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7 1 “A Rude Place and an Unpolisht Man” William Penn and the Nature of Pennsylvania When Pennsylvania was in its planning stages, William Petty was one of the many figures to offer William Penn advice on establishing his new colony. Petty was in the process of developing a mode of inquiry he called “political arithmetick,” which explained national power in demographic terms. In keeping with that premise, he suggested that Penn plant the future Philadelphia on a “peece of land . . . chosen for it’s situation, healthfulness, and fertility.” Both men, like their contemporaries, understood that a healthy location was a critical factor in the success or failure of their ventures. When Penn invited Thomas Holme to survey the newly granted land and lay out plots of land for purchase, he therefore ordered him to lay the city out where it was “most navigable, high, dry and healthy.”1 Penn further directed that land be set aside for a “large Towne or Citty in the most convenient place upon the River for health and Navigation,” again stressing the importance of both commercial and physiological concerns. The meaning of healthy land, however, was tied to a complex bundle of ideas about nature, medicine, geography, climate, agriculture, and human difference. Penn’s understanding of how to identify and create such spaces guided his approach to settling the province and to governing it, setting the stage for conflict with settlers and constituents who did not share his assessments of the local conditions or his priorities for the city’s development. It was far from clear that any city could provide both wealth and well-being; most of the era’s major cities were filthy, pestilential places. Penn’s own sentiments were haunted by the living memory of London beset by plague and conflagration. At stake was more than just the proprietor’s power, but broader anxieties about whether English life would survive the journey to America, whether people made their environments or were made by them, and whether commerce and a healthy constitution could coexist.2 8 “A Rude Place and an Unpolisht Man” William Penn and the Problem of the City Penn delighted in the rough-hewn charm of his new holdings, “for a rude place & an unpolisht man cant but agree together,” and understanding his dream for Philadelphia begins with the dreamer who saw himself reflected in the land.3 As the historian Mary Dunn has observed, Penn’s complexity too often “remains hidden beneath the broad-brimmed hat.” He was a tireless champion of religious freedom, and he maintained a sincere belief in the possibility of government built on persuasion rather than coercion. He idealized rural virtue and plain living. And yet, in the words of another scholar, he was also “essentially a man of action, restless and enterprising, at times a courtier and a politician, who loved handsome dress, lived well and lavishly.” He was an aristocrat-proprietor with feudal pretensions to manorial privilege, who embraced rusticity more in theory than in practice.4 Penn’s father, Admiral William Penn, had supported the Stuart bid to reclaim the English throne, and in payment of that debt, Charles II granted the younger William an enormous 45,000 square mile tract, carved from the even vaster lands seized from the Dutch and administered by the Duke of York. Penn had managed his family’s plantations in Ireland and invested in the West Jersey colony. But the domains named for his father, and granted for his father’s actions, came with far more expansive territory and far more expansive powers to shape its society according to Penn’s vision. That vision did not include cities. Penn counted himself among the rural gentry, and he shared their characteristic distrust of urban life. Of “Citys and towns of concourse beware,” he warned his wife, for they were dangerous to body and soul.5 By the seventeenth century, it was obvious that cities generated health risks unknown in rural communities, hazards growing impossible to ignore. Chests tightened at the sulfurous smoke pouring from the coal-burning furnaces of protoindustrial workshops. Stomachs turned at the stench of butcher stalls. Eyes watered from the acrid by-products of “noxious trades” like soap-making, candle manufacture, and leather tanning. Confronted by such hazards, improvers and medical men searched in earnest for explanations and solutions. The naturalist John Evelyn (1620–1706) greeted the 1660 coronation of Charles II with his Fumifugium, an essay on the dire condition of London’s...

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