Читать книгу Frontier Country - Patrick Spero - Страница 9

CHAPTER 1

The Hidden Flaw

There is a fundamental principle about frontiers in the early modern world. A frontier did not exist without a government to defend it, and a government would cease to exist if it could not protect its frontiers. The developments on the eighteenth-century American frontiers, then, can only be appreciated by understanding the creation of the colonial government to which those frontiers belonged. For Pennsylvania, that founding moment came with the Frame of 1701, a document that scholars have described with many superlatives: “the most famous of all colonial constitutions,” “radically democratic,” “remarkably innovative,” “a landmark of religious liberty,” one of the “most influential documents protecting individual rights,” and “comparable in the development of political institutions to the development of the wheel in transportation.” In its own time, the Frame was credited with the economic prosperity that the eastern areas of Pennsylvania enjoyed for much of the eighteenth century. The colony’s remarkable progress, a leading assemblyman noted in 1739, “is principally, and almost wholly, owing to the excellency of our constitution; under which we enjoy a greater share both of civil and religious liberty than any of our neighbors.”¹

There was, however, a fatal oversight in the Frame of 1701. It failed to address the issue of political expansion. Rather than creating a stable political environment, as most have assumed it did, the Frame created a formula for the colony’s ultimate demise. This flaw only became apparent as the colony tried to incorporate new territory in the eighteenth century. By the time of the American Revolution, the revolutionaries who drafted a new constitution in 1776 knew of this and other problems, declaring “we are determined not to pay the least regard to the former constitution of this province, but to reject everything therein that may be proposed, merely because it was part of the former constitution.” To understand how the authors of the revolutionary constitution of Pennsylvania came to this conclusion, we must turn to where the seeds of this revolt were first planted: the flawed founding.²

Figure 2. This map is based on a colored version of the 1755 London-printed A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America, with the Roads, Distances, Limits, and Extent of the Settlements, also known as the Mitchell Map, named for its designer John Mitchell, a Virginia-born doctor. Pennsylvania’s boundaries in this version are farther north than they are today and include parts of modern-day western New York, while its western border mirrors the Delaware River. The borders appear clear on this British map, although in practice, they were much harder to establish in the colonies. New York’s boundaries, for example, were never quite as expansive as this map depicts.

“A Just, Plain, and Honest People That Neither Make War upon Others nor Fear War from Others”

For three days, the English ship Welcome made its course up the Delaware River, as anxious passengers scanned the shore for signs of life. The vessel carried William Penn and about a hundred others who had come to launch a new English colony called Pennsylvania. On the night of October 26, 1682, they came upon a clearing with a small fort and scattered houses. They had reached their destination.³

The boat’s appearance came as a surprise to those on shore. As soon as the ship moored, several magistrates left the fort and paddled a small canoe out to investigate. Penn showed them his charter from King Charles II declaring Penn the proprietor of the land that these magistrates governed. The magistrates, appointed by the Duke of York, the previous proprietor, seemed uncertain. They took Penn’s papers and told him to stay put while they went ashore to review his documents. The magistrates conferred that night. Given that Penn had sent advance agents to the colony, the magistrates’ behavior was likely a performance of protocol—or at least, they wanted to ensure that the man claiming to be Penn was not an imposter. By morning, they had determined that his charter was valid and readied the ritual that would recognize Penn’s power as the head of this new colony.⁴

Penn had prepared for what happened next. When he went ashore, the magistrates handed him the keys to the fort, the strongest symbol of political sovereignty in the area. Penn unlocked its door, entered, and closed the door behind him. He stood alone in the fort—now his fort—for a moment, then opened the door and walked back out. The magistrates greeted him with twigs from the forests beyond, a piece of earth, and a bowl containing river water, representations of Penn’s new authority over the woods, land, and streams of this English colony.⁵

Penn’s journey to the banks of the Delaware River was an arduous one. Penn, the son of a distinguished naval hero whose exploits had won the family fortune, received art education at the most elite institutions in England and on the Continent. His privilege meant that he had access to the finest things in life. Indeed, a life of indulgent complacency seemed his likely destiny. Penn, however, chose to take a different path while in his twenties. Troubled by the violent world around him, Penn became a critic of the reigning order in England. Always a searcher, he converted to Quakerism after discovering his Inner Light. He rejected the life of compliance and comfort that his father had cleared for him. Instead, he embraced the faith’s tenets of individual introspection and communal harmony. Imprisoned and exiled for his beliefs, Penn fought for years to regain his stature. By 1681, Penn had won the favor of Charles II’s court, and with it, the colony he would call Pennsylvania—or Penn’s woods, named not for him, but for his father, Admiral William Penn, whose past service to the Crown the younger Penn had leveraged to secure a colony.⁶

The ritual Penn performed outside the fort was the culmination of his work. The “turf, twig, and water” ritual was an ancient one, dating to the days of feudalism when warring English lords needed a way to show their lieges that they had surrendered their powers to another. Now, centuries later, the tradition, known more formally as the livery of seisin, found a new purpose in the New World as a symbolic means to establish sovereignty over acquired land. Penn’s acceptance of the keys and the gifts signaled the dawn of a new era. Harkening back to a lord’s feudal controls over people and territory, it also showed just how much power proprietors could have in the colonies they possessed.⁷

The symbolism fit the circumstances. Charles II granted Penn a colony from the Dutch territory the Crown acquired in 1664. Charles’s gift made Penn the largest landowner in the English Empire, save for the king himself. Penn’s charter gave him an expanse that stretched from the Delaware River five degrees west and between the fortieth and forty-third parallels in breadth, more than twenty-five million square acres of land. Charles had carved this territory out of the holdings of his brother, the Duke of York, who held a tract of land that ran from the southern tip of modern-day Delaware all the way north, through New York City, to Canada. With the transfer of twigs, water, and earth at the fort, the Duke of York’s magistrates recognized the shift of sovereignty from their previous master to their new one.⁸

The ritual also encapsulated the very peculiar nature of a proprietary government. In proprietary colonies, individuals—in this case William Penn—were vested with inordinate power. As the person who controlled the waterways, land, and woods, Penn’s powers resembled those of a feudal lord. Likewise, his responsibilities were similar to those that lords had to their tenants. Penn—and, after him, his sons—would dispense land, control the courts, create governments, and form a very personal relationship with colonists based on an allegiance that resembled the loyalties tenants held toward their manorial lords. Every landowner, for instance, was to provide the proprietary with a quitrent, an annual payment given in exchange for the security and prosperity the proprietorship’s good governance provided. This reciprocal relationship in which colonists gave their loyalty in exchange for protection had feudal roots, but it also mimicked the bond that knitted subjects to the English Crown in the early modern world. Indeed, it is what held all colonial governments together.

The ritual also contained an implicit statement about Penn’s vision for the future of the colony. Although the colony contained only a few fledgling communities hugging the Delaware River in 1682, Penn planned for it to realize its full geographic expanse, if not within his lifetime then certainly in his descendants’. Indeed, he was well on his way before he arrived. By the time he left England, he had sold nearly 300,000 acres of land to more than 300 individuals, most of whom were fellow Quakers and many of whom were of middling means but great aspiration.⁹

Indeed, Penn kept expansion in mind in everything he designed, including his government. When Penn arrived on the banks of the Delaware, he carried two founding documents that he hoped would turn his expansionist dreams into a reality: a Frame of Government and twenty laws called “The Concessions” that would regulate the behavior of the first settlers. In the Frame, he transferred most of his political powers to his settlers by creating two legislative bodies and establishing a weak executive that he intended to grow even weaker over time. The two major governing bodies were representative bodies, the Assembly, similar in theory to a Parliament, and the more elite Provincial Council, similar to an upper House of Lords. Penn vested the Provincial Council with the power to control all facets of colonial growth. In consultation with the governor, the Provincial Council was to “settle and order the situation of all cities, ports, and market towns in every county, modeling therein all public buildings, streets, and market places, and shall appoint all necessary roads, and high-ways in the province.” The Assembly, meanwhile, would grow alongside the colony to five hundred members, proportionally represented by the hundreds (an English term to define an administrative region within a county) and counties.¹⁰

Penn also outlined the process through which land acquisition would happen. In his “Concessions,” he declared that the proprietor was the only person who could purchase land from Native Americans. He was aware that Native peoples in other colonies complained of deceptive land practices, and the strife in these colonies often frustrated English imperialists’ plans for their colonial domains. Penn believed that direct negotiations between Indian groups and himself (or his representatives in his absence) would create more formalized and peaceful diplomatic protocols for acquiring land. Such procedures also reduced the chance for individuals to hold competing titles. By purchasing all land directly from Indians through formal diplomatic treaties and alliances, the transfer would thus rest on the theory of consent facilitated through diplomacy between the proprietor and Indian nations. Penn’s approach to land also revealed something else about his vision for expansion. While he was willing to defer to colonists in governing settled areas, Penn’s land policy meant he controlled the acquisition of all new territory.¹¹

There was one thing wrong with the ritual. While Penn planned to assert his rights to all of the land outlined in his charter, he intended this growth to occur peacefully. The livery of seisin, however, occurred at a fort, a symbol of war, militarization, violence, and all the emotions such a structure conjured: fear, anger, hatred, and desperation. Penn wanted none of these things in his realm. As he promised his Indian neighbors, “The people who come with me are a just, plain, and honest people that neither make war upon others nor fear war from others because they will be just.” With his designs for an ordered expansion through just treatment of Indians and good governance, Penn expected to build bridges, roads, and markets connecting people, not forts that divided. There would be no frontiers in Penn’s woods.¹²

Penn knew that good relations with Native Americans were the foundation upon which his promise of peace rested. He used the Concessions to reinforce this pledge by regulating interactions between colonists and Native Americans. Penn acknowledged that disputes over trading practices had led to conflict in other colonies. In Pennsylvania, he wanted to create a means of guaranteeing open and fair trade by regulating it. He limited trading to specific areas designated as public markets, mandated that all traders receive a license through the governor, required all goods to be inspected and stamped by colonial officials to protect against fraud, and placed heavy fines on those dealing in “goods not being good.”¹³

He also knew that the daily interactions of cross-cultural contact caused tensions. He thus declared that Indians should receive the same protections of the law that colonists enjoyed. If any settler wronged an Indian, Penn warned that the colonist should expect to “incur the same penalty of the law, as if he had committed it against his fellow planter.” Penn seemed particularly worried that settlers might seek retribution if they felt wronged by an Indian. Penn warned that under no circumstances were settlers to take the law into their own hands, stating that colonists “shall not be his own judge upon the Indian, but he shall make his complaint to the governor of the province, or his lieutenant, or deputy, or some inferior magistrate near him.” Penn also proposed a novel way to handle the inevitable conflicts that would arise between Indians and colonists: juries composed of equal numbers of Indians and colonists. Penn’s goal was to create an environment of just treatment that avoided rash action.¹⁴

Penn’s laws revealed his political acumen. He was a visionary, a theorist, and an optimist, but he was also a realist. Penn saw trade as an opportunity for both unity and friction. In theory, Penn believed fair dealing and brisk trade would help bring colonists and Indians together. In practice, he recognized that intercultural relationships were difficult and that colonists might try to defraud Indians of goods and lands. Penn the realist visionary anticipated this human inclination and saw government as the only means of safeguarding against it.

Penn applied this same foresight to controlling expansion. He envisioned developing any newly purchased land through a Land Office staffed by a Superintendent and various deputies. He would build some manors, but he would sell other land to individuals, most likely through a public auction that distributed lands fairly and evenly. All landowners would pay an annual quitrent to the proprietor for the protection and prosperity that proprietary offices provided them. The quitrent would not be onerous, but it would give Penn some compensation for his troubles and allow him to continue to develop the colony.

All of this planning would promote prosperity, peace, and stability. It was neither utopian nor cynical. Like so much else Penn had done to prepare, the plan sounded good in theory and appeared realistic from the drawing rooms in London.

“Be Soe Good and Kind a Neighbor”

Soon after arriving in his colony, Penn discovered a challenge to his expansionary vision: the imagined borders outlined in his charter conflicted with those of his English neighbors. Many of these overlapping jurisdictions existed only in the abstract because colonial settlement still hugged the eastern seaboard. No one, for instance, seemed to notice that Virginia’s claims to the Ohio River were the same as Pennsylvania’s, or that Connecticut might assert ownership to parts of the territory. Such was not the case when it came to Penn’s southern neighbor, Lord Baltimore, the proprietor of Maryland. Penn’s charter gave Penn rights to what is today Delaware. Lord Baltimore, however, grew enraged by Penn’s ownership, claiming that Marylanders already legally possessed it. Indeed, Baltimore argued that much of the land granted to Penn, including even Philadelphia, was already his. He also began to grumble that Penn’s western plans interfered with his own. If Baltimore’s understanding proved correct, then Penn’s dreams for his colony’s future would die.¹⁵

The dispute revealed the difficulties imperial planners faced when building an empire on a vast tract of foreign land. For those who sat an ocean away and drew lines on maps of North America, the specific location of borders looked clear and a minor detail when they saw so much open space on the parchments sitting before them. But for those whose personal wealth was tied to these lands, the ambiguities surrounding a few square miles were hard to accept. Baltimore and Penn thus marshalled legal arguments to justify their dueling claims and then looked to England for clarity.

The main sticking point in the south had to do with whether or not Europeans had settled on the southern portions of the Delaware River before English ownership. If Europeans (notably the Swedes and then the Dutch) had, then the land would have transferred to the Crown after the English defeated the Dutch in 1664 and the territory would thus be Penn’s. Baltimore argued that the land was never in European hands and was rightfully his because his charter gave him the right to all undeveloped areas of the Delmarva Peninsula (the name for the spit of land that Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia now share). If Baltimore’s argument won out in English courts, then Penn would lose the only waterway that provided his colony with access to the Atlantic. At stake was the future of each colony. The outcome would also shape the English Empire in this burgeoning region.¹⁶

The second dispute regarded the fortieth degree, or the northern border of Maryland, and proved much trickier to resolve. Here too the disagreement was over a river—this time, the Susquehanna—that both proprietors saw as a gateway to the west. Without the river, Penn worried that his western lands would become nothing more than “a dead lump of earth” because Baltimore would control all trade. Penn’s charter stated that his colony’s southern border was the “beginning of the fortieth degree.” According to Penn’s maps, his colony started below where the Susquehanna River met the Chesapeake, giving him the entirety of the potentially lucrative river. Baltimore’s charter, in contrast, contained the passage that his colony went up to “that part of the Bay of Delaware … which lieth under the fortieth degree.” Today, such phrases may seem very specific designations, and indeed, they were meant to be exactly that. In an era of poor instrumentation and mapmaking, however, such descriptions proved troublesome. And this too was no small matter. Whoever controlled the Susquehanna would control trade with and expansion into the interior.¹⁷

Once Penn caught wind of Baltimore’s concerns, he tried to settle their differences in a series of meetings. He asked Baltimore “to be soe good and kind a neighbour as to afford him but a back door” to his colony. Penn’s friendly talk won him no favors. Baltimore appeared displeased and uninterested—if not downright hostile—at every meeting. And he had just cause. Many people at the time and quite a few historians since believed that by the letter of the law, Baltimore had a stronger case in both disputes. Penn, however, disagreed and pressed Baltimore on both fronts.¹⁸

Matters came to a head when Penn and Baltimore met in New Castle in August 1683. Their relations had become so poisonous that they could not even agree on how to conduct their negotiations. Penn wanted the two to adopt diplomatic protocols that resembled the way two nations negotiated treaties. He proposed that both men retire to separate houses with their respective advisers by their sides and then “treat by way of written memorials,” so their words could not have “the mistakes or abuses that may follow from ill designs, or ill memory.” Baltimore declined this invitation by blaming poor weather, but it was clear he had little interest in negotiating. After this failed meeting, Baltimore began issuing proclamations in the contested zone, offering more land for cheaper prices than Pennsylvania in an attempt to build a solid bulwark of loyal Marylanders who rejected Penn’s authority.¹⁹

The race was on to see who could establish the strongest claims to the territory. Penn, realizing that Baltimore rejected Penn’s own admittedly self-serving sense of neighborliness, began to adopt Baltimore’s more cutthroat tactics in order to bolster his legal standing in an English court. In October 1683, just two months after the failed treaty, Penn traveled to the Susquehanna River to secure an Indian deed to this contested area. Penn’s “purchase of the mouth of the Susquehanna River” was one of the shortest and vaguest of his original purchases. He purchased the land from Machaloha, a Delaware whose right to sell it scholars have deemed “questionable.” Penn ignored any doubts, however, reasoning that he could use the purchase to show that Indians invested with the original right to the land recognized his ownership. As his biographers have pointed out, Penn’s purpose was “to solidify his claim and to notify the Lords of Trade,” the imperial organization that mediated disputes between colonies. Driven by a feud with his neighbor and guided by his understanding of the precedents imperial officials might privilege in a case before them, Penn took the actions he believed necessary to secure his domain.²⁰

Figure 3. William Penn’s first purchases of Indian lands, shown here in aggregate. One of Penn’s first objectives was to secure title to the land bordering the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers, believing that control of both arteries was essential to the future prosperity of his colony. Machaloha’s grant, the approximate extent of which is noted above, overlapped with other purchases of Penn’s. Penn made his purchase from Machaloha under duress, fearing that if he did not secure a claim to the land near the mouth of the Susquehanna from a Native representative, Lord Baltimore would win this valuable waterway. After Pencak and Richter, eds., Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods (University Park, PA, 2004).

Although the Susquehanna purchase instructed all settlers to “behave themselves justly and lovingly” toward the Indians, the dubious nature of the purchase suggests that when English colonies competed over land, Penn, like others, would push aside Native concerns. Indeed, such times laid bare the driving assumption of Penn’s enterprise: expansion was essential to colonial success in the Middle Colonies. In this early case, Penn surrendered some of his principles to preserve his larger vision. Indeed, Penn may have considered this treaty simply a short-term expedient that did not compromise his core principles because in 1701, he negotiated a new purchase with the Conestoga Indians, the group with the strongest claim to the land he had purchased from Machaloha.²¹

“The Securitie of the Fronteers”

Penn left for England aboard the Endeavour in 1684 to defend his case against Baltimore. He departed feeling confident, his optimism about the future of the colony buoyed by signs of success. Just before he left, he wrote his close friend John Alloway a letter brimming with enthusiasm, bragging that Philadelphia had about six hundred people and hundreds of homes. The city supported a tavern, and colonists constructed a three-hundred-foot-long dock that jutted out into the Delaware River to accommodate the more than forty-five ships arriving annually. Penn’s expansionary dreams were also coming to fruition. He boasted to another friend that Pennsylvania would eclipse its rival Maryland within seven years, and he told another with a little pride, if not vanity, “I must say, without vanity, I have led the greatest colony into America that ever any man did upon a private credit.”²²

Matters back in England gave Penn more reason for cheer. Penn and Baltimore presented their case to the Lords of Trade, the body the Crown designated to mediate such disputes. Baltimore hoped to secure the Lower Counties and receive recognition of the fortieth degree as the boundary between the two colonies. Much to his chagrin, the Lords of Trade decided largely in Penn’s favor. They recognized Penn’s claim to the Lower Counties, thus ensuring he had access to the Delaware River. They refused to draw the exact boundary between the Lower Counties and Maryland, however, leaving the proprietors responsible for hashing it out. Moreover, the question of the fortieth degree remained unaddressed, largely because, with Pennsylvanian settlement still hugging the banks of the Delaware and Marylanders focusing more on their southern lands, this dispute seemed too far removed.²³

Things then took a turn for the worse for Penn when in 1688 zones of invasion—that is, frontiers—began to appear on the geopolitical landscape of North America when England became embroiled in a war with France, known as King William’s War in North America. This war was the first that the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, founded on the principle of pacifism, had to confront. Although Pennsylvania itself was well insulated from the fighting, imperial officials expected Pennsylvania’s government would aid its fellow colonies that were waging a war. For Penn, rumors circulated that he was a secret agent for the Catholic belligerent. He eventually faced charges of treason in England. The Crown, understandably, revoked his charter. Though treason was the key reason for its revocation, Penn’s pacifism was also a concern. The Crown worried that a pacifist colony would fail to provide the military protection for its frontiers that was expected of its colonial governments.²⁴

Indeed, the colony’s wartime behavior proved that the administration’s fears had merit and that frontiers were something Pennsylvanians took pride in avoiding. In 1692, the Crown wrote to Benjamin Fletcher, New York’s governor who also temporarily replaced Penn as Pennsylvania’s governor, instructing him that New York’s neighbors should offer defensive aid. The geopolitics of frontiers drove the request. Albany was the chief frontier in England’s grand imperial vision of its North American domain because it was the site at which they expected a French invasion. Without New York’s successful “defence of Albany, its frontiers against the French,” the Crown warned, the English colonies to the south would “not be able to live, but in Garrison.” A shared concern about frontiers was thus supposed to compel colonies to cooperate. Further, the Crown’s orders revealed something about life on frontiers: they were militarized zones—“garrisons”—in which people lived in constant fear of invasion.²⁵

Fletcher traveled to Pennsylvania to make his case for men and money, noting that “the securitie of the fronteers” in New York depended on Pennsylvania’s support. Such a request, New Yorkers believed, was a pittance compared with what they were already doing in Pennsylvania’s interest because the strength of New York’s frontiers secured Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania deferred, confirming for imperial officials that Pennsylvania, under its current regime, was incapable of fulfilling one of its chief responsibilities to the empire: managing frontiers. As a frustrated Fletcher wrote to the Board of Trade in 1694, “They [Quaker Pennsylvanians] will rather die than resist with carnal weapons,” a sentiment that portended the fractious future of frontier politics in Pennsylvania.²⁶

“Better Adapted to Answer the Present Circumstances and Conditions”

Penn eventually won his charter back in 1694 as the war wound down. He then prepared to return to Pennsylvania. Continuing strife with his personal affairs, however, kept Penn away until 1699, when he finally visited again. Penn found a much-changed colony when he arrived. In his absence, Philadelphia had undergone explosive growth and had begun to look more like a town than some small colonial outpost. There were many taverns, a courthouse, and all sorts of houses, from mansions of stone and slate to ramshackle huts. Within two years of his return, the population of the city passed two thousand souls, making it one of the largest settlements in British North America. Most of the new arrivals were Quakers attracted by Penn’s promise of a refuge that protected liberty of conscience and provided a just government. The economy boomed as well. When Penn left in 1684, trade to the colony was just dribbling in. By 1699, the trickle had become a strong and steady flow.²⁷

Two issues preoccupied Penn’s time in the colony, both of which dealt with establishing the colony he wished to have. First, he was concerned about Indian affairs. Violence between Indians and colonists on the western fringes of settlement were fraying his once strong ties to Pennsylvania’s Native neighbors. Strengthening these relations was a top priority. He did so because he wanted to keep the peace that was so important to his Quaker faith. He also knew that losing Indian allies on the Susquehanna, which seemed possible, could hurt his expansionary visions. The Indian settlement on the banks of the river was a bustling hub of trade and travel. It was here that strife seemed most pressing because Penn knew that this site, with its access to the vast interior and its trade networks, was a key part of his future plans.²⁸

The Conestoga, the most influential of the many groups then residing in the Indian town, were the focus of Penn’s diplomatic foray. In April, a delegation of Conestogas joined by the Shawnees, another powerful group on the Susquehanna, hiked to Philadelphia to reestablish good relations with Penn. Penn reassured his neighbors that his intentions remained unchanged. He promised that they would receive “the full and free privileges and immunities of all the said laws as any other inhabitants,” extending the same protection that Penn’s proprietorship gave to all colonists to include the Indians present. Penn also strengthened trade agreements and regulations. Penn’s words convinced the Conestogas to agree to a deal that would last for over sixty years, only ending because the Paxton Boys killed it. The Conestoga’s representatives ceded control of the eastern banks to Penn so long as they could continue to inhabit their settlement without interference. By doing so, they gave Penn even better title to the land in dispute with Baltimore, and they secured a piece of independence from colonization efforts. Penn then did a remarkable thing. To show his allies that the two were truly of “one head and one heart” who could “live in true friendship and amity as one people,” he visited their community for several days, also taking time to scout out its potential as a future site for a Pennsylvania trading city.²⁹

With Indian affairs on stronger footing, Penn turned to the second issue that troubled him. The government in Philadelphia had spun out of his control. In the years since he had left, the colony went through three different governments. From the moment Penn landed in 1682, colonists complained that his initial Frame with its large Assembly was too unwieldy for colonial life. In the years since Penn’s initial visit, they also had grown anxious about the proprietor’s powers, especially his right to collect quitrents, what they saw as a feudal form of taxation that had no place in their colony. Penn saw things differently, admitting to a friend “though I desire to extend religious freedom, yet I want some recompense for my trouble.” In 1701, when Penn returned, the colony was governed by an unofficial frame of government that colonists put in place as a temporary solution after Penn’s charter was returned. One of Penn’s objectives on his return was to regain some control by creating a new frame of government.³⁰

Penn had changed in these years as well. Most notably, he had grown more jealous of his proprietary powers as he fended off assaults on his charter and fretted about finances. He worried about what would become of his colony and of his interest in it if he ceded too much authority to the colonists who, to his eyes, seemed more interested in their private affairs than in the vision he held for the colony. Penn often expressed frustration at colonists’ intransigence throughout these years—once pleading with colonists to show more deference, writing “for the love of God, me, and the poor country, be not so governmentish; so noisy and open in your dissatisfaction” and another time flippantly threatening to sell the colony to the Crown. He wanted to draft a new and official constitution that better reflected his own vision for the colony and preserved more of his proprietary authority than the previous frames.³¹

English affairs once again intruded on Penn’s visit, however, and ruined his plans to draft a new frame more acceptable to him. In 1701, with still no frame agreed upon, reliable reports reached Penn that he might again lose the colony to the Crown. If there was no official governing document in place when Penn lost his charter, then the Crown could design the government any way it pleased, which certainly would have spelled the end of Penn’s vision and threatened the freedom of conscience that the predominantly Quaker colonists enjoyed. While rushing to leave for England, Penn decided to let colonists design the document as they wished. He asked a select group of leading colonists to write the document “quickly.” Penn did so because he knew that colonists needed a formal frame of government in place to protect them should a royal government replace a proprietary one.³²

Penn’s decision to give his colonists carte blanche produced a constitution unlike any other, though its form represented the logical culmination of the political culture that had developed within the proprietary colony. After an initial period of warm feelings toward the proprietor, colonists by 1701 saw the primary political problem in Pennsylvania as a struggle between the people and their interest and the proprietor and his prerogative. In each frame that followed Penn’s first one, colonists pushed for greater power in the Assembly at the expense of proprietary authority. If anything, while Penn was away, fear of proprietary rule—if not of the proprietor himself—had lodged in the minds of most colonists, and they saw a legislature as a check against the potential for a grasping proprietorship.

The government they designed in 1701 enshrined this struggle. The Frame of 1701 went further than any other frame in empowering the Assembly. Previously, the colonial government had an upper house called the Provincial Council that exerted strong legislative powers, but the new frame transformed this body into an advisory board appointed by the governor. Instead of the bicameral structure Penn had always preferred, the colonists wanted a unicameral legislature composed of four representatives from each county. The framers concentrated their interests in this single legislature because it would allow the people to stay united in their struggles against a proprietor or, if Penn lost the government, a royal governor.³³

People at the time and historians since have commended the Frame of 1701 for being innovative and democratic, and point to its longevity as a sign of its success. It was, as its preamble declared, “better adapted to answer the present circumstances and conditions” of colonists. But along with significant changes, there were important continuities that historians have missed and that left the colony ill-prepared for future circumstances. For one thing, the proprietor still possessed an immense amount of potential power, even as the new Frame took a great deal of his immediate powers. Most of this residual power rested in the proprietor’s control over expansion. The proprietor had at his disposal a land office, a surveyor-general, and deputy surveyors. Every landowner would need to work through these offices to have land legally recognized. The proprietor also continued to levy annual quitrents from landowners and could use force to evict squatters.³⁴

Aside from such strong control over land ownership, the proprietary branch managed many of the administrative and coercive powers of the government. The charter conferred to the proprietor enormous powers over commerce and its regulation. The institution could collect export and import duties and handle all licensing and fee collection, and claimed the right to control travel on all waterways, including the sole right to license ferries. Such revenue was not insignificant. In 1765, the income from the collection of fees was so great that the proprietor could, if necessary, pay for the lieutenant governor’s salary without having to rely on any Assembly support. As captain-general, the proprietor was also responsible for diplomacy with natives and military defenses in the time of war. Finally, the proprietor appointed the judges for the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and, of course, the lieutenant governor, who would serve as the proprietor in residence in Philadelphia.³⁵

The proprietor’s administrative power was even stronger on the local level because of his power to appoint county officials. The county was the main political unit of Pennsylvania. Each county had a series of offices meant to enforce law and to provide a level of local self-government. Each county had only two solely elective county offices: the three county commissioners and six tax assessors. When it came to county commissioners, the proprietor often appointed the first county commissioners, but after the county was formally established, these offices became elective. Beyond that, nearly every other office—at least ten—either was appointed directly by proprietary officials or was elective-appointive. Within the county, the proprietor directly appointed the recorder of deeds (an office, one historian notes, that was “of great significance for the daily and continuing life of the county”), the register of wills, the prothonotary, clerks of the courts, and sealer of weights and measures. The sheriff and coroner were elective-appointive because the proprietor had to select from the two highest vote getters. Notably, the Assembly had the power of only one appointment: the unpopular collector of excise. The proprietor’s power to appoint these offices resided primarily in powers implied in the Frame of 1701. In previous frames, the elected Provincial Council had controlled many of these appointments, but because the Frame of 1701 did not explicitly state how each office was to be appointed, the proprietor retained the powers the council once held.³⁶

The most powerful of the proprietor’s local appointments was the justice of the peace. The justices convened the three major courts that handled legal disputes and law enforcement: the Court of Quarter Sessions, the Court of Common Pleas, and the Orphan’s Court. Through these courts, the justices oversaw the building of roads, the punishment of crimes, the mediation of civil disputes, and the care of the poor. They also held additional appointive powers through their position on the Court of Quarter Sessions. The court appointed town constables in the same way the proprietor appointed the sheriff and all town overseers of the poor. With so many roles, most of which dealt with the enforcement of law, the justice of the peace often served as the colonial government’s chief representative in areas of new settlement. The final important proprietary office on the county level was the county surveyor who was appointed by the surveyor-general, who was himself a direct proprietary appointment.³⁷

All totaled, through direct proprietary appointment, elective-appointment, or appointment by proprietary institutions like the Court of Quarter Sessions, nearly every official on the county level was a proprietary office and those that were not were often elected on the local level. For the most part, the direct appointments took the form of political patronage, especially as the colony developed. Edward Shippen described the offices as “lucrative posts,” and he personally benefited from his close alliance with the proprietorship. In fact, many justices of the peace held concurrent offices, providing for a very healthy salary. Even the elective-appointive offices had the feel of patronage. The lieutenant governor did occasionally select the lowest vote getter for sheriff if he was thought to be better able to serve the proprietorship’s interest, and the lieutenant governor could withhold payment for services if he disagreed with the way the sheriff performed.³⁸

It would be a mistake to diminish the centrality of these proprietary officials to creating the bonds upon which a governing contract was based. Rather, these local officeholders played a crucial role in connecting local communities to the sometimes distant colonial government. These proprietary appointees lived in the towns and counties they served and had to interact with their neighbors and peers frequently in both official and unofficial capacities. In areas in which the Assembly’s role was weak, local administrators served as what one historian described as the “transmitters” and “translators” of local concerns to proprietary officials back east much as representatives were to do in the Assembly. These local proprietary representatives were thus the conduit through which colonists in newly established communities could negotiate with their government. Indeed, as the colony dealt with expanding its legal and political jurisdiction in the years that followed the Frame’s drafting, the retained administrative and policing powers of the proprietor grew in significance and served as the most powerful institutions in new settlers’ political lives.³⁹

If most of these county, land, and legal offices were part of the proprietary institution and thus under the control of the proprietor, the Assembly served as the other major institution of the colonial government because it operated largely free from proprietary influence because all of its members were elected by and served to protect the interest of their constituents. The legislature had a variety of powers at its disposal to check the proprietor and to shape official policy. It could pass laws and taxes, regulate commerce and colonial behavior and distribute public funds on special projects.

In theory, these two institutions formed the foundation for the colonial government. In theory, at least, they would work together to advance the colony’s interests, with the Assembly passing initiatives that the governor could execute through his control of the administrative powers of government. But they were also independent institutions that could be at odds with what direction the colonial project should take. Moreover, their decidedly separate spheres of influence meant that institutional rivalries could develop, as the first decades of the colony showed. In the decades to come, as Pennsylvania grew and the proprietor exercised these retained powers, the rivalry between Assembly and proprietor would become acute once again. In time, in many areas of recent settlement, proprietary power would supersede that of the legislature, much to the Assembly members’ dismay.

Indeed, the rush to write a frame in 1701 also caused another oversight that only made the inherent tension between these two institutions worse. In every previous frame in which Penn or his representatives participated, the document outlined a plan for how the representative institutions of the colony would change over time because Penn anticipated growth. The Frame in no way addressed what Penn saw as an inevitable political development: political expansion and population growth. This ambiguity created uncertainty between both institutions and among colonists that, in time, destabilized the government as people fought for the political power to fill this hole. While Penn had reservations about the document, he accepted it with the hopes that it could be changed if he held onto the proprietorship.⁴⁰

Before Penn left, he decided to take one final, controversial step to try to preserve his colony from a Crown takeover. The Crown was facing another war with France. While Penn remained a dogged pacifist in his personal beliefs, he proved less doctrinaire in his governmental policy once he realized that the Crown might revoke his charter if his colony proved recalcitrant in defending imperial frontiers. In 1701, as Penn prepared to return to England to protect his colony, he aligned his stance on frontiers to fit imperial prerogatives.⁴¹

Penn made his case for raiding defense monies to the Assembly before he left for England. He had received a personal request from the Crown to raise funds to support New York’s frontiers, which Penn thought might make for a strong inducement for the legislature to act. In a speech to the Assembly, he described New York “as a frontier government” because its vulnerability left it “exposed to a much greater expence in proportion to the other colonies” due to potential invasion by Indian and French enemies. Penn asked the legislature to offer financial support to this “frontier government,” which he argued would serve the interests of the empire without contravening Quaker principles of peace. Aid to a neighboring colony was not the same as active support of war, he contended. The Assembly, meanwhile, remained unyielding: New York would go without Pennsylvania help.⁴²

From the colony’s founding, then, government support for and policy toward frontiers, competition with neighbors over land, proprietary oversight of Indian diplomacy, and tensions between the Assembly and proprietor defined the colony’s politics. After Penn departed in 1701 and succeeded in defending himself in England, the colony settled into a period of relative peace and harmony. No one seemed to notice that the much-vaunted Frame of 1701 contained the seeds for the colony’s demise. Indeed, the founding’s fatal flaw—the failure of the Frame of 1701 to create an explicit means for the government to handle expansion and to manage zones that could become frontiers—remained submerged until the colony experienced the growth Penn so deserved.