PENN IN POLITICS
People in Holland and Germany, as well as in England, had now felt the
new spirit of religious liberty, so that William Penn and George Fox
found more men and women in those countries eager to listen to their
teachings than they had found elsewhere. The Quaker leaders traveled
from one town to another, meeting many people, giving them copies of the
pamphlets that Penn and others had written, and urging them to join the
new Society of Friends. The Quaker missionaries met with considerable
success, although by no means all the people who listened to them became
Quakers, but many joined one or another of the new sects that were
springing up at the time.
When he returned to England, Penn found the condition of the Quakers
there as unsatisfactory as ever. The majority of the English people were
so afraid that King Charles II. wanted to turn the country over to the
Catholics that they were making the laws more and more strict against
all who were not members of the Church of England, and this, of course,
included the Quakers. They were being fined and imprisoned right and
left, and treated worse than if they had no religion at all.
As it was against the Quaker rule to take an oath of any kind, members
of the new sect were at a great disadvantage in courts of law and in all
places where an oath of allegiance to the government was required. To
help them in this difficulty, Penn succeeded in inducing the House of
Commons to allow Quakers to affirm instead of taking an oath, but before
he could succeed in having the House of Lords pass the same bill the
king dissolved Parliament.
Then, in the summer of 1678, occurred what was known as the Popish Plot.
This plot was probably largely invented by a man named Titus Oates, who
claimed that he had discovered evidence that the Catholics intended to
seize the government of England, kill the king and the leading
statesmen, set fire to the shipping on the Thames, at a given signal
murder all the Protestants, and seize Ireland with a French army. The
people were so excited that they were willing to believe even such a
wild story as Titus Oates told them, and immediately the authorities
began to arrest and imprison Catholics as zealously as they had been
imprisoning Quakers. The Quakers kept out of the dispute between the
Church of England and the Catholics as well as they could, following the
advice of Penn, who told his people to keep away from all worldly
controversies. "Fly as for your lives," he wrote them in a letter, "from
the snares therein, and get you into your watch-tower, the name of the
Lord." He urged the Protestants to treat the followers of other creeds
more fairly, trying to show them that in their persecution of others the
Protestants were themselves guilty of doing the very things which they
had most feared from others.
Penn could advise others to keep out of worldly discussions, but he
found it hard to do so himself. His nature was too bold and energetic,
and he was above all things else a public man. So he tried to help his
friend Algernon Sydney win a seat in the House of Commons, and, as a
Whig, used all his influence to win success for that party in the
elections. Sydney was defeated, but William Penn now became known as
something of a politician as well as a religious leader.
In 1680 Penn began to work out a plan that had been in the minds of
George Fox and other Quakers for some time, namely, to obtain from the
king a grant of land in America where the Quakers might establish a
settlement for themselves. They had already seen the Puritans cross the
Atlantic and found the colony of Massachusetts Bay, where they were free
to establish their own religion, and they had seen the Catholics go to
Maryland under the guidance of Lord Baltimore. The Quakers were having a
hard time of it at home; why should they not choose a new land where
they could do as they pleased? They were not welcome in Massachusetts,
where some of them had been hung and some whipped at the tail of a cart.
Virginia was being settled by members of the Church of England, Maryland
by the Catholics, and the Dutch were in possession of New York. They
looked about to find some territory not yet well occupied.
Some time earlier George Fox had considered founding a Quaker colony in
the country lying north of Maryland and west of New York and the
Jerseys. Travelers reported that this was easy to reach by a broad river
called the Delaware. Penn already knew a good deal about this and the
neighboring country, partly from George Fox, and partly because he had
already acted as arbitrator in a dispute as to the boundary line between
East Jersey and West Jersey. He had also helped to draw up the
constitution for West Jersey, and, as that constitution established
religious liberty in that territory, many Quakers had gone there to
live. Indeed, West Jersey might have become a great Quaker colony had it
not been that men who went out there reported that its soil was not so
fertile nor its general character so attractive as the land that lay
farther to the west.
In spite of the difficulties he had so often experienced with the law
courts, Penn was now looked upon with favor by both King Charles and his
brother the Duke of York. His father, Sir William, had never been paid
all the money that was due him as a naval officer; the government was
therefore in debt to Penn to the amount of £16,000, and Penn knew that
the king was always hard pressed for money to keep up his very expensive
court. Penn knew also that the king would make difficulties about paying
him the money that was owed, but he thought that Charles might be glad
to give him some of the unoccupied land in North America in place of
payment in money. Therefore he now, in 1680, sent a petition to King
Charles asking that in payment of the money owed to his father he be
granted a tract of land "bounded on the east by the Delaware River, on
the west limited as Maryland, and northward to extend as far as
plantable."
The petition was referred to a committee of the Privy Council, where
much discussion followed as to whether such a grant would not conflict
with other grants to some of the New England colonies. There was much
confusion in the plans, and great doubt as to the boundaries of
Maryland. But when the grant was finally made to Penn, it covered a vast
stretch of territory, including more than forty thousand square miles of
land, the largest grant that had ever been made to one person in
America. The tract was larger than Ireland, and not very much smaller
than all of England. One reason for such liberality on the part of the
king may have been that it canceled a debt of considerable money;
another reason was that Charles was particularly well disposed toward
the son of his friend Admiral Penn.
Now let us learn how our great State of Pennsylvania was named. On March
4, 1681, the king signed the charter. Penn wrote, "This day my country
was confirmed to me under the great seal of England, with large powers
and privileges, by the name of Pennsylvania; a name the King would give
it in honor of my father. I chose New Wales, being as this is a pretty
hilly country, but Penn being Welsh for a head, as Pennanmoire in Wales,
and Penrith in Cumberland, and Penn in Buckinghamshire, the highest land
in England, called this Pennsylvania, which is the high or head
woodlands; for I proposed when the secretary, a Welshman, refused to
have it called New Wales, Sylvania, and they added Penn to it; and
though I much opposed it, and went to the King to have it struck out and
altered, he said it was past and would take it upon him; nor could
twenty guineas move the under secretary to vary the name; for I feared
lest it should be looked on as a vanity in me, and not as a respect in
the King, as it truly was, to my father, whom he often mentions with
praise."
So, in spite of William Penn's modesty, the new colony was christened,
as it were by chance, one of the most beautiful names in all the new
continent.
Penn owned the new colony much as the lord of an English manor owns his
estate. The land belonged to him, and the colonists were in reality to
be his tenants, paying him rent for their right to use the land. Penn,
on his part, was to pay two beaver skins to the king each year at his
castle of Windsor, and the king was also to have one fifth of all the
gold and silver that might be found in Pennsylvania.
The charter set forth the form of government for the province. The
people were to elect delegates who should pass laws, and Penn was to
have the right to veto such laws as he did not approve. He had the right
to appoint judges and other officers and to grant pardons for crimes.
He was to be the perpetual governor of the province, but if he chose to
remain in England, he might govern the colony by a deputy whom he should
send out in his place.
A month after the charter was granted to him Penn sent his cousin,
William Markham, who was a son of Admiral Penn's sister, to
Pennsylvania, to take temporary charge of the few scattered families of
Swedes, English, and Dutch, who were living along the shores of the
Delaware. Markham arrived at the colony in July, 1681, and established
his home at Upland, a settlement some fifteen miles below the site of
the present city of Philadelphia. Markham examined the province, and
sent word to Penn that Lord Baltimore disputed the boundary lines
between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and that, if his claim was correct,
Maryland would cut into a large section of southern Pennsylvania. Penn
then went to the Duke of York and secured from him an additional grant
that gave him land now forming part of the state of Delaware. What he
wanted was to obtain control of the entire western shore of the Delaware
River from his province down to the Atlantic Ocean.
Then he advertised for settlers for his new domain, warning them that,
for a few years at least, they would have to do without some of the
comforts of England, but explaining that it was a glorious opportunity
to spread English influence in a new world. He offered them very easy
terms of rent; they could have five thousand acres by paying £100; and a
shilling rent for every hundred acres annually afterward. If they did
not have the money to take up so large a tract of land, they could have
two hundred acres or less for the rent of one shilling an acre. These
terms were very attractive, and many persons who were eager to take a
share in what Penn was pleased to call "his holy experiment of
Pennsylvania," applied for tracts of land in the new colony.
Penn was now a very practical, businesslike man, and he meant to add to
his fortune by means of his new province, and also to become a man of
great influence. He intended to show that a people like the Quakers
could build up a community where liberty should be the watchword, where
war should be frowned upon, and where every man should have a chance to
own land and cultivate it. He was not a dreamer only, but a great
planner and organizer as well, one of those men who seized the
opportunity that the new world of America presented, and hoped that he
might there set right the wrongs that had brought so much trouble to
the poorer classes in Europe. There was probably no finer type of man
among those who settled the colonies of North America than this
broadminded, well-balanced, shrewd, and yet ideal-loving Quaker
courtier, with his profound sense of justice, and his determination to
deal fairly by all,--both settlers and Indians.
Some men came to him offering to form a company and pay him £6000 in
return for a monopoly of the trade with the Indians in his province, but
this he refused. He had his own ideas as to how he and his settlers must
deal with the Indians; they must deal with them fairly; and since they
were to take land that belonged to the Indians, they must pay for every
acre they occupied in their settlements and farms. This was a new idea,
and not the usual custom, since most colonists paid no regard whatever
to any right the Indians might have to their lands. He wrote out a set
of rules for dealing with the Indians, and among them it was stated that
a white man who injured an Indian was to be dealt with exactly as if he
had injured another white man; and that all disputes between the two
races were to be adjusted by a jury of twelve men, six settlers and six
Indians. A man who tried to obtain some special privileges from him paid
him the following noble tribute: "I believe he truly does aim more at
justice and righteousness, and spreading of truth, than at his own
particular gain."
Meantime, several ships carrying settlers started for America, and Penn
sent out three agents to choose a site for a town and deal with the
Indians of the neighborhood. He told these agents to examine the
different creeks on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River in order
to choose one that should allow boats to go up into the country. To use
his own words, he ordered them, "to settle a great town, and be sure to
make your choice where it is most navigable, high, dry, and healthy;
that is, where most ships may best ride, of deepest draught of water, if
possible to load or unload at the bank or quay side, without boating or
lighterage."
When the agents arrived, they found that the settlers already there knew
the best situation for a great settlement,--at a place a few miles north
of where the Schuylkill River flowed into the Delaware. This place they
named Philadelphia, a word that means "Brotherly love."
What pleasure and satisfaction Penn must have taken in planning how this
new town should be built! He outlined it very carefully, directing where
the markets and storehouses should be placed, and telling his agents to
choose a site in the center of the line of houses facing the river for
his own residence. "Let every house be placed," he suggested, "if the
person pleases, in the middle of its plat, as to the breadth 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." From that comes the name of "Penn's green country
town" that was so often applied to Philadelphia in the early years of
its existence.
Penn sent a special letter to the Indians. "Now the great God hath been
pleased to make me concerned in your part of the world," he wrote them,
"and the King of the country where I live hath given me a great province
therein; but I desire to enjoy it with your love and consent, that we
may always live together as neighbors and friends; else what would the
great God do to us who hath made us (not to devour and destroy one
another, but) to live soberly and kindly together in the world?"
Penn was now such a prominent figure in England, the owner of a great
tract of land given him by the king, that he was able to help those
Quakers who got into trouble with the government; and when he was not
busy planning his colony, he was usually helping some persecuted
members of his faith, and urging them to join him in his new province
where liberty in religion was to be the keynote. He also drew up a
constitution for Pennsylvania, and then, in the summer of 1682, he was
ready to set sail for his new domain.
[Illustration: PENN'S SEAL.
WILLIAM PENN PROTECTOR AND GOVERNOR OF PENSYLVANIA
MERCY
JUSTICE]