Conceived in Liberty (71 page)

With Jennings and the Assembly working harmoniously, no feudal manors were erected in West New Jersey. A 500-acre maximum of land grants discouraged the arbitrary accumulation of large estates, and the competition for settlers led the government to make the quitrents negligible. The consequence of West New Jersey land policy then was an approach toward the libertarian homesteading principle, with land being sold at the reltively cheap rate of five to ten pounds per hundred acres.

A struggle now ensued between the angered Edward Byllinge, who refused to recognize the agreement, and the people of West New Jersey, led now by Samuel Jennings, who was in thorough accord with the liberties granted in the original Concessions. Finally, in 1683, on hearing rumors that Byllinge was coming to Jersey to take the reigns of command personally, West New Jersey revolted; the Assembly elected Jennings as governor and elected a Council to help him. The colony was now totally self-governing. The Assembly then reproclaimed the original Concessions as the colony’s fundamental law, with this addition: it provided for amendments to the Concessions by a six-sevenths vote of the Assembly.
No
amendment was to be permitted to weaken liberty of conscience, procedural protections such as the laws of evidence in trials, or guarantees of trial by jury.

Byllinge’s reaction was to have his sole right to govern immediately reconfirmed by the Crown, and then to submit the dispute to a Quaker arbitration board of fourteen, who decided for Byllinge on the peculiar ground that it was impossible to divide the right to govern into many parties. Byllinge then appointed John Skene as deputy governor. In late 1685 Skene formally took over the government and fired most of the magistrates. The Assembly, however, overwhelmingly rejected a new charter proposed by Byllinge.

By now, Edward Byllinge was not only the sole governor, but also the largest proprietor of West New Jersey, holding twenty shares of the more than one hundred. During 1687 the resident proprietors of the colony, like their counterparts in East New Jersey, established a Council of Proprietors of West New Jersey to decide on use and disposal of proprietary lands. Before his death at the turn of 1687, Byllinge sold all of his rights to Dr. Daniel Coxe, the English court physician and non-Quaker, who announced his repudiation of the Concessions.

*
See H. N. Brailsford,
The Levellers in the English Revolution
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), pp. 639–41.

The example of West Jersey taught William Penn two lessons: it was possible, given sufficient territory, to found a large Quaker settlement in America; and it was best to secure a charter for such a colony directly from the king. In the vast stretches of America, Penn envisaged a truly Quaker colony, “a Holy experiment... that an example may be set up to the nations.”

In his quest for such a charter, Penn was aided by the fact that the Crown had owed his father, Admiral Sir William Penn, the huge sum of 16,000 pounds for loans and back salary. In March 1681 the king agreed to grant young William, the admiral’s heir, proprietary ownership of the lands west of the Delaware River and north of the Maryland border in exchange for canceling the old debt. The land was to be called Pennsylvania. Penn was greatly aided in securing the charter by his friendship with the king and other high officials of the court.

The proprietary charter was not quite as absolute as the colonial charters granted earlier in the century. The proprietor could rule only with the advice and consent of an assembly of freemen—a provision quite satisfactory to Penn. The Privy Council could veto Pennsylvania’s actions, and the Crown, of course, could hear appeals from litigation in the colony. The Navigation Acts had to be enforced, and there was an ambiguous provision implying that England could impose taxes in Pennsylvania.

As soon as Penn heard news of the charter, he dispatched his cousin William Markham to be deputy governor of Pennsylvania. The latter informed the five hundred or so Swedish and Dutch residents on the west bank of the Delaware of the new charter. In the fall Markham was succeeded by
four commissioners, and they were succeeded by Thomas Holme as deputy governor in early 1682.

In May William Penn made the Frame of Government the constitution for the colony. The Frame was amended and streamlined, and became the Second Frame of 1683, also called the Charter of Liberties. The Frame provided, first, for full religious freedom for all theists. No compulsory religion was to be enforced. The Quaker ideal of religious liberty was put into practice. Only Christians, however, were to be eligible for public office; later, at the insistence of the Crown, Catholics were barred from official posts in the colony.

The government, as instituted by the Frame, comprised a governor, the proprietor; an elected Council, which performed executive and supreme judicial functions; and an Assembly, elected by the freeholders. Justices of lower courts were appointed by the governor. But while the Assembly, like those in other colonies, had the only power to levy taxes, its powers were more restricted than those of assemblies elsewhere. Only the Council could initiate laws, and the Assembly was confined to ratifying or vetoing the Council’s proposals.

William Penn himself arrived in America in the fall of 1682 to institute the new colony. He announced that the Duke’s Laws would be temporarily in force and then called an Assembly for December. The Assembly included representatives not only of three counties of Pennsylvania, but also of the three lower counties of Delaware. For Delaware—or New Castle and the lower counties on the west bank of Delaware Bay—had been secured from the Duke of York in August. While Penn’s legal title to exercising governmental functions over Delaware was dubious, he pursued it boldly. William Penn now owned the entire west bank of the Delaware River.

The Assembly confirmed the amended Frame of Government, including the declaration of religious liberty, and this code of laws constituted the “Great Law of Pennsylvania.” The three lower Delaware counties were placed under one administration, separate from Pennsylvania proper.

Penn was anxious to promote settlement as rapidly as possible, both for religious (a haven to Quakers) and for economic (income for himself) reasons. Penn advertised the virtues of the new colony far and wide throughout Europe. Although he tried to impose quitrents and extracted selling prices for land, he disposed of the land at easy terms. The prices of land were cheap. Fifty acres were granted to each servant at the end of his term of service. Fifty acres also were given for each servant brought into the colony. Land sales were mainly in moderate-sized parcels. Penn soon found that at the rate of one shilling per hundred acres, quitrents were extremely difficult to collect from the settlers.

Induced by religious liberty and relatively cheap land, settlers poured into Pennsylvania at a remarkably rapid rate, beginning in 1682. Most of the immigrants were Quakers; in addition to English Quakers came Welsh, Irish, and German Quakers. Penn laid out the capital, destined to become the
great city of Philadelphia, and changed the name of the old Swedish settlement of Upland to Chester. The German Quakers, led by Francis Daniel Pastorius, founded Germantown. In addition to Quakers, there came other groups attracted by the promise of full religious liberty: German Lutherans, Catholics, Mennonites, and Huguenots. The growth of Pennsylvania was rapid: 3,000 immigrants arrived during this first year; by 1684 the population of Philadelphia was 2,500, and of Pennsylvania, 8,000. There were over 350 dwellings in Philadelphia by the end of 1683. By 1689 there were over 12,000 people in Pennsylvania.

One of William Penn’s most notable achievements was to set a remarkable pattern of peace and justice with the Indians. In November 1682 Penn concluded the first of several treaties of peace and friendship with the Delaware Indians at Shackamaxon, near Philadelphia. The Quaker achievement of maintaining peace with the Indians for well over half a century has been disparaged; some have held that it applied to only the mild Delaware Indians, who were perpetually cowed by the fief ce but pro-English Iroquois. But this surely accounts for only part of the story. For the Quakers not only insisted on voluntary purchase of land from the Indians; they also treated the Indians as human beings, as deserving of respect and dignity as anyone else. Hence they deserved to be treated with honesty, friendliness, and evenhanded justice. As a consequence, the Quakers were treated precisely the same way in return. No drop of Quaker blood was ever shed by the Indians. So strong was the mutual trust between the races that Quaker farmers unhesitatingly left their children in the care of the Indians. Originally, too, the law provided that whenever an Indian was involved in a trial, six whites and six Indians would constitute the jury.

Voltaire, rapturous over the Quaker achievement, wittily and perceptively wrote that the Shackamaxon treaty was “the only treaty between Indians and Christians that was never sworn to and that was never broken.” Voltaire went on to say that for the Indians “it was truly a new sight to see a sovereign [William Penn] to whom everyone said ‘thou’ and to whom one spoke with one’s hat on one’s head; a government without priests, a people without arms, citizens as equal as the magistrate, and neighbors without jealousy.” Other features of the Assembly’s early laws were Puritanical acts barring dramas, drunkenness, etc. More liberally, oaths were not required and the death penalty applied only to the crime of murder. Punishment was considered for purposes of reform. Feudal primogeniture was abolished. To make justice more efficient and informal, the government undertook to appoint three arbitrators in every precinct, to hand down decisions in disputes. The Quakers, however, unsatisfactorily evaded the problem of what to do about a military force. So as not to violate Quaker principle against bearing arms, the Friends refused to serve in the militia, but they still maintained a militia in the province, and non-Quaker officials were appointed in command. But surely if armies are evil, then
voting for taxes and for laws in support of the evil is serving that evil and therefore not to be condoned.

On the question of free speech for criticizing government, laws were, unfortunately, passed prohibiting the writing or uttering of anything malicious, of anything stirring up dislike of the governor, or of anything tending to subvert the government.

The tax burden was extremely light in Pennsylvania. The only tax laws were enacted in 1683; these placed a small duty on liquor and cider, a general duty on goods, and an export duty on hides and furs. But Governor Penn promptly set aside all taxes for a year to encourage settlers. In 1684, however, another bill to raise import and other duties for William Penn’s personal use was tabled; instead, a group of leaders of Pennsylvania pointed out that the colony would progress much faster if there were no taxes to cripple trade. These men heroically promised to raise 500 pounds for Penn as a gift, if the tax bill were dropped. The tax bill was dropped, but not all the money raised.

As might have been predicted, the first political conflict in Pennsylvania came as a protest against the curious provisions of the Frame restricting the Assembly to ratifying bills initiated by the Council. In the spring of 1683, several assemblymen urged that the Assembly be granted the power to initiate legislation. Several of Penn’s devotees attacked the request as that which seemed “to render him ingratitude for his goodness towards the people.” The Assembly balked too at granting the governor veto power over itself. There are indications that the non-Quaker elements in the Assembly were particularly active in criticizing the great powers assumed by the governor and the Council. One of the leaders of the incipient opposition to Penn was the non-Quaker Nicholas More, Speaker of the Assembly in 1684. And Anthony Weston, apparently a non-Quaker, was publicly whipped on three successive days for his “presumption and contempt of this government and authority.”

Having founded the new colony and its government, and hearing of renewed persecution of Quakers at home, William Penn returned to England in the fall of 1684. He soon found his expectations of large proprietary profits from the vast royal grant to be in vain. For the people of the struggling young colony of Pennsylvania extended the principles of liberty far beyond what Penn was willing to allow. The free people of Pennsylvania would not vote for taxes, and simply would not pay the quitrents to Penn as feudal overlord. As a result, Penn’s deficits in ruling Pennsylvania were large and his fortune dwindled steadily. In late 1685 Penn ordered the officials to use force to protect the monopoly of lime production that he had granted himself, in order to prevent others from opening lime quarries.

As to quitrents, Penn, to encourage settlement, had granted a moratorium until 1685. The people insisted that payment be postponed another year, and Penn’s threatened legal proceedings were without success. Penn
was especially aggrieved that his agents in Pennsylvania failed to press his levies upon the people with sufficient zeal. Presumably, the free taxless air of Pennsylvania had contaminated them. As Penn complained in the fall of 1686: “The great fault is, that those who are there lose their authority one way or another in the spirits of the people and then they can do little with their outward powers.”

After Penn returned to England in 1684, the Council virtually succeeded him in governing the colony. The Council assumed full executive powers, and, since it was elected rather than appointed, this left Pennsylvania as a virtually self-governing colony. Though Thomas Lloyd, a Welsh Quaker, had by Penn been appointed as president of the Council, the president had virtually no power and could make no decisions on his own. Because the Council met very infrequently, and because no officials had any power to act in the interim, during these intervals Pennsylvania had almost no government at all—and seemed not to suffer from the experience. During the period from late 1684 to late 1688, there were no meetings of the Council from the end of October 1684 to the end of March 1685; none from November 1686 to March 1687; and virtually none from May 1687 to late 1688. The councillors, for one thing, had little to do. And being private citizens rather than bureaucrats, and being unpaid as councillors, they had their own struggling businesses to attend to. There was no inclination under these conditions to dabble in political affairs. The laws had called for a small payment to the councillors, but, typically, it was found to be almost impossible to extract these funds from the populace.