Читать книгу An Alternative History of Pittsburgh - Э.Д. - Страница 13

1680

Land Granted

Held in the Library of Congress are a series of workmanlike paintings titled The Pageant of a Nation, composed by the Philadelphia-born artist Jean Leon Gerome Ferris in the late nineteenth century. Ferris meant to illustrate pivotal moments in patriotic history, a stations of the cross for American civil religion. Paintings like The Mayflower Compact, The First Thanksgiving, Writing the Declaration of Independence, and Betsy Ross, 1777 all serve to construct an idealized view of the past, stolid and sober as it is sentimental and sanctimonious. Ferris’s depiction of the founding of his own state, The Birth of Pennsylvania, 1680, is no different.

Ferris depicts William Penn in the chambers of Charles II at Whitehall, as the king presents to the Quaker the charter for the new province to be named in honor of the latter’s father. Charles II is seated on the left, every inch of him the resplendent libertine in heavy yellow coat, framed with cascading, curly chestnut locks and purple-stockinged legs crossed at his shapely calves. The King’s retinue is similarly dandyish: frivolous and foppish young men in powdered wigs, buxom ladies twittering amongst each other, an African slave in turban and Maghreb garb. And there, on the right, is Penn, holding the charter for his province. Upon his head is a simple black tricorne, removed not for a king, but for Christ alone.

Historian Alan Taylor writes in American Colonies: The Settling of North America that Penn was a “paradoxical man … [who] combined an elite status with radical religion.” A convert to Quakerism, Penn’s powerful father had ironically been an admiral in the English Navy, first in the service of Oliver Cromwell’s interregnum government, and then with Charles II during the Restoration. The elder Penn begrudgingly developed a respect for his son’s steadfast faith, and though his son had been imprisoned several times for his prominence within the heretical sect, Charles II had assured the dying admiral that the court would protect Penn upon the elder’s passing.

A fortuitous promise, as Charles wished to dispatch with all of these pesky Quakers in England anyway. He had no use for those who refused to acknowledge hierarchy or to doff their caps toward their superiors. And so from Charles’s own North American landholdings, the king would carve out 45,000 square miles of land far south of the strict Puritans of New England and far north of the oppressive slaveholders of Virginia, in a land that Penn called “New Wales,” but which the monarch christened “Pennsylvania,” in honor of the elder Penn’s service in the conquering of Jamaica.

Suddenly, the man who’d once scribbled heretical pamphlets in Newgate was in possession of the single largest individual land claim in the entire world. Taylor writes that Penn had “organized the fastest and most efficient colonization in the seventeenth-century English empire.” Penn would declaim that “It is a clear and just thing, and my God who has given it to me through many difficulties, will, I believe, bless and make it the seed of a nation.” He envisioned a land defined by and rooted in Quakerism’s founding principles. An experiment in religious tolerance and freedom in the New World.

But what exactly were the parameters of this new proprietary colony, answerable to neither charter as in Massachusetts nor royal prerogative as in Virginia? On the east it was to be bound by the Delaware River, which was the border with West Jersey. To the north lay the land that had once been New Netherlands, but which had since been forcibly ceded to the Duke of York. To the south were the proprietary holdings of Cecil Calvert, the Catholic Baron Baltimore. Some ambiguity on those parameters led to several skirmishes between the provinces in the coming century, culminating in Cresap’s War, when Pennsylvania and Maryland actually went to (smallish) blows, settled only when Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon defined that latitude that would mythically solidify the border between North and South.

And what of to the west? Well, of that there was some disagreement, for if the borders in the other three cardinal directions were better defined, the great western interior of the continent, that kingdom of buckskin and acorn stretching onward to an undifferentiated and apocalyptic frontier, was more uncertain. That Penn’s landholdings stretched beyond the Susquehanna and into the Allegheny Mountains was at least clear to him, but what exactly it meant to be Pennsylvanian once you’d left the safe environs of the east remains a pertinent question. Especially true, since if Pittsburgh was in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania was not yet in Pittsburgh.

Traditionally, the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle is regarded as the first European to arrive at the Iroquois village of Dionde:gâ on the banks of the Allegheny, but more recent research has cast doubt on the accuracy of that claim. The first written description of the land was made by a Virginian trader named Michael Bezallion much later, in 1717. Pittsburgh has always been as liminal as the frontier, its geography as ambiguous as its discovery. Its location is strung between both East and West, and the city is less than a hundred miles north of that famed Mason-Dixon line. In the years before the American Revolution, the headwaters of the Ohio would be claimed by both Pennsylvania and the Royal Colony of Virginia; the site would be contested by both the English and French.

Much of Pittsburgh history is lacunae, as unclear as who once made Meadowcroft their home, or when the Great Peacemaker lived and died. The western frontier has always been as shadowy and mysterious as an errand into the wilderness.