Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania

Chapter 3. Words and Things: Contesting Civic Identity in Early Pennsylvania

c h a p te r 3 Words and Things Contesting Civic Identity in Early Pennsylvania from may to August 1685, William Penn sent a series of letters to Pennsylvania conveying his increasing frustration at the course of events in his American colony. They addressed three major themes. First, he worried about the growing reputation of lawlessness in the colony, noting the ‘‘great complaints ’’ he had heard against the ‘‘Court of Philadelphia’’ regarding the adjudication of some controversial cases. ‘‘Such rumors,’’ he wrote, ‘‘doe mightily disserve the province’’ and damage its reputation in England among potential investors.1 Penn also expressed concern about reports emerging of scandalous behavior among leading Friends, including an unnamed ‘‘business’’ involving John Songhurst that was garnering public attention. Here, too, he feared his correspondents insufficiently cognizant of the dangers of allowing such news to spread, writing, ‘‘Dear Friends, no good is got by such publick righteousness , unless the evil be so too.’’2 The airing of Quaker dirty laundry in public —especially when so many leaders within the Quaker Meeting also served as leading political figures—benefited no one; ‘‘publick righteousness’’ thus potentially threatened the legitimacy of Pennsylvania’s political leadership. The proprietor worried most of all about conflict in the colony’s governing institutions. Though ‘‘I am sorry at heart for yr Anemositys,’’ he implored his correspondents ‘‘for the love of god, me & the poor Country, be not so Governmentish, so Noisy & open in yr dissatisfactions.’’3 Penn’s laments in summer 1685 comprised only part of a longer litany of complaints about his colonists’ unruliness. Nor were these reports inaccurate. Provincial politicians spent a seemingly inordinate amount of time arguing Words and Things 105 over procedural details great and small: questioning whether legislation had been enacted properly, debating who had the authority to dissolve the legislature at the end of each session, and challenging the authenticity of official commissions. Nor was it strange that these reports reached Penn in England, for Pennsylvanians seldom felt shy about airing their grievances with the legislature, the courts, or any other provincial institutions. They wrote letters, loudly threatened in taverns to overthrow the proprietary government, or used a position on the county bench to denounce enemies. Indeed, given the regularity with which Pennsylvanians turned opportunities to speak publicly into opportunities for public slander, it would have been surprising had news of this behavior not reached Penn. Provincials, especially Quakers, seemed petty, almost jealous, of any attempt on Penn’s part to exert his proprietary authority. When Penn’s appointed deputy governor John Blackwell arrived in Philadelphia in December 1688, for example, not a single member of the Provincial Council came out to greet him, refusing the highest official in the land even the most elementary civility. A session of the Council ground to a halt two months later when some ‘‘members declared themselves offended with [Blackwell’s] words and Carriage,’’ accusing him of inflating his own authority.4 To modern eyes, this behavior appears strange. These Friends seem consumed with procedure at the expense of results, with gossip at the expense of actual governance. From one angle, early Pennsylvania’s governing Quakers look almost like a cliché—a dissenting group so long denied power that they became intoxicated with even a whiff of it. Having lost sight of the goal of governance, they had have become, in Penn’s words, ‘‘governmentish’’ instead . In the words of early Pennsylvania’s most eminent historian, Gary B. Nash, early provincials created ‘‘a make-believe world’’ in which ‘‘words became more important than actions and points of ceremonial propriety took precedent over legislative proposals.’’5 Surely—a modern observer might think—something else must have lain behind this provincial obstinacy, this excessive attention to political ritual and language: perhaps tension over Penn’s rent policies, or perhaps a deeply ingrained antiauthoritarianism within Quaker culture.6 How else to explain why Friends wasted so much time on trivial matters? Penn’s complaints suggest that this question misses the point, though. His litany reveals that he knew words themselves could be actions. Some verbal utterances were performative, effecting real social change. He knew, then, that, in some cases, words could become things, objects of power in 106 chapter 3 and of themselves.7 Moreover, he realized that while the province’s constitution and statutes defined the rules for a provincial civic speech economy—the exchange of...