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§ 173]

PENNSYLVANIA TO 1700

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proved necessary to introduce a representative Assembly (1682). Down to the Revolution, however, the governor had more extensive prerogatives in New York than in any other colony.

172. Early Pennsylvania owed more to William Penn than any other colony did to its proprietor. Penn is one of the striking figures in history. Son of a famous and wealthy English admiral who had added Jamaica to England's colonies (§ 133), he risked his inheritance, as well as all prospect of worldly promotion, in order to join the Quakers. Happily for the world, his resources were not taken from him after all, and he kept the warm friendship of men so different from himself as the royal brothers, Charles and James.

Through this friendship, Penn was selected to help some Quaker proprietors organize the colony of New Jersey, and thereby he became interested in trying a "Holy Experiment" in a colony of his own. The Council for colonial affairs (§ 134) had already become jealous of proprietary grants; but James readily gave him the old Swedish settlements on the Delaware. Penn, however, wished a still freer field to work in, and soon he secured from King Charles, in consideration of a large debt due him from the crown, a grant of wild territory west of the Delaware between New York and Maryland.

Owing to geographical ignorance, the grant conflicted with those of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and especially with those of New York and Maryland. The adjustment with Maryland was not finally accomplished until 1767, when Mason and Dixon, two English surveyors, ran the boundary line that goes by their name- -commonly referred to in later history as the dividing line between North and South.

173. Penn's charter of 1680 (Source Book, No. 102) gave him proprietary power like that of Baltimore in Maryland, with some limitations. Settlers were guaranteed the right of appeal from colonial courts to the king in council, and all colonial laws were to be subject to a royal veto. The Quaker colony was required to tolerate the established English church, and especial emphasis was placed upon obedience to the navigation laws. A unique clause renounced all authority on the

part of the crown to tax the colonists without the consent of the Assembly or of Parliament, an indirect assertion that Parlia

ment might tax the colony.1

174. Pennsylvania knew none of the desperate hardships that make so large a part of the story of the earlier colonies. The wealthy Quakers of England and Wales helped the enterprise cordially, and the Mennonites (a German sect somewhat re

[graphic]

PENN'S TREATY WITH THE INDIANS FOR THE PURCHASE OF PENNSYL From the imaginative painting by Benjamin West, now in Independence Hall, Philadelphia.

VANIA.

sembling Quakers) poured in a large and industrious immigration. In 1687 one of their settlements voiced the first protest in America against slavery: "Those who steal or rob men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alike? Here is liberty of conscience . . . and here ought to be likewise liberty of the body.... To bring men hither or to robb or sell them against their will, we stand against."

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There were no Indian troubles, thanks to Penn's wise and just policy with the natives. Population increased rapidly, and

1 The Delaware settlements were not covered by the charter. For them a separate form of government was devised, though they belonged to the same proprietor.

$ 175]

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

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material prosperity was unbroken. By 1700 (when only twenty years old) the colony stood next to Virginia and Massachusetts in wealth and numbers. Unlike other colonies, except conquered New York, the population was at least half non-English from the first,- Welsh, German, Swedes, Dutch, French, Danes, and Finns.

175. Penn took no thought to extend his own powers. His ideas, for the time, were broad and noble.

"The nations want a precedent for a just and righteous government," he wrote. . . . "The people must rule." And again, in a letter to a friend, "I propose to leave myself and my successors no power of doing mischief- that the will of one man may not hinder the good of a whole country." To the expected settlers he proclaimed (1681), "You shall be governed by laws of your own making, and live a free and, if you will, a sober and industrious people."

The first "Frame of Government" granted by Penn to the colonists was very liberal, but it was clumsy; and even with a proprietor so unselfish and settlers so good, politics were confused by bitter quarrels for some years. Finally Penn substituted for that first charter to the settlers a new fundamental law, the Charter of 1701 (Source Book, 103 b). The colonists accepted this by formal compact, and it remained the constitution of Pennsylvania until 1776.

The governor was appointed by the proprietor, and had a veto upon all legislation. He was aided by an appointed Council, which body was not part of the legislature. The people chose a one-House Assembly each year. This body had complete control over its own sittings: the charter fixed a date for the annual meeting, and provided that the Assembly should be dissolved only by its own vote. Freedom of conscience was guaranteed to all who believed in "one Almighty God"; and the franchise was given to all who accepted Christ as the "Savior of the World" and who owned 50 acres of land or £50 personal estate.

1 Pennsylvania was the only colony in which Roman Catholics had political rights in the eighteenth century. Rhode Island disfranchised them in 1719.

The provision for religious freedom was declared not subject to amendment. All other parts of the charter could be amended by the joint action of the proprietor and six sevenths of the Assembly. This was the first written constitution to provide a definite machinery for its own amendment.

FOR FURTHER READING. - Channing's History of the United States, II, 94-129, 313-340, and Andrews' Colonial Self-Government, 75–128, 162– 201. Some student may be asked to report upon Leisler's Rebellion in New York, especially if Fiske's Dutch and Quaker Colonies is accessible. EXERCISE. - Name ten dates in the seventeenth century worthy of memorization. Point out which ones stand for some important relation between American and English history.

V. SUMMARY FOR THE PERIOD 1660-1690

In

176. The "Restoration" of Charles II began a new era for the English race; but the two divisions of Englishmen on opposite sides of the Atlantic met very different fates. England itself, the second Stuart period (1660-1688) was a time of infamy and peril. In America, it was singularly progressive and attractive. For the first time the government of the home land took an active part in fostering the plantations; and the separate colonies first began to have a common history. 177. Three great characteristics marked the period:

English territory in America was greatly expanded.

The English government established its first real "colonial department," to regulate colonial affairs and to draw the plantations into a closer dependence upon England.

This new attitude of the home government, both in its wise and unwise applications, stirred the colonists to a new insistence upon their rights of self-government.

Thus there developed an "irrepressible conflict" between the natural and wholesome English demand for imperial unity and the even more indispensable American demand for local freedom. Of this struggle the most picturesque episodes are Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia and the Andros incident in New England. The conflict was intensified by evil traits on both sides, by the personal despotic inclinations of James II

178]

SELF-GOVERNMENT SAVED

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and of some of his agents in the colonies, and by pettiness and ignorance on the part of the colonists; and each party was blind to the good on the other side. Still the unconquerable determination of the colonists to manage their own affairs, even though inspired in part by narrow prejudice, is the central fact of the period. If we mark the period by one phrase we may best call it the era of the struggle to save self-government.

178. During this period, too, the view-point for our history is shifting. Until 1660, the colonists are Englishmen · -enterprising Englishmen busied in establishing themselves on scattered outlying frontiers. After 1690, they are Americans— colonial Americans, it is true, dependent still upon England partly from custom, partly from affection, and largely from need of protection against the French on the north.

The three marks of the period treated in this chapter (§ 177) are all found, intensified, in the next seventy years, with the addition of one new element, the incessant war with the French and Indians. The story of the present chapter is continued directly in the next.

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