Province of Pennsylvania
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The Province of Pennsylvania, better known to Americans as Pennsylvania Colony, was a North America colony granted to William Penn in 1681 by King Charles II of England. The name itself means "Penn's Woods" in Latin.
Founding
William Penn received the colony as payment in lieu of a $100,000 award that the Crown owed his father, naval hero Sir William Penn. Establishment of the colony also solved the problem of the growing Society of Friends or "Quaker" movement in England, which was causing great embarrassment to the established Church of England. While still in England, Penn wrote his First Frame of Government, which outlined the governmental structure for the colony an promised certain rights to its citizens.
One of the Middle Colonies, Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony. Unlike other proprietary colonies, its taxes were enforced by the British Parliament. The three counties of the Delaware Colony, captured from the Swedish, were originally part of the Province of Pennsylvania, but regained a separate existence in 1704. The rest of the colony was demarcated from sea to shining sea by its latitudinal borders with New York and Maryland (the latter defined by the historic 1763 Mason-Dixon line geographical survey) as well as an irregular border with the coastal Province of New Jersey.
The first governor was William Markham, a relative of Penn. A large tract of land north and west of Philadelphia, in Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware Counties, was settled by Welsh Quakers and called the "Welsh Tract".
Religious Freedom and Prosperity
William Penn and his fellow Quakers heavily imprinted their religious values on the Pennsylvania government. Among the most radical belief was religious freedom for all religions, as well as acceptance for Native Americans. This extreme tolerance led to significantly healthier relationships with the local Native tribes (the Lenape and Susquehanna, mainly) than most other colonies had. It also encouraged the rapid growth of Philadelphia into America's most important city, and of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country hinterlands, where German (or "Deutsch") religious and political refugees prospered on the fertile soil and spirit of cultural creativeness. Among the first groups were the Mennonites, who founded Germantown in 1683; their presence inspired a new group of dissenting Mennonites, the Amish, to set up many of their largest communities in Dutch Country.In 1737, the Colony exchanged a great deal of its political goodwill with the Native Lenape for more land. The colonial administrators claimed that they had a deed dating to the 1680s in which the Lenape-Delaware had promised to sell a portion of land beginning between the junction of the Delaware River and Lehigh River (near present Wrightstown, Pennsylvania) "as far west as a man could walk in a day and a half." Although the document was most likely a forgery, the Lenape either did not realize that, or failed to see the harm in demarcating the boundary this way, since by their estimation it would only serve to confirm that the White settlers had run out of room to expand. But Provincial Secretary James Logan planned well, and hired the three fastest runners in the colony, to run out the purchase on a prepared trail. The pace was so intense that only one runner actually completed the "walk," covering an astonishing 70 miles (113 km). This netted the Penns 1,200,000 acres (4,860 km²) of land in what is now northeastern Pennsylvania, an area roughly equivalent to the size of the state of Rhode Island in the purchase. The area of the purchase covers all or part of what are now Pike, Monroe, Carbon, Schuylkill, Northampton, Lehigh and Bucks counties. The Lenape tribe fought for the next 19 years to have the treaty annulled, but to no avail. The Lenape-Delaware were forced into the Shamokin and Wyoming Valleys, which were already overcrowded with other displaced tribes.
1751 was an auspicious year for the colony. Pennsylvania Hospital, the first hospital in the British American colonies, and The Academy and College of Philadelphia, the predecessor to the private University of Pennsylvania, both opened.
Despite Quaker opposition to slavery, by 1730 colonists had brought about 4,000 slaves in to Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 was the first emancipation statute in the colonies which would become the United States. The census of 1790 showed that the number of African-Americans had increased to about 10,000, of whom about 6,300 had received their freedom.
The Rise of Revolutionary Sentiment
As the colony grew, however, colonists and British military forces came increasingly into conflict with Natives in the Western half of the state. With the debilitating French and Indian War just over and Pontiac's War beginning, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 banned colonization beyond the Appalachian Mountains. This proclamation affected Pennsylvanians and Virginians the most, as they had been racing towards the rich lands surrounding Fort Pitt. The fighting was both colonist against native and colonist against colonist: in 1774, Justice Arthur St. Clair ordered the arrest of the officer leading Virginia troops into confrontations with armed settlers loyal to Pennsylvania.Heightened revolutionary sentiment among Pennsylvanians, along with the pre-eminent position of Philadelphia, made that city the natural choice for meetings of the Continental Congress, the first coordinated act towards independence. The publication of the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 by locally-elected revolutionaries concluded the history of the Colony and began the history of the Commonwealth.
Famous Colonial Pennsylvanians
- Benjamin Franklin moved to Philadelphia at age 17 in 1723; during his later years he was Pennsylvania's most famous citizen. Among his accomplishments was founding in 1751 The Academy and College of Philadelphia, the predecessor to the private University of Pennsylvania.
- Thomas McKean was born in New London, Pennsylvania. He was an officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the second President of the U.S. Congress under the Articles of Confederation, Acting President of Delaware, and Chief Justice and Governor of Pennsylvania.
- Gouverneur Morris, one of the leading minds of the American Revolution, lived in New York City during most of the colonial period, but moved to Philadelphia to work as a lawyer and merchant during the Revolution.
- Robert Morris, moved to Philadelphia around 1749 at about age 14. He was known as the Financier of the Revolution, because of his role in securing financial assistance for the American Colonial side in the Revolutionary War. In 1921, Robert Morris University was founded and named after him.
- Thomas Paine emigrated to Philadelphia in 1774 at Benjamin Franklin's urging. His tract, Common Sense, published in 1776, was arguably the most famous and influential argument for the Revolution. He was also the first to publicly champion the phrase "United States of America."
- William Penn, the colony's founder
- Arthur St. Clair moved to Ligonier Valley, Pennsylvania in 1764. He served as a judge in colonial Pennsylvania, a general in the Continental Army, and a President under the Articles of Confederation.
- James Wilson moved to Philadelphia in 1765 and became a lawyer; he signed the Declaration of Independence and wrote or worked on many of the most difficult compromises in the U.S. Constitution, including the Three-Fifths Compromise, which defined slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of census-taking and therefore government appropriations.
References
- [Illick Joseph E. Colonial Pennsylvania: A History (1976)]
- [Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, The Quaker Province]
See also
External link
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