Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  A key part of Penn's strategy for establishing a stable settler colony was to negotiate peaceful relationships with the local Indians from the outset, agreeing to purchase the land needed for his settlement and promising that the Indians would be left undisturbed on their own lands in the future. The main Indians living in eastern Pennsylvania by the early 1680s were the Algonquian-speaking Lenapes (or Delawares). A decentralized group whose members been long engaged in fur trading with Dutch and Swedish merchants in the region, the Lenapes had by this time suffered population declines caused by exposure to European diseases, and were relatively weak. They had good reasons for pursuing an alliance with the English, who could provide trade goods and military assistance. Moreover, their experience with the tiny, dispersed settlements of the Dutch and the Swedes gave them no reason to think the influx of European settlers would eventually lead to their own dispossession.

  Pennsylvania's early success in maintaining peaceful relations with the Indians was also partly the product of the colony's late establishment. Penn founded the colony after New York's Governor Andros had negotiated the Covenant Chain with the members of the Iroquois League. Thus the Iroquois were not only friendly to Pennsylvania's early settlers, they also helped to maintain control over less powerful groups living in the region. The Susquehannocks, for example, migrated into this area after being driven out of the Chesapeake by Bacon's forces. The Iroquois helped to ensure that the Susquehannocks' hostility towards the new settlers would remain muted.14

  Other factors, too, aided the establishment of Pennsylvania. One was the fact that Pennsylvania faced no immediate external threats, being protected by New York to the north, Maryland to the south, and the mountains to the west. Unlike earlier colonies, Pennsylvania had older, settled English colonies nearby with whom to engage in trade. Pennsylvania's fertile soil and relatively long growing season (at least compared to New England's) made it a good place for farmers to grow grain, which by the 1680s had a ready market in the Caribbean. And even the humbler Quakers were fired with a sense of mission to make the most of God's bounty. Like the Puritans, they were firm believers in the Protestant ethic.

  Figure 15 William Penn's Treaty with the Indians. Detail after original painting by Benjamin West, 1771. Engraving by Robert Delaunay, Paris, circa 1772. William Penn and settlers are shown trading with Native Indians, with buildings under construction in the background. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  The settlement around Philadelphia thus experienced rapid growth. Some 50 ships filled with settlers, organized by the Free Society of Traders, arrived between 1682 and 1683. Within a year crops were being harvested and the surplus shipped for export. When Penn himself arrived late in 1682 to take up the governorship, he was well pleased to see that the settlement already had some 4,000 inhabitants and contained 80 dwellings in Philadelphia alone. Among the early arrivals were several groups of Welsh and Irish Quakers, together with some African slaves whom Penn bought to work on his farm. Soon Penn announced that the duke of York had sold him the three counties of Delaware, Newcastle, Kent, and Sussex, which were then annexed to Pennsylvania subject to the new colony's laws and privileges.

  Before his departure for Pennsylvania, Penn had drafted a frame of government and charter of liberties, asserting that government was a divine institution whose purpose was to “terrify evil doers” and “cherish those that do well.” He agreed with virtually all seventeenth-century political thinkers that some institutional framework was necessary to maintain social order. His philosophy of government, however, expressed little of the pessimism about human nature so characteristic of other colonial founders. His philosophy, “Let men be good and the government cannot be bad,” was to demonstrate that people of varying religious persuasions could live in peace and harmony. To that end, he decreed that power was to be vested in him as governor, together with the freemen of the province, meeting as a provincial council and general assembly, “by whom all laws shall be made, officers chosen and public affairs transacted.” Freemanship was accorded to any male who owned 50 acres of partially cultivated land or who paid the local taxes. Some Quakers wanted to deny the vote to non-Quakers to maintain their control, but Penn insisted on a broad franchise, believing that so benign a regime would not be challenged, even by outsiders.

  In many respects, Penn's document was remarkably liberal, in keeping with the egalitarian nature of the Quaker religion. At the same time, however, Penn believed (like most political thinkers of his time) that government ought to be left to “men of wisdom and virtue,” though he was quick to deny that by this he meant wealth. The council was to comprise 72 persons (later reduced to 18) “of most note for their wisdom, virtue and ability,” who were to serve on a rotating basis for three years, helping the governor to prepare all legislation. The assembly's role, in contrast, was to be restricted to accepting or rejecting bills, though its members could propose amendments. Penn's frame of government also included a list of privileges and liberties. Trial was to be by jury, fees were to be moderate, and punishment was to fit the crime. Servants were to be protected, while everyone who acknowledged “the one almighty and eternal God … [would] in no ways be molested or prejudiced in their religious persuasion.” This protection included exemption from tithes, as there was to be no established church.

  The legislature initially played its expected role by passing a series of laws imbued with the Quaker spirit. Anyone settling a dispute by violence was to be sentenced to three months in the house of correction; 10 days was the punishment for riotous behavior or cruel sports. Provision was made for the destitute. There was, too, a heavy emphasis on honesty between the inhabitants, and meticulous attention was given to weights and measures. Finally, in December 1682 a bill was passed confirming religious tolerance. All freemen who declared “Jesus Christ to be the son of God” and “saviour of the world” could hold office and participate in the affairs of the province. As a legal code it was a model of reasonableness and humanity.

  Yet the harmony was short-lived, for various factions began jockeying for greater control within the first decade after settlement began. The non-Quaker counties of Delaware constituted one discordant factor, since they resented their inclusion in the new colony. Most of the inhabitants were Swedish or Dutch, while even those of English descent were Presbyterians or Anglicans. Also, the initial grant of special privileges to the Free Society of Traders now became an issue. Their claims to the choicest lands along the Delaware and best plots in Philadelphia rankled with the poorer Quakers, most of whom owned small farms. The result was a split in their ranks. The wealthy Friends led by Thomas Lloyd dominated the council, while the poorer inhabitants looked to the assembly for protection. Each group vied with the other and generally ignored the orders of Penn's lieutenant governor, especially after Penn returned to England in 1684 to fight the territorial claims of Maryland.

  In truth Penn was less than brilliant as an administrator. Though genuinely concerned for his coreligionists, he was too full of his own importance to appreciate their point of view, believing instead that he deserved their gratitude and deference. Like many others, he failed to see that the pursuit of his own material advantage conflicted with his professed altruism. Before he died he was to be sadly disillusioned.

  Communal divisions were soon compounded by religious schism, following the arrival in 1689 of George Keith from New Jersey. Keith basically believed that the Friends were losing their purity, but his proposed remedy was not a return to the simple ways of the movement in its early years but rather a purification of the Quaker religion through stricter discipline. Unfortunately such discipline threatened the religion's spontaneity as well as the principle of freedom of conscience. In the resulting split in the Quaker ranks, perhaps a quarter of the Society took Keith's position. His followers were drawn mainly from the poorer Quakers, many of them Scots like himself, and the dispute began to have political ramifications when Keith took issue with Lloyd and his wealthy supporters in
Philadelphia's main meeting house.

  The new colony nevertheless continued to take shape, aided by the influx of capital and willing hands. Philadelphia was well established and three counties – Bucks, Philadelphia, and Chester – had been founded. Already the population had reached 10,000, with more settlers on their way. In 1686 some Pietists from Frankfurt and Quakers from Kreveld, led by Francis Pastorius, purchased a tract of 25,000 acres and established a settlement which in 1691 became Germantown. Even this development was not free from controversy, however, for the Welsh settlers then argued that they should have been similarly privileged with a county of their own. Pennsylvania was already set to become a society of many ethnic groups and religions, just like the later United States.

  1. Historians have a long-standing debate about the social origins of immigrants to the Chesapeake. Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill, 1947), 82–3, categorized most servants as “Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds.” This view was challenged by Mildred Campbell in “Social Origins of Some Early Americans,” in James Morton Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill, 1959), 63–89. Campbell found that most immigrants were respectable maids and skilled artisans. Her view was qualified by David W. Galenson in “‘Middling People’ or ‘Common Sort’? The Social Origins of Some Early Americans Re-examined,” to which there is a rebuttal by Campbell, William and Mary Quarterly, 35 (1978), 499–524. More recently, Russell R. Menard has concluded that the truth lies somewhere in between. See “British Migration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,” in Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, eds, Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, 1988), 99–132. The distorted sex ratio of Virginian society was first noted by Wesley Frank Craven in White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian (Charlottesville, 1971). The subject is explored in greater detail by Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975); and by Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650–1750 (New York, 1984). The implications of the imbalanced sex ratio for men's achievement of manhood status and as a cause of conflict is explored in Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996). Immigrant gender ratios were similar in Maryland (see Chapter 5, section 3).

  2. Recent historians have increasingly sought to understand the origins of Indian–European conflicts from Indian and not only European points of view. For example, Michael Leroy Oberg discusses changes in Indian settlement patterns in the Chesapeake between 1646 and 1675 in Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585–1685 (Ithaca, 1999), while Virginia DeJohn Anderson explores the reasons for disputes about livestock in Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York, 2004).

  3. The view that Bacon was an early George Washington can be found in Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Torch-Bearer of the Rebellion: The Story of Bacon's Rebellion and Its Leader (Princeton, 1940). For a contrary view, see Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1957). A more recent version of the old interpretation is Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (New York, 1984). Modern historians who emphasize the rebels' class-based grievances include Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, and Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches. Recently it has been argued that conflicts over Indian policy were at the root of the political dispute between frontiersmen and Berkeley's faction (Oberg, Dominion and Civility, ch. 5).

  4. The view that Africans were substituted for servants because they were easier to control than Englishmen is put forward by Morgan in American Slavery, American Freedom, though he believes that the decision was more subconscious than rational. The argument that the switch occurred primarily because of a decline in the supply of servants is presented in Russell R. Menard, “From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System,” Southern Studies, 16 (1977), 355–90. The effects of greater life expectancy and the creation of a white native class are discussed by Allan Kulikoff in Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1689–1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986). For a useful summary, see Warren M. Billings, John E. Selby, and Thad W. Tate, Colonial Virginia: A History (New York, 1986).

  5. See James Horn's Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, 1994), in which the author argues that most people suffered a drop in their standard of housing before 1700 compared with what they would have enjoyed in England.

  6. For the changing values of seventeenth-century New England, see Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630–1717 (Princeton, 1962); Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630–1649 (Chapel Hill, 1965); Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1991); Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York, 1995); Mark Valeri, “Religious Discipline and the Market: Puritans and the Issue of Usury,” William and Mary Quarterly, 54 (1997), 746–68; and Margaret Ellen Newell, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England (Ithaca, 1998). The continued predominance of the community over the individual is argued by Helena M. Wall, Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). For the entrepreneurial Pynchon family, see Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (Princeton, 1983). Historians are unable to agree on when the market became predominant. Gary B. Nash finds traces of the old communal values as late as the 1730s, notably in Boston when there was a dispute over the building of a new market house: see The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness; and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). In contrast, James Henretta, The Origins of American Capitalism: Collected Essays (Boston, 1991), and Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, 1992), believe that the era of the American Revolution and federal Constitution was the time when capitalism, wage labor, and free markets first triumphed. Other writers push the origins of the market further into the past (see Chapter 10, section 2).

  7. The view that Puritanism was in decline was popular with Progressive historians during the two world wars. See James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (Boston, 1927), and William W. Sweet, Religion in Colonial America (New York, 1942). It was to counter such views that Perry Miller wrote Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650: A Genetic Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1933) and The New England Mind, 2 vols (New York, 1939), though Miller argued that Puritanism was in decline by the end of the seventeenth century. The declension thesis was challenged subsequently by, among others, Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, 1969), and Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, “The Puritan Family and Religion: A Critical Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly, 39 (1982), 29–63. The argument that concerns about youth were central to the Half-Way Covenant is found in Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia, 2005). The debate about declension has more recently shifted to the eighteenth century (see Chapter 13, section 1).

  8. Scholars have disagreed about how to refer to the Wampanoag leader. Some describe him as Metacomet or Metacom, others as King Philip. However, Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998), xix–xxi, argues for keeping the traditional name of Philip, a name which he himself had adopted. Recent scholarship follows this convention.

  9. Although tensions between settlers and local Indians have traditionally been seen as stemming from purely local causes, it has recently b
een shown that the Indians were able to use the colony's political problems with the Crown to bolster their own political position (Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King).

  10. Historians once believed that the early English colonists were committed to universal military service, especially in New England. See, for example, John Shy, “A New Look at the Colonial Militia,” in A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (New York, 1976), and Robert Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York, 1976). This conclusion has been challenged by Kyle Zelner, A Rabble in Arms: Massachusetts Towns and Militiamen during King Philip's War (New York, 2009), which shows that town militia committees avoided drafting fathers of families or the sons of established farmers and church members, instead drafting men considered part of the “rabble,” including poor men and those formerly convicted of crimes.

  11. The four surviving towns were Natick, Punkapaug, Hassanamesit, and Wamesit.

  12. The publication in 1682 of Mary Rowlandson's account of her capture by the Nipmuck Indians at Lancaster also highlighted the dilemma. Not only was Rowlandson's life spared, but she was treated with something akin to respect in contrast to the New Englanders' treatment of their captives.

  13. The full text is printed in Kavenagh, Documentary History, Vol. 2, 1131–4. The right of servants to a headright of 50 acres was abandoned after a few years.

  14. The Lenapes' perspective on their famous treaty with William Penn is explored in Thomas Sugrue, “The Peopling and Depeopling of Early Pennyslvania: Indians and Colonists, 1680–1720,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 116 (1992), 3–31.

  Chapter 8

  James II and the Glorious Revolution