American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  From this premise, for which he cited a multitude of authorities, especially Chief Justice Edward Coke, Penn argued that Parliament had no business at all to meddle with religion. Quakers did not ask that their religion be supported by government. Their political ideal was to have no religion supported by government. And this, Penn maintained, was precisely what fundamental law required, because the ancient constitution, the most fundamental of fundamental laws, gave Parliament no authority to prescribe religion. “Religion,” he insisted, had been “no Part of the Old English Government.” Indeed, how could the ancient constitution have made adherence to the Church of England a requirement for the enjoyment of the rights of Englishmen when the Church of England did not even exist at the time when the constitution was formed: “Our Claim to these English privileges, rising higher than the Date of Protestancy, can never justly be invalidated for Non-Conformity to any Form of it.” Yet the Restoration Parliament did require conformity to the Church of England, required everyone to pay tithes to support the church, virtually forbade other religions to exist at all, and thus deprived Englishmen of their fundamental rights in direct violation of Magna Carta. That great charter, Penn said, “considers us not, as of this or that perswasion in matters of Religion, in order to the obtaining of our antient Rights and Priviledges, but as English men.” And being English did not mean being of the Church of England: “A Man may be a very good Englishman, and yet a very indifferent Churchman.”

  Penn’s position, that the English government was purely secular, was not a novel one. It had been adumbrated by radical religious groups in the 1640s and 1650s. But Penn was able to attach his argument to English political tradition in a variety of ways designed to win support even from the most ardent conservatives of his day. Given the propensity of men in all ages to justify revolution or rebellion on religious grounds, there is an inherent paradoxical conservatism in denying government any religious function or sanction. Penn, like Roger Williams before him, could denounce the monarchomachs, whether Catholic or Protestant, who called for the overthrow of kings whom they thought heretical. The Puritans who persecuted Quakers in Massachusetts were of a piece with the Puritans who brought Charles I to the block in England. Both, in Penn’s view, were enemies to civil peace and freedom. And he never lost an opportunity to denounce the arch-Puritan and monarchomach, Oliver Cromwell, and the “Oppression & Persecution which Reign’d during his Usurpation”—a position well designed to win the approval of the restored monarchy.

  Although the new monarch himself was unwilling to forgo his position as head of the Church of England, Penn continually suggested to him that in attaching his regimen to any church, he was actually subjecting himself to ecclesiastical control, allowing “the State…to be Rid by the Church.” Charles II was content to be rid by the Church of England if that was the price of his throne, but he probably did not enjoy it. Penn’s good relations with him and his brother and Penn’s influence at court may have been owing in part, at least, to the fact that Penn did not regard the king’s religion as having any proper connection with his authority. Charles and James were both Catholics, Charles secretly, James openly; their subjects were not, and ultimately they ousted James from the throne because of his Catholicism, but not with any help from Penn.

  Although Penn’s close ties with James resulted in accusations that he was himself a Catholic, accusations that jeopardized his campaign to prove that Quakers were Protestants, he considered his position to be the ultimate and true Protestant one. Religion, he maintained, was something that did not affect authority. The allegiance of subjects to their king was based on the fulfillment of his civil and political duties; his religion was his own business.

  By the same token, according to Penn (though not according to Charles or James), a subject’s religion was his own business, not the king’s. It was probably on this ground that Penn and his father had finally become reconciled. Penn gives us at least a hint that his father shared his feelings about mixing religion and politics. At the beginning of the war with the Dutch in 1665, Charles asked the elder Penn for a list of the ablest naval officers to serve in the war. The admiral, according to his son,

  pickt them by their Ability, not their [religious] Opinions; and he was in the Right; for that was the best Way of doing the King’s Business. And of my own Knowledge, Conformity robb’d the King at that Time of Ten Men, whose greater Knowledge and Valour… [would] have saved a Battel, or perfected a Victory.

  Father and son agreed at least in making religious opinion irrelevant to the functions of government; and if Admiral Penn felt that way, probably a good many other Englishmen did.

  But Penn’s strongest appeal against government interference in religion rested on the threat it posed, not to the monarch’s power but to the subject’s property. In the apostrophes that Englishmen regularly addressed to the ancient constitution, the protection it offered to property had always been paramount. Penn pointed out to them that bringing religion into the picture could impair this fundamental protection. The “plain English of publick Severity for Nonconformity,” he said, could be reduced to a simple maxim: “no Property out of the Church.” This was not only unconstitutional; it was a ridiculous intrusion of the church into a sphere where religion had no place, an attempt to make the security of property depend on religious opinion. Accordingly when Penn proposed to Parliament in 1678 two bills for toleration of religious dissent, he entitled the first one “An Act for the Preserving of the Subjects Properties, and for the repealing of Several penal Laws, by which the lives and properties of the subjects were subject to be forfeited for things not in their power to be avoyded.” The second one he called “An other Form of bill for the better Preserving, and maintaining English Property, being the true Fundation of English Government.” In the preambles to both bills, Penn recited the evils that the penal laws (against noncomformity in religion) had brought upon England, especially in inducing sober and industrious men to leave the country and in preventing others from coming there.

  Penn did not get either of his bills passed, and three years after they failed, he took the step that made him famous, in establishing a refuge where sober and industrious people could enjoy the security of property that England continued to deny to people of his persuasion. Pennsylvania was designed not as an alternative to the ancient constitution of England but as the fulfillment of it in an age that had betrayed it.

  If his colony had turned out as he wished, it would have been appropriate to call William Penn finally a Pennsylvanian. He had great plans for his colony when he arrived there to supervise its founding in 1682, but he left after two years, frustrated by the unruliness of the people who joined him, an unruliness continued by their successors until his death in England in 1718. In his dreams for his colony, he had envisioned “a blessed government, and a vertuous ingenious and industrious society, so as people may Live well and have more time to serve the Lord, then in this Crowded land.” In Pennsylvania, Penn expected Quakers to set an example of Christian, Protestant virtue. Quaker gentlemen would prove to be truly gentlemen, and with the willing consent of the people their paternal government would revive the ancient constitution of England, free from domineering prelates. Penn even rose to millennial hopes for his colony. “God,” he wrote, “will plant Americha and it shall have its day: the 5th kingdom or Gloryous day of [Jesus?] Christ…may have the last parte of the world, the setting of the son or western world to shine in.”

  The prospect of a millennial kingdom in the New World brought out the prophet in Penn. While he was engaged in defending the Protestantism of Quakers and the rights of Englishmen, while he had George Fox by his side, fighting to keep the Quaker movement from splintering, Penn was dealing with a world where he knew his limits, a world in which one contended with hostile authority to achieve whatever approximation of right one could. In a new world, where he himself would hold the reins of authority, there seemed no limits to what might be achieved. If men were capable of perfe
ction, Pennsylvania was the place where they could begin to show it, unhampered by the corruption that had overtaken England. Unfortunately Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvanians proved less than perfect.

  And so did Penn. In escaping from the restraints of the world that had hitherto bound him, he expected too much both of himself and of those whom he persuaded to settle in his colony. If perfection meant self-denial, he was not ready to deny himself privileges and rights that he thought his position as founder of the colony entitled him to. And his colonists seemed unwilling to deny themselves anything.

  Penn’s unfounded optimism became apparent even before the founding, as he planned and replanned a constitution for the colony. He had had some experience at planning already as one of the proprietors of West New Jersey, where he and his colleagues proposed in 1676 a government in which virtually all power was placed in a representative assembly of the colony’s freemen. In his initial plans for Pennsylvania, Penn again envisaged a government close to the people, with power centered in their representatives, who would be unable to act at all except under the instruction of their constituents. Though he provided for a bicameral legislature, the upper house was to be chosen by the representative lower house, which would have the initiative in proposing legislation (approved in advance by constituents). In assigning so much power to the people and their immediate representatives, Penn seems to have assumed that the settlers of Pennsylvania would align themselves willingly with his wishes for them or that they would spontaneously want for themselves what he wanted for them. It was symptomatic of his thinking about the colony that he did not specify his own power, except to place limits on it by providing for meetings of the assembly without summons from a governor and by providing for laws to take effect automatically if not assented to by the governor within fourteen days. He simply took for granted that there would be a governor—either himself or his substitute—and that the governor would normally give his assent to legislation.

  As Penn thought about this scheme and discussed it with others, he evidently became concerned that the settlers might include some of the wrong sort of people and that the government should therefore be placed more firmly in the hands of the right sort, of which he had to be one. In his final “Frame of Government,” he provided for an upper house of the legislature, to be elected from “Persons of most Note for their Wisdom, Virtue and Ability” (“ability” in the seventeenth century carried the connotation of wealth) and for a governor who should sit with this “Council” and have a treble vote in its proceedings. He now assigned to the council virtually all governmental powers, with the sole authority to initiate legislation, which the representative assembly, no longer bound by instruction of their constituents, was empowered only to accept or reject without amendment. Again Penn left unspecified most of his own powers as governor (beyond the treble vote in the council), but provided that laws should be enacted “by the Governour, with the Assent and Approbation of the Freemen in Provincial Council and General Assembly.” He may have intended this to mean that laws would now require his assent. And he implied that his powers (whatever they might be) were to descend to his children, for in one clause he referred to “the Governour, his Heirs or Assigns,” and he made provision for a commission to serve in case the governor should be a minor.

  What Penn wanted was a popular government in which a grateful people would gladly accept the measures that he and other men of “Wisdom, Virtue and Ability” devised for them. He disclosed his manner of thinking when he sent an agent to West New Jersey to take charge of the town of Salem there, which he had acquired as one of the proprietors. He had bought the title, but he wanted the people to sign some sort of agreement (the text is now lost) asking him to assume government over them. The agent went to Salem and reported the reaction: “some said if the Government belonged to thee, thou might assume it without our petitioning thee thereto, I replyed, thou wouldst rather have it by Consent of the people also; for William called the Conqueror acknowledged, he was chosen King, by the consent of the people.”

  That was perhaps how Penn saw himself, a Quaker king by consent, William the First of Pennsylvania. Besides deciding on a proper government for Pennsylvania, he decided on a set of laws for the people of the colony to consent to at the outset. Here again he revealed his high hopes—and wishful thinking—for a society that was not to be troubled by the self-indulgent gentlemen, misguided statesmen, and corrupt prelates whom he contended against in England. Pennsylvania would be a place where his laws favored the industrious and penalized the idle (all children would be taught a skilled trade), where he would make all persons free to worship God as they chose, where he would allow no one to engage in “Stage-Plays, Cards, Dice, May-Games, Gamesters, Masques, Revels, Bull-baitings, Cock-fightings, Bear-baitings and the like, which excite the People to Rudeness, Cruelty, Looseness and Irreligion,” and where he would restrain the litigious by requiring every litigant to declare in court, before beginning a suit, “That he believes in his Conscience, his Cause is Just.”

  IN HIS PLANS for Pennsylvania, Penn showed none of the realism that marked his dealings with the English world. Instead of consulting his own past experience, he studied the scheme of government that James Harrington had concocted for an imaginary England in Oceana (1656). This was the source of his notion of a representative assembly whose supine members would be content with saying “yea” or “nay” to laws proposed by their superiors. Anyone who thought twice about the behavior of England’s actual House of Commons should have known better. Quaker representatives might practice self-denial, but they were no more ready than other Englishmen for this kind of self-denial.

  To be sure, some of Penn’s troubles with his colony came from the presence there and nearby of non-Quakers. After learning a little of the geography of Pennsylvania, he thought that he must have, in addition to his original grant, the area now comprised in the state of Delaware. Otherwise his settlers would not have proper access to the sea. He succeeded, through his friend the Duke of York, in wresting this area from Lord Baltimore, who claimed it as part of Maryland. But it was already inhabited by Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, and English settlers who showed no sympathy with Quaker principles. And Baltimore, though frustrated here, entered into a lengthy dispute with Penn over Pennsylvania’s southern boundary, a dispute that kept Penn in England, after a brief stay in his colony (1682–84), during most of the rest of his life.

  But it was neither Baltimore in England nor the outsiders on the Delaware who turned the early history of Pennsylvania into a contest between Penn and his settlers. The settlers at first accepted most of the Frame of Government he devised for them and elected leading Quakers, men of “ability” if not of wisdom and virtue, to the powerful Council. They even accepted, however grudgingly, the gubernatorial veto power over legislation that Penn made explicit once the colony was founded. But they saw Pennsylvania as their colony, and Penn saw it as his. In moving from England to the New World, both Penn and his settlers thought of themselves as moving from a position of opposition to a position of control. In England, Penn was their spokesman and defender against a hostile government—and he continued to fill that role in England before and after the overthrow of his friend James II—but within Pennsylvania the settlers did not need him. Within Pennsylvania he became the authority against which they would themselves contend, assisted by new homegrown leaders: the very men of ability who sat on the Council.

  What they contended about mostly was property and the power that accompanied property. Penn, as proprietor of the colony, felt that it should bring him some revenue. He had never thought of it as a way of flinging away all outward substance. Though he had sold and continued to sell large amounts of Pennsylvania land, he had spent more than he gained in getting the colony started, and he expected some return on his investment, at the very least a small quitrent, such as the king collected in royal colonies, on lands in private hands. Moreover, the political power he claimed as governor seemed to him small in
deed for one who still owned most of the colony. But the settlers did not see it that way. They had invested their savings and committed their lives in an enterprise that was supposed to make them free as they had never before been free, free not only in their religion but in their property and government. They wanted to pay no quitrents, and they wanted no directions from Penn or from the governors and agents he sent to represent him.

  The settlers won. Though they were divided among themselves, they united in resisting Penn in almost every measure he proposed. The story is familiar and need not be repeated here. Penn’s settlers, led by large Quaker landowners and merchants, paid him no quitrents, or none to speak of; they defied his governors; they ignored his messages. In the end, though he retained his formal veto power, it was of little use. He continued to plead for his rights, both against the settlers and against attempts by the English government to bring the colony under royal control, but the settlers were less willing than the king to recognize his rights (though for two years, 1692–94, King William assumed control of the government). In Pennsylvania, it seemed, everyone’s rights were secure except Penn’s. After two decades of strife the colony wound up with a popularly elected unicameral legislative assembly that dominated the government and continued throughout the colonial period to quarrel with Penn and his heirs.

  And yet Pennsylvania must be counted a success, a success not for Penn himself but for the principles he fought for all his life. He had contended that Quakers were Protestants, in the mainstream of Christianity and not wild enthusiasts who threatened the social order. In Pennsylvania, despite internal quarrels, they proved it. Though the settlers defied Penn, they established on a small scale the same sort of social order that prevailed in England, with small men deferring to those who had made their way in the world. And in Pennsylvania enterprising men made their way very rapidly indeed. Penn had contended that religion should be no concern of government, that making it so was a threat to the security of property and the rights of Englishmen. In Pennsylvania, although Penn compromised his principles by limiting public office to Christians (of whatever persuasion), all religions were tolerated, and the colony flourished economically beyond any other. The rapid growth of Philadelphia, outpacing all other colonial cities, the ships loading and unloading at its docks, the lush farms of the interior, all testified to the viability of a society where government was not entangled with the church.