Jersey; but the monotony of failure had been broken there by the sudden
re-entry of the Dutch upon the scene. England and France had joined in
war against Holland in 1672, and a hostile Dutch fleet presently found
its way to the coasts of America. It first preyed upon the commerce of
Virginia and Maryland in the south, and then, standing to the northward,
entered the familiar harbor at New York, and took possession as easily
as Colonel Nicolls had taken possession nine years before. From August,
1673, to November, 1674, the Dutch were masters in their old seats; there
was no New York, no New Jersey; all alike was New Netherland once more.
But it was a mere episode, a mere passing reminder of the old days when
the Dutch were really masters there. In 1674 the war ended, and England
regained her provinces by the treaty of peace (Treaty of Westminster,
February 9, 1674).
[Illustration: SIR EDMUND ANDROS]
The withdrawal of the Dutch, however, did not put the affairs of the
English back at the point at which they had been broken off by the
conquest. There were new difficulties to face. Philip Carteret again
became governor in New Jersey, for Sir George Carteret, the proprietor;
and for a little his task seemed easier than it had been before the Dutch
came. The chief English towns of the province had stubbornly resisted
his authority until the very eve of the coming of the Dutch men-of-war,
though he had been steadfast and had not ceased to rule in such matters
as he could, or to press the interests and the powers of the proprietor.
At last documents had come out of England which conclusively put an
end to the claim of the uneasy colonists that they had a right to act
independently of the proprietor; but they had hardly reached Carteret
before the Dutch fleet came in. When the Dutch were gone again the once
discontented towns received their English governor back with a sort of
satisfaction, having been gladdened to see the alien masters go. But
there were new difficulties, because Edmund Andros, that stirring major
of dragoons, was governor of New York. King Charles made a new grant of
New York to his brother the Duke of York in 1674, to cure any doubt the
Dutch occupation might be thought to have put upon his title; and the
Duke promptly granted East New Jersey over again to Sir George Carteret;
but the new grant was not couched in the terms of the old, left a doubt
upon the mind of a careful reader whether it meant to renew Sir George’s
sovereignty or only Sir George’s ownership as overlord,—and his Grace
had explicitly commissioned Andros to be his deputy in the government
of New York “and its dependencies.” Andros understood Carteret’s new
charter literally, as it read, and acted as if he had been bidden annul
the right of Sir George’s governor to govern. He saw to it that the New
Jersey towns should get as little comfort out of the resumption of their
separate government as possible. He was a bluff soldier, bred in the
school of Prince Rupert, as honest as he was direct and determined,—not a
man to originate a policy of his own, but sure to do what he understood
he was commanded to do very absolutely, without tact or scruple or
hesitation, with the rough energy of a man who was no politician, but
only a soldier. Moreover, he had in him the warm blood of thirty-four.
At first he contented himself with collecting customs duties at the
New Jersey ports as well as at New York for the Duke’s revenues; but
when Sir George Carteret died, in January, 1680, he went further. He
challenged Philip Carteret’s authority outright, accused him of acting
without legal warrant within the Duke of York’s patent, “to the great
disturbance of his Majesty’s subjects,” and, when he would not yield,
seized him, deposed him from his government by force, and himself assumed
the authority of governor in the New Jersey towns. The next year, 1681,
saw Carteret upheld and reinstated and Andros rebuked by official letters
out of England, and the discredited soldier went home to give his account
of the affair. East Jersey was to have quiet again for a little under new
proprietors.
[Illustration: DOCUMENT BEARING AUTOGRAPH OF SIR EDMUND ANDROS]
The King’s new grants made of New Jersey, not a single province, as
before, but two distinct provinces, East Jersey and West Jersey. Lord
Berkeley, Sir George Carteret’s associate in the original grant, had sold
his interest in the province early in 1673, before the Dutch came, and
when the Dutch were gone again Sir George Carteret’s grant was renewed,
not for the whole of New Jersey, but only for “East” Jersey. “West”
Jersey passed into the hands of those who had bought out Lord Berkeley’s
interest in the original gift. It included all the southwestern portion
of the province, below a line drawn from Little Egg Harbor at the sea
sharply north and northwest to the northernmost branch of the Delaware
in latitude 40° 41′. Its lands lay upon the great river from end to end,
almost, of the original grant. All the spreading waters of the stream
below and of the great Bay through which it opened to the sea were its
highway and frontier.
East Jersey passed, after Sir George Carteret’s death, to a numerous
company of proprietors, by purchase (1681),—men of all “religions,
professions, and characters.” Some were high prerogative men, likely to
be of any king’s party; some were dissenters, some papists, some Quakers.
The governors whom they sent out were not likely to push any one interest
or opinion or scheme of authority, and their province fell upon quieter
days, when governors and colonists could generally agree and live in
peace together.
West Jersey seemed sometimes, to outsiders, a place with no government
at all. It, too, had numerous proprietors, whose shares were constantly
changing hands, to the confusion both of questions of ownership and
questions of government. But there was, in fact, a quiet growth of
prosperous settlements, nevertheless. The several hamlets planted within
the little province were established by people abundantly able to take
care of themselves, and local government went peacefully on, whether
there was any definite guiding authority fixed for the colony as a whole
or not. Moreover, there was in due time, when affairs had settled and
taken on a normal face, a very well ordered government for the province,
under a popular assembly to which the proprietors accorded powers very
freely, and which they let their governors heed and obey in a way that
other colonies might very well have envied.
Both provinces prospered. Many settlers preferred the Jerseys to
New York. There was less taxation there, and less interference with
merchants’ dealings. The currency was kept freer from sudden changes of
value than elsewhere, because the law did not play with its value. In
West Jersey the laws for the punishment and suppression of crime were
singularly humane and just. A wilderness lay between the towns near New
York and on the Monmouth grant and the towns upon the Delaware; only
an Indian trail here and there, like that which ran from the Puritan
settlement at Newark south and southwest to the river, threaded the
untouched forests; and it was not easy to pass from the one region to
the other except by sea. But settlers poured in very steadily to the
parts that were open, from New England and Long Island especially, as
well as from over sea. Saw mills and iron mills were set up; tar, pitch,
and turpentine were shipped in paying quantities from the pine forests;
whales, caught upon the very coasts, yielded rich supplies of oil and
whalebone; and the Jerseys made ready to be as forward as any other
colony in growth and self-support.
[Illustration: WILLIAM PENN]
[Illustration: WILLIAM PENN’S FIRST RESIDENCE IN AMERICA (LETITIA
COTTAGE)]
The democratic government of West Jersey, the humane clemency of its
laws, the full freedom of religious belief allowed to all comers, and
all the features of liberality and tolerance which drew settlers to the
Delaware were due in no small degree to the presence of influential
Quakers among its proprietors. Among the rest was William Penn, a man at
whose hands schemes of proprietorship in America were to receive a new
dignity, and a touch almost of romance. He was but thirty-one when he
bought a share in the province of West Jersey (1675). He had been born in
1644, the year before Mr. Ingle turned reformer and roving governor in
Maryland,—two years after Sir William Berkeley came out to be governor in
Virginia. That was also the year in which Mr. George Fox, the founder of
the sect of Quakers, first began, a lad of twenty, to preach a new way of
life. He preached no new creed, but only simplicity and purity of life,
the direct gift of a guiding light from Heaven, without intermediation
of priest or church or learned dogma, the independence of every man’s
conscience, and his freedom from the authority of man or government in
such things as concerned the life of the spirit. He spoke such words
as made men’s hearts burn within them, and quickly kindled a fire which
no man could put out or check. William Penn had become his follower at
twenty-four, taken captive almost upon a first hearing by the new and
generous way of thought which so gently bade men better their lives.
[Illustration: SEAL AND SIGNATURES OF THE PENNSYLVANIA FRAME OF
GOVERNMENT]
Penn was singularly unlike the plain, unlettered people who had been the
first to hear Mr. Fox with gladness and live as he counselled. He was
son to Sir William Penn, whom all the world knew as admiral in the royal
navy, a great career behind him, a favorite with the King for the service
he had done him when he was restored,—half man of the world, half bluff
sailor; a man of fortune, and of a direct and ready fashion of making his
own way; no lover of new-fangled notions or young men’s whims; and his
son had so handsome a person, so gallant a manner, so manifest a charm
in what he said and did, that Sir William’s head was filled with dreams
of what he should become,—dreams of preferment and a notable career in
affairs. It astounded and angered him mightily that the boy should turn
Quaker and give up everything for a set of foolish notions. But it half
pleased the old man, after all, when his first choler was passed, to
see how steadfast his son was. It half amused him to recognize his own
wilfulness turned to such a use. Presently he forgave the strange lad,
like the frank sailor he was, and helped him to succeed in another way.
[Illustration: THE PENN ARMS]
And so it turned out that West Jersey was bought,—so far as Mr. Penn and
those who thought with him among the new proprietors were concerned,—to
be a refuge and place of peace for the Quakers. It was the Quakers who
principally crowded into the new province and gave it its prosperity and
its sober way in affairs. But Mr. Penn’s plans widened as his thought
became engaged in this great matter. A mere share in the ownership of
West Jersey did not satisfy him. He determined to have a province of his
own, a Quaker colony upon a great scale. The outcome of that purpose was
the founding of Pennsylvania, whose peaceful story of orderly government
and quick prosperity reads like the incidents, almost, of an idyl
amidst the confused annals of colonial affairs in that day of change.
Sir William Penn had died in 1670, and had left to his son, among other
items of an ample fortune, a claim for sixteen thousand pounds against
the crown. The young Quaker asked for a grant of land in America in
satisfaction of the claim, and the King readily enough consented, glad
to please an old friend’s son and be quit of an obligation so easily.
Penn asked for and obtained the land “lying north of Maryland, on the
east bounded with Delaware River, on the west limited as Maryland
is, and northward to extend as far as plantable” into the unclaimed
Indian country; and the King pleased his own fancy by calling the grant
“Pennsylvania,” in honor of the old admiral whose claim against the crown
he was thus paying off. The grant was dated March 4, 1681.
[Illustration: SEAL OF MASSACHUSETTS PROVINCE]
There was a charming frankness and nobility about the spirit in which the
young proprietor set out upon his great enterprise. He admitted “that
government was a business he had never undertaken,” but he promptly
assured those who were already settled in his province that they should
be “at the mercy of no governor who comes to make his fortune great.
You shall be governed by laws of your own making,” he said, “and live
a free and, if you will, a sober and industrious people.” “For the
matter of liberty and privilege,” he declared, “I propose that which
is extraordinary, and to leave myself and successors no power of doing
mischief,—that the will of one may not hinder the good of a whole
country.” His wish was to honor God and the principles of the despised
sect in whose service he had embarked his faith and his fortune. “The
nations want a precedent,” he said; and it was his hope to give it them
as boldly and wisely as possible. It was his belief, as it was the
belief of the great Edmund Burke a hundred years afterwards, “that any
government is free to the people under it (whatever be the frame) where
the laws rule and the people are a party to those laws.” He meant that
his colonists should have such freedom as his gift, and at the very
beginning of their government.
[Illustration: MASSACHUSETTS COINAGE]
There were, when he set up his gentle rule, scarcely five hundred white
men, all told, settled within the territory Charles had given him: a few
tiny Swedish hamlets, a few Quaker families who had crossed the river
from West Jersey, stragglers here and there, looking for good lands.
There was something of a village at Upland (whose name Mr. Penn was
presently to change to Chester), on the river, where the authority of the
new proprietor was first proclaimed and his liberal plan of government
made known in September, 1681; but the real creation of the colony was
to follow, when colonists began to pour in under the new arrangement. In
August, 1682, Mr. Penn added to his first grant from the King the lands
lying about New Castle and below, by purchase from the Duke of York, to
whom they had passed with the rest of New Netherland when the Dutch were
ousted; and a few hundred more were thereby added to the number of his
colonists, Dutch as well as Swedes, and a few score scattered groups of
lonely settlers. Maryland hotly protested the new grant. Her own charter
gave her the Delaware for eastern boundary. She had never acknowledged
the title of the Dutch there, and thought the title of his Grace of York
no better. But her protests were not heeded. Mr. Penn was determined
not to be shut within the continent, but to get his own outlet to the
sea, and took what the wilful Stuart granted him. The very month of that
new grant, August, 1682, he himself took ship for his province, with a
goodly company of Quakers, to begin the real planting of the new region.
He reached the colony in October; and during that autumn and the winter
which followed (1682-1683) no fewer than twenty-three ships came into the
Delaware bringing immigrants; to be followed presently by other ships
seeking trade.
Within but a little more than a single year of his coming, Mr. Penn
could boast, “I have led the greatest colony into America that ever any
man did upon a private credit, and the most prosperous beginnings that
ever were in it are to be found among us.” By 1685 there were more than
seven thousand settlers there. Englishmen predominated among them, but
almost one-half the number were of other nationalities,—French, Dutch,
Swedes, Germans, Finns, Scots-Irishmen, whoever would come, men of all
creeds and kinds, who had sought out the free place and had been accorded
an ungrudging welcome. A company of Welsh Quakers arrived before the
proprietor himself (August, 1682), and settled upon a tract apart, which
it had been agreed beforehand they should have. The next year came a
little colony of Germans to obtain like privileges upon a grant of their
own, and to make ready for others of their race, a great many, who were
to follow. And so company followed company, now of one nationality and
again of another, bringing what creed and what peaceful practices of
self-government they pleased, to be received and given grants of land
without question. Quakers for a while predominated, as Mr. Penn had
wished. The German settlers were most of them Mennonites, whose creed and
way of simple living were very like those Mr. Fox had preached. And where
there were Quakers government was apt to be a very simple matter. Few
officers were needed in their hamlets, and for a while no courts at all.
They settled their common affairs not only, but the private quarrels,
differences, and difficulties of their members also, very quietly in
their own stated meetings, and seemed to know the secret of enforcing
good temper as well as orderly conduct in a way very honorable to their
principles.
[Illustration: PROVINCE HOUSE, RESIDENCE OF THE ROYAL GOVERNORS OF
MASSACHUSETTS]
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF A SHERIFF’S RETURN EXECUTION OF A WITCH]
The chief town of the province was established at the confluence of
the two fine rivers Delaware and Schuylkill, and Mr. Penn named it
Philadelphia, wishing it to be a place of peace and good-will. At first
those who were to build there lived in caves cut out of the bluffs which
lined the river; but they were quick at substituting good houses. By
the end of the year 1683 there were no fewer than one hundred and fifty
dwellings built,—frail and cheap enough, no doubt, but sufficient until
stone and brick could be had, and time in which to build with them. The
change came very soon. The sober, substantial, yeomanlike folk who came
into the colony preferred, whenever it was possible, to build of good,
lasting stuff, and to build solidly and well. Before Mr. Penn sailed for
home, in 1684, there were already three hundred and fifty houses erected,
some of them several stories high, built with cellars and decorated
with balconies. Outside the central town, with its busy two thousand
colonists, there were quite fifty hamlets in the thriving province.
[Illustration: A PENNSYLVANIA CAVE-DWELLING IN 1683]
Government did not go quite so easily after Mr. Penn returned to
England. He left men behind who wished to have their own way, and whom
no authority less than his own could restrain. “For the love of God,
me, and the poor country,” he wrote them, “be not so _governmentish_,
so uneasy and open in your dissatisfaction.” But, though the growth
and prosperity of the colony were a little retarded by the bickerings
of those left in control, there was, after all, less turbulence in the
sober colony than Pennsylvania’s neighbor settlements had made shift to
put up with and survive. The government was liberal in all things, and
very simple in its make-up,—upon the familiar model of deputy governor,
council, and assembly. The courts did not attempt the elaborate procedure
of the courts at home. There were not lawyers enough in the colony for
that, and no one was very anxious to see more of them there. A very
simple method of trial sufficed for simple causes, with or without
juries as the parties to the suit might agree; and the Quakers at their
periodical meetings saw to it that as few of their own people should
resort to the courts as possible. That various population was of course
too heterogeneous and too spirited not to give its rulers trouble; but
it went on to prosper very well, and to make its way in the world in
a fashion so orderly that its neighbors might well have looked on in
envious wonder.
[Illustration: PAGE OF TUNES FROM THE “BAY PSALM BOOK”]
For one thing, it kept peace with the Indians as its neighbors could
not. The Quakers everywhere seemed to win the confidence of the redmen
upon the instant, as Roger Williams had won it, whose doctrines and
principles of life were so like their own. They won it by loving justice
and keeping faith, and Mr. Penn set them an example which neither they
nor any others who heard of it were likely to forget. He scrupulously
purchased the land he occupied of its native owners. He hoped for
their speedy civilization, and stipulated in the contracts which he
made with those who in turn purchased from him that the Indians should
have “the same liberties to improve their grounds and provide for the
sustenance of their families as the planters” who were established
there. There was something that took hold of men’s imaginations in the
sober conference he held with the Indians, as if with the leaders of
an equal race, at Shackamaxon, June 23, 1683, and in the terms of the
free treaty then entered into. Peace between the white men and the
red in Pennsylvania rested always upon the firm foundations of mutual
confidence which were laid that day. It was a peace whose guarantee was
good-will and friendliness. It was a colony of rigorous laws. “Profanity,
drunkenness, the drinking of healths, duelling, stage plays, masks,
revels, bull-baiting, cock-fighting, cards, dice, and lotteries were all
prohibited,” and women might be fined for clamorous scolding, quite as
in Puritan New England. But it was a more kindly rigor, as the Indians
perceived. The New Englanders had sought to be just with the redmen; but
the Quakers sought to add a gentle kindliness to justice, and their peace
was more lasting than that of the English in the north.
And yet not even their fine temper and quick spirit of justice could have
so steadily held the restless redskins off from mischief had not the
fates of the forest made their borders a place of peace. The Indians they
dealt with were not the men who had once made that wilderness a place
of dread and caution. Six years before Mr. Penn got his charter (1675)
the formidable Susquehannocks, once masters there, had turned their
faces to the south, beaten and in retreat before the implacable hatred
of their kinsmen of the Five Nations at the north, and had gone to harry
the borders of Maryland and Virginia and bring Mr. Bacon to his fate.
There were now none but humble Delawares to be dealt with in Mr. Penn’s
province, men who paid their tribute right promptly to the masterful
Iroquois who had driven the Susquehannocks out, accepted them as masters,
and dared not lift a hand against the English, whom the Iroquois received
and fought for as friends and allies.
The next year after Mr. Penn’s meeting with the Indians at Shackamaxon
saw an infinitely more important treaty concluded with the Indians in
the north. This was the treaty made with the great Iroquois confederacy
itself at Albany, on the 2d of August, 1684, to secure the frontiers of
the English alike against the redmen and against the French. The tribes
of that memorable confederacy were the most capable and formidable
anywhere to be found upon the eastern stretches of the continent. Their
power extended from the lakes to the borders of the Carolina grant,—as
the Susquehannocks had reason to know. The Dutch in New Netherland had
early won their friendship,—the French in Canada their bitter enmity.
It was with the firearms the Dutch had sold them that they had made
themselves masters in all the Indian country north and south, and had
brought their power to such a pitch that no settlement of the white
man was safe without their good-will. The French had long ago sent
missionaries among them, to speak to them both of the true God and of
the sacred authority of his Majesty their king in France, and had used,
through these, every argument of interest and every threat of power
to bring them to an alliance; but the shrewd sachems who were their
statesmen had stood out unchangingly against their advances, and had held
fast to the English, seeing very clearly in their calm counsels, as they
sat apart, how much greater the power of the white men grew in the south
than in the north. The English governors of New York were as quick as
the Dutch rulers of New Netherland had been to see the priceless value
of this protecting friendship of the border, no less than of the great
trade in furs of which it made Albany the mart and centre. They saw how
it would serve them when it should come to the final rivalry between
French and English for the possession of the interior of the continent;
and they held the French off by a very close alliance with the masters of
the forests.