Conceived in Liberty (90 page)

Penn’s return also meant a renewed assault upon the liberties of the colonists from yet another quarter: the imposition of feudal quitrents by the proprietary. Though the Assembly voted Penn a huge grant of two thousand pounds in 1700, to be collected from property taxes, the colonists were always reluctant to pay quitrents. Penn appointed his aide James Logan as receiver general and secretary of the colony, and Logan was to enforce payment of the quitrents. Moreover, the duties on imports levied in 1700 also went to Penn’s private purse, as did another tax on the retailing of alcoholic beverages.

The last General Assembly to meet under Penn’s personal rule convened in the fall of 1701. It was during this Assembly that the representatives of the Delaware counties walked out. Delaware secession had long been brewing. The differences between Delaware and Pennsylvania were striking. Pennsylvania was predominantly Quaker, growing rapidly, and flourishing economically. Delaware was largely Dutch Calvinist, Swedish Lutheran, and Anglican, and was comparatively stagnant. Delaware, having none of the pacifist ideals of Pennsylvania, desired a militia. As soon as Penn arrived, New Castle County in Delaware refused to send representatives to the Pennsylvania Assembly. Now with the Delaware representatives walking out, and Penn proposing to defend his proprietary against royal assault, William Penn decided to grant Delaware
its secession from Pennsylvania. Delaware took the step in 1704 and from then on the two colonies were completely separate, except for a common governor appointed by the proprietary.

The Assembly continued to be the focal point of resistance to Penn and his exactions. It passed a bill to give freemen the right to bring court action against Penn and other government officials, but Penn’s appointed Council buried the measure. The Assembly also favored a bill to repeal the liquor tax, but Penn insisted that the revenue must then be raised by some other form of taxation.

Penn still had the task of resolving the constitutional quarrels of the colony. A new constitution, the Charter of Privileges, was finally approved by Assembly and Council and signed by Penn at the end of October 1701. This charter replaced both the old charter of 1683 and the Markham Frame, and was to govern Pennsylvania for the remainder of the colony’s existence. The Assembly kept its cherished power to initiate legislation, but, significantly, the Council was now to be appointed by the proprietary governor, and was thus taken permanently out of popular control. The Council was now, as in most other royal colonies, a puppet agency of the governor, instead of a formidable elective body capable of checking the chief executive. Furthermore, the governor retained the power to veto all legislation. The Assembly was still elected according to limited suffrage, with modest property restrictions. The new charter also included guarantees of liberty of conscience as well as procedural guarantees for property against arbitrary attack by the governor.

Pennsylvania now truly resembled its fellows, especially the royal colonies. It now joined them in possessing a (proprietary) governor outside the colonists’ control and a Council appointed by the governor, and suffered the agonies of a network of taxes, duties, and quitrents. It too faced the threats of royal bureaucracy and enforcement of the crippling navigation laws. Apart from a continued reluctance to arm, a peaceful policy toward the Indians, and the limiting of capital punishment strictly to murderers, there were few traces of the unique “holy experiment” that had been established in Pennsylvania.
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The enormously greater freedom that had prevailed so much longer in Pennsylvania than in the other colonies had given, however, the colony a tremendous push toward growth and prosperity. Farmers and merchants had prospered. Philadelphia, with a population of 5,000 in 1700, had begun
the remarkable rise that was to make it one of America’s foremost cities. That city had already become the commercial port for the farmers not only of Pennsylvania, but of West New Jersey as well. In 1690 Governor Fletcher of New York admitted that “the town of Philadelphia in fourteen years’ time has become nearly equal to the city of New York in trade and riches”—an unwitting tribute to the propulsive powers of individual freedom, unencumbered by taxes and restrictions, as over against the crippling effects of monopoly and high taxation on the older colony.

It was not long before the unique Pennsylvania attribute of pacifism was also to wither away. After Penn’s return to England, James Logan remained as builder of the proprietary party, which favored taxation and quitrents, and was willing to abandon the Quaker resistance to war and to an armed militia. The leader of the popular libertarian party, dominant in the Assembly, was the Welsh Quaker David Lloyd. The Assembly consistently resisted proprietary demands for a militia; it did allow a voluntary one, which could not sustain itself. Finally, William Penn brought an end to the opposition by (1) removing from the governor’s chair the hated John Evans, who had tried to raise a war panic by false scares of French and Indian invasion, and who had illegally imposed a tax by Delaware on Philadelphia shipping (“powder money”); and (2) threatening the colonists that he would sell his proprietary rights to the Crown. Under this blackmail threat, the election of 1710 brought complete victory to the Logan-Penn forces. Under Logan’s aegis, Penn quickly voted the Crown the large sum of 2,000 pounds, which was expected to be used for military purposes against New France.

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Even the rational limitation of capital punishment to proportionate retribution against the crime of murder was destined to disappear in 1718, when Pennsylvania adopted the English criminal code, which provided for a much broader application of capital punishment. However, Pennsylvania continued to be unique in its widespread opposition to Negro slavery. As early as 1688, German Quakers, headed by Francis Pastorius, had attacked slavery, and a yearly meeting of Quakers in 1696 at least urged discouragement of further importation of Negro slaves. The Keithians had gone much further, declaring in 1693 that slavery was theft and opposed to the Golden Rule, and warning that it was only moral to buy Negroes for the purpose of freeing them.

We have seen that the colonies in the first decade of the eighteenth century were again embroiled in projects for invasions of New France. Indeed, England had only four years of respite from war with France after the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. In 1701 England and the other powers of Europe became involved in the War of the Spanish Succession, largely against the ambitions of Louis XIV. The war was marked by a series of expensive but futile attempts to invade Canada. Early expeditions failed to conquer Acadia, but a large expedition in 1709, having failed to mount an attack on Quebec, consoled itself by seizing Port Royal and the rest of Acadia. Another huge expedition was mounted against Quebec in 1711, but the invasion was so badly bungled that some ships were wrecked in a storm, and the rest hastily returned.

Peace between England and France came in 1713 with the Peace of Utrecht. Essentially beaten in the European war, France agreed to turn over Acadia (now Nova Scotia), Newfoundland, and Hudson’s Bay permanently to the English, and to recognize the Iroquois (among whom French Jesuits had made considerable headway) as being under English jurisdiction.

By the first decade of the eighteenth century, the previously highly disparate colonies had become far more uniform. The political structures of the colonies, in particular, were now more alike. By 1710 the great liberal revolutions of the 1670s and 80s had made their attempt and failed, but their failure at least succeeded in gaining a few crucial concessions from the ruling power. In each of the colonies, by 1710, a royal or proprietary governor ruled the territory. He appointed the Council and the lesser administrative
and judicial bureaucracies, and ruled in alliance with a colonial oligarchy largely created by English rule, as well as with a bureaucracy of royal officialdom. The oligarchy received all manner of subsidies and privileges by virtue of its share in the control of the state apparatus; conspicuous among these privileges were arbitrary large land grants to favored individuals and groups. In each of the colonies an elected Assembly had emerged as the representative of the popular liberal forces, in continuing battle against the power of the royal officials and their appointed upper house.

Most of the provinces were now royal colonies, and even the proprietors were not the proud independent rulers of yore. Once feisty and independent Massachusetts had now been brought under the royal heel. New York, formerly a proprietary colony lacking any elected Assembly, was now a royal colony similar to the others, with an elected Assembly possessing the taxing power partially offsetting the royal appointees. The proprietary New Jerseys were now a single royal colony. New Hampshire too was finally established as a royal colony. Of the five proprietary colonies remaining in the first decade of the eighteenth century, two (the Carolinas) were soon to be forcibly transformed into royal provinces. Furthermore, the previously remarkable religious freedom and separation of church and state in the Carolinas was now replaced by an Anglican establishment serving a small minority, particularly in North Carolina. In Maryland, Lord Baltimore had been deprived of his proprietary, and though it was soon to be returned to the Baltimore family, it was returned as an Anglican colony. Gone was Maryland as a haven for Catholics from religious persecution. In short, the former uniqueness of the various proprietary, and self-governing, colonies had now disappeared, and there was little to distinguish the royal from the remaining proprietary colonies. The same was true for originally pacifist and anarchistic Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania and its sister proprietary Delaware had been made royal colonies; William Penn received them back only on the condition that he would mold his colonies into what had become the standard North American pattern. Of the original self-governing colonies of New England, only Connecticut and Rhode Island remained as anomalies, still in the seventeenth-century framework.

A proprietary always meant that there would be annoying attempts to collect feudal quitrents from the landowners. The Crown too tried to impose quitrents, but they proved, despite continuing efforts by the governors, to be virtually impossible to collect. The dissolution of the quitrent threat meant that true feudal tenure could not take hold in America, since the proprietary could not enforce its claims to feudal tribute. Even less could such plans as Maryland’s consciously created feudal hierachy of land claims persist under American conditions of abundant cheap land and individual independence. Of course, such feudalistic institutions as servitude and Negro slavery greatly increased the privileged ownership of large
tracts of land. Fortunately, although the tobacco country of the Southern colonies and isolated areas such as the Naragansett Country and West New Jersey had large plantations, no permanent landlord-tenancy relations prevailed—even where arbitrary and privileged land grants had been extensive. For speculative land monopolists, perhaps wanting nothing better than to be feudal lords over a host of servants and subtenants, invariably decided to take their wealth quickly and reap speculative gains without suffering the risks of land ownership. The one crucial exception was New York, where receivers of huge land grants—the
manors,
following after the patroonships of the Dutch—decided to continue as landlords exacting rents from their tenants. Deciding to rent out and not to sell, the New York landlords thereby made the fateful decision to freeze land monopoly in existing huge tracts. Except for the master-slave relation, all major aspects of feudalism in the colonies disappeared rather quickly upon their introduction—New York, of course, excepted; here essentially feudal landholding continued for at least a century. As a result, New York’s growth, compared with that of the other colonies, was retarded.

Negro slaves were becoming an increasingly large part of the coerced labor force. They were used everywhere in the colonies, but especially and increasingly on the large plantations of the South.

The following tabulation is the estimated population of the American colonies in 1710 and 1680, the figures in parenthesis being the estimated number of Negroes (overwhelmingly slave).

The table reveals the comparatively slow growth of New York, the phenomenal growth of Pennsylvania, and the high proportion of Negro slaves in Virginia and South Carolina.

The religious structure of the colonies was also becoming uniform, in a sense, by 1710. Whereas in the seventeenth century religious persecution in behalf of the dominant sect had been the norm, except in such maverick colonies as Rhode Island and North Carolina, by the eighteenth century religious freedom generally prevailed. But only partially, since many colonies had their established church: for example, the Puritan in Massachusetts, the Presbyterian in Connecticut, and the Anglican in the Southern colonies.