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 ofEngland, William Penn was a seventeen-year-old student at Christ Church, Oxford. His father, a distinguished admiral in high favor at Court, hadabandoned his erstwhile friends and had aided in restoring King Charlieto his own again. Young William was associating with the sons of thearistocracy and was receiving an education which would fit him to obtainpreferment at Court. But there was a serious vein in him, and while at ahigh church Oxford College he was surreptitiously attending the meetingsand 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 foundcolonies on the Delaware in America. Forty years afterwards he wrote, "Ihad an opening of joy as to these parts in the year 1661 at Oxford. " Andwith America and the Quakers, in spite of a brief youthful experience asa soldier and a courtier, William Penn's life, as well as his fame, isindissolubly linked. 

Quakerism was one of the many religious sects born in the seventeenthcentury under the influence of Puritan thought. The foundation principleof the Reformation, the right of private judgment, the Quakers carriedout to its logical conclusion; but they were people whose minds hadso long been suppressed and terrorized that, once free, they rushed toextremes. They shocked and horrified even the most advanced Reformationsects by rejecting Baptism, the doctrine of the Trinity, and allsacraments, forms, and ceremonies. They represented, on their bestside, the most vigorous effort of the Reformation to return to thespirituality and the simplicity of the early Christians. But theirintense spirituality, pathetic often in its extreme manifestations, was not wholly concerned with another world. Their humane ideas andphilanthropic methods, such as the abolition of slavery, and the reformof prisons and of charitable institutions, came in time to be acceptedas fundamental practical social principles. 

The tendencies of which Quakerism formed only one manifestation appearedoutside of England, in Italy, in France, and especially in Germany. Thefundamental Quaker idea of "quietism, " as it was called, or peaceful, silent contemplation as a spiritual form of worship and as a developmentof moral consciousness, was very widespread at the close of theReformation and even began to be practiced in the Roman Catholic Churchuntil it was stopped by the Jesuits. The most extreme of the EnglishQuakers, however, gave way to such extravagances of conduct as tremblingwhen they preached (whence their name), preaching openly in thestreets and fields--a horrible thing at that time--interrupting othercongregations, and appearing naked as a sign and warning. They gaveoffense by refusing to remove their hats in public and by applying toall alike the words "thee" and "thou, " a form of address hitherto usedonly to servants and inferiors. Worst of all, the Quakers refused topay tithes or taxes to support the Church of England. As a result, theloathsome jails of the day were soon filled with these objectors, andtheir property melted away in fines. This contumacy and their streetmeetings, regarded at that time as riotous breaches of the peace, gavethe Government at first a legal excuse to hunt them down; but as theygrew in numbers and influence, laws were enacted to suppress them. Someof them, though not the wildest extremists, escaped to the colonies inAmerica. There, however, they were made welcome to conditions no lesssevere. 

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 thema woman, Mary Dyer. Though there were no other hangings, many Quakerswere punished by whipping and banishment. In other colonies, notably NewYork, fines and banishment were not uncommon. Such treatment forced theQuakers, against the will of many of them, to seek a tract of landand found a colony of their own. To such a course there appeared noalternative, unless they were determined to establish their religionsolely by martyrdom. 

About the time when the Massachusetts laws were enforced, the principalQuaker leader and organizer, George Fox (1624-1691), began to considerthe possibility of making a settlement among the great forests andmountains said to lie north of Maryland in the region drained by theDelaware and Susquehanna rivers. In this region lay practically the onlygood land on the Atlantic seaboard not already occupied. The Puritansand Dutch were on the north, and there were Catholic and Church ofEngland colonies on the south in Maryland and Virginia. The middleground was unoccupied because heretofore a difficult coast had preventedeasy access by sea. Fox consulted Josiah Coale, a Quaker who hadtraveled in America and had seen a good deal of the Indian tribes, withthe result that on his second visit to America Coale was commissioned totreat with the Susquehanna Indians, who were supposed to have rights inthe desired land. In November, 1660, Coale reported to Fox the resultof his inquiries: "As concerning Friends buying a piece of land of theSusquehanna Indians I have spoken of it to them and told them what thousaid concerning it; but their answer was, that there is no land that ishabitable or fit for situation beyond Baltimore's liberty till they cometo or near the Susquehanna's Fort. " * Nothing could be done immediately, the letter went on to say, because the Indians were at war with oneanother, and William Fuller, a Maryland Quaker, whose cooperation wasdeemed 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 Quakercolony. Reports of it reached the ears of young Penn at Oxford and sethis imagination aflame. He never forgot the project, for seventeen is anage when grand thoughts strike home. The adventurousness of the plan wasirresistible--a home for the new faith in the primeval forest, far fromimprisonment, tithes, and persecution, and to be won by effort worthy ofa man. It was, however, a dream destined not to be realized for many along year. More was needed than the mere consent of the Indians. Inthe meantime, however, a temporary refuge for the sect was found in theprovince of West Jersey on the Delaware, which two Quakers had boughtfrom Lord Berkeley for the comparatively small sum of 1000 pounds. Ofthis grant William Penn became one of the trustees and thus gainedhis first experience in the business of colonizing the region of hisyouthful dreams. But there was never a sufficient governmental controlof West Jersey to make it an ideal Quaker colony. What little controlthe Quakers exercised disappeared after 1702; and the land and situationwere not all that could be desired. Penn, though also one of the ownersof East Jersey, made no attempt to turn that region into a Quakercolony. 

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

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

The experience in the Jerseys and elsewhere very soon proved that ifthere was to be a real Quaker colony, the British Crown must givenot only a title to the land but a strong charter guaranteeingself-government and protection of the Quaker faith from outsideinterference. But that the British Government would grant such valuedprivileges to a sect of schismatics which it was hunting down in Englandseemed a most unlikely event. Nothing but unusual influence at Courtcould 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 byhis father for consorting with the schismatic; sometimes in deferenceto 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 someof the people of the Court. In the end, as he grew older, religiousfeeling completely absorbed him. He became one of the leading Quakertheologians, and his very earnest religious writings fill severalvolumes. He became a preacher at the meetings and went to prison for hisheretical doctrines and pamphlets. At last he found himself at the ageof thirty-six with his father dead, and a debt due from the Crown of16, 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 happenedtwice. Young Penn was popular at Court. He had inherited a valuablefriendship with Charles II and his heir, the Duke of York. Thisfriendship rested on the solid fact that Penn's father, the admiral, had rendered such signal assistance in restoring Charles and the wholeStuart line to the throne. But still 16, 000 pounds or $80, 000, theaccumulation 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 landin America, of which the Crown had abundance? That was the fruitfulthought which visited Penn. Lord Berkeley and Lord Carteret had beengiven New Jersey because they had signally helped to restore the Straitfamily to the throne. All the more therefore should the Stuart familygive a tract of land, and even a larger tract, to Penn, whose fatherhad not only assisted the family to the throne but had refrained so longfrom pressing his just claim for money due. 

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

Penn received his charter in 1681, and in it he was very careful toavoid all the mistakes of the Jersey proprietary grants. Instead ofnumerous proprietors, Penn was to be the sole proprietor. Insteadof giving title to the land and remaining silent about the politicalgovernment, Penn's charter not only gave him title to the land buta clearly defined position as its political head, and described theprinciples of the government so clearly that there was little room fordoubt or dispute. 

It was a decidedly feudal charter, very much like the one granted toLord Baltimore fifty years before, and yet at the same time it securedcivil liberty and representative government to the people. Penn ownedall 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 byhim with the assent of the people or their delegates. In practice thisof course meant that the people were to elect a legislature and Pennwould have a veto, as we now call it, on such acts as the legislatureshould pass. He had power to appoint magistrates, judges, and some otherofficers, and to grant pardons. Though, by the charter, proprietor ofthe province, he usually remained in England and appointed a deputygovernor to exercise authority in the colony. In modern phrase, he controlled the executive part of the government and his peoplecontrolled the legislative part. 

Pennsylvania, besides being the largest in area of the proprietarycolonies, was also the most successful, not only from the proprietor'spoint of view but also from the point of view of the inhabitants. Theproprietorships in Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and the Carolinaswere largely failures. Maryland was only partially successful; it wasnot particularly remunerative to its owner, and the Crown deprived himof his control of it for twenty years. Penn, too, was deprived of thecontrol of Pennsylvania by William III but for only about two years. Except for this brief interval (1692-1694), Penn and his sons after himheld 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, seemsto modern minds grievously wrong in theory, and yet it would be verydifficult to show that it proved onerous in practice. Under it thepeople of Pennsylvania flourished in wealth, peace, and happiness. Pennwon undying fame for the liberal principles of his feudal enterprise. His expenses in England were so great and his quitrents always so muchin arrears that he was seldom out of debt. But his children grew richfrom the province. As in other provinces that were not feudal there weredisputes between the people and the proprietors; but there was notso much general dissatisfaction as might have been expected. Theproprietors were on the whole not altogether disliked. In the AmericanRevolution, when the people could have confiscated everything inPennsylvania belonging to the proprietary family, they not onlyleft them in possession of a large part of their land, but paid themhandsomely for the part that was taken. 

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

Penn's frame of government contained, however, a provision for its ownamendment. This was a new idea and proved to be so happy that it is nowfound in all American constitutions. His method of impeachment by whichthe lower house was to bring in the charge and the upper house wasto try it has also been universally adopted. His view that anunconstitutional law is void was a step towards our modern system. Thenext step, giving the courts power to declare a law unconstitutional, was not taken until one hundred years after his time. With the adviceand assistance of some of those who were going out to his colony heprepared a code of laws which contained many of the advanced ideasof the Quakers. Capital punishment was to be confined to murder andtreason, instead of being applied as in England to a host of minoroffenses. The property of murderers, instead of being forfeited to theState, was to be divided among the next of kin of the victim and ofthe criminal. Religious liberty was established as it had been in RhodeIsland and the Jerseys. All children were to be taught a useful trade. Oaths in judicial proceedings were not required. All prisons were tobe workhouses and places of reformation instead of dungeons of dirt, idleness, and disease. This attempt to improve the prisons inaugurateda movement of great importance in the modern world in which the partplayed by the Quakers is too often forgotten. 

Penn had now started his "Holy Experiment, " as he called his enterprisein Pennsylvania, by which he intended to prove that religious libertywas not only right, but that agriculture, commerce, and all arts andrefinements of life would flourish under it. He would break the delusionthat prosperity and morals were possible only under some one particularfaith established by law. He, would prove that government couldbe carried on without war and without oaths, and that primitiveChristianity could be maintained without a hireling ministry, withoutpersecution, without ridiculous dogmas or ritual, sustained only by itsown innate power and the inward light. 

Chapter II. Penn Sails For The Delaware

The framing of the constitution and other preparations consumed the yearfollowing Penn's receipt of his charter in 1681. But at last, onAugust 30, 1682, he set sail in the ship Welcome, with about a hundredcolonists. After a voyage of about six weeks, and the loss of thirty oftheir number by smallpox, they arrived in the Delaware. June would havebeen a somewhat better month in which to see the rich luxuriance ofthe green meadows and forests of this beautiful river. But the autumnfoliage and bracing air of October must have been inspiring enough. The ship slowly beat her way for three days up the bay and river inthe silence and romantic loneliness of its shores. Everything indicatedrichness and fertility. At some points the lofty trees of the primevalforest grew down to the water's edge. The river at every high tideoverflowed great meadows grown up in reeds and grasses and red andyellow flowers, stretching back to the borders of the forest and fullof water birds and wild fowl of every variety. Penn, now in the prime oflife, must surely have been aroused by this scene and by the reflectionthat the noble river was his and the vast stretches of forests andmountains for three hundred miles to the westward. 

He was soon ashore, exploring the edge of his mighty domain, settlinghis government, and passing his laws. He was much pleased with theSwedes whom he found on his land. He changed the name of the littleSwedish village of Upland, fifteen miles below Philadelphia, to Chester. He superintended laying out the streets of Philadelphia and they remainto this day substantially as he planned them, though unfortunately toonarrow and monotonously regular. He met the Indians at Philadelphia, satwith them at their fires, ate their roasted corn, and when to amuse himthey showed him some of their sports and games he renewed his collegedays 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; hevisited the Long Island Quakers; and on his return he went to Marylandto meet with much pomp and ceremony Lord Baltimore and there discusswith him the disputed boundary. He even crossed to the eastern shore ofthe Chesapeake to visit a Quaker meeting on the Choptank before winterset in, and he describes the immense migration of wild pigeons atthat season, and the ducks which flew so low and were so tame that thecolonists knocked them down with sticks. 

Most of the winter he spent at Chester and wrote to England in highspirits of his journeys, the wonders of the country, the abundance ofgame and provisions, and the twenty-three ships which had arrived soswiftly that few had taken longer than six weeks, and only three hadbeen infected with the smallpox. "Oh how sweet, " he says, "is the quietof 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 reportedthat 50 sail had arrived within the past year, 80 houses had been builtin Philadelphia, and about 300 farms had been laid out round the town. It is supposed that about 8000 immigrants had arrived. This was amore rapid development than was usual in the colonies of America. Massachusetts and Virginia had been established slowly and with muchprivation and suffering. But the settlement of Philadelphia was like asummer outing. There were no dangers, the hardships were trifling, andthere was no sickness or famine. There was such an abundance of gameclose at hand that hunger and famine were in nowise to be feared. Theclimate was good and the Indians, kindly treated, remained friendly forseventy years. 

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

While they were building houses in Philadelphia, the settlers lived inbark huts or in caves dug in the river bank, as the early settlersin New Jersey across the river had lived. Pastorius, a learned GermanQuaker, who had come out with the English, placed over the door of hiscave the motto, "Parva domus, sed amica bonis, procul este profani, "which much amused Penn when he saw it. A certain Mrs. Morris was muchexercised one day as to how she could provide supper in the cave forher husband who was working on the construction of their house. But onreturning to her cave she found that her cat had just brought in a finerabbit. In their later prosperous years they had a picture of the catand the rabbit made on a box which has descended as a family heirloom. Doubtless there were preserved many other interesting reminiscences ofthe brief camp life. These Quakers were all of the thrifty, industrioustype 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 finesand confiscations imposed upon them in England. They brought with themexcellent supplies of everything. Many of the ships carried the framesof houses ready to put together. But substantial people of thissort demanded for the most part houses of brick, with stone cellars. Fortunately both brick clay and stone were readily obtainable in theneighborhood, and whatever may have been the case in other colonies, ships loaded with brick from England would have found it little to theirprofit to touch at Philadelphia. An early description says that thebrick houses in Philadelphia were modeled on those of London, and thistype prevailed for nearly two hundred years. 

It was probably in June, 1683, that Penn made his famous treaty withthe Indians. No documentary proof of the existence of such a treaty hasreached us. He made, indeed, a number of so-called treaties, whichwere really only purchases of land involving oral promises between theprincipals to treat each other fairly. Hundreds of such treaties havebeen made. The remarkable part about Penn's dealings with the Indianswas that such promises as he made he kept. The other Quakers, too, wereas careful as Penn in their honorable treatment of the red men. Quaker families of farmers and settlers lived unarmed among them forgenerations and, when absent from home, left children in their care. TheIndians, on their part, were known to have helped white families withfood in winter time. Penn, on his first visit to the colony, made a longjourney unarmed among the Indians as far as the Susquehanna, saw thegreat herds of elk on that river, lived in Indian wigwams, and learnedmuch of the language and customs of the natives. There need never be anytrouble with them, he said. They were the easiest people in the world toget on with if the white men would simply be just. Penn's fair treatmentof the Indians kept Pennsylvania at peace with them for about seventyyears--in fact, from 1682 until the outbreak of the French and IndianWars, in 1755. In its critical period of growth, Pennsylvania wastherefore not at all harassed or checked by those Indian hostilitieswhich were such a serious impediment in other colonies. 

The two years of Penn's first visit were probably the happiest of hislife. Always fond of the country, he built himself a fine seat onthe Delaware near Bristol, and it would have been better for him, andprobably also for the colony, if he had remained there. But he thoughthe had duties in England: his family needed him; he must defendhis people from the religious oppression still prevailing; and LordBaltimore had gone to England to resist him in the boundary dispute. Oneof the more narrow-minded of his faith wrote to Penn from England thathe was enjoying himself too much in his colony and seeking his ownselfish interest. Influenced by all these considerations, he returnedin 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 inPennsylvania during the life of its founder present a striking contrastto the slower and more troubled growth of the other British coloniesin America. The settlers in Pennsylvania engaged at once in profitableagriculture. The loam, clay, and limestone soils on the Pennsylvaniatide of the Delaware produced heavy crops of grain, as well as pasturefor cattle and valuable lumber from its forests. The Pennsylvaniasettlers were of a class particularly skilled in dealing with the soil. They apparently encountered none of the difficulties, due probably toincompetent farming, which beset the settlers of Delaware, whose landwas as good as that of the Pennsylvania colonists. 

In a few years the port of Philadelphia was loading abundant cargoes forEngland and the great West India trade. After much experimenting withdifferent places on the river, such as New Castle, Wilmington, Salem, Burlington, the Quakers had at last found the right location for a greatseat of commerce and trade that could serve as a center for the exportof everything from the region behind it and around it. Philadelphia thussoon became the basis of a prosperity which no other townsite on theDelaware had been able to attain. The Quakers of Philadelphia were thesoundest of financiers and men of business, and in their skillful handsthe natural resources of their colony were developed without setbackor accident. At an early date banking institutions were established inPhiladelphia, and the strongest colonial merchants and mercantile firmshad their offices there. It was out of such a sound business life thatwere produced in Revolutionary times such characters as Robert Morrisand after the Revolution men like Stephen Girard. 

Pennsylvania in colonial times was ruled from Philadelphia somewhat asFrance has always been ruled from Paris. And yet there was a difference:Pennsylvania had free government. The Germans and the Scotch-Irishoutnumbered the Quakers and could have controlled the Legislature, for in 1750 out of a population of 150, 000 the Quakers were only about50, 000; and yet the Legislature down to the Revolution was alwaysconfided to the competent hands of the Quakers. No higher tribute, indeed, has ever been paid to any group of people as governors of acommonwealth and architects of its finance and trade. 

It is a curious commentary on the times and on human nature that theseQuaker folk, treated as outcasts and enemies of good order and religionin England and gradually losing all their property in heavy fines andconfiscations, should so suddenly in the wilderness prove the capacityof their "Holy Experiment" for achieving the best sort of good order andmaterial success. They immediately built a most charming little townby the waterside, snug and pretty with its red brick houses in the bestarchitectural style. It was essentially a commercial town down to thetime of the Revolution and long afterwards. The principal residenceswere on Water Street, the second street from the wharves. The town inthose days extended back only as far as Fourth Street, and the StateHouse, now Independence Hall, an admirable instance of the local brickarchitecture, stood on the edge of the town. The Pennsylvania Hospital, the first institution of its kind to be built in America, was situatedout in the fields. 

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

Everybody's attention in those days was centered on the water instead ofinland on railroads as it is today. Commerce was the source of wealth ofthe 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 andfall of the tide. The little town extended for a mile along the waterbut scarcely half a mile back from it. All communication with otherplaces, all news from the world of Europe came from the ships, whosecaptains brought the letters and the few newspapers which reachedthe colonists. An important ship on her arrival often fired a gun anddropped anchor with some ceremony. Immediately the shore boats swarmedto her side; the captain was besieged for news and usually brought theletters ashore to be distributed at the coffeehouse. This institutiontook the place of the modern stock exchange, clearing house, newspaper, university, club, and theater all under one roof, with plenty to eat anddrink besides. Within its rooms vessels and cargoes were sold; beforeits door negro slaves were auctioned off; and around it as acommon center were brought together all sorts of business, valuableinformation, gossip, and scandal. It must have been a brilliant scenein the evening, with the candles lighting embroidered red and yellowwaistcoats, blue and scarlet Coats, green and black velvet, with therich drab and mouse color of the prosperous Quakers contrasting with theuniforms of British officers come to fight the French and Indian wars. Sound, as well as color, had its place in this busy and happy coloniallife. Christ Church, a brick building which still stands the perfectionof colonial architecture had been established by the Church of Englandpeople defiantly in the midst of heretical Quakerdom. It soon possesseda chime of bells sent out from England. Captain Budden, who brought themin his ship Myrtilla, would charge no freight for so charitable a deed, and in consequence of his generosity every time he and his ship appearedin the harbor the bells were rung in his honor. They were rung on marketdays to please the farmers who came into town with their wagons loadedwith poultry and vegetables. They were rung muffled in times of publicdisaster 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 whilein London he had favored the Stamp Act--a means of expressing popularopinion which the newspapers subsequently put out of date. 

The severe Quaker code of conduct and peaceful contemplation contains noprohibition against good eating and drinking. Quakers have been known tohave the gout. The opportunities in Philadelphia to enjoy the pleasuresof the table were soon unlimited. Farm, garden, and dairy products, vegetables, poultry, beef, and mutton were soon produced in immensequantity and variety and of excellent quality. John Adams, coming fromthe "plain living and high thinking" of Boston to attend the firstmeeting of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, was invited to dinewith Stephen Collins, a typical Quaker, and was amazed at the feast setbefore 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 looksaskance never seems to have withheld him from a generous indulgence. "Drank Madeira at a great rate, " he says on one occasion, "and took noharm from it. " Madeira obtained in the trade with Spain was the populardrink 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 thetable at the same time, with little regard to formal courses. Beef, poultry, and mutton would all be served at one dinner. Fruit and nutswere placed on the table in profusion, as well as puddings and dessertsnumerous and deadly. Dinners were served usually in the afternoon. Thesplendid banquet which Adams describes as given to some members of theContinental Congress by Chief Justice Chew at his country seat was heldat four in the afternoon. The dinner hour was still in the afternoonlong after the Revolution and down to the times of the Civil War. Otherrelics of this old love of good living lasted into modern times. Itwas not so very long ago that an occasional householder of wealth anddistinction in Philadelphia could still be found who insisted on doinghis own marketing in the old way, going himself the first thing in themorning on certain days to the excellent markets and purchasing all thefamily 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 ofmerit as to be a good judge of Madeira. A typical Philadelphian, enviousNew Yorkers say, will still keep a line of depositors waiting at a bankwhile he discourses to the receiving teller on what a splendid purchaseof poultry he had made that morning. Early in the last century a wealthyleader of the bar is said to have continued the old practice of goingto market followed by a negro with a wheelbarrow to bring back thesupplies. Not content with feasting in their own homes, the colonialPhiladelphians were continually banqueting at the numerous taverns, fromthe Coach and Horses, opposite the State House, down to the PennyPot Inn close by the river. At the Coach and Horses, where the cityelections were usually held, the discarded oyster shells around it hadbeen trampled into a hard white and smooth floor over which surged theexcited election crowds. In those taverns the old fashion prevailed ofroasting great joints of meat on a turnspit before an open fire; and tokeep the spit turning before the heat little dogs were trained to workin a sort of treadmill cage. 

In nothing is this colonial prosperity better revealed than in thequality of the country seats. They were usually built of stone andsometimes of brick and stone, substantial, beautifully proportioned, admirable in taste, with a certain simplicity, yet indicating a peopleof wealth, leisure, and refinement, who believed in themselves andtook pleasure in adorning their lives. Not a few of these homes onthe outskirts of the city have come down to us unharmed, and Cliveden, Stenton, and Belmont are precious relics of such solid structurethat with ordinary care they will still last for centuries. Many weredestroyed during the Revolution; others, such as Landsdowne, the seatof 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 smallones, were most interesting and typical of the life of the times. Thecolonists 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 whichwas equally substantial. Sometimes they built at a greater distance. Governor Keith, for example, had a country seat, still standing thoughbuilt in the middle of the eighteenth century, some twenty-five milesnorth of the city in what was then almost a wilderness. 

Penn's ideal had always been to have Philadelphia what he called "agreen country town. " Probably he had in mind the beautiful English townsof abundant foliage and open spaces. And Penn was successful, for manyof the Philadelphia houses stood by themselves, with gardens round them. The present Walnut was first called Pool Street; Chestnut was calledWinn Street; and Market was called High Street. If he could haveforeseen the enormous modern growth of the city, he might not have madehis streets so narrow and level. But the fault lies perhaps rather withthe 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 verypositive directions in his bluff British way to break up the originalrectangular, narrow plan which was becoming dismally monotonous whenapplied to a widely spread-out modern city. He was a theologian, but hehad 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 inDelaware and the Jerseys was the more notable because, within a fewyears after Pennsylvania was founded, persecution of the Quakers ceasedin England and one prolific cause of their migration was no more. Thirteen hundred Quakers were released from prison in 1686 by JamesII; and in 1689, when William of Orange took the throne, toleration wasextended to the Quakers and other Protestant dissenters. 

The success of the first Quakers who came to America brought otherseven after persecution ceased in England. The most numerous class ofimmigrants for the first fifteen or twenty years were Welsh, most ofwhom were Quakers with a few Baptists and Church of England people. Theymay have come not so much from a desire to flee from persecution as tobuild up a little Welsh community and to revive Welsh nationalism. Intheir new surroundings they spoke their own Welsh language and very fewof them had learned English. They had been encouraged in their nationalaspirations by an agreement with Penn that they were to have a tract of40, 000 acres where they could live by themselves. The land assigned tothem lay west of Philadelphia in that high ridge along the present mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad, now so noted for its wealthy suburbanhomes. 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 northof Philadelphia, where names like Gwynedd and Penllyn remain as theirmemorials. The Chester Valley bordering the high ridge of their firstsettlement 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 quiteluxuriously. They had none of the usual county and township officersbut ruled their Welsh Barony, as it was called, through the authority oftheir Quaker meetings. But this system eventually disappeared. TheWelsh were absorbed into the English population, and in a couple ofgenerations their language disappeared. Prominent people are descendedfrom them. David Rittenhouse, the astronomer, was Welsh on his mother'sside. David Lloyd, for a long time the leader of the popular party andat one time Chief Justice, was a Welshman. Since the Revolution theWelsh names of Cadwalader and Meredith have been conspicuous. 

The Church of England people formed a curious and decidedly hostileelement in the early population of Pennsylvania. They establishedthemselves in Philadelphia in the beginning and rapidly grew into apolitical party which, while it cannot be called very strong in numbers, was important in ability and influence. After Penn's death, his sonsjoined the Church of England, and the Churchmen in the province becamestill stronger. They formed the basis of the proprietary party, filledexecutive offices in the Government, and waged relentless war againstthe Quaker majority which controlled the Legislature. During Penn'slifetime the Churchmen were naturally opposed to the whole government, both executive and legislative. They were constantly sending home toEngland all sorts of reports and information calculated to show that theQuakers were unfit to rule a province, that Penn should be deprived ofhis charter, and that Pennsylvania should be put under the direct ruleof the King. 

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

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

In spite of this opposition, however, the Quakers continued theircontrol of the colony, serenely tolerating the anathemas of thelearned Churchmen and the fierce curses and brandished weapons of thePresbyterians and Scotch-Irish. Curses and anathemas were no checkto the fertile soil. Grist continued to come to the mill; and theagricultural products poured into Philadelphia to be carried away in theships. The contemplative Quaker took his profits as they passed; enactedhis liberalizing laws, his prison reform, his charities, his peace withthe savage Indians; allowed science, research, and all the kindly artsof life to flourish; and seemed perfectly contented with the damnationin the other world to which those who flourished under his ruleconsigned him. 

In discussing the remarkable success of the province, the colonistsalways disputed whether the credit should be given to the fertile soilor to the liberal laws and constitution. It was no doubt due toboth. But the obvious advantages of Penn's charter over the mixed andtroublesome governmental conditions in the Jerseys, Penn's personal fameand the repute of the Quakers for liberalism then at its zenith, and thewide advertising given to their ideas and Penn's, on the continent ofEurope as well as in England, seem to have been the reasons why morepeople, and many besides Quakers, came to take advantage of that fertilesoil. 

The first great increase of alien population came from Germany, whichwas still in a state of religious turmoil, disunion, and depression fromthe results of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War. The reactionfrom dogma in Germany had produced a multitude of sects, all yearningfor greater liberty and prosperity than they had at home. Penn and otherQuakers had made missionary tours in Germany and had preached to thepeople. The Germans do not appear to have been asked to come to theJerseys. But they were urged to come to Pennsylvania as soon as thecharter was obtained; and many of them made an immediate response. TheGerman mind was then at the height of its emotional unrestraint. It wasas unaccustomed to liberty of thought as to political liberty and itproduced a new sect or religious distinction almost every day. Manyof these sects came to Pennsylvania, where new small religious bodiessprang 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 theWilderness, are names which occur in the annals of the province. Butthese are only a few. In Lancaster County alone the number has atdifferent times been estimated at from twenty to thirty. It wouldprobably be impossible to make a complete list; some of them, indeed, existed for only a few years. Their own writers describe them ascountless and bewildering. Many of them were characterized by thestrangest sort of German mysticism, and some of them were inclined tomonastic and hermit life and their devotees often lived in caves orsolitary huts in the woods. 

It would hardly be accurate to call all the German sects Quakers, sincea great deal of their mysticism would have been anything but congenialto 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 twodivisions fraternized and preached in each other's meetings. TheMennonites were well educated as a class and Pastorius, their leader, was a ponderously learned German. Most of the German sects left theQuakers in undisturbed possession of Philadelphia, and spread out intothe surrounding region, which was then a wilderness. They and all theother Germans who afterwards followed them settled in a half circlebeginning at Easton on the Delaware, passing up the Lehigh Valley intoLancaster County, thence across the Susquehanna and down the CumberlandValley to the Maryland border, which many of them crossed, and in timescattered far to the south in Virginia and even North Carolina, wheretheir descendants are still found. 

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

The church people, or peasantry of the later migration, belonged usuallyto one of the two dominant churches of Germany, the Lutheran orthe Reformed. Those of the Reformed Church were often spoken of asCalvinists. This migration of the church people was not due to theexample of the Quakers but was the result of a new policy which wasadopted by the British Government when Queen Anne ascended the thronein 1702, and which aimed at keeping the English people at home and atfilling the English colonies in America with foreign Protestants hostileto France and Spain. 

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

This method of transporting colonists proved a profitable trade forthe shipping people, and was soon regularly organized like the modernassisted immigration. Agents, called "newlanders" and "soul-sellers, "traveled through Germany working up the transatlantic traffic by variousdevices, some of them not altogether creditable. Pennsylvania proved tobe the most attractive region for these immigrants. Some of those whowere 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 Pennsylvaniapopulation consisted of the Scotch-Irish. They were descendants ofScotch and English Presbyterians who had gone to Ireland to take up theestates of the Irish rebels confiscated under Queen Elizabeth and JamesI. This migration of Protestants to Ireland, which began soon after1600, was encouraged by the English Government. Towards the middleof the seventeenth century the confiscation of more Irish land underCromwell's regime increased the migration to Ulster. Many English joinedthe migration, and Scotch of the Lowlands who were largely of Englishextraction, although there were many Gaelic or Celtic names among them. 

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

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

The dream of their life, their haven of rest, was for these Scotch-Irisha fertile soil where they would find neither Irish "papists" nor Churchof England; and for this reason in America they always sought thefrontier where they could be by themselves. They could not even get onwell with the Germans in Pennsylvania; and when the Germans crowdedinto their frontier settlements, quarrels became so frequent that theproprietors asked the Ulstermen to move farther west, a suggestion whichthey were usually quite willing to accept. At the close of the colonialperiod in Pennsylvania the Quakers, the Church of England people, andthe miscellaneous denominations occupied Philadelphia and the regionround it in a half circle from the Delaware River. Outside of thisarea lay another containing the Germans, and beyond that were theScotch-Irish. The principal stronghold of the Scotch-Irish was theCumberland Valley in Southern Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna, aregion now containing the flourishing towns of Chambersburg, Gettysburg, Carlisle, and York, where the descendants of these early settlers arestill very numerous. In modern times, however, they have spread outwidely; they are now to be found all over the State, and they no longerdesire so strongly to live by themselves. 

The Ulstermen, owing to the circumstances of their earlier life, had nosympathy whatever with the Quaker's objection to war or with hisdesire to deal fairly with the Indians and pay them for their land. AsPresbyterians and Calvinists, they belonged to one of the older and moreconservative divisions of the Reformation. The Quaker's doctrine of theinward light, his quietism, contemplation, and advanced ideas were quiteincomprehensible to them. As for the Indians, they held that the OldTestament commands the destruction of all the heathen; and as for payingthe savages for their land, it seemed ridiculous to waste money on suchan object when they could exterminate the natives at less cost. TheUlstermen, therefore, settled on the Indian land as they pleased, or forthat matter on any land, and were continually getting into difficultywith the Pennsylvania Government no less than with the Indians. Theyregarded any region into which they entered as constituting a sovereignstate. It was this feeling of independence which subsequently promptedthem to organize what is known as the Whisky Rebellion when, after theRevolution, the Federal Government put a tax on the liquor which theyso much esteemed as a product, for corn converted into whisky was moreeasily transported on horses over mountain trails, and in that formfetched a better price in the markets. 

After the year 1755, when the Quaker method of dealing with the Indiansno longer prevailed, the Scotch-Irish lived on the frontier in acontinual state of savage warfare which lasted for the next forty years. War, hunting the abundant game, the deer, buffalo, and elk, and someagriculture filled the measure of their days and years. They paid littleattention to the laws of the province, which were difficult to enforceon the distant frontier, and they administered a criminal code of theirown with whipping or "laced jacket, " as they called it, as a punishment. They were Jacks of all trades, weaving their own cloth and making nearlyeverything they needed. They were the first people in America to developthe use of the rifle, and they used it in the Back Country all theway down into the Carolinas at a time when it was seldom seen in theseaboard settlements. In those days, rifles were largely manufacturedin Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and there were several famous gunsmiths inPhiladelphia. Some of the best of these old rifles have been preservedand are really beautiful weapons, with delicate hair triggers, gracefully curved stocks, and quaint brass or even gold or silvermountings. The ornamentation was often done by the hunter himself, whowould melt a gold or silver coin and pour it into some design which hehad 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 othercontest which involved liberty and independence. In fact, in that periodthey played such a conspicuous part that they almost ruled Philadelphia, the original home of the Quakers. Since then, spread out through theState, they have always had great influence, the natural result of theirenergy, intelligence, and love of education. 

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

All these cleavages and divisions in the population continue in theireffects to this day. They prevented the development of a homogeneouspopulation. No exact statistics were taken of the numbers of thedifferent nationalities in colonial times; but Franklin's estimate isprobably fairly accurate, and his position in practical politics gavehim the means of knowing and of testing his calculations. About the year1750 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 ofthe thirds. Provost Smith, of the newly founded college, estimated theQuakers at only about 40, 000. But his estimate seems too low. He wasinterested in making out their numbers small because he was tryingto show the absurdity of allowing such a small band of fanatics andheretics to rule a great province of the British Empire. One greatsource of the Quaker power lay in the sympathy of the Germans, whoalways 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. TheQuakers, it must be admitted, never lost their heads. Unperturbedthrough all the conflicts and the jarring of races and sects, they heldtheir position unimpaired and kept the confidence and support of theGermans until the Revolution changed everything. 

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

The settlers followed the old Indian trails. The first westwardpioneers seem to have been the Welsh Quakers, who pushed due west fromPhiladelphia and marked out the course of the famous Lancaster Road, afterwards the Lancaster Turnpike. It took the line of least resistancealong the old trail, following ridges until it reached the Susquehannaat a spot where an Indian trader, named Harris, established himself andfounded a post which subsequently became Harrisburg, the capital of theState. 

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

The Germans in their expansion at first seem to have followed up theSchuylkill Valley and its tributaries, and they hold this region to thepresent day. Gradually they crossed the watershed to the Susquehanna andbroke 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 Philadelphiainto Bucks County, a fine rolling and hilly wheat and corn region, where their descendants are still found and whence not a few well-knownPhiladelphia families have come. 

The Quaker government of Pennsylvania in almost a century of itsexistence largely fulfilled its ideals. It did not succeed in governingwithout war; but the war was not its fault. It did succeed in governingwithout oaths. An affirmation instead of an oath became the law ofPennsylvania for all who chose an affirmation; and this law was soonadopted by most American communities. It succeeded in establishingreligious liberty in Pennsylvania in the fullest sense of the word. Itbrought Christianity nearer to its original simplicity and made it lesssuperstitious and cruel. 

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

But Franklin was not the only scientist in the colony. Besides his threefriends, Kinnersley, Hopkinson, and Syng, who worked with him and helpedhim in his discoveries, there were David Rittenhouse, the astronomer, John Bartram, the botanist, and a host of others. Rittenhouse excelledin every undertaking which required the practical application ofastronomy, He attracted attention even in Europe for his orrery whichindicated the movements of the stars and which was an advance on allprevious instruments of the kind. When astronomers in Europe wereseeking to have the transit of Venus of 1769 observed in different partsof the world, Pennsylvania alone of the American colonies seems tohave had the man and the apparatus necessary for the work. Rittenhouseconducted the observations at three points and won a world-widereputation by the accuracy and skill of his observations. The wholecommunity was interested in this scientific undertaking; the Legislatureand public institutions raised the necessary funds; and the AmericanPhilosophical Society, the only organization of its kind in thecolonies, had charge of the preparations. 

The American Philosophical Society had been started in Philadelphia in1743. It was the first scientific society to be founded in America, andthroughout the colonial period it was the only society of its kind inthe country. Its membership included not only prominent men throughoutAmerica, such as Thomas Jefferson, who were interested in scientificinquiry, but also representatives of foreign nations. With its libraryof rare and valuable collections and its annual publication of essays onalmost every branch of science, the society still continues its usefulscientific work. 

John Bartram, who was the first botanist to describe the plants of theNew World and who explored the whole country from the Great Lakes toFlorida, was a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial times, farmer born andbred. Thomas Godfrey, also a colonial Pennsylvanian, was rewarded bythe Royal Society of England for an improvement which he made inthe quadrant. Peter Collinson of England, a famous naturalist andantiquarian of early times, was a Quaker. In modern times John Dalton, the discoverer of the atomic theory of colorblindness, was born ofQuaker parents, and Edward Cope, of a well-known Philadelphia Quakerfamily, became one of the most eminent naturalists and paleontologistsof the nineteenth century, and unaided discovered over a third of thethree thousand extinct species of vertebrates recognized by men ofscience. In the field of education, Lindley Murray, the grammarian ofa hundred years ago, was a Quaker. Ezra Cornell, a Quaker, founded thegreat 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 scientificpursuits to popular uses. The first American professorship of botanyand natural history was established in Philadelphia College, now theUniversity of Pennsylvania. The first American book on a medical subjectwas written in Philadelphia by Thomas Cadwalader in 1740; the firstAmerican hospital was established there in 1751; and the firstsystematic instruction in medicine. Since then Philadelphia hasproduced a long line of physicians and surgeons of national and Europeanreputation. For half a century after the Revolution the city was thecenter of medical education for the country and it still retains a largepart of that preeminence. The Academy of Natural Sciences founded inPhiladelphia in 1812 by two inconspicuous young men, an apothecary anda dentist, soon became by the spontaneous support of the community adistinguished institution. It sent out two Arctic expeditions, thatof Kane and that of Hayes, and has included among its members the mostprominent men of science in America. It is now the oldest as well asthe most complete institution of its kind in the country. The FranklinInstitute, founded in Philadelphia in 1824, was the result of a similarscientific interest. It was the first institution of applied scienceand the mechanic arts in America. Descriptions of the first 2900 patentsissued by the United States Government are to be found only on the pagesof its Journal, which is still an authoritative annual record. 

Apart from their scientific attainments, one of the most interestingfacts about the Quakers is the large proportion of them who havereached eminence, often in occupations which are supposed to be somewhatinconsistent with Quaker doctrine. General Greene, the most capableAmerican officer of the Revolution, after Washington, was a Rhode IslandQuaker. General Mifflin of the Revolution was a Pennsylvania Quaker. General Jacob Brown, a Bucks County Pennsylvania Quaker, reorganized thearmy 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 inPennsylvania but elsewhere, are to be found John Bright, a lover ofpeace and human liberty through a long and eminent career in Britishpolitics; John Dickinson of Philadelphia, who wrote the famous Farmer'sLetters so signally useful in the American Revolution; Whittier, theAmerican poet, a Quaker born in Massachusetts of a family converted fromPuritanism when the Quakers invaded Boston in the seventeenth century;and Benjamin West, a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial times, an artist ofpermanent eminence, one of the founders of the Royal Academy in Englandand 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 smallnumbers. It has often been asked why this height of attainment shouldoccur among a people of such narrow religious discipline. But werethe Quakers really narrow, or were they any more narrow than otherrigorously self-disciplined people: Spartans, Puritans, soldiers whosediscipline enables them to achieve great results? All discipline isin one sense narrow. Quaker quietude and retirement probably conservedmental energy instead of dissipating it. In an age of superstition andirrational religion, their minds were free and unhampered, and it wasthe dominant rational tone of their thought that enabled science toflourish in Pennsylvania. 

Chapter V. The Troubles Of Penn And His Sons

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

Penn was closely tied by both interest and friendship to Charles II andthe Stuart family. When Charles II died in 1685 and his brother, theDuke of York, ascended the throne as James II, Penn was equally boundto him, because among other things the Duke of York had obtained Penn'srelease in 1669 from imprisonment for his religious opinions. He becamestill more bound when one of the first acts of the new King's reignwas the release of a great number of people who had been imprisonedfor their religion, among them thirteen hundred Quakers. In addition topreaching to the Quakers and protecting them, Penn used his influencewith James to secure the return of several political offenders fromexile. His friendship with James raised him, indeed, to a position of nolittle importance at Court. He was constantly consulted by the King, inwhose political policy he gradually became more and more involved. 

James was a Roman Catholic and soon perfected his plans for making bothChurch and State a papal appendage and securing for the Crown the rightto suspend acts of Parliament. Penn at first protested, but finallysupported the King in the belief that he would in the end establishliberty. In his earlier years, however, Penn had written pamphletsarguing strenuously against the same sort of despotic schemes thatJames was now undertaking; and this contradiction of his former positionseriously injured his reputation even among his own people. 

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

In spite of the attempts which James made to secure his position, thedissenters, the Church of England, and Penn's own Quakers all joinedheart and soul in the Revolution of 1688, which quickly dethroned theKing, drove him from England, and placed the Prince of Orange onthe throne as William III. Penn was now for many years in a veryunfortunate, if not dangerous, position, and was continually suspectedof plotting to restore James. For three years he was in hiding to escapearrest or worse, and he largely lost the good will and affection of theQuakers. 

Meantime, since his departure from Pennsylvania in the summer of1684, that province went on increasing in population and in pioneerprosperity. But Penn's quitrents and money from sales of land were farin arrears, and he had been and still was at great expense in startingthe colony and in keeping up the plantation and country seat he hadestablished on the Delaware River above Philadelphia. Troublesomepolitical disputes also arose. The Council of eighteen members which hehad authorized to act as governor in his absence neglected to send thenew laws to him, slighted his letters, and published laws in their ownname without mentioning him or the King. These irregularities were muchexaggerated by enemies of the Quakers in England. The Council was not apopular body and was frequently at odds with the Assembly. 

Penn thought he could improve the government by appointing fivecommissioners to act as governor instead of the whole Council. ThomasLloyd, an excellent Quaker who had been President of the Council and whohad done much to allay hard feeling, was fortunately the president ofthese commissioners. Penn instructed them to act as if he himself werepresent, and at the next meeting of the Assembly to annul all the lawsand reenact only such as seemed proper. This course reminds us of theabsolutism of his friend, King James, and, indeed, the date of theseinstructions (1686) is that when his intimacy with that bigoted monarchreached its highest point. Penn's theory of his power was that the frameor 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 hepleased. Fortunately his commissioners never attempted to carry outthese instructions. There would have been a rebellion and some veryunpleasant history if they had undertaken to enforce such orientaldespotism in Pennsylvania. The five commissioners with Thomas Lloyd attheir head seem to have governed without seriously troublesome incidentsfor the short term of two years during which they were in power. Butin 1687 Thomas Lloyd, becoming weary of directing them, asked to berelieved and is supposed to have advised Penn to appoint a singleexecutive instead of commissioners. Penn accordingly appointed CaptainJohn Blackwell, formerly an officer in Cromwell's army. Blackwell wasnot 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 washoped that he would vigorously check all irregularities and bring Pennbetter returns from quitrents and sales of land. 

But this new governor clashed almost at once with the Assembly, triedto make them pass a militia law, suggested that the province's trade toforeign countries was illegal, persecuted and arrested members of theAssembly, refused to submit new laws to it, and irritated the people bysuggesting the invalidity of their favorite laws. The Quaker Assemblywithstood and resisted him until they wore him out. After a year andone month in office he resigned at Penn's request or, according tosome accounts, at his own request. At any rate, he expressed himself asdelighted to be relieved. As a Puritan soldier he found himself no matchfor a peaceable Quaker Assembly. 

Penn again made the Council the executive with Thomas Lloyd as itsPresident. But to the old causes of unrest a new one was now added. One George Keith, a Quaker, turned heretic and carried a number ofPennsylvania Quakers over to the Church of England, thereby causinggreat scandal. The "Lower Counties" or Territories, as the presentState of Delaware was then called, became mutinous, withdrew theirrepresentatives from the Council, and made William Markham theirGovernor. This action together with the Keithian controversy, thedisturbances over Blackwell, and the clamors of Church of England peoplethat Penn was absent and neglecting his province, that the Quakers wouldmake no military defense, and that the province might at any time fallinto the hands of France, came to the ears of King William, who wasalready ill disposed toward Penn and distrusted him as a Jacobite. Itseemed hardly advisable to allow a Jacobite to rule a British colony. Accordingly a royal order suspended Penn's governmental authority andplaced the province under Benjamin Fletcher, Governor of New York. He undertook to rule in dictatorial fashion, threatening to annex theprovince to New York, and as a consequence the Assembly had plenty oftrouble with him. But two years later, 1694, the province was returnedto Penn, who now appointed as Governor William Markham, who had servedas lieutenant-governor under Fletcher. 

Markham proceeded to be high-handed with the Assembly and to administerthe government in the imperialistic style of Fletcher. But theAssembly soon tamed him and in 1696 actually worried out of him a newconstitution, which became known as Markham's Frame, proved much morepopular than the one Penn had given, and allowed the Assembly much morepower. Markham had no conceivable right to assent to it and Penn neveragreed to it; but it was lived under for the next four years untilPenn returned to the province. While it naturally had opponents, itwas largely regarded as entirely valid, and apparently with theunderstanding that it was to last until Penn objected to it. 

Penn had always been longing to return to Pennsylvania and live therefor the rest of his life; but the terrible times of the Revolutionof 1688 in England and its consequences had held him back. Thosedifficulties had now passed. Moreover, William III had established freegovernment and religious liberty. No more Quakers were imprisoned andPenn'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. Hispolitical scrapes and mistakes in England seemed to be buried in thepast. He was soon at his old enjoyable life again, traveling activelyabout the country, preaching to the Quakers, and enlarging andbeautifying his country seat, Pennsbury, on the Delaware, twenty milesabove Philadelphia. As roads and trails were few and bad he usuallytraveled to and from the town in a barge which was rowed by six oarsmenand which seemed to give him great pride and pleasure. 

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

This new constitution was quite liberal. The most noticeable feature ofit was the absence of any provision for the large elective council orupper house of legislation, which had been very unpopular. The Assemblythus became the one legislative body. There was incidental referencein the document to a governor's council, although there was no formalclause creating it. Penn and his heirs after his death always appointeda small council as an advisory body for the deputy governor. TheAssembly was to be chosen annually by the freemen and to be composed offour representatives from each county. It could originate bills, controlits own adjournments without interference from the Governor, choose itsspeaker and other officers, and judge of the qualifications andelection of its own members. These were standard Anglo-Saxon popularparliamentary rights developed by long struggles in England and nowestablished in Pennsylvania never to be relaxed. Finally a clause in theconstitution permitted the Lower Counties, or Territories, undercertain conditions to establish home rule. In 1705 the Territories tookadvantage 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 becameabsorbed in affairs in England and never saw his colony again. This wasunfortunate because Pennsylvania soon became a torment to him instead ofa great pleasure as it always seems to have been when he lived in it. Hewas a happy present proprietor, but not a very happy absentee one. 

The Church of England people in Pennsylvania entertained great hopesof this proposal to turn the proprietary colonies into royal provinces. Under such a change, while the Quakers might still have an influence inthe Legislature, the Crown would probably give the executive offices toChurchmen. They therefore labored hard to discredit the Quakers. Theykept harping on the absurdity of a set of fanatics attempting to governa colony without a militia and without administering oaths of office orusing oaths in judicial proceedings. How could any one's life be safefrom foreign enemies without soldiers, and what safeguard was there forlife, liberty, and property before judges, jurors, and witnesses, noneof whom had been sworn? The Churchmen kept up their complaints for alongtime, but without effect in England. Penn was able to thwart all theirplans. The bill to change the province into a royal one was never passedby Parliament. Penn returned to his court life, his preaching, and histheological writing, a rather curious combination and yet one by whichhe had always succeeded in protecting his people. He was a favoritewith Queen Anne, who was now on the throne, and he led an expensive lifewhich, with the cost of his deputy governor's salary in the colony, theslowness of his quitrent collections, and the dishonesty of the stewardof his English estates, rapidly brought him into debt. To pay thegovernment expense of a small colonial empire and at the same timeto lead the life of a courtier and to travel as a preacher would haveexhausted a stronger exchequer than Penn's. 

The contests between the different deputy governors, whom Penn or hisdescendants sent out, and the Quaker Legislature fill the annals ofthe province for the next seventy years, down to the Revolution. Thesequarrels, when compared with the larger national political contests ofhistory, seem petty enough and even tedious in detail. But, looked atin another aspect, they are important because they disclose howliberty, self-government, republicanism, and many of the constitutionalprinciples by which Americans now live were gradually developed asthe colonies grew towards independence. The keynote to all these earlycontests was what may be called the fundamental principle of colonialconstitutional law or, at any rate, of constitutional practice, namely, that the Governor, whether royal or proprietary, must always be keptpoor. His salary or income must never become a fixed or certain sum butmust always be dependent on the annual favor and grants of a legislaturecontrolled by the people. This belief was the foundation of Americancolonial liberty. The Assemblies, not only in Pennsylvania but in othercolonies, would withhold the Governor's salary until he consented totheir favorite laws. If he vetoed their laws, he received no salary. Oneof the causes of the Revolution in 1776 was the attempt of the mothercountry to make the governors and other colonial officials dependentfor their salaries on the Government in England instead of on thelegislatures in the colonies. 

So the squabbles, as we of today are inclined to call them, went onin Pennsylvania--provincial and petty enough, but often very large andimportant so far as the principle which they involved was concerned. TheLegislature of Pennsylvania in those days was a small body composed ofonly about twenty-five or thirty members, most of them sturdy, thriftyQuakers. 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 loanoffice, if investigating accounts. Beneath their broad brim hats andgrave demeanor they were as Anglo-Saxon at heart as Robin Hood and hismerry men, and in their ninety years of political control they built upas goodly a fabric of civil liberty as can be found in any community inthe world. 

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

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

The ten years after Penn's return to England in 1701 were full oftrouble for him. Money returns from the province were slow, partlybecause England was involved in war and trade depressed, and partlybecause the Assembly, exasperated by the deputy governors he appointed, often refused to vote the deputy a salary and left Penn to bear all theexpense of government. He was being rapidly overwhelmed with debt. Oneof his sons was turning out badly. The manager of his estates in Englandand Ireland, Philip Ford, was enriching himself by the trust, chargingcompound interest at eight per cent every six months, and finallyclaiming that Penn owed him 14, 000 pounds. Ford had rendered accountsfrom time to time, but Penn in his careless way had tossed them asidewithout examination. When Ford pressed for payment, Penn, still withoutmaking any investigation, foolishly gave Ford a deed in fee simple ofPennsylvania as security. Afterwards he accepted from Ford a lease ofthe province, which was another piece of folly, for the lease could, of course, be used as evidence to show that the deed was an absoluteconveyance and not intended as a mortgage. 

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

After that conditions improved in the affairs of Penn. The colony wasbetter governed, and the anti-proprietary party almost disappeared. Thelast six or eight years of Penn's life were free from trouble. Hehad ceased his active work at court, for everything that could beaccomplished for the Quakers in the way of protection and favorablelaws had now been done. Penn spent his last years in trying to sell thegovernment of his province to the Crown for a sum that would enable himto pay his debts and to restore his family to prosperity. But he wastoo particular in stipulating that the great principles of civil andreligious liberty on which the colony had been established should not beinfringed. He had seen how much evil had resulted to the rights of thepeople when the proprietors of the Jerseys parted with their right togovern. In consequence he required so many safeguards that the sale ofPennsylvania was delayed and delayed until its founder was stricken withparalysis. Penn lingered for some years, but his intellect was now toomuch clouded to make a valid sale. The event, however, was fortunatefor Pennsylvania, which would probably otherwise have lost many valuablerights and privileges by becoming a Crown colony. 

On July 30, 1718, Penn died at the age of seventy-four. His widow becameproprietor of the province, probably the only woman who ever becamefeudal proprietor of such an immense domain. She appointed excellentdeputy governors and ruled with success for eight years until her deathin 1726. In her time the ocean was free from enemy cruisers, and thetrade of the colony grew so rapidly that the increasing sales of landand quitrents soon enabled her to pay off the mortgage on the provinceand all the rest of her husband's debts. It was sad that Penn did notlive to see that day, which he had so hoped for in his last years, when, with ocean commerce free from depredations, the increasing money returnsfrom his province would obviate all necessity of selling the governmentto the Crown. 

With all debts paid and prosperity increasing, Penn's sons became veryrich men. Death had reduced the children to three--John, Thomas, and Richard. Of these, Thomas became what may be called the managingproprietor, and the others were seldom heard of. Thomas lived in thecolony nine years--1732 to 1741--studying its affairs and sitting as amember of the Council. For over forty years he was looked upon as theproprietor. In fact, he directed the great province for almost as longa time as his father had managed it. But he was so totally unlike hisfather that it is difficult to find the slightest resemblance in featureor in mind. He was not in the least disposed to proclaim or argue aboutreligion. Like the rest of his family, he left the Quakers and joinedthe Church of England, a natural evolution in the case of many Quakers. He was a prosperous, accomplished, sensible, cool-headed gentleman, byno means without ability, but without any inclination for setting theworld on fire. He was a careful, economical man of business, which ismore than can be said of his distinguished father. He saw no visions andcared 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 opinionof him held by Franklin, who led the anti-proprietary party. But at thesame time some consideration must be given to the position in whichPenn found himself. He had on his hands an empire, rich, fertile, andinhabited by liberty-loving Anglo-Saxons and by passive Germans. Hehad to collect from their land the purchase money and quitrents rapidlyrolling up in value with the increase of population into millions ofpounds sterling, for which he was responsible to his relatives. At thesame time he had to influence the politics of the province, approve orreject laws in such a way that his family interest would be protectedfrom attack or attempted confiscation, keep the British Crown satisfied, and see that the liberties of the colonists were not impaired and thatthe 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 oftheir lands in accordance with the humane ideas of his father and in theface of the Scotch-Irish thirst for Indian blood and the French desireto turn the savages loose upon the Anglo-Saxon settlements. He had tofight through the boundary disputes with Connecticut, Maryland, andVirginia, which threatened to reduce his empire to a mere strip of landcontaining neither Philadelphia nor Pittsburgh. The controversy withConnecticut lasted throughout the colonial period and was not definitelysettled till the close of the Revolution. The charter of Connecticutgranted by the British Crown extended the colony westward to the PacificOcean and cut off the northern half of the tract afterwards granted toWilliam Penn. In pursuance of what they believed to be their rights, theConnecticut people settled in the beautiful valley of Wyoming. They werethereupon ejected by force by the proprietors of Pennsylvania; but theyreturned, only to be ejected again and again in a petty warfare carriedon for many years. In the summer of 1778, the people of the valleywere massacred by the Iroquois Indians. The history of this Connecticutboundary dispute fills volumes. So does the boundary dispute withMaryland, which also lasted throughout the colonial period; the disputewith 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 theState owes him a debt of gratitude. 

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

The wealth which came to the three brothers they spent after the mannerof the time in country life. John and Richard do not appear to have hadremarkable country seats. But Thomas purchased in 1760 the fine Englishestate of Stoke Park, which had belonged to Sir Christopher Hatton ofQueen Elizabeth's time, to Lord Coke, and later to the Cobham family. Thomas's son John, grandson of the founder, greatly enlarged andbeautified the place and far down into the nineteenth century it wasone of the notable country seats of England. This John Penn also builtanother country place called Pennsylvania Castle, equally picturesqueand 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 untilabout the year 1755. The French in Canada had been gradually developingtheir plans of spreading down the Ohio and Mississippi valleys behindthe English colonies. They were at the same time securing alliances withthe Indians and inciting them to hostilities against the English. Butso rapidly were the settlers advancing that often the land could notbe purchased fast enough to prevent irritation and ill feeling. TheScotch-Irish and Germans, it has already been noted, settled on landswithout the formality of purchase from the Indians. The Government, whenthe Indians complained, sometimes ejected the settlers but more oftenhastened to purchase from the Indians the land which had been occupied. "The Importance of the British Plantations in America, " published in1731, describes the Indians as peaceful and contented in Pennsylvaniabut irritated and unsettled in those other colonies where they hadusually been ill-treated and defrauded. This, with other evidence, goes to show that up to that time Penn's policy of fairness and goodtreatment still prevailed. But those conditions soon changed, as thefamous Walking Purchase of 1737 clearly indicated. 

The Walking Purchase had provided for the sale of some lands along theDelaware below the Lehigh on a line starting at Wrightstown, a few milesback 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 tothe Lehigh, which was the ordinary journey of a day and a half. Theproprietors, 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, atthe end of a day and a half these men had reached a point thirty milesbeyond the Lehigh. 

The Delaware Indians regarded this measurement as a pure fraud andrefused to abandon the Minisink region north of the Lehigh. Theproprietors then called in the assistance of the Six Nations of NewYork, who ordered the Delawares off the Minisink lands. Though theyobeyed, the Delawares became the relentless enemies of the white man andin the coming years revenged themselves by massacres and murder. Theyalso broke the control which the Six Nations had over them, became anindependent nation, and in the French Wars revenged themselves on theSix Nations as well as on the white men. The congress which convened atAlbany in 1754 was an attempt on the part of the British Government tosettle all Indian affairs in a general agreement and to prevent separatetreaties by the different colonies; but the Pennsylvania delegates, byvarious devices of compass courses which the Indians did not understandand by failing to notify and secure the consent of certain tribes, obtained a grant of pretty much the whole of Pennsylvania west of theSusquehanna. The Indians considered this procedure to be another grossfraud. It is to be noticed that in their dealings with Penn they hadalways been satisfied, and that he had always been careful that theyshould be duly consulted and if necessary be paid twice over for theland. But his sons were more economical, and as a result of the shrewdpractices of the Albany purchase the Pennsylvania Indians almostimmediately went over in a body to the French and were soon scalpingmen, women, and children among the Pennsylvania colonists. It is astriking fact, however, that in all the after years of war and rapineand for generations afterwards the Indians retained the most distinctand positive tradition of Penn's good faith and of the honesty of allQuakers. So persistent, indeed, was this tradition among the tribes ofthe West that more than a century later President Grant proposed toput the whole charge of the nation's Indian affairs in the hands of theQuakers. The first efforts to avert the catastrophe threatened by thealliance of the red man with the French were made by the provincialassemblies, which voted presents of money or goods to the Indians tooffset similar presents from the French. The result was, of course, theutter demoralization of the savages. Bribed by both sides, the Indiansused all their native cunning to encourage the bribers to bid againsteach other. So far as Pennsylvania was concerned, feeling themselvescheated in the first instance and now bribed with gifts, they developeda contempt for the people who could stoop to such practices. As aresult this contempt manifested itself in deeds hitherto unknown in theprovince. One tribe on a visit to Philadelphia killed cattle and robbedorchards as they passed. The delegates of another tribe, having visitedPhiladelphia and received 500 pounds as a present, returned to thefrontier and on their way back for another present destroyed theproperty of the interpreter and Indian agent, Conrad Weiser. They feltthat they could do as they pleased. To make matters worse, the Assemblypaid for all the damage done; and having started on this foolishbusiness, they found that the list of tribes demanding presents rapidlyincreased. 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 increasingexpense or divide it between them, became a subject of increasingcontroversy. It was in these discussions that Thomas Penn, in trying tokeep his family's share of the expense as small as possible, first gotthe reputation for closeness which followed him for the rest of his lifeand which started a party in the province desirous of having Parliamentabolish the proprietorship and put the province under a governorappointed by the Crown. 

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

When Governor Morris asked the Assembly for a war contribution in1754, they promptly voted 20, 000 pounds. This was the same amount thatVirginia, the most active of the colonies in the war, was giving. Othercolonies gave much less; New York, only 5000 pounds, and Maryland 6000pounds. Morris, however, would not assent to the Assembly's bill unlessit contained a clause suspending its effect until the King's pleasurewas known. This was an attempt to establish a precedent for giving upthe Assembly's charter right of passing laws which need not be submittedto the King for five years and which in the meantime were valid. Themembers of the Assembly very naturally refused to be forced by thenecessities of the war into surrendering one of the most importantprivileges the province possessed. It was, they said, as much their dutyto resist this invasion of their rights as to resist the French. 

Governor Morris, besides demanding that the supply of 20, 000 poundsshould not go into force until the King's pleasure was known, insistedthat the paper money representing it should be redeemable in five years. This period the Assembly considered too short; the usual time was tenyears. Five years would ruin too many people by foreclosures. Moreover, the Governor was attempting to dictate the way in which the peopleshould raise a money supply. He and the King had a right to ask for aidin war; but it was the right of the colony to use its own methodsof furnishing this assistance. The Governor also refused to let theAssembly see the instructions from the proprietors under which hewas acting. This was another attack upon their liberties and involvednothing less than an attempt to change their charter rights by secretinstructions to a deputy governor which he must obey at his peril. Several bills had recently been introduced in the English Parliament forthe purpose of making royal instructions to governors binding on all thecolonial assemblies without regard to their charters. This innovation, the colonists felt, would wreck all their liberties and turn colonialgovernment into a mere despotism. 

The assemblies of all the colonies have been a good deal abused fordelay in supporting the war and meanness in withholding money. Butin many instances the delay and lack of money were occasioned by thegrasping schemes of governors who saw a chance to gain new privilegesfor the Crown or a proprietor or to weaken popular government bycrippling the powers of the legislatures. The usual statement thatthe Pennsylvania Assembly was slow in assisting the war because it wascomposed of Quakers is not supported by the facts. The PennsylvaniaAssembly was not behind the rest. On this particular occasion, whentheir large money supply bill could not be passed without sacrificingtheir constitutional rights, they raised money for the war by appointinga committee which was authorized to borrow 5000 pounds on the credit ofthe Assembly. 

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

Pennsylvania, though governed by Quakers assisted by noncombatantGermans, had a better protected frontier than Maryland or Virginia; nocolony, indeed, was at that time better protected. The Quaker Assemblydid more than take care of the frontier during the war; it preservedat the same time constitutional rights in defense of which twenty-fiveyears afterwards the whole continent fought the Revolution. The QuakerAssembly even passed two militia bills, one of which became law, andsent rather more than the province's full share of troops to protectthe frontiers of New York and New England and to carry the invasion intoCanada. 

General Braddock warmly praised the assistance which Pennsylvania gavehim because, he said, she had done more for him than any of the othercolonies. Virginia and Maryland promised everything and performednothing, while Pennsylvania promised nothing and performed everything. Commodore Spy thanked the Assembly for the large number of sailors senthis fleet at the expense of the province. General Shirley, in chargeof the New England and New York campaigns, thanked the Assembly forthe numerous recruits; and it was the common opinion at the time thatPennsylvania had sent more troops to the war than any other colony. Inthe first four years of the war the province spent for military purposes210, 567 pounds sterling, which was a very considerable sum at that timefor a community of less than 200, 000 people. Quakers, though they hatewar, will accept it when there is no escape. The old story of the Quakerwho tossed a pirate overboard, saying, "Friend, thee has no businesshere, " gives their point of view better than pages of explanation. Quaker opinion has not always been entirely uniform. In Revolutionarytimes in Philadelphia there was a division of the Quakers known as theFighting Quakers, and their meeting house is still pointed out at thecorner of Fourth Street and Arch. They even produced able militaryleaders: Colonel John Dickinson, General Greene, and General Mifflin inthe Continental Army, and, in the War of 1812, General Jacob Brown, who reorganized the army and restored its failing fortunes after manyofficers had been tried and found wanting. 

There was always among the Quakers a rationalistic party and a party ofmysticism. The rationalistic party prevailed in Pennsylvania all throughthe colonial period. In the midst of the worst horrors of the French andIndian wars, however, the conscientious objectors roused themselves andbegan preaching and exhorting what has been called the mystical side ofthe faith. Many extreme Quaker members of the Assembly resigned theirseats in consequence. After the Revolution the spiritual party begangaining ground, partly perhaps because then the responsibilities ofgovernment and care of the great political and religious experiment inPennsylvania were removed. The spiritual party increased so rapidlyin power that in 1827 a split occurred which involved not a littlebitterness, ill feeling, and litigation over property. This divisioninto 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 bythe difficulties and disasters that followed Braddock's defeat. Thatunfortunate general had something over two thousand men and was hamperedwith a train of artillery and a splendid equipment of arms, tools, andsupplies, as if he were to march over the smooth highways of Europe. When he came to drag all these munitions through the depths of thePennsylvania forests and up and down the mountains, he found that hemade only about three miles a day and that his horses had nothing to eatbut the leaves of the trees. Washington, who was of the party, finallypersuaded him to abandon his artillery and press forward with aboutfifteen hundred picked men. These troops, when a few miles from FortDuquesne (now Pittsburgh), met about six hundred Indians and threehundred French coming from the fort. The English maintained a closeformation where they were, but the French and Indians immediately spreadout on their flanks, lying behind trees and logs which provided restsfor their rifles and security for their bodies. This strategy decidedthe day. The English were shot down like cattle in a pen, and out ofabout fifteen hundred only four hundred and fifty escaped. The Frenchand Indian loss was not much over fifty. 

This defeat of Braddock's force has become one of the most famousreverses in history; and it was made worse by the conduct of Dunbar whohad 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 thefrontier. But he took fright, burned his wagons, emptied his barrels ofpowder into the streams, destroyed his provisions, and fled back to FortCumberland in Maryland. Here the governors of Pennsylvania and Virginiaas well as the Pennsylvania Assembly urged him to stay. But, determinedto make the British rout complete, he soon retreated to the peace andquiet of Philadelphia, and nothing would induce him to enter again theterrible forests of Pennsylvania. 

The natural result of the blunder soon followed. The French, findingthe whole frontier of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia abandoned, organized the Indians under French officers and swept the whole regionwith a devastation of massacre, scalping, and burning that has neverbeen equaled. Hurons, Potawatomies, Ojibways, Ottawas, Mingoes, renegades from the Six Nations, together with the old treaty friends ofPenn, the Delawares and Shawanoes, began swarming eastward and soonhad killed more people than had been lost at Braddock's defeat. Theonslaught reached its height in September and October. By that time allthe outlying frontier settlers and their families had been killed orsent flying eastward to seek refuge in the settlements. The Indians evenfollowed them to the settlements, reached the Susquehanna, and crossedit. They massacred the people of the village of Gnadenhutten, nearBethlehem on the Lehigh, and established near by a headquarters forprisoners and plunder. Families were scalped within fifty miles ofPhiladelphia, and in one instance the bodies of a murdered familywere brought into the town and exhibited in the streets to show theinhabitants how near the danger was approaching. Nothing could be doneto stem the savage tide. Virginia was suffering in the same way: thesettlers on her border were slaughtered or were driven back in herdsupon the more settled districts, and Washington, with a nominal strengthof fifteen hundred who would not obey orders, was forced to standa helpless spectator of the general flight and misery. There was noadequate force or army anywhere within reach. The British had beenput to flight and had gone to the defense of New England and New York. Neither Pennsylvania nor Virginia had a militia that could withstandthe French and their red allies. They could only wait till the panic hadsubsided and then see what could be done. 

One thing was accomplished, however, when the Pennsylvania Assemblypassed a Quaker militia law which is one of the most curious legaldocuments of its kind in history. It was most aptly worded, drafted bythe master hand of Franklin. It recited the fact that the province hadalways been ruled by Quakers who were opposed to war, but that now ithad become necessary to allow men to become soldiers and to give themevery facility for the profession of arms, because the Assembly thoughcontaining a Quaker majority nevertheless represented all the people ofthe province. To prevent those who believed in war from taking part init would be as much a violation of liberty of conscience as to forceenlistments among those who had conscientious scruples against it. Norwould the Quaker majority have any right to compel others to bear armsand at the same time exempt themselves. Therefore a voluntary militiasystem was established under which a fighting Quaker, a Presbyterian, anEpiscopalian, or anybody, could enlist and have all the military gloryhe could win. 

It was altogether a volunteer system. Two years afterwards, as thenecessities of war increased, the Quaker Assembly passed a ratherstringent compulsory militia bill; but the governor vetoed it, and thefirst law with its volunteer system remained in force. Franklin busiedhimself to encourage enlistments under it and was very successful. Though a philosopher and a man of science, almost as much opposed to waras the Quakers and not even owning a shotgun, he was elected commanderand 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 ofGnadenhutten had been burned and its people massacred. The Moravians, like the Quakers, had suddenly found that they were not as much opposedto war as they had supposed. They had obtained arms and ammunition fromNew York and had built stockades, and Franklin was glad to find them sowell prepared when he arrived. He built small forts in different partsof the valley, acted entirely on the defensive, and no doubt checked theraids of the Indians at that point. They seem to have been watchinghim from the hilltops all the time, and any rashness on his part wouldprobably have brought disaster upon him. After his force had beenwithdrawn, 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 sofar as it went, but it was merely defensive and by no means completelydefensive, since Indian raiding parties could pass between the forts. They served chiefly as refuges for neighboring settlers. The colonialtroops or militia, after manning the fifty forts and sending their quotato the operations against Canada by way of New England and New York, were not numerous enough to attack the Indians. They could only act onthe defensive as Franklin's command had done. As for the rangers, asthe small bands of frontiersmen acting without any authority of eithergovernor or legislature were called, they were very efficient asindividuals but they accomplished very little because they acted atwidely isolated spots. What was needed was a well organized force whichcould pursue the Indians on their own ground so far westward that thesettlers on the frontier would be safe. The only troops which coulddo this were the British regulars with the assistance of the colonialmilitia. 

Two energetic efforts to end the war without aid from abroad were made, however, one by the pacific Quakers and the other by the combatantportion of the people. Both of these were successful so far as theywent, but had little effect on the general situation. In the summerof 1756, the Quakers made a very earnest effort to persuade the twoprincipal Pennsylvania tribes, the Delawares and Shawanoes, to withdrawfrom the French alliance and return to their old friends. These twotribes possessed a knowledge of the country which enabled them greatlyto assist the French designs on Pennsylvania. Chiefs of these tribeswere brought under safe conducts to Philadelphia, where they wereentertained as equals in the Quaker homes. Such progress, indeed, wasmade that by the end of July a treaty of peace was concluded at Eastoneliminating those two tribes from the war. This has sometimes beensneered at as mere Quaker pacifism; but it was certainly successful inlessening the numbers and effectiveness of the enemy. 

The other undertaking was a military one, the famous attack uponKittanning conducted by Colonel John Armstrong, an Ulsterman fromCarlisle, Pennsylvania, and the first really aggressive officer theprovince had produced. The Indians had two headquarters for their raidsinto the province, one at Logstown on the Ohio a few miles below FortDuquesne, and the other at Kittanning or, as the French called it, Attique, about forty miles northeast. At these two points they assembledtheir forces, received ammunition and supplies from the French, andorganized their expeditions. As Kittanning was the nearer, Armstrong ina masterly maneuver took three hundred men through the mountains withoutbeing discovered and, by falling upon the village early in the morning, he effected a complete surprise. The town was set on fire, the Indianswere put to flight, and large quantities of their ammunition weredestroyed. But Armstrong could not follow up his success. Threatenedby overwhelming numbers, he hastened to withdraw. The effect which thefighting and the Quaker treaty had on the frontier was good. Incursionsof the savages were, at least for the present, checked. But the root ofthe evil had not yet been reached, and the Indians remained massedalong the Ohio, ready to break in upon the people again at the firstopportunity. 

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

Turmoil and party strife rose to the most exciting heights, and thedetails of it might, under certain circumstances, be interesting todescribe. But the next year, 1758, the British Government, by sendinga powerful force of regulars to Pennsylvania, at last adopted theonly method for ending the war. Confidence was at once restored. ThePennsylvania Assembly now voted the sufficient and, indeed, immense sumof one hundred thousand pounds, and offered a bounty of five poundsto every recruit. It was no longer a war of defense but now a war ofaggression and conquest. Fort Duquesne on the Ohio was taken; and thenext autumn Fort Pitt was built on its ruins. Then Canada fell, andthe French empire in America came to an end. Canada and the Great Westpassed 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'stitle to Canada and turning over Canada and the Mississippi Valley tothe English, the colonists were prepared to enjoy all the blessings ofpeace. But the treaty of peace had been made with France, not with thered man. A remarkable genius, Pontiac, appeared among the Indians, oneof the few characters, like Tecumseh and Osceola, who are often citedas proof of latent powers almost equal to the strongest qualities of thewhite race. Within a few months he had united all the tribes of theWest in a discipline and control which, if it had been brought to theassistance of the French six years earlier, might have conquered thecolonies to the Atlantic seaboard before the British regulars could havecome to their assistance. The tribes swept westward into Pennsylvania, burning, murdering, and leveling every habitation to the ground with athoroughness beyond anything attempted under the French alliance. Thesettlers and farmers fled eastward to the towns to live in cellars, camps, and sheds as best they could. * Fortunately the colonies retaineda large part of the military organization, both men and officers, ofthe French War, and were soon able to handle the situation. Detroit andNiagara were relieved by water; and an expedition commanded by ColonelBouquet, who had distinguished himself under General Forties, saved FortPitt. 

 * 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 withnot a little success. They refused to join the expedition of regulartroops marching westward against Pontiac's warriors, because they wantedto protect their own homes and because they believed the regulars to bemarching to sure destruction. Many of the regular troops were invalidedfrom the West Indies, and the Scotch-Irish never expected to see anyof them again. They believed that the salvation of Pennsylvania, or atleast of their part of the province, depended entirely upon themselves. Their increasing numbers and rugged independence were forming themalso into an organized political party with decided tendencies, as itafterwards appeared, towards forming a separate state. 

The extreme narrowness of the Scotch-Irish, however, misled them. Theonly real safety for the province lay in regularly constituted andstrong expeditions, like that of Bouquet, which would drive the mainbody of the savages far westward. But the Scotch-Irish could not seethis; and with that intensity of passion which marked all theiractions they turned their energy and vengeance upon the Quakers andsemicivilized Indians in the eastern end of the colony. Their preachers, who were their principal leaders and organizers, encouraged them indenouncing Quaker doctrine as a wicked heresy from which only evilcould result. The Quakers had offended God from the beginning by makingtreaties of kindness with the heathen savages instead of exterminatingthem as the Scripture commanded: "And when the Lord thy God shalldeliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroythem; 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 aconsequence, the Ulstermen said, the frontiers were now deluged inblood. They were particularly resentful against the small settlement ofIndians near Bethlehem, who had been converted to Christianity by theMoravians, and another little village of half civilized basketmakingIndians at Conestoga near Lancaster. The Scotch-Irish had workedthemselves up into a strange belief that these small remnants weresending information, arms, and ammunition to the western tribes; andthey seemed to think that it was more important to exterminate theselittle communities than to go with such expeditions as Bouquet's tothe West. They asked the Governor to remove these civilized Indians andassured 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 thematter in their own fashion. 

Bouquet's victory at Bushy Run, much to the surprise of theScotch-Irish, stopped Indian raids of any seriousness until thefollowing spring. But in the autumn there were a few depredations, whichled the frontiersmen to believe that the whole invasion would beginagain. A party of them, therefore, started to attack the MoravianIndians near Bethlehem; but before they could accomplish their object, the Governor brought most of the Indians down to Philadelphia forprotection. Even there they were narrowly saved from the mob, for thehostility 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 ConestogaIndians and found only six of them at home--three men, two women, and aboy. These they instantly shot down, mutilated their bodies, and burnedtheir cabins. As the murderers returned, they related to a man on theroad what they had done, and when he protested against the cruelty ofthe deed, they asked, "Don't you believe in God and the Bible?" Theremaining fourteen inhabitants of the village, who were away sellingbrooms, were collected by the sheriff and put in the jail at Lancasterfor protection. The Paxtons heard of it and in a few days stormed thejail, broke down the doors, and either shot the poor Indians or cut themto pieces with hatchets. 

This was probably the first instance of lynch law in America. It raiseda storm of indignation and controversy; and a pamphlet war persistedfor several years. The whole province was immediately divided intotwo parties. On one side were the Quakers, most of the Germans, andconservatives of every sort, and on the other, inclined to sympathizewith the Scotch-Irish, were the eastern Presbyterians, some of theChurchmen, and various miscellaneous people whose vindictiveness towardsall Indians had been aroused by the war. The Quakers and conservatives, who seem to have been the more numerous, assailed the Scotch-Irish in nomeasured language as a gang of ruffians without respect for law or orderwho, though always crying for protection, had refused to march withBouquet to save Fort Pitt or to furnish him the slightest assistance. Instead of going westward where the danger was and something mightbe accomplished, they had turned eastward among the settlements andmurdered a few poor defenseless people, mostly women and children. 

Franklin, who had now returned from England, wrote one of his bestpamphlets against the Paxtons, the valorous, heroic Paxtons, as hecalled them, prating of God and the Bible, fifty-seven of whom, armedwith rifles, knives, and hatchets, had actually succeeded in killingthree 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 immensecirculation. Like everything Franklin wrote, it is interesting readingto this day. 

One of the first effects of this controversy was to drive the excitableScotch-Irish into a flame of insurrection not unlike the WhiskyRebellion, which started among them some years after the Revolution. They held tumultuous meetings denouncing the Quakers and the wholeproprietary government in Philadelphia, and they organized an expeditionwhich included some delegates to suggest reforms. For the most part, however, it was a well equipped little army variously estimated at fromfive hundred to fifteen hundred on foot and on horseback, which marchedtowards Philadelphia with no uncertain purpose. They openly declaredthat they intended to capture the town, seize the Moravian Indiansprotected there, and put them to death. They fully expected to besupported by most of the people and to have everything their own way. As they passed along the roads, they amused themselves in their roughfashion by shooting chickens and pigs, frightening people by thrustingtheir rifles into windows, and occasionally throwing some one down andpretending to scalp him. 

In the city there was great excitement and alarm. Even the classes whosympathized with the Scotch-Irish did not altogether relish having theirproperty burned or destroyed. Great preparations were made to meet theexpedition. British regulars were summoned. Eight companies of militiaand a battery of artillery were hastily formed. Franklin became amilitary man once more and superintended the preparations. On all sidesthe Quakers were enlisting; they had become accustomed to war; and thislegitimate chance to shoot a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian was too much forthe strongest scruples of their religion. It was a long time, however, before they heard the end of this zeal; and in the pamphlet war whichfollowed they were accused of clamorously rushing to arms and demandingto be led against the enemy. 

It is amusing now to read about it in the old records. But it wasserious enough at the time. When the Scotch-Irish army reached theSchuylkill River and found the fords leading to the city guarded, theywere not quite so enthusiastic about killing Quakers and Indians. Theywent up the river some fifteen miles, crossed by an unopposed ford, andhalted in Germantown ten miles north of Philadelphia. That was as far asthey thought it safe to venture. Several days passed, during which thecity people continued their preparations and expected every night to beattacked. There were, indeed, several false alarms. Whenever the alarmwas sounded at night, every one placed candles in his windows to lightup the streets. One night when it rained the soldiers were allowedto shelter themselves in a Quaker meeting house, which for some hoursbristled with bayonets and swords, an incident of which the Presbyterianpamphleteers afterwards made much use for satire. On another day all thecannon 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 mightydifference composed. The Scotch-Irish stated their grievances. TheMoravian Indians ought not to be protected by the government, and allsuch Indians should be removed from the colony; the men who killedthe Conestoga Indians should be tried where the supposed offense wascommitted and not in Philadelphia; the five frontier counties hadonly ten representatives in the Assembly while the three others hadtwenty-six--this should be remedied; men wounded in border war should becared for at public expense; no trade should be carried on with hostileIndians until they restored prisoners; and there should be a bounty onscalps. 

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

Franklin while in England had succeeded in having the proprietary landstaxed equally with the lands of the colonists. But the proprietorsattempted to construe this provision so that their best lands were taxedat the rate paid by the people on their worst. This obvious quibble ofcourse raised such a storm of opposition that the Quakers, joined byclasses which had never before supported them, and now forming a largemajority, determined to appeal to the Government in England to abolishthe proprietorship and put the colony under the rule of the King. In theproposal to make Pennsylvania a Crown colony there was no intentionof confiscating the possessions of the proprietors. It was merely theproprietary political power, their right to appoint the Governor, thatwas to be abolished. This right was to be absorbed by the Crown withpayment for its value to the proprietors; but in all other respectsthe charter and the rights and liberties of the people were to remainunimpaired. Just there lay the danger. An act of Parliament would berequired to make the change and, having once started on such a change, Parliament, or the party in power therein, might decide to make otherchanges, and in the end there might remain very little of the originalrights and liberties of the colonists under their charter. It was byno means a wise move. But intense feeling on the subject was aroused. Passionate feeling seemed to have been running very high among thesteady Quakers. In this new outburst the Quakers had the Scotch-Irish ontheir side, and a part of the Churchmen. The Germans were divided, butthe majority enthusiastic for the change was very large. 

There was a new alignment of parties. The eastern Presbyterians, usuallymore or less in sympathy with the Scotch-Irish, broke away from themon this occasion. These Presbyterians opposed the change to a royalgovernor because they believed that it would be followed by theestablishment by law of the Church of England, with bishops and all theother ancient evils. Although some of the Churchmen joined the Quakerside, most of them and the most influential of them were opposed to thechange and did good work in opposing it. They were well content withtheir position under the proprietors and saw nothing to be gained undera royal governor. There were also not a few people who, in the increaseof the wealth of the province, had acquired aristocratic tastes and wereattached to the pleasant social conditions that had grown up round theproprietary governors and their followers; and there were also thosewhose salaries, incomes, or opportunities for wealth were more or lessdependent on the proprietors retaining the executive offices and theappointments and patronage. 

One of the most striking instances of a change of sides was the case ofa Philadelphia Quaker, John Dickinson, a lawyer of large practice, a manof wealth and position, and of not a little colonial magnificence whenhe 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 theAssembly and had been in politics for some years. But on this questionof a change to royal government, he left the Quaker majority and opposedthe change with all his influence and ability. He and his father-in-law, Isaac Norris, Speaker of the Assembly, became the leaders againstthe change, and Franklin and Joseph Galloway, the latter afterwards aprominent loyalist in the Revolution, were the leading advocates of thechange. 

The whole subject was thoroughly thrashed out in debates in the Assemblyand in pamphlets of very great ability and of much interest to studentsof colonial history and the growth of American ideas of liberty. It mustbe remembered that this was the year 1764, on the eve of the Revolution. British statesmen were planning a system of more rigorous control of thecolonies; 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 Quakerparty thought there was no danger and that the mother country could beimplicitly trusted. 

Dickinson warned the people that the British Ministry were startingspecial regulations for new colonies and "designing the strictestreformations in the old. " It would be a great relief, he admitted, tobe rid of the pettiness of the proprietors, and it might be accomplishedsome time in the future; but not now. The proprietary system mightbe bad, but a royal government might be worse and might wreck all theliberties of the province, religious freedom, the Assembly's controlof its own adjournments, and its power of raising and disposing of thepublic money. The ministry of the day in England were well known notto be favorably inclined towards Pennsylvania because of the frequentlyreported willfulness of the Assembly, on which the recent disturbanceshad also been blamed. If the King, Ministry, and Parliament startedupon a change, they might decide to reconstitute the Assembly entirely, abolish its ancient privileges, and disfranchise both Quakers andPresbyterians. 

The arguments of Franklin and Galloway consisted principally ofassertions of the good intentions of the mother country and theabsurdity 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 theParliament which they thought would do no harm was the same one whicha few months afterwards passed the Stamp Act which brought on theRevolution. Franklin and Galloway also asserted that the colonies likeMassachusetts, the Jerseys, and the Carolinas, which had been changed toroyal governments, had profited by the change. But that was hardly theprevailing opinion in those colonies themselves. Royal governorscould be as petty and annoying as the Penns and far more tyrannical. Pennsylvania had always defeated any attempts at despotism on the partof the Penn family and had built up a splendid body of liberal laws andlegislative privileges. But governors with the authority and power ofthe British Crown behind them could not be so easily resisted as thedeputy governors of the Penns. 

The Assembly, however, voted--twenty-seven to three--with Franklinand Galloway. In the general election of the autumn, the question wasdebated anew among the people and, though Franklin and Galloway weredefeated for seats in the Assembly, yet the popular verdict was stronglyin favor of a change, and the majority in the Assembly was for practicalpurposes unaltered. They voted to appeal to England for the change, andappointed Franklin to be their agent before the Crown and Ministry. Hesailed again for England and soon was involved in the opening scenes ofthe Revolution. He was made agent for all the colonies and he spentmany delightful years there pursuing his studies in science, dining withdistinguished men, staying at country seats, and learning all the artsof 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 finallyconvinced that the time was inopportune. In fact, the Assembly itselfbefore long began to have doubts and fears and sent him word to letthe subject drop; and amid much greater events it was soon entirelyforgotten. 

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 historyrather different from that of other English colonies in America. Geographically, it had not a few attractions. It was a good sizeddominion surrounded on all sides but one by water, almost an islanddomain, secluded and independent. In fact, it was the only one of thecolonies which stood naturally separate and apart. The others werebounded almost entirely by artificial or imaginary lines. 

It offered an opportunity, one might have supposed, for somedissatisfied religious sect of the seventeenth century to secure asanctuary and keep off all intruders. But at first no one of the variousdenominations seems to have fancied it or chanced upon it. The Puritansdisembarked upon the bleak shores of New England well suited to thesternness of their religion. How different American history might havebeen 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 aboutthe Jerseys and cast thrifty eyes upon them. Their seafaring habits andthe pursuit of whales led them along the coast and into Delaware Bay. The Puritans of New Haven made persistent efforts to settle the southernpart of Jersey, on the Delaware near Salem. They thought, as theirquaint old records show, that if they could once start a branch colonyin Jersey it might become more populous and powerful than the NewHaven settlement and in that case they intended to move their seat ofgovernment to the new colony. But their shrewd estimate of its valuecame too late. The Dutch and the Swedes occupied the Delaware at thattime and drove them out. Puritans, however, entered northern Jerseyand, while they were not numerous enough to make it a thoroughly Puritancommunity, they largely tinged its thought and its laws, and theirinfluence still survives. 

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

There were only two places easy of settlement in the Jerseys. One wasthe open region of meadows and marshes by Newark Bay near the mouthof the Hudson and along the Hackensack River, whence the people slowlyextended themselves to the seashore at Sandy Hook and thence southwardalong the ocean beach. This was East Jersey. The other easily occupiedregion, which became West Jersey, stretched along the shore of the lowerDelaware from the modern Trenton to Salem, whence the settlers graduallyworked their way into the interior. Between these two divisions laya rough wilderness which in its southern portion was full of swamps, thickets, and pine barrens. So rugged was the country that the nativeIndians lived for the most part only in the two open regions alreadydescribed. 

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

The Delaware River flowed into this sound at Trenton. Gradually theHudson end of the sound filled up as far as Trenton, but the tide fromthe 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 PensaukenSound, as it is called by geologists. 

The Jerseys originated as a colony in 1664. In 1675 West Jersey passedinto the control of the Quakers. In 1680 East Jersey came partiallyunder Quaker influence. In August, 1664, Charles II seized New York, NewJersey, and all the Dutch possessions in America, having previouslyin March granted them to his brother the Duke of York. The Duke almostimmediately gave to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, members ofthe Privy Council and defenders of the Stuart family in the Cromwellianwars, the land between the Delaware River and the ocean, and boundedon the north by a line drawn from latitude 41 degrees on the Hudson tolatitude 41 degrees 40 minutes on the Delaware. This region was to becalled, the grant said, Nova Caesarea, or New Jersey. The name was acompliment to Carteret, who in the Cromwellian wars had defended thelittle isle of Jersey against the forces of the Long Parliament. As theAmerican 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 anexact division was attempted, creating the rather unnatural sectionsknown as East Jersey and West Jersey. The first idea seems to have beento divide by a line running from Barnegat on the seashore to the mouthof Pensauken Creek on the Delaware just above Camden. This, however, would have made a North Jersey and a South Jersey, with the latter muchsmaller than the former. Several lines seem to have been surveyed atdifferent times in the attempt to make an exactly equal division, whichwas no easy engineering task. As private land titles and boundaries werein some places dependent on the location of the division line, thereresulted much controversy and litigation which lasted down into ourown time. Without going into details, it is sufficient to say that theacceptable division line began on the seashore at Little Egg Harbor atthe lower end of Barnegat Bay and crossed diagonally or northwesterly tothe northern part of the Delaware River just above the Water Gap. It isknown as the Old Province line, and it can be traced on any map of theState by prolonging, in both directions, the northeastern boundary ofBurlington County. 

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

George Fox, the Quaker leader, had just returned from a missionaryjourney in America, in the course of which he had traveled through NewJersey in going from New York to Maryland. Some years previously inEngland, about 1659, he had made inquiries as to a suitable place forQuaker settlement and was told of the region north of Maryland whichbecame Pennsylvania. But how could a persecuted sect obtain such aregion from the British Crown and the Government that was persecutingthem? It would require powerful influence at Court; nothing could thenbe done about it; and Pennsylvania had to wait until William Penn becamea man with influence enough in 1681 to win it from the Crown. But herewas West Jersey, no longer owned directly by the Crown and bought incheap by two Quakers. It was an unexpected opportunity. Quakers soonwent to it, and it was the first Quaker colonial experiment. 

Byllinge and Fenwick, though turned Quakers, seem to have retainedsome of the contentious Cromwellian spirit of their youth. They soonquarreled over their respective interests in the ownership of WestJersey; and to prevent a lawsuit, so objectionable to Quakers, thedecision was left to William Penn, then a rising young Quaker aboutthirty years old, dreaming of ideal colonies in America. Penn awardedFenwick a one-tenth interest and four hundred pounds. Byllinge soonbecame insolvent and turned over his nine-tenths interest to hiscreditors, appointing Penn and two other Quakers, Gawen Lawrie, amerchant of London, and Nicholas Lucas, a maltster of Hertford, to holdit in trust for them. Gawen Lawrie afterwards became deputy governor ofEast Jersey. Lucas was one of those thoroughgoing Quakers just releasedfrom eight years in prison for his religion. *

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

Fenwick also in the end fell into debt and, after selling over onehundred thousand acres to about fifty purchasers, leased what remainedof his interest for a thousand years to John Edridge, a tanner, andEdmund 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 theWest Jersey ownership into one hundred shares. The ninety belonging toByllinge were offered for sale to settlers or to creditors of Byllingewho would take them in exchange for debts. The settlement of West Jerseythus became the distribution of an insolvent Quaker's estate among hiscreditor 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 foundedthe modern town of Salem, which means peace, giving it that name becauseof the fair and peaceful aspect of the wilderness on the day theyarrived. 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 orprovision for organized government. When Fenwick attempted to exercisepolitical authority at Salem, he was seized and imprisoned by Andros, Governor of New York for the Duke of York, on the ground that, althoughthe Duke had given Jersey to certain individual proprietors, thepolitical 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 theDelaware, 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, whowas suspiciously indifferent to the matter, but finally referred itfor decision to a prominent lawyer, Sir William Jones, before whom theQuaker proprietors of West Jersey made a most excellent argument. Theyshowed the illegality, injustice, and wrong of depriving the Jerseysof vested political rights and forcing them from the freeman's rightof making their own laws to a state of mere dependence on the arbitrarywill of one man. Then with much boldness they declared that "To exactsuch an unterminated tax from English planters, and to continue it afterso many repeated complaints, will be the greatest evidence of a designto introduce, if the Crown should ever devolve upon the Duke, anunlimited government in old England. " Prophetic words which the Duke, ina few years, tried his best to fulfill. But Sir William Jones decidingagainst him, he acquiesced, confirmed the political rights of WestJersey by a separate grant, and withdrew any authority Andros claimedover East Jersey. The trouble, however, did not end here. Both theJerseys 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, thefirst Quaker political constitution embodying their advanced ideas, establishing religious liberty, universal suffrage, and voting byballot, and abolishing imprisonment for debt. It foreshadowed some ofthe ideas subsequently included in the Pennsylvania constitution. Allthese experiences were an excellent school for William Penn. He learnedthe importance in starting a colony of having a carefully and maturelyconsidered system of government. In his preparations some yearsafterwards for establishing Pennsylvania he avoided much of the bunglingof the West Jersey enterprise. 

A better organized attempt was now made to establish a foothold in WestJersey farther up the river than Fenwick's colony at Salem. In 1677 theship Kent took out some 230 rather well-to-do Quakers, about as fine acompany of broadbrims, it is said, as ever entered the Delaware. Somewere from Yorkshire and London, largely creditors of Byllinge, whowere taking land to satisfy their debts. They all went up the river toRaccoon Creek on the Jersey side, about fifteen miles below the presentsite of Philadelphia, and lived at first among the Swedes, who hadbeen in that part of Jersey for some years and who took care of the newarrivals in their barns and sheds. These Quaker immigrants, however, soon began to take care of themselves, and the weather during the winterproving mild, they explored farther up the river in a small boat. Theybought from the Indians the land along the river shore from Oldman'sCreek all the way up to Trenton and made their first settlements on theriver about eighteen miles above the site of Philadelphia, at aplace they at first called New Beverly, then Bridlington, and finallyBurlington. 

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

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

Settlements were also started on the river opposite the site afterwardsoccupied by Philadelphia, at Newton on the creek still called by thatname; and another a little above on Cooper's Creek, known as Cooper'sFerry until 1794. Since then it has become the flourishing town ofCamden, full of shipbuilding and manufacturing, but for long after theRevolution it was merely a small village on the Jersey shore oppositePhiladelphia, sometimes used as a hunting ground and a place of resortfor 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 possessedof property in England and bringing good supplies with them. Like allthe rest of the New Jersey settlers they were in no sense adventurers, gold seekers, cavaliers, or desperadoes. They were well-to-do middleclass English tradespeople who would never have thought of leavingEngland if they had not lost faith in the stability of civil andreligious liberty and the security of their property under the StuartKings. With them came servants, as they were called; that is, persons ofno property, who agreed to work for a certain time in payment of theirpassage, to escape from England. All, indeed, were escaping from Englandbefore their estates melted away in fines and confiscations or theirhealth or lives ended in the damp, foul air of the crowded prisons. Manyof those who came had been in jail and had decided that they would notrisk imprisonment a second time. Indeed, the proportion of West Jerseyimmigrants who had actually been in prison for holding or attendingQuaker meetings or refusing to pay tithes for the support of theestablished church was large. For example, William Bates, a carpenter, while in jail for his religion, made arrangements with his friendsto escape to West Jersey as soon as he should be released, and hisdescendants are now scattered over the United States. Robert Turner, aman of means, who settled finally in Philadelphia but also owned muchland 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 hadthe same experience. Details such as these make us realize the situationfrom which the Quakers sought to escape. So widespread was the Quakermovement in England and so severe the punishment imposed in order tosuppress it that fifteen thousand families are said to have been ruinedby the fines, confiscations, and imprisonments. 

Not a few Jersey Quakers were from Ireland, whither they had fledbecause 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, theyhad also been fined and imprisoned, though with less severity than athome, for nonconformity to the Church of England. On arriving, the WestJersey settlers suffered some hardships during the year that must elapsebefore a crop could be raised and a log cabin or house built. Duringthat period they usually lived, in the Indian manner, in wigwams ofpoles covered with bark, or in caves protected with logs in the steepbanks of the creeks. Many of them lived in the villages of the Indians. The Indians supplied them all with corn and venison, and without thisIndian help, they would have run serious risk of starving, for they werenot accustomed to hunting. They had also to thank the Indians for havingin past ages removed so much of the heavy forest growth from the widestrip of land along the river that it was easy to start cultivation. 

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

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

It was the ship Shields of Hull, bringing Quaker immigrants toBurlington, of which the story is told that in beating up the rivershe tacked close to the rather high bank with deep water frontage wherePhiladelphia was afterwards established; and some of the passengersremarked 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 beforeBurlington in the evening, the colonists woke up next morning to findthe river frozen hard so that they walked on the ice to their futurehabitations. 

Burlington was made the capital of West Jersey, a legislature wasconvened and laws were passed under the "concessions" or constitutionof the proprietors. Salem and Burlington became the ports of the littleprovince, which was well under way by 1682, when Penn came out to takepossession of Pennsylvania. 

The West Jersey people of these two settlements spread eastward into theinterior but were stopped by a great forest area known as the Pines, orPine Barrens, of such heavy growth that even the Indians lived on itsouter edges and entered it only for hunting. It was an irregularlyshaped tract, full of wolves, bear, beaver, deer, and other game, anduntil recent years has continued to attract sportsmen from all parts ofthe country. Starting near Delaware Bay, it extended parallel with theocean as far north as the lower portion of the present Monmouth Countyand 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 fromthe ocean, and it has been longer above water than any other part ofsouthern Jersey. The old name, Pine Barrens, is hardly correct becauseit implies something like a desert, when as a matter of fact the regionproduced magnificent forest trees. 

The innumerable visitors who cross southern Jersey to the famousseashore resorts always pass through the remains of this old centralforest and are likely to conclude that the monotonous low scrub oaksand stunted pines on sandy level soil, seen for the last two or threegenerations, were always there and that the primeval forest of colonialtimes was no better. But that is a mistake. The stunted growth now seenis not even second growth but in many cases fourth or fifth or more. Thewhole region was cut over long ago. The original growth, pine in manyplaces, 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, alongwith the valuable white cedar. DeVries, who visited the Jersey coastabout 1632, at what is supposed to have been Beesley's or Somer's Point, describes high woods coming down to the shore. Even today, immediatelyback of Somer's Point, there is a magnificent lofty oak forestaccidentally preserved by surrounding marsh from the destructiveforest fires; and there are similar groves along the road towardsPleasantville. In fact, the finest forest trees flourish in that regionwherever given a good chance. Even some of the beaches of Cape May hadvaluable oak and luxuriant growths of red cedar; and until a few yearsago there were fine trees, especially hollies, surviving on WildwoodBeach. 

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

While there are many of these swamps left, the appearance of numbersof them has largely changed. When the white men first came, the greatcedars three or four feet in diameter which had fallen centuries beforeoften lay among the living trees, some of them buried deep in the mudand preserved from decay. They were invaluable timber, and digging themout and cutting them up became an important industry for over a hundredyears. In addition to being used for boat building, they made excellentshingles which would last a lifetime. The swamps, indeed, became knownas shingle mines, and it was a good description of them. An importanttrade was developed in hogshead staves, hoops, shingles, boards, andplanks, much of which went into the West Indian trade to be exchangedfor 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 takenfrom them is incalculable, not only as an article of trade, but tosupply the home demand for fencing and building material in the county. Large portions of these swamps have been worked a second and some athird time, since located. At the present time [1857] there is not anacre of original growth of swamp standing, having all passed awaybefore 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 wereworked for tar, pitch, resin, and turpentine until for lack of materialthe industry passed southward through the Carolinas to Florida, exhausting the trees as it went. The Christmas demand for holly hasalmost stripped the Jersey woods of these trees once so numerous. Destructive fires and frequent cutting keep the pine and oak landsstunted. Thousands of dollars' worth of cedar springing up in the swampsare sometimes destroyed in a day. But efforts to control the fires sodestructive not only to this standing timber but to the fertility ofthe soil, and attempts to reforest this country not only for the sakeof timber but as an attraction to those who resort there in search ofhealth or natural beauty, have not been vigorously pushed. The greatforest has now, to be sure, been partially cultivated in spots, and thesand used for large glass-making industries. Small fruits and grapesflourish in some places. At the northern end of this forest tract thehealth resort known as Lakewood was established to take advantage of thepine air. A little to the southward is the secluded Brown's Mills, onceso appealing to lovers of the simple life. Checked on the east by thegreat forest, the West Jersey Quakers spread southward from Salem untilthey came to the Cohansey, a large and beautiful stream flowing out ofthe forest and wandering through green meadows and marshes to the bay. So numerous were the wild geese along its shores and along the MauriceRiver farther south that the first settlers are said to have killed themfor their feathers alone and to have thrown the carcasses away. At thehead of navigation of the Cohansey was a village called Cohansey Bridge, and after 1765 Bridgeton, a name still borne by a flourishing moderntown. Lower down near the marsh was the village of Greenwich, theprincipal 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 colonistsduring the Revolution was sent there and was duly rejected. It is stillan extremely pretty village, with its broad shaded streets like a NewEngland town and its old Quaker meeting house. In fact, not a few NewEnglanders from Connecticut, still infatuated with southern Jersey inspite of the rebuffs received in ancient times from Dutch and Swedes, finally settled near the Cohansey after it came under control of themore amiable Quakers. There was also one place called after Fairfield inConnecticut and another called New England Town. 

The first churches of this region were usually built near runningstreams so that the congregation could procure water for themselves andtheir horses. Of one old Presbyterian Church it used to be said thatno one had ever ridden to it in a wheeled vehicle. Wagons and carriageswere very scarce until after the Revolution. Carts for occasions ofceremony as well as utility were used before wagons and carriages. For ahundred and fifty years the horse's back was the best form of conveyancein the deep sand of the trails and roads. This was true of all southernJersey. Pack horses and the backs of Indian and negro slaves were theprincipal means of transportation on land. The roads and trails, infact, were so few and so heavy with sand that water travel was verymuch developed. The Indian dugout canoe was adopted and found fasterand better than heavy English rowboats. As the province was almostsurrounded by water and was covered with a network of creeks andchannels, nearly all the villages and towns were situated on tidewaterstreams, and the dugout canoe, modified and improved, was for severalgenerations the principal means of communication. Most of the old roadsin New Jersey followed Indian trails. There was a trail, for example, from the modern Camden opposite Philadelphia, following up Cooper'sCreek past Berlin, then called Long-a-coming, crossing the watershed, and then following Great Egg Harbor River to the seashore. Anothertrail, long used by the settlers, led from Salem up to Camden, Burlington, and Trenton, going round the heads of streams. It wasafterwards abandoned for the shorter route obtained by bridging thestreams nearer their mouths. This old trail also extended from theneighborhood of Trenton to Perth Amboy near the mouth of the Hudson, andthus, by supplementing the lower routes, made a trail nearly the wholelength of the province. 

As a Quaker refuge, West Jersey never attained the success ofPennsylvania. The political disturbances and the continually threatenedloss of self-government in both the Jerseys were a serious deterrent toQuakers who, above all else, prized rights which they found far bettersecured in Pennsylvania. In 1702, when the two Jerseys were united intoone colony under a government appointed by the Crown, those rights weremore restricted than ever and all hopes of West Jersey becoming a colonyunder complete Quaker control were shattered. Under Governor Cornbury, the English law was adopted and enforced, and the Quakers weredisqualified from testifying in court unless they took an oath andwere 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 thesheriff's cavalcade and opened court with great parade and ceremony. Such a spectacle of pomp was sufficient to divert the flow of Quakerimmigrants to Pennsylvania, where the government was entirely in Quakerhands and where plain and serious ways gave promise of enduring andunmolested prosperity. 

The Quakers had altogether thirty meeting houses in West Jersey andeleven in East Jersey, which probably shows about the proportionof Quaker influence in the two Jerseys. Many of them have sincedisappeared; some of the early buildings, to judge from the pictures, were of wood and not particularly pleasing in appearance. They weremakeshifts, usually intended to be replaced by better buildings. Somesubstantial brick buildings of excellent architecture have survived, andtheir plainness and simplicity, combined with excellent proportions andthorough construction, are clearly indicative of Quaker character. Thereis a particularly interesting one in Salem with a magnificent old oakbeside it, another in the village of Greenwich on the Cohansey farthersouth, and another at Crosswicks near Trenton. 

In West Jersey near Mount Holly was born and lived John Woolman, aQuaker who became eminent throughout the English speaking world for thesimplicity and loftiness of his religious thought as well as for hisadmirable style of expression. His "Journal, " once greatly and evenextravagantly admired, still finds readers. "Get the writings of JohnWoolman by heart, " said Charles Lamb, "and love the early Quakers. "He was among the Quakers one of the first and perhaps the first reallyearnest advocate of the abolition of slavery. The scenes of West Jerseyand the writings of Woolman seem to belong together. Possibly a feelingfor the simplicity of those scenes and their life led Walt Whitman, whogrew up on Long Island under Quaker influence, to spend his last yearsat Camden, in West Jersey. His profound democracy, which was veryQuaker-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 anaristocratic class, which was often large and powerful, as in the caseof Virginia, and which usually centered around the governor, especiallyif he were appointed from England by the Crown or by a proprietor. Butthere was very little of this social distinction in New Jersey. Herpolitical life had been too much broken up, and she had been too longdependent on the governors of New York to have any of those prettylittle aristocracies with bright colored clothes, and coaches and four, flourishing within her boundaries. There seems to have been a faintsuggestion of such social pretensions under Governor Franklin justbefore the Revolution. He was beginning to live down the objections tohis illegitimate birth and Toryism and by his entertainments and mannerof living was creating a social following. There is said also to havebeen something a little like the beginning of an aristocracy among thedescendants of the Dutch settlers who had ancestral holdings near theHudson; but this amounted to very little. 

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

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

There was a marked difference between East Jersey and West Jerseyin county organization. In West Jersey the people tended to becomeplanters; their farms and plantations somewhat like those of the farSouth; and the political unit of government was the county. In EastJersey the town was the starting point and the county marked theboundaries of a collection of towns. This curious difference, the resultof soil, climate, and methods of life, shows itself in other Stateswherever South and North meet. Illinois is an example, where thesouthern part of the State is governed by the county system, and thenorthern part by the town system. 

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

There was a speculative tinge in the operations of this landedaristocracy. Like the old tobacco raising aristocracy of Virginia andMaryland, they were inclined to go from tract to tract, skinning whatthey could from a piece of deforested land and then seeking anothervirgin tract. The roughest methods were used; wooden plows, brushharrows, straw collars, grapevine harness, and poor shelter for animalsand crops; but were the Virginia methods any better? In these operationsthere was apparently a good deal of sudden profit and mushroomprosperity accompanied by a good deal of debt and insolvency. In this, too, they were like the Virginians and Carolinians. There seem to havebeen also a good many slaves in West Jersey, brought, as in the southerncolonies, to work on the large estates, and this also, no doubt, helpedto foster the aristocratic feeling. 

The best days of the Jersey gentlemen farmers came probably when theycould no longer move from tract to tract. They settled down and enjoyeda very plentiful, if rude, existence on the products of their land, game, and fish, amid a fine climate--with mosquitoes enough in summer toact as a counterirritant and prevent stagnation from too much ease andprosperity. After the manner of colonial times, they wove their ownclothes 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 inout-of-the-way parts of southern Jersey. To run upon old houses amongthe Jersey pines still stored with Latin classics and old editions ofShakespeare, Addison, or Samuel Johnson, to come across an old millwith its machinery, cogwheels, flywheels, and all, made of wood, to findpeople who make their own oars, and the handles of their tools fromthe materials furnished by their own forest, is now unfortunately arefreshment of the spirit that is daily becoming rarer. 

This condition of material and social self-sufficiency lasted in placeslong after the Revolution. It was a curious little aristocracy--a veryfaint and faded one, lacking the robustness of the far southerntype, and lacking indeed the real essential of an aristocracy, namelypolitical power. Moreover, although there were slaves in New Jersey, there were not enough of them to exalt the Jersey gentlemen farmers intosuch self-sufficient lords and masters as the Virginian and Carolinianplanters became. 

To search out the remains of this stage of American history, however, takes one up many pleasant streams flowing out of the forest tractto the Delaware on one side or to the ocean on the other. Thistopographical formation of a central ridge or watershed of forest andswamp was a repetition of the same formation in the Delaware peninsula, which like southern Jersey had originally been a shoal and then anisland. The Jersey watershed, with its streams abounding in wood duckand all manner of wild life, must have been in its primeval days asfascinating as some of the streams of the Florida cypress swamps. Towardthe ocean, Wading River, the Mullica, the Tuckahoe, Great Egg; and onthe 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 apartat their sources in the old forest tract; so that a canoe can betransported over the few miles and thus traverse the State. One of thesetrips up Timber Creek from the Delaware and across only eight miles ofland to the headwaters of Great Egg Harbor River and thence down to theocean, thus cutting South Jersey in half, is a particularly romanticone. The heavy woods and swamps of this secluded route along theseforest shadowed streams are apparently very much as they were threehundred years ago. 

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

The spread of the Quaker settlements along Delaware Bay to Cape Maywas checked by the Maurice River and its marshes and by the Great CedarSwamp which crossed the country from Delaware Bay to the ocean and thusmade of the Cape May region a sort of island. The Cape May region, itis true, was settled by Quakers, but most of them came from Long Islandrather than from the settlements on the Delaware. They had followedwhale fishing on Long Island and in pursuit of that occupation some ofthem had migrated to Cape May where whales were numerous not far offshore. 

The leading early families of Cape May, the Townsends, Stillwells, Corsons, Leamings, Ludlams, Spicers, and Cresses, many of whosedescendants still live there, were Quakers of the Long Island strain. The ancestor of the Townsend family came to Cape May because he hadbeen imprisoned and fined and threatened with worse under the New Yorkgovernment for assisting his fellow Quakers to hold meetings. Probablythe occasional severity of the administration of the New York lawsagainst Quakers, which were the same as those of England, had as muchto do as had the whales with the migration to Cape May. This Quakercivilization extended from Cape May up as far as Great Egg Harbor wherethe Great Cedar Swamp joined the seashore. Quaker meeting houses werebuilt at Cape May, Galloway, Tuckahoe, and Great Egg. All have beenabandoned and the buildings themselves have disappeared, except that ofthe Cape May meeting, called the Old Cedar Meeting, at Seaville; and ithas no congregation. The building is kept in repair by members of theSociety from other places. 

Besides the Quakers, Cape May included a number of New Haven people, thefirst of whom came there as early as 1640 under the leadership of GeorgeLamberton and Captain Turner, seeking profit in whale fishing. They werenot driven out by the Dutch and Swedes, as happened to their companionswho 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 aresimilar, and there is supposed to be not a little New England bloodnot only in Cape May but in the neighboring counties of Cumberland andSalem. While the first New Haven whalers came to Cape May in 1640, it isprobable 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 CapeMay region. Very little is definitely known about this settlement, butthe Swedish names in Cape May and Cumberland counties seem to indicate amigration of Scandinavians from Wilmington and Tinicum. 

Great Egg Harbor, which formed the northern part of the Cape Maysettlement, was named from the immense numbers of wild fowl, swans, ducks, and water birds that formerly nested there every summer and havenow been driven to Canada or beyond. Little Egg Harbor farther up thecoast was named for the same reason as well as Egg Island, of threehundred acres in Delaware Bay, since then eaten away by the tide. Thepeople of the district had excellent living from the eggs as well asfrom 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 theuninhabited beaches which have now become seaside summer cities. Someof the cattle were still running wild on the beaches down to the timeof the Civil War. The settlers "mined" the valuable white cedar from theswamps for shingles and boards, leaving great "pool holes" in the swampswhich even today sometimes trap the unwary sportsman. The women knittedinnumerable mittens and also made wampum or Indian money from the clamand oyster shells, an important means of exchange in the Indian tradeall over the colonies, and even to some extent among the coloniststhemselves. The Cape May people built sloops for carrying the whitecedar, the mittens, oysters, and wampum to the outside world. Theysold a great deal of their cedar in Long Island, Rhode Island, andConnecticut. Philadelphia finally became their market for oysters andalso for lumber, corn, and the whalebone and oil. Their sloops alsotraded to the southern colonies and even to the West Indies. 

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

Next above Cape May on the coast was another isolated patch ofcivilization which, while not an island, was nevertheless cut off on thesouth by Great Egg Harbor with its river and marshes, and on the northby Little Egg Harbor with the Mullica River and its marshes extendingfar inland. The people in this district also lived somewhat tothemselves. 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 invarious pursuits. Although in one sense they were as isolated asislanders, their adventurous life on the sea gave them breadth of view. By their thrift and in innumerable shrewd and persistent ways theyamassed competencies and estates for their families. Aaron Leaming, forexample, who died in 1780, left an estate of nearly $1, 000, 000. Somekept diaries which have become historically valuable in showing not onlytheir history but their good education and the peculiar cast of theirmind for keen trading as well as their rigid economy and integrity. 

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

The Cape May people, relying almost entirely on the water forcommunication and trade, soon took to piloting vessels in the DelawareRiver, and some of them still follow this occupation. They also becameskillful sailors and builders of small craft, and it is not surprisingto learn that Jacocks Swain and his sons introduced, in 1811, thecenterboard for keeping flat-bottomed craft closer to the wind. Theyare said to have taken out a patent for this invention and are given thecredit of being the originators of the idea. But the device was known inEngland in 1774, was introduced in Massachusetts in the same year, andmay have been used long before by the Dutch. The need of it, however, was no doubt strongly impressed upon the Cape May people by thedifficulties which their little sloops experienced in beating homeagainst contrary winds. Some of them, indeed, spent weeks in sight ofthe Cape, unable to make it. One sloop, the Nancy, seventy-two days fromDemarara, hung off and on for forty-three days from December 25, 1787, to February 6, 1788, and was driven off fifteen times before she finallygot into Hereford Inlet. Sometimes better sailing craft had to go outand bring in such distressed vessels. The early boats were no doubtbadly constructed; but in the end apprenticeship to dire necessity madethe 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 Mayregion, because of the great variety of birds to be found there. Southern types, like the Florida egret, ventured even so far north, andit was a stopping place for migrating birds, notably woodcock, on theirnorthern and southern journeys. Men of the stone age had once beennumerous in this region, as the remains of village plats and great shellheaps bore witness. It was a resting point for all forms of life. Thatmuch traveled, adventurous gentleman of the sea, Captain Kidd, accordingto popular legend, was a frequent visitor to this coast. 

In later times, beginning in 1801, the Cape became one of the earliestof the summer resorts. The famous Commodore Decatur was among the firstdistinguished men to be attracted by the simple seaside charm of theplace, long before it was destroyed by wealth and crowds. Year by yearhe used to measure and record at one spot the encroachment of the seaupon the beach. Where today the sea washes and the steel pier extends, once lay cornfields. For a hundred years it was a favorite resting placefor statesmen and politicians of national eminence. They traveled thereby stage, sailing sloop, or their own wagons. People from Baltimoreand the South more particularly sought the place because it was easilyaccessible from the head of Chesapeake Bay by an old railroad, longsince abandoned, to Newcastle on the Delaware, whence sail-or steamboatswent to Cape May. This avoided the tedious stage ride over the sandyJersey roads. Presidents, cabinet officers, senators, and congressmensought the invigorating air of the Cape and the attractions of the oldvillage, its seafaring life, the sailing, fishing, and bathing on thebest beach of the coast. Congress Hall, their favorite hotel, becamefamous, and during a large part of the nineteenth century presidentialnominations 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. Aspart of the original continent it had been under the ice sheet ofthe glacial age and was very unlike the level sands, swamps, and pinebarrens of West Jersey which had arisen as a shoal and island from thesea. The only place in East Jersey where settlement was at all easy wasalong the open meadows which were reached by water near the mouth of theHudson, round Newark Bay, and along the Hackensack River. 

The Dutch, by the discoveries of Henry Hudson in 1609, claimed the wholeregion between the Hudson and the Delaware. They settled part of EastJersey opposite their headquarters at New York and called it Pavonia. But their cruel massacre of some Indians who sought refuge among them atPavonia destroyed the prospects of the settlement. The Indians revengedthemselves by massacring the Dutch again and again, every time theyattempted to reestablish Pavonia. This kept the Dutch out of East Jerseyuntil 1660, when they succeeded in establishing Bergen between NewarkBay 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 theDutch possessions; and he had been given full power as deputy governorof all the Duke of York's vast territory. 

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

Meantime, however, unknown to Nicolls, the Duke of York in England hadgiven all of New Jersey to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. As hasalready been pointed out, they had divided the province betweenthem, and East Jersey had fallen to Carteret, who sent out, with someimmigrants, his relative Philip Carteret as governor. Governor Carteretwas of course very much surprised to find so much of the best landalready occupied by the excellent and thrifty Yankees. As a consequence, litigation and sometimes civil war over this unlucky mistake lasted fora hundred years. Many of the Yankee settlers under the Nicolls grantrefused to pay quitrents to Carteret or his successors and, in spite ofa commission of inquiry from England in 1751 and a chancery suit, theyheld their own until the Revolution of 1776 extinguished all Britishauthority. 

There was therefore from the beginning a strong New England tinge inEast Jersey which has lasted to this day. Governor Carteret establisheda village on Newark Bay which still bears the name Elizabeth, whichhe gave it in honor of the wife of the proprietor, and he made it thecapital. There were also immigrants from Scotland and England. ButPuritans from Long Island and New England continued to settle roundNewark Bay. By virtue either of character or numbers, New Englanderswere evidently the controlling element, for they established the NewEngland system of town government, and imposed strict Connecticut laws, making twelve crimes punishable with death. Soon there were flourishinglittle villages, Newark and Elizabeth, besides Middletown andShrewsbury. The next year Piscatawa and Woodbridge were added. Newarkand the region round it, including the Oranges, was settled by veryexclusive 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 shouldhold office and vote. 

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

After the death of Sir George Carteret in 1680, his province of EastJersey was sold to William Penn and eleven other Quakers for the sumof 3400 pounds. Colonies seem to have been comparatively inexpensiveluxuries in those days. A few years before, in 1675, Penn and some otherQuakers had, as has already been related, gained control of West Jerseyfor the still smaller sum of one thousand pounds and had establishedit as a Quaker refuge. It might be supposed that they now had the samepurpose in view in East Jersey, but apparently their intention was tocreate a refuge for Presbyterians, the famous Scotch Covenanters, much persecuted at that time under Charles II, who was forcing them toconform 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 LordDrummond, were prominent men. To this mixed body of Quakers, otherdissenters, and some Papists, twenty-four proprietors in all, the Dukeof York reconfirmed by special patent their right to East Jersey. Undertheir urging a few Scotch Covenanters began to arrive and seem to havefirst established themselves at Perth Amboy, which they named fromthe Scottish Earl of Perth and an Indian word meaning "point. " Thissettlement they expected to become a great commercial port rivaling NewYork. 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 dayas the best statement of the original Quaker doctrine. He remained inEngland, however, and the deputies whom he sent out to rule the colonyhad a troublous time of it. 

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

In 1683, a few years after the Quaker control of East Jersey began, anew and fiercer persecution of the Covenanters was started in the oldcountry, and shortly afterwards Monmouth's insurrection in England brokeout and was followed by a most bloody proscription and punishment. Thegreatest efforts were made to induce those still untouched to fly forrefuge to East Jersey; but, strange to say, comparatively few of themcame. It is another proof of the sturdiness and devotion which hasfilled so many pages of history and romance with their praise that asa class the Covenanters remained at home to establish their faith withtorture, 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 wassoon realized. The persecutions of the Covenanters grew worse. Crowdedinto prisons to die of thirst and suffocation, shot down on thehighways, tied to stakes to be drowned by the rising tide, the wholeCalvinistic population of Scotland seemed doomed to extermination. Againthey were told of America as the only place where religious liberty wasallowed, and in addition a book was circulated among them called "TheModel of the Government of the Province of East Jersey in America. "These efforts were partially successful. More Covenanters came thanbefore, but nothing like the numbers of Quakers that flocked toPennsylvania. The whole population of East Jersey--New Englanders, Dutch, Scotch Covenanters, and all--did not exceed five thousand andpossibly was not over four thousand. 

Some French Huguenots, such as came to many of the English coloniesafter the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes of 1685, were added to theEast Jersey population. A few went to Salem in West Jersey, and someof these became Quakers. In both the Jerseys, as elsewhere, they becameprominent and influential in all spheres of life. There was a decidedDutch influence, it is said, in the part nearest New York, emanatingfrom the Bergen settlement in which the Dutch had succeeded inestablishing themselves in 1660 after the Indians had twice driven themfrom Pavonia. Many descendants of Dutch families are still found inthat region. Many Dutch characteristics were to be found in that regionthroughout colonial times. Many of the houses had Dutch stoops orporches at the door, with seats where the family and visitors sat onsummer evenings to smoke and gossip. Long Dutch spouts extended outfrom the eaves to discharge the rain water into the street. But theprevailing tone of East Jersey seems to have been set by the ScotchPresbyterians and the New England Congregationalists. The College ofNew Jersey, afterward known as Princeton, established in 1747, was theresult of a movement among the Presbyterians of East Jersey and NewYork. 

All these elements of East Jersey, Scotch Covenanters, ConnecticutPuritans, Huguenots, and Dutch of the Dutch Reformed Church, were ina sense different but in reality very much in accord and congenialin their ideas of religion and politics. They were all sturdy, freedom-loving Protestants, and they set the tone that prevails in EastJersey to this day. Their strict discipline and their uncompromisingthrift 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 alienreligions and races are eager to seek protection. In its foundation theQuakers may claim a share. 

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

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

The proprietaries of both Jerseys reassumed their former authority. Butthe New York Assembly attempted to exercise control over East Jersey andto levy duties on its exports. The two provinces were soon on the eve ofa little war. For twelve or fifteen years East Jersey was in disorder, with seditious meetings, mob rule, judges and sheriffs attacked whileperforming their duty, the proprietors claiming quitrents from thepeople, the people resisting, and the British Privy Council threateninga suit to take the province from the proprietors and make a Crowncolony of it. The period is known in the history of this colony as "TheRevolution. " Under the threat of the Privy Council to take over theprovince, the proprietors of both East and West Jersey surrendered theirrights of political government, retaining their ownership of land andquitrents, 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 theDelaware, and the Scotch Covenanters and New England colonists groupedaround Perth Amboy and Newark, near the mouth of the Hudson, made up thetwo Jerseys. Neither colony had a numerous population, and the stretchof country lying between them was during most of the colonial period awilderness. 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. Atfirst there was only an Indian trail across it, but after 1695 there wasa road, and after 1738 a stage route. 

In 1702, while still separated by this wilderness, the two Jerseys wereunited politically by the proprietors voluntarily surrendering all theirpolitical rights to the Crown. The political distinction betweenEast Jersey and West Jersey was thus abolished; their excellent freeconstitutions were rendered of doubtful authority; and from that time tothe Revolution they constituted one colony under the control of a royalgovernor appointed by the Crown. 

The change was due to the uncertainty and annoyance caused for theirseparate governments when their right to govern was in doubt owing tointerference on the part of New York and the desire of the King tomake them a Crown colony. The original grant of the Duke of York to theproprietors Berkeley and Carteret had given title to the soil but hadbeen silent as to the right to govern. The first proprietors and theirsuccessors had always assumed that the right to govern necessarilyaccompanied this gift of the land. Such a privilege, however, theCrown was inclined to doubt. William Penn was careful to avoid thisuncertainty when he received his charter for Pennsylvania. Profiting bythe sad example of the Jerseys, he made sure that he was given both thetitle to the soil and the right to govern. 

The proprietors, however, now surrendered only their right to govern theJerseys and retained their ownership of the land; and the people alwaysmaintained that they, on their part, retained all the political rightsand privileges which had been granted them by the proprietors. And theserights were important, for the concessions or constitutions granted bythe proprietors under the advanced Quaker influence of the time weredecidedly liberal. The assemblies, as the legislatures were called, hadthe right to meet and adjourn as they pleased, instead of havingtheir meetings and adjournments dictated by the governor. This was animportant right and one which the Crown and royal governors werealways trying to restrict or destroy, because it made an assembly veryindependent. This contest for colonial rights was exactly similar tothe struggle of the English Parliament for liberty against the supposedright of the Stuart kings to call and adjourn Parliament as they chose. If the governor could adjourn the assembly when he pleased, he couldforce it to pass any laws he wanted or prevent its passing any laws atall. The two Jersey assemblies under their Quaker constitutions alsohad the privilege of making their own rules of procedure, and theyhad jurisdiction over taxes, roads, towns, militia, and all details ofgovernment. These rights of a legislature are familiar enough nowto all. Very few people realize, however, what a struggle and whatsacrifices were required to attain them. 

The rest of New Jersey colonial history is made up chiefly of strugglesover these two questions--the rights of the proprietors and theirquitrents as against the people, and the rights of the new assembly asagainst the Crown. There were thus three parties, the governor and hisadherents, the proprietors and their friends, and the assembly and thepeople. The proprietors had the best of the change, for they lost onlytheir troublesome political power and retained their property. Theynever, however, received such financial returns from the property asthe sons of William Penn enjoyed from Pennsylvania. But the union of theJerseys seriously curtailed the rights enjoyed by the people underthe old government, and all possibility of a Quaker government in WestJersey was ended. It was this experience in the Jerseys, no doubt, that caused William Penn to require so many safeguards in sellinghis 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 atBurlington. Lord Cornbury, the first governor, was also Governor ofNew York, a humiliating arrangement that led to no end of trouble. Theexecutive government, the press, and the judiciary were in the completecontrol of the Crown and the Governor, who was instructed to take carethat "God Almighty be duly served according to the rites of the Churchof England, and the traffic in merchantable negroes encouraged. "Cornbury contemptuously ignored the assembly's right to adjourn and keptadjourning it till one was elected which would pass the laws he wanted. Afterwards the assemblies were less compliant, and, under the lead oftwo able men, Lewis Morris of East Jersey and Samuel Jennings, a Quakerof West Jersey, they stood up for their rights and complained to themother country. But Cornbury went on fighting them, granted monopolies, established arbitrary fees, prohibited the proprietors from sellingtheir lands, prevented three members of the assembly duly elected frombeing sworn, and was absent in New York so much of the time that thelaws went unexecuted and convicted murderers wandered about at large. In short, he went through pretty much the whole list of offenses of acorrupt and good-for-nothing royal governor of colonial times. The unionof the two colonies consequently seemed to involve no improvement overformer conditions. At last, the protests and appeals of proprietors andpeople prevailed, and Cornbury was recalled. 

Quieter times followed, and in 1738 New Jersey had the satisfactionof obtaining a governor all her own. The New York Governor had alwaysneglected Jersey affairs, was difficult of access, made appointmentsand administered justice in the interests of New York, and forced Jerseyvessels to pay registration fees to New York. Amid great rejoicing overthe change, the Crown appointed the popular leader, Lewis Morris, asgovernor. But by a strange turn of fate, when once secure in power, he became a most obstinate upholder of royal prerogative, worried theassembly with adjournments, and, after Cornbury, was the most obnoxiousof 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 colonialgovernor was William Franklin, an illegitimate son of BenjaminFranklin, and he would probably have made a success of the office ifthe Revolution had not stopped him. He had plenty of ability, affablemanners, and was full of humor and anecdote like his father, whom he issaid to have somewhat resembled. He had combined in youth a fondnessfor books with a fondness for adventure, was comptroller of the colonialpost office and clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, served a couple ofcampaigns in the French and Indian Wars, went to England with his fatherin 1757, was admitted to the English Bar, attained some intimacy withthe Earl of Bute and Lord Fairfax, and through the latter obtained thegovernorship of New Jersey in 1762. 

The people were at first much displeased at his appointment and neverentirely got over his illegitimate birth and his turning from Whigto Tory as soon as his appointment was secured. But he advanced theinterests of the colony with the home government and favored beneficiallegislation. He had an attractive wife, and they entertained, it issaid, with viceregal elegance, and started a fine model farm or countryplace on the north shore of the Rancocas not far from the capital atBurlington. Franklin was drawing the province together and building itup as a community, but his extreme loyalist principles in the Revolutiondestroyed his chance for popularity and have obscured his reputation. 

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

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

Trenton, the capital of the State, is very properly in the dividingbelt. It was named after William Trent, a Philadelphia merchant who hadbeen speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly and who became chief justiceof New Jersey. Long ages before white men came Trenton seems to havebeen a meeting place and residence of the Indians or preceding racesof stone age men. Antiquarians have estimated that fifty thousand stoneimplements 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 oftravel and traffic from other regions. From the top of the bluff belowthe modern city of Trenton there was easy access to forests of chestnut, oak, and pine, with their supplies of game, while the river and itstributary creeks were full of fish. It was a pleasant and convenientplace where the people of prehistoric times apparently met and lingeredduring many centuries without necessarily having a large residentpopulation at any one time. Trenton was so obviously convenient andcentral in colonial times that it was seriously proposed as a site forthe national capital. 

Princeton University, though originating, as we have seen, among thePresbyterians of North Jersey, seems as a higher educational institutionfor the whole State to belong naturally in the dividing belt, themeeting place of the two divisions of the colony. The college began itsexistence at Elizabeth, was then moved to Newark, both in the stronglyPresbyterian region, and finally, in 1757, was established at Princeton, a more suitable place, it was thought, because far removed from thedissipation and temptation of towns, and because it was in the centerof the colony on the post road between Philadelphia and New York. Thoughchartered as the College of New Jersey, it was often called Nassau Hallat Princeton or simply "Princeton. " In 1896 it became known officiallyas Princeton University. It was a hard struggle to found the collegewith lotteries and petty subscriptions here and there. But Presbyteriansin New York and other provinces gave aid. Substantial assistance wasalso obtained from the Presbyterians of England and Scotland. In theold pamphlets of the time which have been preserved the founders of thecollege argued that higher education was needed not only for ministersof religion, but for the bench, the bar, and the legislature. The twoNew England colleges, Harvard and Yale, on the north, and the VirginiaCollege of William and Mary on the south, were too far away. There mustbe 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 producedstatesmen such as Richard Stockton of New Jersey, who signed theDeclaration of Independence; physicians such as Dr. Benjamin Rush ofPhiladelphia; 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 powerfulassemblage of intellectual lights. Nor should the names of JamesMadison, Aaron Burr, and Jonathan Edwards be omitted. 

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

New Jersey was fortunate in having no Indian wars in colonial times, nofrontier, no point of hostile contact with the French of Canada orwith the powerful western tribes of red men. Like Rhode Island in thisrespect, she was completely shut in by the other colonies. Once or twiceonly did bands of savages cross the Delaware and commit depredations onJersey soil. This colony, however, did her part in sending troops andassistance to the others in the long French and Indian wars; but she hadnone of the pressing danger and experience of other colonies. Her peoplewere never drawn together by a common danger until the Revolution. 

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

Almanacs furnished much of the reading for the masses. The fewnewspapers offered little except the barest chronicle of events. Thebooks of the upper classes were good though few, and consisted chieflyof the classics of English literature and books of information andtravel. The diaries and letters of colonial native Jerseymen, thepamphlets of the time, and John Woolman's "Journal, " all show a goodaverage 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 intelligenta grasp of political events as any modern mind could show; the type, paper, and presswork, too, are excellent. Smith was born and educated inthis same New Jersey town. He became a member of council and assembly, at one time was treasurer of the province, and his manuscript historicalcollections were largely used by Robert Proud in his "History ofPennsylvania. "

The early houses of New Jersey were of heavy timbers covered withunpainted clapboards, usually one story and a half high, with immensefireplaces, which, with candles, supplied the light. The floors werescrubbed hard and sprinkled with the plentiful white sand. Carpets, except the famous old rag carpets, were very rare. The old wooden houseshave now almost entirely disappeared; but many of the brick houses whichsucceeded them are still preserved. They are of simple well-proportionedarchitecture, of a distinctive type, less luxuriant, massive, andexuberant than those across the river in Pennsylvania, although bothevidently derived from the Christopher Wren school. The old Jersey homesseem to reflect with great exactness the simple feeling of the peopleand to be one expression of the spirit of Jersey democracy. 

There were no important seats of commerce in this province. Exports ofwheat, provisions, and lumber went to Philadelphia or New York, whichwere near and convenient. The Jersey shores near the mouth of the Hudsonand along the Delaware, as at Camden, presented opportunities for ports, but the proximity to the two dominating ports prevented the developmentof additional harbors in this part of the coast. It was not until afterthe 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 villagesin the Jerseys. It is a noticeable fact that in colonial times and evenlater there were very few Jersey towns beyond the head of tidewater. Thepeople, even the farmers, were essentially maritime. The province showedits natural maritime characteristics, produced many sailors, and builtinnumerable small vessels for the coasting and West India trade--sloops, schooners, yachts, and sailboats, down to the tiniest gunning boat andsneak box. Perth Amboy was the principal port and shipbuildingcenter for East Jersey as Salem was for West Jersey. But Burlington, Bordentown, Cape May, and Trenton, and innumerable little villagesup creeks and channels or mere ditches could not be kept from theprevailing industry. They built craft up to the limit of size thatcould be floated away in the water before their very doors. Plentifullysupplied with excellent oak and pine and with the admirable white cedarof their own forests, very skillful shipwrights grew up in every littlehamlet. 

A large part of the capital used in Jersey shipbuilding is said to havecome from Philadelphia and New York. At first this capital sought itsprofit in whaling along the coast and afterwards in the trade with theWest Indies, which for a time absorbed so much of the shipping of allthe colonies in America. The inlets and beaches along the Jersey coastnow given over to summer resorts were first used for whaling camps orbases. Cape May and Tuckerton were started and maintained by whaling;and as late as 1830, it is said, there were still signs of the industryon Long Beach. 

Except for the whaling, the beaches were uninhabited--wild stretchesof sand, swarming with birds and wild fowl, without a lighthouse orlifesaving station. In the Revolution, when the British fleet blockadedthe Delaware and New York, Little Egg, the safest of the inlets, wasused for evading the blockade. Vessels entered there and sailed upthe Mullica River to the head of navigation, whence the goods weredistributed by wagons. To conceal their vessels when anchored justinside an inlet, the privateersmen would stand slim pine trees besidethe masts and thus very effectively concealed the rigging from Britishcruisers prowling along the shore. 

Along with the whaling industry the risks and seclusion of the inletsand channels developed a romantic class of gentlemen, as handy withmusket and cutlass as with helm and sheet, fond of easy, excitingprofits, and reaping where they had not sown. They would start legallyenough, for they began as privateersmen under legal letters of marquein the wars. But the step was a short one to a traffic still moreprofitable; and for a hundred years Jersey customs officers are said tohave issued documents which were ostensibly letters of marque but whichreally abetted a piratical cruise. Piracy was, however, in those daysa semi-legitimate offense, winked at by the authorities all through thecolonial period; and respectable people and governors and officials ofNew York and North Carolina, it is said, secretly furnished funds forsuch expeditions and were interested in the profits. 

Chapter XII. Little Delaware

Delaware was the first colony to be established on the river that bearsthis name. It went through half a century of experiences under the Dutchand Swedes from 1609 to 1664, and then eighteen years under the Englishrule of the Duke of York, from whom it passed into the hands of WilliamPenn, the Quaker. The Dutch got into it by an accident and were regardedby the English as interlopers. And the Swedes who followed had no bettertitle. 

The whole North Atlantic seaboard was claimed by England by virtue ofthe discoveries of the Cabots, father and son; but nearly a hundredyears elapsed before England took advantage of this claim by startingthe Virginia colony near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in 1607. Andnearly a quarter of a century more elapsed before Englishmen settledon the shores of Massachusetts Bay. Those were the two points mostaccessible to ships and most favorable for settlement. The middleground of the Delaware and Hudson regions was not so easily entered andremained unoccupied. The mouth of the Delaware was full of shoals andwas always difficult to navigate. The natural harbor at the mouth of theHudson was excellent, but the entrance to it was not at first apparent. 

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

This exploration gave the Dutch their claim to the Delaware and Hudsonregions. But though it was worthless as against the English right bydiscovery of the Cabots, the Dutch went ahead with their settlement, established their headquarters and seat of government on ManhattanIsland, where New York stands today, and exercised as much jurisdictionand control as they could on the Delaware. 

Their explorations of the Delaware, feeling their way up it with smalllight draft vessels among its shoals and swift tides, their travelson land--shooting wild turkeys on the site of the present busy town ofChester--and their adventures with the Indians are full of interest. The immense quantities of wild fowl and animal and bird life along theshores astonished them; but what most aroused their cupidity was theenormous supply of furs, especially beaver and otter, that could beobtained from the Indians. Furs became their great, in fact, their onlyinterest in the Delaware. They established forts, one near Cape Henlopenat the mouth of the river, calling it Fort Oplandt, and another farup the river on the Jersey side at the mouth of Timber Creek, nearlyopposite the present site of Philadelphia, and this they called FortNassau. Fort Oplandt was destroyed by the Indians and its people weremassacred. Fort Nassau was probably occupied only at intervals. Thesetwo posts were built mainly to assist the fur trade, and any attempts atreal settlement were slight and unsuccessful. 

Meantime about the year 1624 the Swedes heard of the wonderfulopportunities on the Delaware. The Swedish monarch, Gustavus Adolphus, aman of broad ambitions and energetic mind, heard about the Delaware fromWillem Usselinx, a merchant of Antwerp who had been actively interestedin the formation of the Dutch West India Company to trade in the Dutchpossessions in America. Having quarreled with the directors, Usselinxhad withdrawn from the Netherlands and now offered his services toSweden. The Swedish court, nobles, and people, all became enthusiasticabout the project which he elaborated for a great commercial companyto trade and colonize in Asia, Africa, and America. * But the plan wasdropped because, soon after 1630, Gustavus Adolphus led his country tointervene on the side of the Protestants in the Thirty Years' War inGermany, where he was killed three years later at the battle of Lutzen. But the desire aroused by Usselinx for a Swedish colonial empirewas revived in the reign of his infant daughter, Christina, by thecelebrated Swedish Chancellor, Oxenstierna. 

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

An expedition, which actually reached the Delaware in 1638, was sent outunder another Dutch renegade, Peter Minuit, who had been Governor of NewNetherland and after being dismissed from office was now leading thisSwedish enterprise to occupy part of the territory he had formerlygoverned for the Dutch. His two ships sailed up the Delaware and withgood judgment landed at the present site of Wilmington. At that pointa creek carrying a depth of over fourteen feet for ten miles from itsmouth flowed into the Delaware. The Dutch had called this creek Minquas, after the tribe of Indians; the Swedes named it the Christina aftertheir infant Queen; and in modern times it has been corrupted intoChristiana. 

They sailed about two and a half miles through its delta marshes to somerocks which formed a natural wharf and which still stand today atthe foot of Sixth Street in Wilmington. This was the Plymouth Rock ofDelaware. Level land, marshes, and meadows lay along the Christina, theremains of the delta which the stream had formed in the past. On theedge of the delta or moorland, rocky hills rose, forming the edge of thePiedmont, and out of them from the north flowed a fine large stream, the Brandywine, which fell into the Christina just before it enteredthe Delaware. Here in the delta their engineer laid out a town, calledChristinaham, and a fort behind the rocks on which they had landed. Acove in the Christina made a snug anchorage for their ships, out of theway of the tide. They then bought from the Indians all the land fromCape Henlopen to the Falls of the Delaware at Trenton, calling it NewSweden and the Delaware New Swedeland Stream. The people of Delawarehave always regarded New Sweden as the beginning of their State, andPeter Minuit, the leader of this Swedish expedition, always stands firston the published lists of their governors. 

On their arrival in the river in the spring of 1638, the Swedes found noevidences of permanent Dutch colonization. Neither Fort Oplandt norFort Nassau was then occupied. They always maintained that the Dutch hadabandoned the river, and that it was therefore open to the Swedes foroccupation, especially after they had purchased the Indian title. It wascertainly true that the Dutch efforts to plant colonies in that regionhad failed; and since the last attempt by De Vries, six years hadelapsed. On the other hand, the Dutch contended that they had in thattime put Fort Nassau in repair, although they had not occupied it, andthat 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 NewAmsterdam of the arrival of the Swedes, and he promptly issued a protestagainst the intrusion. But his protest was neither very strenuous norwas it followed up by hostile action, for Sweden and Holland were onfriendly terms. Sweden, the great champion of Protestant Europe, hadintervened in the Thirty Years' War to save the Protestants of Germany. The Dutch had just finished a similar desperate war of eighty yearsfor 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 andin the first year, it is said, collected thirty thousand skins. Ifthis is true, it is an indication of the immense supply of furbearinganimals, especially beaver, available at that time. For the nexttwenty-five years Dutch and Swedes quarreled and sometimes fought overtheir respective claims. But it is significant of the difficulty ofretaining a hold on the Delaware region that the Swedish colonists onthe Christina after a year or two regarded themselves as a failureand were on the point of abandoning their enterprise, when a vessel, fortunately for them, arrived with cattle, agricultural tools, andimmigrants. It is significant also that the immigrants, though in aSwedish vessel and under the Swedish government, were Dutchmen. Theyformed a sort of separate Dutch colony under Swedish rule and settlednear St. George's and Appoquinimink. Immigrants apparently weredifficult to obtain among the Swedes, who were not colonizers like theEnglish. 

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

The seat of the Swedish government was moved in 1643 from the Christinato Tinicum, one of the islands of the Schuylkill delta, with anexcellent harbor in front of it which is now the home of the yacht clubsof Philadelphia. Here they built a fort of logs, called Fort Gothenborg, a chapel with a graveyard, and a mansion house for the governor, andthis remained the seat of Swedish authority as long as they had any onthe river. From here Governor Printz, a portly irascible old soldier, said to have weighed "upwards of 400 pounds and taken three drinksat every meal, " ruled the river. He built forts on the Schuylkill andworried the Dutch out of the fur trade. He also built a fort called NyaElfsborg, afterward Elsinboro, on the Jersey side below Salem. Bymeans of this fort he was able to command the entrance to the riverand compelled every Dutch ship to strike her colors and acknowledge thesovereignty 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 ordersto destroy every trading house or fort which the Dutch had built on theSchuylkill, and to tear down the coat of arms and insignia which theDutch had placed on a post on the site of Philadelphia. The Swedes nowalso bought from the Indians and claimed the land on the Jersey sidefrom Cape May up to Raccoon Creek, opposite the modern Chester. 

The best place to trade with the Indians for furs was the SchuylkillRiver, which flowed into the Delaware at a point where Philadelphia wasafterwards built. There were at that time Indian villages where WestPhiladelphia now stands. The headwaters of streams flowing into theSchuylkill were only a short distance from the headwaters of streamsflowing into the Susquehanna, so that the valley of the Schuylkillformed the natural highway into the interior of Pennsylvania. The routeto the Ohio River followed the Schuylkill for some thirty or fortymiles, turned up one of its tributaries to its source, then crossed thewatershed to the head of a stream flowing into the Susquehanna, thenceto the Juniata, at the head of which the trail led over a short divideto the head of the Conemaugh, which flowed into the Allegheny, and theAllegheny into the Ohio. Some of the Swedes and Dutch appear to havefollowed this route with the Indians as early as 1646. 

The Ohio and Allegheny region was inhabited by the Black Minquas, socalled from their custom of wearing a black badge on their breast. TheOhio, indeed, was first called the Black Minquas River. As the countrynearer the Delaware was gradually denuded of beaver, these Black Minquasbecame the great source of supply and carried the furs, over the routedescribed, to the Schuylkill. The White Minquas lived further east, round Chesapeake and Delaware bays, and, though spoken of as belongingby language to the great Iroquois or Six Nation stock, were themselvesconquered and pretty much exterminated by the Six Nations. The BlackMinquas, 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 twoor three miles above its mouth at Bartram's Gardens, now one of the cityparks of Philadelphia. On these rocks, then an island in the Schuylkill, the Swedes built a fort which completely commanded the river and cut theDutch off from the fur trade. They built another fort on the other sideof 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'sCreek, where the old Blue Bell tavern has long stood. These two fortsprotected the mill and the Indian villages in West Philadelphia. 

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

At Christinaham, in the delta of the Christina and the Brandywine, thetide flowed far inland to the rocks on which Minuit's Swedish expeditionlanded, leaving one dry spot called Cherry Island, a name still borneby a shoal in the river. Fort Christina, on the edge of the overflowedmeadow, with the rocky promontory of hills behind it, its church andhouses, and a wide prospect across the delta and river, was a fair spotin the old days. The Indians came down the Christina in their canoes oroverland, bringing their packs of beaver, otter, and deer skins, theirtobacco, corn, and venison to exchange for the cloth, blankets, tools, and gaudy trinkets that pleased them. It must often have been a scene ofstrange life and coloring, and it is difficult today to imagine it alloccurring close to the spot where the Pennsylvania railroad station nowstands in Wilmington. 

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

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

The whole population--Dutch and Swede, but in 1654 mostlySwede--numbered only 368 persons. Before the arrival of Rising therehad been only seventy. It seems a very small number about which to bewriting history; but small as it was their "High Mightinesses, " as thegovernment of the United Netherlands was called, were determined toavenge on even so small a number the insult of the capture of FortCasimir. 

Drums, it is said, were beaten every day in Holland to call for recruitsto go to America. Gunners, carpenters, and powder were collected. A shipof war was sent from Holland, accompanied by two other vessels whosenames alone, Great Christopher and King Solomon, should have beensufficient to scare all the Swedes. At New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant laborednight and day to fit out the expedition. A French privateer whichhappened to be in the harbor was hired. Several other vessels, inall seven ships, and six or seven hundred men, with a chaplain calledMegapolensis, composed this mighty armament gathered together to driveout the handful of poor hardworking Swedes. A day of fasting and prayerwas held and the Almighty was implored to bless this mighty expeditionwhich, He was assured, was undertaken for "the glory of His name. " Itwas the absurdity of such contrasts as this running all through theannals of the Dutch in America that inspired Washington Irving to writehis infinitely humorous "History of New York from the Beginning of theWorld to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, " by "Diedrich Knickerbocker. " Itis difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to take the Dutch in America seriously. What can you do with a people whose imagination allowed them to givesuch names to their ships as Weigh Scales, Spotted Cow, and The PearTree? So Irving described the taking of Fort Casimir in mock heroicmanner. He describes the marshaling of the Dutch hosts of New York byfamilies, the Van Grolls of Anthony's Nose, the Brinkerhoffs, the VanKortlandts, the Van Bunschotens of Nyack and Kakiat, the fighting menof Wallabout, the Van Pelts, the Say Dams, the Van Dams, and all thewarriors 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 maddeningferocity, the frantic desperation, the confusion and self-abandonmentof war. Dutchman and Swede commingled, tugged, panted, and blowed. Theheavens were darkened with a tempest of missives. Bang! went the guns;whack! went the broadswords; thump! went the cudgels; crash! went themusket-stocks; blows, kicks, cuffs, scratches, black eyes and bloodynoses 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 andsplutter! cried the Swedes. Storm the works! shouted Hardkoppig Peter. Fire the mine! roared stout Rising--Tantarar-ra-ra! twanged thetrumpet of Antony Van Corlear;--until all voice and sound becameunintelligible, --grunts of pain, yells of fury, and shouts of triumphmingling in one hideous clamor. The earth shook as if struck with aparalytic stroke; trees shrunk aghast, and withered at the sight; rocksburrowed in the ground like rabbits; and even Christina creek turnedfrom its course, and ran up a hill in breathless terror!"

As a matter of fact, the fort surrendered without a fight onSeptember 1, 1655. It was thereupon christened New Amstel, afterwardsNew Castle, and was for a long time the most important town on theDelaware. This achievement put the Dutch in complete authority over theSwedes on both sides of the river. The Swedes, however, were content, abandoned politics, secluded themselves on their farms, and leftpolitics to the Dutch. Trade, too, they left to the Dutch, who, in theireffort to monopolize it, almost killed it. This conquest by their HighMightinesses also ended the attempts of the New Englanders, particularlythe people of New Haven, to get a foothold in the neighborhood of Salem, New Jersey, for which they had been struggling for years. They haddreams of a great lake far to northward full of beaver to which theDelaware would lead them. Their efforts to establish themselves survivedin one or two names of places near Salem, as, for example, New EnglandCreek, and New England Channel, which down almost into our own time wasfound on charts marking one of the minor channels of the bay along theJersey shore. They continued coming to the river in ships to trade inspite of restrictions by the Dutch; and some of them in later years, ashas been pointed out, secured a foothold on the Cohansey and in the CapeMay 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 inNew York, after whom Beekman Street is named, was for a time one of theDutch governors on the Delaware who afterwards became the sheriff ofEsopus, New York. His successor on the Delaware had some thoughts ofremoving the capital down to Odessa on the Appoquinimink, when anevent long dreaded happened. In 1664, war broke out between Englandand Holland, long rivals in trade and commerce, and all the Dutchpossessions in the New World fell an easy prey to English conquerors. A British fleet took possession of New Amsterdam, which surrenderedwithout a struggle. But when two British men of war under Sir RobertCarr appeared before New Amstel on the Delaware, Governor D'Hinoyossaunwisely resisted; and his untenable fort was quickly subdued by a fewbroadsides and a storming party. This opposition gave the conqueringparty, according to the custom of the times, the right to plunder; andit must be confessed that the English soldiers made full use of theiropportunity. They plundered the town and confiscated the land ofprominent citizens for the benefit of the officers of the expedition. 

After the English conquest on the Delaware, not a few of the Dutchmigrated to Maryland, where their descendants, it is said, are stillto be found. Some in later years returned to the Delaware, where on thewhole, notwithstanding the early confiscations, English rule seemed topromise well. The very first documents, the terms of surrender both onthe Delaware and on the Hudson, breathed an air of Anglo-Saxon freedom. Everybody was at liberty to come and go at will. Hollanders couldmigrate to the Delaware or to New York as much as before. The Dutchsoldiers in the country, if they wished to remain, were to have fiftyacres of land apiece. This generous settlement seemed in strikingcontrast to the pinching, narrow interference with trade and individualrights, the seizures and confiscations for private gain, all underpretense of punishment, bad enough on the Delaware but worse at NewAmsterdam, 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 localcustoms of the people. But the political rule of the Duke was absoluteas became a Stuart. He arbitrarily taxed exports and imports. Executive, judicial, and legislative powers were all vested in his deputy governorat New York or in creatures appointed and controlled by him. It was thesort of government the Duke hoped to impose upon all Great Britain whenhe should come to the throne, and he was trying his 'prentice hand inthe colonies. A political rebellion against this despotism was startedon the Delaware by a man named Konigsmarke, or the Long Finn, aided byan Englishman, Henry Coleman. They were captured and tried for treason, their property was confiscated, and the Long Finn branded with theletter R, and sold as a slave in the Barbados. They might be called thefirst martyrs to foreshadow the English Revolution of 1688 which endedforever the despotic reign of the Stuarts. 

The Swedes continued to form the main body of people on the Delawareunder the regime of the Duke of York, and at the time when William Penntook possession of the country in 1682 their settlements extended fromNew 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 andPennypack. They had their churches at Christina, Tinicum, Kingsessing, and Wicaco. The last, when absorbed by Philadelphia, was a pretty littlehamlet on the river shore, its farms belonging to a Swedish familycalled Swanson whose name is now borne by one of the city's streets. Across the river in New Jersey, opposite Chester, the Swedes hadsettlements on Raccoon Creek and round Swedesboro. These riversettlements constituted an interesting and from all accounts a veryattractive Scandinavian community. Their strongest bond of union seemsto have been their interest in their Lutheran churches on the river. They spread very little into the interior, made few roads, and livedalmost exclusively on the river or on its navigable tributaries. Onereason they gave for this preference was that it was easier to reach thedifferent churches by boat. 

There were only about a thousand Swedes along the Delaware and possiblyfive hundred of Dutch and mixed blood, together with a few English, allliving a life of abundance on a fine river amid pleasing scenery, withgood supplies of fish and game, a fertile soil, and a wilderness ofopportunity to the west of them. All were well pleased to be relievedfrom the stagnant despotism of the Duke of York and to take part in thefree popular government of William Penn in Pennsylvania. Theybecame magistrates and officials, members of the council and of thelegislature. They soon found that all their avenues of trade and lifewere quickened. They passed from mere farmers supplying their own needsto exporters of the products of their farms. 

Descendants of the Swedes and Dutch still form the basis of thepopulation of Delaware. * There were some Finns at Marcus Hook, whichwas called Finland; and it may be noted in passing that there were nota few French among the Dutch, as among the Germans in Pennsylvania, Huguenots who had fled from religious persecution in France. The nameJaquette, well known in Delaware, marks one of these families, whoseimmigrant ancestor was one of the Dutch governors. In the ten ordozen generations since the English conquest intermarriage has in manyinstances inextricably mixed up Swede, Dutch, and French, as well as theEnglish stock, so that many persons with Dutch names are of Swedish orFrench descent and vice versa, and some with English names like Oldhamare of Dutch descent. There has been apparently much more intermarriageamong the different nationalities in the province and less standingaloof than among the alien divisions of Pennsylvania. 

 * Swedish names anglicized are now found everywhere. Gostafssonhas 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 asWallraven, Hendrickson, Stedham, Peterson, Matson, Talley, Anderson, andthe omnipresent Rambo, which have suffered little, if any, change. Dutch names are also numerous, such as Lockermans, Vandever, VanDyke, Vangezel, Vandegrift, Alricks, Statts, Van Zandt, Hyatt, Cochran(originally Kolchman), Vance, and Blackstone (originally Blackenstein). 

After the English conquest some Irish Presbyterians or Scotch-Irishentered Delaware. Finally came the Quakers, comparatively few incolonial times but more numerous after the Revolution, especially inWilmington and its neighborhood. True to their characteristics, theyleft descendants who have become the most prominent and useful citizensdown into our own time. At present Wilmington has become almost asdistinctive a Quaker town as Philadelphia. "Thee" and "thou" arefrequently heard in the streets, and a surprisingly large proportionof the people of prominence and importance are Quakers or of Quakerdescent. Many of the neat and pleasant characteristics of the townare distinctly of Quaker origin; and these characteristics are foundwherever 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 afew streets on his wife's land on the hill behind the site of old FortChristina, in close imitation of the plan of Philadelphia, and fromthat small beginning the present city grew, and was at first calledWillingtown. * William Shipley, a Pennsylvania Quaker born in England, bought land in it in 1735, and having more capital than Willing, pushedthe fortunes of the town more rapidly. He probably had not a little todo with bringing Quakers to Wilmington; indeed, their first meetingswere held in a house belonging to him until they could build a meetinghouse of their own in 1738. 

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

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

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

The most striking relic of the old Swedish days in Wilmington is thebrick and stone church of good proportions and no small beauty, andtoday one of the very ancient relics of America. It was built by theSwedes in 1698 to replace their old wooden church, which was on thelower land, and the Swedish language was used in the services downto the year 1800, when the building was turned over to the Church ofEngland. Old Peter Minuit, the first Swedish governor, may possibly havebeen buried there. The Swedes built another pretty chapel--Gloria Dei, as it was called--at the village of Wicaco, on the shore of the Delawarewhere Philadelphia afterwards was established. The original building wastaken down in 1700, and the present one was erected on its site partlywith materials from the church at Tinicum. It remained Swedish Lutheranuntil 1831, when, like all the Swedish chapels, it became the propertyof the Church of England, between which and the Swedish Lutheran bodythere was a close affinity, if not in doctrine, at least in episcopalorganization. * The old brick church dating from 1740, on themain street of Wilmington, is an interesting relic of the colonialScotch-Irish Presbyterians in Delaware, and is now carefully preservedas 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, WilliamPenn felt a need of the west side of the river all the way down tothe sea to strengthen his ownership of Pennsylvania. He also wanted tooffset the ambitions of Lord Baltimore to extend Maryland northward. Penn accordingly persuaded his friend James, the Duke of York, to givehim a grant of Delaware, which Penn thereupon annexed to Pennsylvaniaunder the name of the Territories or Three Lower Counties. The threecounties, New Castle, Kent, and Sussex, * are still the counties ofDelaware, each one extending across the State and filling its wholelength from the hills of the Brandywine on the Pennsylvania border tothe sands of Sussex at Cape Henlopen. The term "Territory" has eversince been used in America to describe an outlying province not yetgiven the privileges of a State. Instead of townships, the threeDelaware counties were divided into "hundreds, " an old Anglo-Saxoncounty method of division going back beyond the times of Alfred theGreat. Delaware is the only State in the Union that retains this namefor county divisions. The Three Lower Counties were allowed to sendrepresentatives to the Pennsylvania Assembly; and the Quakers ofDelaware have always been part of the Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia. 

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

In 1703, after having been a part of Pennsylvania for twenty years, theThree Lower Counties were given home rule and a legislature of theirown; but they remained under the Governor of Pennsylvania until theRevolution of 1776. They then became an entirely separate community andone of the thirteen original States. Delaware was the first State toadopt the National Constitution, and Rhode Island, its fellow smallState, the last. Having been first to adopt the Constitution, the peopleof Delaware claim that on all national occasions or ceremonies they areentitled to the privilege of precedence. They have every reason to beproud of the representative men they sent to the Continental Congress, and to the Senate in later times. Agriculture has, of course, alwaysbeen the principal occupation on the level fertile land of Delaware; andit is agriculture of a high class, for the soil, especially in certainlocalities, is particularly adapted to wheat, corn, and timothy grass, as well as small fruits. That section of land crossing the State inthe region of Delaware City and Middleton is one of the show regions inAmerica, for crops of wheat and corn. Farther south, grain growing iscombined with small fruits and vegetables with a success seldom attainedelsewhere. Agriculturally there is no division of land of similar sizequite equal to Delaware in fertility. Its sand and gravel base withvegetable mold above is somewhat like the southern Jersey formation, but it is more productive from having a larger deposit of decayedvegetation. 

The people of Delaware have, indeed, very little land that is nottillable. The problems of poverty, crowding, great cities, and excessivewealth in few hands are practically unknown among them. The foreigncommerce of Wilmington began in 1740 with the building of a brig namedafter 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 theBrandywine, and the breadstuffs industry at Newport on the Christina. With the Brandywine so admirably suited to the water-power machineryof those days and the Christina deep enough for the ships, Wilmingtonseemed in colonial times to possess an ideal combination of advantagesfor manufacturing and commerce. The flour mills were followed in 1802 bythe Du Pont Powder Works, which are known all over the world, and whichfurnished powder for all American wars since the Revolution, for theCrimean War in Europe, and for the Allies in the Great War. 

"From the hills of Brandywine to the sands of Sussex" is an expressionthe people of Delaware use to indicate the whole length of their littleState. The beautiful cluster of hills at the northern end dropping intopark-like pastures along the shores of the rippling Red Clay and WhiteClay creeks which form the deep Christina with its border of green reedymarshes, is in striking contrast to the wild waste of sands at CapeHenlopen. Yet in one way the Brandywine Hills are closely connected withthose sands, for from these very hills have been quarried the hardrocks for the great breakwater at the Cape, behind which the fleets ofmerchant vessels take refuge in storms. 

The great sand dunes behind the lighthouse at the cape have their equalnowhere else on the coast. Blown by the ocean winds, the dunes workinland, overwhelming a pine forest to the tree tops and filling swampsin their course. The beach is strewn with every type of wreckage ofman's vain attempts to conquer the sea. The Life Saving Service men havestrange tales to tell and show their collections of coins found alongthe 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 andsands which were so baffling to Henry Hudson and his mate one hot Augustday of the year 1609. 

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

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

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

There is a vast literature on the history of Quakerism. The "Journal ofGeorge Fox" (1694), Penn's "Brief Account of the Rise and Progress ofthe People called Quakers" (1695), and Robert Barclay's "Apology for theTrue Christian Divinity" (1678) are of first importance for the study ofthe rise of the Society of Friends. Among the older histories are J. J. Gurney's "Observations on the Religious Peculiarities of the Society ofFriends" (1824), James Bowden's "History of the Society of Friends inAmerica, " 2 vols. (1850-54), and S. M. Janney's "History of the ReligiousSociety of Friends, " 4 vols. (1860-67). Two recent histories are ofgreat value: W. C. Braithwaite, "The Beginnings of Quakerism" (1912) andRufus M. Jones, "The Quakers in the American Colonies" (1911). Among theolder histories of Penn's province are "The History of Pennsylvaniain North America, " 2 vols. (1797-98), written by Robert Proud from theQuaker point of view and of great value because of the quotations fromoriginal documents and letters, and "History of Pennsylvania from itsDiscovery by Europeans to the Declaration of Independence in 1776"(1829) by T. F. Gordon, largely an epitome of the debates of thePennsylvania Assembly which recorded in its minutes in fascinatingold-fashioned English the whole history of the province from year toyear. Franklin's "Historical Review of the Constitution and Governmentof Pennsylvania from its Origin" (1759) is a storehouse of informationabout the history of the province in the French and Indian wars. Muchof 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, " 16vols. (1851-53), and "Pennsylvania Archives" (1874-). A vast amount ofmaterial is scattered in pamphlets, in files of colonial newspaperslike the "Pennsylvania Gazette, " in the publications of the HistoricalSociety of Pennsylvania, and in the "Pennsylvania Magazine of Historyand Biography" (1877-). Recent histories of the province havebeen written by Isaac Sharpless, "History of Quaker Government inPennsylvania, " 2 vols. (1898-99), and by Sydney G. Fisher, "The Makingof 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 UniversityStudies" (1896) and the "Relations of Pennsylvania with the BritishGovernment, 1696-1765" (1912) have been traced with painstaking care byWinfred T. Root. 

Concerning the racial and religious elements in Pennsylvania thefollowing 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 theBeginning 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 ColonialPennsylvania" (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, containvaluable original material not found elsewhere. Among these SamuelSmith's "The History of the Colony of Nova Casaria, or New Jersey"(1765) should have first place. E. B. O'Callaghan's "History of NewNetherland, " 2 vols. (1846), and J. R. Brodhead's "History of the Stateof New York, " 2 vols. (1853, 1871) contain also information about theJerseys under Dutch rule. Other important works are: W. A. Whitehead's"East Jersey under the Proprietary Governments" (New Jersey HistoricalSociety "Collections, " vol. 1, 1875), and "The English in East and WestJersey" in Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of America, " vol. III, L. Q. C. Elmer's "The Constitution and Government of the Provinceand State of New Jersey" (New Jersey Historical Society Collections, vols. III and VII, 1849 and 1872. ) Special studies have been made byAustin Scott, "Influence of the Proprietors in the Founding of NewJersey" (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, "NewJersey as a Royal Province, 1738-1776" (1911) in the Columbia University"Studies. " Several county histories yield excellent materialconcerning the life and times of the colonists, notably Isaac Mickle's"Reminiscences of Old Gloucester" (1845) and L. T. Stevens's "TheHistory of Cape May County" (1897) which are real histories writtenin scholarly fashion and not to be confused with the vulgar countyhistories gotten up to sell. 

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