, with a composite new-world population, in
twenty or even ten years' time, but it furnished the keystone to the
arch of states that constituted the American republic in the next
century after Penn's settlement.
Philadelphia led the American towns in the seven years of the
Revolution. It was their capital commercially as well as politically. It
supplied most of the sinews of war. Without Robert Morris's $1,400,000,
all of which came from Philadelphia, the final and crucial campaign of
the war could not have been fought. More than that, without just the
sort of commonwealth that Pennsylvania had already become, standing in
the center of things--cosmopolitan, independent of royalist or
aristocratic influence, populous, well-to-do, democratic, steady--it is
hard to see how the Revolution could have been undertaken at all.
But for the incident which permitted Penn's settlement, the vast
territory which afterward constituted Pennsylvania would have become
merely an extension of New York, or of New Jersey, or of Maryland, or of
Virginia, or of all of them. The chances are that its resources would
have been exploited by slave labor. The greater part of the state might
have remained slave territory up to 1861. In any case its development
would have been much more slow, its peopling much less rapid. Not only
must Indian wars have checked growth, but the spectacle of the arrival
of five hundred thousand stalwart Germans, the creation of the largest
city in the colonies within fifty years, and the upbuilding, in that
time, of a trade from the Delaware River that employed more than five
hundred ships and seven thousand sailors, could never have been
presented.
The part which Pennsylvania began to play from the moment of Penn's
arrival, and which it still plays, in American affairs, was directly
dependent upon Penn's character and genius, and, for a long time, upon
his wealth and social position. Without the wealth which William Penn
inherited from his father, Admiral Sir William Penn, he could not have
organized his Pennsylvania Society, nor bought the site of Philadelphia.
Without the position, as well as the wealth, which he inherited, he
could not, in the first place, have aspired to the acquaintance with and
confidence of King Charles II; and these were absolutely essential to
the extraordinary charter, in behalf of a despised and distrusted
people, which Penn received at the king's hands.
Had Penn always been in this favorable position? We shall see. The
admiral, his father, was a good churchman and a conservative man. King
Charles held him in very high estimation. The son was brilliant, and of
noble character. He was sent to Oxford University; and what was the
father's astonishment, after the boy had been there some little time, to
hear that he had joined the despised and persecuted sect of the Quakers!
This was very much as if, at the present day, the son and heir of a
great multi-millionaire should join, not merely the Socialists, but the
Anarchists at Paterson!
Sir William raved and scolded. The son only grew more firm in the faith.
Sir William endured much; but finding the young man actually inclined to
address the king as "thou," he told him that if he committed this
impropriety, or "thee-ed" and "thoued" either him, the admiral, or the
Duke of York, he would disown him, and cut him off without a shilling.
On the very first opportunity after this, young William addressed King
Charles as "thou!" The king, having a more than royal sense of humor,
made a jest of the matter, but Sir William did not. He was as good as
his word. He turned his son out of doors, and bade him begone. The youth
went abroad, and took up for a time a very much discredited existence.
He had already been expelled from the university.
Here, for a time, the fate of Pennsylvania certainly trembled in the
balance. It was quite within the outraged admiral's power to make the
ban permanent. If he had done so, there would never have been a
Quaker-German commonwealth in America.
It is known that the son accepted his banishment as permanent. But his
mother did not. She pleaded with the father for his forgiveness. She
reminded him of the boy's great natural goodness, his brilliancy, his
affectionateness. He would, Lady Penn maintained, recover from his
distemper of Quakerism. She begged her husband, before it was too late,
to relent and recall him.
At length, moved by this appeal and the promptings of his own heart, the
admiral called the young man home. Once or twice afterwards he was on
the point of a more radical banishment of him. But, fortunately for the
New World, Sir William's heart was soft after all. The son was
reestablished in his good graces. After the admiral's death, in 1670, it
was found that he had bequeathed all his wealth to the son, and, owing
to the son's influence, the Quakers improved their position not a
little, and in due time Penn organized and put through the Pennsylvania
experiment. But King Charles took good care to inform him that the name
"Pennsylvania," officially bestowed on the colony, was not in honor of
the founder, but in compliment to the admiral, his father.
Narrow as this contingency may have been, since so great an event
depended on the impulse of one man, it was after all a moral
contingency, and not due of physical accident, as so many others have
been. It is the more impressive for this reason. It is good to know that
a few heartbeats the more, in the breast of a man who can be kind as
well as hot-tempered, may create a mighty empire.