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

Chapter 6. Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, II: The Founding of Pennsylvania

c h a p te r 6 Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, II The Founding of Pennsylvania by 1709, william penn had reached a state of utter despair about the fate of his American colony. Political opponents like David Lloyd stood firm in their perverse opposition to him at every turn. Worse, voters repeatedly rewarded Lloyd’s behavior. What governor, he asked his secretary James Logan, ‘‘would care one jot w[ha]t comes of such a foolish (if not wicked) people’’? Logan concurred, wondering why Penn had not shed himself of the colony long ago. Acknowledging Penn’s fear that Friends would suffer political and legal disabilities were the colony royalized, Logan believed Quaker disenfranchisement a ‘‘singularly just’’ outcome. Quaker ingrates needed ‘‘to deal to their Portions Crosses[,] Vexation[,] & Disappointments to convince them of their Mistakes and own Inconsistancy.’’ Penn needed no further convincing . After all these years of bickering, he was finally ready to surrender his colony to the Crown.1 And yet only fourteen months later, Penn found himself thanking Pennsylvania ’s Quaker community for ‘‘the eminent Zeal and Concurrence for the Publick Good & therein for my service,’’ still convinced the two went hand in hand. He assured them that he would make every effort to ‘‘take care of your Property and Privileges . . . as Christians & Englishmen’’ against any and all imperial encroachments. For their part, leading provincial politicians , having removed Lloyd and his supporters in the October 1710 elections, pledged their support for Penn and their gratitude for his efforts on their behalf. Three decades of conflict had given way to harmony between proprietor and colonists. 216 chapter 6 This remarkable political turnaround culminated a long process of religious and cultural consolidation. After years of conflicts between proprietary and antiproprietary factions, imperial and local officials, and struggles between Quakers and non-Quakers, provincial Friends finally came to terms with their history in America. This allowed them to create the workable political identity that had previously eluded them. Decades after Penn received his charter from Charles II, they established Pennsylvania as a firmly Quaker colony.2 In one sense, this outcome was deeply ironic. For years, Penn and his opponents had blamed their inability to create community on infighting within Pennsylvania’s Quaker governing class. Provincial politics would have been harmonious and amicable, if only Quaker leaders treated themselves with the same love and unity Friends exhibited within the Meeting. Quaker leaders could easily ‘‘season’’ new settlers and bring non-Quakers into the civic fold if only they embraced their common tribal identity as Friends. And American Quakerism would have flowered if only the Keithian ‘‘weeds’’ had not despoiled the spiritual landscape. Penn and his newfound allies each wrote of the election of 1710 as the triumph of these hopes. It represented the fulfillment of Pennsylvania’s initial promise. But these persistent religious and political frictions had not prevented Friends from achieving the coherent civic order they constructed in 1710. Rather, they provided Pennsylvanians numerous opportunities to define what it meant to be a Quaker in America. They helped them to work out the relationship between Friends and non-Friends in a Quaker colony. And they allowed them to come to terms with what it meant to live in a proprietary colony within the English empire. Provincials needed to have these arguments as they built a workable political language they all found legitimate. In other words, Pennsylvania’s political stabilization did not happen in spite of the internal strife that had plagued the colony in the decades after its founding; it happened because of it. Years of cultural friction enabled the creation of a creole civic culture. Histories of Pennsylvania: The English Inheritance in America On 12 April 1704, Lieutenant Governor John Evans addressed Pennsylvania’s legislature for the first time. He reminded the Assembly and Provincial Council that a good society required a ‘‘well Regulated Legislative Power’’ in Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, II 217 which those empowered to govern had the respect of the governed. He asked them to look on the motherland as an example, for its glory derived in no small part from the harmony that prevailed in Parliament, its legislative body. Evans’s words must have seemed uncontroversial, if not cliché, to the audience . They were, after all, ‘‘blest with the Priviledges of English men,’’ just as he and their compatriots on the eastern side of the...