Conceived in Liberty (89 page)

Fletcher did not succeed in imposing a militia on Pennsylvania, although there were some formations in the Delaware counties. He believed that his main mission there was imposing taxation on Pennsylvania in order to raise funds for the New York war against New France. Fletcher convened the Assembly in May and speciously argued that any taxes it might provide him for war would go for nonbelligerent uses “and shall not be dipped in blood.” The argument was deceptive because military funds must always be divided between strictly belligerent and supportive “nonbelligerent” uses, and any aid to the latter frees additional funds for the former. Fletcher was able to drive through a tax bill, but not by this reasoning; he succeeded because he and the Council had the power to reconfirm or not reconfirm all the existing laws of Pennsylvania. To save the colony’s legal structure, as well as ward off a threatened annexation by New York, the Assembly finally and reluctantly passed a tax bill. Taxes had arrived at last in Pennsylvania and the unique glory of that colony was now no more. Pennsylvanians, like everyone else, now suffered the burdens of taxation.

As might be expected, taxation was still very low; a tax of one penny per pound had been levied on all real and personal property, and a six-shilling tax on those without assessed property. Fletcher, interested less in the
principles involved in taxation versus no taxation than in raising money for the war with Canada, was highly disappointed with this “trifling” amount of money. He believed it a petty “introduction of future supply.” Of the tax raised, half went to Fletcher and the other half to the Crown. Furthermore, the Assembly refused to agree to vote funds for salaries for the upper house. Writing home, Fletcher denounced the pacifism of the unarmed Quakers, as well as their resistance to any militia.

The Assembly gained in power during the Fletcher regime, because the new rules gave it the authority to initiate legislation. On the other hand, the Council, so powerful a body before, now became a virtual puppet of the governor, functioning, as it did, on his appointment and renewal.

Between the spring of 1693, when taxes were first imposed, and the Assembly session the following spring, the government collected a little over half of its tax quota. Of the three Delaware counties, Kent paid more than three-quarters of its assessment and Sussex about one-half; northernmost New Castle County paid nothing. Of the three counties of Pennsylvania proper, Philadelphia paid over three-quarters of its assessment, Chester paid ninety percent, and Bucks County paid nothing. In May 1694 Fletcher urged the Assembly to increase its tax revenue for war purposes. But not only did the Assembly continue the tax at the same rate; it also decided to allocate almost half of the revenue for the personal use of Lloyd and Markham for past services as deputy governors. This infuriated Fletcher, because it promised to deprive him and the Crown of the whole revenue. When Fletcher denied that the Assembly could raise taxes except for giving to the Crown, the Assembly retorted that it could appropriate money as it saw fit. Fletcher berated the Assembly for neglecting the Crown’s request to “defend” the province, and angrily dissolved the Assembly. Taxation had again gone from Pennsylvania.

Even though Fletcher had managed to enforce a monopoly of ferry service on the Schuylkill (a monopoly which had been granted by Pennsylvania) and to suppress two competing ferries, the dissolution of the Assembly now made him lose interest in Pennsylvania. If he could not raise money there, he saw no point in worrying about the affairs of the province. The colony returned to its former quasi-anarchist state, with no taxes and a Council that did little and met infrequently.

Meanwhile, William Penn was campaigning energetically for return of the province to his ownership. He abjectly promised the Crown that Pennsylvania would be good; that it would levy taxes for war, raise a militia, and obey royal orders like the other dutiful colonies. He also promised that he would continue Fletcher’s laws and keep Markham, well-liked by the Crown, as his deputy governor. As a result of this cajolery, the Crown restored Pennsylvania to William Penn in the summer of 1694.

William Penn was as good as his word. By the spring of 1695 William Markham was installed as deputy governor under the restored proprietary.
The people of Pennsylvania had long been independent in spirit from the proprietary; Penn’s surrender of all Quaker principles in order to resume his proprietorship, as well as to extract quitrents, was hardly calculated to endear him further to the colony.

Reverting back to its previous governmental form, the Council was now elected by the people. At its first meeting in the spring of 1695, Markham revealed that his major aim was the old one of Fletcher’s—imposing taxation on the colony for prosecuting the war against New France. The Council proved, however, that the spirit of liberty and independence in Pennsylvania had not slackened; it refused to consider any tax or militia bill and Markham could only end the session.

The first Assembly of the restored regime met in September. The Assembly first indicated that it would levy money for nonbelligerent military needs, but not for a militia; but it coupled debate on a tax bill with revision of the Pennsylvania constitution. It was particularly interested in safeguarding the recently acquired right of the Assembly to initiate laws. Again Markham was forced to dissolve the Assembly. Pennsylvania, remarkably, retained that unique splendor of being a taxless and armsless land. Markham could do little, and the situation of minimal government continued in this fashion for another year. In the summer of 1696, the Crown again directed Markham to build up military fortifications in the colony. Again the Council refused.

Finally, in the fall of 1696, Markham decided to usurp the powers of government. He decreed a new constitution of his own, since the colonists were not willing to return simply to the constitution of 1683. The most flagrant of Markham’s usurpations of power was his decision to return to the royal practice of appointing the Council members. The elected Council was replaced by his own appointees, chosen frankly from among the large landowners. It was by this naked usurpation and by the promulgation of his own “Markham’s Frame” as the new constitution that the governor was able to push a tax bill through the Assembly. He was able also to appropriate revenue for the New York war effort as well as an equal sum for his personal benefit. Under Markham’s Frame, the Assembly kept its right to initiate laws, and the property requirements were lowered in the rural areas and raised in the towns.

And so the Quakers, who led the Assembly, and who had been able to repulse and rout the attempts of such despotic governors as Blackwell and Fletcher to impose burdensome taxation on Pennsylvania, now succumbed to the usurper Markham. It is clear that a deal had been made; Markham obtained the tax bill, and the Assembly was assured of the power to initiate legislation. Furthermore, the Quakers, who dominated the Assembly, also won the concession of raising the property requirement in the towns, thus excluding the largely non-Quaker urban poor from the vote. As the persecution of the Keithians first indicated, the Quakers were
beginning to abandon the consistent principles of individual liberty for the alluring perquisites of political power.

A minority group of leaders formed a coalition to oppose the new dispensation. Making up the coalition were dissidents ranging from Keithians like Robert Turner to old Blackwell henchmen like Griffith Jones. Significantly, its main leader was Arthur Cook, an assistant to Markham. Cook had, along with the now deceased Lloyd, led the libertarian opposition to Governor Blackwell. The opposition gathered a petition in March 1697, signed by over a hundred, and sent to the proprietor letters attacking the major features of Markham’s Frame. The opposition particularly denounced the raising of urban suffrage requirements and the institution of taxation.

The libertarian opposition now contested Markham’s Frame; a separate set of elections were held in 1697 in Philadelphia County, under the old charter of 1683. When the elected councillors and assemblymen presented themselves and were duly rejected, Robert Turner protested the threat to “our ancient rights, liberties, and freedom,” as well as Quaker domination of the colony’s political affairs. Turner also denounced the tax bill of 1696, and urged that the money seized from its rightful owners “by that unwarrantable, illegal and arbitrary act, be forthwith restored.” He noted that people were coerced into paying the tax by threats and trickery.

Popular resistance to the reimposition of taxation in 1696 is indicated by the fact that little more than half of the taxes levied were collected. So many citizens refused to pay the tax that an additional law was passed to enforce collection.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere of accelerating statism was reflected in William Penn’s messages to Pennsylvania, in which he ordered the suppression of all trade that violated the navigation laws, and of such immoral businesses as taverns, which were proliferating in Philadelphia. And the structure and mores of Pennsylvania affairs were beginning to take on an uncomfortable resemblance to all the other English colonies in America. The “holy experiment” was beginning to fade. Pennsylvania, until now the envy—thus the occasion of hatred—of the other colonies and their royal officials because of its magnetic attractions of individual liberty, peace, and absence of taxation, was now falling into step with its neighbors.

In 1696—the year of the punitive Navigation Act and the creation of the Board of Trade—new trouble came to Pennsylvania, this time in the form of royal officialdom. Edward Randolph was particularly incensed at the individualism rampant in Pennsylvania, so he and Col. Robert Quary, appointed judge of the vice admiralty Court in Pennsylvania, launched a determined assault on the colony’s freedoms. The Tory views of Randolph and Quary recognized no subtle distinctions between the quasi-statism of Pennsylvania and the Markham Frame on the one hand, and the libertarian opposition on the other. To these royal officials, all Pennsylvania was
a pesthole and Markham the leader of the lawlessness. When in 1698 a justice of the peace issued a writ against Quary’s marshal, forcing him to return gold confiscated from a merchant engaged in illegal trade, Quary wrote to the Board of Trade of Pennsylvania’s “beloved profitable darling, illegal trade.” Quary went on to denounce the Pennsylvanians as a “perverse, obstinate and turbulent people, that will not submit to any power or laws but their own.... they have so long encouraged and carried on a most pernicious illegal trade... which hath been so advantageous to them, that no ordinary means can make them part with it.”

The new threat from the royal officials and courts easily superseded that posed by the Markham Frame to the liberties of Pennsylvania, and tended to bring new factions to the fore. So it was in the case of Quary’s marshal; David Lloyd led the prosecution and became a popular hero by denouncing admiralty courts as being “greater enemies to the rights and liberties of the people” than ship taxes in the days of Charles I. Lloyd was censured by the Council for his remarks.

In the same year, 1698, the Pennsylvania Assembly courageously passed a law granting accused violators of the Navigation Acts the common-law privileges of trial by jury, thus going counter to imperial decisions. William Penn, anxious to continue toadying to the Crown in order to keep his proprietary, hastened to veto the law, but in 1699 Quary reported that he was forced for reasons of safety to hold admiralty court sessions forty miles from Philadelphia. Furthermore, Quary complained, no one in Pennsylvania deigned to pay any attention to the decisions and orders of the admiralty court.

Finally, though, the Randolph-Quary campaign of vilification of Pennsylvania took effect. William Penn was ordered by the Board of Trade to return to Pennsylvania to take charge of the colony, enforce the navigation laws, cooperate with the admiralty courts, remove Markham from the post of lieutenant governor and David Lloyd from the office of attorney general, and establish a militia in the colony. Penn agreed to return, and arrived in December 1699.

From the time of his return, Penn tried his best to placate the Tories. Quary was made attorney general of Pennsylvania, and the marshal of the admiralty court was appointed undersheriff of the colony. But Quary, Randolph, and their allies on the Board of Trade were implacable, and attempted to eliminate all the proprietary and self-governing colonies in America. Penn would finally be forced to return to England in late 1701 to fight this enormous extension of imperial control, and he was the main force behind the bill’s defeat.

Penn carried to Pennsylvania Crown orders to impose on Pennsylvania a tyranny, that would be subservient to the Crown. Obediently, Penn vetoed the act for jury trial for Navigation Act violations, and summarily removed from office Markham, David Lloyd, and other leaders of the popular
resistance against the Navigation Acts. Not only was Lloyd ousted as attorney general and court clerk; he was also prevented from assuming his elective seat on the Council. An act against illegal trade was also passed. Concessions, already mentioned, were made to Quary and the admiralty courts. Penn moved close to the conditions of the other colonies by levying duties on imports. He did not dare attempt to create a militia, but he did maintain a military watch at the mouth of the Delaware Bay.

Penn’s actions soon engendered strong opposition in the colony. The Quakers resented Penn’s treatment of Lloyd and the other popular leaders, and the Assembly only reluctantly granted tax monies for payment of a salary to Penn. The people of Delaware also resented the act to repress the illegal trade.

With the former constitution of the colony in abeyance, Penn quickened his reactionary course by deciding to appoint his Council rather than have it elected. In protest, several members of the Council refused the appointment and were instead elected in the fall of 1700 to the Assembly. Heading this move was Joseph Growdon, who was elected as Speaker of the Assembly.

At the summer 1701 meeting of the Assembly, Penn commended the king’s request for 350 pounds for military fortifications of New York, but the Assembly resumed its old role as champion of the colony’s liberties by rejecting the request. The Delaware counties protested sending any tax money for armed forces in New York; rather, any such funds should be kept for their own defense.