Conceived in Liberty (88 page)

As to the proprietors’ request to make Perth Amboy and Burlington free ports, without harassment from New York, the Crown suggested that this would be granted only if the New Jersey Assembly raised its customs duties and regulations to equal New York’s—thus ending embarrassing free competition with the highly taxed and regulated port of New York, and increasing the royal revenue extracted from the colonies.

Lewis Morris tried to use the new accession of royal power, as well as his leading role in the colony, to establish the Anglican church. As early as
1697 he tried to pass such a bill, but it was defeated by the combined efforts of Richard Hartshorne, Quaker, and Andrew Bowne, Baptist. One of Morris’ main reasons for wanting the proprietors ousted was to further the project of an Anglican establishment. But the royal government would not establish a religion that was very weak in the colony—indeed, weak everywhere north of Maryland. The lack of a bishop resident in the colonies also handicapped the growth of Anglicanism. For example, it was difficult for one aspiring to the Anglican ministry to be ordained; either a bishop had to come from England to perform the ceremony (and few chose to come) or the would-be priest had to travel to England.

What happened, incidentally, to the ultra-Puritan settlement at Newark that was founded by the former New Haven minister Abraham Pierson in 1667? Newark continued at first as a rigorously Puritan township, but Pierson died in 1678 and was succeeded by his son, Rev. Abraham Pierson, Jr. Typical of the Puritan ministry throughout New England, New York, and New Jersey, the younger Pierson was drifting strongly toward Presbyterianism. As a result, Newark ended its established church in 1687 and threw Pierson’s salary open to voluntary subscription. Pierson was thereby obliged to move elsewhere. The ultratheocratic experiment at Newark had collapsed.

Thus New Jersey took its place after 1702 as a Northern royal colony, with appointed governor and Council, and a popularly elected Assembly. Proprietary tyranny and attempts to impose taxes, quitrents, and arbitrary land allocations ceased, but royal government, in alliance with the land claims of the proprietary, continued the power of the old oligarchy. Also ended, forcibly, were the several years of successful rebellion in New Jersey. The colony continued to be relatively individualistic, however, and to enjoy religious liberty and diversity.

Let us now return to the situation of Pennsylvania in 1690. We have seen that by almost unanimous resistance of the Quaker colony, Governor Blackwell’s harsh attempt to reimpose a state on an essentially anarchist Pennsylvania had failed ignominiously. Blackwell was forced to return to England. We have also seen that the Assembly, in the spring of 1690, refused to vote funds to aid Governor Penn; it also ignored a request from Jacob Leisler to help fight the French in King William’s War. When a former Blackwellite, Secretary William Markham, asked for a governmental organization of the colony to provide for military defense against a supposed French and Indian threat (which never materialized), the Council preserved the anarchist status of the colony by replying that any people interested might provide for their own defense
at their own expense.
And even so, any militia had to be obedient to civil authority. This effectively killed the idea of a militia in the colony; the militiamongers were reluctant to pay for the services that they professed to desire so ardently.

Furthermore, the Assembly and Council continued their pre-1688 practice of rarely meeting, of doing little even then, and therefore of rarely governing.

But William Penn, the absent proprietor, was not disposed to let Pennsylvania continue in this anarchistic idyll. In March 1691 the colony received a message from Penn announcing his aim of appointing a deputy governor and of giving Pennsylvania the option of naming its ruler. Penn expressed a preference for a five-man commission of state to serve as deputy governor, but the Pennsylvania Council overruled him and chose
Thomas Lloyd, the great leader of the anti-Blackwell resistance. Lloyd assumed his new post in April. With the accession of a continuous government official, government, unfortunately, was back in Pennsylvania, but its power remained at an absolute minimum. The Assembly and Council still met infrequently and there was still no taxation in the colony.

In the meanwhile, the leading political dispute centered on the three lower counties of (non-Quaker) Delaware. Delaware, eager for self-government of its own, objected to all of its judges being named by the central government in Philadelphia. This dispute, becoming prominent in late 1690, reached its high point when Pennsylvania was forced to reassume government. Now a single governor would appoint Delaware’s officials. Bitter at this turn of affairs and at the idea of a tax to support a Pennsylvania governor, the Delaware counties immediately decided to secede and to found their own self-governing colony. The reimposition of government had directly provoked secession by Delaware.

Governor Lloyd did his best to induce the seceding counties to return, promising, in fact, that they would never be forced by the central government to pay any of his salary and that they would be allowed full local self-government without central interference. Delaware preferred, however, to assure itself of noninterference by remaining independent.

Finally a compromise was reached in the winter of 1691–92. William Penn agreed to appoint two deputy governors: Lloyd in Pennsylvania, Markham in Delaware. These executives would control their respective appointments of officials as well as local matters, while both areas agreed to elect representatives to a joint Council and a General Assembly. Pennsylvania-Delaware now had two sets of executive officials and a common legislature.

Although a permanent government now existed and had nominal power, Pennsylvania society was still quasi-anarchic, since no taxes were yet being levied by the government. The government was still being wholly supported by voluntary subsidization from the proprietor. But in April 1692 the Council had passed a new bill for the reestablishment of taxation. Making this a particularly bitter blow was Governor Lloyd’s concurrence in the bill. The specific tax proposal was one penny per pound of property, or less than .25 percent, with a minimum payment of two shillings.

Would the May Assembly, always the great stronghold of libertarianism, ratify this drastic and far-reaching proposal to reintroduce taxation? The freemen of Philadelphia and Chester sent the Assembly petitions strongly protesting the proposed tax. The petitioners urged the assemblymen to keep “their country free from bondage and slavery, and avoiding such ill methods, as may render themselves and posterity liable thereto.” Heeding these protests, the Assembly proved itself still a stronghold of liberty and ended its session without passing any tax law.

Unable to collect quitrents or impose taxes, William Penn, rapidly losing money in his support of the Pennsylvania government, cried poverty and begged the Quakers of Pennsylvania, in early 1693, to lend him ten thousand pounds. But the practical Quakers saw no sense in making such an enormous loan at heavy risk, heavy not only because of Penn’s financial straits, but also because of his shaky position at court owing to his friendship with the deposed James II. The loan request failed.

With the government treasury literally empty, Lloyd had to refuse the requests of New York for funds to prosecute the war against New France. In 1691 and again in 1693, Lloyd replied that there was no public treasury and that he himself was in great financial difficulty from lack of tax support.

At about this time George Keith began to exert a great impact on Pennsylvania and on the neighboring Quaker colony of West New Jersey. A scholarly Scottish Quaker, Keith had as surveyor general immigrated to East New Jersey in the mid-1680s. He soon established himself as the outstanding Quaker minister of the Middle Colonies, but strong differences with the regular Quakers soon became evident. Religiously far more conservative, Keith leaned toward Presbyterianism—toward formal articles of creed, institutions of elders and deacons, and emphasis on Scripture rather than on inner light. Politically, Keith also was different from the regular Quakers; he was considerably more individualistic. Having moved to Philadelphia in 1689 and become the Quaker schoolmaster there, Keith was stimulated by the anarchistic condition of the colony. He concluded logically that
all
participation in government was counter to Quaker principles. Keith’s fervor was particularly stimulated by Pennsylvania’s return to government in the spring of 1691. And even before 1691, Quakers served, at least intermittently, as government councillors in the colony. How, asked Keith, could a Quaker minister like Thomas Lloyd or Samuel Jennings (during these years living in Pennsylvania), professing belief in nonviolence, serve as a magistrate at all? Keith, in short, wished to press on from Quaker nonviolence to pure individualistic anarchism, of the nonviolent variety.

With the religious, and especially the political, disagreements between the two groups of Quakers ever intensifying, the split finally became open in the spring of 1692. The Keithians, now calling themselves Christian Quakers, left the standard body of Quakers. As they struggled for influence over the body of the faithful, feeling ran high between the two Quaker factions. In September the Keithian Quakers were expelled and formed their own organization.

After being persecuted so widely for religious differences, how did the Quakers react to a split in their
own
ranks? Unfortunately, not very differently from other groups. The Keithians had drawn up a statement of their political and religious position, and William Bradford, the only
printer in Philadelphia and a Keithian, printed the document. In reply the Quaker officials arrested Bradford and the distributor of the pamphlet, John McComb, on the charge of printing unlicensed books without including the name of the printer. The Quaker magistrates confiscated the press and type of Bradford and withdrew McComb’s license as a retailer. The Quaker government might not yet be able to levy taxes, but it was now indeed a government with a vengeance. And from being the persecuted, the Quakers had now become the persecutors. Keith was naturally bitter; he protested the cruel treatment meted out to the two men, and denounced Governor Lloyd, Samuel Jennings, and the other magistrates on the Council. Although Keith tried to mitigate his offense in the eyes of the government by calling the quarrel strictly a religious one, the government issued a proclamation against Keith at the end of August. The magistrates demanded that Keith stop making speeches and publishing pamphlets that “have a tendency to sedition, and disturbance of the peace, as also to the subversion of the present government.”

When the Keithians persisted in their protest, the grand jury in October 1692 indicted three Keithian leaders, including Keith, for writing a book denouncing Jennings and other magistrates. The jury, incidentally, was packed with friends of Jennings, and Keith fittingly accused his enemies of constituting the judge and jury as well as the prosecution. Keith also pointed out that Quakers never should go to court, and thus resort to the use of violence, but should always settle their disputes peacefully and voluntarily. The three men, however, were convicted and fined (though the fines were never paid); and they were denied the right to appeal to the Council or to the provincial court. Keith’s charges—that ministers were being judges and were using governmental authority to suppress religious liberty—must have seemed all too familiar to the colonists in America.

While the dispute over the Keithians was raging in the colonies, William Penn was, as a close friend of the deposed James II, in deep political trouble in England. King William was also peeved at the anarchistic conditions in the colony and angered—as rulers always are—at the Quaker principles of pacifism. Moreover, the king was anxious to weld the Northern colonies into a fighting force for attacking the French; a pacifistic, virtually unarmed colony hardly suited his purpose. Consequently, when Benjamin Fletcher was named governor of New York in late 1692, he was
also
named governor of Pennsylvania and Delaware. Pennsylvania was now a royal colony.

William Penn courageously tried to raise a resistance in Pennsylvania against this invasion by royal officials. The colonists, however, cared little about the proprietary, and became critical of Fletcher only when he tried to reimpose taxation on the colony.

Fletcher formally assumed the reins of government in Pennsylvania in April 1693. As in the other royal colonies, the Council was now appointed
by the governor, instead of being elected by the people, and laws could now be vetoed by the Crown. Fletcher’s appointments took the Council out of Quaker control; of the nine new councillors, only four were Quakers, and two of these were Keithians. One immediately beneficial result of the new regime was the freeing of Keith and his friends, and the restoration to Bradford of his confiscated press. Keith and Bradford both left the inhospitable colony, however, Bradford for New York and Keith for England.

With Keith’s return to England, the Keithian movement, deprived of its founder, began to disintegrate. Some Keithians drifted into Pietism, others became Baptists or Anglicans. By the late 1690s, the only Keithian remnants were in Burlington, capital of West New Jersey; in addition, there were some “Baptist Quakers” in Pennsylvania. In 1700 Keith himself delivered the lethal blow to the movement by converting to Anglicanism; shortly thereafter, he became an ardent Anglican minister, and a missionary to America. It is ironic that in these later years, their individualistic anarchism forgotten, George Keith and William Bradford, now ardent Anglicans, helped to impose a year’s imprisonment on Rev. Samuel Bownes of Long Island—on grounds of sedition against the established Anglican church of New York.

Fletcher appointed William Markham as his lieutenant governor. Now the
de facto
operating head of the colony, Markham was the leader of the old Blackwell clique. At this time the Quakers were taken up with the Keithian schism and could not form a fully unified or consistently libertarian opposition to royal or Markhamite rule.