Title: The Quaker Colonies: A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware
Author: Fisher, Sydney George, 1856-1927
Language: English
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THE QUAKER COLONIES,

A CHRONICLE OF THE PROPRIETORS OF THE DELAWARE

Volume 8 In The Chronicles Of America Series

By Sydney G. Fisher


New Haven: Yale University Press

Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.

London: Humphrey Milford

Oxford University Press

1919


CONTENTS

     I.    THE BIRTH OF PENNSYLVANIA
     II.   PENN SAILS FOR THE DELAWARE
     III.  LIFE IN PHILADELPHIA
     IV.   TYPES OF THE POPULATION
     V.    THE TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS
     VI.   THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
     VII.  THE DECLINE OF QUAKER GOVERNMENT
     VIII. THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY
     IX.   PLANTERS AND TRADERS OF SOUTHERN JERSEY
     X.    SCOTCH COVENANTERS AND OTHERS IN EAST JERSEY
     XI.   THE UNITED JERSEYS
     XII.  LITTLE DELAWARE
     XIII. THE ENGLISH CONQUEST

     BIBLIOGRAPHY



THE QUAKER COLONIES



Chapter I. The Birth Of Pennsylvania

In 1661, the year after Charles II was restored to the throne of
England, William Penn was a seventeen-year-old student at Christ Church,
Oxford. His father, a distinguished admiral in high favor at Court, had
abandoned his erstwhile friends and had aided in restoring King Charlie
to his own again. Young William was associating with the sons of the
aristocracy and was receiving an education which would fit him to obtain
preferment at Court. But there was a serious vein in him, and while at a
high church Oxford College he was surreptitiously attending the meetings
and listening to the preaching of the despised and outlawed Quakers.
There he first began to hear of the plans of a group of Quakers to found
colonies on the Delaware in America. Forty years afterwards he wrote, "I
had an opening of joy as to these parts in the year 1661 at Oxford." And
with America and the Quakers, in spite of a brief youthful experience as
a soldier and a courtier, William Penn's life, as well as his fame, is
indissolubly linked.

Quakerism was one of the many religious sects born in the seventeenth
century under the influence of Puritan thought. The foundation principle
of the Reformation, the right of private judgment, the Quakers carried
out to its logical conclusion; but they were people whose minds had
so long been suppressed and terrorized that, once free, they rushed to
extremes. They shocked and horrified even the most advanced Reformation
sects by rejecting Baptism, the doctrine of the Trinity, and all
sacraments, forms, and ceremonies. They represented, on their best
side, the most vigorous effort of the Reformation to return to the
spirituality and the simplicity of the early Christians. But their
intense spirituality, pathetic often in its extreme manifestations,
was not wholly concerned with another world. Their humane ideas and
philanthropic methods, such as the abolition of slavery, and the reform
of prisons and of charitable institutions, came in time to be accepted
as fundamental practical social principles.

The tendencies of which Quakerism formed only one manifestation appeared
outside of England, in Italy, in France, and especially in Germany. The
fundamental Quaker idea of "quietism," as it was called, or peaceful,
silent contemplation as a spiritual form of worship and as a development
of moral consciousness, was very widespread at the close of the
Reformation and even began to be practiced in the Roman Catholic Church
until it was stopped by the Jesuits. The most extreme of the English
Quakers, however, gave way to such extravagances of conduct as trembling
when they preached (whence their name), preaching openly in the
streets and fields--a horrible thing at that time--interrupting other
congregations, and appearing naked as a sign and warning. They gave
offense by refusing to remove their hats in public and by applying to
all alike the words "thee" and "thou," a form of address hitherto used
only to servants and inferiors. Worst of all, the Quakers refused to
pay tithes or taxes to support the Church of England. As a result, the
loathsome jails of the day were soon filled with these objectors, and
their property melted away in fines. This contumacy and their street
meetings, regarded at that time as riotous breaches of the peace, gave
the Government at first a legal excuse to hunt them down; but as they
grew in numbers and influence, laws were enacted to suppress them. Some
of them, though not the wildest extremists, escaped to the colonies in
America. There, however, they were made welcome to conditions no less
severe.

The first law against the Quakers in Massachusetts was passed in 1656,
and between that date and 1660 four of the sect were hanged, one of them
a woman, Mary Dyer. Though there were no other hangings, many Quakers
were punished by whipping and banishment. In other colonies, notably New
York, fines and banishment were not uncommon. Such treatment forced the
Quakers, against the will of many of them, to seek a tract of land
and found a colony of their own. To such a course there appeared no
alternative, unless they were determined to establish their religion
solely by martyrdom.

About the time when the Massachusetts laws were enforced, the principal
Quaker leader and organizer, George Fox (1624-1691), began to consider
the possibility of making a settlement among the great forests and
mountains said to lie north of Maryland in the region drained by the
Delaware and Susquehanna rivers. In this region lay practically the only
good land on the Atlantic seaboard not already occupied. The Puritans
and Dutch were on the north, and there were Catholic and Church of
England colonies on the south in Maryland and Virginia. The middle
ground was unoccupied because heretofore a difficult coast had prevented
easy access by sea. Fox consulted Josiah Coale, a Quaker who had
traveled in America and had seen a good deal of the Indian tribes, with
the result that on his second visit to America Coale was commissioned to
treat with the Susquehanna Indians, who were supposed to have rights in
the desired land. In November, 1660, Coale reported to Fox the result
of his inquiries: "As concerning Friends buying a piece of land of the
Susquehanna Indians I have spoken of it to them and told them what thou
said concerning it; but their answer was, that there is no land that is
habitable or fit for situation beyond Baltimore's liberty till they come
to or near the Susquehanna's Fort." * Nothing could be done immediately,
the letter went on to say, because the Indians were at war with one
another, and William Fuller, a Maryland Quaker, whose cooperation was
deemed essential, was absent.


    * James Bowden's "History of the Friends in America," vol. I, p.
389


This seems to have been the first definite movement towards a Quaker
colony. Reports of it reached the ears of young Penn at Oxford and set
his imagination aflame. He never forgot the project, for seventeen is an
age when grand thoughts strike home. The adventurousness of the plan was
irresistible--a home for the new faith in the primeval forest, far from
imprisonment, tithes, and persecution, and to be won by effort worthy of
a man. It was, however, a dream destined not to be realized for many a
long year. More was needed than the mere consent of the Indians. In
the meantime, however, a temporary refuge for the sect was found in the
province of West Jersey on the Delaware, which two Quakers had bought
from Lord Berkeley for the comparatively small sum of 1000 pounds. Of
this grant William Penn became one of the trustees and thus gained
his first experience in the business of colonizing the region of his
youthful dreams. But there was never a sufficient governmental control
of West Jersey to make it an ideal Quaker colony. What little control
the Quakers exercised disappeared after 1702; and the land and situation
were not all that could be desired. Penn, though also one of the owners
of East Jersey, made no attempt to turn that region into a Quaker
colony.

Besides West Jersey the Quakers found a temporary asylum in Aquidneck,
now Rhode Island. * For many years the governors and magistrates were
Quakers, and the affairs of this island colony were largely in their
hands. Quakers were also prominent in the politics of North Carolina,
and John Archdale, a Quaker, was Governor for several years. They formed
a considerable element of the population in the towns of Long Island and
Westchester County but they could not hope to convert these communities
into real Quaker commonwealths.


    * This Rhode Island colony should be distinguished from the
settlement at Providence founded by Roger Williams with which it was
later united. See Jones, "The Quakers in the American Colonies," p. 21,
note.


The experience in the Jerseys and elsewhere very soon proved that if
there was to be a real Quaker colony, the British Crown must give
not only a title to the land but a strong charter guaranteeing
self-government and protection of the Quaker faith from outside
interference. But that the British Government would grant such valued
privileges to a sect of schismatics which it was hunting down in England
seemed a most unlikely event. Nothing but unusual influence at Court
could bring it about, and in that quarter the Quakers had no influence.

Penn never forgot the boyhood ideal which he had developed at college.
For twenty years he led a varied life--driven from home and whipped by
his father for consorting with the schismatic; sometimes in deference
to his father's wishes taking his place in the gay world at Court; even,
for a time, becoming a soldier, and again traveling in France with some
of the people of the Court. In the end, as he grew older, religious
feeling completely absorbed him. He became one of the leading Quaker
theologians, and his very earnest religious writings fill several
volumes. He became a preacher at the meetings and went to prison for his
heretical doctrines and pamphlets. At last he found himself at the age
of thirty-six with his father dead, and a debt due from the Crown of
16,000 pounds for services which his distinguished father, the admiral,
had rendered the Government.

Here was the accident that brought into being the great Quaker colony,
by a combination of circumstances which could hardly have happened
twice. Young Penn was popular at Court. He had inherited a valuable
friendship with Charles II and his heir, the Duke of York. This
friendship rested on the solid fact that Penn's father, the admiral,
had rendered such signal assistance in restoring Charles and the whole
Stuart line to the throne. But still 16,000 pounds or $80,000, the
accumulation of many deferred payments, was a goodly sum in those days,
and that the Crown would pay it in money, of which it had none too much,
was unlikely. Why not therefore suggest paying it instead in wild land
in America, of which the Crown had abundance? That was the fruitful
thought which visited Penn. Lord Berkeley and Lord Carteret had been
given New Jersey because they had signally helped to restore the Strait
family to the throne. All the more therefore should the Stuart family
give a tract of land, and even a larger tract, to Penn, whose father
had not only assisted the family to the throne but had refrained so long
from pressing his just claim for money due.

So the Crown, knowing little of the value of it, granted him the most
magnificent domain of mountains; lakes, rivers, and forests, fertile
soil, coal, petroleum, and iron that ever was given to a single
proprietor. In addition to giving Penn the control of Delaware and, with
certain other Quakers, that of New Jersey as well, the Crown placed
at the disposal of the Quakers 55,000 square miles of most valuable,
fertile territory, lacking only about three thousand square miles of
being as large as England and Wales. Even when cut down to 45,000 square
miles by a boundary dispute with Maryland, it was larger than Ireland.
Kings themselves have possessed such dominions, but never before a
private citizen who scorned all titles and belonged to a hunted sect
that exalted peace and spiritual contemplation above all the wealth and
power of the world. Whether the obtaining of this enormous tract of
the best land in America was due to what may be called the eternal
thriftiness of the Quaker mind or to the intense desire of the British
Government to get rid of these people--at any cost might be hard to
determine.

Penn received his charter in 1681, and in it he was very careful to
avoid all the mistakes of the Jersey proprietary grants. Instead of
numerous proprietors, Penn was to be the sole proprietor. Instead
of giving title to the land and remaining silent about the political
government, Penn's charter not only gave him title to the land but
a clearly defined position as its political head, and described the
principles of the government so clearly that there was little room for
doubt or dispute.

It was a decidedly feudal charter, very much like the one granted to
Lord Baltimore fifty years before, and yet at the same time it secured
civil liberty and representative government to the people. Penn owned
all the land and the colonists were to be his tenants. He was compelled,
however, to give his people free government. The laws were to be made by
him with the assent of the people or their delegates. In practice this
of course meant that the people were to elect a legislature and Penn
would have a veto, as we now call it, on such acts as the legislature
should pass. He had power to appoint magistrates, judges, and some other
officers, and to grant pardons. Though, by the charter, proprietor of
the province, he usually remained in England and appointed a deputy
governor to exercise authority in the colony. In modern phrase,
he controlled the executive part of the government and his people
controlled the legislative part.

Pennsylvania, besides being the largest in area of the proprietary
colonies, was also the most successful, not only from the proprietor's
point of view but also from the point of view of the inhabitants. The
proprietorships in Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and the Carolinas
were largely failures. Maryland was only partially successful; it was
not particularly remunerative to its owner, and the Crown deprived him
of his control of it for twenty years. Penn, too, was deprived of the
control of Pennsylvania by William III but for only about two years.
Except for this brief interval (1692-1694), Penn and his sons after him
held their province down to the time of the American Revolution in 1776,
a period of ninety-four years.

A feudal proprietorship, collecting rents from all the people, seems
to modern minds grievously wrong in theory, and yet it would be very
difficult to show that it proved onerous in practice. Under it the
people of Pennsylvania flourished in wealth, peace, and happiness. Penn
won undying fame for the liberal principles of his feudal enterprise.
His expenses in England were so great and his quitrents always so much
in arrears that he was seldom out of debt. But his children grew rich
from the province. As in other provinces that were not feudal there were
disputes between the people and the proprietors; but there was not
so much general dissatisfaction as might have been expected. The
proprietors were on the whole not altogether disliked. In the American
Revolution, when the people could have confiscated everything in
Pennsylvania belonging to the proprietary family, they not only
left them in possession of a large part of their land, but paid them
handsomely for the part that was taken.

After Penn had secured his charter in 1681, he obtained from the Duke of
York the land now included in the State of Delaware. He advertised for
colonists, and began selling land at 100 pounds for five thousand acres
and annually thereafter a shilling quitrent for every hundred acres. He
drew up a constitution or frame of government, as he called it, after
wide and earnest consultation with many, including the famous Algernon
Sydney. Among the Penn papers in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
is a collection of about twenty preliminary drafts. Beginning with one
which erected a government by a landed aristocracy, they became more
and more liberal, until in the end his frame was very much like the most
liberal government of the other English colonies in America. He had
a council and an assembly, both elected by the people. The council,
however, was very large, had seventy-two members, and was more like
an upper house of the Legislature than the usual colonial governor's
council. The council also had the sole right of proposing legislation,
and the assembly could merely accept or reject its proposals. This was
a new idea, and it worked so badly in practice that in the end the
province went to the opposite extreme and had no council or upper house
of the Legislature at all.

Penn's frame of government contained, however, a provision for its own
amendment. This was a new idea and proved to be so happy that it is now
found in all American constitutions. His method of impeachment by which
the lower house was to bring in the charge and the upper house was
to try it has also been universally adopted. His view that an
unconstitutional law is void was a step towards our modern system. The
next step, giving the courts power to declare a law unconstitutional,
was not taken until one hundred years after his time. With the advice
and assistance of some of those who were going out to his colony he
prepared a code of laws which contained many of the advanced ideas
of the Quakers. Capital punishment was to be confined to murder and
treason, instead of being applied as in England to a host of minor
offenses. The property of murderers, instead of being forfeited to the
State, was to be divided among the next of kin of the victim and of
the criminal. Religious liberty was established as it had been in Rhode
Island and the Jerseys. All children were to be taught a useful trade.
Oaths in judicial proceedings were not required. All prisons were to
be workhouses and places of reformation instead of dungeons of dirt,
idleness, and disease. This attempt to improve the prisons inaugurated
a movement of great importance in the modern world in which the part
played by the Quakers is too often forgotten.

Penn had now started his "Holy Experiment," as he called his enterprise
in Pennsylvania, by which he intended to prove that religious liberty
was not only right, but that agriculture, commerce, and all arts and
refinements of life would flourish under it. He would break the delusion
that prosperity and morals were possible only under some one particular
faith established by law. He, would prove that government could
be carried on without war and without oaths, and that primitive
Christianity could be maintained without a hireling ministry, without
persecution, without ridiculous dogmas or ritual, sustained only by its
own innate power and the inward light.



Chapter II. Penn Sails For The Delaware

The framing of the constitution and other preparations consumed the year
following Penn's receipt of his charter in 1681. But at last, on
August 30, 1682, he set sail in the ship Welcome, with about a hundred
colonists. After a voyage of about six weeks, and the loss of thirty of
their number by smallpox, they arrived in the Delaware. June would have
been a somewhat better month in which to see the rich luxuriance of
the green meadows and forests of this beautiful river. But the autumn
foliage and bracing air of October must have been inspiring enough.
The ship slowly beat her way for three days up the bay and river in
the silence and romantic loneliness of its shores. Everything indicated
richness and fertility. At some points the lofty trees of the primeval
forest grew down to the water's edge. The river at every high tide
overflowed great meadows grown up in reeds and grasses and red and
yellow flowers, stretching back to the borders of the forest and full
of water birds and wild fowl of every variety. Penn, now in the prime of
life, must surely have been aroused by this scene and by the reflection
that the noble river was his and the vast stretches of forests and
mountains for three hundred miles to the westward.

He was soon ashore, exploring the edge of his mighty domain, settling
his government, and passing his laws. He was much pleased with the
Swedes whom he found on his land. He changed the name of the little
Swedish village of Upland, fifteen miles below Philadelphia, to Chester.
He superintended laying out the streets of Philadelphia and they remain
to this day substantially as he planned them, though unfortunately too
narrow and monotonously regular. He met the Indians at Philadelphia, sat
with them at their fires, ate their roasted corn, and when to amuse him
they showed him some of their sports and games he renewed his college
days by joining them in a jumping match.

Then he started on journeys. He traveled through the woods to New York,
which then belonged to the Duke of York, who had given him Delaware; he
visited the Long Island Quakers; and on his return he went to Maryland
to meet with much pomp and ceremony Lord Baltimore and there discuss
with him the disputed boundary. He even crossed to the eastern shore of
the Chesapeake to visit a Quaker meeting on the Choptank before winter
set in, and he describes the immense migration of wild pigeons at
that season, and the ducks which flew so low and were so tame that the
colonists knocked them down with sticks.

Most of the winter he spent at Chester and wrote to England in high
spirits of his journeys, the wonders of the country, the abundance of
game and provisions, and the twenty-three ships which had arrived so
swiftly that few had taken longer than six weeks, and only three had
been infected with the smallpox. "Oh how sweet," he says, "is the quiet
of these parts, freed from the anxious and troublesome solicitations,
hurries and perplexities of woful Europe."

As the weeks and months passed, ships kept arriving with more Quakers,
far exceeding the migration to the Jerseys. By summer, Penn reported
that 50 sail had arrived within the past year, 80 houses had been built
in Philadelphia, and about 300 farms had been laid out round the town.
It is supposed that about 8000 immigrants had arrived. This was a
more rapid development than was usual in the colonies of America.
Massachusetts and Virginia had been established slowly and with much
privation and suffering. But the settlement of Philadelphia was like a
summer outing. There were no dangers, the hardships were trifling, and
there was no sickness or famine. There was such an abundance of game
close at hand that hunger and famine were in nowise to be feared. The
climate was good and the Indians, kindly treated, remained friendly for
seventy years.

It is interesting to note that in that same year, 1682, in which Penn
and his friends with such ease and comfort founded their great colony
on the Delaware, the French explorers and voyageurs from Canada, after
years of incredible hardships, had traversed the northern region of the
Great Lakes with their canoes and had passed down the Mississippi to its
mouth, giving to the whole of the Great West the name of Louisiana, and
claiming it for France. Already La Salle had taken his fleet of canoes
down the Mississippi River and had placed the arms of France on a post
at its mouth in April, 1682, only a few months before Penn reached
his newly acquired colony. Thus in the same year in which the Quakers
established in Pennsylvania their reign of liberty and of peace with
the red men, La Salle was laying the foundation of the western empire of
despotic France, which seventy years afterwards was to hurl the savages
upon the English colonies, to wreck the Quaker policy of peace, but to
fail in the end to maintain itself against the free colonies of England.

While they were building houses in Philadelphia, the settlers lived in
bark huts or in caves dug in the river bank, as the early settlers
in New Jersey across the river had lived. Pastorius, a learned German
Quaker, who had come out with the English, placed over the door of his
cave the motto, "Parva domus, sed amica bonis, procul este profani,"
which much amused Penn when he saw it. A certain Mrs. Morris was much
exercised one day as to how she could provide supper in the cave for
her husband who was working on the construction of their house. But on
returning to her cave she found that her cat had just brought in a fine
rabbit. In their later prosperous years they had a picture of the cat
and the rabbit made on a box which has descended as a family heirloom.
Doubtless there were preserved many other interesting reminiscences of
the brief camp life. These Quakers were all of the thrifty, industrious
type which had gone to West Jersey a few years before. Men of means,
indeed, among the Quakers were the first to seek refuge from the fines
and confiscations imposed upon them in England. They brought with them
excellent supplies of everything. Many of the ships carried the frames
of houses ready to put together. But substantial people of this
sort demanded for the most part houses of brick, with stone cellars.
Fortunately both brick clay and stone were readily obtainable in the
neighborhood, and whatever may have been the case in other colonies,
ships loaded with brick from England would have found it little to their
profit to touch at Philadelphia. An early description says that the
brick houses in Philadelphia were modeled on those of London, and this
type prevailed for nearly two hundred years.

It was probably in June, 1683, that Penn made his famous treaty with
the Indians. No documentary proof of the existence of such a treaty has
reached us. He made, indeed, a number of so-called treaties, which
were really only purchases of land involving oral promises between the
principals to treat each other fairly. Hundreds of such treaties have
been made. The remarkable part about Penn's dealings with the Indians
was that such promises as he made he kept. The other Quakers, too, were
as careful as Penn in their honorable treatment of the red men.
Quaker families of farmers and settlers lived unarmed among them for
generations and, when absent from home, left children in their care. The
Indians, on their part, were known to have helped white families with
food in winter time. Penn, on his first visit to the colony, made a long
journey unarmed among the Indians as far as the Susquehanna, saw the
great herds of elk on that river, lived in Indian wigwams, and learned
much of the language and customs of the natives. There need never be any
trouble with them, he said. They were the easiest people in the world to
get on with if the white men would simply be just. Penn's fair treatment
of the Indians kept Pennsylvania at peace with them for about seventy
years--in fact, from 1682 until the outbreak of the French and Indian
Wars, in 1755. In its critical period of growth, Pennsylvania was
therefore not at all harassed or checked by those Indian hostilities
which were such a serious impediment in other colonies.

The two years of Penn's first visit were probably the happiest of his
life. Always fond of the country, he built himself a fine seat on
the Delaware near Bristol, and it would have been better for him, and
probably also for the colony, if he had remained there. But he thought
he had duties in England: his family needed him; he must defend
his people from the religious oppression still prevailing; and Lord
Baltimore had gone to England to resist him in the boundary dispute. One
of the more narrow-minded of his faith wrote to Penn from England that
he was enjoying himself too much in his colony and seeking his own
selfish interest. Influenced by all these considerations, he returned
in August, 1684, and it was long before he saw Pennsylvania again--not,
indeed, until October, 1699, and then for only two years.



Chapter III. Life In Philadelphia

The rapid increase of population and the growing prosperity in
Pennsylvania during the life of its founder present a striking contrast
to the slower and more troubled growth of the other British colonies
in America. The settlers in Pennsylvania engaged at once in profitable
agriculture. The loam, clay, and limestone soils on the Pennsylvania
tide of the Delaware produced heavy crops of grain, as well as pasture
for cattle and valuable lumber from its forests. The Pennsylvania
settlers were of a class particularly skilled in dealing with the soil.
They apparently encountered none of the difficulties, due probably to
incompetent farming, which beset the settlers of Delaware, whose land
was as good as that of the Pennsylvania colonists.

In a few years the port of Philadelphia was loading abundant cargoes for
England and the great West India trade. After much experimenting with
different places on the river, such as New Castle, Wilmington, Salem,
Burlington, the Quakers had at last found the right location for a great
seat of commerce and trade that could serve as a center for the export
of everything from the region behind it and around it. Philadelphia thus
soon became the basis of a prosperity which no other townsite on the
Delaware had been able to attain. The Quakers of Philadelphia were the
soundest of financiers and men of business, and in their skillful hands
the natural resources of their colony were developed without setback
or accident. At an early date banking institutions were established in
Philadelphia, and the strongest colonial merchants and mercantile firms
had their offices there. It was out of such a sound business life that
were produced in Revolutionary times such characters as Robert Morris
and after the Revolution men like Stephen Girard.

Pennsylvania in colonial times was ruled from Philadelphia somewhat as
France has always been ruled from Paris. And yet there was a difference:
Pennsylvania had free government. The Germans and the Scotch-Irish
outnumbered the Quakers and could have controlled the Legislature,
for in 1750 out of a population of 150,000 the Quakers were only about
50,000; and yet the Legislature down to the Revolution was always
confided to the competent hands of the Quakers. No higher tribute,
indeed, has ever been paid to any group of people as governors of a
commonwealth and architects of its finance and trade.

It is a curious commentary on the times and on human nature that these
Quaker folk, treated as outcasts and enemies of good order and religion
in England and gradually losing all their property in heavy fines and
confiscations, should so suddenly in the wilderness prove the capacity
of their "Holy Experiment" for achieving the best sort of good order and
material success. They immediately built a most charming little town
by the waterside, snug and pretty with its red brick houses in the best
architectural style. It was essentially a commercial town down to the
time of the Revolution and long afterwards. The principal residences
were on Water Street, the second street from the wharves. The town in
those days extended back only as far as Fourth Street, and the State
House, now Independence Hall, an admirable instance of the local brick
architecture, stood on the edge of the town. The Pennsylvania Hospital,
the first institution of its kind to be built in America, was situated
out in the fields.

Through the town ran a stream following the line of the present Dock
Street. Its mouth had been a natural landing place for the first
explorers and for the Indians from time immemorial. Here stood a neat
tavern, the Blue Anchor, with its dovecotes in old English style,
looking out for many a year over the river with its fleet of small
boats. Along the wharves lay the very solid, broad, somber, Quaker-like
brick warehouses, some of which have survived into modern times.
Everywhere were to be found ships and the good seafaring smell of tar
and hemp. Ships were built and fitted out alongside docks where other
ships were lading. A privateer would receive her equipment of guns,
pistols, and cutlasses on one side of a wharf, while on the other side
a ship was peacefully loading wheat or salted provisions for the West
Indies.

Everybody's attention in those days was centered on the water instead of
inland on railroads as it is today. Commerce was the source of wealth of
the town as agriculture was the wealth of the interior of the province.
Every one lived close to the river and had an interest in the rise and
fall of the tide. The little town extended for a mile along the water
but scarcely half a mile back from it. All communication with other
places, all news from the world of Europe came from the ships, whose
captains brought the letters and the few newspapers which reached
the colonists. An important ship on her arrival often fired a gun and
dropped anchor with some ceremony. Immediately the shore boats swarmed
to her side; the captain was besieged for news and usually brought the
letters ashore to be distributed at the coffeehouse. This institution
took the place of the modern stock exchange, clearing house, newspaper,
university, club, and theater all under one roof, with plenty to eat and
drink besides. Within its rooms vessels and cargoes were sold; before
its door negro slaves were auctioned off; and around it as a
common center were brought together all sorts of business, valuable
information, gossip, and scandal. It must have been a brilliant scene
in the evening, with the candles lighting embroidered red and yellow
waistcoats, blue and scarlet Coats, green and black velvet, with the
rich drab and mouse color of the prosperous Quakers contrasting with the
uniforms of British officers come to fight the French and Indian wars.
Sound, as well as color, had its place in this busy and happy colonial
life. Christ Church, a brick building which still stands the perfection
of colonial architecture had been established by the Church of England
people defiantly in the midst of heretical Quakerdom. It soon possessed
a chime of bells sent out from England. Captain Budden, who brought them
in his ship Myrtilla, would charge no freight for so charitable a deed,
and in consequence of his generosity every time he and his ship appeared
in the harbor the bells were rung in his honor. They were rung on market
days to please the farmers who came into town with their wagons loaded
with poultry and vegetables. They were rung muffled in times of public
disaster and were kept busy in that way in the French and Indian wars.
They were also rung muffled for Franklin when it was learned that while
in London he had favored the Stamp Act--a means of expressing popular
opinion which the newspapers subsequently put out of date.

The severe Quaker code of conduct and peaceful contemplation contains no
prohibition against good eating and drinking. Quakers have been known to
have the gout. The opportunities in Philadelphia to enjoy the pleasures
of the table were soon unlimited. Farm, garden, and dairy products,
vegetables, poultry, beef, and mutton were soon produced in immense
quantity and variety and of excellent quality. John Adams, coming from
the "plain living and high thinking" of Boston to attend the first
meeting of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, was invited to dine
with Stephen Collins, a typical Quaker, and was amazed at the feast set
before him. From that time his diary records one after another of these
"sinful feasts," as he calls them. But the sin at which he thus looks
askance never seems to have withheld him from a generous indulgence.
"Drank Madeira at a great rate," he says on one occasion, "and took no
harm from it." Madeira obtained in the trade with Spain was the popular
drink even at the taverns. Various forms of punch and rum were common,
but the modern light wines and champagne were not then in vogue.

Food in great quantity and variety seems to have been placed on the
table at the same time, with little regard to formal courses. Beef,
poultry, and mutton would all be served at one dinner. Fruit and nuts
were placed on the table in profusion, as well as puddings and desserts
numerous and deadly. Dinners were served usually in the afternoon. The
splendid banquet which Adams describes as given to some members of the
Continental Congress by Chief Justice Chew at his country seat was held
at four in the afternoon. The dinner hour was still in the afternoon
long after the Revolution and down to the times of the Civil War. Other
relics of this old love of good living lasted into modern times. It
was not so very long ago that an occasional householder of wealth and
distinction in Philadelphia could still be found who insisted on doing
his own marketing in the old way, going himself the first thing in the
morning on certain days to the excellent markets and purchasing all the
family supplies. Philadelphia poultry is still famous the country over;
and to be a good judge of poultry was in the old days as much a point of
merit as to be a good judge of Madeira. A typical Philadelphian, envious
New Yorkers say, will still keep a line of depositors waiting at a bank
while he discourses to the receiving teller on what a splendid purchase
of poultry he had made that morning. Early in the last century a wealthy
leader of the bar is said to have continued the old practice of going
to market followed by a negro with a wheelbarrow to bring back the
supplies. Not content with feasting in their own homes, the colonial
Philadelphians were continually banqueting at the numerous taverns, from
the Coach and Horses, opposite the State House, down to the Penny
Pot Inn close by the river. At the Coach and Horses, where the city
elections were usually held, the discarded oyster shells around it had
been trampled into a hard white and smooth floor over which surged the
excited election crowds. In those taverns the old fashion prevailed of
roasting great joints of meat on a turnspit before an open fire; and to
keep the spit turning before the heat little dogs were trained to work
in a sort of treadmill cage.

In nothing is this colonial prosperity better revealed than in the
quality of the country seats. They were usually built of stone and
sometimes of brick and stone, substantial, beautifully proportioned,
admirable in taste, with a certain simplicity, yet indicating a people
of wealth, leisure, and refinement, who believed in themselves and
took pleasure in adorning their lives. Not a few of these homes on
the outskirts of the city have come down to us unharmed, and Cliveden,
Stenton, and Belmont are precious relics of such solid structure
that with ordinary care they will still last for centuries. Many were
destroyed during the Revolution; others, such as Landsdowne, the seat
of one of the Penn family, built in the Italian style, have disappeared;
others were wiped out by the city's growth. All of them, even the small
ones, were most interesting and typical of the life of the times. The
colonists began to build them very early. A family would have a solid,
brick town house and, only a mile or so away, a country house which
was equally substantial. Sometimes they built at a greater distance.
Governor Keith, for example, had a country seat, still standing though
built in the middle of the eighteenth century, some twenty-five miles
north of the city in what was then almost a wilderness.

Penn's ideal had always been to have Philadelphia what he called "a
green country town." Probably he had in mind the beautiful English towns
of abundant foliage and open spaces. And Penn was successful, for many
of the Philadelphia houses stood by themselves, with gardens round them.
The present Walnut was first called Pool Street; Chestnut was called
Winn Street; and Market was called High Street. If he could have
foreseen the enormous modern growth of the city, he might not have made
his streets so narrow and level. But the fault lies perhaps rather with
the people for adhering so rigidly and for so long to Penn's scheme,
when traffic that he could not have imagined demanded wider streets.
If he could have lived into our times he would surely have sent us very
positive directions in his bluff British way to break up the original
rectangular, narrow plan which was becoming dismally monotonous when
applied to a widely spread-out modern city. He was a theologian, but he
had a very keen eye for appearances and beauty of surroundings.



Chapter IV. Types Of The Population

The arrival of colonists in Pennsylvania in greater numbers than in
Delaware and the Jerseys was the more notable because, within a few
years after Pennsylvania was founded, persecution of the Quakers ceased
in England and one prolific cause of their migration was no more.
Thirteen hundred Quakers were released from prison in 1686 by James
II; and in 1689, when William of Orange took the throne, toleration was
extended to the Quakers and other Protestant dissenters.

The success of the first Quakers who came to America brought others
even after persecution ceased in England. The most numerous class of
immigrants for the first fifteen or twenty years were Welsh, most of
whom were Quakers with a few Baptists and Church of England people. They
may have come not so much from a desire to flee from persecution as to
build up a little Welsh community and to revive Welsh nationalism. In
their new surroundings they spoke their own Welsh language and very few
of them had learned English. They had been encouraged in their national
aspirations by an agreement with Penn that they were to have a tract of
40,000 acres where they could live by themselves. The land assigned to
them lay west of Philadelphia in that high ridge along the present main
line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, now so noted for its wealthy suburban
homes. All the important names of townships and places in that region,
such as Wynnewood, St. Davids, Berwyn, Bryn Mawr, Merion, Haverford,
Radnor, are Welsh in origin. Some of the Welsh spread round to the north
of Philadelphia, where names like Gwynedd and Penllyn remain as their
memorials. The Chester Valley bordering the high ridge of their first
settlement they called Duffrin Mawr or Great Valley.

These Welsh, like so many of the Quakers, were of a well-to-do class.
They rapidly developed their fertile land and, for pioneers, lived quite
luxuriously. They had none of the usual county and township officers
but ruled their Welsh Barony, as it was called, through the authority of
their Quaker meetings. But this system eventually disappeared. The
Welsh were absorbed into the English population, and in a couple of
generations their language disappeared. Prominent people are descended
from them. David Rittenhouse, the astronomer, was Welsh on his mother's
side. David Lloyd, for a long time the leader of the popular party and
at one time Chief Justice, was a Welshman. Since the Revolution the
Welsh names of Cadwalader and Meredith have been conspicuous.

The Church of England people formed a curious and decidedly hostile
element in the early population of Pennsylvania. They established
themselves in Philadelphia in the beginning and rapidly grew into a
political party which, while it cannot be called very strong in numbers,
was important in ability and influence. After Penn's death, his sons
joined the Church of England, and the Churchmen in the province became
still stronger. They formed the basis of the proprietary party, filled
executive offices in the Government, and waged relentless war against
the Quaker majority which controlled the Legislature. During Penn's
lifetime the Churchmen were naturally opposed to the whole government,
both executive and legislative. They were constantly sending home to
England all sorts of reports and information calculated to show that the
Quakers were unfit to rule a province, that Penn should be deprived of
his charter, and that Pennsylvania should be put under the direct rule
of the King.

They had delightful schemes for making it a strong Church of England
colony like Virginia. One of them suggested that, as the title to the
Three Lower Counties, as Delaware was called, was in dispute, it should
be taken by the Crown and given to the Church as a manor to support
a bishop. Such an ecclesiastic certainly could have lived in princely
state from the rents of its fertile farms, with a palace, retinue,
chamberlains, chancellors, feudal courts, and all the appendages of
earthly glory. For the sake of the picturesqueness of colonial history
it is perhaps a pity that this pious plan was never carried out.

As it was, however, the Churchmen established themselves with not a
little glamour and romance round two institutions, Christ Church for the
first fifty years, and after that round the old College of Philadelphia.
The Reverend William Smith, a pugnacious and eloquent Scotchman, led
them in many a gallant onset against the "haughty tribe" of Quakers, and
he even suffered imprisonment in the cause. He had a country seat on
the Schuylkill and was in his way a fine character, devoted to the
establishment of ecclesiasticism and higher learning as a bulwark
against the menace of Quaker fanaticism; and but for the coming on of
the Revolution he might have become the first colonial bishop with all
the palaces, pomp, and glory appertaining thereunto.

In spite of this opposition, however, the Quakers continued their
control of the colony, serenely tolerating the anathemas of the
learned Churchmen and the fierce curses and brandished weapons of the
Presbyterians and Scotch-Irish. Curses and anathemas were no check
to the fertile soil. Grist continued to come to the mill; and the
agricultural products poured into Philadelphia to be carried away in the
ships. The contemplative Quaker took his profits as they passed; enacted
his liberalizing laws, his prison reform, his charities, his peace with
the savage Indians; allowed science, research, and all the kindly arts
of life to flourish; and seemed perfectly contented with the damnation
in the other world to which those who flourished under his rule
consigned him.

In discussing the remarkable success of the province, the colonists
always disputed whether the credit should be given to the fertile soil
or to the liberal laws and constitution. It was no doubt due to
both. But the obvious advantages of Penn's charter over the mixed and
troublesome governmental conditions in the Jerseys, Penn's personal fame
and the repute of the Quakers for liberalism then at its zenith, and the
wide advertising given to their ideas and Penn's, on the continent of
Europe as well as in England, seem to have been the reasons why more
people, and many besides Quakers, came to take advantage of that fertile
soil.

The first great increase of alien population came from Germany, which
was still in a state of religious turmoil, disunion, and depression from
the results of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War. The reaction
from dogma in Germany had produced a multitude of sects, all yearning
for greater liberty and prosperity than they had at home. Penn and other
Quakers had made missionary tours in Germany and had preached to the
people. The Germans do not appear to have been asked to come to the
Jerseys. But they were urged to come to Pennsylvania as soon as the
charter was obtained; and many of them made an immediate response. The
German mind was then at the height of its emotional unrestraint. It was
as unaccustomed to liberty of thought as to political liberty and it
produced a new sect or religious distinction almost every day. Many
of these sects came to Pennsylvania, where new small religious bodies
sprang up among them after their arrival. Schwenkfelders, Tunkers,
Labadists, New Born, New Mooners, Separatists, Zion's Brueder,
Ronsdorfer, Inspired, Quietists, Gichtelians, Depellians, Mountain Men,
River Brethren, Brinser Brethren, and the Society of the Woman in the
Wilderness, are names which occur in the annals of the province. But
these are only a few. In Lancaster County alone the number has at
different times been estimated at from twenty to thirty. It would
probably be impossible to make a complete list; some of them, indeed,
existed for only a few years. Their own writers describe them as
countless and bewildering. Many of them were characterized by the
strangest sort of German mysticism, and some of them were inclined to
monastic and hermit life and their devotees often lived in caves or
solitary huts in the woods.

It would hardly be accurate to call all the German sects Quakers, since
a great deal of their mysticism would have been anything but congenial
to the followers of Fox and Penn. Resemblances to Quaker doctrine can,
however, be found among many of them; and there was one large sect,
the Mennonites, who were often spoken of as German Quakers. The two
divisions fraternized and preached in each other's meetings. The
Mennonites were well educated as a class and Pastorius, their leader,
was a ponderously learned German. Most of the German sects left the
Quakers in undisturbed possession of Philadelphia, and spread out into
the surrounding region, which was then a wilderness. They and all the
other Germans who afterwards followed them settled in a half circle
beginning at Easton on the Delaware, passing up the Lehigh Valley into
Lancaster County, thence across the Susquehanna and down the Cumberland
Valley to the Maryland border, which many of them crossed, and in time
scattered far to the south in Virginia and even North Carolina, where
their descendants are still found.

These German sects which came over under the influence of Penn and the
Quakers, between the years 1682 and 1702, formed a class by themselves.
Though they may be regarded as peculiar in their ideas and often in
their manner of life, it cannot be denied that as a class they were a
well-educated, thrifty, and excellent people and far superior to the
rough German peasants who followed them in later years. This latter
class was often spoken of in Pennsylvania as "the church people," to
distinguish them from "the sects," as those of the earlier migration
were called.

The church people, or peasantry of the later migration, belonged usually
to one of the two dominant churches of Germany, the Lutheran or
the Reformed. Those of the Reformed Church were often spoken of as
Calvinists. This migration of the church people was not due to the
example of the Quakers but was the result of a new policy which was
adopted by the British Government when Queen Anne ascended the throne
in 1702, and which aimed at keeping the English people at home and at
filling the English colonies in America with foreign Protestants hostile
to France and Spain.

Large numbers of these immigrants were "redemptioners," as they were
called; that is to say, they were persons who had been obliged to sell
themselves to the shipping agents to pay for their passage. On their
arrival in Pennsylvania the captain sold them to the colonists to pay
the passage, and the redemptioner had to work for his owner for a period
varying from five to ten years. No stigma or disgrace clung to any of
these people under this system. It was regarded as a necessary business
transaction. Not a few of the very respectable families of the State and
some of its prominent men are known to be descended from redemptioners.

This method of transporting colonists proved a profitable trade for
the shipping people, and was soon regularly organized like the modern
assisted immigration. Agents, called "newlanders" and "soul-sellers,"
traveled through Germany working up the transatlantic traffic by various
devices, some of them not altogether creditable. Pennsylvania proved to
be the most attractive region for these immigrants. Some of those who
were taken to other colonies finally worked their way to Pennsylvania.
Practically none went to New England, and very few, if any, to Virginia.
Indeed, only certain colonies were willing to admit them.

Another important element that went to make up the Pennsylvania
population consisted of the Scotch-Irish. They were descendants of
Scotch and English Presbyterians who had gone to Ireland to take up the
estates of the Irish rebels confiscated under Queen Elizabeth and James
I. This migration of Protestants to Ireland, which began soon after
1600, was encouraged by the English Government. Towards the middle
of the seventeenth century the confiscation of more Irish land under
Cromwell's regime increased the migration to Ulster. Many English joined
the migration, and Scotch of the Lowlands who were largely of English
extraction, although there were many Gaelic or Celtic names among them.

These are the people usually known in English history as Ulstermen--the
same who made such a heroic defense of Londonderry against James II, and
the same who in modern times have resisted home rule in Ireland because
it would bury them, they believe, under the tyranny of their old
enemies, the native Irish Catholic majority. They were more thrifty and
industrious than the native Irish and as a result they usually prospered
on the Irish land. At first they were in a more or less constant state
of war with the native Irish, who attempted to expel them. They were
subsequently persecuted by the Church of England under Charles I, who
attempted to force them to conform to the English established religion.
Such a rugged schooling in Ireland made of them a very aggressive, hardy
people, Protestants of the Protestants, so accustomed to contests and
warfare that they accepted it as the natural state of man.

These Ulstermen came to Pennsylvania somewhat later than the first
German sects; and not many of them arrived until some years after 1700.
They were not, like the first Germans, attracted to the colony by any
resemblance of their religion to that of the Quakers. On the contrary
they were entirely out of sympathy with the Quakers, except in the
one point of religious liberty; and the Quakers were certainly out of
sympathy with them. Nearly all the colonies in America received a share
of these settlers. Wherever they went they usually sought the frontier
and the wilderness; and by the time of the Revolution, they could be
found upon the whole colonial frontier from New Hampshire to Georgia.
They were quite numerous in Virginia, and most numerous along the edge
of the Pennsylvania wilderness. It was apparently the liberal laws
and the fertile soil that drew them to Pennsylvania in spite of their
contempt for most of the Quaker doctrines.

The dream of their life, their haven of rest, was for these Scotch-Irish
a fertile soil where they would find neither Irish "papists" nor Church
of England; and for this reason in America they always sought the
frontier where they could be by themselves. They could not even get on
well with the Germans in Pennsylvania; and when the Germans crowded
into their frontier settlements, quarrels became so frequent that the
proprietors asked the Ulstermen to move farther west, a suggestion which
they were usually quite willing to accept. At the close of the colonial
period in Pennsylvania the Quakers, the Church of England people, and
the miscellaneous denominations occupied Philadelphia and the region
round it in a half circle from the Delaware River. Outside of this
area lay another containing the Germans, and beyond that were the
Scotch-Irish. The principal stronghold of the Scotch-Irish was the
Cumberland Valley in Southern Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna, a
region now containing the flourishing towns of Chambersburg, Gettysburg,
Carlisle, and York, where the descendants of these early settlers are
still very numerous. In modern times, however, they have spread out
widely; they are now to be found all over the State, and they no longer
desire so strongly to live by themselves.

The Ulstermen, owing to the circumstances of their earlier life, had no
sympathy whatever with the Quaker's objection to war or with his
desire to deal fairly with the Indians and pay them for their land. As
Presbyterians and Calvinists, they belonged to one of the older and more
conservative divisions of the Reformation. The Quaker's doctrine of the
inward light, his quietism, contemplation, and advanced ideas were quite
incomprehensible to them. As for the Indians, they held that the Old
Testament commands the destruction of all the heathen; and as for paying
the savages for their land, it seemed ridiculous to waste money on such
an object when they could exterminate the natives at less cost. The
Ulstermen, therefore, settled on the Indian land as they pleased, or for
that matter on any land, and were continually getting into difficulty
with the Pennsylvania Government no less than with the Indians. They
regarded any region into which they entered as constituting a sovereign
state. It was this feeling of independence which subsequently prompted
them to organize what is known as the Whisky Rebellion when, after the
Revolution, the Federal Government put a tax on the liquor which they
so much esteemed as a product, for corn converted into whisky was more
easily transported on horses over mountain trails, and in that form
fetched a better price in the markets.

After the year 1755, when the Quaker method of dealing with the Indians
no longer prevailed, the Scotch-Irish lived on the frontier in a
continual state of savage warfare which lasted for the next forty years.
War, hunting the abundant game, the deer, buffalo, and elk, and some
agriculture filled the measure of their days and years. They paid little
attention to the laws of the province, which were difficult to enforce
on the distant frontier, and they administered a criminal code of their
own with whipping or "laced jacket," as they called it, as a punishment.
They were Jacks of all trades, weaving their own cloth and making nearly
everything they needed. They were the first people in America to develop
the use of the rifle, and they used it in the Back Country all the
way down into the Carolinas at a time when it was seldom seen in the
seaboard settlements. In those days, rifles were largely manufactured
in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and there were several famous gunsmiths in
Philadelphia. Some of the best of these old rifles have been preserved
and are really beautiful weapons, with delicate hair triggers,
gracefully curved stocks, and quaint brass or even gold or silver
mountings. The ornamentation was often done by the hunter himself, who
would melt a gold or silver coin and pour it into some design which he
had carved with his knife in the stock.

The Revolution offered an opportunity after the Ulstermen's heart,
and they entered it with their entire spirit, as they had every other
contest which involved liberty and independence. In fact, in that period
they played such a conspicuous part that they almost ruled Philadelphia,
the original home of the Quakers. Since then, spread out through the
State, they have always had great influence, the natural result of their
energy, intelligence, and love of education.

Nearly all these diverse elements of the Pennsylvania population were
decidedly sectional in character. The Welsh had a language of their own,
and they attempted, though without success, to maintain it, as well as
a government of their own within their barony independent of the regular
government of the province. The Germans were also extremely sectional.
They clung with better success to their own language, customs, and
literature. The Scotch-Irish were so clannish that they had ideas of
founding a separate province on the Susquehanna. Even the Church of
England people were so aloof and partisan that, though they lived about
Philadelphia among the Quakers, they were extremely hostile to the
Quaker rule and unremittingly strove to destroy it.

All these cleavages and divisions in the population continue in their
effects to this day. They prevented the development of a homogeneous
population. No exact statistics were taken of the numbers of the
different nationalities in colonial times; but Franklin's estimate is
probably fairly accurate, and his position in practical politics gave
him the means of knowing and of testing his calculations. About the year
1750 he estimated the population as one-third Quaker, one-third German,
and one-third miscellaneous. This gave about 50,000 or 60,000 to each of
the thirds. Provost Smith, of the newly founded college, estimated the
Quakers at only about 40,000. But his estimate seems too low. He was
interested in making out their numbers small because he was trying
to show the absurdity of allowing such a small band of fanatics and
heretics to rule a great province of the British Empire. One great
source of the Quaker power lay in the sympathy of the Germans, who
always voted on their side and kept them in control of the Legislature,
so that it was in reality a case of two-thirds ruling one-third. The
Quakers, it must be admitted, never lost their heads. Unperturbed
through all the conflicts and the jarring of races and sects, they held
their position unimpaired and kept the confidence and support of the
Germans until the Revolution changed everything.

The varied elements of population spread out in ever widening half
circles from Philadelphia as a center. There was nothing in the
character of the region to stop this progress. The country all the way
westward to the Susquehanna was easy hill, dale, and valley, covered
by a magnificent growth of large forest trees--oaks, beeches, poplars,
walnuts, hickories, and ash--which rewarded the labor of felling by
exposing to cultivation a most fruitful soil.

The settlers followed the old Indian trails. The first westward
pioneers seem to have been the Welsh Quakers, who pushed due west from
Philadelphia and marked out the course of the famous Lancaster Road,
afterwards the Lancaster Turnpike. It took the line of least resistance
along the old trail, following ridges until it reached the Susquehanna
at a spot where an Indian trader, named Harris, established himself and
founded a post which subsequently became Harrisburg, the capital of the
State.

For a hundred years the Lancaster Road was the great highway westward,
at first to the mountains, then to the Ohio, and finally to the
Mississippi Valley and the Great West. Immigrants and pioneers from all
the New England and Middle States flocked out that way to the land of
promise in wagons, or horseback, or trudging along on foot. Substantial
taverns grew up along the route; and habitual freighters and stage
drivers, proud of their fine teams of horses, grew into characters of
the road. When the Pennsylvania Railroad was built, it followed the same
line. In fact, most of the lines of railroad in the State follow Indian
trails. The trails for trade and tribal intercourse led east and west.
The warrior trails usually led north and south, for that had long been
the line of strategy and conquest of the tribes. The northern tribes,
or Six Nations, established in the lake region of New York near the
headwaters of the Delaware, the Susquehanna, and the Ohio, had the
advantage of these river valleys for descending into the whole Atlantic
seaboard and the valley of the Mississippi. They had in consequence
conquered all the tribes south of them as far even as the Carolinas and
Georgia. All their trails of conquest led across Pennsylvania.

The Germans in their expansion at first seem to have followed up the
Schuylkill Valley and its tributaries, and they hold this region to the
present day. Gradually they crossed the watershed to the Susquehanna and
broke into the region of the famous limestone soil in Lancaster County,
a veritable farmer's paradise from which nothing will ever drive them.
Many Quaker farmers penetrated north and northeast from Philadelphia
into Bucks County, a fine rolling and hilly wheat and corn region,
where their descendants are still found and whence not a few well-known
Philadelphia families have come.

The Quaker government of Pennsylvania in almost a century of its
existence largely fulfilled its ideals. It did not succeed in governing
without war; but the war was not its fault. It did succeed in governing
without oaths. An affirmation instead of an oath became the law of
Pennsylvania for all who chose an affirmation; and this law was soon
adopted by most American communities. It succeeded in establishing
religious liberty in Pennsylvania in the fullest sense of the word. It
brought Christianity nearer to its original simplicity and made it less
superstitious and cruel.

The Quakers had always maintained that it was a mistake to suppose that
their ideas would interfere with material prosperity and happiness;
and they certainly proved their contention in Pennsylvania. To Quaker
liberalism was due not merely the material prosperity, but prison reform
and the notable public charities of Pennsylvania; in both of which
activities, as in the abolition of slavery, the Quakers were leaders.
Original research in science also flourished in a marked degree in
colonial Pennsylvania. No one in those days knew the nature of thunder
and lightning, and the old explanation that they were the voice of an
angry God was for many a sufficient explanation. Franklin, by a long
series of experiments in the free Quaker colony, finally proved in 1752
that lightning was electricity, that is to say, a manifestation of
the same force that is produced when glass is rubbed with buckskin. He
invented the lightning rod, discovered the phenomenon of positive and
negative electricity, explained the action of the Leyden jar, and was
the first American writer on the modern science of political economy.
This energetic citizen of Pennsylvania spent a large part of his life
in research; he studied the Gulf Stream, storms and their causes,
waterspouts, whirlwinds; and he established the fact that the northeast
storms of the Atlantic coast usually move against the wind.

But Franklin was not the only scientist in the colony. Besides his three
friends, Kinnersley, Hopkinson, and Syng, who worked with him and helped
him in his discoveries, there were David Rittenhouse, the astronomer,
John Bartram, the botanist, and a host of others. Rittenhouse excelled
in every undertaking which required the practical application of
astronomy, He attracted attention even in Europe for his orrery which
indicated the movements of the stars and which was an advance on all
previous instruments of the kind. When astronomers in Europe were
seeking to have the transit of Venus of 1769 observed in different parts
of the world, Pennsylvania alone of the American colonies seems to
have had the man and the apparatus necessary for the work. Rittenhouse
conducted the observations at three points and won a world-wide
reputation by the accuracy and skill of his observations. The whole
community was interested in this scientific undertaking; the Legislature
and public institutions raised the necessary funds; and the American
Philosophical Society, the only organization of its kind in the
colonies, had charge of the preparations.

The American Philosophical Society had been started in Philadelphia in
1743. It was the first scientific society to be founded in America, and
throughout the colonial period it was the only society of its kind in
the country. Its membership included not only prominent men throughout
America, such as Thomas Jefferson, who were interested in scientific
inquiry, but also representatives of foreign nations. With its library
of rare and valuable collections and its annual publication of essays on
almost every branch of science, the society still continues its useful
scientific work.

John Bartram, who was the first botanist to describe the plants of the
New World and who explored the whole country from the Great Lakes to
Florida, was a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial times, farmer born and
bred. Thomas Godfrey, also a colonial Pennsylvanian, was rewarded by
the Royal Society of England for an improvement which he made in
the quadrant. Peter Collinson of England, a famous naturalist and
antiquarian of early times, was a Quaker. In modern times John Dalton,
the discoverer of the atomic theory of colorblindness, was born of
Quaker parents, and Edward Cope, of a well-known Philadelphia Quaker
family, became one of the most eminent naturalists and paleontologists
of the nineteenth century, and unaided discovered over a third of the
three thousand extinct species of vertebrates recognized by men of
science. In the field of education, Lindley Murray, the grammarian of
a hundred years ago, was a Quaker. Ezra Cornell, a Quaker, founded the
great university in New York which bears his name; and Johns Hopkins,
also a Quaker, founded the university of that name in Baltimore.

Pennsylvania deserves the credit of turning these early scientific
pursuits to popular uses. The first American professorship of botany
and natural history was established in Philadelphia College, now the
University of Pennsylvania. The first American book on a medical subject
was written in Philadelphia by Thomas Cadwalader in 1740; the first
American hospital was established there in 1751; and the first
systematic instruction in medicine. Since then Philadelphia has
produced a long line of physicians and surgeons of national and European
reputation. For half a century after the Revolution the city was the
center of medical education for the country and it still retains a large
part of that preeminence. The Academy of Natural Sciences founded in
Philadelphia in 1812 by two inconspicuous young men, an apothecary and
a dentist, soon became by the spontaneous support of the community a
distinguished institution. It sent out two Arctic expeditions, that
of Kane and that of Hayes, and has included among its members the most
prominent men of science in America. It is now the oldest as well as
the most complete institution of its kind in the country. The Franklin
Institute, founded in Philadelphia in 1824, was the result of a similar
scientific interest. It was the first institution of applied science
and the mechanic arts in America. Descriptions of the first 2900 patents
issued by the United States Government are to be found only on the pages
of its Journal, which is still an authoritative annual record.

Apart from their scientific attainments, one of the most interesting
facts about the Quakers is the large proportion of them who have
reached eminence, often in occupations which are supposed to be somewhat
inconsistent with Quaker doctrine. General Greene, the most capable
American officer of the Revolution, after Washington, was a Rhode Island
Quaker. General Mifflin of the Revolution was a Pennsylvania Quaker.
General Jacob Brown, a Bucks County Pennsylvania Quaker, reorganized the
army in the War of 1819. and restored it to its former efficiency.
In the long list of Quakers eminent in all walks of life, not only in
Pennsylvania but elsewhere, are to be found John Bright, a lover of
peace and human liberty through a long and eminent career in British
politics; John Dickinson of Philadelphia, who wrote the famous Farmer's
Letters so signally useful in the American Revolution; Whittier, the
American poet, a Quaker born in Massachusetts of a family converted from
Puritanism when the Quakers invaded Boston in the seventeenth century;
and Benjamin West, a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial times, an artist of
permanent eminence, one of the founders of the Royal Academy in England
and its president in succession to Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Wherever Quakers are found they are the useful and steady citizens.
Their eminence seems out of all proportion to their comparatively small
numbers. It has often been asked why this height of attainment should
occur among a people of such narrow religious discipline. But were
the Quakers really narrow, or were they any more narrow than other
rigorously self-disciplined people: Spartans, Puritans, soldiers whose
discipline enables them to achieve great results? All discipline is
in one sense narrow. Quaker quietude and retirement probably conserved
mental energy instead of dissipating it. In an age of superstition and
irrational religion, their minds were free and unhampered, and it was
the dominant rational tone of their thought that enabled science to
flourish in Pennsylvania.



Chapter V. The Troubles Of Penn And His Sons

The material prosperity of Penn's Holy Experiment kept on proving itself
over and over again every month of the year. But meantime great events
were taking place in England. The period of fifteen years from Penn's
return to England in 1684, until his return to Pennsylvania at the close
of the year of 1699, was an eventful time in English history. It was
long for a proprietor to be away from his province, and Penn would have
left a better reputation if he had passed those fifteen years in his
colony, for in England during that period he took what most Americans
believe to have been the wrong side in the Revolution of 1688.

Penn was closely tied by both interest and friendship to Charles II and
the Stuart family. When Charles II died in 1685 and his brother, the
Duke of York, ascended the throne as James II, Penn was equally bound
to him, because among other things the Duke of York had obtained Penn's
release in 1669 from imprisonment for his religious opinions. He became
still more bound when one of the first acts of the new King's reign
was the release of a great number of people who had been imprisoned
for their religion, among them thirteen hundred Quakers. In addition to
preaching to the Quakers and protecting them, Penn used his influence
with James to secure the return of several political offenders from
exile. His friendship with James raised him, indeed, to a position of no
little importance at Court. He was constantly consulted by the King, in
whose political policy he gradually became more and more involved.

James was a Roman Catholic and soon perfected his plans for making both
Church and State a papal appendage and securing for the Crown the right
to suspend acts of Parliament. Penn at first protested, but finally
supported the King in the belief that he would in the end establish
liberty. In his earlier years, however, Penn had written pamphlets
arguing strenuously against the same sort of despotic schemes that
James was now undertaking; and this contradiction of his former position
seriously injured his reputation even among his own people.

Part of the policy of James was to grant many favors to the Quakers and
to all other dissenting bodies in England, to release them from prison,
to give them perfect freedom of worship, and to remove the test laws
which prevented them from holding office. He thus hoped to unite them
with the Roman Catholics in extirpating the Church of England
and establishing the Papacy in its place. But the dissenters and
nonconformists, though promised relief from sufferings severer than
it is possible perhaps now to appreciate, refused almost to a man this
tempting bait. Even the Quakers, who had suffered probably more than
the others, rejected the offer with indignation and mourned the
fatal mistake of their leader Penn. All Protestant England united in
condemning him, accused him of being a secret Papist and a Jesuit in
disguise, and believed him guilty of acts and intentions of which he
was probably entirely innocent. This extreme feeling against Penn is
reflected in Macaulay's "History of England," which strongly espouses
the Whig side; and in those vivid pages Penn is represented, and very
unfairly, as nothing less than a scoundrel.

In spite of the attempts which James made to secure his position, the
dissenters, the Church of England, and Penn's own Quakers all joined
heart and soul in the Revolution of 1688, which quickly dethroned the
King, drove him from England, and placed the Prince of Orange on
the throne as William III. Penn was now for many years in a very
unfortunate, if not dangerous, position, and was continually suspected
of plotting to restore James. For three years he was in hiding to escape
arrest or worse, and he largely lost the good will and affection of the
Quakers.

Meantime, since his departure from Pennsylvania in the summer of
1684, that province went on increasing in population and in pioneer
prosperity. But Penn's quitrents and money from sales of land were far
in arrears, and he had been and still was at great expense in starting
the colony and in keeping up the plantation and country seat he had
established on the Delaware River above Philadelphia. Troublesome
political disputes also arose. The Council of eighteen members which he
had authorized to act as governor in his absence neglected to send the
new laws to him, slighted his letters, and published laws in their own
name without mentioning him or the King. These irregularities were much
exaggerated by enemies of the Quakers in England. The Council was not a
popular body and was frequently at odds with the Assembly.

Penn thought he could improve the government by appointing five
commissioners to act as governor instead of the whole Council. Thomas
Lloyd, an excellent Quaker who had been President of the Council and who
had done much to allay hard feeling, was fortunately the president of
these commissioners. Penn instructed them to act as if he himself were
present, and at the next meeting of the Assembly to annul all the laws
and reenact only such as seemed proper. This course reminds us of the
absolutism of his friend, King James, and, indeed, the date of these
instructions (1686) is that when his intimacy with that bigoted monarch
reached its highest point. Penn's theory of his power was that the frame
or constitution of government he had given the province was a contract;
that, the Council and Assembly having violated some of its provisions,
it was annulled and he was free, at least for a time, to govern as he
pleased. Fortunately his commissioners never attempted to carry out
these instructions. There would have been a rebellion and some very
unpleasant history if they had undertaken to enforce such oriental
despotism in Pennsylvania. The five commissioners with Thomas Lloyd at
their head seem to have governed without seriously troublesome incidents
for the short term of two years during which they were in power. But
in 1687 Thomas Lloyd, becoming weary of directing them, asked to be
relieved and is supposed to have advised Penn to appoint a single
executive instead of commissioners. Penn accordingly appointed Captain
John Blackwell, formerly an officer in Cromwell's army. Blackwell was
not a Quaker but a "grave, sober, wise man," as Penn wrote to a friend,
who would "bear down with a visible authority vice and faction." It was
hoped that he would vigorously check all irregularities and bring Penn
better returns from quitrents and sales of land.

But this new governor clashed almost at once with the Assembly, tried
to make them pass a militia law, suggested that the province's trade to
foreign countries was illegal, persecuted and arrested members of the
Assembly, refused to submit new laws to it, and irritated the people by
suggesting the invalidity of their favorite laws. The Quaker Assembly
withstood and resisted him until they wore him out. After a year and
one month in office he resigned at Penn's request or, according to
some accounts, at his own request. At any rate, he expressed himself as
delighted to be relieved. As a Puritan soldier he found himself no match
for a peaceable Quaker Assembly.

Penn again made the Council the executive with Thomas Lloyd as its
President. But to the old causes of unrest a new one was now added.
One George Keith, a Quaker, turned heretic and carried a number of
Pennsylvania Quakers over to the Church of England, thereby causing
great scandal. The "Lower Counties" or Territories, as the present
State of Delaware was then called, became mutinous, withdrew their
representatives from the Council, and made William Markham their
Governor. This action together with the Keithian controversy, the
disturbances over Blackwell, and the clamors of Church of England people
that Penn was absent and neglecting his province, that the Quakers would
make no military defense, and that the province might at any time fall
into the hands of France, came to the ears of King William, who was
already ill disposed toward Penn and distrusted him as a Jacobite. It
seemed hardly advisable to allow a Jacobite to rule a British colony.
Accordingly a royal order suspended Penn's governmental authority and
placed the province under Benjamin Fletcher, Governor of New York.
He undertook to rule in dictatorial fashion, threatening to annex the
province to New York, and as a consequence the Assembly had plenty of
trouble with him. But two years later, 1694, the province was returned
to Penn, who now appointed as Governor William Markham, who had served
as lieutenant-governor under Fletcher.

Markham proceeded to be high-handed with the Assembly and to administer
the government in the imperialistic style of Fletcher. But the
Assembly soon tamed him and in 1696 actually worried out of him a new
constitution, which became known as Markham's Frame, proved much more
popular than the one Penn had given, and allowed the Assembly much more
power. Markham had no conceivable right to assent to it and Penn never
agreed to it; but it was lived under for the next four years until
Penn returned to the province. While it naturally had opponents, it
was largely regarded as entirely valid, and apparently with the
understanding that it was to last until Penn objected to it.

Penn had always been longing to return to Pennsylvania and live there
for the rest of his life; but the terrible times of the Revolution
of 1688 in England and its consequences had held him back. Those
difficulties had now passed. Moreover, William III had established free
government and religious liberty. No more Quakers were imprisoned and
Penn's old occupation of securing their protection and release was gone.

In the autumn of 1699 he sailed for Pennsylvania with his family and,
arriving after a tedious three months' voyage, was well received. His
political scrapes and mistakes in England seemed to be buried in the
past. He was soon at his old enjoyable life again, traveling actively
about the country, preaching to the Quakers, and enlarging and
beautifying his country seat, Pennsbury, on the Delaware, twenty miles
above Philadelphia. As roads and trails were few and bad he usually
traveled to and from the town in a barge which was rowed by six oarsmen
and which seemed to give him great pride and pleasure.

Two happy years passed away in this manner, during which Penn seems to
have settled, not however without difficulty, a great deal of business
with his people, the Assembly, and the Indian tribes. Unfortunately
he got word from England of a bill in Parliament for the revocation
of colonial charters and for the establishment of royal governments in
their place. He must needs return to England to fight it. Shortly before
he sailed the Assembly presented him with a draft of a new constitution
or frame of government which they had been discussing with him
and preparing for some time. This he accepted, and it became the
constitution under which Pennsylvania lived and prospered for
seventy-five years, until the Revolution of 1776.

This new constitution was quite liberal. The most noticeable feature of
it was the absence of any provision for the large elective council or
upper house of legislation, which had been very unpopular. The Assembly
thus became the one legislative body. There was incidental reference
in the document to a governor's council, although there was no formal
clause creating it. Penn and his heirs after his death always appointed
a small council as an advisory body for the deputy governor. The
Assembly was to be chosen annually by the freemen and to be composed of
four representatives from each county. It could originate bills, control
its own adjournments without interference from the Governor, choose its
speaker and other officers, and judge of the qualifications and
election of its own members. These were standard Anglo-Saxon popular
parliamentary rights developed by long struggles in England and now
established in Pennsylvania never to be relaxed. Finally a clause in the
constitution permitted the Lower Counties, or Territories, under
certain conditions to establish home rule. In 1705 the Territories took
advantage of this concession and set up an assembly of their own.

Immediately after signing the constitution, in the last days of October,
1701, Penn sailed for England, expecting soon to return. But he became
absorbed in affairs in England and never saw his colony again. This was
unfortunate because Pennsylvania soon became a torment to him instead of
a great pleasure as it always seems to have been when he lived in it. He
was a happy present proprietor, but not a very happy absentee one.

The Church of England people in Pennsylvania entertained great hopes
of this proposal to turn the proprietary colonies into royal provinces.
Under such a change, while the Quakers might still have an influence in
the Legislature, the Crown would probably give the executive offices to
Churchmen. They therefore labored hard to discredit the Quakers. They
kept harping on the absurdity of a set of fanatics attempting to govern
a colony without a militia and without administering oaths of office or
using oaths in judicial proceedings. How could any one's life be safe
from foreign enemies without soldiers, and what safeguard was there for
life, liberty, and property before judges, jurors, and witnesses, none
of whom had been sworn? The Churchmen kept up their complaints for along
time, but without effect in England. Penn was able to thwart all their
plans. The bill to change the province into a royal one was never passed
by Parliament. Penn returned to his court life, his preaching, and his
theological writing, a rather curious combination and yet one by which
he had always succeeded in protecting his people. He was a favorite
with Queen Anne, who was now on the throne, and he led an expensive life
which, with the cost of his deputy governor's salary in the colony, the
slowness of his quitrent collections, and the dishonesty of the steward
of his English estates, rapidly brought him into debt. To pay the
government expense of a small colonial empire and at the same time
to lead the life of a courtier and to travel as a preacher would have
exhausted a stronger exchequer than Penn's.

The contests between the different deputy governors, whom Penn or his
descendants sent out, and the Quaker Legislature fill the annals of
the province for the next seventy years, down to the Revolution. These
quarrels, when compared with the larger national political contests of
history, seem petty enough and even tedious in detail. But, looked at
in another aspect, they are important because they disclose how
liberty, self-government, republicanism, and many of the constitutional
principles by which Americans now live were gradually developed as
the colonies grew towards independence. The keynote to all these early
contests was what may be called the fundamental principle of colonial
constitutional law or, at any rate, of constitutional practice, namely,
that the Governor, whether royal or proprietary, must always be kept
poor. His salary or income must never become a fixed or certain sum but
must always be dependent on the annual favor and grants of a legislature
controlled by the people. This belief was the foundation of American
colonial liberty. The Assemblies, not only in Pennsylvania but in other
colonies, would withhold the Governor's salary until he consented to
their favorite laws. If he vetoed their laws, he received no salary. One
of the causes of the Revolution in 1776 was the attempt of the mother
country to make the governors and other colonial officials dependent
for their salaries on the Government in England instead of on the
legislatures in the colonies.

So the squabbles, as we of today are inclined to call them, went on
in Pennsylvania--provincial and petty enough, but often very large and
important so far as the principle which they involved was concerned. The
Legislature of Pennsylvania in those days was a small body composed of
only about twenty-five or thirty members, most of them sturdy, thrifty
Quakers. They could meet very easily anywhere--at the Governor's house,
if in conference with him, or at the treasurer's office or at the loan
office, if investigating accounts. Beneath their broad brim hats and
grave demeanor they were as Anglo-Saxon at heart as Robin Hood and his
merry men, and in their ninety years of political control they built up
as goodly a fabric of civil liberty as can be found in any community in
the world.

The dignified, confident message from a deputy governor, full of
lofty admonitions of their duty to the Crown, the province, and the
proprietor, is often met by a sarcastic, stinging reply of the Assembly.
David Lloyd, the Welsh leader of the anti-proprietary party, and
Joseph Wilcox, another leader, became very skillful in drafting these
profoundly respectful but deeply cutting replies. In after years,
Benjamin Franklin attained even greater skill. In fact, it is not
unlikely that he developed a large measure of his world famous aptness
in the use of language in the process of drafting these replies. The
composing of these official communications was important work, for a
reply had to be telling and effective not only with the Governor but
with the people who learned of its contents at the coffeehouse and
spread the report of it among all classes. There was not a little
good-fellowship in their contests; and Franklin, for instance, tells us
how he used to abuse a certain deputy governor all day in the Assembly
and then dine with him in jovial intercourse in the evening.

The Assembly had a very convenient way of accomplishing its purposes in
legislation in spite of the opposition of the British Government.
Laws when passed and approved by the deputy governor had to be sent to
England for approval by the Crown within five years. But meanwhile the
people would live under the law for five years, and, if at the end of
that time it was disallowed, the Assembly would reenact the measure and
live under it again for another period.


The ten years after Penn's return to England in 1701 were full of
trouble for him. Money returns from the province were slow, partly
because England was involved in war and trade depressed, and partly
because the Assembly, exasperated by the deputy governors he appointed,
often refused to vote the deputy a salary and left Penn to bear all the
expense of government. He was being rapidly overwhelmed with debt. One
of his sons was turning out badly. The manager of his estates in England
and Ireland, Philip Ford, was enriching himself by the trust, charging
compound interest at eight per cent every six months, and finally
claiming that Penn owed him 14,000 pounds. Ford had rendered accounts
from time to time, but Penn in his careless way had tossed them aside
without examination. When Ford pressed for payment, Penn, still without
making any investigation, foolishly gave Ford a deed in fee simple of
Pennsylvania as security. Afterwards he accepted from Ford a lease of
the province, which was another piece of folly, for the lease could,
of course, be used as evidence to show that the deed was an absolute
conveyance and not intended as a mortgage.

This unfortunate business Ford kept quiet during his lifetime. But on
his death his widow and son made everything public, professed to be
the proprietors of Pennsylvania, and sued Penn for 2000 pounds rent in
arrears. They obtained a judgment for the amount claimed and, as Penn
could not pay, they had him arrested and imprisoned for debt. For nine
months he was locked up in the debtors' prison, the "Old Bailey," and
there he might have remained indefinitely if some of his friends had
not raised enough money to compromise with the Fords. Isaac Norris,
a prominent Quaker from Pennsylvania, happened at that time to be in
England and exerted himself to set Penn free and save the province from
further disgrace. After this there was a reaction in Penn's favor. He
selected a better deputy governor for Pennsylvania. He wrote a long and
touching letter to the people, reminding them how they had flourished
and grown rich and free under his liberal laws, while he had been
sinking in poverty.

After that conditions improved in the affairs of Penn. The colony was
better governed, and the anti-proprietary party almost disappeared. The
last six or eight years of Penn's life were free from trouble. He
had ceased his active work at court, for everything that could be
accomplished for the Quakers in the way of protection and favorable
laws had now been done. Penn spent his last years in trying to sell the
government of his province to the Crown for a sum that would enable him
to pay his debts and to restore his family to prosperity. But he was
too particular in stipulating that the great principles of civil and
religious liberty on which the colony had been established should not be
infringed. He had seen how much evil had resulted to the rights of the
people when the proprietors of the Jerseys parted with their right to
govern. In consequence he required so many safeguards that the sale of
Pennsylvania was delayed and delayed until its founder was stricken with
paralysis. Penn lingered for some years, but his intellect was now too
much clouded to make a valid sale. The event, however, was fortunate
for Pennsylvania, which would probably otherwise have lost many valuable
rights and privileges by becoming a Crown colony.

On July 30,1718, Penn died at the age of seventy-four. His widow became
proprietor of the province, probably the only woman who ever became
feudal proprietor of such an immense domain. She appointed excellent
deputy governors and ruled with success for eight years until her death
in 1726. In her time the ocean was free from enemy cruisers, and the
trade of the colony grew so rapidly that the increasing sales of land
and quitrents soon enabled her to pay off the mortgage on the province
and all the rest of her husband's debts. It was sad that Penn did not
live to see that day, which he had so hoped for in his last years, when,
with ocean commerce free from depredations, the increasing money returns
from his province would obviate all necessity of selling the government
to the Crown.

With all debts paid and prosperity increasing, Penn's sons became very
rich men. Death had reduced the children to three--John, Thomas,
and Richard. Of these, Thomas became what may be called the managing
proprietor, and the others were seldom heard of. Thomas lived in the
colony nine years--1732 to 1741--studying its affairs and sitting as a
member of the Council. For over forty years he was looked upon as the
proprietor. In fact, he directed the great province for almost as long
a time as his father had managed it. But he was so totally unlike his
father that it is difficult to find the slightest resemblance in feature
or in mind. He was not in the least disposed to proclaim or argue about
religion. Like the rest of his family, he left the Quakers and joined
the Church of England, a natural evolution in the case of many Quakers.
He was a prosperous, accomplished, sensible, cool-headed gentleman, by
no means without ability, but without any inclination for setting the
world on fire. He was a careful, economical man of business, which is
more than can be said of his distinguished father. He saw no visions and
cared nothing for grand speculations.

Thomas Penn, however, had his troubles and disputes with the Assembly.
They thought him narrow and close. Perhaps he was. That was the opinion
of him held by Franklin, who led the anti-proprietary party. But at the
same time some consideration must be given to the position in which
Penn found himself. He had on his hands an empire, rich, fertile, and
inhabited by liberty-loving Anglo-Saxons and by passive Germans. He
had to collect from their land the purchase money and quitrents rapidly
rolling up in value with the increase of population into millions of
pounds sterling, for which he was responsible to his relatives. At the
same time he had to influence the politics of the province, approve or
reject laws in such a way that his family interest would be protected
from attack or attempted confiscation, keep the British Crown satisfied,
and see that the liberties of the colonists were not impaired and that
the people were kept contented.

It was not an easy task even for a clear-headed man like Thomas Penn.
He had to arrange for treaties with the Indians and for the purchase of
their lands in accordance with the humane ideas of his father and in the
face of the Scotch-Irish thirst for Indian blood and the French desire
to turn the savages loose upon the Anglo-Saxon settlements. He had to
fight through the boundary disputes with Connecticut, Maryland, and
Virginia, which threatened to reduce his empire to a mere strip of land
containing neither Philadelphia nor Pittsburgh. The controversy with
Connecticut lasted throughout the colonial period and was not definitely
settled till the close of the Revolution. The charter of Connecticut
granted by the British Crown extended the colony westward to the Pacific
Ocean and cut off the northern half of the tract afterwards granted to
William Penn. In pursuance of what they believed to be their rights, the
Connecticut people settled in the beautiful valley of Wyoming. They were
thereupon ejected by force by the proprietors of Pennsylvania; but they
returned, only to be ejected again and again in a petty warfare carried
on for many years. In the summer of 1778, the people of the valley
were massacred by the Iroquois Indians. The history of this Connecticut
boundary dispute fills volumes. So does the boundary dispute with
Maryland, which also lasted throughout the colonial period; the dispute
with Virginia over the site of Pittsburgh is not so voluminous.
All these controversies Thomas Penn conducted with eminent skill,
inexhaustible patience, and complete success. For this achievement the
State owes him a debt of gratitude.

Thomas Penn was in the extraordinary position of having to govern as
a feudal lord what was virtually a modern community. He was exercising
feudal powers three hundred years after all the reasons for the feudal
system had ceased to exist; and he was exercising those powers and
acquiring by them vast wealth from a people in a new and wild country
whose convictions, both civil and religious, were entirely opposed
to anything like the feudal system. It must certainly be put down as
something to his credit that he succeeded so well as to retain control
both of the political government and his family's increasing wealth down
to the time of the Revolution and that he gave on the whole so little
offense to a high-strung people that in the Revolution they allowed his
family to retain a large part of their land and paid them liberally for
what was confiscated.

The wealth which came to the three brothers they spent after the manner
of the time in country life. John and Richard do not appear to have had
remarkable country seats. But Thomas purchased in 1760 the fine English
estate of Stoke Park, which had belonged to Sir Christopher Hatton of
Queen Elizabeth's time, to Lord Coke, and later to the Cobham family.
Thomas's son John, grandson of the founder, greatly enlarged and
beautified the place and far down into the nineteenth century it was
one of the notable country seats of England. This John Penn also built
another country place called Pennsylvania Castle, equally picturesque
and interesting, on the Isle of Portland, of which he was Governor.



Chapter VI. The French And Indian War

There was no great change in political conditions in Pennsylvania until
about the year 1755. The French in Canada had been gradually developing
their plans of spreading down the Ohio and Mississippi valleys behind
the English colonies. They were at the same time securing alliances with
the Indians and inciting them to hostilities against the English. But
so rapidly were the settlers advancing that often the land could not
be purchased fast enough to prevent irritation and ill feeling. The
Scotch-Irish and Germans, it has already been noted, settled on lands
without the formality of purchase from the Indians. The Government, when
the Indians complained, sometimes ejected the settlers but more often
hastened to purchase from the Indians the land which had been occupied.
"The Importance of the British Plantations in America," published in
1731, describes the Indians as peaceful and contented in Pennsylvania
but irritated and unsettled in those other colonies where they had
usually been ill-treated and defrauded. This, with other evidence,
goes to show that up to that time Penn's policy of fairness and good
treatment still prevailed. But those conditions soon changed, as the
famous Walking Purchase of 1737 clearly indicated.

The Walking Purchase had provided for the sale of some lands along the
Delaware below the Lehigh on a line starting at Wrightstown, a few miles
back from the Delaware not far above Trenton, and running northwest,
parallel with the river, as far as a man could walk in a day and a half.
The Indians understood that this tract would extend northward only to
the Lehigh, which was the ordinary journey of a day and a half. The
proprietors, however, surveyed the line beforehand, marked the trees,
engaged the fastest walkers and, with horses to carry provisions,
started their men at sunrise. By running a large part of the way, at
the end of a day and a half these men had reached a point thirty miles
beyond the Lehigh.

The Delaware Indians regarded this measurement as a pure fraud and
refused to abandon the Minisink region north of the Lehigh. The
proprietors then called in the assistance of the Six Nations of New
York, who ordered the Delawares off the Minisink lands. Though they
obeyed, the Delawares became the relentless enemies of the white man and
in the coming years revenged themselves by massacres and murder. They
also broke the control which the Six Nations had over them, became an
independent nation, and in the French Wars revenged themselves on the
Six Nations as well as on the white men. The congress which convened at
Albany in 1754 was an attempt on the part of the British Government to
settle all Indian affairs in a general agreement and to prevent separate
treaties by the different colonies; but the Pennsylvania delegates, by
various devices of compass courses which the Indians did not understand
and by failing to notify and secure the consent of certain tribes,
obtained a grant of pretty much the whole of Pennsylvania west of the
Susquehanna. The Indians considered this procedure to be another gross
fraud. It is to be noticed that in their dealings with Penn they had
always been satisfied, and that he had always been careful that they
should be duly consulted and if necessary be paid twice over for the
land. But his sons were more economical, and as a result of the shrewd
practices of the Albany purchase the Pennsylvania Indians almost
immediately went over in a body to the French and were soon scalping
men, women, and children among the Pennsylvania colonists. It is a
striking fact, however, that in all the after years of war and rapine
and for generations afterwards the Indians retained the most distinct
and positive tradition of Penn's good faith and of the honesty of all
Quakers. So persistent, indeed, was this tradition among the tribes of
the West that more than a century later President Grant proposed to
put the whole charge of the nation's Indian affairs in the hands of the
Quakers. The first efforts to avert the catastrophe threatened by the
alliance of the red man with the French were made by the provincial
assemblies, which voted presents of money or goods to the Indians to
offset similar presents from the French. The result was, of course, the
utter demoralization of the savages. Bribed by both sides, the Indians
used all their native cunning to encourage the bribers to bid against
each other. So far as Pennsylvania was concerned, feeling themselves
cheated in the first instance and now bribed with gifts, they developed
a contempt for the people who could stoop to such practices. As a
result this contempt manifested itself in deeds hitherto unknown in the
province. One tribe on a visit to Philadelphia killed cattle and robbed
orchards as they passed. The delegates of another tribe, having visited
Philadelphia and received 500 pounds as a present, returned to the
frontier and on their way back for another present destroyed the
property of the interpreter and Indian agent, Conrad Weiser. They felt
that they could do as they pleased. To make matters worse, the Assembly
paid for all the damage done; and having started on this foolish
business, they found that the list of tribes demanding presents rapidly
increased. The Shawanoes and the Six Nations, as well as the Delawares,
were now swarming to this new and convenient source of wealth.

Whether the proprietors or the Assembly should meet this increasing
expense or divide it between them, became a subject of increasing
controversy. It was in these discussions that Thomas Penn, in trying to
keep his family's share of the expense as small as possible, first got
the reputation for closeness which followed him for the rest of his life
and which started a party in the province desirous of having Parliament
abolish the proprietorship and put the province under a governor
appointed by the Crown.

The war with the French of Canada and their Indian allies is of interest
here only in so far as it affected the government of Pennsylvania.
From this point of view it involved a series of contests between the
proprietors and the Crown on the one side and the Assembly on the other.
The proprietors and the Crown took advantage of every military necessity
to force the Assembly into a surrender of popular rights. But the
Assembly resisted, maintaining that they had the same right as the
British Commons of having their money bills received or rejected by the
Governor without amendment. Whatever they should give must be given on
their own terms or not at all; and they would not yield this point to
any necessities of the war.

When Governor Morris asked the Assembly for a war contribution in
1754, they promptly voted 20,000 pounds. This was the same amount that
Virginia, the most active of the colonies in the war, was giving. Other
colonies gave much less; New York, only 5000 pounds, and Maryland 6000
pounds. Morris, however, would not assent to the Assembly's bill unless
it contained a clause suspending its effect until the King's pleasure
was known. This was an attempt to establish a precedent for giving up
the Assembly's charter right of passing laws which need not be submitted
to the King for five years and which in the meantime were valid. The
members of the Assembly very naturally refused to be forced by the
necessities of the war into surrendering one of the most important
privileges the province possessed. It was, they said, as much their duty
to resist this invasion of their rights as to resist the French.

Governor Morris, besides demanding that the supply of 20,000 pounds
should not go into force until the King's pleasure was known, insisted
that the paper money representing it should be redeemable in five years.
This period the Assembly considered too short; the usual time was ten
years. Five years would ruin too many people by foreclosures. Moreover,
the Governor was attempting to dictate the way in which the people
should raise a money supply. He and the King had a right to ask for aid
in war; but it was the right of the colony to use its own methods
of furnishing this assistance. The Governor also refused to let the
Assembly see the instructions from the proprietors under which he
was acting. This was another attack upon their liberties and involved
nothing less than an attempt to change their charter rights by secret
instructions to a deputy governor which he must obey at his peril.
Several bills had recently been introduced in the English Parliament for
the purpose of making royal instructions to governors binding on all the
colonial assemblies without regard to their charters. This innovation,
the colonists felt, would wreck all their liberties and turn colonial
government into a mere despotism.

The assemblies of all the colonies have been a good deal abused for
delay in supporting the war and meanness in withholding money. But
in many instances the delay and lack of money were occasioned by the
grasping schemes of governors who saw a chance to gain new privileges
for the Crown or a proprietor or to weaken popular government by
crippling the powers of the legislatures. The usual statement that
the Pennsylvania Assembly was slow in assisting the war because it was
composed of Quakers is not supported by the facts. The Pennsylvania
Assembly was not behind the rest. On this particular occasion, when
their large money supply bill could not be passed without sacrificing
their constitutional rights, they raised money for the war by appointing
a committee which was authorized to borrow 5000 pounds on the credit of
the Assembly.

Other contests arose over the claim of the proprietors that their
estates in the province were exempt from taxation for the war or any
purpose. One bill taxing the proprietary estates along with others was
met by Thomas Penn offering to subscribe 5000 pounds, as a free gift to
the colony's war measures. The Assembly accepted this, and passed the
bill without taxing the proprietary estates. It turned out, however,
to be a shrewd business move on the part of Thomas Penn; for the 5000
pounds was to be collected out of the quitrents that were in arrears,
and the payment of it was in consequence long delayed. The thrifty
Thomas had thus saddled his bad debts on the province and gained a
reputation for generosity at the same time.

Pennsylvania, though governed by Quakers assisted by noncombatant
Germans, had a better protected frontier than Maryland or Virginia; no
colony, indeed, was at that time better protected. The Quaker Assembly
did more than take care of the frontier during the war; it preserved
at the same time constitutional rights in defense of which twenty-five
years afterwards the whole continent fought the Revolution. The Quaker
Assembly even passed two militia bills, one of which became law, and
sent rather more than the province's full share of troops to protect
the frontiers of New York and New England and to carry the invasion into
Canada.

General Braddock warmly praised the assistance which Pennsylvania gave
him because, he said, she had done more for him than any of the other
colonies. Virginia and Maryland promised everything and performed
nothing, while Pennsylvania promised nothing and performed everything.
Commodore Spy thanked the Assembly for the large number of sailors sent
his fleet at the expense of the province. General Shirley, in charge
of the New England and New York campaigns, thanked the Assembly for
the numerous recruits; and it was the common opinion at the time that
Pennsylvania had sent more troops to the war than any other colony. In
the first four years of the war the province spent for military purposes
210,567 pounds sterling, which was a very considerable sum at that time
for a community of less than 200,000 people. Quakers, though they hate
war, will accept it when there is no escape. The old story of the Quaker
who tossed a pirate overboard, saying, "Friend, thee has no business
here," gives their point of view better than pages of explanation.
Quaker opinion has not always been entirely uniform. In Revolutionary
times in Philadelphia there was a division of the Quakers known as the
Fighting Quakers, and their meeting house is still pointed out at the
corner of Fourth Street and Arch. They even produced able military
leaders: Colonel John Dickinson, General Greene, and General Mifflin in
the Continental Army, and, in the War of 1812, General Jacob Brown,
who reorganized the army and restored its failing fortunes after many
officers had been tried and found wanting.

There was always among the Quakers a rationalistic party and a party of
mysticism. The rationalistic party prevailed in Pennsylvania all through
the colonial period. In the midst of the worst horrors of the French and
Indian wars, however, the conscientious objectors roused themselves and
began preaching and exhorting what has been called the mystical side of
the faith. Many extreme Quaker members of the Assembly resigned their
seats in consequence. After the Revolution the spiritual party began
gaining ground, partly perhaps because then the responsibilities of
government and care of the great political and religious experiment in
Pennsylvania were removed. The spiritual party increased so rapidly
in power that in 1827 a split occurred which involved not a little
bitterness, ill feeling, and litigation over property. This division
into two opposing camps, known as the Hicksites and the Orthodox,
continues and is likely to remain.

Quaker government in Pennsylvania was put to still severer tests by
the difficulties and disasters that followed Braddock's defeat. That
unfortunate general had something over two thousand men and was hampered
with a train of artillery and a splendid equipment of arms, tools, and
supplies, as if he were to march over the smooth highways of Europe.
When he came to drag all these munitions through the depths of the
Pennsylvania forests and up and down the mountains, he found that he
made only about three miles a day and that his horses had nothing to eat
but the leaves of the trees. Washington, who was of the party, finally
persuaded him to abandon his artillery and press forward with about
fifteen hundred picked men. These troops, when a few miles from Fort
Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), met about six hundred Indians and three
hundred French coming from the fort. The English maintained a close
formation where they were, but the French and Indians immediately spread
out on their flanks, lying behind trees and logs which provided rests
for their rifles and security for their bodies. This strategy decided
the day. The English were shot down like cattle in a pen, and out of
about fifteen hundred only four hundred and fifty escaped. The French
and Indian loss was not much over fifty.

This defeat of Braddock's force has become one of the most famous
reverses in history; and it was made worse by the conduct of Dunbar who
had been left in command of the artillery, baggage, and men in the rear.
He could have remained where he was as some sort of protection to the
frontier. But he took fright, burned his wagons, emptied his barrels of
powder into the streams, destroyed his provisions, and fled back to Fort
Cumberland in Maryland. Here the governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia
as well as the Pennsylvania Assembly urged him to stay. But, determined
to make the British rout complete, he soon retreated to the peace and
quiet of Philadelphia, and nothing would induce him to enter again the
terrible forests of Pennsylvania.

The natural result of the blunder soon followed. The French, finding
the whole frontier of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia abandoned,
organized the Indians under French officers and swept the whole region
with a devastation of massacre, scalping, and burning that has never
been equaled. Hurons, Potawatomies, Ojibways, Ottawas, Mingoes,
renegades from the Six Nations, together with the old treaty friends of
Penn, the Delawares and Shawanoes, began swarming eastward and soon
had killed more people than had been lost at Braddock's defeat. The
onslaught reached its height in September and October. By that time all
the outlying frontier settlers and their families had been killed or
sent flying eastward to seek refuge in the settlements. The Indians even
followed them to the settlements, reached the Susquehanna, and crossed
it. They massacred the people of the village of Gnadenhutten, near
Bethlehem on the Lehigh, and established near by a headquarters for
prisoners and plunder. Families were scalped within fifty miles of
Philadelphia, and in one instance the bodies of a murdered family
were brought into the town and exhibited in the streets to show the
inhabitants how near the danger was approaching. Nothing could be done
to stem the savage tide. Virginia was suffering in the same way: the
settlers on her border were slaughtered or were driven back in herds
upon the more settled districts, and Washington, with a nominal strength
of fifteen hundred who would not obey orders, was forced to stand
a helpless spectator of the general flight and misery. There was no
adequate force or army anywhere within reach. The British had been
put to flight and had gone to the defense of New England and New York.
Neither Pennsylvania nor Virginia had a militia that could withstand
the French and their red allies. They could only wait till the panic had
subsided and then see what could be done.

One thing was accomplished, however, when the Pennsylvania Assembly
passed a Quaker militia law which is one of the most curious legal
documents of its kind in history. It was most aptly worded, drafted by
the master hand of Franklin. It recited the fact that the province had
always been ruled by Quakers who were opposed to war, but that now it
had become necessary to allow men to become soldiers and to give them
every facility for the profession of arms, because the Assembly though
containing a Quaker majority nevertheless represented all the people of
the province. To prevent those who believed in war from taking part in
it would be as much a violation of liberty of conscience as to force
enlistments among those who had conscientious scruples against it. Nor
would the Quaker majority have any right to compel others to bear arms
and at the same time exempt themselves. Therefore a voluntary militia
system was established under which a fighting Quaker, a Presbyterian, an
Episcopalian, or anybody, could enlist and have all the military glory
he could win.

It was altogether a volunteer system. Two years afterwards, as the
necessities of war increased, the Quaker Assembly passed a rather
stringent compulsory militia bill; but the governor vetoed it, and the
first law with its volunteer system remained in force. Franklin busied
himself to encourage enlistments under it and was very successful.
Though a philosopher and a man of science, almost as much opposed to war
as the Quakers and not even owning a shotgun, he was elected commander
and led a force of about five hundred men to protect the Lehigh Valley.
His common sense seems to have supplied his lack of military training.
He did no worse than some professional soldiers who might be named.
The valley was supposed to be in great danger since its village of
Gnadenhutten had been burned and its people massacred. The Moravians,
like the Quakers, had suddenly found that they were not as much opposed
to war as they had supposed. They had obtained arms and ammunition from
New York and had built stockades, and Franklin was glad to find them so
well prepared when he arrived. He built small forts in different parts
of the valley, acted entirely on the defensive, and no doubt checked the
raids of the Indians at that point. They seem to have been watching
him from the hilltops all the time, and any rashness on his part would
probably have brought disaster upon him. After his force had been
withdrawn, the Indians again attacked and burned Gnadenhutten.

The chain of forts, at first seventeen, afterwards increased to fifty,
built by the Assembly on the Pennsylvania frontier was a good plan so
far as it went, but it was merely defensive and by no means completely
defensive, since Indian raiding parties could pass between the forts.
They served chiefly as refuges for neighboring settlers. The colonial
troops or militia, after manning the fifty forts and sending their quota
to the operations against Canada by way of New England and New York,
were not numerous enough to attack the Indians. They could only act on
the defensive as Franklin's command had done. As for the rangers, as
the small bands of frontiersmen acting without any authority of either
governor or legislature were called, they were very efficient as
individuals but they accomplished very little because they acted at
widely isolated spots. What was needed was a well organized force which
could pursue the Indians on their own ground so far westward that the
settlers on the frontier would be safe. The only troops which could
do this were the British regulars with the assistance of the colonial
militia.

Two energetic efforts to end the war without aid from abroad were made,
however, one by the pacific Quakers and the other by the combatant
portion of the people. Both of these were successful so far as they
went, but had little effect on the general situation. In the summer
of 1756, the Quakers made a very earnest effort to persuade the two
principal Pennsylvania tribes, the Delawares and Shawanoes, to withdraw
from the French alliance and return to their old friends. These two
tribes possessed a knowledge of the country which enabled them greatly
to assist the French designs on Pennsylvania. Chiefs of these tribes
were brought under safe conducts to Philadelphia, where they were
entertained as equals in the Quaker homes. Such progress, indeed, was
made that by the end of July a treaty of peace was concluded at Easton
eliminating those two tribes from the war. This has sometimes been
sneered at as mere Quaker pacifism; but it was certainly successful in
lessening the numbers and effectiveness of the enemy.

The other undertaking was a military one, the famous attack upon
Kittanning conducted by Colonel John Armstrong, an Ulsterman from
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the first really aggressive officer the
province had produced. The Indians had two headquarters for their raids
into the province, one at Logstown on the Ohio a few miles below Fort
Duquesne, and the other at Kittanning or, as the French called it,
Attique, about forty miles northeast. At these two points they assembled
their forces, received ammunition and supplies from the French, and
organized their expeditions. As Kittanning was the nearer, Armstrong in
a masterly maneuver took three hundred men through the mountains without
being discovered and, by falling upon the village early in the morning,
he effected a complete surprise. The town was set on fire, the Indians
were put to flight, and large quantities of their ammunition were
destroyed. But Armstrong could not follow up his success. Threatened
by overwhelming numbers, he hastened to withdraw. The effect which the
fighting and the Quaker treaty had on the frontier was good. Incursions
of the savages were, at least for the present, checked. But the root of
the evil had not yet been reached, and the Indians remained massed
along the Ohio, ready to break in upon the people again at the first
opportunity.

The following year, 1757, was the most depressing period of the war.
The proprietors of Pennsylvania took the opportunity to exempt their own
estate from taxation and throw the burden of furnishing money for the
war upon the colonists. Under pressure of the increasing success of the
French and Indians and because the dreadful massacres were coming nearer
and nearer to Philadelphia, the Quaker Assembly yielded, voted the
largest sum they had ever voted to the war, and exempted the proprietary
estates. The colony was soon boiling with excitement. The Churchmen, as
friends of the proprietors, were delighted to have the estates exempted,
thought it a good opportunity to have the Quaker Assembly abolished, and
sent petitions and letters and proofs of alleged Quaker incompetence
to the British Government. The Quakers and a large majority of the
colonists, on the other hand, instead of consenting to their own
destruction, struck at the root of the Churchmen's power by proposing
to abolish the proprietors. And in a letter to Isaac Norris, Benjamin
Franklin, who had been sent to England to present the grievances of the
colonists, even suggested that "tumults and insurrections that might
prove the proprietary government unable to preserve order, or show the
people to be ungovernable, would do the business immediately."

Turmoil and party strife rose to the most exciting heights, and the
details of it might, under certain circumstances, be interesting to
describe. But the next year, 1758, the British Government, by sending
a powerful force of regulars to Pennsylvania, at last adopted the
only method for ending the war. Confidence was at once restored. The
Pennsylvania Assembly now voted the sufficient and, indeed, immense sum
of one hundred thousand pounds, and offered a bounty of five pounds
to every recruit. It was no longer a war of defense but now a war of
aggression and conquest. Fort Duquesne on the Ohio was taken; and the
next autumn Fort Pitt was built on its ruins. Then Canada fell, and
the French empire in America came to an end. Canada and the Great West
passed into the possession of the Anglo-Saxon race.



Chapter VII. The Decline Of Quaker Government

When the treaty of peace was signed in 1763, extinguishing France's
title to Canada and turning over Canada and the Mississippi Valley to
the English, the colonists were prepared to enjoy all the blessings of
peace. But the treaty of peace had been made with France, not with the
red man. A remarkable genius, Pontiac, appeared among the Indians, one
of the few characters, like Tecumseh and Osceola, who are often cited
as proof of latent powers almost equal to the strongest qualities of the
white race. Within a few months he had united all the tribes of the
West in a discipline and control which, if it had been brought to the
assistance of the French six years earlier, might have conquered the
colonies to the Atlantic seaboard before the British regulars could have
come to their assistance. The tribes swept westward into Pennsylvania,
burning, murdering, and leveling every habitation to the ground with a
thoroughness beyond anything attempted under the French alliance. The
settlers and farmers fled eastward to the towns to live in cellars,
camps, and sheds as best they could. * Fortunately the colonies retained
a large part of the military organization, both men and officers, of
the French War, and were soon able to handle the situation. Detroit and
Niagara were relieved by water; and an expedition commanded by Colonel
Bouquet, who had distinguished himself under General Forties, saved Fort
Pitt.


    * For an account of Pontiac's conspiracy, see "The Old Northwest"
by Frederic A. Ogg (in "The Chronicles of America").


At this time the Scotch-Irish frontiersmen suddenly became prominent.
They had been organizing for their own protection and were meeting with
not a little success. They refused to join the expedition of regular
troops marching westward against Pontiac's warriors, because they wanted
to protect their own homes and because they believed the regulars to be
marching to sure destruction. Many of the regular troops were invalided
from the West Indies, and the Scotch-Irish never expected to see any
of them again. They believed that the salvation of Pennsylvania, or at
least of their part of the province, depended entirely upon themselves.
Their increasing numbers and rugged independence were forming them
also into an organized political party with decided tendencies, as it
afterwards appeared, towards forming a separate state.

The extreme narrowness of the Scotch-Irish, however, misled them. The
only real safety for the province lay in regularly constituted and
strong expeditions, like that of Bouquet, which would drive the main
body of the savages far westward. But the Scotch-Irish could not see
this; and with that intensity of passion which marked all their
actions they turned their energy and vengeance upon the Quakers and
semicivilized Indians in the eastern end of the colony. Their preachers,
who were their principal leaders and organizers, encouraged them in
denouncing Quaker doctrine as a wicked heresy from which only evil
could result. The Quakers had offended God from the beginning by making
treaties of kindness with the heathen savages instead of exterminating
them as the Scripture commanded: "And when the Lord thy God shall
deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy
them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them."
The Scripture had not been obeyed; the heathen had not been destroyed;
on the contrary, a systematic policy of covenants, treaties,
and kindness had been persisted in for two generations, and as a
consequence, the Ulstermen said, the frontiers were now deluged in
blood. They were particularly resentful against the small settlement of
Indians near Bethlehem, who had been converted to Christianity by the
Moravians, and another little village of half civilized basketmaking
Indians at Conestoga near Lancaster. The Scotch-Irish had worked
themselves up into a strange belief that these small remnants were
sending information, arms, and ammunition to the western tribes; and
they seemed to think that it was more important to exterminate these
little communities than to go with such expeditions as Bouquet's to
the West. They asked the Governor to remove these civilized Indians and
assured him that their removal would secure the safety of the frontier.
When the Governor, not being able to find anything against the Indians,
declined to remove them, the Scotch-Irish determined to attend to the
matter in their own fashion.

Bouquet's victory at Bushy Run, much to the surprise of the
Scotch-Irish, stopped Indian raids of any seriousness until the
following spring. But in the autumn there were a few depredations, which
led the frontiersmen to believe that the whole invasion would begin
again. A party of them, therefore, started to attack the Moravian
Indians near Bethlehem; but before they could accomplish their object,
the Governor brought most of the Indians down to Philadelphia for
protection. Even there they were narrowly saved from the mob, for the
hostility against them was spreading throughout the province.

Soon afterwards another party of Scotch-Irish, ever since known as the
"Paxton Boys," went at break of day to the village of the Conestoga
Indians and found only six of them at home--three men, two women, and a
boy. These they instantly shot down, mutilated their bodies, and burned
their cabins. As the murderers returned, they related to a man on the
road what they had done, and when he protested against the cruelty of
the deed, they asked, "Don't you believe in God and the Bible?" The
remaining fourteen inhabitants of the village, who were away selling
brooms, were collected by the sheriff and put in the jail at Lancaster
for protection. The Paxtons heard of it and in a few days stormed the
jail, broke down the doors, and either shot the poor Indians or cut them
to pieces with hatchets.

This was probably the first instance of lynch law in America. It raised
a storm of indignation and controversy; and a pamphlet war persisted
for several years. The whole province was immediately divided into
two parties. On one side were the Quakers, most of the Germans, and
conservatives of every sort, and on the other, inclined to sympathize
with the Scotch-Irish, were the eastern Presbyterians, some of the
Churchmen, and various miscellaneous people whose vindictiveness towards
all Indians had been aroused by the war. The Quakers and conservatives,
who seem to have been the more numerous, assailed the Scotch-Irish in no
measured language as a gang of ruffians without respect for law or order
who, though always crying for protection, had refused to march with
Bouquet to save Fort Pitt or to furnish him the slightest assistance.
Instead of going westward where the danger was and something might
be accomplished, they had turned eastward among the settlements and
murdered a few poor defenseless people, mostly women and children.

Franklin, who had now returned from England, wrote one of his best
pamphlets against the Paxtons, the valorous, heroic Paxtons, as he
called them, prating of God and the Bible, fifty-seven of whom, armed
with rifles, knives, and hatchets, had actually succeeded in killing
three old men, two women, and a boy. This pamphlet became known as the
"Narrative" from the first word of its title, and it had an immense
circulation. Like everything Franklin wrote, it is interesting reading
to this day.

One of the first effects of this controversy was to drive the excitable
Scotch-Irish into a flame of insurrection not unlike the Whisky
Rebellion, which started among them some years after the Revolution.
They held tumultuous meetings denouncing the Quakers and the whole
proprietary government in Philadelphia, and they organized an expedition
which included some delegates to suggest reforms. For the most part,
however, it was a well equipped little army variously estimated at from
five hundred to fifteen hundred on foot and on horseback, which marched
towards Philadelphia with no uncertain purpose. They openly declared
that they intended to capture the town, seize the Moravian Indians
protected there, and put them to death. They fully expected to be
supported by most of the people and to have everything their own way.
As they passed along the roads, they amused themselves in their rough
fashion by shooting chickens and pigs, frightening people by thrusting
their rifles into windows, and occasionally throwing some one down and
pretending to scalp him.

In the city there was great excitement and alarm. Even the classes who
sympathized with the Scotch-Irish did not altogether relish having their
property burned or destroyed. Great preparations were made to meet the
expedition. British regulars were summoned. Eight companies of militia
and a battery of artillery were hastily formed. Franklin became a
military man once more and superintended the preparations. On all sides
the Quakers were enlisting; they had become accustomed to war; and this
legitimate chance to shoot a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian was too much for
the strongest scruples of their religion. It was a long time, however,
before they heard the end of this zeal; and in the pamphlet war which
followed they were accused of clamorously rushing to arms and demanding
to be led against the enemy.

It is amusing now to read about it in the old records. But it was
serious enough at the time. When the Scotch-Irish army reached the
Schuylkill River and found the fords leading to the city guarded, they
were not quite so enthusiastic about killing Quakers and Indians. They
went up the river some fifteen miles, crossed by an unopposed ford, and
halted in Germantown ten miles north of Philadelphia. That was as far as
they thought it safe to venture. Several days passed, during which the
city people continued their preparations and expected every night to be
attacked. There were, indeed, several false alarms. Whenever the alarm
was sounded at night, every one placed candles in his windows to light
up the streets. One night when it rained the soldiers were allowed
to shelter themselves in a Quaker meeting house, which for some hours
bristled with bayonets and swords, an incident of which the Presbyterian
pamphleteers afterwards made much use for satire. On another day all the
cannon were fired to let the enemy know what was in store for him.

Finally commissioners with the clever, genial Franklin at their head,
went out to Germantown to negotiate, and soon had the whole mighty
difference composed. The Scotch-Irish stated their grievances. The
Moravian Indians ought not to be protected by the government, and all
such Indians should be removed from the colony; the men who killed
the Conestoga Indians should be tried where the supposed offense was
committed and not in Philadelphia; the five frontier counties had
only ten representatives in the Assembly while the three others had
twenty-six--this should be remedied; men wounded in border war should be
cared for at public expense; no trade should be carried on with hostile
Indians until they restored prisoners; and there should be a bounty on
scalps.

While these negotiations were proceeding, some of the Scotch-Irish
amused themselves by practicing with their rifles at the weather vane,
a figure of a cock, on the steeple of the old Lutheran church in
Germantown--an unimportant incident, it is true, but one revealing the
conditions and character of the time as much as graver matters do. The
old weather vane with the bullet marks upon it is still preserved. About
thirty of these same riflemen were invited to Philadelphia and were
allowed to wander about and see the sights of the town. The rest
returned to the frontier. As for their list of grievances, not one of
them was granted except, strange and sad to relate, the one which asked
for a scalp bounty. The Governor, after the manner of other colonies,
it must be admitted, issued the long desired scalp proclamation, which
after offering rewards for prisoners and scalps, closed by saying, "and
for the scalp of a female Indian fifty pieces of eight." William Penn's
Indian policy had been admired for its justice and humanity by all the
philosophers and statesmen of the world, and now his grandson, Governor
of the province, in the last days of the family's control, was offering
bounties for women's scalps.

Franklin while in England had succeeded in having the proprietary lands
taxed equally with the lands of the colonists. But the proprietors
attempted to construe this provision so that their best lands were taxed
at the rate paid by the people on their worst. This obvious quibble of
course raised such a storm of opposition that the Quakers, joined by
classes which had never before supported them, and now forming a large
majority, determined to appeal to the Government in England to abolish
the proprietorship and put the colony under the rule of the King. In the
proposal to make Pennsylvania a Crown colony there was no intention
of confiscating the possessions of the proprietors. It was merely the
proprietary political power, their right to appoint the Governor, that
was to be abolished. This right was to be absorbed by the Crown with
payment for its value to the proprietors; but in all other respects
the charter and the rights and liberties of the people were to remain
unimpaired. Just there lay the danger. An act of Parliament would be
required to make the change and, having once started on such a change,
Parliament, or the party in power therein, might decide to make other
changes, and in the end there might remain very little of the original
rights and liberties of the colonists under their charter. It was by
no means a wise move. But intense feeling on the subject was aroused.
Passionate feeling seemed to have been running very high among the
steady Quakers. In this new outburst the Quakers had the Scotch-Irish on
their side, and a part of the Churchmen. The Germans were divided, but
the majority enthusiastic for the change was very large.

There was a new alignment of parties. The eastern Presbyterians, usually
more or less in sympathy with the Scotch-Irish, broke away from them
on this occasion. These Presbyterians opposed the change to a royal
governor because they believed that it would be followed by the
establishment by law of the Church of England, with bishops and all the
other ancient evils. Although some of the Churchmen joined the Quaker
side, most of them and the most influential of them were opposed to the
change and did good work in opposing it. They were well content with
their position under the proprietors and saw nothing to be gained under
a royal governor. There were also not a few people who, in the increase
of the wealth of the province, had acquired aristocratic tastes and were
attached to the pleasant social conditions that had grown up round the
proprietary governors and their followers; and there were also those
whose salaries, incomes, or opportunities for wealth were more or less
dependent on the proprietors retaining the executive offices and the
appointments and patronage.

One of the most striking instances of a change of sides was the case of
a Philadelphia Quaker, John Dickinson, a lawyer of large practice, a man
of wealth and position, and of not a little colonial magnificence when
he drove in his coach and four. It was he who later wrote the famous
"Farmer's Letters" during the Revolution. He was a member of the
Assembly and had been in politics for some years. But on this question
of a change to royal government, he left the Quaker majority and opposed
the change with all his influence and ability. He and his father-in-law,
Isaac Norris, Speaker of the Assembly, became the leaders against
the change, and Franklin and Joseph Galloway, the latter afterwards a
prominent loyalist in the Revolution, were the leading advocates of the
change.

The whole subject was thoroughly thrashed out in debates in the Assembly
and in pamphlets of very great ability and of much interest to students
of colonial history and the growth of American ideas of liberty. It must
be remembered that this was the year 1764, on the eve of the Revolution.
British statesmen were planning a system of more rigorous control of the
colonies; and the advisability of a stamp tax was under consideration.
Information of all these possible changes had reached the colonies.
Dickinson foresaw the end and warned the people. Franklin and the Quaker
party thought there was no danger and that the mother country could be
implicitly trusted.

Dickinson warned the people that the British Ministry were starting
special regulations for new colonies and "designing the strictest
reformations in the old." It would be a great relief, he admitted, to
be rid of the pettiness of the proprietors, and it might be accomplished
some time in the future; but not now. The proprietary system might
be bad, but a royal government might be worse and might wreck all the
liberties of the province, religious freedom, the Assembly's control
of its own adjournments, and its power of raising and disposing of the
public money. The ministry of the day in England were well known not
to be favorably inclined towards Pennsylvania because of the frequently
reported willfulness of the Assembly, on which the recent disturbances
had also been blamed. If the King, Ministry, and Parliament started
upon a change, they might decide to reconstitute the Assembly entirely,
abolish its ancient privileges, and disfranchise both Quakers and
Presbyterians.

The arguments of Franklin and Galloway consisted principally of
assertions of the good intentions of the mother country and the
absurdity of any fear on the part of the colonists for their privileges.
But the King in whom they had so much confidence was George III, and the
Parliament which they thought would do no harm was the same one which
a few months afterwards passed the Stamp Act which brought on the
Revolution. Franklin and Galloway also asserted that the colonies like
Massachusetts, the Jerseys, and the Carolinas, which had been changed to
royal governments, had profited by the change. But that was hardly the
prevailing opinion in those colonies themselves. Royal governors
could be as petty and annoying as the Penns and far more tyrannical.
Pennsylvania had always defeated any attempts at despotism on the part
of the Penn family and had built up a splendid body of liberal laws and
legislative privileges. But governors with the authority and power of
the British Crown behind them could not be so easily resisted as the
deputy governors of the Penns.

The Assembly, however, voted--twenty-seven to three--with Franklin
and Galloway. In the general election of the autumn, the question was
debated anew among the people and, though Franklin and Galloway were
defeated for seats in the Assembly, yet the popular verdict was strongly
in favor of a change, and the majority in the Assembly was for practical
purposes unaltered. They voted to appeal to England for the change, and
appointed Franklin to be their agent before the Crown and Ministry. He
sailed again for England and soon was involved in the opening scenes of
the Revolution. He was made agent for all the colonies and he spent
many delightful years there pursuing his studies in science, dining with
distinguished men, staying at country seats, and learning all the arts
of diplomacy for which he afterwards became so distinguished.

As for the Assembly's petition for a change to royal government,
Franklin presented it, but never pressed it. He, too, was finally
convinced that the time was inopportune. In fact, the Assembly itself
before long began to have doubts and fears and sent him word to let
the subject drop; and amid much greater events it was soon entirely
forgotten.



Chapter VIII. The Beginnings Of New Jersey

New Jersey, Scheyichbi, as the Indians called it, or Nova Caesarea,
as it was called in the Latin of its proprietary grant, had a history
rather different from that of other English colonies in America.
Geographically, it had not a few attractions. It was a good sized
dominion surrounded on all sides but one by water, almost an island
domain, secluded and independent. In fact, it was the only one of the
colonies which stood naturally separate and apart. The others were
bounded almost entirely by artificial or imaginary lines.

It offered an opportunity, one might have supposed, for some
dissatisfied religious sect of the seventeenth century to secure a
sanctuary and keep off all intruders. But at first no one of the various
denominations seems to have fancied it or chanced upon it. The Puritans
disembarked upon the bleak shores of New England well suited to the
sternness of their religion. How different American history might have
been if they had established themselves in the Jerseys! Could they,
under those milder skies, have developed witchcraft, set up blue laws,
and indulged in the killing of Quakers? After a time they learned about
the Jerseys and cast thrifty eyes upon them. Their seafaring habits and
the pursuit of whales led them along the coast and into Delaware Bay.
The Puritans of New Haven made persistent efforts to settle the southern
part of Jersey, on the Delaware near Salem. They thought, as their
quaint old records show, that if they could once start a branch colony
in Jersey it might become more populous and powerful than the New
Haven settlement and in that case they intended to move their seat of
government to the new colony. But their shrewd estimate of its value
came too late. The Dutch and the Swedes occupied the Delaware at that
time and drove them out. Puritans, however, entered northern Jersey
and, while they were not numerous enough to make it a thoroughly Puritan
community, they largely tinged its thought and its laws, and their
influence still survives.

The difficulty with Jersey was that its seacoast was a monotonous line
of breakers with dangerous shoal inlets, few harbors, and vast mosquito
infested salt marshes and sandy thickets. In the interior it was for
the most part a level, heavily forested, sandy, swampy country in its
southern portions, and rough and mountainous in the northern portions.
Even the entrance by Delaware Bay was so difficult by reason of its
shoals that it was the last part of the coast to be explored. The
Delaware region and Jersey were in fact a sort of middle ground far less
easy of access by the sea than the regions to the north in New England
and to the south in Virginia.

There were only two places easy of settlement in the Jerseys. One was
the open region of meadows and marshes by Newark Bay near the mouth
of the Hudson and along the Hackensack River, whence the people slowly
extended themselves to the seashore at Sandy Hook and thence southward
along the ocean beach. This was East Jersey. The other easily occupied
region, which became West Jersey, stretched along the shore of the lower
Delaware from the modern Trenton to Salem, whence the settlers gradually
worked their way into the interior. Between these two divisions lay
a rough wilderness which in its southern portion was full of swamps,
thickets, and pine barrens. So rugged was the country that the native
Indians lived for the most part only in the two open regions already
described.

The natural geographical, geological, and even social division of New
Jersey is made by drawing a line from Trenton to the mouth of the Hudson
River. North of that line the successive terraces of the piedmont and
mountainous region form part of the original North American continent.
South of that line the more or less sandy level region was once a shoal
beneath the ocean; afterwards a series of islands; then one island with
a wide sound behind it passing along the division line to the mouth of
the Hudson. Southern Jersey was in short an island with a sound behind
it very much like the present Long Island. The shoal and island had been
formed in the far distant geologic past by the erosion and washings from
the lofty Pennsylvania mountains now worn down to mere stumps.

The Delaware River flowed into this sound at Trenton. Gradually the
Hudson end of the sound filled up as far as Trenton, but the tide from
the ocean still runs up the remains of the Old Sound as far as Trenton.
The Delaware should still be properly considered as ending at Trenton,
for the rest of its course to the ocean is still part of Old Pensauken
Sound, as it is called by geologists.

The Jerseys originated as a colony in 1664. In 1675 West Jersey passed
into the control of the Quakers. In 1680 East Jersey came partially
under Quaker influence. In August, 1664, Charles II seized New York, New
Jersey, and all the Dutch possessions in America, having previously
in March granted them to his brother the Duke of York. The Duke almost
immediately gave to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, members of
the Privy Council and defenders of the Stuart family in the Cromwellian
wars, the land between the Delaware River and the ocean, and bounded
on the north by a line drawn from latitude 41 degrees on the Hudson to
latitude 41 degrees 40 minutes on the Delaware. This region was to be
called, the grant said, Nova Caesarea, or New Jersey. The name was a
compliment to Carteret, who in the Cromwellian wars had defended the
little isle of Jersey against the forces of the Long Parliament. As the
American Jersey was then almost an island and geologically had been one,
the name was not inappropriate.

Berkeley and Carteret divided the province between them. In 1676 an
exact division was attempted, creating the rather unnatural sections
known as East Jersey and West Jersey. The first idea seems to have been
to divide by a line running from Barnegat on the seashore to the mouth
of Pensauken Creek on the Delaware just above Camden. This, however,
would have made a North Jersey and a South Jersey, with the latter much
smaller than the former. Several lines seem to have been surveyed at
different times in the attempt to make an exactly equal division, which
was no easy engineering task. As private land titles and boundaries were
in some places dependent on the location of the division line, there
resulted much controversy and litigation which lasted down into our
own time. Without going into details, it is sufficient to say that the
acceptable division line began on the seashore at Little Egg Harbor at
the lower end of Barnegat Bay and crossed diagonally or northwesterly to
the northern part of the Delaware River just above the Water Gap. It is
known as the Old Province line, and it can be traced on any map of the
State by prolonging, in both directions, the northeastern boundary of
Burlington County.

West Jersey, which became decidedly Quaker, did not remain long in the
possession of Lord Berkeley. He was growing old; and, disappointed in
his hopes of seeing it settled, he sold it, in 1673, for one thousand
pounds to John Fenwick and Edward Byllinge, both of them old Cromwellian
soldiers turned Quakers. That this purchase was made for the purpose
of affording a refuge in America for Quakers then much imprisoned and
persecuted in England does not very distinctly appear. At least there
was no parade of it. But such a purpose in addition to profit for the
proprietors may well have been in the minds of the purchasers.

George Fox, the Quaker leader, had just returned from a missionary
journey in America, in the course of which he had traveled through New
Jersey in going from New York to Maryland. Some years previously in
England, about 1659, he had made inquiries as to a suitable place for
Quaker settlement and was told of the region north of Maryland which
became Pennsylvania. But how could a persecuted sect obtain such a
region from the British Crown and the Government that was persecuting
them? It would require powerful influence at Court; nothing could then
be done about it; and Pennsylvania had to wait until William Penn became
a man with influence enough in 1681 to win it from the Crown. But here
was West Jersey, no longer owned directly by the Crown and bought in
cheap by two Quakers. It was an unexpected opportunity. Quakers soon
went to it, and it was the first Quaker colonial experiment.

Byllinge and Fenwick, though turned Quakers, seem to have retained
some of the contentious Cromwellian spirit of their youth. They soon
quarreled over their respective interests in the ownership of West
Jersey; and to prevent a lawsuit, so objectionable to Quakers, the
decision was left to William Penn, then a rising young Quaker about
thirty years old, dreaming of ideal colonies in America. Penn awarded
Fenwick a one-tenth interest and four hundred pounds. Byllinge soon
became insolvent and turned over his nine-tenths interest to his
creditors, appointing Penn and two other Quakers, Gawen Lawrie, a
merchant of London, and Nicholas Lucas, a maltster of Hertford, to hold
it in trust for them. Gawen Lawrie afterwards became deputy governor of
East Jersey. Lucas was one of those thoroughgoing Quakers just released
from eight years in prison for his religion. *


    * Myers, "Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West Jersey, and
Delaware", p. 180.

Fenwick also in the end fell into debt and, after selling over one
hundred thousand acres to about fifty purchasers, leased what remained
of his interest for a thousand years to John Edridge, a tanner, and
Edmund Warner, a poulterer, as security for money borrowed from them.
They conveyed this lease and their claims to Penn, Lawrie, and Lucas,
who thus became the owners, as trustees, of pretty much all West Jersey.

This was William Penn's first practical experience in American affairs.
He and his fellow trustees, with the consent of Fenwick, divided the
West Jersey ownership into one hundred shares. The ninety belonging to
Byllinge were offered for sale to settlers or to creditors of Byllinge
who would take them in exchange for debts. The settlement of West Jersey
thus became the distribution of an insolvent Quaker's estate among his
creditor fellow religionists.

Although no longer in possession of a title to land, Fenwick, in 1675,
went out with some Quaker settlers to Delaware Bay. There they founded
the modern town of Salem, which means peace, giving it that name because
of the fair and peaceful aspect of the wilderness on the day they
arrived. They bought the land from the Indians in the usual manner,
as the Swedes and Dutch had so often done. But they had no charter or
provision for organized government. When Fenwick attempted to exercise
political authority at Salem, he was seized and imprisoned by Andros,
Governor of New York for the Duke of York, on the ground that, although
the Duke had given Jersey to certain individual proprietors, the
political control of it remained in the Duke's deputy governor. Andros,
who had levied a tax of five per cent on all goods passing up the
Delaware, now established commissioners at Salem to collect the duties.

This action brought up the whole question of the authority of Andros.
The trustee proprietors of West Jersey appealed to the Duke of York, who
was suspiciously indifferent to the matter, but finally referred it
for decision to a prominent lawyer, Sir William Jones, before whom the
Quaker proprietors of West Jersey made a most excellent argument. They
showed the illegality, injustice, and wrong of depriving the Jerseys
of vested political rights and forcing them from the freeman's right
of making their own laws to a state of mere dependence on the arbitrary
will of one man. Then with much boldness they declared that "To exact
such an unterminated tax from English planters, and to continue it after
so many repeated complaints, will be the greatest evidence of a design
to introduce, if the Crown should ever devolve upon the Duke, an
unlimited government in old England." Prophetic words which the Duke, in
a few years, tried his best to fulfill. But Sir William Jones deciding
against him, he acquiesced, confirmed the political rights of West
Jersey by a separate grant, and withdrew any authority Andros claimed
over East Jersey. The trouble, however, did not end here. Both the
Jerseys were long afflicted by domineering attempts from New York.

Penn and his fellow trustees now prepared a constitution, or
"Concessions and Agreements," as they called it, for West Jersey, the
first Quaker political constitution embodying their advanced ideas,
establishing religious liberty, universal suffrage, and voting by
ballot, and abolishing imprisonment for debt. It foreshadowed some of
the ideas subsequently included in the Pennsylvania constitution. All
these experiences were an excellent school for William Penn. He learned
the importance in starting a colony of having a carefully and maturely
considered system of government. In his preparations some years
afterwards for establishing Pennsylvania he avoided much of the bungling
of the West Jersey enterprise.

A better organized attempt was now made to establish a foothold in West
Jersey farther up the river than Fenwick's colony at Salem. In 1677 the
ship Kent took out some 230 rather well-to-do Quakers, about as fine a
company of broadbrims, it is said, as ever entered the Delaware. Some
were from Yorkshire and London, largely creditors of Byllinge, who
were taking land to satisfy their debts. They all went up the river to
Raccoon Creek on the Jersey side, about fifteen miles below the present
site of Philadelphia, and lived at first among the Swedes, who had
been in that part of Jersey for some years and who took care of the new
arrivals in their barns and sheds. These Quaker immigrants, however,
soon began to take care of themselves, and the weather during the winter
proving mild, they explored farther up the river in a small boat. They
bought from the Indians the land along the river shore from Oldman's
Creek all the way up to Trenton and made their first settlements on the
river about eighteen miles above the site of Philadelphia, at a
place they at first called New Beverly, then Bridlington, and finally
Burlington.

They may have chosen this spot partly because there had been an old
Dutch settlement of a few families there. It had long been a crossing of
the Delaware for the few persons who passed by land from New York or New
England to Maryland and Virginia. One of the Dutchmen, Peter Yegon, kept
a ferry and a house for entertaining travelers. George Fox, who crossed
there in 1671, describes the place as having been plundered by the
Indians and deserted. He and his party swam their horses across the
river and got some of the Indians to help them with canoes.

Other Quaker immigrants followed, going to Salem as well as to
Burlington, and a stretch of some fifty miles of the river shore became
strongly Quaker. There are not many American towns now to be found with
more of the old-time picturesqueness and more relics of the past than
Salem and Burlington.

Settlements were also started on the river opposite the site afterwards
occupied by Philadelphia, at Newton on the creek still called by that
name; and another a little above on Cooper's Creek, known as Cooper's
Ferry until 1794. Since then it has become the flourishing town of
Camden, full of shipbuilding and manufacturing, but for long after the
Revolution it was merely a small village on the Jersey shore opposite
Philadelphia, sometimes used as a hunting ground and a place of resort
for duelers and dancing parties from Philadelphia.

The Newton settlers were Quakers of the English middle class, weavers,
tanners, carpenters, bricklayers, chandlers, blacksmiths, coopers,
bakers, haberdashers, hatters, and linen drapers, most of them possessed
of property in England and bringing good supplies with them. Like all
the rest of the New Jersey settlers they were in no sense adventurers,
gold seekers, cavaliers, or desperadoes. They were well-to-do middle
class English tradespeople who would never have thought of leaving
England if they had not lost faith in the stability of civil and
religious liberty and the security of their property under the Stuart
Kings. With them came servants, as they were called; that is, persons of
no property, who agreed to work for a certain time in payment of their
passage, to escape from England. All, indeed, were escaping from England
before their estates melted away in fines and confiscations or their
health or lives ended in the damp, foul air of the crowded prisons. Many
of those who came had been in jail and had decided that they would not
risk imprisonment a second time. Indeed, the proportion of West Jersey
immigrants who had actually been in prison for holding or attending
Quaker meetings or refusing to pay tithes for the support of the
established church was large. For example, William Bates, a carpenter,
while in jail for his religion, made arrangements with his friends
to escape to West Jersey as soon as he should be released, and his
descendants are now scattered over the United States. Robert Turner, a
man of means, who settled finally in Philadelphia but also owned much
land near Newton in West Jersey, had been imprisoned in England in 1660,
again in 1662, again in 1665, and some of his property had been taken,
again imprisoned in 1669 and more property taken; and many others had
the same experience. Details such as these make us realize the situation
from which the Quakers sought to escape. So widespread was the Quaker
movement in England and so severe the punishment imposed in order to
suppress it that fifteen thousand families are said to have been ruined
by the fines, confiscations, and imprisonments.

Not a few Jersey Quakers were from Ireland, whither they had fled
because there the laws against them were less rigorously administered.
The Newton settlers were joined by Quakers from Long Island, where,
under the English law as administered by the New York governors, they
had also been fined and imprisoned, though with less severity than at
home, for nonconformity to the Church of England. On arriving, the West
Jersey settlers suffered some hardships during the year that must elapse
before a crop could be raised and a log cabin or house built. During
that period they usually lived, in the Indian manner, in wigwams of
poles covered with bark, or in caves protected with logs in the steep
banks of the creeks. Many of them lived in the villages of the Indians.
The Indians supplied them all with corn and venison, and without this
Indian help, they would have run serious risk of starving, for they were
not accustomed to hunting. They had also to thank the Indians for having
in past ages removed so much of the heavy forest growth from the wide
strip of land along the river that it was easy to start cultivation.

These Quaker settlers made a point of dealing very justly with the
Indians and the two races lived side by side for several generations.
There is an instance recorded of the Indians attending with much
solemnity the funeral of a prominent Quaker woman, Esther Spicer, for
whom they had acquired great respect. The funeral was held at night,
and the Indians in canoes, the white men in boats, passed down Cooper's
Creek and along the river to Newton Creek where the graveyard was,
lighting the darkness with innumerable torches, a strange scene to think
of now as having been once enacted in front of the bustling cities of
Camden and Philadelphia. Some of the young settlers took Indian wives,
and that strain of native blood is said to show itself in the features
of several families to this day.

Many letters of these settlers have been preserved, all expressing the
greatest enthusiasm for the new country, for the splendid river better
than the Thames, the good climate, and their improved health, the
immense relief to be away from the constant dread of fines and
punishment, the chance to rise in the world, with large rewards for
industry. They note the immense quantities of game, the Indians bringing
in fat bucks every day, the venison better than in England, the streams
full of fish, the abundance of wild fruits, cranberries, hurtleberries,
the rapid increase of cattle, and the good soil. A few details
concerning some of the interesting characters among these early colonial
Quakers have been rescued from oblivion. There is, for instance, the
pleasing picture of a young man and his sister, convinced Quakers,
coming out together and pioneering in their log cabin until each found a
partner for life. There was John Haddon, from whom Haddonfield is named,
who bought a large tract of land but remained in England, while his
daughter Elizabeth came out alone to look after it. A strong, decisive
character she was, and women of that sort have always been encouraged in
independent action by the Quakers. She proved to be an excellent manager
of an estate. The romance of her marriage to a young Quaker preacher,
Estaugh, has been celebrated in Mrs. Maria Child's novel "The Youthful
Emigrant." The pair became leading citizens devoted to good works and to
Quaker liberalism for many a year in Haddonfield.

It was the ship Shields of Hull, bringing Quaker immigrants to
Burlington, of which the story is told that in beating up the river
she tacked close to the rather high bank with deep water frontage where
Philadelphia was afterwards established; and some of the passengers
remarked that it was a fine site for a town. The Shields, it is said,
was the first ship to sail up as far as Burlington. Anchoring before
Burlington in the evening, the colonists woke up next morning to find
the river frozen hard so that they walked on the ice to their future
habitations.

Burlington was made the capital of West Jersey, a legislature was
convened and laws were passed under the "concessions" or constitution
of the proprietors. Salem and Burlington became the ports of the little
province, which was well under way by 1682, when Penn came out to take
possession of Pennsylvania.

The West Jersey people of these two settlements spread eastward into the
interior but were stopped by a great forest area known as the Pines, or
Pine Barrens, of such heavy growth that even the Indians lived on its
outer edges and entered it only for hunting. It was an irregularly
shaped tract, full of wolves, bear, beaver, deer, and other game, and
until recent years has continued to attract sportsmen from all parts of
the country. Starting near Delaware Bay, it extended parallel with the
ocean as far north as the lower portion of the present Monmouth County
and formed a region about seventy-five miles long and thirty miles wide.
It was roughly the part of the old sandy shoal that first emerged from
the ocean, and it has been longer above water than any other part of
southern Jersey. The old name, Pine Barrens, is hardly correct because
it implies something like a desert, when as a matter of fact the region
produced magnificent forest trees.

The innumerable visitors who cross southern Jersey to the famous
seashore resorts always pass through the remains of this old central
forest and are likely to conclude that the monotonous low scrub oaks
and stunted pines on sandy level soil, seen for the last two or three
generations, were always there and that the primeval forest of colonial
times was no better. But that is a mistake. The stunted growth now seen
is not even second growth but in many cases fourth or fifth or more. The
whole region was cut over long ago. The original growth, pine in many
places, consisted also of lofty timber of oak, hickory, gum, ash,
chestnut, and numerous other trees, interspersed with dogwood,
sassafras, and holly, and in the swamps the beautiful magnolia, along
with the valuable white cedar. DeVries, who visited the Jersey coast
about 1632, at what is supposed to have been Beesley's or Somer's Point,
describes high woods coming down to the shore. Even today, immediately
back of Somer's Point, there is a magnificent lofty oak forest
accidentally preserved by surrounding marsh from the destructive
forest fires; and there are similar groves along the road towards
Pleasantville. In fact, the finest forest trees flourish in that region
wherever given a good chance. Even some of the beaches of Cape May had
valuable oak and luxuriant growths of red cedar; and until a few years
ago there were fine trees, especially hollies, surviving on Wildwood
Beach.

The Jersey white cedar swamps were, and still are, places of fascinating
interest to the naturalist and the botanist. The hunter or explorer
found them scattered almost everywhere in the old forest and near its
edges, varying in size from a few square yards up to hundreds of acres.
They were formed by little streams easily checked in their flow through
the level land by decaying vegetation or dammed by beavers. They kept
the water within the country, preventing all effects of droughts,
stimulating the growth of vegetation which by its decay, throughout
the centuries, was steadily adding vegetable mold or humus to the sandy
soil. This process of building up a richer soil has now been largely
stopped by lumbering, drainage, and fires.

While there are many of these swamps left, the appearance of numbers
of them has largely changed. When the white men first came, the great
cedars three or four feet in diameter which had fallen centuries before
often lay among the living trees, some of them buried deep in the mud
and preserved from decay. They were invaluable timber, and digging them
out and cutting them up became an important industry for over a hundred
years. In addition to being used for boat building, they made excellent
shingles which would last a lifetime. The swamps, indeed, became known
as shingle mines, and it was a good description of them. An important
trade was developed in hogshead staves, hoops, shingles, boards, and
planks, much of which went into the West Indian trade to be exchanged
for rum, sugar, molasses, and negroes. *


    * Between the years 1740 and '50, the Cedar Swamps of the county
[Cape May] were mostly located; and the amount of lumber since taken
from them is incalculable, not only as an article of trade, but to
supply the home demand for fencing and building material in the county.
Large portions of these swamps have been worked a second and some a
third time, since located. At the present time [1857] there is not an
acre of original growth of swamp standing, having all passed away
before the resistless sway of the speculator or the consumer. "Beesley's
"Sketch of Cape May" p. 197.


The great forest has long since been lumbered to death. The pines were
worked for tar, pitch, resin, and turpentine until for lack of material
the industry passed southward through the Carolinas to Florida,
exhausting the trees as it went. The Christmas demand for holly has
almost stripped the Jersey woods of these trees once so numerous.
Destructive fires and frequent cutting keep the pine and oak lands
stunted. Thousands of dollars' worth of cedar springing up in the swamps
are sometimes destroyed in a day. But efforts to control the fires so
destructive not only to this standing timber but to the fertility of
the soil, and attempts to reforest this country not only for the sake
of timber but as an attraction to those who resort there in search of
health or natural beauty, have not been vigorously pushed. The great
forest has now, to be sure, been partially cultivated in spots, and the
sand used for large glass-making industries. Small fruits and grapes
flourish in some places. At the northern end of this forest tract the
health resort known as Lakewood was established to take advantage of the
pine air. A little to the southward is the secluded Brown's Mills, once
so appealing to lovers of the simple life. Checked on the east by the
great forest, the West Jersey Quakers spread southward from Salem until
they came to the Cohansey, a large and beautiful stream flowing out of
the forest and wandering through green meadows and marshes to the bay.
So numerous were the wild geese along its shores and along the Maurice
River farther south that the first settlers are said to have killed them
for their feathers alone and to have thrown the carcasses away. At the
head of navigation of the Cohansey was a village called Cohansey Bridge,
and after 1765 Bridgeton, a name still borne by a flourishing modern
town. Lower down near the marsh was the village of Greenwich, the
principal place of business up to the year 1800, with a foreign trade.
Some of the tea the East India Company tried to force on the colonists
during the Revolution was sent there and was duly rejected. It is still
an extremely pretty village, with its broad shaded streets like a New
England town and its old Quaker meeting house. In fact, not a few New
Englanders from Connecticut, still infatuated with southern Jersey in
spite of the rebuffs received in ancient times from Dutch and Swedes,
finally settled near the Cohansey after it came under control of the
more amiable Quakers. There was also one place called after Fairfield in
Connecticut and another called New England Town.

The first churches of this region were usually built near running
streams so that the congregation could procure water for themselves and
their horses. Of one old Presbyterian Church it used to be said that
no one had ever ridden to it in a wheeled vehicle. Wagons and carriages
were very scarce until after the Revolution. Carts for occasions of
ceremony as well as utility were used before wagons and carriages. For a
hundred and fifty years the horse's back was the best form of conveyance
in the deep sand of the trails and roads. This was true of all southern
Jersey. Pack horses and the backs of Indian and negro slaves were the
principal means of transportation on land. The roads and trails, in
fact, were so few and so heavy with sand that water travel was very
much developed. The Indian dugout canoe was adopted and found faster
and better than heavy English rowboats. As the province was almost
surrounded by water and was covered with a network of creeks and
channels, nearly all the villages and towns were situated on tidewater
streams, and the dugout canoe, modified and improved, was for several
generations the principal means of communication. Most of the old roads
in New Jersey followed Indian trails. There was a trail, for example,
from the modern Camden opposite Philadelphia, following up Cooper's
Creek past Berlin, then called Long-a-coming, crossing the watershed,
and then following Great Egg Harbor River to the seashore. Another
trail, long used by the settlers, led from Salem up to Camden,
Burlington, and Trenton, going round the heads of streams. It was
afterwards abandoned for the shorter route obtained by bridging the
streams nearer their mouths. This old trail also extended from the
neighborhood of Trenton to Perth Amboy near the mouth of the Hudson, and
thus, by supplementing the lower routes, made a trail nearly the whole
length of the province.

As a Quaker refuge, West Jersey never attained the success of
Pennsylvania. The political disturbances and the continually threatened
loss of self-government in both the Jerseys were a serious deterrent to
Quakers who, above all else, prized rights which they found far better
secured in Pennsylvania. In 1702, when the two Jerseys were united into
one colony under a government appointed by the Crown, those rights were
more restricted than ever and all hopes of West Jersey becoming a colony
under complete Quaker control were shattered. Under Governor Cornbury,
the English law was adopted and enforced, and the Quakers were
disqualified from testifying in court unless they took an oath and
were prohibited from serving on juries or holding any office of trust.
Cornbury's judges wore scarlet robes, powdered wigs, cocked hats,
gold lace, and side arms; they were conducted to the courthouse by the
sheriff's cavalcade and opened court with great parade and ceremony.
Such a spectacle of pomp was sufficient to divert the flow of Quaker
immigrants to Pennsylvania, where the government was entirely in Quaker
hands and where plain and serious ways gave promise of enduring and
unmolested prosperity.

The Quakers had altogether thirty meeting houses in West Jersey and
eleven in East Jersey, which probably shows about the proportion
of Quaker influence in the two Jerseys. Many of them have since
disappeared; some of the early buildings, to judge from the pictures,
were of wood and not particularly pleasing in appearance. They were
makeshifts, usually intended to be replaced by better buildings. Some
substantial brick buildings of excellent architecture have survived, and
their plainness and simplicity, combined with excellent proportions and
thorough construction, are clearly indicative of Quaker character. There
is a particularly interesting one in Salem with a magnificent old oak
beside it, another in the village of Greenwich on the Cohansey farther
south, and another at Crosswicks near Trenton.

In West Jersey near Mount Holly was born and lived John Woolman, a
Quaker who became eminent throughout the English speaking world for the
simplicity and loftiness of his religious thought as well as for his
admirable style of expression. His "Journal," once greatly and even
extravagantly admired, still finds readers. "Get the writings of John
Woolman by heart," said Charles Lamb, "and love the early Quakers."
He was among the Quakers one of the first and perhaps the first really
earnest advocate of the abolition of slavery. The scenes of West Jersey
and the writings of Woolman seem to belong together. Possibly a feeling
for the simplicity of those scenes and their life led Walt Whitman, who
grew up on Long Island under Quaker influence, to spend his last years
at Camden, in West Jersey. His profound democracy, which was very
Quaker-like, was more at home there perhaps than anywhere else.



Chapter IX. Planters And Traders Of Southern Jersey

Most of the colonies in America, especially the stronger ones, had an
aristocratic class, which was often large and powerful, as in the case
of Virginia, and which usually centered around the governor, especially
if he were appointed from England by the Crown or by a proprietor. But
there was very little of this social distinction in New Jersey. Her
political life had been too much broken up, and she had been too long
dependent on the governors of New York to have any of those pretty
little aristocracies with bright colored clothes, and coaches and four,
flourishing within her boundaries. There seems to have been a faint
suggestion of such social pretensions under Governor Franklin just
before the Revolution. He was beginning to live down the objections to
his illegitimate birth and Toryism and by his entertainments and manner
of living was creating a social following. There is said also to have
been something a little like the beginning of an aristocracy among the
descendants of the Dutch settlers who had ancestral holdings near the
Hudson; but this amounted to very little.

Class distinctions were not so strongly marked in New Jersey as in some
other colonies. There grew up in southern Jersey, however, a sort of
aristocracy of gentlemen farmers, who owned large tracts of land and
lived in not a little style in good houses on the small streams.

The northern part of the province, largely settled and influenced by New
Englanders, was like New England a land of vigorous concentrated town
life and small farms. The hilly and mountainous nature of the northern
section naturally led to small holdings of land. But in southern Jersey
the level sandy tracts of forest were often taken up in large areas.
In the absence of manufacturing, large acreage naturally became, as in
Virginia and Maryland, the only mark of wealth and social distinction.
The great landlord was looked up to by the lesser fry. The Quaker rule
of discountenancing marrying out of meeting tended to keep a large
acreage in the family and to make it larger by marriage. A Quaker
of broad acres would seek for his daughter a young man of another
landholding Quaker family and would thus join the two estates.

There was a marked difference between East Jersey and West Jersey
in county organization. In West Jersey the people tended to become
planters; their farms and plantations somewhat like those of the far
South; and the political unit of government was the county. In East
Jersey the town was the starting point and the county marked the
boundaries of a collection of towns. This curious difference, the result
of soil, climate, and methods of life, shows itself in other States
wherever South and North meet. Illinois is an example, where the
southern part of the State is governed by the county system, and the
northern part by the town system.

The lumberman, too, in clearing off the primeval forest and selling the
timber, usually dealt in immense acreage. Some families, it is said, can
be traced steadily proceeding southward as they stripped off the forest,
and started sawmills and gristmills on the little streams that trickled
from the swamps, and like beavers making with their dams those pretty
ponds which modern lovers of the picturesque are now so eager to find. A
good deal of the lumbering in the interior pines tract was carried on
by persons who leased the premises from owners who lived on plantations
along the Delaware or its tributary streams. These operations began soon
after 1700. Wood roads were cut into the Pines, sawmills were started,
and constant use turned some of these wood roads into the highways of
modern times.

There was a speculative tinge in the operations of this landed
aristocracy. Like the old tobacco raising aristocracy of Virginia and
Maryland, they were inclined to go from tract to tract, skinning what
they could from a piece of deforested land and then seeking another
virgin tract. The roughest methods were used; wooden plows, brush
harrows, straw collars, grapevine harness, and poor shelter for animals
and crops; but were the Virginia methods any better? In these operations
there was apparently a good deal of sudden profit and mushroom
prosperity accompanied by a good deal of debt and insolvency. In this,
too, they were like the Virginians and Carolinians. There seem to have
been also a good many slaves in West Jersey, brought, as in the southern
colonies, to work on the large estates, and this also, no doubt, helped
to foster the aristocratic feeling.

The best days of the Jersey gentlemen farmers came probably when they
could no longer move from tract to tract. They settled down and enjoyed
a very plentiful, if rude, existence on the products of their land,
game, and fish, amid a fine climate--with mosquitoes enough in summer to
act as a counterirritant and prevent stagnation from too much ease and
prosperity. After the manner of colonial times, they wove their own
clothes from the wool of their own sheep and made their own implements,
furniture, and simple machinery.

There are still to be found fascinating traces of this old life in
out-of-the-way parts of southern Jersey. To run upon old houses among
the Jersey pines still stored with Latin classics and old editions of
Shakespeare, Addison, or Samuel Johnson, to come across an old mill
with its machinery, cogwheels, flywheels, and all, made of wood, to find
people who make their own oars, and the handles of their tools from
the materials furnished by their own forest, is now unfortunately a
refreshment of the spirit that is daily becoming rarer.

This condition of material and social self-sufficiency lasted in places
long after the Revolution. It was a curious little aristocracy--a very
faint and faded one, lacking the robustness of the far southern
type, and lacking indeed the real essential of an aristocracy, namely
political power. Moreover, although there were slaves in New Jersey,
there were not enough of them to exalt the Jersey gentlemen farmers into
such self-sufficient lords and masters as the Virginian and Carolinian
planters became.

To search out the remains of this stage of American history, however,
takes one up many pleasant streams flowing out of the forest tract
to the Delaware on one side or to the ocean on the other. This
topographical formation of a central ridge or watershed of forest and
swamp was a repetition of the same formation in the Delaware peninsula,
which like southern Jersey had originally been a shoal and then an
island. The Jersey watershed, with its streams abounding in wood duck
and all manner of wild life, must have been in its primeval days as
fascinating as some of the streams of the Florida cypress swamps. Toward
the ocean, Wading River, the Mullica, the Tuckahoe, Great Egg; and on
the Delaware side the Maurice, Cohansey, Salem Creek, Oldman's, Raccoon,
Mantua, Woodberry, Timber, and the Rancocas, still possess attraction.
Some of them, on opposite sides of the divide, are not far apart
at their sources in the old forest tract; so that a canoe can be
transported over the few miles and thus traverse the State. One of these
trips up Timber Creek from the Delaware and across only eight miles of
land to the headwaters of Great Egg Harbor River and thence down to the
ocean, thus cutting South Jersey in half, is a particularly romantic
one. The heavy woods and swamps of this secluded route along these
forest shadowed streams are apparently very much as they were three
hundred years ago.

The water in all these streams, particularly in their upper parts, owing
to the sandy soil, is very clean and clear and is often stained by
the cedar roots in the swamps a clear brown, sometimes almost an amber
color. One of the streams, the Rancocas, with its many windings to Mount
Holly and then far inland to Brown's Mills, seems to be the favorite
with canoemen and is probably without an equal in its way for those who
love the Indian's gift that brings us so close to nature.

The spread of the Quaker settlements along Delaware Bay to Cape May
was checked by the Maurice River and its marshes and by the Great Cedar
Swamp which crossed the country from Delaware Bay to the ocean and thus
made of the Cape May region a sort of island. The Cape May region, it
is true, was settled by Quakers, but most of them came from Long Island
rather than from the settlements on the Delaware. They had followed
whale fishing on Long Island and in pursuit of that occupation some of
them had migrated to Cape May where whales were numerous not far off
shore.

The leading early families of Cape May, the Townsends, Stillwells,
Corsons, Leamings, Ludlams, Spicers, and Cresses, many of whose
descendants still live there, were Quakers of the Long Island strain.
The ancestor of the Townsend family came to Cape May because he had
been imprisoned and fined and threatened with worse under the New York
government for assisting his fellow Quakers to hold meetings. Probably
the occasional severity of the administration of the New York laws
against Quakers, which were the same as those of England, had as much
to do as had the whales with the migration to Cape May. This Quaker
civilization extended from Cape May up as far as Great Egg Harbor where
the Great Cedar Swamp joined the seashore. Quaker meeting houses were
built at Cape May, Galloway, Tuckahoe, and Great Egg. All have been
abandoned and the buildings themselves have disappeared, except that of
the Cape May meeting, called the Old Cedar Meeting, at Seaville; and it
has no congregation. The building is kept in repair by members of the
Society from other places.

Besides the Quakers, Cape May included a number of New Haven people, the
first of whom came there as early as 1640 under the leadership of George
Lamberton and Captain Turner, seeking profit in whale fishing. They were
not driven out by the Dutch and Swedes, as happened to their companions
who attempted to settle higher up the river at Salem and the Schuylkill.
About one-fifth of the old family names of Cape May and New Haven are
similar, and there is supposed to be not a little New England blood
not only in Cape May but in the neighboring counties of Cumberland and
Salem. While the first New Haven whalers came to Cape May in 1640, it is
probable that for a long time they only sheltered their vessels there,
and none of them became permanent settlers until about 1685.

Scandinavians contributed another element to the population of the Cape
May region. Very little is definitely known about this settlement, but
the Swedish names in Cape May and Cumberland counties seem to indicate a
migration of Scandinavians from Wilmington and Tinicum.

Great Egg Harbor, which formed the northern part of the Cape May
settlement, was named from the immense numbers of wild fowl, swans,
ducks, and water birds that formerly nested there every summer and have
now been driven to Canada or beyond. Little Egg Harbor farther up the
coast was named for the same reason as well as Egg Island, of three
hundred acres in Delaware Bay, since then eaten away by the tide. The
people of the district had excellent living from the eggs as well as
from the plentiful fowl, fish, and oysters.

Some farming was done by the inhabitants of Cape May; and many cattle,
marked with brands but in a half wild state, were kept out on the
uninhabited beaches which have now become seaside summer cities. Some
of the cattle were still running wild on the beaches down to the time
of the Civil War. The settlers "mined" the valuable white cedar from the
swamps for shingles and boards, leaving great "pool holes" in the swamps
which even today sometimes trap the unwary sportsman. The women knitted
innumerable mittens and also made wampum or Indian money from the clam
and oyster shells, an important means of exchange in the Indian trade
all over the colonies, and even to some extent among the colonists
themselves. The Cape May people built sloops for carrying the white
cedar, the mittens, oysters, and wampum to the outside world. They
sold a great deal of their cedar in Long Island, Rhode Island, and
Connecticut. Philadelphia finally became their market for oysters and
also for lumber, corn, and the whalebone and oil. Their sloops also
traded to the southern colonies and even to the West Indies.

They were an interesting little community, these Cape May people, very
isolated and dependent on the water and on their boats, for they were
completely cut off by the Great Cedar Swamp which stretched across the
point and separated them from the rest of the coast. This troublesome
swamp was not bridged for many years; and even then the roads to it were
long, slow, and too sandy for transporting anything of much bulk.

Next above Cape May on the coast was another isolated patch of
civilization which, while not an island, was nevertheless cut off on the
south by Great Egg Harbor with its river and marshes, and on the north
by Little Egg Harbor with the Mullica River and its marshes extending
far inland. The people in this district also lived somewhat to
themselves. To the north lay the district which extended to Sandy Hook,
also with its distinct set of people.

The people of the Cape became in colonial times clever traders in
various pursuits. Although in one sense they were as isolated as
islanders, their adventurous life on the sea gave them breadth of view.
By their thrift and in innumerable shrewd and persistent ways they
amassed competencies and estates for their families. Aaron Leaming, for
example, who died in 1780, left an estate of nearly $1,000,000. Some
kept diaries which have become historically valuable in showing not only
their history but their good education and the peculiar cast of their
mind for keen trading as well as their rigid economy and integrity.

One character, Jacob Spicer, a prosperous colonial, insisted on having
everything made at home by his sons and daughters--shoes, clothes,
leather breeches, wampum, even shoe thread--calculating the cost of
everything to a fraction and economizing to the last penny of money and
the last second of time. Yet in the course of a year he used "fifty-two
gallons of rum, ten of wine, and two barrels of cyder." Apparently in
those days hard labor and hard drinking went well together.

The Cape May people, relying almost entirely on the water for
communication and trade, soon took to piloting vessels in the Delaware
River, and some of them still follow this occupation. They also became
skillful sailors and builders of small craft, and it is not surprising
to learn that Jacocks Swain and his sons introduced, in 1811, the
centerboard for keeping flat-bottomed craft closer to the wind. They
are said to have taken out a patent for this invention and are given the
credit of being the originators of the idea. But the device was known in
England in 1774, was introduced in Massachusetts in the same year, and
may have been used long before by the Dutch. The need of it, however,
was no doubt strongly impressed upon the Cape May people by the
difficulties which their little sloops experienced in beating home
against contrary winds. Some of them, indeed, spent weeks in sight of
the Cape, unable to make it. One sloop, the Nancy, seventy-two days from
Demarara, hung off and on for forty-three days from December 25, 1787,
to February 6, 1788, and was driven off fifteen times before she finally
got into Hereford Inlet. Sometimes better sailing craft had to go out
and bring in such distressed vessels. The early boats were no doubt
badly constructed; but in the end apprenticeship to dire necessity made
the Cape May sailors masters of seamanship and the windward art. *


    * Stevens, "History of Cape May County," pp. 219, 229; Kelley,
"American Yachts" (1884), p. 165.


Wilson, the naturalist, spent a great deal of time in the Cape May
region, because of the great variety of birds to be found there.
Southern types, like the Florida egret, ventured even so far north, and
it was a stopping place for migrating birds, notably woodcock, on their
northern and southern journeys. Men of the stone age had once been
numerous in this region, as the remains of village plats and great shell
heaps bore witness. It was a resting point for all forms of life. That
much traveled, adventurous gentleman of the sea, Captain Kidd, according
to popular legend, was a frequent visitor to this coast.

In later times, beginning in 1801, the Cape became one of the earliest
of the summer resorts. The famous Commodore Decatur was among the first
distinguished men to be attracted by the simple seaside charm of the
place, long before it was destroyed by wealth and crowds. Year by year
he used to measure and record at one spot the encroachment of the sea
upon the beach. Where today the sea washes and the steel pier extends,
once lay cornfields. For a hundred years it was a favorite resting place
for statesmen and politicians of national eminence. They traveled there
by stage, sailing sloop, or their own wagons. People from Baltimore
and the South more particularly sought the place because it was easily
accessible from the head of Chesapeake Bay by an old railroad, long
since abandoned, to Newcastle on the Delaware, whence sail-or steamboats
went to Cape May. This avoided the tedious stage ride over the sandy
Jersey roads. Presidents, cabinet officers, senators, and congressmen
sought the invigorating air of the Cape and the attractions of the old
village, its seafaring life, the sailing, fishing, and bathing on the
best beach of the coast. Congress Hall, their favorite hotel, became
famous, and during a large part of the nineteenth century presidential
nominations and policies are said to have been planned within its walls.



Chapter X. Scotch Covenanters And Others In East Jersey

East Jersey was totally different in its topography from West Jersey.
The northern half of the State is a region of mountains and lakes. As
part of the original continent it had been under the ice sheet of
the glacial age and was very unlike the level sands, swamps, and pine
barrens of West Jersey which had arisen as a shoal and island from the
sea. The only place in East Jersey where settlement was at all easy was
along the open meadows which were reached by water near the mouth of the
Hudson, round Newark Bay, and along the Hackensack River.

The Dutch, by the discoveries of Henry Hudson in 1609, claimed the whole
region between the Hudson and the Delaware. They settled part of East
Jersey opposite their headquarters at New York and called it Pavonia.
But their cruel massacre of some Indians who sought refuge among them at
Pavonia destroyed the prospects of the settlement. The Indians revenged
themselves by massacring the Dutch again and again, every time they
attempted to reestablish Pavonia. This kept the Dutch out of East Jersey
until 1660, when they succeeded in establishing Bergen between Newark
Bay and the Hudson.

The Dutch authority in America was overthrown in 1664 by Charles II,
who had already given all New Jersey to his brother the Duke of York.
Colonel Richard Nicolls commanded the British expedition that seized the
Dutch possessions; and he had been given full power as deputy governor
of all the Duke of York's vast territory.

Meantime the New England Puritans seem to have kept their eyes on East
Jersey as a desirable region, and the moment the Connecticut Puritans
heard of Nicolls' appointment, they applied to him for a grant of a
large tract of land on Newark Bay. In the next year, 1665, he gave them
another tract from the mouth of the Raritan to Sandy Hook; and soon the
villages of Shrewsbury and Middletown were started.

Meantime, however, unknown to Nicolls, the Duke of York in England had
given all of New Jersey to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. As has
already been pointed out, they had divided the province between
them, and East Jersey had fallen to Carteret, who sent out, with some
immigrants, his relative Philip Carteret as governor. Governor Carteret
was of course very much surprised to find so much of the best land
already occupied by the excellent and thrifty Yankees. As a consequence,
litigation and sometimes civil war over this unlucky mistake lasted for
a hundred years. Many of the Yankee settlers under the Nicolls grant
refused to pay quitrents to Carteret or his successors and, in spite of
a commission of inquiry from England in 1751 and a chancery suit, they
held their own until the Revolution of 1776 extinguished all British
authority.

There was therefore from the beginning a strong New England tinge in
East Jersey which has lasted to this day. Governor Carteret established
a village on Newark Bay which still bears the name Elizabeth, which
he gave it in honor of the wife of the proprietor, and he made it the
capital. There were also immigrants from Scotland and England. But
Puritans from Long Island and New England continued to settle round
Newark Bay. By virtue either of character or numbers, New Englanders
were evidently the controlling element, for they established the New
England system of town government, and imposed strict Connecticut laws,
making twelve crimes punishable with death. Soon there were flourishing
little villages, Newark and Elizabeth, besides Middletown and
Shrewsbury. The next year Piscatawa and Woodbridge were added. Newark
and the region round it, including the Oranges, was settled by very
exclusive Puritans, or Congregationalists, as they are now called,
some thirty families from four Connecticut towns--Milford, Guilford,
Bradford, and New Haven. They decided that only church members should
hold office and vote.

Governor Carteret ruled the colony with an appointive council and a
general assembly elected by the people, the typical colonial form of
government. His administration lasted from 1665 to his death in 1682;
and there is nothing very remarkable to record except the rebellion of
the New Englanders, especially those who had received their land from
Nicolls. Such independent Connecticut people were, of course, quite out
of place in a proprietary colony, and, when in 1670 the first collection
of quitrents was attempted, they broke out in violent opposition, in
which the settlers of Elizabeth were prominent. In 1672 they elected
a revolutionary assembly of their own and, in place of the deputy
governor, appointed as proprietor a natural son of Carteret. They
began imprisoning former officers and confiscating estates in the most
approved revolutionary form and for a time had the whole government in
their control. It required the interference of the Duke of York, of the
proprietors, and of the British Crown to allay the little tempest, and
three years were given in which to pay the quitrents.

After the death of Sir George Carteret in 1680, his province of East
Jersey was sold to William Penn and eleven other Quakers for the sum
of 3400 pounds. Colonies seem to have been comparatively inexpensive
luxuries in those days. A few years before, in 1675, Penn and some other
Quakers had, as has already been related, gained control of West Jersey
for the still smaller sum of one thousand pounds and had established
it as a Quaker refuge. It might be supposed that they now had the same
purpose in view in East Jersey, but apparently their intention was to
create a refuge for Presbyterians, the famous Scotch Covenanters,
much persecuted at that time under Charles II, who was forcing them to
conform to the Church of England.

Penn and his fellow proprietors of East Jersey each chose a partner,
most of them Scotchmen, two of whom, the Earl of Perth and Lord
Drummond, were prominent men. To this mixed body of Quakers, other
dissenters, and some Papists, twenty-four proprietors in all, the Duke
of York reconfirmed by special patent their right to East Jersey. Under
their urging a few Scotch Covenanters began to arrive and seem to have
first established themselves at Perth Amboy, which they named from
the Scottish Earl of Perth and an Indian word meaning "point." This
settlement they expected to become a great commercial port rivaling New
York. Curiously enough, Robert Barclay, the first governor appointed,
was not only a Scotchman but also a Quaker, and a theologian whose
"Apology for the True Christian Divinity" (1678) is regarded to this day
as the best statement of the original Quaker doctrine. He remained in
England, however, and the deputies whom he sent out to rule the colony
had a troublous time of it.

That Quakers should establish a refuge for Presbyterians seems at first
peculiar, but it was in accord with their general philanthropic plan to
help the oppressed and suffering, to rescue prisoners and exiles, and
especially to ameliorate the horrible condition of people confined in
the English dungeons and prisons. Many vivid pictures of how the Scotch
Covenanters were hunted down like wild beasts may be found in English
histories and novels. When their lives were spared they often met a
fate worse than death in the loathsome dungeons into which thousands of
Quakers of that time were also thrust. A large part of William Penn's
life as a courtier was spent in rescuing prisoners, exiles, and
condemned persons of all sorts, and not merely those of his own faith.
So the undertaking to make of Jersey two colonies, one a refuge for
Quakers and the other a refuge for Covenanters, was natural enough, and
it was a very broad-minded plan for that age.

In 1683, a few years after the Quaker control of East Jersey began, a
new and fiercer persecution of the Covenanters was started in the old
country, and shortly afterwards Monmouth's insurrection in England broke
out and was followed by a most bloody proscription and punishment. The
greatest efforts were made to induce those still untouched to fly for
refuge to East Jersey; but, strange to say, comparatively few of them
came. It is another proof of the sturdiness and devotion which has
filled so many pages of history and romance with their praise that as
a class the Covenanters remained at home to establish their faith with
torture, martyrdom, and death.

In 1685 the Duke of York ascended the throne of England as James II,
and all that was naturally to be expected from such a bigoted despot was
soon realized. The persecutions of the Covenanters grew worse. Crowded
into prisons to die of thirst and suffocation, shot down on the
highways, tied to stakes to be drowned by the rising tide, the whole
Calvinistic population of Scotland seemed doomed to extermination. Again
they were told of America as the only place where religious liberty was
allowed, and in addition a book was circulated among them called "The
Model of the Government of the Province of East Jersey in America."
These efforts were partially successful. More Covenanters came than
before, but nothing like the numbers of Quakers that flocked to
Pennsylvania. The whole population of East Jersey--New Englanders,
Dutch, Scotch Covenanters, and all--did not exceed five thousand and
possibly was not over four thousand.

Some French Huguenots, such as came to many of the English colonies
after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes of 1685, were added to the
East Jersey population. A few went to Salem in West Jersey, and some
of these became Quakers. In both the Jerseys, as elsewhere, they became
prominent and influential in all spheres of life. There was a decided
Dutch influence, it is said, in the part nearest New York, emanating
from the Bergen settlement in which the Dutch had succeeded in
establishing themselves in 1660 after the Indians had twice driven them
from Pavonia. Many descendants of Dutch families are still found in
that region. Many Dutch characteristics were to be found in that region
throughout colonial times. Many of the houses had Dutch stoops or
porches at the door, with seats where the family and visitors sat on
summer evenings to smoke and gossip. Long Dutch spouts extended out
from the eaves to discharge the rain water into the street. But the
prevailing tone of East Jersey seems to have been set by the Scotch
Presbyterians and the New England Congregationalists. The College of
New Jersey, afterward known as Princeton, established in 1747, was the
result of a movement among the Presbyterians of East Jersey and New
York.

All these elements of East Jersey, Scotch Covenanters, Connecticut
Puritans, Huguenots, and Dutch of the Dutch Reformed Church, were in
a sense different but in reality very much in accord and congenial
in their ideas of religion and politics. They were all sturdy,
freedom-loving Protestants, and they set the tone that prevails in East
Jersey to this day. Their strict discipline and their uncompromising
thrift may now seem narrow and harsh; but it made them what they were;
and it has left a legacy of order and prosperity under which alien
religions and races are eager to seek protection. In its foundation the
Quakers may claim a share.

The new King, James II, was inclined to reassume jurisdiction and extend
the power of the Governor of New York over East Jersey in spite of his
grant to Sir George Carteret. In fact, he desired to put New England,
New York, and New Jersey under one strong government centered at New
York, to abolish their charters, to extinguish popular government, and
to make them all mere royal dependencies in pursuance of his general
policy of establishing an absolute monarchy and a papal church in
England.

The curse of East Jersey's existence was to be always an appendage of
New York, or to be threatened with that condition. The inhabitants now
had to enter their vessels and pay duties at New York. Writs were issued
by order of the King putting both the Jerseys and all New England under
the New York Governor. Step by step the plans for amalgamation and
despotism moved on successfully, when suddenly the English Revolution
of 1688 put an end to the whole magnificent scheme, drove the King into
exile, and placed William of Orange on the throne.

The proprietaries of both Jerseys reassumed their former authority. But
the New York Assembly attempted to exercise control over East Jersey and
to levy duties on its exports. The two provinces were soon on the eve of
a little war. For twelve or fifteen years East Jersey was in disorder,
with seditious meetings, mob rule, judges and sheriffs attacked while
performing their duty, the proprietors claiming quitrents from the
people, the people resisting, and the British Privy Council threatening
a suit to take the province from the proprietors and make a Crown
colony of it. The period is known in the history of this colony as "The
Revolution." Under the threat of the Privy Council to take over the
province, the proprietors of both East and West Jersey surrendered their
rights of political government, retaining their ownership of land and
quitrents, and the two Jerseys were united under one government in 1702.
Its subsequent history demands another chapter.



Chapter XI. The United Jerseys

The Quaker colonists grouped round Burlington and Salem, on the
Delaware, and the Scotch Covenanters and New England colonists grouped
around Perth Amboy and Newark, near the mouth of the Hudson, made up the
two Jerseys. Neither colony had a numerous population, and the stretch
of country lying between them was during most of the colonial period a
wilderness. It is now crossed by the railway from Trenton to New York.
It has always been a line of travel from the Delaware to the Hudson. At
first there was only an Indian trail across it, but after 1695 there was
a road, and after 1738 a stage route.

In 1702, while still separated by this wilderness, the two Jerseys were
united politically by the proprietors voluntarily surrendering all their
political rights to the Crown. The political distinction between
East Jersey and West Jersey was thus abolished; their excellent free
constitutions were rendered of doubtful authority; and from that time to
the Revolution they constituted one colony under the control of a royal
governor appointed by the Crown.

The change was due to the uncertainty and annoyance caused for their
separate governments when their right to govern was in doubt owing to
interference on the part of New York and the desire of the King to
make them a Crown colony. The original grant of the Duke of York to the
proprietors Berkeley and Carteret had given title to the soil but had
been silent as to the right to govern. The first proprietors and their
successors had always assumed that the right to govern necessarily
accompanied this gift of the land. Such a privilege, however, the
Crown was inclined to doubt. William Penn was careful to avoid this
uncertainty when he received his charter for Pennsylvania. Profiting by
the sad example of the Jerseys, he made sure that he was given both the
title to the soil and the right to govern.

The proprietors, however, now surrendered only their right to govern the
Jerseys and retained their ownership of the land; and the people always
maintained that they, on their part, retained all the political rights
and privileges which had been granted them by the proprietors. And these
rights were important, for the concessions or constitutions granted by
the proprietors under the advanced Quaker influence of the time were
decidedly liberal. The assemblies, as the legislatures were called, had
the right to meet and adjourn as they pleased, instead of having
their meetings and adjournments dictated by the governor. This was an
important right and one which the Crown and royal governors were
always trying to restrict or destroy, because it made an assembly very
independent. This contest for colonial rights was exactly similar to
the struggle of the English Parliament for liberty against the supposed
right of the Stuart kings to call and adjourn Parliament as they chose.
If the governor could adjourn the assembly when he pleased, he could
force it to pass any laws he wanted or prevent its passing any laws at
all. The two Jersey assemblies under their Quaker constitutions also
had the privilege of making their own rules of procedure, and they
had jurisdiction over taxes, roads, towns, militia, and all details of
government. These rights of a legislature are familiar enough now
to all. Very few people realize, however, what a struggle and what
sacrifices were required to attain them.

The rest of New Jersey colonial history is made up chiefly of struggles
over these two questions--the rights of the proprietors and their
quitrents as against the people, and the rights of the new assembly as
against the Crown. There were thus three parties, the governor and his
adherents, the proprietors and their friends, and the assembly and the
people. The proprietors had the best of the change, for they lost only
their troublesome political power and retained their property. They
never, however, received such financial returns from the property as
the sons of William Penn enjoyed from Pennsylvania. But the union of the
Jerseys seriously curtailed the rights enjoyed by the people under
the old government, and all possibility of a Quaker government in West
Jersey was ended. It was this experience in the Jerseys, no doubt,
that caused William Penn to require so many safeguards in selling
his political rights in Pennsylvania to the Crown that the sale was,
fortunately for the colony, never completed.

The assembly under the union met alternately at Perth Amboy and at
Burlington. Lord Cornbury, the first governor, was also Governor of
New York, a humiliating arrangement that led to no end of trouble. The
executive government, the press, and the judiciary were in the complete
control of the Crown and the Governor, who was instructed to take care
that "God Almighty be duly served according to the rites of the Church
of England, and the traffic in merchantable negroes encouraged."
Cornbury contemptuously ignored the assembly's right to adjourn and kept
adjourning it till one was elected which would pass the laws he wanted.
Afterwards the assemblies were less compliant, and, under the lead of
two able men, Lewis Morris of East Jersey and Samuel Jennings, a Quaker
of West Jersey, they stood up for their rights and complained to the
mother country. But Cornbury went on fighting them, granted monopolies,
established arbitrary fees, prohibited the proprietors from selling
their lands, prevented three members of the assembly duly elected from
being sworn, and was absent in New York so much of the time that the
laws went unexecuted and convicted murderers wandered about at large.
In short, he went through pretty much the whole list of offenses of a
corrupt and good-for-nothing royal governor of colonial times. The union
of the two colonies consequently seemed to involve no improvement over
former conditions. At last, the protests and appeals of proprietors and
people prevailed, and Cornbury was recalled.

Quieter times followed, and in 1738 New Jersey had the satisfaction
of obtaining a governor all her own. The New York Governor had always
neglected Jersey affairs, was difficult of access, made appointments
and administered justice in the interests of New York, and forced Jersey
vessels to pay registration fees to New York. Amid great rejoicing over
the change, the Crown appointed the popular leader, Lewis Morris, as
governor. But by a strange turn of fate, when once secure in power,
he became a most obstinate upholder of royal prerogative, worried the
assembly with adjournments, and, after Cornbury, was the most obnoxious
of all the royal governors.

The governors now usually made Burlington their capital and it became,
on that account, a place of much show and interest. The last colonial
governor was William Franklin, an illegitimate son of Benjamin
Franklin, and he would probably have made a success of the office if
the Revolution had not stopped him. He had plenty of ability, affable
manners, and was full of humor and anecdote like his father, whom he is
said to have somewhat resembled. He had combined in youth a fondness
for books with a fondness for adventure, was comptroller of the colonial
post office and clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, served a couple of
campaigns in the French and Indian Wars, went to England with his father
in 1757, was admitted to the English Bar, attained some intimacy with
the Earl of Bute and Lord Fairfax, and through the latter obtained the
governorship of New Jersey in 1762.

The people were at first much displeased at his appointment and never
entirely got over his illegitimate birth and his turning from Whig
to Tory as soon as his appointment was secured. But he advanced the
interests of the colony with the home government and favored beneficial
legislation. He had an attractive wife, and they entertained, it is
said, with viceregal elegance, and started a fine model farm or country
place on the north shore of the Rancocas not far from the capital at
Burlington. Franklin was drawing the province together and building it
up as a community, but his extreme loyalist principles in the Revolution
destroyed his chance for popularity and have obscured his reputation.

Though the population of New Jersey was a mixed one, judged by the very
distinct religious differences of colonial times, yet racially it was
thoroughly Anglo-Saxon and a good stock to build upon. At the time
of the Revolution in 1776 the people numbered only about 120,000,
indicating a slow growth; but when the first census of the United States
was taken, in 1790, they numbered 184,139.

The natural division of the State into North and South Jersey is marked
by a line from Trenton to Jersey City. The people of these two divisions
were quite as distinct in early times as striking differences in
environment and religion could make them. Even in the inevitable
merging of modern life the two regions are still distinct socially,
economically, and intellectually. Along the dividing line the two types
of the population, of course, merged and here was produced and is still
to be found the Jerseyman of the composite type.

Trenton, the capital of the State, is very properly in the dividing
belt. It was named after William Trent, a Philadelphia merchant who had
been speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly and who became chief justice
of New Jersey. Long ages before white men came Trenton seems to have
been a meeting place and residence of the Indians or preceding races
of stone age men. Antiquarians have estimated that fifty thousand stone
implements have been found in it. As it was at the head of tidewater,
at the so-called Falls of the Delaware, it was apparently a center of
travel and traffic from other regions. From the top of the bluff below
the modern city of Trenton there was easy access to forests of chestnut,
oak, and pine, with their supplies of game, while the river and its
tributary creeks were full of fish. It was a pleasant and convenient
place where the people of prehistoric times apparently met and lingered
during many centuries without necessarily having a large resident
population at any one time. Trenton was so obviously convenient and
central in colonial times that it was seriously proposed as a site for
the national capital.

Princeton University, though originating, as we have seen, among the
Presbyterians of North Jersey, seems as a higher educational institution
for the whole State to belong naturally in the dividing belt, the
meeting place of the two divisions of the colony. The college began its
existence at Elizabeth, was then moved to Newark, both in the strongly
Presbyterian region, and finally, in 1757, was established at Princeton,
a more suitable place, it was thought, because far removed from the
dissipation and temptation of towns, and because it was in the center
of the colony on the post road between Philadelphia and New York. Though
chartered as the College of New Jersey, it was often called Nassau Hall
at Princeton or simply "Princeton." In 1896 it became known officially
as Princeton University. It was a hard struggle to found the college
with lotteries and petty subscriptions here and there. But Presbyterians
in New York and other provinces gave aid. Substantial assistance was
also obtained from the Presbyterians of England and Scotland. In the
old pamphlets of the time which have been preserved the founders of the
college argued that higher education was needed not only for ministers
of religion, but for the bench, the bar, and the legislature. The two
New England colleges, Harvard and Yale, on the north, and the Virginia
College of William and Mary on the south, were too far away. There must
be a college close at hand.

At first most of the graduates entered the Presbyterian ministry.
But soon in the short time before the Revolution there were produced
statesmen such as Richard Stockton of New Jersey, who signed the
Declaration of Independence; physicians such as Dr. Benjamin Rush of
Philadelphia; soldiers such as "Light Horse" Harry Lee of Virginia;
as well as founders of other colleges, governors of States, lawyers,
attorney-generals, judges, congressmen, and indeed a very powerful
assemblage of intellectual lights. Nor should the names of James
Madison, Aaron Burr, and Jonathan Edwards be omitted.

East Jersey with her New England influence attempted something like free
public schools. In West Jersey the Quakers had schools. In both Jerseys,
after 1700 some private neighborhood schools were started, independent
of religious denominations. The West Jersey Quakers, self-cultured and
with a very effective system of mental discipline and education in their
families as well as in their schools, were not particularly interested
in higher education. But in East Jersey as another evidence of
intellectual awakening in colonial times, Queen's College, afterward
known as Rutgers College, was established by the Dutch Reformed
Church in 1766, and was naturally placed, near the old source of Dutch
influence, at New Brunswick in the northerly end of the dividing belt.

New Jersey was fortunate in having no Indian wars in colonial times, no
frontier, no point of hostile contact with the French of Canada or
with the powerful western tribes of red men. Like Rhode Island in this
respect, she was completely shut in by the other colonies. Once or twice
only did bands of savages cross the Delaware and commit depredations on
Jersey soil. This colony, however, did her part in sending troops and
assistance to the others in the long French and Indian wars; but she had
none of the pressing danger and experience of other colonies. Her people
were never drawn together by a common danger until the Revolution.

In Jersey colonial homes there was not a single modern convenience of
light, heat, or cooking, and none of the modern amusements. But there
was plenty of good living and simple diversion--husking bees and
shooting in the autumn, skating and sleighing in the winter. Meetings
and discussions in coffeehouses and inns supplied in those days the
place of our modern books, newspapers, and magazines. Jersey inns were
famous meeting places. Everybody passed through their doors--judges,
lawyers, legislators, politicians, post riders, stage drivers, each
bringing his contribution of information and humor, and the slaves and
rabble stood round to pick up news and see the fun. The court days in
each county were holidays celebrated with games of quoits, running,
jumping, feasting, and discussions political and social. At the capital
there was even style and extravagance. Governor Belcher, for example,
who lived at Burlington, professed to believe that the Quaker influences
of that town were not strict enough in keeping the Sabbath, so he drove
every Sunday in his coach and four to Philadelphia to worship in the
Presbyterian Church there and saw no inconsistency in his own behavior.

Almanacs furnished much of the reading for the masses. The few
newspapers offered little except the barest chronicle of events. The
books of the upper classes were good though few, and consisted chiefly
of the classics of English literature and books of information and
travel. The diaries and letters of colonial native Jerseymen, the
pamphlets of the time, and John Woolman's "Journal," all show a good
average of education and an excellent use of the English language.
Samuel Smith's "History of the Colony of Nova-Casaria, or New Jersey,"
written and printed at Burlington and published there in the year 1765,
is written in a good and even attractive style, with as intelligent
a grasp of political events as any modern mind could show; the type,
paper, and presswork, too, are excellent. Smith was born and educated in
this same New Jersey town. He became a member of council and assembly,
at one time was treasurer of the province, and his manuscript historical
collections were largely used by Robert Proud in his "History of
Pennsylvania."

The early houses of New Jersey were of heavy timbers covered with
unpainted clapboards, usually one story and a half high, with immense
fireplaces, which, with candles, supplied the light. The floors were
scrubbed hard and sprinkled with the plentiful white sand. Carpets,
except the famous old rag carpets, were very rare. The old wooden houses
have now almost entirely disappeared; but many of the brick houses which
succeeded them are still preserved. They are of simple well-proportioned
architecture, of a distinctive type, less luxuriant, massive, and
exuberant than those across the river in Pennsylvania, although both
evidently derived from the Christopher Wren school. The old Jersey homes
seem to reflect with great exactness the simple feeling of the people
and to be one expression of the spirit of Jersey democracy.

There were no important seats of commerce in this province. Exports of
wheat, provisions, and lumber went to Philadelphia or New York, which
were near and convenient. The Jersey shores near the mouth of the Hudson
and along the Delaware, as at Camden, presented opportunities for ports,
but the proximity to the two dominating ports prevented the development
of additional harbors in this part of the coast. It was not until after
the Revolution that Camden, opposite Philadelphia, and Jersey City,
opposite New York, grew into anything like their present importance.

There were, however, a number of small ports and shipbuilding villages
in the Jerseys. It is a noticeable fact that in colonial times and even
later there were very few Jersey towns beyond the head of tidewater. The
people, even the farmers, were essentially maritime. The province showed
its natural maritime characteristics, produced many sailors, and built
innumerable small vessels for the coasting and West India trade--sloops,
schooners, yachts, and sailboats, down to the tiniest gunning boat and
sneak box. Perth Amboy was the principal port and shipbuilding
center for East Jersey as Salem was for West Jersey. But Burlington,
Bordentown, Cape May, and Trenton, and innumerable little villages
up creeks and channels or mere ditches could not be kept from the
prevailing industry. They built craft up to the limit of size that
could be floated away in the water before their very doors. Plentifully
supplied with excellent oak and pine and with the admirable white cedar
of their own forests, very skillful shipwrights grew up in every little
hamlet.

A large part of the capital used in Jersey shipbuilding is said to have
come from Philadelphia and New York. At first this capital sought its
profit in whaling along the coast and afterwards in the trade with the
West Indies, which for a time absorbed so much of the shipping of all
the colonies in America. The inlets and beaches along the Jersey coast
now given over to summer resorts were first used for whaling camps or
bases. Cape May and Tuckerton were started and maintained by whaling;
and as late as 1830, it is said, there were still signs of the industry
on Long Beach.

Except for the whaling, the beaches were uninhabited--wild stretches
of sand, swarming with birds and wild fowl, without a lighthouse or
lifesaving station. In the Revolution, when the British fleet blockaded
the Delaware and New York, Little Egg, the safest of the inlets, was
used for evading the blockade. Vessels entered there and sailed up
the Mullica River to the head of navigation, whence the goods were
distributed by wagons. To conceal their vessels when anchored just
inside an inlet, the privateersmen would stand slim pine trees beside
the masts and thus very effectively concealed the rigging from British
cruisers prowling along the shore.

Along with the whaling industry the risks and seclusion of the inlets
and channels developed a romantic class of gentlemen, as handy with
musket and cutlass as with helm and sheet, fond of easy, exciting
profits, and reaping where they had not sown. They would start legally
enough, for they began as privateersmen under legal letters of marque
in the wars. But the step was a short one to a traffic still more
profitable; and for a hundred years Jersey customs officers are said to
have issued documents which were ostensibly letters of marque but which
really abetted a piratical cruise. Piracy was, however, in those days
a semi-legitimate offense, winked at by the authorities all through the
colonial period; and respectable people and governors and officials of
New York and North Carolina, it is said, secretly furnished funds for
such expeditions and were interested in the profits.



Chapter XII. Little Delaware

Delaware was the first colony to be established on the river that bears
this name. It went through half a century of experiences under the Dutch
and Swedes from 1609 to 1664, and then eighteen years under the English
rule of the Duke of York, from whom it passed into the hands of William
Penn, the Quaker. The Dutch got into it by an accident and were regarded
by the English as interlopers. And the Swedes who followed had no better
title.

The whole North Atlantic seaboard was claimed by England by virtue of
the discoveries of the Cabots, father and son; but nearly a hundred
years elapsed before England took advantage of this claim by starting
the Virginia colony near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in 1607. And
nearly a quarter of a century more elapsed before Englishmen settled
on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. Those were the two points most
accessible to ships and most favorable for settlement. The middle
ground of the Delaware and Hudson regions was not so easily entered and
remained unoccupied. The mouth of the Delaware was full of shoals and
was always difficult to navigate. The natural harbor at the mouth of the
Hudson was excellent, but the entrance to it was not at first apparent.

Into these two regions, however, the Dutch chanced just after the
English had effected the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia. The Dutch
had employed an Englishman named Henry Hudson and sent him in 1609 in a
small ship called the Half Moon to find a passage to China and India by
way of the Arctic Ocean. Turned back by the ice in the Arctic, he sailed
down the coast of North America, and began exploring the middle ground
from the Virginia settlement, which he seems to have known about; and,
working cautiously northward along the coast and feeling his way
with the lead line, he soon entered Delaware Bay. But finding it very
difficult of navigation he departed and, proceeding in the same careful
way up along the coast of New Jersey, he finally entered the harbor of
New York and sailed up the Hudson far enough to satisfy himself that it
was not the desired course to China.

This exploration gave the Dutch their claim to the Delaware and Hudson
regions. But though it was worthless as against the English right by
discovery of the Cabots, the Dutch went ahead with their settlement,
established their headquarters and seat of government on Manhattan
Island, where New York stands today, and exercised as much jurisdiction
and control as they could on the Delaware.

Their explorations of the Delaware, feeling their way up it with small
light draft vessels among its shoals and swift tides, their travels
on land--shooting wild turkeys on the site of the present busy town of
Chester--and their adventures with the Indians are full of interest.
The immense quantities of wild fowl and animal and bird life along the
shores astonished them; but what most aroused their cupidity was the
enormous supply of furs, especially beaver and otter, that could be
obtained from the Indians. Furs became their great, in fact, their only
interest in the Delaware. They established forts, one near Cape Henlopen
at the mouth of the river, calling it Fort Oplandt, and another far
up the river on the Jersey side at the mouth of Timber Creek, nearly
opposite the present site of Philadelphia, and this they called Fort
Nassau. Fort Oplandt was destroyed by the Indians and its people were
massacred. Fort Nassau was probably occupied only at intervals. These
two posts were built mainly to assist the fur trade, and any attempts at
real settlement were slight and unsuccessful.

Meantime about the year 1624 the Swedes heard of the wonderful
opportunities on the Delaware. The Swedish monarch, Gustavus Adolphus, a
man of broad ambitions and energetic mind, heard about the Delaware from
Willem Usselinx, a merchant of Antwerp who had been actively interested
in the formation of the Dutch West India Company to trade in the Dutch
possessions in America. Having quarreled with the directors, Usselinx
had withdrawn from the Netherlands and now offered his services to
Sweden. The Swedish court, nobles, and people, all became enthusiastic
about the project which he elaborated for a great commercial company
to trade and colonize in Asia, Africa, and America. * But the plan was
dropped because, soon after 1630, Gustavus Adolphus led his country to
intervene on the side of the Protestants in the Thirty Years' War in
Germany, where he was killed three years later at the battle of Lutzen.
But the desire aroused by Usselinx for a Swedish colonial empire
was revived in the reign of his infant daughter, Christina, by the
celebrated Swedish Chancellor, Oxenstierna.



    * See "Willem Usselinx," by J. F. Jameson in the "Papers of the
American Historical Association," vol. II.

An expedition, which actually reached the Delaware in 1638, was sent out
under another Dutch renegade, Peter Minuit, who had been Governor of New
Netherland and after being dismissed from office was now leading this
Swedish enterprise to occupy part of the territory he had formerly
governed for the Dutch. His two ships sailed up the Delaware and with
good judgment landed at the present site of Wilmington. At that point
a creek carrying a depth of over fourteen feet for ten miles from its
mouth flowed into the Delaware. The Dutch had called this creek Minquas,
after the tribe of Indians; the Swedes named it the Christina after
their infant Queen; and in modern times it has been corrupted into
Christiana.

They sailed about two and a half miles through its delta marshes to some
rocks which formed a natural wharf and which still stand today at
the foot of Sixth Street in Wilmington. This was the Plymouth Rock of
Delaware. Level land, marshes, and meadows lay along the Christina, the
remains of the delta which the stream had formed in the past. On the
edge of the delta or moorland, rocky hills rose, forming the edge of the
Piedmont, and out of them from the north flowed a fine large stream,
the Brandywine, which fell into the Christina just before it entered
the Delaware. Here in the delta their engineer laid out a town, called
Christinaham, and a fort behind the rocks on which they had landed. A
cove in the Christina made a snug anchorage for their ships, out of the
way of the tide. They then bought from the Indians all the land from
Cape Henlopen to the Falls of the Delaware at Trenton, calling it New
Sweden and the Delaware New Swedeland Stream. The people of Delaware
have always regarded New Sweden as the beginning of their State, and
Peter Minuit, the leader of this Swedish expedition, always stands first
on the published lists of their governors.

On their arrival in the river in the spring of 1638, the Swedes found no
evidences of permanent Dutch colonization. Neither Fort Oplandt nor
Fort Nassau was then occupied. They always maintained that the Dutch had
abandoned the river, and that it was therefore open to the Swedes for
occupation, especially after they had purchased the Indian title. It was
certainly true that the Dutch efforts to plant colonies in that region
had failed; and since the last attempt by De Vries, six years had
elapsed. On the other hand, the Dutch contended that they had in that
time put Fort Nassau in repair, although they had not occupied it, and
that they kept a few persons living along the Jersey shore of the river,
possibly the remains of the Nassau colony, to watch all who visited it.
These people had immediately notified the Dutch governor Kieft at New
Amsterdam of the arrival of the Swedes, and he promptly issued a protest
against the intrusion. But his protest was neither very strenuous nor
was it followed up by hostile action, for Sweden and Holland were on
friendly terms. Sweden, the great champion of Protestant Europe, had
intervened in the Thirty Years' War to save the Protestants of Germany.
The Dutch had just finished a similar desperate war of eighty years
for freedom from the papal despotism of Spain. Dutch and Swedes had,
therefore, every reason to be in sympathy with each other. The Swedes,
a plain, strong, industrious people, as William Penn aptly called them,
were soon, however, seriously interfering with the Dutch fur trade and
in the first year, it is said, collected thirty thousand skins. If
this is true, it is an indication of the immense supply of furbearing
animals, especially beaver, available at that time. For the next
twenty-five years Dutch and Swedes quarreled and sometimes fought over
their respective claims. But it is significant of the difficulty of
retaining a hold on the Delaware region that the Swedish colonists on
the Christina after a year or two regarded themselves as a failure
and were on the point of abandoning their enterprise, when a vessel,
fortunately for them, arrived with cattle, agricultural tools, and
immigrants. It is significant also that the immigrants, though in a
Swedish vessel and under the Swedish government, were Dutchmen. They
formed a sort of separate Dutch colony under Swedish rule and settled
near St. George's and Appoquinimink. Immigrants apparently were
difficult to obtain among the Swedes, who were not colonizers like the
English.

At this very time, in fact, Englishmen, Puritans from Connecticut, were
slipping into the Delaware region under the leadership of Nathaniel
Turner and George Lamberton, and were buying the land from the Indians.
About sixty settled near Salem, New Jersey, and some on the Schuylkill
in Pennsylvania, close to Fort Nassau--an outrageous piece of audacity,
said the Dutch, and an insult to their "High Mightinesses and the noble
Directors of the West India Company." So the Schuylkill English were
accordingly driven out, and their houses were burned. The Swedes
afterwards expelled the English from Salem and from the Cohansey, lower
down the Bay. Later the English were allowed to return, but they seem to
have done little except trade for furs and beat off hostile Indians.

The seat of the Swedish government was moved in 1643 from the Christina
to Tinicum, one of the islands of the Schuylkill delta, with an
excellent harbor in front of it which is now the home of the yacht clubs
of Philadelphia. Here they built a fort of logs, called Fort Gothenborg,
a chapel with a graveyard, and a mansion house for the governor, and
this remained the seat of Swedish authority as long as they had any on
the river. From here Governor Printz, a portly irascible old soldier,
said to have weighed "upwards of 400 pounds and taken three drinks
at every meal," ruled the river. He built forts on the Schuylkill and
worried the Dutch out of the fur trade. He also built a fort called Nya
Elfsborg, afterward Elsinboro, on the Jersey side below Salem. By
means of this fort he was able to command the entrance to the river
and compelled every Dutch ship to strike her colors and acknowledge the
sovereignty of Sweden. Some he prevented from going up the river at all;
others he allowed to pass on payment of toll or tribute. He gave orders
to destroy every trading house or fort which the Dutch had built on the
Schuylkill, and to tear down the coat of arms and insignia which the
Dutch had placed on a post on the site of Philadelphia. The Swedes now
also bought from the Indians and claimed the land on the Jersey side
from Cape May up to Raccoon Creek, opposite the modern Chester.

The best place to trade with the Indians for furs was the Schuylkill
River, which flowed into the Delaware at a point where Philadelphia was
afterwards built. There were at that time Indian villages where West
Philadelphia now stands. The headwaters of streams flowing into the
Schuylkill were only a short distance from the headwaters of streams
flowing into the Susquehanna, so that the valley of the Schuylkill
formed the natural highway into the interior of Pennsylvania. The route
to the Ohio River followed the Schuylkill for some thirty or forty
miles, turned up one of its tributaries to its source, then crossed the
watershed to the head of a stream flowing into the Susquehanna, thence
to the Juniata, at the head of which the trail led over a short divide
to the head of the Conemaugh, which flowed into the Allegheny, and the
Allegheny into the Ohio. Some of the Swedes and Dutch appear to have
followed this route with the Indians as early as 1646.

The Ohio and Allegheny region was inhabited by the Black Minquas, so
called from their custom of wearing a black badge on their breast. The
Ohio, indeed, was first called the Black Minquas River. As the country
nearer the Delaware was gradually denuded of beaver, these Black Minquas
became the great source of supply and carried the furs, over the route
described, to the Schuylkill. The White Minquas lived further east,
round Chesapeake and Delaware bays, and, though spoken of as belonging
by language to the great Iroquois or Six Nation stock, were themselves
conquered and pretty much exterminated by the Six Nations. The Black
Minquas, believed to be the same as the Eries of the Jesuit Relations,
were also practically exterminated by the Six Nations. *


    * Myers, "Narratives of Early Pennsylvania", pp. 103-104.


The furs brought down the Schuylkill were deposited at certain rocks two
or three miles above its mouth at Bartram's Gardens, now one of the city
parks of Philadelphia. On these rocks, then an island in the Schuylkill,
the Swedes built a fort which completely commanded the river and cut the
Dutch off from the fur trade. They built another fort on the other side
of Bartram's Gardens along the meadow near what is now Gibson's Point;
and Governor Printz had a great mill a couple of miles away on Cobb's
Creek, where the old Blue Bell tavern has long stood. These two forts
protected the mill and the Indian villages in West Philadelphia.

One would like to revisit the Delaware of those days and see all its
wild life and game, its islands and shoals, its virgin forests as they
had grown up since the glacial age, untouched by the civilization of
the white man. There were then more islands in the river, the water was
clearer, and there were pretty pebble and sandy beaches now overlaid by
mud brought down from vast regions of the valley no longer protected by
forests from the wash of the rains. On a wooded island below Salem, long
since cut away by the tides, the pirate Blackhead and his crew are said
to have passed a winter. The waters of the river spread out wide at
every high tide over marshes and meadows, turning them twice a day for a
few hours into lakes, grown up in summer with red and yellow flowers and
the graceful wild oats, or reeds, tasseled like Indian corn.

At Christinaham, in the delta of the Christina and the Brandywine, the
tide flowed far inland to the rocks on which Minuit's Swedish expedition
landed, leaving one dry spot called Cherry Island, a name still borne
by a shoal in the river. Fort Christina, on the edge of the overflowed
meadow, with the rocky promontory of hills behind it, its church and
houses, and a wide prospect across the delta and river, was a fair spot
in the old days. The Indians came down the Christina in their canoes or
overland, bringing their packs of beaver, otter, and deer skins, their
tobacco, corn, and venison to exchange for the cloth, blankets, tools,
and gaudy trinkets that pleased them. It must often have been a scene of
strange life and coloring, and it is difficult today to imagine it all
occurring close to the spot where the Pennsylvania railroad station now
stands in Wilmington.

When doughty Peter Stuyvesant became Governor of New Netherland, he
determined to assert Dutch authority once more on the South River, as
the Delaware was called in distinction from the Hudson. As the Swedes
now controlled it by their three forts, not a Dutch ship could reach
Fort Nassau without being held up at Fort Elfsborg or at Fort Christina
or at the fort at Tinicum. It was a humiliating situation for the
haughty spirit of the Dutch governor. To open the river to Dutch
commerce again, Stuyvesant marched overland in 1651 through the
wilderness, with one hundred and twenty men and, abandoning Fort Nassau,
built a new fort on a fine promontory which then extended far out into
the river below Christina. Today the place is known as New Castle; the
Dutch commonly referred to it as Sandhoeck or Sand Point; the English
called it Grape Vine Point. Stuyvesant named it Fort Casimir.

The tables were now turned: the Dutch could retaliate upon Swedish
shipping. But the Swedes were not so easily to be dispossessed. Three
years later a new Swedish governor named Rising arrived in the river
with a number of immigrants and soldiers. He sailed straight up to Fort
Casimir, took it by surprise, and ejected the Dutch garrison of about a
dozen men. As the successful coup occurred on Trinity Sunday, the Swedes
renamed the place Fort Trinity.

The whole population--Dutch and Swede, but in 1654 mostly
Swede--numbered only 368 persons. Before the arrival of Rising there
had been only seventy. It seems a very small number about which to be
writing history; but small as it was their "High Mightinesses," as the
government of the United Netherlands was called, were determined to
avenge on even so small a number the insult of the capture of Fort
Casimir.

Drums, it is said, were beaten every day in Holland to call for recruits
to go to America. Gunners, carpenters, and powder were collected. A ship
of war was sent from Holland, accompanied by two other vessels whose
names alone, Great Christopher and King Solomon, should have been
sufficient to scare all the Swedes. At New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant labored
night and day to fit out the expedition. A French privateer which
happened to be in the harbor was hired. Several other vessels, in
all seven ships, and six or seven hundred men, with a chaplain called
Megapolensis, composed this mighty armament gathered together to drive
out the handful of poor hardworking Swedes. A day of fasting and prayer
was held and the Almighty was implored to bless this mighty expedition
which, He was assured, was undertaken for "the glory of His name." It
was the absurdity of such contrasts as this running all through the
annals of the Dutch in America that inspired Washington Irving to write
his infinitely humorous "History of New York from the Beginning of the
World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty," by "Diedrich Knickerbocker." It
is difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to take the Dutch in America seriously.
What can you do with a people whose imagination allowed them to give
such names to their ships as Weigh Scales, Spotted Cow, and The Pear
Tree? So Irving described the taking of Fort Casimir in mock heroic
manner. He describes the marshaling of the Dutch hosts of New York by
families, the Van Grolls of Anthony's Nose, the Brinkerhoffs, the Van
Kortlandts, the Van Bunschotens of Nyack and Kakiat, the fighting men
of Wallabout, the Van Pelts, the Say Dams, the Van Dams, and all the
warriors of Hellgate "clad in their thunder-and-lightning gaberdines,"
and lastly the standard bearers and bodyguards of Peter Stuyvesant,
bearing the great beaver of the Manhattan.

"And now commenced the horrid din, the desperate struggle, the maddening
ferocity, the frantic desperation, the confusion and self-abandonment
of war. Dutchman and Swede commingled, tugged, panted, and blowed. The
heavens were darkened with a tempest of missives. Bang! went the guns;
whack! went the broadswords; thump! went the cudgels; crash! went the
musket-stocks; blows, kicks, cuffs, scratches, black eyes and bloody
noses swelling the horrors of the scene! Thick, thwack, cut and hack,
helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy, hurly-burly, heads-over-heels,
rough-and-tumble! Dunder and blixum! swore the Dutchmen; splitter and
splutter! cried the Swedes. Storm the works! shouted Hardkoppig Peter.
Fire the mine! roared stout Rising--Tantarar-ra-ra! twanged the
trumpet of Antony Van Corlear;--until all voice and sound became
unintelligible,--grunts of pain, yells of fury, and shouts of triumph
mingling in one hideous clamor. The earth shook as if struck with a
paralytic stroke; trees shrunk aghast, and withered at the sight; rocks
burrowed in the ground like rabbits; and even Christina creek turned
from its course, and ran up a hill in breathless terror!"

As a matter of fact, the fort surrendered without a fight on
September 1, 1655. It was thereupon christened New Amstel, afterwards
New Castle, and was for a long time the most important town on the
Delaware. This achievement put the Dutch in complete authority over the
Swedes on both sides of the river. The Swedes, however, were content,
abandoned politics, secluded themselves on their farms, and left
politics to the Dutch. Trade, too, they left to the Dutch, who, in their
effort to monopolize it, almost killed it. This conquest by their High
Mightinesses also ended the attempts of the New Englanders, particularly
the people of New Haven, to get a foothold in the neighborhood of Salem,
New Jersey, for which they had been struggling for years. They had
dreams of a great lake far to northward full of beaver to which the
Delaware would lead them. Their efforts to establish themselves survived
in one or two names of places near Salem, as, for example, New England
Creek, and New England Channel, which down almost into our own time was
found on charts marking one of the minor channels of the bay along the
Jersey shore. They continued coming to the river in ships to trade in
spite of restrictions by the Dutch; and some of them in later years, as
has been pointed out, secured a foothold on the Cohansey and in the Cape
May region, where their descendants are still to be found.



Chapter XIII. The English Conquest

It is a curious fact that the ancestor of the numerous Beekman family in
New York, after whom Beekman Street is named, was for a time one of the
Dutch governors on the Delaware who afterwards became the sheriff of
Esopus, New York. His successor on the Delaware had some thoughts of
removing the capital down to Odessa on the Appoquinimink, when an
event long dreaded happened. In 1664, war broke out between England
and Holland, long rivals in trade and commerce, and all the Dutch
possessions in the New World fell an easy prey to English conquerors.
A British fleet took possession of New Amsterdam, which surrendered
without a struggle. But when two British men of war under Sir Robert
Carr appeared before New Amstel on the Delaware, Governor D'Hinoyossa
unwisely resisted; and his untenable fort was quickly subdued by a few
broadsides and a storming party. This opposition gave the conquering
party, according to the custom of the times, the right to plunder; and
it must be confessed that the English soldiers made full use of their
opportunity. They plundered the town and confiscated the land of
prominent citizens for the benefit of the officers of the expedition.

After the English conquest on the Delaware, not a few of the Dutch
migrated to Maryland, where their descendants, it is said, are still
to be found. Some in later years returned to the Delaware, where on the
whole, notwithstanding the early confiscations, English rule seemed to
promise well. The very first documents, the terms of surrender both on
the Delaware and on the Hudson, breathed an air of Anglo-Saxon freedom.
Everybody was at liberty to come and go at will. Hollanders could
migrate to the Delaware or to New York as much as before. The Dutch
soldiers in the country, if they wished to remain, were to have fifty
acres of land apiece. This generous settlement seemed in striking
contrast to the pinching, narrow interference with trade and individual
rights, the seizures and confiscations for private gain, all under
pretense of punishment, bad enough on the Delaware but worse at New
Amsterdam, which had characterized the rule of the Dutch.

The Duke of York, to whom Delaware was given, introduced trial by jury,
settled private titles, and left undisturbed the religion and local
customs of the people. But the political rule of the Duke was absolute
as became a Stuart. He arbitrarily taxed exports and imports. Executive,
judicial, and legislative powers were all vested in his deputy governor
at New York or in creatures appointed and controlled by him. It was the
sort of government the Duke hoped to impose upon all Great Britain when
he should come to the throne, and he was trying his 'prentice hand in
the colonies. A political rebellion against this despotism was started
on the Delaware by a man named Konigsmarke, or the Long Finn, aided by
an Englishman, Henry Coleman. They were captured and tried for treason,
their property was confiscated, and the Long Finn branded with the
letter R, and sold as a slave in the Barbados. They might be called the
first martyrs to foreshadow the English Revolution of 1688 which ended
forever the despotic reign of the Stuarts.

The Swedes continued to form the main body of people on the Delaware
under the regime of the Duke of York, and at the time when William Penn
took possession of the country in 1682 their settlements extended from
New Castle up through Christina, Marcus Hook, Upland (now Chester),
Tinicum, Kingsessing in the modern West Philadelphia, Passyunk, Wicaco,
both in modern Philadelphia, and as far up the river as Frankford and
Pennypack. They had their churches at Christina, Tinicum, Kingsessing,
and Wicaco. The last, when absorbed by Philadelphia, was a pretty little
hamlet on the river shore, its farms belonging to a Swedish family
called Swanson whose name is now borne by one of the city's streets.
Across the river in New Jersey, opposite Chester, the Swedes had
settlements on Raccoon Creek and round Swedesboro. These river
settlements constituted an interesting and from all accounts a very
attractive Scandinavian community. Their strongest bond of union seems
to have been their interest in their Lutheran churches on the river.
They spread very little into the interior, made few roads, and lived
almost exclusively on the river or on its navigable tributaries. One
reason they gave for this preference was that it was easier to reach the
different churches by boat.

There were only about a thousand Swedes along the Delaware and possibly
five hundred of Dutch and mixed blood, together with a few English, all
living a life of abundance on a fine river amid pleasing scenery, with
good supplies of fish and game, a fertile soil, and a wilderness of
opportunity to the west of them. All were well pleased to be relieved
from the stagnant despotism of the Duke of York and to take part in the
free popular government of William Penn in Pennsylvania. They
became magistrates and officials, members of the council and of the
legislature. They soon found that all their avenues of trade and life
were quickened. They passed from mere farmers supplying their own needs
to exporters of the products of their farms.

Descendants of the Swedes and Dutch still form the basis of the
population of Delaware. * There were some Finns at Marcus Hook, which
was called Finland; and it may be noted in passing that there were not
a few French among the Dutch, as among the Germans in Pennsylvania,
Huguenots who had fled from religious persecution in France. The name
Jaquette, well known in Delaware, marks one of these families, whose
immigrant ancestor was one of the Dutch governors. In the ten or
dozen generations since the English conquest intermarriage has in many
instances inextricably mixed up Swede, Dutch, and French, as well as the
English stock, so that many persons with Dutch names are of Swedish or
French descent and vice versa, and some with English names like Oldham
are of Dutch descent. There has been apparently much more intermarriage
among the different nationalities in the province and less standing
aloof than among the alien divisions of Pennsylvania.


    * Swedish names anglicized are now found everywhere. Gostafsson
has become Justison and Justis. Bond has become Boon; Hoppman, Hoffman;
Kalsberg, Colesberry; Wihler, Wheeler; Joccom, Yocum; Dahlbo, Dalbow;
Konigh, King; Kyn, Keen; and so on. Then there are also such names as
Wallraven, Hendrickson, Stedham, Peterson, Matson, Talley, Anderson, and
the omnipresent Rambo, which have suffered little, if any, change.
Dutch names are also numerous, such as Lockermans, Vandever, Van
Dyke, Vangezel, Vandegrift, Alricks, Statts, Van Zandt, Hyatt, Cochran
(originally Kolchman), Vance, and Blackstone (originally Blackenstein).


After the English conquest some Irish Presbyterians or Scotch-Irish
entered Delaware. Finally came the Quakers, comparatively few in
colonial times but more numerous after the Revolution, especially in
Wilmington and its neighborhood. True to their characteristics, they
left descendants who have become the most prominent and useful citizens
down into our own time. At present Wilmington has become almost as
distinctive a Quaker town as Philadelphia. "Thee" and "thou" are
frequently heard in the streets, and a surprisingly large proportion
of the people of prominence and importance are Quakers or of Quaker
descent. Many of the neat and pleasant characteristics of the town
are distinctly of Quaker origin; and these characteristics are found
wherever Quaker influence prevails.

Wilmington was founded about 1731 by Thomas Willing, an Englishman,
who had married into the Swedish family of Justison. He laid out a
few streets on his wife's land on the hill behind the site of old Fort
Christina, in close imitation of the plan of Philadelphia, and from
that small beginning the present city grew, and was at first called
Willingtown. * William Shipley, a Pennsylvania Quaker born in England,
bought land in it in 1735, and having more capital than Willing, pushed
the fortunes of the town more rapidly. He probably had not a little to
do with bringing Quakers to Wilmington; indeed, their first meetings
were held in a house belonging to him until they could build a meeting
house of their own in 1738.


    * Some years later in a borough charter granted by Penn, the name
was changed to Wilmington in honor of the Earl of Wilmington.


Both Shipley and Willing had been impressed with the natural beauty of
the situation, the wide view over the level moorland and green marsh and
across the broad river to the Jersey shore, as well as by the natural
conveniences of the place for trade and commerce. Wilmington has ever
since profited by its excellent situation, with the level moorland for
industry, the river for traffic, and the first terraces or hills of
the Piedmont for residence; and, for scenery, the Brandywine tumbling
through rocks and bowlders in a long series of rapids.

The custom still surviving in Wilmington of punishing certain classes of
criminals by whipping appears to have originated in the days of Willing
and Shipley, about the year 1740, when a cage, stocks, and whipping-post
were erected. They were placed in the most conspicuous part of the town,
and there the culprit, in addition to his legal punishment, was also
disciplined at the discretion of passers-by with rotten eggs and other
equally potent encouragements to reform. These gratuitous inflictions,
not mentioned in the statute, as well as the public exhibition of the
prisoner were abolished in later times and in this modified form the
method of correction was extended to the two other counties. Sometimes
a cat-o'nine-tails was used, sometimes a rawhide whip, and sometimes
a switch cut from a tree. Nowadays, however, all the whipping for the
State is done in Wilmington, where all prisoners sentenced to whipping
in the State are sent. This punishment is found to be so efficacious
that its infliction a second time on the same person is exceedingly
rare.

The most striking relic of the old Swedish days in Wilmington is the
brick and stone church of good proportions and no small beauty, and
today one of the very ancient relics of America. It was built by the
Swedes in 1698 to replace their old wooden church, which was on the
lower land, and the Swedish language was used in the services down
to the year 1800, when the building was turned over to the Church of
England. Old Peter Minuit, the first Swedish governor, may possibly have
been buried there. The Swedes built another pretty chapel--Gloria Dei,
as it was called--at the village of Wicaco, on the shore of the Delaware
where Philadelphia afterwards was established. The original building was
taken down in 1700, and the present one was erected on its site partly
with materials from the church at Tinicum. It remained Swedish Lutheran
until 1831, when, like all the Swedish chapels, it became the property
of the Church of England, between which and the Swedish Lutheran body
there was a close affinity, if not in doctrine, at least in episcopal
organization. * The old brick church dating from 1740, on the
main street of Wilmington, is an interesting relic of the colonial
Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in Delaware, and is now carefully preserved
as the home of the Historical Society.


    * Clay's "Annals of the Swedes", pp. 143, 153-4.


After Delaware had been eighteen years under the Duke of York, William
Penn felt a need of the west side of the river all the way down to
the sea to strengthen his ownership of Pennsylvania. He also wanted to
offset the ambitions of Lord Baltimore to extend Maryland northward.
Penn accordingly persuaded his friend James, the Duke of York, to give
him a grant of Delaware, which Penn thereupon annexed to Pennsylvania
under the name of the Territories or Three Lower Counties. The three
counties, New Castle, Kent, and Sussex, * are still the counties of
Delaware, each one extending across the State and filling its whole
length from the hills of the Brandywine on the Pennsylvania border to
the sands of Sussex at Cape Henlopen. The term "Territory" has ever
since been used in America to describe an outlying province not yet
given the privileges of a State. Instead of townships, the three
Delaware counties were divided into "hundreds," an old Anglo-Saxon
county method of division going back beyond the times of Alfred the
Great. Delaware is the only State in the Union that retains this name
for county divisions. The Three Lower Counties were allowed to send
representatives to the Pennsylvania Assembly; and the Quakers of
Delaware have always been part of the Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia.


    * The original names were New Castle, Jones's, and Hoerekill, as
it was called by the Dutch, or Deal.


In 1703, after having been a part of Pennsylvania for twenty years, the
Three Lower Counties were given home rule and a legislature of their
own; but they remained under the Governor of Pennsylvania until the
Revolution of 1776. They then became an entirely separate community and
one of the thirteen original States. Delaware was the first State to
adopt the National Constitution, and Rhode Island, its fellow small
State, the last. Having been first to adopt the Constitution, the people
of Delaware claim that on all national occasions or ceremonies they are
entitled to the privilege of precedence. They have every reason to be
proud of the representative men they sent to the Continental Congress,
and to the Senate in later times. Agriculture has, of course, always
been the principal occupation on the level fertile land of Delaware; and
it is agriculture of a high class, for the soil, especially in certain
localities, is particularly adapted to wheat, corn, and timothy grass,
as well as small fruits. That section of land crossing the State in
the region of Delaware City and Middleton is one of the show regions in
America, for crops of wheat and corn. Farther south, grain growing is
combined with small fruits and vegetables with a success seldom attained
elsewhere. Agriculturally there is no division of land of similar size
quite equal to Delaware in fertility. Its sand and gravel base with
vegetable mold above is somewhat like the southern Jersey formation,
but it is more productive from having a larger deposit of decayed
vegetation.

The people of Delaware have, indeed, very little land that is not
tillable. The problems of poverty, crowding, great cities, and excessive
wealth in few hands are practically unknown among them. The foreign
commerce of Wilmington began in 1740 with the building of a brig named
after the town, and was continued successfully for a hundred years.
At Wilmington there has always been a strong manufacturing interest,
beginning with the famous colonial flour mills at the falls of the
Brandywine, and the breadstuffs industry at Newport on the Christina.
With the Brandywine so admirably suited to the water-power machinery
of those days and the Christina deep enough for the ships, Wilmington
seemed in colonial times to possess an ideal combination of advantages
for manufacturing and commerce. The flour mills were followed in 1802 by
the Du Pont Powder Works, which are known all over the world, and which
furnished powder for all American wars since the Revolution, for the
Crimean War in Europe, and for the Allies in the Great War.

"From the hills of Brandywine to the sands of Sussex" is an expression
the people of Delaware use to indicate the whole length of their little
State. The beautiful cluster of hills at the northern end dropping into
park-like pastures along the shores of the rippling Red Clay and White
Clay creeks which form the deep Christina with its border of green reedy
marshes, is in striking contrast to the wild waste of sands at Cape
Henlopen. Yet in one way the Brandywine Hills are closely connected with
those sands, for from these very hills have been quarried the hard
rocks for the great breakwater at the Cape, behind which the fleets of
merchant vessels take refuge in storms.

The great sand dunes behind the lighthouse at the cape have their equal
nowhere else on the coast. Blown by the ocean winds, the dunes work
inland, overwhelming a pine forest to the tree tops and filling swamps
in their course. The beach is strewn with every type of wreckage of
man's vain attempts to conquer the sea. The Life Saving Service men have
strange tales to tell and show their collections of coins found along
the sand. The old pilots live snugly in their neat houses in Pilot Row,
waiting their turns to take the great ships up through the shoals and
sands which were so baffling to Henry Hudson and his mate one hot August
day of the year 1609.

The Indians of the northern part of Delaware are said to have been
mostly Minquas who lived along the Christiana and Brandywine, and are
supposed to have had a fort on Iron Hill. The rest of the State was
inhabited by the Nanticokes, who extended their habitations far down the
peninsula, where a river is named after them. They were a division or
clan of the Delawares or Leni Lenapes. In the early days they gave some
trouble; but shortly before the Revolution all left the peninsula in
strange and dramatic fashion. Digging up the bones of their dead chiefs
in 1748, they bore them away to new abodes in the Wyoming Valley of
Pennsylvania. Some appear to have traveled by land up the Delaware to
the Lehigh, which they followed to its source not far from the Wyoming
Valley. Others went in canoes, starting far down the peninsula at the
Nanticoke River and following along the wild shore of the Chesapeake to
the Susquehanna, up which they went by its eastern branch straight into
the Wyoming Valley. It was a grand canoe trip--a weird procession of
tawny, black-haired fellows swinging their paddles day after day, with
their freight of ancient bones, leaving the sunny fishing grounds of the
Nanticoke and the Choptank to seek a refuge from the detested white man
in the cold mountains of Pennsylvania.



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A large part of the material for the early history of Pennsylvania is
contained of course in the writings and papers of the founder. The "Life
of William Penn" by S. M. Janney (1852) is perhaps the most trustworthy
of the older biographies but it is a dull book. A biography written with
a modern point of view is "The True William Penn" by Sydney G. Fisher
(1900). Mrs. Colquhoun Grant, a descendant of Penn has published a book
with the title "Quaker and Courtier: the Life and Work of William Penn"
(1907). The manuscript papers of Penn now in the possession of the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, together with much new material
gathered in England, are soon to be published under the able editorship
of Albert Cook Myers.

There is a vast literature on the history of Quakerism. The "Journal of
George Fox" (1694), Penn's "Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of
the People called Quakers" (1695), and Robert Barclay's "Apology for the
True Christian Divinity" (1678) are of first importance for the study of
the rise of the Society of Friends. Among the older histories are J.J.
Gurney's "Observations on the Religious Peculiarities of the Society of
Friends" (1824), James Bowden's "History of the Society of Friends in
America," 2 vols. (1850-54), and S.M. Janney's "History of the Religious
Society of Friends," 4 vols. (1860-67). Two recent histories are of
great value: W. C. Braithwaite, "The Beginnings of Quakerism" (1912) and
Rufus M. Jones, "The Quakers in the American Colonies" (1911). Among the
older histories of Penn's province are "The History of Pennsylvania
in North America," 2 vols. (1797-98), written by Robert Proud from the
Quaker point of view and of great value because of the quotations from
original documents and letters, and "History of Pennsylvania from its
Discovery by Europeans to the Declaration of Independence in 1776"
(1829) by T. F. Gordon, largely an epitome of the debates of the
Pennsylvania Assembly which recorded in its minutes in fascinating
old-fashioned English the whole history of the province from year to
year. Franklin's "Historical Review of the Constitution and Government
of Pennsylvania from its Origin" (1759) is a storehouse of information
about the history of the province in the French and Indian wars. Much
of the history of the province is to be found in the letters of Penn,
Franklin, Logan, and Lloyd, and in such collections as Samuel Hazard's
"Register of Pennsylvania," 16 vols. (1828-36), "Colonial Records," 16
vols. (1851-53), and "Pennsylvania Archives" (1874-). A vast amount of
material is scattered in pamphlets, in files of colonial newspapers
like the "Pennsylvania Gazette," in the publications of the Historical
Society of Pennsylvania, and in the "Pennsylvania Magazine of History
and Biography" (1877-). Recent histories of the province have
been written by Isaac Sharpless, "History of Quaker Government in
Pennsylvania," 2 vols. (1898-99), and by Sydney G. Fisher, "The Making
of Pennsylvania" (1896) and "Pennsylvania, Colony and Commonwealth"
(1897). A scholarly "History of Proprietary Government in Pennsylvania"
has been published by William R. Shepherd in the "Columbia University
Studies" (1896) and the "Relations of Pennsylvania with the British
Government, 1696-1765" (1912) have been traced with painstaking care by
Winfred T. Root.

Concerning the racial and religious elements in Pennsylvania the
following books contribute much valuable information: A. B. Faust,
"The German Element in the United States," 2 vols. (1909); A. C. Myers,
"Immigration of the Irish Quakers into Pennsylvania, 1682-1750" (1909);
S. W. Pennypacker, "Settlement of Germantown, Pennsylvania, and the
Beginning of German Immigration to North America" (1899); J. F. Sachse,
"The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania, 1694-1708" (1895), and
"The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania, 1708-1800," 2 vols.
(1899-1900); L. O. Kuhns, "The German and Swiss Settlements of Colonial
Pennsylvania" (1901); H. J. Ford, "The Scotch-Irish in America" (1915);
T. A. Glenn, "Merion in the Welsh Tract" (1896).

The older histories of New Jersey, like those of Pennsylvania, contain
valuable original material not found elsewhere. Among these Samuel
Smith's "The History of the Colony of Nova Casaria, or New Jersey"
(1765) should have first place. E. B. O'Callaghan's "History of New
Netherland," 2 vols. (1846), and J. R. Brodhead's "History of the State
of New York," 2 vols. (1853, 1871) contain also information about the
Jerseys under Dutch rule. Other important works are: W. A. Whitehead's
"East Jersey under the Proprietary Governments" (New Jersey Historical
Society "Collections," vol.1, 1875), and "The English in East and West
Jersey" in Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of America," vol.
III, L. Q. C. Elmer's "The Constitution and Government of the Province
and State of New Jersey" (New Jersey Historical Society Collections,
vols. III and VII, 1849 and 1872.) Special studies have been made by
Austin Scott, "Influence of the Proprietors in the Founding of New
Jersey" (1885), and by H. S. Cooley, "Study of Slavery in New Jersey"
(1896), both in the Johns Hopkins University "Studies;" also by E. P.
Tanner, "The Province of New Jersey" (1908) and by E. J. Fisher, "New
Jersey as a Royal Province, 1738-1776" (1911) in the Columbia University
"Studies." Several county histories yield excellent material
concerning the life and times of the colonists, notably Isaac Mickle's
"Reminiscences of Old Gloucester" (1845) and L. T. Stevens's "The
History of Cape May County" (1897) which are real histories written
in scholarly fashion and not to be confused with the vulgar county
histories gotten up to sell.

The Dutch and Swedish occupation of the lands bordering on the Delaware
may be followed in the following histories: Benjamin Ferris, "A History
of the Original Settlements of the Delaware" (1846); Francis Vincent,
"A History of the State of Delaware" (1870); J. T. Scharf, "History of
Delaware, 1609-1888," 2 vols. (1888); Karl K. S. Sprinchorn, Kolonien
Nya Sveriges Historia (1878), translated in the "Pennsylvania Magazine
of History and Biography," vols. VII and VIII. In volume IV of Winsor's
"Narrative and Critical History of America" is a chapter contributed
by G. B. Keen on "New Sweden, or The Swedes on the Delaware." The most
recent minute work on the subject is "The Swedish Settlements on the
Delaware," 2 vols. (1911) by Amandus Johnson.





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