Read Ebook: The Quaker Colonies: A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware by Fisher Sydney George Johnson Allen Editor

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These Ulstermen came to Pennsylvania somewhat later than the first German sects; and not many of them arrived until some years after 1700. They were not, like the first Germans, attracted to the colony by any resemblance of their religion to that of the Quakers. On the contrary they were entirely out of sympathy with the Quakers, except in the one point of religious liberty; and the Quakers were certainly out of sympathy with them. Nearly all the colonies in America received a share of these settlers. Wherever they went they usually sought the frontier and the wilderness; and by the time of the Revolution, they could be found upon the whole colonial frontier from New Hampshire to Georgia. They were quite numerous in Virginia, and most numerous along the edge of the Pennsylvania wilderness. It was apparently the liberal laws and the fertile soil that drew them to Pennsylvania in spite of their contempt for most of the Quaker doctrines.

The dream of their life, their haven of rest, was for these Scotch-Irish a fertile soil where they would find neither Irish "papists" nor Church of England; and for this reason in America they always sought the frontier where they could be by themselves. They could not even get on well with the Germans in Pennsylvania; and when the Germans crowded into their frontier settlements, quarrels became so frequent that the proprietors asked the Ulstermen to move farther west, a suggestion which they were usually quite willing to accept. At the close of the colonial period in Pennsylvania the Quakers, the Church of England people, and the miscellaneous denominations occupied Philadelphia and the region round it in a half circle from the Delaware River. Outside of this area lay another containing the Germans, and beyond that were the Scotch-Irish. The principal stronghold of the Scotch-Irish was the Cumberland Valley in Southern Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna, a region now containing the flourishing towns of Chambersburg, Gettysburg, Carlisle, and York, where the descendants of these early settlers are still very numerous. In modern times, however, they have spread out widely; they are now to be found all over the State, and they no longer desire so strongly to live by themselves.

The Ulstermen, owing to the circumstances of their earlier life, had no sympathy whatever with the Quaker's objection to war or with his desire to deal fairly with the Indians and pay them for their land. As Presbyterians and Calvinists, they belonged to one of the older and more conservative divisions of the Reformation. The Quaker's doctrine of the inward light, his quietism, contemplation, and advanced ideas were quite incomprehensible to them. As for the Indians, they held that the Old Testament commands the destruction of all the heathen; and as for paying the savages for their land, it seemed ridiculous to waste money on such an object when they could exterminate the natives at less cost. The Ulstermen, therefore, settled on the Indian land as they pleased, or for that matter on any land, and were continually getting into difficulty with the Pennsylvania Government no less than with the Indians. They regarded any region into which they entered as constituting a sovereign state. It was this feeling of independence which subsequently prompted them to organize what is known as the Whisky Rebellion when, after the Revolution, the Federal Government put a tax on the liquor which they so much esteemed as a product, for corn converted into whisky was more easily transported on horses over mountain trails, and in that form fetched a better price in the markets.

After the year 1755, when the Quaker method of dealing with the Indians no longer prevailed, the Scotch-Irish lived on the frontier in a continual state of savage warfare which lasted for the next forty years. War, hunting the abundant game, the deer, buffalo, and elk, and some agriculture filled the measure of their days and years. They paid little attention to the laws of the province, which were difficult to enforce on the distant frontier, and they administered a criminal code of their own with whipping or "laced jacket," as they called it, as a punishment. They were Jacks of all trades, weaving their own cloth and making nearly everything they needed. They were the first people in America to develop the use of the rifle, and they used it in the Back Country all the way down into the Carolinas at a time when it was seldom seen in the seaboard settlements. In those days, rifles were largely manufactured in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and there were several famous gunsmiths in Philadelphia. Some of the best of these old rifles have been preserved and are really beautiful weapons, with delicate hair triggers, gracefully curved stocks, and quaint brass or even gold or silver mountings. The ornamentation was often done by the hunter himself, who would melt a gold or silver coin and pour it into some design which he had carved with his knife in the stock.

The Revolution offered an opportunity after the Ulstermen's heart, and they entered it with their entire spirit, as they had every other contest which involved liberty and independence. In fact, in that period they played such a conspicuous part that they almost ruled Philadelphia, the original home of the Quakers. Since then, spread out through the State, they have always had great influence, the natural result of their energy, intelligence, and love of education.

Nearly all these diverse elements of the Pennsylvania population were decidedly sectional in character. The Welsh had a language of their own, and they attempted, though without success, to maintain it, as well as a government of their own within their barony independent of the regular government of the province. The Germans were also extremely sectional. They clung with better success to their own language, customs, and literature. The Scotch-Irish were so clannish that they had ideas of founding a separate province on the Susquehanna. Even the Church of England people were so aloof and partisan that, though they lived about Philadelphia among the Quakers, they were extremely hostile to the Quaker rule and unremittingly strove to destroy it.

All these cleavages and divisions in the population continue in their effects to this day. They prevented the development of a homogeneous population. No exact statistics were taken of the numbers of the different nationalities in colonial times; but Franklin's estimate is probably fairly accurate, and his position in practical politics gave him the means of knowing and of testing his calculations. About the year 1750 he estimated the population as one-third Quaker, one-third German, and one-third miscellaneous. This gave about 50,000 or 60,000 to each of the thirds. Provost Smith, of the newly founded college, estimated the Quakers at only about 40,000. But his estimate seems too low. He was interested in making out their numbers small because he was trying to show the absurdity of allowing such a small band of fanatics and heretics to rule a great province of the British Empire. One great source of the Quaker power lay in the sympathy of the Germans, who always voted on their side and kept them in control of the Legislature, so that it was in reality a case of two-thirds ruling one-third. The Quakers, it must be admitted, never lost their heads. Unperturbed through all the conflicts and the jarring of races and sects, they held their position unimpaired and kept the confidence and support of the Germans until the Revolution changed everything.

The varied elements of population spread out in ever widening half circles from Philadelphia as a center. There was nothing in the character of the region to stop this progress. The country all the way westward to the Susquehanna was easy hill, dale, and valley, covered by a magnificent growth of large forest trees--oaks, beeches, poplars, walnuts, hickories, and ash--which rewarded the labor of felling by exposing to cultivation a most fruitful soil.

The settlers followed the old Indian trails. The first westward pioneers seem to have been the Welsh Quakers, who pushed due west from Philadelphia and marked out the course of the famous Lancaster Road, afterwards the Lancaster Turnpike. It took the line of least resistance along the old trail, following ridges until it reached the Susquehanna at a spot where an Indian trader, named Harris, established himself and founded a post which subsequently became Harrisburg, the capital of the State.

For a hundred years the Lancaster Road was the great highway westward, at first to the mountains, then to the Ohio, and finally to the Mississippi Valley and the Great West. Immigrants and pioneers from all the New England and Middle States flocked out that way to the land of promise in wagons, or horseback, or trudging along on foot. Substantial taverns grew up along the route; and habitual freighters and stage drivers, proud of their fine teams of horses, grew into characters of the road. When the Pennsylvania Railroad was built, it followed the same line. In fact, most of the lines of railroad in the State follow Indian trails. The trails for trade and tribal intercourse led east and west. The warrior trails usually led north and south, for that had long been the line of strategy and conquest of the tribes. The northern tribes, or Six Nations, established in the lake region of New York near the headwaters of the Delaware, the Susquehanna, and the Ohio, had the advantage of these river valleys for descending into the whole Atlantic seaboard and the valley of the Mississippi. They had in consequence conquered all the tribes south of them as far even as the Carolinas and Georgia. All their trails of conquest led across Pennsylvania.

The Germans in their expansion at first seem to have followed up the Schuylkill Valley and its tributaries, and they hold this region to the present day. Gradually they crossed the watershed to the Susquehanna and broke into the region of the famous limestone soil in Lancaster County, a veritable farmer's paradise from which nothing will ever drive them. Many Quaker farmers penetrated north and northeast from Philadelphia into Bucks County, a fine rolling and hilly wheat and corn region, where their descendants are still found and whence not a few well-known Philadelphia families have come.

The Quaker government of Pennsylvania in almost a century of its existence largely fulfilled its ideals. It did not succeed in governing without war; but the war was not its fault. It did succeed in governing without oaths. An affirmation instead of an oath became the law of Pennsylvania for all who chose an affirmation; and this law was soon adopted by most American communities. It succeeded in establishing religious liberty in Pennsylvania in the fullest sense of the word. It brought Christianity nearer to its original simplicity and made it less superstitious and cruel.

The Quakers had always maintained that it was a mistake to suppose that their ideas would interfere with material prosperity and happiness; and they certainly proved their contention in Pennsylvania. To Quaker liberalism was due not merely the material prosperity, but prison reform and the notable public charities of Pennsylvania; in both of which activities, as in the abolition of slavery, the Quakers were leaders. Original research in science also flourished in a marked degree in colonial Pennsylvania. No one in those days knew the nature of thunder and lightning, and the old explanation that they were the voice of an angry God was for many a sufficient explanation. Franklin, by a long series of experiments in the free Quaker colony, finally proved in 1752 that lightning was electricity, that is to say, a manifestation of the same force that is produced when glass is rubbed with buckskin. He invented the lightning rod, discovered the phenomenon of positive and negative electricity, explained the action of the Leyden jar, and was the first American writer on the modern science of political economy. This energetic citizen of Pennsylvania spent a large part of his life in research; he studied the Gulf Stream, storms and their causes, waterspouts, whirlwinds; and he established the fact that the northeast storms of the Atlantic coast usually move against the wind.

But Franklin was not the only scientist in the colony. Besides his three friends, Kinnersley, Hopkinson, and Syng, who worked with him and helped him in his discoveries, there were David Rittenhouse, the astronomer, John Bartram, the botanist, and a host of others. Rittenhouse excelled in every undertaking which required the practical application of astronomy, He attracted attention even in Europe for his orrery which indicated the movements of the stars and which was an advance on all previous instruments of the kind. When astronomers in Europe were seeking to have the transit of Venus of 1769 observed in different parts of the world, Pennsylvania alone of the American colonies seems to have had the man and the apparatus necessary for the work. Rittenhouse conducted the observations at three points and won a world-wide reputation by the accuracy and skill of his observations. The whole community was interested in this scientific undertaking; the Legislature and public institutions raised the necessary funds; and the American Philosophical Society, the only organization of its kind in the colonies, had charge of the preparations.

The American Philosophical Society had been started in Philadelphia in 1743. It was the first scientific society to be founded in America, and throughout the colonial period it was the only society of its kind in the country. Its membership included not only prominent men throughout America, such as Thomas Jefferson, who were interested in scientific inquiry, but also representatives of foreign nations. With its library of rare and valuable collections and its annual publication of essays on almost every branch of science, the society still continues its useful scientific work.

John Bartram, who was the first botanist to describe the plants of the New World and who explored the whole country from the Great Lakes to Florida, was a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial times, farmer born and bred. Thomas Godfrey, also a colonial Pennsylvanian, was rewarded by the Royal Society of England for an improvement which he made in the quadrant. Peter Collinson of England, a famous naturalist and antiquarian of early times, was a Quaker. In modern times John Dalton, the discoverer of the atomic theory of colorblindness, was born of Quaker parents, and Edward Cope, of a well-known Philadelphia Quaker family, became one of the most eminent naturalists and paleontologists of the nineteenth century, and unaided discovered over a third of the three thousand extinct species of vertebrates recognized by men of science. In the field of education, Lindley Murray, the grammarian of a hundred years ago, was a Quaker. Ezra Cornell, a Quaker, founded the great university in New York which bears his name; and Johns Hopkins, also a Quaker, founded the university of that name in Baltimore.

Pennsylvania deserves the credit of turning these early scientific pursuits to popular uses. The first American professorship of botany and natural history was established in Philadelphia College, now the University of Pennsylvania. The first American book on a medical subject was written in Philadelphia by Thomas Cadwalader in 1740; the first American hospital was established there in 1751; and the first systematic instruction in medicine. Since then Philadelphia has produced a long line of physicians and surgeons of national and European reputation. For half a century after the Revolution the city was the center of medical education for the country and it still retains a large part of that preeminence. The Academy of Natural Sciences founded in Philadelphia in 1812 by two inconspicuous young men, an apothecary and a dentist, soon became by the spontaneous support of the community a distinguished institution. It sent out two Arctic expeditions, that of Kane and that of Hayes, and has included among its members the most prominent men of science in America. It is now the oldest as well as the most complete institution of its kind in the country. The Franklin Institute, founded in Philadelphia in 1824, was the result of a similar scientific interest. It was the first institution of applied science and the mechanic arts in America. Descriptions of the first 2900 patents issued by the United States Government are to be found only on the pages of its Journal, which is still an authoritative annual record.

Apart from their scientific attainments, one of the most interesting facts about the Quakers is the large proportion of them who have reached eminence, often in occupations which are supposed to be somewhat inconsistent with Quaker doctrine. General Greene, the most capable American officer of the Revolution, after Washington, was a Rhode Island Quaker. General Mifflin of the Revolution was a Pennsylvania Quaker. General Jacob Brown, a Bucks County Pennsylvania Quaker, reorganized the army in the War of 1819. and restored it to its former efficiency. In the long list of Quakers eminent in all walks of life, not only in Pennsylvania but elsewhere, are to be found John Bright, a lover of peace and human liberty through a long and eminent career in British politics; John Dickinson of Philadelphia, who wrote the famous Farmer's Letters so signally useful in the American Revolution; Whittier, the American poet, a Quaker born in Massachusetts of a family converted from Puritanism when the Quakers invaded Boston in the seventeenth century; and Benjamin West, a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial times, an artist of permanent eminence, one of the founders of the Royal Academy in England and its president in succession to Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Wherever Quakers are found they are the useful and steady citizens. Their eminence seems out of all proportion to their comparatively small numbers. It has often been asked why this height of attainment should occur among a people of such narrow religious discipline. But were the Quakers really narrow, or were they any more narrow than other rigorously self-disciplined people: Spartans, Puritans, soldiers whose discipline enables them to achieve great results? All discipline is in one sense narrow. Quaker quietude and retirement probably conserved mental energy instead of dissipating it. In an age of superstition and irrational religion, their minds were free and unhampered, and it was the dominant rational tone of their thought that enabled science to flourish in Pennsylvania.

The material prosperity of Penn's Holy Experiment kept on proving itself over and over again every month of the year. But meantime great events were taking place in England. The period of fifteen years from Penn's return to England in 1684, until his return to Pennsylvania at the close of the year of 1699, was an eventful time in English history. It was long for a proprietor to be away from his province, and Penn would have left a better reputation if he had passed those fifteen years in his colony, for in England during that period he took what most Americans believe to have been the wrong side in the Revolution of 1688.

Penn was closely tied by both interest and friendship to Charles II and the Stuart family. When Charles II died in 1685 and his brother, the Duke of York, ascended the throne as James II, Penn was equally bound to him, because among other things the Duke of York had obtained Penn's release in 1669 from imprisonment for his religious opinions. He became still more bound when one of the first acts of the new King's reign was the release of a great number of people who had been imprisoned for their religion, among them thirteen hundred Quakers. In addition to preaching to the Quakers and protecting them, Penn used his influence with James to secure the return of several political offenders from exile. His friendship with James raised him, indeed, to a position of no little importance at Court. He was constantly consulted by the King, in whose political policy he gradually became more and more involved.

James was a Roman Catholic and soon perfected his plans for making both Church and State a papal appendage and securing for the Crown the right to suspend acts of Parliament. Penn at first protested, but finally supported the King in the belief that he would in the end establish liberty. In his earlier years, however, Penn had written pamphlets arguing strenuously against the same sort of despotic schemes that James was now undertaking; and this contradiction of his former position seriously injured his reputation even among his own people.

Part of the policy of James was to grant many favors to the Quakers and to all other dissenting bodies in England, to release them from prison, to give them perfect freedom of worship, and to remove the test laws which prevented them from holding office. He thus hoped to unite them with the Roman Catholics in extirpating the Church of England and establishing the Papacy in its place. But the dissenters and nonconformists, though promised relief from sufferings severer than it is possible perhaps now to appreciate, refused almost to a man this tempting bait. Even the Quakers, who had suffered probably more than the others, rejected the offer with indignation and mourned the fatal mistake of their leader Penn. All Protestant England united in condemning him, accused him of being a secret Papist and a Jesuit in disguise, and believed him guilty of acts and intentions of which he was probably entirely innocent. This extreme feeling against Penn is reflected in Macaulay's "History of England," which strongly espouses the Whig side; and in those vivid pages Penn is represented, and very unfairly, as nothing less than a scoundrel.

Meantime, since his departure from Pennsylvania in the summer of 1684, that province went on increasing in population and in pioneer prosperity. But Penn's quitrents and money from sales of land were far in arrears, and he had been and still was at great expense in starting the colony and in keeping up the plantation and country seat he had established on the Delaware River above Philadelphia. Troublesome political disputes also arose. The Council of eighteen members which he had authorized to act as governor in his absence neglected to send the new laws to him, slighted his letters, and published laws in their own name without mentioning him or the King. These irregularities were much exaggerated by enemies of the Quakers in England. The Council was not a popular body and was frequently at odds with the Assembly.

Penn thought he could improve the government by appointing five commissioners to act as governor instead of the whole Council. Thomas Lloyd, an excellent Quaker who had been President of the Council and who had done much to allay hard feeling, was fortunately the president of these commissioners. Penn instructed them to act as if he himself were present, and at the next meeting of the Assembly to annul all the laws and reenact only such as seemed proper. This course reminds us of the absolutism of his friend, King James, and, indeed, the date of these instructions is that when his intimacy with that bigoted monarch reached its highest point. Penn's theory of his power was that the frame or constitution of government he had given the province was a contract; that, the Council and Assembly having violated some of its provisions, it was annulled and he was free, at least for a time, to govern as he pleased. Fortunately his commissioners never attempted to carry out these instructions. There would have been a rebellion and some very unpleasant history if they had undertaken to enforce such oriental despotism in Pennsylvania. The five commissioners with Thomas Lloyd at their head seem to have governed without seriously troublesome incidents for the short term of two years during which they were in power. But in 1687 Thomas Lloyd, becoming weary of directing them, asked to be relieved and is supposed to have advised Penn to appoint a single executive instead of commissioners. Penn accordingly appointed Captain John Blackwell, formerly an officer in Cromwell's army. Blackwell was not a Quaker but a "grave, sober, wise man," as Penn wrote to a friend, who would "bear down with a visible authority vice and faction." It was hoped that he would vigorously check all irregularities and bring Penn better returns from quitrents and sales of land.

But this new governor clashed almost at once with the Assembly, tried to make them pass a militia law, suggested that the province's trade to foreign countries was illegal, persecuted and arrested members of the Assembly, refused to submit new laws to it, and irritated the people by suggesting the invalidity of their favorite laws. The Quaker Assembly withstood and resisted him until they wore him out. After a year and one month in office he resigned at Penn's request or, according to some accounts, at his own request. At any rate, he expressed himself as delighted to be relieved. As a Puritan soldier he found himself no match for a peaceable Quaker Assembly.

Penn again made the Council the executive with Thomas Lloyd as its President. But to the old causes of unrest a new one was now added. One George Keith, a Quaker, turned heretic and carried a number of Pennsylvania Quakers over to the Church of England, thereby causing great scandal. The "Lower Counties" or Territories, as the present State of Delaware was then called, became mutinous, withdrew their representatives from the Council, and made William Markham their Governor. This action together with the Keithian controversy, the disturbances over Blackwell, and the clamors of Church of England people that Penn was absent and neglecting his province, that the Quakers would make no military defense, and that the province might at any time fall into the hands of France, came to the ears of King William, who was already ill disposed toward Penn and distrusted him as a Jacobite. It seemed hardly advisable to allow a Jacobite to rule a British colony. Accordingly a royal order suspended Penn's governmental authority and placed the province under Benjamin Fletcher, Governor of New York. He undertook to rule in dictatorial fashion, threatening to annex the province to New York, and as a consequence the Assembly had plenty of trouble with him. But two years later, 1694, the province was returned to Penn, who now appointed as Governor William Markham, who had served as lieutenant-governor under Fletcher.

Markham proceeded to be high-handed with the Assembly and to administer the government in the imperialistic style of Fletcher. But the Assembly soon tamed him and in 1696 actually worried out of him a new constitution, which became known as Markham's Frame, proved much more popular than the one Penn had given, and allowed the Assembly much more power. Markham had no conceivable right to assent to it and Penn never agreed to it; but it was lived under for the next four years until Penn returned to the province. While it naturally had opponents, it was largely regarded as entirely valid, and apparently with the understanding that it was to last until Penn objected to it.

In the autumn of 1699 he sailed for Pennsylvania with his family and, arriving after a tedious three months' voyage, was well received. His political scrapes and mistakes in England seemed to be buried in the past. He was soon at his old enjoyable life again, traveling actively about the country, preaching to the Quakers, and enlarging and beautifying his country seat, Pennsbury, on the Delaware, twenty miles above Philadelphia. As roads and trails were few and bad he usually traveled to and from the town in a barge which was rowed by six oarsmen and which seemed to give him great pride and pleasure.

Two happy years passed away in this manner, during which Penn seems to have settled, not however without difficulty, a great deal of business with his people, the Assembly, and the Indian tribes. Unfortunately he got word from England of a bill in Parliament for the revocation of colonial charters and for the establishment of royal governments in their place. He must needs return to England to fight it. Shortly before he sailed the Assembly presented him with a draft of a new constitution or frame of government which they had been discussing with him and preparing for some time. This he accepted, and it became the constitution under which Pennsylvania lived and prospered for seventy-five years, until the Revolution of 1776.

This new constitution was quite liberal. The most noticeable feature of it was the absence of any provision for the large elective council or upper house of legislation, which had been very unpopular. The Assembly thus became the one legislative body. There was incidental reference in the document to a governor's council, although there was no formal clause creating it. Penn and his heirs after his death always appointed a small council as an advisory body for the deputy governor. The Assembly was to be chosen annually by the freemen and to be composed of four representatives from each county. It could originate bills, control its own adjournments without interference from the Governor, choose its speaker and other officers, and judge of the qualifications and election of its own members. These were standard Anglo-Saxon popular parliamentary rights developed by long struggles in England and now established in Pennsylvania never to be relaxed. Finally a clause in the constitution permitted the Lower Counties, or Territories, under certain conditions to establish home rule. In 1705 the Territories took advantage of this concession and set up an assembly of their own.

Immediately after signing the constitution, in the last days of October, 1701, Penn sailed for England, expecting soon to return. But he became absorbed in affairs in England and never saw his colony again. This was unfortunate because Pennsylvania soon became a torment to him instead of a great pleasure as it always seems to have been when he lived in it. He was a happy present proprietor, but not a very happy absentee one.

The Church of England people in Pennsylvania entertained great hopes of this proposal to turn the proprietary colonies into royal provinces. Under such a change, while the Quakers might still have an influence in the Legislature, the Crown would probably give the executive offices to Churchmen. They therefore labored hard to discredit the Quakers. They kept harping on the absurdity of a set of fanatics attempting to govern a colony without a militia and without administering oaths of office or using oaths in judicial proceedings. How could any one's life be safe from foreign enemies without soldiers, and what safeguard was there for life, liberty, and property before judges, jurors, and witnesses, none of whom had been sworn? The Churchmen kept up their complaints for along time, but without effect in England. Penn was able to thwart all their plans. The bill to change the province into a royal one was never passed by Parliament. Penn returned to his court life, his preaching, and his theological writing, a rather curious combination and yet one by which he had always succeeded in protecting his people. He was a favorite with Queen Anne, who was now on the throne, and he led an expensive life which, with the cost of his deputy governor's salary in the colony, the slowness of his quitrent collections, and the dishonesty of the steward of his English estates, rapidly brought him into debt. To pay the government expense of a small colonial empire and at the same time to lead the life of a courtier and to travel as a preacher would have exhausted a stronger exchequer than Penn's.

The contests between the different deputy governors, whom Penn or his descendants sent out, and the Quaker Legislature fill the annals of the province for the next seventy years, down to the Revolution. These quarrels, when compared with the larger national political contests of history, seem petty enough and even tedious in detail. But, looked at in another aspect, they are important because they disclose how liberty, self-government, republicanism, and many of the constitutional principles by which Americans now live were gradually developed as the colonies grew towards independence. The keynote to all these early contests was what may be called the fundamental principle of colonial constitutional law or, at any rate, of constitutional practice, namely, that the Governor, whether royal or proprietary, must always be kept poor. His salary or income must never become a fixed or certain sum but must always be dependent on the annual favor and grants of a legislature controlled by the people. This belief was the foundation of American colonial liberty. The Assemblies, not only in Pennsylvania but in other colonies, would withhold the Governor's salary until he consented to their favorite laws. If he vetoed their laws, he received no salary. One of the causes of the Revolution in 1776 was the attempt of the mother country to make the governors and other colonial officials dependent for their salaries on the Government in England instead of on the legislatures in the colonies.

So the squabbles, as we of today are inclined to call them, went on in Pennsylvania--provincial and petty enough, but often very large and important so far as the principle which they involved was concerned. The Legislature of Pennsylvania in those days was a small body composed of only about twenty-five or thirty members, most of them sturdy, thrifty Quakers. They could meet very easily anywhere--at the Governor's house, if in conference with him, or at the treasurer's office or at the loan office, if investigating accounts. Beneath their broad brim hats and grave demeanor they were as Anglo-Saxon at heart as Robin Hood and his merry men, and in their ninety years of political control they built up as goodly a fabric of civil liberty as can be found in any community in the world.

The dignified, confident message from a deputy governor, full of lofty admonitions of their duty to the Crown, the province, and the proprietor, is often met by a sarcastic, stinging reply of the Assembly. David Lloyd, the Welsh leader of the anti-proprietary party, and Joseph Wilcox, another leader, became very skillful in drafting these profoundly respectful but deeply cutting replies. In after years, Benjamin Franklin attained even greater skill. In fact, it is not unlikely that he developed a large measure of his world famous aptness in the use of language in the process of drafting these replies. The composing of these official communications was important work, for a reply had to be telling and effective not only with the Governor but with the people who learned of its contents at the coffeehouse and spread the report of it among all classes. There was not a little good-fellowship in their contests; and Franklin, for instance, tells us how he used to abuse a certain deputy governor all day in the Assembly and then dine with him in jovial intercourse in the evening.

The Assembly had a very convenient way of accomplishing its purposes in legislation in spite of the opposition of the British Government. Laws when passed and approved by the deputy governor had to be sent to England for approval by the Crown within five years. But meanwhile the people would live under the law for five years, and, if at the end of that time it was disallowed, the Assembly would reenact the measure and live under it again for another period.

The ten years after Penn's return to England in 1701 were full of trouble for him. Money returns from the province were slow, partly because England was involved in war and trade depressed, and partly because the Assembly, exasperated by the deputy governors he appointed, often refused to vote the deputy a salary and left Penn to bear all the expense of government. He was being rapidly overwhelmed with debt. One of his sons was turning out badly. The manager of his estates in England and Ireland, Philip Ford, was enriching himself by the trust, charging compound interest at eight per cent every six months, and finally claiming that Penn owed him 14,000 pounds. Ford had rendered accounts from time to time, but Penn in his careless way had tossed them aside without examination. When Ford pressed for payment, Penn, still without making any investigation, foolishly gave Ford a deed in fee simple of Pennsylvania as security. Afterwards he accepted from Ford a lease of the province, which was another piece of folly, for the lease could, of course, be used as evidence to show that the deed was an absolute conveyance and not intended as a mortgage.

This unfortunate business Ford kept quiet during his lifetime. But on his death his widow and son made everything public, professed to be the proprietors of Pennsylvania, and sued Penn for 2000 pounds rent in arrears. They obtained a judgment for the amount claimed and, as Penn could not pay, they had him arrested and imprisoned for debt. For nine months he was locked up in the debtors' prison, the "Old Bailey," and there he might have remained indefinitely if some of his friends had not raised enough money to compromise with the Fords. Isaac Norris, a prominent Quaker from Pennsylvania, happened at that time to be in England and exerted himself to set Penn free and save the province from further disgrace. After this there was a reaction in Penn's favor. He selected a better deputy governor for Pennsylvania. He wrote a long and touching letter to the people, reminding them how they had flourished and grown rich and free under his liberal laws, while he had been sinking in poverty.

After that conditions improved in the affairs of Penn. The colony was better governed, and the anti-proprietary party almost disappeared. The last six or eight years of Penn's life were free from trouble. He had ceased his active work at court, for everything that could be accomplished for the Quakers in the way of protection and favorable laws had now been done. Penn spent his last years in trying to sell the government of his province to the Crown for a sum that would enable him to pay his debts and to restore his family to prosperity. But he was too particular in stipulating that the great principles of civil and religious liberty on which the colony had been established should not be infringed. He had seen how much evil had resulted to the rights of the people when the proprietors of the Jerseys parted with their right to govern. In consequence he required so many safeguards that the sale of Pennsylvania was delayed and delayed until its founder was stricken with paralysis. Penn lingered for some years, but his intellect was now too much clouded to make a valid sale. The event, however, was fortunate for Pennsylvania, which would probably otherwise have lost many valuable rights and privileges by becoming a Crown colony.

On July 30,1718, Penn died at the age of seventy-four. His widow became proprietor of the province, probably the only woman who ever became feudal proprietor of such an immense domain. She appointed excellent deputy governors and ruled with success for eight years until her death in 1726. In her time the ocean was free from enemy cruisers, and the trade of the colony grew so rapidly that the increasing sales of land and quitrents soon enabled her to pay off the mortgage on the province and all the rest of her husband's debts. It was sad that Penn did not live to see that day, which he had so hoped for in his last years, when, with ocean commerce free from depredations, the increasing money returns from his province would obviate all necessity of selling the government to the Crown.

With all debts paid and prosperity increasing, Penn's sons became very rich men. Death had reduced the children to three--John, Thomas, and Richard. Of these, Thomas became what may be called the managing proprietor, and the others were seldom heard of. Thomas lived in the colony nine years--1732 to 1741--studying its affairs and sitting as a member of the Council. For over forty years he was looked upon as the proprietor. In fact, he directed the great province for almost as long a time as his father had managed it. But he was so totally unlike his father that it is difficult to find the slightest resemblance in feature or in mind. He was not in the least disposed to proclaim or argue about religion. Like the rest of his family, he left the Quakers and joined the Church of England, a natural evolution in the case of many Quakers. He was a prosperous, accomplished, sensible, cool-headed gentleman, by no means without ability, but without any inclination for setting the world on fire. He was a careful, economical man of business, which is more than can be said of his distinguished father. He saw no visions and cared nothing for grand speculations.

Thomas Penn, however, had his troubles and disputes with the Assembly. They thought him narrow and close. Perhaps he was. That was the opinion of him held by Franklin, who led the anti-proprietary party. But at the same time some consideration must be given to the position in which Penn found himself. He had on his hands an empire, rich, fertile, and inhabited by liberty-loving Anglo-Saxons and by passive Germans. He had to collect from their land the purchase money and quitrents rapidly rolling up in value with the increase of population into millions of pounds sterling, for which he was responsible to his relatives. At the same time he had to influence the politics of the province, approve or reject laws in such a way that his family interest would be protected from attack or attempted confiscation, keep the British Crown satisfied, and see that the liberties of the colonists were not impaired and that the people were kept contented.

It was not an easy task even for a clear-headed man like Thomas Penn. He had to arrange for treaties with the Indians and for the purchase of their lands in accordance with the humane ideas of his father and in the face of the Scotch-Irish thirst for Indian blood and the French desire to turn the savages loose upon the Anglo-Saxon settlements. He had to fight through the boundary disputes with Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia, which threatened to reduce his empire to a mere strip of land containing neither Philadelphia nor Pittsburgh. The controversy with Connecticut lasted throughout the colonial period and was not definitely settled till the close of the Revolution. The charter of Connecticut granted by the British Crown extended the colony westward to the Pacific Ocean and cut off the northern half of the tract afterwards granted to William Penn. In pursuance of what they believed to be their rights, the Connecticut people settled in the beautiful valley of Wyoming. They were thereupon ejected by force by the proprietors of Pennsylvania; but they returned, only to be ejected again and again in a petty warfare carried on for many years. In the summer of 1778, the people of the valley were massacred by the Iroquois Indians. The history of this Connecticut boundary dispute fills volumes. So does the boundary dispute with Maryland, which also lasted throughout the colonial period; the dispute with Virginia over the site of Pittsburgh is not so voluminous. All these controversies Thomas Penn conducted with eminent skill, inexhaustible patience, and complete success. For this achievement the State owes him a debt of gratitude.

Thomas Penn was in the extraordinary position of having to govern as a feudal lord what was virtually a modern community. He was exercising feudal powers three hundred years after all the reasons for the feudal system had ceased to exist; and he was exercising those powers and acquiring by them vast wealth from a people in a new and wild country whose convictions, both civil and religious, were entirely opposed to anything like the feudal system. It must certainly be put down as something to his credit that he succeeded so well as to retain control both of the political government and his family's increasing wealth down to the time of the Revolution and that he gave on the whole so little offense to a high-strung people that in the Revolution they allowed his family to retain a large part of their land and paid them liberally for what was confiscated.

The wealth which came to the three brothers they spent after the manner of the time in country life. John and Richard do not appear to have had remarkable country seats. But Thomas purchased in 1760 the fine English estate of Stoke Park, which had belonged to Sir Christopher Hatton of Queen Elizabeth's time, to Lord Coke, and later to the Cobham family. Thomas's son John, grandson of the founder, greatly enlarged and beautified the place and far down into the nineteenth century it was one of the notable country seats of England. This John Penn also built another country place called Pennsylvania Castle, equally picturesque and interesting, on the Isle of Portland, of which he was Governor.

There was no great change in political conditions in Pennsylvania until about the year 1755. The French in Canada had been gradually developing their plans of spreading down the Ohio and Mississippi valleys behind the English colonies. They were at the same time securing alliances with the Indians and inciting them to hostilities against the English. But so rapidly were the settlers advancing that often the land could not be purchased fast enough to prevent irritation and ill feeling. The Scotch-Irish and Germans, it has already been noted, settled on lands without the formality of purchase from the Indians. The Government, when the Indians complained, sometimes ejected the settlers but more often hastened to purchase from the Indians the land which had been occupied. "The Importance of the British Plantations in America," published in 1731, describes the Indians as peaceful and contented in Pennsylvania but irritated and unsettled in those other colonies where they had usually been ill-treated and defrauded. This, with other evidence, goes to show that up to that time Penn's policy of fairness and good treatment still prevailed. But those conditions soon changed, as the famous Walking Purchase of 1737 clearly indicated.

The Delaware Indians regarded this measurement as a pure fraud and refused to abandon the Minisink region north of the Lehigh. The proprietors then called in the assistance of the Six Nations of New York, who ordered the Delawares off the Minisink lands. Though they obeyed, the Delawares became the relentless enemies of the white man and in the coming years revenged themselves by massacres and murder. They also broke the control which the Six Nations had over them, became an independent nation, and in the French Wars revenged themselves on the Six Nations as well as on the white men. The congress which convened at Albany in 1754 was an attempt on the part of the British Government to settle all Indian affairs in a general agreement and to prevent separate treaties by the different colonies; but the Pennsylvania delegates, by various devices of compass courses which the Indians did not understand and by failing to notify and secure the consent of certain tribes, obtained a grant of pretty much the whole of Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna. The Indians considered this procedure to be another gross fraud. It is to be noticed that in their dealings with Penn they had always been satisfied, and that he had always been careful that they should be duly consulted and if necessary be paid twice over for the land. But his sons were more economical, and as a result of the shrewd practices of the Albany purchase the Pennsylvania Indians almost immediately went over in a body to the French and were soon scalping men, women, and children among the Pennsylvania colonists. It is a striking fact, however, that in all the after years of war and rapine and for generations afterwards the Indians retained the most distinct and positive tradition of Penn's good faith and of the honesty of all Quakers. So persistent, indeed, was this tradition among the tribes of the West that more than a century later President Grant proposed to put the whole charge of the nation's Indian affairs in the hands of the Quakers. The first efforts to avert the catastrophe threatened by the alliance of the red man with the French were made by the provincial assemblies, which voted presents of money or goods to the Indians to offset similar presents from the French. The result was, of course, the utter demoralization of the savages. Bribed by both sides, the Indians used all their native cunning to encourage the bribers to bid against each other. So far as Pennsylvania was concerned, feeling themselves cheated in the first instance and now bribed with gifts, they developed a contempt for the people who could stoop to such practices. As a result this contempt manifested itself in deeds hitherto unknown in the province. One tribe on a visit to Philadelphia killed cattle and robbed orchards as they passed. The delegates of another tribe, having visited Philadelphia and received 500 pounds as a present, returned to the frontier and on their way back for another present destroyed the property of the interpreter and Indian agent, Conrad Weiser. They felt that they could do as they pleased. To make matters worse, the Assembly paid for all the damage done; and having started on this foolish business, they found that the list of tribes demanding presents rapidly increased. The Shawanoes and the Six Nations, as well as the Delawares, were now swarming to this new and convenient source of wealth.

Whether the proprietors or the Assembly should meet this increasing expense or divide it between them, became a subject of increasing controversy. It was in these discussions that Thomas Penn, in trying to keep his family's share of the expense as small as possible, first got the reputation for closeness which followed him for the rest of his life and which started a party in the province desirous of having Parliament abolish the proprietorship and put the province under a governor appointed by the Crown.

The war with the French of Canada and their Indian allies is of interest here only in so far as it affected the government of Pennsylvania. From this point of view it involved a series of contests between the proprietors and the Crown on the one side and the Assembly on the other. The proprietors and the Crown took advantage of every military necessity to force the Assembly into a surrender of popular rights. But the Assembly resisted, maintaining that they had the same right as the British Commons of having their money bills received or rejected by the Governor without amendment. Whatever they should give must be given on their own terms or not at all; and they would not yield this point to any necessities of the war.

When Governor Morris asked the Assembly for a war contribution in 1754, they promptly voted 20,000 pounds. This was the same amount that Virginia, the most active of the colonies in the war, was giving. Other colonies gave much less; New York, only 5000 pounds, and Maryland 6000 pounds. Morris, however, would not assent to the Assembly's bill unless it contained a clause suspending its effect until the King's pleasure was known. This was an attempt to establish a precedent for giving up the Assembly's charter right of passing laws which need not be submitted to the King for five years and which in the meantime were valid. The members of the Assembly very naturally refused to be forced by the necessities of the war into surrendering one of the most important privileges the province possessed. It was, they said, as much their duty to resist this invasion of their rights as to resist the French.

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