The Pennsylvania Difference: Religious Diversity on the Delaware before 1683

With justice, Pennsylvania is widely recognized as the front door through which ethnic and religious diversity entered America. New York and New Jersey made their contributions as well, but they tend to pale in comparison to what could be found in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. It would not be terribly controversial to assert that, in the creation of early American ethnic and religious diversity, Pennsylvania made a very big difference. Perhaps Pennsylvania made the difference.

To appreciate the difference that Pennsylvania made it is first essential to realize that diversity did not just happen. Diversity is a deceptively simple word. There is no single way to be diverse. In colonial America, religious diversity emerged in different ways, appeared in different degrees, and had different connotations, depending on the local context. Indeed, the one vital lesson in the history of the middle colonies may be that there are diverse sorts of diversities, each with its own peculiar causes and consequences. Without this critical appreciation of diversity we risk taking Pennsylvania's accomplishments for granted. Exactly why Pennsylvania happened at all, let alone how it evolved into the epicenter of early American religious pluralism, are complicated and still contentious questions that are outside the scope of this essay. This essay seeks to establish that whatever Pennsylvania was, it was very different from what had been happening in the Delaware Valley beforehand.

American historians have not been ignorant of the pluralism existing on the Delaware when William Penn arrived. But they have lacked the familiarity with the languages and ecclesiastical histories of several different European countries necessary to provide a comprehensive account of it. The few scholars who have worked on the material until now have tended to specialize in one group or another, not all. Source material is also scarce and scattered. Most of the existing records are administrative and concerned primarily with relations involving different religious groups and the political structures that governed them. Since religious toleration was the medium through which these relations were negotiated, this essay is primarily about the causes and consequences of religious toleration on the Delaware in the seventeenth century.

Pennsylvania was not the first colony to grant religious toleration in the Delaware River Valley. The Dutch did it (in two separate colonies no less). So did the Swedes. Pennsylvania was not even the first Quaker colony in the region—that honor goes to West Jersey. In fact, West Jersey should probably take the prize as the most radical framework for religious freedom in the area. But the ultimate practice of religious freedom in West Jersey did not differ from its effects in early Pennsylvania, which historian J. William Frost has described as a "quasi or noncoercive Quaker establishment."¹ The Pennsylvania difference was to consolidate Quaker hegemony over the entire Delaware Valley. A Quaker "establishment" entailed the absence of any official mechanism for the support or coercion of religious practice. By radically disestablishing Christianity in the region, Pennsylvania laid the vital groundwork for the extraordinary diversity of the eighteenth century.

Despite the peaceful coexistence of Quakers, Indians, and others, the fact of military conquest is vital for understanding the power and potential of religious liberty in the Delaware Valley. Unlike the English colonies in New England and on the Chesapeake, Pennsylvania entered a New World already inhabited for decades by hundreds of Europeans. Along with West Jersey (and eventually Delaware), it had been carved out of the earlier colonies of New Netherland and New Sweden, both of which had belonged to New York for a time as well. Far from a tabula rasa, or even a more straightforward encounter between natives and newcomers, Pennsylvania was merely the icing on a sort of colonial layer cake, capping off a turbulent thirty-year period where one colony had supplanted another in a series of military conquests and diplomatic deals. Nowhere else in North America did colonists have to adjust to such radical and repeated shifts of sovereignty.

New Sweden

Though the Dutch had staked the first claim to the region, the Swedes planted the first permanent settlements. They were also the first to...