Pennsylvania

The founding of the Pennsylvania colony began when King Charles II awarded a charter in 1681 to William Penn, son of Admiral Sir William Penn, to whom the king owed a debt. The charter, the largest grant ever made to one man in America, was awarded in discharge of the debt on the condition that it would be named for the king's patron. The resulting Pennsylvania colony took shape as a refuge for Quakers, a radical sect that had been persecuted in England for their unorthodox views. The Quakers were pacifists who refused to pay taxes, did not respect social ranks, and were branded by Parliament as "dangerous."

Following the tenets of their founder, George Fox, Quakers found themselves unwelcome in the existing American colonies, especially in Massachusetts, where several of them were hanged as heretics. By the mid-1600s their members numbered in the tens of thousands, and by the time William Penn received his grant from King Charles, he was the best known Quaker in England.

The charter situated the colony to the north of Maryland, but the exact boundary was a bone of contention between Penn and Maryland's Lord Baltimore. It was not until 1767 that the exact boundary was determined by the English surveyors Mason and Dixon. As the proprietor of the colony, Penn was allowed to determine the shape of the government of Pennsylvania by establishing courts and judges and forming a militia; but the tax power under the charter was retained by Parliament. To expand his domains and give them access to the oceans, he purchased the three counties of the Delaware colony.

The first colonists arrived in Pennsylvania in 1681 under Pennsylvania's first appointed governor, William Markham. William Penn himself arrived a year later and began to build a city on the spot that became Philadelphia, soon to become the most important city in colonial America. Penn's approach to the Indians was unusual in that he believed that the Indians were legitimate owners of the land, and he was prepared to pay them a fair price for the areas that Pennsylvania took over. Shortly after arriving, Penn made a formal treaty with the Delaware Indians and promised friendship with them. The treaty remained in effect for decades, and the Indians always considered the Quakers their friends.

In 1683 the colonial legislature of Pennsylvania had begun to function, and it passed laws granting citizenship in the colony to all free Christians. Penn temporarily lost his charter and his friendship with the Duke of York, who became King James II, because of issues relating to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when James was deposed in favor of William of Orange and his wife Mary. Business affairs also kept Penn in England for an additional time, but when he returned to Pennsylvania he found that the economy had grown and changed considerably in his absence. To revise the government he turned the three counties that constituted Delaware over to the people of that colony to govern themselves.

Noted for its openness to various religions, the Quaker colony soon attracted large numbers of Germans fleeing from religious wars, as well as a stream of Scotch-Irish from the Northern Ireland province of Ulster. The Germans in particular were hardworking, humble, and pious people, many of whose descendants still inhabit Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and surrounding areas. In their religious devotion, the German sects tended to be very much like the Quakers themselves. Their descendants, the Amish, still live peacefully in Lancaster County.

In 1723 an event occurred in Pennsylvania that did not seem significant at the time, but over the course of the life of the colony, it would grow in importance. In that year a young apprentice printer by the name of Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia from Boston. Franklin set himself up as a printer, a trade he had learned under the tutelage of his brother, James, who had started an early colonial newspaper. Franklin's business acumen soon made him wealthy, and he began to delve into a variety of pursuits, from politics and civic action to scientific experiments, which led him to inventions such as bifocals, the lightning rod and the Franklin stove. He also established the first lending library in America and served for a time as colonial postmaster general. He held several important diplomatic posts before and during the American Revolution. A leading figure of the Enlightenment, Franklin would help to shape not only the colony of Pennsylvania but the destiny of the future United States. During the colonial era he was the most famous of all Americans. His last service to his country came during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He died in 1790.