First City. Gary B. Nash
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for they revealed Penn as a devout Christian, an advocate of education, and a loving father. Such interest in the Penn family remains unabated, but of some 2,600 Penn documents that have survived, only 75 are private family letters. The vast collection of Penn Papers acquired by the Historical Society in 1870 at a London auction had been sadly pillaged, and it is possible that family papers, as Mary Maples Dunn has suggested, “were the special target of wanton destruction,” possibly by “a disgruntled, illegitimate, and disinherited member of the family.”10
With the meteoric rise of women’s history in the last generation, the women connected to Penn have attracted much interest recently. Penn’s second wife, Hannah Callowhill Penn, is of special significance. Hannah married William in 1696, accompanied him to Philadelphia on his second trip in 1699, and bore seven children. After Penn’s debilitating stroke in 1712, Hannah and her advisors managed the founder’s tangled legal and business affairs until his death six years later. As acting proprietor of Pennsylvania, Hannah Penn wielded more political power than any other colonial woman. One governor, William Keith, expressed his resentment at receiving “instructions from a woman” shortly before Hannah dismissed him.
Launching a Colony
By the time Penn and his fellow Quakers reached Pennsylvania in the early 1680s, more than a dozen English colonies existed in North America and the West Indies. But Penn and his followers were determined to establish a unique colony free of the violence, corruption, and intolerance that were widespread on both sides of the Atlantic.
When Penn received his grant for Pennsylvania, the Society of Friends had begun to leave behind the radical beginnings that had made them objects of scorn and brutal treatment by the English authorities and had brought from such a Puritan stalwart as Cotton Mather the charge that the Quakers were “the chokeweed of Christianity.” The greater autonomy allowed women in religious affairs made Quakers suspect in the eyes of most of their Christian contemporaries. Especially troubling to those who defended gender hierarchy was how female Quaker “ministering Friends” or “Publishers of the Truth” fanned out across the Atlantic world, traveling unattended by husbands, fathers, or brothers. A seventeenth-century painting mocked Quakers for their radical ways, depicting a woman preaching to a gathering of urinating dogs and grotesque Quakers groping lewdly.11
Pennsylvania never entirely lived up to its visionary founding principles, but nowhere else in the hemisphere where Europeans were colonizing did there exist such substantial toleration for religious and ethnic differences and such relatively peaceful relations with Native American groups. Most European visitors were astounded at what had been achieved. Peter Kalm, a Swedish visitor, wrote in 1750: “Everyone who acknowledges God to be the Creator … and teaches or undertakes nothing against the state or against the common peace, is at liberty to settle, stay, and carry on his trade here, be his religious principles ever so strange.” This would have pleased Penn, who had written: “I deplore two principles in religion: obedience upon authority without conviction and destroying them that differ with me for Christ’s sake.”12
Much of Penn’s life from 1680 to 1686 revolved around attracting settlers and working out the framework of government for his colony. King Charles II had granted Penn extensive powers to govern the province in 1681, but the proprietor had to win the consent of his settlers in order to achieve a peaceful and just society. Building a colony was also a business proposition, one that could not succeed without vigorous promotion. Launching a colony was hugely expensive. Penn later calculated that he spent almost £12,000 (about $2.5 million today) in the first two years alone to obtain his patent from the king and promote his colony. He was not ashamed to say that he wanted some return on his investment. “Though I desire to extend religious freedom,” he wrote in 1681, “yet I want some recompense for my trouble.”13
Penn’s attempts to create a utopia in the wilderness had all the elements of mythmaking, and it is no surprise that his efforts attracted the attention of collecting institutions. Although the Library Company had less than a burning interest in collecting Penn material for more than a century after its founding, partly because Penn’s separately published essays were out of print for a long time and biographies of Penn did not appear until the early nineteenth century, the Historical Society from the outset was an avid collector of anything related to the launching of Pennsylvania. That interest has never abated. In its first year, the Historical Society asked the Philosophical Society to make a donation of its manuscript papers on the early history of Pennsylvania. Especially important were the rough minutes of the Provincial Council covering the period from 1693 to 1717. But the Philosophical Society brusquely denied the request, although it allowed the Historical Society’s curator, Samuel Hazard, to publish the minutes a few years later.
Of special interest have been materials that documented the early promotion of Pennsylvania and the drafting of early laws and frames of government. From the late 1820s, the Historical Society negotiated with the descendants of James Logan, whose extensive correspondence with William Penn and his widow, Hannah Penn, provides the richest source of material on the early affairs of Pennsylvania. Negotiations with the Logan family went on through most of the nineteenth century, and this mother lode of manuscripts gradually reached the society. Descendants of other proprietary officials who had Penn correspondence, records, and documents also made gifts to the society, and some of its members began copying letters between Penn and the English government deposited in the Public Record Office in London.
But the biggest breakthrough came when a massive collection of Penn papers became available in 1870. The papers had been bought a year before for wastepaper from the house of Granville Penn, a grandson of William Penn who had been made an honorary member of the Historical Society in 1833. In one of those hairbreadth escapes from dispersion or destruction that has crippled historical reconstructions, a book dealer, recognizing their value, bought the papers, catalogued them, and offered them for sale. For about £555, an agent of the Historical Society purchased the largest part of the papers, which represent the heart of the society’s holdings of the Penn Papers. Totaling more than twenty thousand documents, they include Penn’s cash books, journals, letter books, receipt books, and commonplace books as well as hundreds of documents concerning Indian relations, the long boundary dispute with the proprietor of Maryland, Lord Baltimore, and many other aspects of colonial Pennsylvania history. Rich additions to the Penn material have been made in the early twentieth century by gift, and a huge addition—the correspondence between Penn and two of his most trusted officials in Pennsylvania in the years immediately after he left the colony in 1684—would come in the 1980s from the descendants of Benjamin Chew, another of the most important colonial officials of Pennsylvania. The five-volume edition of the most important papers and essays of William Penn prepared in the 1980s is built on these various collections (although the editors located hundreds of other items scattered throughout the world).
In promoting his colony Penn relied on two kinds of documents: vivid descriptions of the land and of the terms of settlement, and maps of the region. Penn wasted no time on the former, issuing Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania in America in London in 1681. In this suitably optimistic account, he described what he had never seen: a land on the same latitude as Naples, Italy or Montpelier, France with fertile soil, fish-filled rivers, and wildlife in abundance. Here was a place for industrious farmers and urban artisans—all those who were “clogged and oppress’d about a Livelyhood,” all the “younger Brothers of small Inheritances”—and for servants, who were promised fifty acres of good land after their term of servitude was over.
FIGURE 6. Thomas Holme, A Mapp of the Improved Part of Pensilvania in America, Divided into Countyes, Townships and Lotts, 1687, LCP. Nothing could serve Penn better than a map showing the rapid settlement of his “sylvan woods.” He requested such a work in 1684 from his surveyor-general, Thomas Holme, and finally received it three years later. Its London engravers, using six copper plates, pleased Penn, the real estate promoter, greatly. Penn’s manor land, at the bend of the Delaware River, shows in the lower right corner, and that of his daughter, Laetitia Penn, near the middle on the east bank of the Schuylkill River in the lower center.
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