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21 2 “An Infancy of Government” Population, Authority, and the Problem of Proprietorship When he was still hopeful about the future of his infant province, William Penn reminded his councilors that it was not “wealth or trade that Makes a government great,” but “sobriety, Peace, temperance, labour and equal administration.” Pennsylvania’s “climat [was] as fitt” for those qualities “as any other in the world,” but atmospheres alone could not guarantee the success of Penn’s vision. Colonizing required hard work, and labor required the bodies to do it. Penn hoped that his colony would be peopled with “men of universal spirits,” who would harmoniously contribute to the shared project of improvement. Both inclination and obligation limited Penn’s ability to impose his plan against the will of his colonists, and when he departed the colony in 1684, he was confident that his plan was solid enough and his settlers public-spirited enough that his direct supervision was unnecessary . But people ambitious enough to traverse the ocean were unwilling to accede meekly to proprietary demands, and the proprietor ultimately found himself unable to make any demands at all upon a population that came to his colony for their own reasons. With his authority further attenuated by distance, Penn could only rebuke his colonists and lament his impotence as Philadelphia came to embody his most hated aspects of both wilderness and city.1 Populating Pennsylvania Throughout England’s imperial venture in America, colonial promoters unanimously agreed upon a simple truth: without colonists, colonies were nothing but paper claims. Settlers were “the foundation and improvement 22 “An Infancy of Government” of all plantations.”2 They paid fees and rents to investors, ensuring a steady stream of income. They deterred rival claimants and defended the territory against aggression. And they cultivated the land, harnessing natural resources for colonial profit. As one Barbados colonist put it, “a plantation . . . is worth nothing unless they be a good store of hands upon it.”3 Moreover, settlement validated territorial claims. Challenging the Iberian doctrine of papal donation, English imperialists argued that no title could be legitimate without “effective occupation.” Well into the eighteenth century, many English land grants were legally contingent upon inhabitation and improvement. And so, from Roanoke to Ulster, Jamestown to Boston, every attempt at developing English colonies was accompanied by a desperate effort to recruit English colonists.4 Early colonial promoters benefited from the widespread sense that England had too many people competing for too few jobs. Until the English Civil War, most of the nation’s political leaders viewed a large population as a burden, and every new birth as a new mouth to feed. The enclosure of common lands and the decline of the cloth trade set throngs of the displaced in search of employment, traveling across the country to any place work could be found. They crowded into the seaports, alarming the inhabitants with the prospect of discord and disease. Most especially, they flocked to London.5 The antipopulationist argument gathered strength in England, where the labor supply outstripped available land, but colonization was justified on the idea that the Americas were underpopulated and native title annulled by the absence of cultivating labor. George Peckham (d. 1608) prefaced his plea for plantations with a poem by Benjamin Hawkins evoking Englishmen who “shuffled in such pinching bonds, that very breath doth lack, And for the want of place they crawl one o’er another’s back.” Advocates of colonial projects, both near at hand in Ireland and across the sea in the Americas, promised that new lands would relieve the capital’s “ouerflowing multitude of inhabitants” that, like “too much bloud in the body,” would “infect the whole Cittie with plague and pouertie.”6 The Galenic analogy underscored the promise of mutual benefit. Transplantation would provide a colony with the new blood it needed to cultivate its crops and defend its borders, while freeing England from a restive population of landless and jobless vagabonds. Moreover, this venting would not only relieve pressure in the short term but also lead to greater long-term employment by creating markets abroad for English products.7 No less than its predecessors, Pennsylvania needed a stream of colonists to sustain itself, but much had changed in the century separating Peckham and Penn. Where the earlier generation promised outlets into which an overpopulated nation could channel its surplus people, Penn assured his sovereign that Pennsylvania would be no drain, but rather a “nursery of men,” promoting the “increase...

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