Authority in Early America: The Decay of Deference on the Provincial Periphery

In the portrait, his heavy armor gleams. His dark hair curls thickly to his shoulders. His neck is swathed in a fine cravat that falls jauntily between the pauldrons of his cuirass. Lustrous steel, raven locks, and sumptuous silk all set off his fair face. He is a handsome young man, faintly effeminate, ambiguously martial. He has an authoritative air despite himself.¹

When he sat for the portrait, William Penn was just twenty-two years old. He had already been to—and been expelled from—Oxford's most prestigious college. He had toured and studied on the continent. He had read law at Lincoln's Inn. He was just a year from his decisive break with his father over his conversion to the Quakers.

He did not seek the authority that he exuded. If anything, he sought to unburden himself of it. It was, in part, their impassioned insistence on the equality of all people in the Light that drew him to the Quakers.²

Nonetheless, he could not escape the authority to which he had been born. His father was an admiral of the British navy and a knight of the realm. Penn himself had acquired, ineluctably, both the outward accoutrements of his privileged position and its inmost assumptions. His clothes, his conversation, his carriage with women marked him as a man of high gentility, accustomed

Figure 1.

William Penn. William Penn's grandson Granville Penn presented this portrait of Pennsylvania's founder to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1833. It shows Penn at age twenty-two, in 1666. Scholars believe that this is a late eighteenth-century copy of the original, now lost. Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Atwater Kent Museum, Philadelphia.

to its entitlements. He was heir to an English estate and retinues of servants to work it, and to still more extensive holdings in Ireland that would enrich him by the hour, sleeping as well as waking.³

Even after his defection to the Friends—indeed, even after his emergence as a "weighty Friend" and the "chiefest undertaker" of both written and spoken debate on behalf of the movement—he had to be accorded extraordinary dispensations. Recognizing that he had grown up accustomed to the prerogatives of rank and to the homage that ordinary men and women paid to its symbols, the leading men of the Meeting allowed their remarkable recruit to continue to carry his sword in defiance of their peace testimony and to go on wearing elegant finery and a wig in disregard of their insistence on simplicity.⁴

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In America fifteen years later, Penn could not even collect quitrents from the plain folk who settled the vast proprietary he had received from the king. He still had—and still flourished—his silks, his sword, and his servants, but their effect in his infant plantation was not what it had been in the mother country. In the New World it did not matter, somehow, that he was the son of a knight, one of the only ones ever to come to the colonies. Though he was by all accounts loved by large numbers of his settlers, he could not even command their compliance with his plans, let alone secure their submission to his authority.

At home in the metropolis, Penn projected his "holy experiment" as a hierarchical one. He himself would be its "true and absolute proprietor." Though he would permit most adult males to vote for the council in which he concentrated all legislative power, he took for granted that those men would vote for councilors of his own kind. As they did in England, commoners formally free to choose anyone they pleased would in fact defer to the "wisdom, virtue, and ability" of a wealthy, well-born elite.⁵

But on the provincial periphery, Penn could not constitute such a class. He could call his councilors "Knights of Shires," but he could not ennoble them. The nine men who made up the inner circle of the Free Society of Traders...