Chapter VII: The Settlement of Pennsylvania

Governments in their Action like Pianos.—The Reason; and illustrating
Examples.—Varieties in the Make-ups of the different Settlers in the
Colonies.—Character of Penn, and why it improves by Age.—His
Accomplishments.—His first Visit to America in 1681.—Tall Talk and
Peace.—Philadelphia, its early and late Characteristics.—Delaware sets
up for herself.—Penn in Prison.—Again in Pennsylvania.—Returns to
England by the Philadelphia Line.—Pennsylvania leaps into the
Eighteenth Century, and what she does there.

Governments and states, like pianos, go according to the works originally put into them. Unlike the grand-action instruments of the Carolinas, manufactured in the princely factory of Lord Shaftesbury and John Locke, dissimilar to the violin movement of the New England States, the banjo airs of Virginia, or “the harp with a thousand strings” set up in New York, the government of Pennsylvania combined the sweetness of the æolian harp and the free harmonious breathings of the accordion. And the music which Penn drew from it was such as “soothed the savage breast”; for Pennsylvania was the only American settlement which never heard the whirr of the Indian arrow through her woods, or the sullen blow of the death-dealing tomahawk in the settler’s hut.

PORTRAIT OF PENN.
(p. 144)
]

To complete the mosaic pavement of our American house, all kinds of materials seemed necessary. In South Carolina, French Huguenots; in Georgia, Oglethorpe the loyalist, with loyal settlers; in North Carolina, English yeomanry; in Virginia, supporters of the Episcopal Establishment and the partisans of the Stuarts; in Maryland, Roman Catholics, imbued with the largest spirit of toleration; in Delaware and New Jersey, the countrymen of Gustavus Adolphus, alive with Protestantism and mechanical invention; in New England, the representatives of Presbyterianism, Independency, and Anabaptists, in church intolerantly tolerant of those who differed from them, and jealous liberals in state matters,—an epitome of the various dissenting and freedom-claiming classes in England during the important era of the decade which preceded and succeeded the Commonwealth; in New York, the sturdy burghers of Holland, commercial, Protestant, and free, mixed with Englishmen who believed in kingly prerogative as they did in the Thirty-nine Articles; and now the drab peaceful Quakers, cherishing the inner light, simple in speech and garb, wise in their worldly wisdom, yet harmless as doves, firm, yet not defiant, keeping on their hats in presence of dignitaries, yet servants to the lowliest in the bonds of truth and love.

William Penn is one of the few characters, which, wine-like, improves by age. His cask was filled with pure juices of the grape, grown in honest soils, and ripened by the natural sun. Tested in every way, it shows no adulterations.

Descended from a father at once gifted by nature and ennobled by services to the state, which it could not requite; himself favored with large wealth; bred at Oxford University; a law student of Lincoln’s Inn; a sagacious and observing traveller over all Europe; skilled in all manly accomplishments, including swimming and the use of the broadsword; the friend of Sir Isaac Newton, of Algernon Sidney, and Lord William Russell,—he exhibited that rare union, a moral courage that dared to live out his convictions, although counter to those with whom he associated and although leading him to prison and severe persecution, and a gentleness of speech and manner that persuaded all whom he met, not only of his own personal honesty, but of the truth of his principles.

In 1681 he obtained from Charles II. a grant of all the lands embraced in the present limits of Pennsylvania; and in the following autumn he came out to prospect his large unfenced farm. Sailing up the Delaware, over fins whose ancestors had preceded him by centuries, and between banks colonized sparsely by Finns and Swedes thirty-nine years before, he landed at New Castle.

His open, sunny face, then browned with thirty-eight summers, warmed even the Indians toward him, in the frosty month of November; and thus trickled their confidence and trust: “You are our brothers. We will leave a broad path for you and us to walk in. If an Englishman falls asleep in the path, the Indian shall pass him by and say: ‘He is an Englishman; he is asleep; let him alone.’ The path shall be plain; there shall not be in it a stump to hurt the feet.”

THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE.

At the junction of the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers,—a triangle since often worked at by people who, wanting his simplicity, have tried so to draw their lines as to prove that an acute angle is larger than the other two, even if those two be very obtuse,—at this place he halted to work out the problem of a city to be governed by brotherly love. He found clumps of pine, chestnut, and walnut trees,—names which grew to the streets which displaced them. Disliking crowded towns, which he had found to be but nurseries of vice, he desired his city to be planted with gardens round each house, so as to form “a greene countrie towne.” The jealous rivals of the Quaker Emporium assert that he succeeded in carrying out his plan.

He was not pen-urious; but paid the natives for their lands. Peace, Penn, and plenty prevailed through all the borders of the baby settlement. In two years, twenty-five hundred wood-colored bonnets and broad-brims could be counted of a Sunday in the loving city. Unlike most of the other young settlements, the neck of land between the two rivers on which Penn’s pet stood was not wrung by famine or by the hand of political oppression. In March, 1683, Penn granted to the assembly, held in the growing town, an ample charter of liberty. The next year he made a trip to Europe, taking the “Philadelphia line,” which, fortunately for him, did not break before he reached shore.

In 1691 the three counties, now forming the State of Delaware, and of which Penn had procured a conveyance, took it in their heads to try their own luck at housekeeping, and set up a separate kitchen of their own. Penn wished them pot-luck; and off they went in high glee, cultivating their own Pea Patch and sowing their own oats to their heart’s content.

The next year Penn was deprived of his government and shut up in prison for two years. For some time William and Mary, it was supposed, had a taste for his head served up _à la_ John the Baptist; but this dish was at last thought to be too expensive for the English constitution, and so the ruffles around Penn’s neck were untroubled.

In 1699 Penn again visited his North American estate, took an account of stock, gave presents of all the political privileges they asked for, and went home again, for the last time, in high feather.

Meanwhile the young colony leaped vigorously over into the eighteenth century, found its supply of anthracile coal sufficient for a good house-warming, invited over Dutch, Germans, Norwegians, and Swedes, with their large horses, heavily tired wagons, and never-tiring heavy wives, who settled down on the whole territory so solidly that neither they nor it could ever be moved from that day to this.