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THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
ROOSEVELT EDITION 
 
 VOLUME 8 
 
 THE CHRONICLES 
 
 OF AMERICA SERIES 
 
 ALLEN JOHNSON 
 
 EDITOR 
 
 GERHARD R. LOMER 
 
 CHARLES W. JEFFERYS 
 
 ASSISTANT EDITORS 
 
WILLIAM PENN IN TREATY WITH THE LNDL\Nb, 1683 
 From the painting by C. W. Jefferys 
 
THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 A CHROMCLE OF THE 
 
 PROPRIETORS OF THE Delaware 
 
 BY SYDNEY G. FISHER 
 
 LVXET 
 
 NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & CO. 
 
 LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1921 
 
 c 
 
-±^1 29 
 
 Copt/right, 1919, hy Yale University Press 
 
 JUN -2 1922 
 
 ©CI.A66t906 
 
:ONTENTS 
 
 I. THE BIRTH OF PENNSYLVANIA Page 
 
 II. PENN SAILS FOR THE DELAWARE 
 
 III. LIFE IN PHILADELPHIA 
 
 IV. TYPES OF THE POPULATION 
 
 V. THE TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS " 
 
 VI. THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 
 
 VII. THE DECLINE OF QUAKER GOVERN- 
 MENT 
 
 VIII. THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 
 
 IX. PLANTERS AND TRADERS OF SOUTHERN 
 JERSEY 
 
 X. SCOTCH COVENANTERS AND OTHERS 
 IN EAST JERSEY 
 
 XL THE UNITED JERSEYS 
 
 XII. LITTLE DELAWARE 
 
 XIII. THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 INDEX 
 
 1 
 
 17 
 
 25 
 36 
 63 
 
 108 
 125 
 
 153 
 
 168 
 180 
 197 
 215 
 231 
 235 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 WILLIAM PENN IN TREATY WITH 
 THE INDIANS, 1683 
 
 From the painting by C, W. Jefferys. Frontispiece 
 
 THE DELAWARE RIVER REGION, 
 
 1665-1774 
 
 Map by W. L. G. Joerg, American Geo- 
 graphical Society. Facing page SJi. 
 
 IX 
 
 /^ 
 
THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE BIRTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 
 
 In 1661, the year after Charles II was restored to 
 the throne of England, William Penn was a seven- 
 teen-year-old student at Christ Church, Oxford. 
 His father, a distinguished admiral in high favor 
 at Court, had abandoned his erstwhile friends and 
 had aided in restoring King Charlie to his own 
 again. Young William was associating with the 
 sons of the aristocracy and was receiving an educa- 
 tion which would fit him to obtain preferment at 
 Court. But there was a serious vein in him, and 
 while at a high church Oxford College he was 
 surreptitiously attending the meetings and listen- 
 ing to the preaching of the despised and outlawed 
 Quakers. There he first began to hear of the plans 
 of a group of Quakers to found colonies on the 
 
 / 
 
2 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Delaware in America. Forty years afterwards he 
 wrote, "I had an opening of joy as to these parts 
 in the year 1661 at Oxford." And with America 
 and the Quakers, in spite of a brief youthful expe- 
 rience as a soldier and a courtier, William Penn's 
 life, as well as his fame, is indissolubly linked. 
 
 Quakerism was one of the many religious sects 
 born in the seventeenth century under the influence 
 of Puritan thought. The foundation principle 
 of the Reformation, the right of private judg- 
 ment, the Quakers carried out to its logical con- 
 clusion; but they were people whose minds had 
 so long been suppressed and terrorized that, once 
 free, they rushed to extremes^ They shocked 
 and horrified even the most advanced Refor- 
 mation sects by rejecting Baptism, the doc- 
 trine of the Trinity, and all sacraments, forms, 
 and ceremonies. They represented, on their best 
 side, the most vigorous effort of the Reforma- 
 tion to return to the spirituality and the simplic- 
 ity of the early Christians. But their intense 
 spirituality, pathetic often in its extreme mani- 
 festations, was not wholly concerned with another 
 world. Their humane ideas and philanthropic 
 methods, such as the abolition of slavery, and the 
 reform of prisons and of charitable institutions. 
 
THE BIRTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 3 
 
 came in time to be accepted as fundamental 
 practical social principles. 
 
 The tendencies of which Quakerism formed only 
 one manifestation appeared outside of England, 
 in Italy, in France, and especially in Germany. 
 The fundamental Quaker idea of "quietism," as 
 it was called, or peaceful, silent contemplation as 
 a spiritual form of worship and as a development 
 of moral consciousness, was very widespread at the 
 close of the Reformation and even began to be 
 practiced in the Roman Catholic Church until it 
 was stopped by the Jesuits. The most extreme 
 of the English Quakers, however, gave way to 
 such extravagances of conduct as trembling when 
 they preached (whence their name), preaching 
 openly in the streets and fields — a horrible thing 
 at that time — interrupting other congregations, 
 and appearing naked as a sign and warning. They 
 gave offense by refusing to remove their hats in 
 public and by applying to all alike the words 
 "thee" and "thou," a form of address hitherto 
 used only to servants and inferiors. Worst of all, 
 the Quakers refused to pay tithes or taxes to 
 support the Church of England. As a result, the 
 loathsome jails of the day were soon filled with 
 these objectors, and their property melted away 
 
4 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 in fines. This contumacy and their street meet- 
 ings, regarded at that time as riotous breaches of 
 the peace, gave the Government at first a legal 
 excuse to hunt them down; but as they grew in 
 numbers and influence, laws were enacted to sup- 
 press them. Some of them, though not the wild- 
 est extremists, escaped to the colonies in Amer- 
 ica. There, however, they were made welcome to 
 conditions no less severe. 
 
 The first law against the Quakers in Massachu- 
 setts was passed in 1656, and between that date 
 and 1660 four of the sect were hanged, one of them 
 a woman, Mary Dyer. Though there were no 
 other hangings, many Quakers were punished 
 by whipping and banishment. In other colonies, 
 notably New York, fines and banishment were not 
 uncommon. Such treatment forced the Quakers, 
 against the will of many of them, to seek a tract 
 of land and found a colony of their own. To such 
 a course there appeared no alternative, unless they 
 were determined to establish their religion solely 
 by martyrdom. 
 
 About the time when the Massachusetts laws 
 were enforced, the principal Quaker leader and 
 organizer, George Fox (1624-1691), began to 
 consider the possibility of making a settlement 
 
THE BIRTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 5 
 
 among the great forests and mountains said to lie 
 north of Maryland in the region drained by the 
 Delaware and Susquehanna rivers. In this region 
 lay practically the only good land on the Atlantic 
 seaboard not already occupied. The Puritans 
 and Dutch were on the north, and there were 
 Catholic and Church of England colonies on the 
 south in Maryland and Virginia. The middle 
 ground was unoccupied because heretofore a diffi- 
 cult coast had prevented easy access by sea. Fox 
 consulted Josiah Coale, a Quaker who had traveled 
 in America and had seen a good deal of the Indian 
 tribes, with the result that on his second visit to 
 America Coale was commissioned to treat with 
 the Susquehanna Indians, who were supposed to 
 have rights in the desired land. In November, 
 1660, Coale reported to Fox the result of his in- 
 quiries: "As concerning Friends buying a piece of 
 land of the Susquehanna Indians I have spoken of 
 it to them and told them what thou said concern- 
 ing it; but their answer was, that there is no land 
 that is habitable or fit for situation beyond Bal- 
 timore's liberty till they come to or near the 
 Susquehanna's Fort."' Nothing could be done 
 
 ^ James Bowden's History of the Friends in America, vol. i, p. 
 
6 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 immediately, the letter went on to say, because 
 the Indians were at war with one another, and Wil- 
 liam Fuller, a Maryland Quaker, whose cooperation 
 was deemed essential, was absent. 
 
 This seems to have been the first definite move- 
 ment towards a Quaker colony. Reports of it 
 reached the ears of young Penn at Oxford and set 
 his imagination aflame. He never forgot the pro- 
 ject, for seventeen is an age when grand thoughts 
 strike home. The adventurousness of the plan 
 was irresistible — a home for the new faith in 
 the primeval forest, far from imprisonment, tithes, 
 and persecution, and to be won by effort worthy of 
 a man. It was, however, a dream destined not 
 to be realized for many a long year. More was 
 needed than the mere consent of the Indians. In 
 the meantime, however, a temporary refuge for 
 the sect was found in the province of West Jersey 
 on the Delaware, which two Quakers had bought 
 from Lord Berkeley for the comparatively small 
 sum of £1000. Of this grant William Penn be- 
 came one of the trustees and thus gained his first 
 experience in the business of colonizing the region 
 of his youthful dreams. But there was never a 
 suflBcient governmental control of West Jersey to 
 make it an ideal Quaker colony. What little 
 
THE BIRTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 7 
 
 control the Quakers exercised disappeared after 
 1702; and the land and situation were not all that 
 could be desired. Penn, though also one of the 
 owners of East Jersey, made no attempt to turn 
 that region into a Quaker colony. 
 
 Besides West Jersey the Quakers found a tem- 
 porary asylum in Aquidneck, now Rhode Island. ' 
 For many years the governors and magistrates 
 were Quakers, and the affairs of this island colony 
 were largely in their hands. Quakers were also 
 prominent in the politics of North Carolina, and 
 John Archdale, a Quaker, was Governor for sev- 
 eral years. They formed a considerable element 
 of the population in the towns of Long Island 
 and Westchester County but they could not hope 
 to convert these communities into real Quaker 
 commonwealths . 
 
 The experience in the Jerseys and elsewhere 
 very soon proved that if there was to be a real 
 Quaker colony, the British Crown must give not 
 only a title to the land but a strong charter guar- 
 anteeing self-government and protection of the 
 Quaker faith from outside interference. But that 
 
 ^This Rhode Island colony should be distinguished from the 
 settlement at Providence founded by Roger Williams with which it 
 was later united. See Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies, 
 p. 21, note. 
 
8 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 the British Government would grant such valued 
 privileges to a sect of schismatics which it was 
 hunting down in England seemed a most unlikely 
 event. Nothing but unusual influence at Court 
 could bring it about, and in that quarter the 
 Quakers had no influence. 
 
 MPenn never forgot the boyhood ideal which he 
 nad developed at college. For twenty years he 
 led a varied life — driven from home and whipped 
 by his father for consorting with the schismatics; 
 sometimes in deference to his father's wishes tak- 
 ing his place in the gay world at Court; even, for 
 a time, becoming a soldier, and again traveling in 
 France with some of the people of the Court. In 
 the end, as he grew older, religious feeling com- 
 pletely absorbed him. He became one of the lead- 
 ing Quaker theologians, and his very earnest reli- 
 gious writings fill several volumes. He became a 
 preacher at the meetings and went to prison for 
 his heretical doctrines and pamphlets. At last 
 he found himself at the age of thirty-six with his 
 father dead, and a debt due from the Crown of 
 £16,000 for services which his distinguished father, 
 the admiral, had rendered the Government. 
 
 Here was the accident that brought into being 
 the great Quaker colony, by a combination of 
 
THE BIRTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 9 
 
 circumstances which could hardly have happened 
 twice. Young Penn was popular at Court. He 
 had inherited a valuable friendship with Charles 
 II and his heir, the Duke of York. This friend- 
 ship rested on the solid fact that Penn's father, 
 the admiral, had rendered such signal assistance 
 in restoring Charles and the whole Stuart line 
 to the throne. But still £16,000 or $80,000, the 
 accumulation of many deferred payments, was a 
 goodly sum in those days, and that the Crown 
 would pay it in money, of which it had none too 
 much, was unlikely. Why not therefore suggest 
 paying it instead in wild land in America, of which 
 the Crown had abundance.'^ That was the fruit- 
 ful thought which visited Penn. Lord Berkeley 
 and Lord Carteret had been given New Jersey 
 because they had signally helped to restore the 
 Stuart family to the throne. All the more there- 
 fore should the Stuart family give a tract of land, 
 and even a larger tract, to Penn, whose father had 
 not only assisted the family to the throne but had 
 refrained so long from pressing his just claim for 
 money due. 
 
 So the Crown, knowing little of the value of it, 
 granted him the most magnificent domain of 
 mountains, lakes, rivers, and forests, fertile soil. 
 
10 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 coal, petroleum, and iron that ever was given to 
 a single proprietor. In addition to giving Penn 
 the control of Delaware and, with certain other 
 Quakers, that of New Jersey as well, the Crown 
 placed at the disposal of the Quakers 55,000 square 
 miles of most valuable, fertile territory, lacking 
 only about three thousand square miles of being 
 as large as England and Wales. Even when cut 
 down to 45,000 square miles by a boundary dis- 
 pute with Maryland, it was larger than Ireland. 
 Kings themselves have possessed such dominions, 
 but never before a private citizen who scorned all 
 titles and belonged to a hunted sect that exalted 
 peace and spiritual contemplation above all the 
 wealth and power of the world. Whether the ob- 
 taining of this enormous tract of the best land in 
 America was due to what may be called the eternal 
 thriftiness of the Quaker mind or to the intense de- 
 sire of the British Government to get rid of these 
 people at any cost might be hard to determine. 
 
 Penn received his charter in 1681, and in it he 
 was very careful to avoid all the mistakes of the 
 Jersey proprietary grants. Instead of numerous 
 proprietors, Penn was to be the sole proprietor. 
 Instead of giving title to the land and remain- 
 ing silent about the political government, Penn's 
 
THE BIRTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 11 
 
 charter not only gave him title to the land but a 
 clearlj^ defined position as its political head, and de- 
 scribed the principles of the government so clearly 
 that there was little room for doubt or dispute. 
 
 It was a decidedly feudal charter, very much like 
 the one granted to Lord Baltimore fifty years 
 before, and yet at the same time it secured civil 
 liberty and representative government to the peo- 
 ple. Penn owned all the land and the colonists 
 were to be his tenants. Lie was compelled, how- 
 ever, to give his people free government. The 
 laws were to be made by him with the assent of 
 the people or their delegates. In practice this of 
 course meant that the people were to elect a legis- 
 lature and Penn would have a veto, as we now call 
 it, on such acts as the legislature should pass. He 
 had power to appoint magistrates, judges, and 
 some other officers, and to grant pardons. Though 
 by the charter proprietor of the province, he usu- 
 ally remained in England and appointed a deputy 
 governor to exercise authority in the colony. In 
 modern phrase, he controlled the executive part 
 of the government and his people controlled the 
 legislative part. 
 
 Pennsylvania, besides being the largest in area 
 of the proprietary colonies, was also the most 
 
12 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 successful, not only from the proprietor's point of 
 view but also from the point of view of the in- 
 habitants. The proprietorships in Maine, New 
 Hampshire, New Jersey, and the Carolinas were 
 largely failures. Maryland was only partially 
 successful; it was not particularly remunerative 
 to its owner, and the Crown deprived him of his 
 control of it for twenty years. Penn, too, was de- 
 prived of the control of Pennsylvania by William 
 III but for only about two years. Except for 
 this brief interval (1692-1694), Penn and his sons 
 after him held their province down to the time 
 of the American Revolution in 1776, a period of 
 ninety -four years. 
 
 A feudal proprietorship, collecting rents from 
 all the people, seems to modern minds grievously 
 wrong in theory, and yet it would be very difficult 
 to show that it proved onerous in practice. Un- 
 der it the people of Pennsylvania flourished in 
 wealth, peace, and happiness. Penn won undying 
 fame for the liberal principles of his feudal enter- 
 prise. His expenses in England were so great and 
 his quitrents always so much in arrears that he was 
 seldom out of debt. But his children grew rich 
 from the province. As in other provinces that 
 were not feudal there were disputes between the 
 
THE BIRTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 13 
 
 people and the proprietors; but there was not so 
 much general dissatisfaction as might have been 
 expected. The proprietors were on the whole 
 not altogether disliked. In the American Revo- 
 lution, when the people could have confiscated 
 everything in Pennsylvania belonging to the pro- 
 prietary family, they not only left them in posses- 
 sion of a large part of their land, but paid them 
 handsomely for the part that was taken. 
 
 After Penn had secured his charter in 1681, he 
 obtained from the Duke of York the land now in- 
 cluded in the State of Delaware. He advertised 
 for colonists, and began selling land at £100 for 
 five thousand acres and annually thereafter a 
 shilling quitrent for every hundred acres. He 
 drew up a constitution or frame of government, 
 as he called it, after wide and earnest consultation 
 with many, including the famous Algernon Sydney. 
 Among the Penn papers in the Historical Society 
 of Pennsylvania is a collection of about twenty 
 preliminary drafts. Beginning with one which 
 created a government by a landed aristocracy, 
 they became more and more liberal, until in the 
 end his frame was very much like the most liberal 
 government of the other English colonies in Amer- 
 ica. He had a council and an assembly, both 
 
14 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 elected by the people. The council, however, was 
 very large, had seventy-two members, and was 
 more like an upper house of the Legislature than 
 the usual colonial governor's council. The coun- 
 cil also had the sole right of proposing legisla- 
 tion, and the assembly could merely accept or 
 reject its proposals. This was a new idea, and 
 it worked so badly in practice that in the end 
 the province went to the opposite extreme and 
 had no council or upper house of the Legislature 
 at all. 
 
 Penn's frame of government contained, however, 
 a provision for its own amendment. This was a 
 new idea and proved to be so happy that it is now 
 found in all American constitutions. His method 
 of impeachment by which the lower house was to 
 bring in the charge and the upper house was to 
 try it has also been universally adopted. His view 
 that an unconstitutional law is void was a step 
 towards our modern system. The next step, giv- 
 ing the courts power to declare a law unconstitu- 
 tional, was not taken until one hundred years 
 after his time. With the advice and assistance 
 of some of those who were going out to his colony 
 he prepared a code of laws which contained many 
 of the advanced ideas of the Quakers. Capital 
 
THE BIRTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 15 
 
 punishment was to be confined to murder and 
 treason, instead of being applied as in Eng- 
 land to a host of minor offenses. The property 
 of murderers, instead of being forfeited to the 
 State, was to be divided among the next of 
 kin of the victim and of the criminal. Religious 
 liberty was established as it had been in Rhode 
 Island and the Jerseys. All children were to be 
 taught a useful trade. Oaths in judicial pro- 
 ceedings were not required. All prisons were 
 to be workhouses and places of reformation in- 
 stead of dungeons of dirt, idleness, and disease. 
 This attempt to improve the prisons inaugurated 
 a movement of great importance in the modern 
 world in which the part played by the Quakers is 
 too often forgotten. 
 
 Penn had now started his "Holy Experiment," 
 as he called his enterprise in Pennsylvania, by 
 which he intended to prove that religious liberty 
 was not only right, but that agriculture, com- 
 merce, and all arts and refinements of life would 
 flourish under it. He would break the delusion 
 that prosperity and morals were possible only 
 under some one particular faith established by law. 
 He would prove that government could be car- 
 ried on without war and without oaths, and 
 
16 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 that primitive Christianity could be maintained 
 without a hireling ministry, without persecution, 
 without ridiculous dogmas or ritual, sustained only 
 by its own innate power and the inward light. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 PENN SAILS FOR THE DELAWARE 
 
 The framing of the constitution and other prep- 
 arations consumed the year following Penn's re- 
 ceipt of his charter in 1681. But at last, on August 
 30, 1682, he set sail in the ship Welcome, with 
 about a hundred colonists. After a voyage of 
 about six weeks, and the loss of thirty of their 
 number by smallpox, they arrived in the Delaware. 
 June would have been a somewhat better month 
 in which to see the rich luxuriance of the green 
 meadows and forests of this beautiful river. But 
 the autumn foliage and bracing air of October 
 must have been inspiring enough. The ship slowly 
 beat her way for three days up the bay and river 
 in the silence and romantic loneliness of its shores. 
 Everything indicated richness and fertility. At 
 some points the lofty trees of the primeval forest 
 grew down to the water's edge. The river at 
 every high tide overflowed great meadows grown 
 
 2 17 
 
18 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 up in reeds and grasses and red and yellow flowers, 
 stretching back to the borders of the forest and 
 full of water birds and wild fowl of every variety. 
 Penn, now in the prime of life, must surely have 
 been aroused by this scene and by the reflection 
 that the noble river was his and the vast stretches 
 of forests and mountains for three hundred miles 
 to the westward. 
 
 He was soon ashore, exploring the edge of his 
 mighty domain, settling his government, and 
 passing his laws. He was much pleased with the 
 Swedes whom he found on his land. He changed 
 the name of the little Swedish village of Upland, 
 fifteen miles below Philadelphia, to Chester. He 
 superintended laying out the streets of Philadel- 
 phia and they remain to this day substantially 
 as he planned them, though unfortunately too 
 narrow and monotonously regular. He met the 
 Indians at Philadelphia, sat with them at their 
 fires, ate their roasted corn, and when to amuse 
 him they showed him some of their sports and 
 games he renewed his college days by joining 
 them in a jumping match. 
 
 Then he started on journeys. He traveled 
 through the woods to New York, which then be- 
 longed to the Duke of York, who had given him 
 
PENN SAILS FOR THE DELAWARE 19 
 
 Delaware; he visited the Long Island Quakers; 
 and on his return he went to Maryland to meet 
 with much pomp and ceremony Lord Baltimore 
 and there discuss with him the disputed boundary. 
 He even crossed to the eastern shore of the Chesa- 
 peake to visit a Quaker meeting on the Choptank 
 before winter set in, and he describes the immense 
 migration of wild pigeons at that season, and the 
 flocks which flew so low and were so tame that 
 the colonists knocked them down with sticks. 
 
 Most of the winter he spent at Chester and 
 wrote to England in high spirits of his journeys, 
 the wonders of the country, the abundance of 
 game and provisions, and the twenty-three ships 
 which had arrived so swiftly that few had taken 
 longer than six weeks, and only three had been 
 infected with the smallpox. "Oh how sweet," 
 he says, "is the quiet of these parts, freed from 
 the anxious and troublesome solicitations, hurries 
 and perplexities of woful Europe." 
 
 As the weeks and months passed, ships kept 
 arriving with more Quakers, far exceeding the 
 migration to the Jerseys. By summer, Penn re- 
 ported that 50 sail had arrived within the past 
 year, 80 houses had been built in Philadelphia, 
 and about 300 farms had been laid out round the 
 
20 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 town. It is supposed that about 3000 immigrants 
 had arrived. This was a more rapid development 
 than was usual in the colonies of America. Mas- 
 sachusetts and Virginia had been established slowly 
 and with much privation and suffering. But the 
 settlement of Philadelphia was like a summer out- 
 ing. There were no dangers, the hardships were tri- 
 fling, and there was no sickness or famine. There 
 was such an abundance of game close at hand that 
 hunger and famine were in nowise to be feared. 
 The climate was good and the Indians, kindly 
 treated, remained friendly for seventy years. 
 
 It is interesting to note that in that same year, 
 1682, in which Penn and his friends with such ease 
 and comfort founded their great colony on the 
 Delaware, the French explorers and voyageurs from 
 Canada, after years of incredible hardships, had 
 traversed the northern region of the Great Lakes 
 with their canoes and had passed down the Missis- 
 sippi to its mouth, giving to the whole of the 
 Great West the name of Louisiana, and claiming 
 it for France. Already La Salle had taken his 
 fleet of canoes down the Mississippi River and 
 had placed the arms of France on a post at its 
 mouth in April, 1682, only a few months before 
 Penn reached his newly acquired colony. Thus 
 
PENN SAILS FOR THE DELAWARE 21 
 
 in the same year in which the Quakers estabhshed 
 in Pennsylvania their reign of liberty and of peace 
 with the red men, La Salle was laying the founda- 
 tion of the western empire of despotic France, 
 which seventy years afterwards was to hurl the 
 savages upon the English colonies, to wreck the 
 Quaker policy of peace, but to fail in the end to 
 maintain itself against the free colonies of England. 
 While they were building houses in Philadel- 
 phia, the settlers lived in bark huts or in caves dug 
 in the river bank, as the early settlers in New 
 Jersey across the river had lived. Pastorius, a 
 learned German Quaker, who had come out with 
 the English, placed over the door of his cave the 
 motto, ''Parva domus, sed arnica bonis, procul este 
 profani/' which much amused Penn when he saw 
 it. A certain Mrs. Morris was much exercised one 
 day as to how she could provide supper in the cave 
 for her husband who was working on the construc- 
 tion of their house. But on returning to her cave 
 she found that her cat had just brought in a fine 
 rabbit. In their later prosperous years they had 
 a picture of the cat and the rabbit made on a box 
 which has descended as a family heirloom. Doubt- 
 less there were preserved many other interesting 
 reminiscences of the brief camp life. 
 
22 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 These Quakers were all of the thrifty, industrious 
 type which had gone to West Jersey a few years 
 before. Men of means, indeed, among the Quak- 
 ers were the first to seek refuge from the fines and 
 confiscations imposed upon them in England. 
 They brought with them excellent supplies of 
 everything. Many of the ships carried the frames 
 of houses ready to put together. But substantial 
 people of this sort demanded for the most part 
 houses of brick, with stone cellars. Fortunately 
 both brick clay and stone were readily obtainable 
 in the neighborhood, and whatever may have been 
 the case in other colonies, ships loaded with brick 
 from England would have found it Httle to their 
 profit to touch at Philadelphia. An early descrip- 
 tion says that the brick houses in Philadelphia 
 were modeled on those of London, and this type 
 prevailed for nearly two hundred years. 
 
 It_was probably in June, 1683, that Penn made 
 his famous treaty with the Indians. No docu- 
 mentary proof of the existence of such a treaty 
 has reached us. He made, indeed, a number of 
 so-called treaties, which were really only purchases 
 of land involving oral promises between the prin- 
 cipals to treat each other fairly. Hundreds of 
 such treaties have been made. The remarkable 
 
PENN SAILS FOR THE DELAWARE 23 
 
 part about Penn's dealings with the Indians was 
 that such promises as he made he kept. The 
 other Quakers, too, were as careful as Penn in 
 their honorable treatment of the red men. Quak- 
 er families of farmers and settlers lived unarmed 
 among them for generations and, when absent 
 from home, left children in their care. The In- 
 dians, on their part, were known to have helped 
 white families with food in winter time. Penn, 
 on his first visit to the colony, made a long journey 
 imarmed among the Indians as far as the Susque- 
 hanna, saw the great herds of elk on that river, 
 lived[^in Indian wigwams, and learned much of 
 the language and customs of the natives. There 
 need never be any trouble with them, he said. 
 They were the easiest people in the world to get 
 on with if the white men would simply be just. 
 Penn's fair treatment of the Indians kept Penn- 
 sylvania at peace with them for about seventy 
 years — in fact, from 1682 until the outbreak 
 of the French and Indian Wars, in 1755. In its 
 critical period of growth, Pennsylvania was there- 
 fore not at all harassed or checked by those Indian 
 hostilities which were such a serious impediment 
 in other colonies. 
 
 The two years of Penn's first visit were probably 
 
\A^ 
 
 24 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 the happiest of his life. Always fond of the coun- 
 try, he built himself a fine seat on the Delaware 
 near Bristol, and it would have been better for 
 him, and probably also for the colony, if he had 
 remained there. But he thought he had duties 
 in England: his family needed him; he must de- 
 fend his people from the religious oppression still 
 prevailing; and Lord Baltimore had gone to Eng- 
 land to resist him in the boundary dispute. One 
 of the more narrow-minded of his faith wrote to 
 Penn from England that he was enjoying himself 
 too much in his colony and seeking his own selfish 
 interest. Influenced by all these considerations, 
 he returned in August, 1684, and it was long before 
 he saw Pennsylvania again — not, indeed, until 
 October, 1699, and then for only two years. 
 
 1-' t^^JjOs^'^^^^-^ 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 LIFE IN PHILADELPHIA 
 
 The rapid increase of population and the growing 
 prosperity in Pennsylvania during the life of its 
 founder present a striking contrast to the slower 
 and more troubled growth of the other British 
 colonies in America. The settlers in Pennsylvania 
 engaged at once in profitable agriculture. The 
 loam, clay, and limestone soils on the Pennsylvania 
 side of the Delaware produced heavy crops of 
 grain, as well as pasture for cattle and valuable 
 lumber from its forests. The Pennsylvania set- 
 tlers were of a class particularly skilled in dealing 
 with the soil. They apparently encountered none 
 of the difficulties, due probably to incompetent farm- 
 ing, which beset the settlers of Delaware, whose land 
 was as good as that of the Pennsylvania colonists. 
 
 In a few years the port of Philadelphia was load- 
 ing abundant cargoes for England and the great 
 West India trade. After much experimenting 
 
 25 
 
26 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 with different places on the river, such as New 
 Castle, Wilmington, Salem, Burlington, the Quak- 
 ers had at last found the right location for a great 
 seat of commerce and trade that could serve as 
 a center for the export of everything from the re- 
 gion behind it and around it. Philadelphia thus 
 soon became the basis of a prosperity which no 
 other townsite on the Delaware had been able to 
 attain. The Quakers of Philadelphia were the 
 soundest of financiers and men of business, and 
 in their skillful hands the natural resources of their 
 colony were developed without setback or acci- 
 dent. At an early date banking institutions were 
 established in Philadelphia, and the strongest co- 
 lonial merchants and mercantile firms had their 
 offices there. It was out of such a sound business 
 life that were produced in Revolutionary times 
 such characters as Robert Morris and after the 
 Revolution men like Stephen Girard. 
 
 Pennsylvania in colonial times was ruled from 
 Philadelphia somewhat as France has always been 
 ruled from Paris. And yet there was a difference: 
 Pennsylvania had free government. The Ger- 
 mans and the Scotch-Irish outnumbered the Quak- 
 ers and could have controlled the Legislature, 
 for in 1750 out of a population of 150,000 the 
 
LIFE IN PHILADELPHIA 27 
 
 Quakers were only about 50,000; and yet the 
 Legislature down to the Revolution was always 
 confided to the competent hands of the Quakers. 
 No higher tribute, indeed, has ever been paid to any 
 group of people as governors of a commonwealth 
 and architects of its finance and trade. 
 
 It is a curious commentary on the times and on 
 human nature that these Quaker folk; treated as 
 outcasts and enemies of good order and religion 
 in England and gradually losing all their property 
 in heavy fines and confiscations, should so sud- 
 denly in the wilderness prove the capacity of their 
 "Holy Experiment" for achieving the best sort 
 of good order and material success. They imme- 
 diately built a most charming little town by the 
 waterside, snug and pretty with its red brick 
 houses in the best architectural style. It was 
 essentially a commercial town down to the time 
 of the Revolution and long afterwards. The 
 principal residences were on Water Street, the 
 second street from the wharves. The town in 
 those days extended back only as far as Fourth 
 Street, and the State House, now Independence 
 Hall, an admirable instance of the local brick 
 architecture, stood on the edge of the town. The 
 Pennsylvania Hospital the first institution of its 
 
28 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 kind to be built in America, was situated out in 
 the fields. 
 
 Through the town ran a stream following the 
 line of the present Dock Street. Its mouth had 
 been a natural landing place for the first explorers 
 and for the Indians from time immemorial. Here 
 stood a neat tavern, the Blue Anchor, with its 
 dovecotes in old English style, looking out for 
 many a year over the river with its fleet of small 
 boats. Along the wharves lay the very solid, 
 broad, somber, Quaker-like brick warehouses, some 
 of which have survived into modern times. 
 Everywhere were to be found ships and the good 
 seafaring smell of tar and hemp. Ships were built 
 and fitted out alongside docks where other ships 
 were lading. A privateer would receive her equip- 
 ment of guns, pistols, and cutlasses on one side of 
 a wharf, while on the other side a ship was peace- 
 fully loading wheat or salted provisions for the 
 West Indies. 
 
 Everybody's attention in those days was cen- 
 tered on the water instead of inland on railroads 
 as it is today. Commerce was the source of wealth 
 of the town as agriculture was the wealth of the 
 interior of the province. Every one lived close 
 to the river and had an interest in the rise and fall 
 
LIFE IN PHILADELPHIA 29 
 
 of the tide. The little town extended for a mile 
 along the water but scarcely half a mile back from 
 it. All communication with other places, all news 
 from the world of Europe came from the ships, 
 whose captains brought the letters and the few 
 newspapers which reached the colonists. An im- 
 portant ship on her arrival often fired a gun and 
 dropped anchor with some ceremony. Immedi- 
 ately the shore boats swarmed to her side; the 
 captain was besieged for news and usually brought 
 the letters ashore to be distributed at the coffee- 
 house. This institution took the place of the 
 modern stock exchange, clearing house, newspa- 
 per, university, club, and theater all under one 
 roof, with plenty to eat and drink besides. Within 
 its rooms vessels and cargoes were sold; before its 
 door negro slaves were auctioned off; and around 
 it as a common center were brought together all 
 sorts of business, valuable information, gossip, 
 and scandal. It must have been a brilliant scene 
 in the evening, with the candles lighting embroid- 
 ered red and yellow waistcoats, blue and scarlet 
 coats, green and black velvet, with the rich drab 
 and mouse color of the prosperous Quakers con- 
 trasting with the uniforms of British officers come 
 to fight the French and Indian wars. 
 
so THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Sound, as well as color, had its place in this 
 busy and happy colonial life. Christ Church, a 
 brick building which still stands the perfection 
 of colonial architecture had been established by 
 the Church of England people defiantly in the 
 midst of heretical Quakerdom. It soon possessed 
 a chime of bells sent out from England. Captain 
 Budden, who brought them in his ship Myrtilla, 
 would charge no freight for so charitable a deed, 
 and in consequence of his generosity every time 
 he and his ship appeared in the harbor the bells 
 were rung in his honor. They were rung on 
 market days to please the farmers who came into 
 town with their wagons loaded with poultry and 
 vegetables. They were rung muffled in times of 
 public disaster and were kept busy in that way in 
 the French and Indian wars. They were also rung 
 muffled for Franklin when it was learned that 
 while in London he had favored the Stamp Act 
 — a means of expressing popular opinion which 
 the newspapers subsequently put out of date. 
 
 The severe Quaker code of conduct and peaceful 
 contemplation contains no prohibition against! 
 good eating and drinking. Quakers have been 
 known to have the gout. The opportunities in 
 Philadelphia to enjoy the pleasures of the tabk 
 
LIFE IN PHILADELPHIA 31 
 
 were soon unlimited. Farm, garden, and dairy 
 products, vegetables, poultry, beef, and mutton 
 were soon produced in immense quantity and 
 variety and of excellent quality. John Adams, 
 coming from the "plain living and high thinking" 
 of Boston to attend the first meeting of the Con- 
 tinental Congress in Philadelphia, was invited to 
 dine with Stephen Collins, a typical Quaker, and 
 was amazed at the feast set before him. From 
 that time his diary records one after another of 
 these "sinful feasts," as he calls them. But the 
 sin at which he thus looks askance never seems 
 to have withheld him from a generous indulgence. 
 "Drank Madeira at a great rate," he says on one 
 occasion, "and took no harm from it." Madeira 
 obtained in the trade with Spain was the popular 
 drink even at the taverns. Various forms of punch 
 and rum were common, but the modern light wines 
 and champagne were not then in vogue. 
 
 Food in great quantity and variety seems to 
 have been placed on the table at the same time, 
 with little regard to formal courses. Beef, poul- 
 try, and mutton would all be served at one dinner. 
 Fruit and nuts were placed on the table in profu- 
 sion, as well as puddings and desserts numerous 
 and deadly. Dinners were served usually in the 
 
32 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 afternoon. The splendid banquet which Adams de- 
 scribes as given to some members of the Continen- 
 tal Congress by Chief Justice Chew at his country 
 seat was held at four in the afternoon. The din- 
 ner hour was still in the afternoon long after the 
 Revolution and down to the times of the Civil War. 
 Other relics of this old love of good living lasted 
 into modern times. It was not so very long ago 
 that an occasional householder of wealth and dis- 
 tinction in Philadelphia could still be found who 
 insisted on doing his own marketing in the old 
 way, going himself the first thing in the morn- 
 ing on certain days to the excellent markets and 
 purchasing all the family supplies. Philadelphia 
 poultry is still famous the country over; and to 
 be a good judge of poultry was in the old days as 
 much a point of merit as to be a good judge of 
 Madeira. A typical Philadelphian, envious New 
 Yorkers say, will still keep a line of depositors 
 waiting at a bank while he discourses to the re- 
 ceiving teller on what a splendid purchase of poul- 
 try he had made that morning. Early in the last 
 century a wealthy leader of the bar is said to have 
 continued the old practice of going to market fol- 
 lowed by a negro with a wheelbarrow to bring 
 back the supplies. 
 
LIFE IN PHILADELPHIA 33 
 
 Not content with feasting in their own homes, 
 the colonial Philadelphians were continually ban- 
 queting at the numerous taverns, from the Coach 
 and Horses, opposite the State House, down to 
 the Penny Pot Inn close by the river. At the 
 Coach and Horses, where the city elections were 
 usually held, the discarded oyster shells around 
 it had been trampled into a hard white and smooth 
 floor over which surged the excited election crowds. 
 In those taverns the old fashion prevailed of roast- 
 ing great joints of meat on a turnspit before an 
 open fire; and to keep the spit turning before the 
 heat little dogs were trained to work in a sort of 
 treadmill cage. 
 
 In nothing is this colonial prosperity better re- 
 vealed than in the quality of the country seats. 
 They were usually built of stone and sometimes 
 of brick and stone, substantial, beautifully pro- 
 portioned, admirable in taste, with a certain sim- 
 plicity, yet indicating a people of wealth, leisure, 
 and refinement, who believed in themselves and 
 took pleasure in adorning their lives. Not a few 
 of these homes on the outskirts of the city have 
 come down to us unharmed, and Cliveden, Sten- 
 ton, and Belmont are precious relics of such solid 
 structure that with ordinary care they will still 
 
34 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 last for centuries. Many were destroyed during 
 the Revolution; others, such as Landsdowne, the 
 seat of one of the Penn family, built in the Italian 
 style, have disappeared ; others were wiped out by 
 the city's growth. All of them, even the small 
 ones, were most interesting and typical of the life 
 of the times. The colonists began to build them 
 very early. A family would have a solid, brick 
 town house and, only a mile or so away, a country 
 house which was equally substantial. Sometimes 
 they built at a greater distance. Governor Keith, 
 for example, had a country seat, still standing 
 though built in the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, some twenty-five miles north of the city in 
 what was then almost a wilderness. 
 
 Penn's ideal had always been to have Philadel- 
 phia what he called "a green country town." 
 Probably he had in mind the beautiful English 
 towns of abundant foliage and open spaces. And 
 Penn was successful, for many of the Philadelphia 
 houses stood by themselves, with gardens round 
 them. The present Walnut was first called Pool 
 Street; Chestnut was called Winn Street; and 
 Market was called High Street. If he could have 
 foreseen the enormous modern growth of the city, 
 he might not have made his streets so narrow and 
 
LIFE IN PHILADELPHIA 35 
 
 level. But the fault lies perhaps rather with the 
 people for adhering so rigidly and for so long to 
 Penn's scheme, when traffic that he could not have 
 imagined demanded wider streets. If he could have 
 lived into our times he would surely have sent us 
 very positive directions in his bluff British way 
 to break up the original rectangular, narrow plan 
 which was becoming dismally monotonous when 
 applied to a widely spread-out modern city. He 
 was a theologian, but he had a very keen eye for 
 appearances and beauty of surroundings. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 TYPES OF THE POPULATION 
 
 The arrival of colonists in Pennsylvania in greater 
 
 numbers than in Delaware and the Jerseys was 
 
 the more notable because, within a few years after 
 
 Pennsylvania was founded, persecution of the 
 
 Quakers ceased in England and one prolific cause 
 
 of their migration was no more. Thirteen hundred 
 
 Quakers were released from prison in 1686 by 
 
 James II; and in 1689, when William of Orange 
 
 took the throne, toleration was extended to the 
 
 Quakers and other Protestant dissenters. 
 
 The success of the first Quakers who came to 
 
 America brought others even after persecution 
 
 ceased in England. The most numerous class of 
 
 immigrants for the first fifteen or twenty years 
 
 were Welsh, most of whom were Quakers with 
 
 a few Baptists and Church of England people. 
 
 They may have come not so much from a desire 
 
 to flee from persecution as to build up a little 
 
 S6 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 37 
 
 Welsh community and to revive Welsh national- 
 ism. In their new surroundings they spoke their 
 own Welsh language and very few of them had 
 learned English. They had been encouraged in 
 their national aspirations by an agreement with 
 Penn that they were to have a tract of 40,000 acres 
 where they could live by themselves. The land 
 assigned to them lay west of Philadelphia in that 
 high ridge along the present main line of the Penn- 
 sylvania Railroad, now so noted for its wealthy 
 suburban homes. All the important names of 
 townships and places in that region, such as Wynne- 
 wood, St. Davids, Berwyn, Bryn Mawr, Merion, 
 Haverford, Radnor, are Welsh in origin. Some 
 of the Welsh spread round to the north of Phila- 
 delphia, where names like Gwynedd and Penllyn 
 remain as their memorials. The Chester Valley 
 bordering the high ridge of their first settlement 
 they called Duff r in Mawr or Great Valley. 
 
 These Welsh, like so many of the Quakers, were 
 of a well-to-do class. They rapidly developed 
 their fertile land and, for pioneers, lived quite 
 luxuriously. They had none of the usual county 
 and township officers but ruled their Welsh Barony, 
 as it was called, through the authority of their 
 Quaker meetings. But this system eventually 
 
38 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 disappeared. The Welsh were absorbed into the 
 English population, and in a couple of generations 
 their language disappeared. Prominent people 
 are descended from them. David Rittenhouse, 
 the astronomer, was Welsh on his mother's side. 
 David Lloyd, for a long time the leader of the 
 popular party and at one time Chief Justice, 
 was a Welshman. Since the Revolution the 
 Welsh names of Cadwalader and Meredith have 
 been conspicuous. 
 
 The Church of England people formed a curious 
 and decidedly hostile element in the early popu- 
 lation of Pennsylvania. They established them- 
 selves in Philadelphia in the beginning and rapidl}^ 
 grew into a political party which, while it cannot 
 be called very strong in numbers, was important 
 in ability and influence. After Penn's death, his 
 sons joined the Church of England, and the Church- 
 men in the province became still stronger. They 
 formed the basis of the proprietary party, filled 
 executive offices in the Government, and waged 
 relentless war against the Quaker majority which 
 controlled the Legislature. During Penn's life- 
 time the Churchmen were naturally opposed to 
 the whole government, both executive and legis- 
 lative. They were constantly sending home to 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 39 
 
 England all sorts of reports and information cal- 
 culated to show that the Quakers were unfit to 
 rule a province, that Penn should be deprived of 
 his charter, and that Pennsylvania should be put 
 under the direct rule of the King. 
 
 They had delightful schemes for making it a 
 strong Church of England colony like Virginia. 
 One of them suggested that, as the title to the 
 Three Lower Counties, as Delaware was called, 
 was in dispute, it should be taken by the Crown 
 and given to the Church as a manor to support a 
 bishop. Such an ecclesiastic certainly could have 
 lived in princely state from the rents of its fertile 
 farms, with a palace, retinue, chamberlains, chan- 
 cellors, feudal courts, and all the appendages of 
 earthly glory. For the sake of the picturesque- 
 ness of colonial history it is perhaps a pity that 
 this pious plan was never carried out. 
 
 As it was, however, the Churchmen established 
 themselves with not a little glamour and romance 
 round two institutions, Christ Church for the first 
 fifty years, and after that round the old College 
 of Philadelphia. The Reverend William Smith, a 
 pugnacious and eloquent Scotchman, led them in 
 many a gallant onset against the "haughty tribe" 
 of Quakers, and he even suffered imprisonment in 
 
40 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 the cause. He had a country seat on the Schuyl- 
 kill and was in his way a fine character, devoted 
 to the establishment of ecclesiasticism and high- 
 er learning as a bulwark against the menace of 
 Quaker fanaticism; and but for the coming on of 
 the Revolution he might have become the first 
 colonial bishop with all the palaces, pomp, and glory 
 appertaining thereunto. 
 
 In spite of this opposition, however, the Quak- 
 ers continued their control of the colony, serenely 
 tolerating the anathemas of the learned Church- 
 men and the fierce curses and brandished weapons 
 of the Presbyterians and Scotch-Irish. Curses 
 and anathemas were no check to the fertile soil. 
 Grist continued to come to the mill; and the agri- 
 cultural products poured into Philadelphia to be 
 carried away in the ships. The contemplative 
 Quaker took his profits as they passed; enacted 
 his liberalizing laws, his prison reform, his chari- 
 ties, his peace with the savage Indians; allowed 
 science, research, and all the kindly arts of life to 
 flourish; and seemed perfectly contented with the 
 damnation in the other world to which those who 
 flourished under his rule consigned him. 
 
 In discussing the remarkable success of the 
 province, the colonists always disputed whether 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 41 
 
 the credit should be given to the fertile soil or to 
 the liberal laws and constitution. It was no doubt 
 due to both. But the obvious advantages of 
 Penn's charter over the mixed and troublesome 
 governmental conditions in the Jerseys, Penn's 
 personal fame and the repute of the Quakers for 
 liberalism then at its zenith, and the wide adver- 
 tising given to their ideas and Penn's, on the con- 
 tinent of Europe as well as in England, seem to 
 have been the reasons why more people, and many 
 besides Quakers, came to take advantage of that 
 fertile soil. 
 
 The first great increase of alien population came 
 from Germany, which was still in a state of reli- 
 gious turmoil, disunion, and depression from the 
 results of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' 
 War. The reaction from dogma in Germany had 
 produced a multitude of sects, all yearning for 
 greater liberty and prosperity than they had at 
 home. Penn and other Quakers had made mis- 
 sionary tours in Germany and had preached to 
 the people. The Germans do not appear to have 
 been asked to come to the Jerseys. But they were 
 urged to come to Pennsylvania as soon as the 
 charter was obtained; and many of them made 
 an immediate response. 
 
42 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 The German mind was then at the height of its 
 emotional unrestraint. It was as unaccustomed 
 to liberty of thought as to political liberty and it 
 produced a new sect or religious distinction almost 
 every day. Many of these sects came to Pennsyl- 
 vania, where new small religious bodies sprang 
 up among them after their arrival. Schwenkf el- 
 ders, Tunkers, Labadists, New^ Born, New Moon- 
 ers. Separatists, Zion's Brueder, Ronsdorfer, In- 
 spired, Quietists, Gichtelians, Depellians, Moun- 
 tain Men, River Brethren, Brinser Brethren, and 
 the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness, are 
 names which occur in the annals of the province. 
 But these are only a few. In Lancaster County 
 alone the number has at different times been esti- 
 mated at from twenty to thirty. It would proba- 
 bly be impossible to make a complete list; some of 
 them, indeed, existed for only a few years. Their 
 own writers describe them as countless and be- 
 wildering. Many of them were characterized by 
 the strangest sort of German mysticism, and some 
 of them were inclined to monastic and hermit life 
 and their devotees often lived in caves or solitary 
 huts in the woods. 
 
 It would hardly be accurate to call all the Ger- 
 man sects Quakers, since a great deal of their 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 43 
 
 mysticism would have been anything but con- 
 genial to the followers of Fox and Penn. Resem- 
 blances to Quaker doctrine can, however, be found 
 among many of them; and there was one large 
 sect, the Mennonites, who were often spoken of as 
 German Quakers. The two divisions fraternized 
 and preached in each other's meetings. The Men- 
 nonites were well educated as a class and Pas- 
 torius, their leader, was a ponderously learned 
 German. Most of the German sects left the 
 Quakers in undisturbed possession of Philadelphia, 
 and spread out into the surrounding region, which 
 was then a wilderness. They and all the other 
 Germans who afterwards followed them settled 
 in a half circle beginning at Easton on the Dela- 
 ware, passing up the Lehigh Valley into Lancaster 
 County, thence across the Susquehanna and down 
 the Cumberland Valley to the Maryland border, 
 which many of them crossed, and in time scat- 
 tered far to the south in Virginia and even North 
 Carolina, where their descendants are still found. 
 These German sects which came over under 
 the influence of Penn and the Quakers, between 
 the years 1682 and 1702, formed a class by them- 
 selves. Though they may be regarded as peculiar 
 in their ideas and often in their manner of life, it 
 
44 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 cannot be denied that as a class they were a well- 
 educated, thrifty, and excellent people and far 
 superior to the rough German peasants who fol- 
 lowed them in later years. This latter class was 
 often spoken of in Pennsylvania as "the church 
 people," to distinguish them from "the sects," as 
 those of the earlier migration were called. 
 
 The church people, or peasantry of the later 
 migration, belonged usually to one of the two 
 dominant churches of Germany, the Lutheran or 
 the Reformed. Those of the Reformed Church 
 were often spoken of as Calvinists. This migra- 
 tion of the church people was not due to the ex- 
 ample of the Quakers but was the result of a new 
 policy which was adopted by the British Govern- 
 ment when Queen Anne ascended the throne in 
 1702, and which aimed at keeping the English 
 people at home and at filling the English colonies 
 in America with foreign Protestants hostile to 
 France and Spain. 
 
 Large numbers of these immigrants were "re- 
 demptioners," as they were called; that is to say, 
 they were persons who had been obliged to sell 
 themselves to the shipping agents to pay for their 
 passage. On their arrival in Pennsylvania the 
 captain sold them to the colonists to pay the 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 45 
 
 passage, and the redemptioner had to work for his 
 owner for a period varying from five to ten years. 
 No stigma or disgrace clung to any of these peo- 
 ple under this system. It was regarded as a 
 necessary business transaction. Not a few of the 
 very respectable families of the State and some of 
 its prominent men are known to be descended 
 from redemptioners. 
 
 This method of transporting colonists proved a 
 profitable trade for the shipping people, and was 
 soon regularly organized like the modern assisted 
 immigration. Agents, called "newlanders" and 
 "soul-sellers," traveled through Germany work- 
 ing up the transatlantic traffic by various devices, 
 some of them not altogether creditable. Pennsyl- 
 vania proved to be the most attractive region for 
 these immigrants. Some of those who were taken 
 to other colonies finally worked their way to Penn- 
 sylvania. Practically none went to New England, 
 and very few, if any, to Virginia. Indeed, only 
 certain colonies w^ere willing to admit them. 
 
 Another important element that went to make 
 up the Pennsylvania population consisted of the 
 Scotch -Irish . They were descendants of Scotch 
 and English Presbyterians who had gone to Ireland 
 to take up the estates of the Irish rebels confiscated 
 
46 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 under Queen Elizabeth and James I. This migra- 
 tion of Protestants to Ireland, which began soon 
 after 1600, was encouraged by the English Govern- 
 ment. Towards the middle of the seventeenth 
 century the confiscation of more Irish land under 
 Cromwell's regime increased the migration to 
 Ulster. Many English joined the migration, and 
 Scotch of the Lowlands who were largely of Eng- 
 lish extraction, although there were many Gaelic 
 or Celtic names among them. 
 
 These are the people usually known in English 
 history as Ulstermen — the same who made such 
 a heroic defense of Londonderry against James II, 
 and the same who in modern times have resisted 
 home rule in Ireland because it would bury them, 
 they believe, under the tyranny of their old ene- 
 mies, the native Irish Catholic majority. They 
 were more thrifty and industrious than the native 
 Irish and as a result they usually prospered on 
 the Irish land. At first they were in a more or 
 less constant state of war with the native Irish, 
 who attempted to expel them. They were sub- 
 sequently persecuted by the Church of England 
 under Charles I, who attempted to force them to 
 conform to the English established religion. Such 
 a rugged schooling in Ireland made of them a very 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 47 
 
 aggressive, hardy people, Protestants of the Prot- 
 estants, so accustomed to contests and warfare 
 that they accepted it as the natural state of man. 
 
 These Ulstermen came to Pennsylvania some- 
 what later than the first German sects; and not 
 many of them arrived until some years after 1700. 
 They were not, like the first Germans, attracted 
 to the colony by any resemblance of their religion 
 to that of the Quakers. On the contrary they 
 were entirely out of sympathy with the Quakers, 
 except in the one point of religious liberty; and 
 the Quakers were certainly out of sympathy with 
 them. Nearly all the colonies in America received 
 a share of these settlers. Wherever they went 
 they usually sought the frontier and the wilder- 
 ness; and by the time of the Revolution, they 
 could be found upon the whole colonial frontier 
 from New Hampshire to Georgia. They were 
 quite numerous in Virginia, and most numerous 
 along the edge of the Pennsylvania wilderness. It 
 was apparently the liberal laws and the fertile soil 
 that drew them to Pennsylvania in spite of their 
 contempt for most of the Quaker doctrines. 
 
 The dream of their life, their haven of rest, was 
 for these Scotch-Irish a fertile soil where they 
 would find neither Irish "papists" nor Church of 
 
48 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 England; and for this reason in America they 
 always sought the frontier where they could be 
 by themselves. They could not even get on well 
 with the Germans in Pennsylvania; and when the 
 Germans crowded into their frontier settlements, 
 quarrels became so frequent that the proprietors 
 asked the Ulstermen to move farther west, a sug- 
 gestion which they were usually quite willing to 
 accept. At the close of the colonial period in 
 Pennsylvania the Quakers, the Church of Eng- 
 land people, and the miscellaneous denominations 
 occupied Philadelphia and the region round it in 
 a half circle from the Delaware River. Outside 
 of this area lay another containing the Germans, 
 and beyond that were the Scotch-Irish. The 
 principal stronghold of the Scotch-Irish was the 
 Cumberland Valley in Southern Pennsylvania 
 west of the Susquehanna, a region now containing 
 the flourishing towns of Chambersburg, Gettys- 
 burg, Carlisle, and York, where the descendants 
 of these early settlers are still very numerous. 
 In modern times, however, they have spread out 
 widely; they are now to be found all over the State, 
 and they no longer desire so strongly to live 
 by themselves. 
 
 The Ulstermen, owing to the circumstances of 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 49 
 
 their earlier life, had no sympathy whatever with 
 the Quaker's objection to war or with his desire 
 to deal fairly with the Indians and pay them for 
 their land. As Presbyterians and Calvinists, they 
 belonged to one of the older and more conservative 
 divisions of the Reformation. The Quaker's doc- 
 trine of the inward light, his quietism, contem- 
 plation, and advanced ideas were quite incompre- 
 hensible to them. As for the Indians, they held 
 that the Old Testament commands the destruction 
 of all the heathen; and as for paying the savages 
 for their land, it seemed ridiculous to waste money 
 on such an object when they could exterminate 
 the natives at less cost. The Ulstermen, therefore, 
 settled on the Indian land as they pleased, or for 
 that matter on any land, and were continually 
 getting into difficulty with the Pennsylvania Gov- 
 ernment no less than with the Indians. They 
 regarded any region into which they entered as 
 constituting a sovereign state. It was this feeling 
 of independence which subsequently prompted 
 them to organize what is known as the Whisky 
 Rebellion when, after the Revolution, the Federal 
 Government put a tax on the liquor which they 
 so much esteemed as a product, for corn converted 
 into whisky was more easily transported on horses 
 
50 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 over mountain trails, and in that form fetched a 
 better price in the markets. 
 
 After the year 1755, when the Quaker method 
 of deahng with the Indians no longer prevailed, 
 the Scotch-Irish lived on the frontier in a contin- 
 ual state of savage warfare which lasted for the 
 next forty years. War, hunting the abundant 
 game, the deer, buffalo, and elk, and some agricul- 
 ture filled the measure of their days and years. 
 They paid little attention to the laws of the prov- 
 ince, which were difficult to enforce on the distant 
 frontier, and they administered a criminal code of 
 their own with whipping or "laced jacket," as 
 they called it, as a punishment. They were Jacks 
 of all trades, weaving their own cloth and making 
 nearly everything they needed. They were the 
 first people in America to develop the use of the 
 rifle, and they used it in the Back Country all the 
 way down into the Carolinas at a time when it 
 was seldom seen in the seaboard settlements. In 
 those days, rifles were largely manufactured in 
 Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and there were several 
 famous gunsmiths in Philadelphia. Some of the 
 best of these old rifles have been preserved and 
 are really beautiful weapons, with delicate hair 
 triggers, gracefully curved stocks, and quaint brass 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 51 
 
 or even gold or silver mountings. The ornamenta- 
 tion was often done by the hunter himself, who 
 would melt a gold or silver coin and pour it into 
 some design which he had carved with his knife 
 in the stock. 
 
 The Revolution offered an opportunity after 
 the Ulstermen's heart, and they entered it with 
 their entire spirit, as they had every other contest 
 which involved liberty and independence. In fact, 
 in that period they played such a conspicuous 
 part that they almost ruled Philadelphia, the origi- 
 nal home of the Quakers. Since then, spread 
 out through the State, they have always had 
 great influence, the natural result of their energy, 
 intelligence, and love of education. 
 
 Nearly all these diverse elements of the Penn- 
 sylvania population were decidedly sectional in 
 character. The Welsh had a language of their 
 own, and they attempted, though without success, 
 to maintain it, as well as a government of their 
 own within their barony independent of the regular 
 government of the province. The Germans were 
 also extremely sectional. They clung with better 
 success to their own language, customs, and liter- 
 ature. The Scotch-Irish were so clannish that 
 they had ideas of founding a separate province on 
 
52 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 the Susquehanna. Even the Church of England 
 people were so aloof and partisan that, though 
 they lived about Philadelphia among the Quakers, 
 they were extremely hostile to the Quaker rule and 
 unremittingly strove to destroy it. 
 
 All these cleavages and divisions in the popula- 
 tion continue in their effects to this day. They 
 prevented the development of a homogeneous 
 population. No exact statistics were taken of 
 the numbers of the different nationalities in co- 
 lonial times; but Franklin's estimate is probably 
 fairly accurate, and his position in practical poli- 
 tics gave him the means of knowing and of testing 
 his calculations. About the year 1750 he esti- 
 mated the population as one-third Quaker, one- 
 third German, and one-third miscellaneous. This 
 gave about 50,000 or 60,000 to each of the thirds. 
 Provost Smith, of the newly founded college, esti- 
 mated the Quakers at only about 40,000. But 
 his estimate seems too low. He was interested in 
 making out their numbers small because he was 
 trying to show the absurdity of allowing such a 
 small band of fanatics and heretics to rule a great 
 province of the British Empire. One great source 
 of the Quaker power lay in the sympathy of the 
 Germans, who always voted on their side and kept 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 53 
 
 them in control of the Legislature, so that it was 
 in reality a case of two-thirds ruling one-third. 
 The Quakers, it must be admitted, never lost their 
 heads. Unperturbed through all the conflicts 
 and the jarring of races and sects, they held their 
 position unimpaired and kept the confidence and 
 support of the Germans until the Revolution 
 changed everything. 
 
 The varied elements of population spread out 
 in ever widening half circles from Philadelphia as 
 a center. There was nothing in the character of 
 the region to stop this progress. The country all 
 the way westward to the Susquehanna was easy 
 hill, dale, and valley, covered by a magnificent 
 growth of large forest trees — oaks, beeches, pop- 
 lars, walnuts, hickories, and ash — which rewarded 
 the labor of felling by exposing to cultivation a 
 most fruitful soil. 
 
 The settlers followed the old Indian trails. The 
 first westward pioneers seem to have been the 
 Welsh Quakers, who pushed due west from Phila- 
 delphia and marked out the course of the famous 
 Lancaster Road, afterwards the Lancaster Turn- 
 pike. It took the line of least resistance along 
 the old trail, following ridges until it reached 
 the Susquehanna at a spot where an Indian trader. 
 
54 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 named Harris, established himself and founded a 
 post which subsequently became Harrisburg, the 
 capital of the State. 
 
 For a hundred years the Lancaster Road was 
 the great highway westward, at first to the moun- 
 tains, then to the Ohio, and finally to the Mis- 
 sissippi Valley and the Great West. Immigrants 
 and pioneers from all the New England and Middle 
 States flocked out that way to the land of promise 
 in wagons, or horseback, or trudging along on foot. 
 Substantial taverns grew up along the route; and 
 habitual freighters and stage drivers, proud of 
 their fine teams of horses, grew into characters of 
 the road. When the Pennsylvania Railroad was 
 built, it followed the same line. In fact, most of 
 the lines of railroad in the State follow Indian trails. 
 The trails for trade and tribal intercourse led east 
 and west. The warrior trails usually led north 
 and south, for that had long been the line of 
 strategy and conquest of the tribes. The north- 
 ern tribes, or Six Nations, established in the lake 
 region of New York near the headwaters of the 
 Delaware, the Susquehanna, and the Ohio, had the 
 advantage of these river valleys for descending into 
 the whole Atlantic seaboard and the valley of the 
 Mississippi. They had in consequence conquered 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 55 
 
 all the tribes south of them as far even as the Caro- 
 linas and Georgia. All their trails of conquest led 
 across Pennsylvania. 
 
 The Germans in their expansion at first seem 
 to have followed up the Schuylkill Valley and its 
 tributaries, and they hold this region to the pres- 
 ent day. Gradually they crossed the watershed 
 to the Susquehanna and broke into the region of 
 the famous limestone soil in Lancaster County, a 
 veritable farmer's paradise from which nothing will 
 ever drive them. Many Quaker farmers pene- 
 trated north and northeast from Philadelphia into 
 Bucks County, a fine rolling and hilly wheat and 
 corn region, where their descendants are still found 
 and whence not a few well-known Philadelphia 
 families have come. 
 
 The Quaker government of Pennsylvania in 
 almost a century of its existence largely fulfilled 
 its ideals. It did not succeed in governing with- 
 out war; but the war was not its fault. It did 
 succeed in governing without oaths. An aflSrma- 
 tion instead of an oath became the law of Penn- 
 sylvania for all who chose an affirmation; and 
 this law was soon adopted by most American 
 communities. It succeeded in establishing reli- 
 gious liberty in Pennsylvania in the fullest sense 
 
5Q THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 of the word. It brought Christianity nearer to its 
 original simphcity and made it less superstitious 
 and cruel. 
 
 The Quakers had always maintained that it 
 was a mistake to suppose that their ideas would 
 interfere with material prosperity and happiness; 
 and they certainly proved their contention in 
 Pennsylvania. To Quaker liberalism was due 
 not merely the material prosperity, but prison 
 reform and the notable public charities of Penn- 
 sylvania; in both of which activities, as in the 
 abolition of slavery, the Quakers were leaders. 
 Original research in science also flourished in a 
 marked degree in colonial Pennsylvania. No one 
 in those days knew the nature of thunder and 
 lightning, and the old explanation that they were 
 the voice of an angry God was for many a sufficient 
 explanation. Franklin, by a long series of experi- 
 ments in the free Quaker colony, finally proved 
 in 1752 that lightning was electricity, that is to 
 say, a manifestation of the same force that is pro- 
 duced when glass is rubbed with buckskin. He 
 invented the lightning rod, discovered the phe- 
 nomenon of positive and negative electricity, ex- 
 plained the action of the Leyden jar, and was the 
 first American writer on the modern science of 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 57 
 
 political economy. This energetic citizen of Penn- 
 sylvania spent a large part of his life in research; 
 he studied the Gulf Stream, storms and their causes, 
 waterspouts, whirlwinds; and he established the 
 fact that the northeast storms of the Atlantic coast 
 usually move against the wind. 
 
 But Franklin was not the only scientist in the 
 colony. Besides his three friends, Kinnersley, 
 Hopkinson, and Syng, who worked with him and 
 helped him in his discoveries, there were David 
 Rittenhouse, the astronomer, John Bartram, the 
 botanist, and a host of others. Rittenhouse ex- 
 celled in every undertaking which required the 
 practical application of astronomy, He attracted 
 attention even in Europe for his orrery which 
 indicated the movements of the stars and which 
 was an advance on all previous instruments of the 
 kind. When astronomers in Europe were seek- 
 ing to have the transit of Venus of 1769 observed 
 in difiPerent parts of the world, Pennsylvania 
 alone of the American colonies seems to have 
 had the man and the apparatus necessary for the 
 work. Rittenhouse conducted the observations 
 at three points and won a world-wide reputation 
 by the accuracy and skill of his observations. The 
 whole community was interested in this scientific 
 
58 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 undertaking; the Legislature and public institutions 
 raised the necessary funds ; and the American Philo- 
 sophical Society, the only organization of its kind 
 in the colonies, had charge of the preparations. 
 
 The American Philosophical Society had been 
 started in Philadelphia in 1743. It was the first 
 scientific society to be founded in America, and 
 throughout the colonial period it was the only 
 society of its kind in the country. Its member- 
 ship included not only prominent men throughout 
 America, such as Thomas Jefferson, who were in- 
 terested in scientific inquiry, but also representa- 
 tives of foreign nations. With its library of rare 
 and valuable collections and its annual publica- 
 tion of essays on almost every branch of science, 
 the society still continues its useful scientific work. 
 
 John Bartram, who was the first botanist to 
 describe the plants of the New World and who 
 explored the whole country from the Great Lakes 
 to Florida, was a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial 
 times, farmer born and bred. Thomas Godfrey, 
 also a colonial Pennsylvanian, was rewarded by 
 the Royal Society of England for an improvement 
 which he made in the quadrant. Peter Collinson 
 of England, a famous naturalist and antiquarian 
 of early times, was a Quaker. In modern times 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 59 
 
 John Dalton, the discoverer of the atomic theory 
 of color -bhndness, was born of Quaker parents, 
 and Edward Cope, of a well-known Philadelphia 
 Quaker family, became one of the most eminent 
 naturalists and paleontologists of the nineteenth 
 century, and unaided discovered over a third of the 
 three thousand extinct species of vertebrates recog- 
 nized by men of science. In the field of education, 
 Lindley Murray, the grammarian of a hundred 
 years ago, was a Quaker. Ezra Cornell, a Quaker, 
 founded the great university in New York which 
 bears his name; and Johns Hopkins, also a Quaker, 
 founded the university of that name in Baltimore. 
 Pennsylvania deserves the credit of turning 
 these early scientific pursuits to popular uses. 
 The first American professorship of botany and 
 natural history was established in Philadelphia 
 College, now the University of Pennsylvania. The 
 first American book on a medical subject was 
 written in Philadelphia by Thomas Cadwalader 
 in 1740 ; the first American hospital was established 
 there in 1751; and the first systematic instruction 
 in medicine. Since then Philadelphia has pro- 
 duced a long line of physicians and surgeons of 
 national and European reputation. For half a 
 century after the Revolution the city was the 
 
60 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 center of medical education for the country and it 
 still retains a large part of that preeminence. The 
 Academy of Natural Sciences founded in Phila- 
 delphia in 1812 by two inconspicuous young men, 
 an apothecary and a dentist, soon became by the 
 spontaneous support of the community a distin- 
 guished institution. It sent out two Arctic expe- 
 ditions, that of Kane and that of Hayes, and has 
 included among its members the most prominent 
 men of science in America. It is now the oldest 
 as well as the most complete institution of its kind 
 in the country. The Franklin Institute, founded 
 in Philadelphia in 1824, was the result of a similar 
 scientific interest. It was the first institution of 
 applied science and the mechanic arts in America. 
 Descriptions of the first 2900 patents issued by 
 the United States Government are to be found 
 only on the pages of its Journal, which is still an 
 authoritative annual record. 
 
 Apart from their scientific attainments, one of 
 the most interesting facts about the Quakers is the 
 large proportion of them who have reached emi- 
 nence, often in occupations which are supposed 
 to be somewhat inconsistent with Quaker doctrine. 
 General Greene, the most capable American oflScer 
 of the Revolution, after Washington, was a Rhode 
 
TYPES OF THE POPULATION 61 
 
 Island Quaker. General Mifflin of the Revolu- 
 tion was a Pennsylvania Quaker. General Jacob 
 Brown, a Bucks County Pennsylvania Quaker, 
 reorganized the army in the War of 1812 and re- 
 stored it to its former efficiency. In the long list 
 of Quakers eminent in all walks of life, not only 
 in Pennsylvania but elsewhere, are to be found 
 John Bright, a lover of peace and human liberty 
 through a long and eminent career in British poli- 
 tics; John Dickinson of Philadelphia, who wrote 
 the famous Farmer's Letters so signally useful in 
 the American Revolution; Whittiei, the American 
 poet, a Quaker born in Massachusetts of a family 
 converted from Puritanism when the Quakers in- 
 vaded Boston in the seventeenth century; and Ben- 
 jamin West, a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial 
 times, an artist of permanent eminence, one of the 
 founders of the Royal Academ^y in England and its 
 president in succession to Sir Joshua Reynolds. 
 
 Wherever Quakers are found they are the useful 
 and steady citizens. Their eminence seems out 
 of all proportion to their comparatively small 
 numbers. It has often been asked why this height 
 of attainment should occur among a people of 
 such narrow religious discipline. But were the 
 Quakers really narrow, or were they any more 
 
62 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 narrow than other rigorously self-disciphned peo- 
 ple — Spartans, Puritans, soldiers whose discipline 
 enables them to achieve great results? All disci- 
 pline is in one sense narrow. Quaker quietude and 
 retirement probably conserved mental energy in- 
 stead of dissipating it. In an age of supersti- 
 tion and irrational religion, their minds were free 
 and unhampered, and it was the dominant rational 
 tone of their thought that enabled science to 
 flourish in Pennsylvania. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS 
 
 The material prosperity of Penn's Holy Experi- 
 ment kept on proving itself over and over again 
 every month of the year. But meantime great 
 events were taking place in England. The period 
 of fifteen years from Penn's return to England 
 in 1684, until his return to Pennsylvania at the 
 close of the year of 1699, was an eventful time in 
 English history. It was long for a proprietor to 
 be away from his province, and Penn would have 
 left a better reputation if he had passed those 
 fifteen years in his colony, for in England during 
 that period he took what most Americans believe to 
 have been the wrong side in the Revolution of 1688. 
 Penn was closely tied by both interest and 
 friendship to Charles II and the Stuart family. 
 When Charles II died in 1685 and his brother, the 
 Duke of York, ascended the throne as James II, 
 Penn was equally bound to him, because among 
 
 63 
 
64 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 other things the Duke of York had obtained Penn's 
 release in 1669 from imprisonment for his reHgious 
 opinions. He became still more bound when one 
 of the first acts of the new King's reign was the 
 release of a great number of people who had been 
 imprisoned for their religion, among them thirteen 
 hundred Quakers. In addition to preaching to 
 the Quakers and protecting them, Penn used his 
 influence with James to secure the return of several 
 political offenders from exile. His friendship with 
 James raised him, indeed, to a position of no little 
 importance at Court. He was constantlj^ con- 
 sulted by the King, in whose political policy he 
 gradually became more and more involved. 
 
 James was a Roman Catholic and soon per- 
 fected his plans for making both Church and State 
 a papal appendage and securing for the Crown the 
 right to suspend acts of Parliament. Penn at 
 first protested, but finally supported the King in 
 the belief that he would in the end establish liberty.- 
 In his earlier years, however, Penn had written 
 pamphlets arguing strenuously against the same 
 sort of despotic schemes that James was now un- 
 dertaking; and this contradiction of his former 
 position seriously injured his reputation even 
 among his own people. 
 
TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS 65 
 
 Part of the policy of James was to grant many 
 favors to the Quakers and to all other dissenting 
 bodies in England, to release them from prison, 
 to give them perfect freedom of worship, and to 
 remove the test laws which prevented them from 
 holding office. He thus hoped to unite them with 
 the Roman Catholics in extirpating the Church of 
 England and establishing the Papacy in its place. 
 But the dissenters and nonconformists, though 
 promised relief from sufferings severer than it is 
 possible perhaps now to appreciate, refused almost 
 to a man this tempting bait. Even the Quakers, 
 who had suffered probably more than the others, 
 rejected the offer with indignation and mourned 
 the fatal mistake of their leader Penn. All Prot- 
 estant England united in condemning him, ac- 
 cused him of being a secret Papist and a Jesuit in 
 disguise, and believed him guilty of acts and in- 
 tentions of which he was probably entirely inno- 
 cent. This extreme feeling against Penn is re- 
 flected in Macaulay's History of England, which 
 strongly espouses the Whig side; and in those 
 vivid pages Penn is represented, and very unfairly, 
 as nothing less than a scoundrel. 
 
 In spite of the attempts which James naade to 
 secure his position, the dissenters, the Church of 
 
66 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 England, and Penn's own Quakers all joined 
 heart and soul in the Revolution of 1688, which 
 quickly dethroned the King, drove him from 
 England, and placed the Prince of Orange on the 
 throne as William III. Penn was now for many 
 years in a very unfortunate, if not dangerous, 
 position, and was continually suspected of plotting 
 to restore James. For three years he was in 
 hiding to escape arrest or worse, and he largely 
 lost the good will and affection of the Quakers. 
 
 Meantime since his departure from Pennsyl- 
 vania in the summer of 1684 that province went 
 on increasing in population and in pioneer prosper- 
 ity. But Penn's quitrents and money from sales 
 of land were far in arrears, and he had been and 
 still was at great expense in starting the colony 
 and in keeping up the plantation and country seat 
 he had established on the Delaware River above 
 Philadelphia, j Troublesome political disputes also 
 arose. The Council of eighteen members which 
 he had authorized to act as governor in his ab- 
 sence neglected to send the new laws to him, slight- 
 ed his letters, and published laws in their own name 
 without mentioning him or the King. These ir- 
 regularities were much exaggerated by enemies 
 of the Quakers in England. The Council was not 
 
TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS 67 
 
 a popular body and was frequently at odds with 
 the Assembly. 
 
 Penn thought he could improve the government 
 by appointing five commissioners to act as gover- 
 nor instead of the whole Council. Thomas Lloyd, 
 an excellent Quaker who had been President of 
 the Council and who had done much to allay hard 
 feeling, was fortunately the president of these 
 commissioners. Penn instructed them to act as 
 if he himself were present, and at the next meeting 
 of the Assembly to annul all the laws and reenact 
 only such as seemed proper. This course reminds 
 us of the absolutism of his friend, King James, 
 and, indeed, the date of these instructions (1686) 
 is that when his intimacy with that bigoted mon- 
 arch reached its highest point. Penn's theory 
 of his power was that the frame or constitution 
 of government he had given the province was a 
 contract; that, the Council and Assembly having 
 violated some of its provisions, it was annulled 
 and he was free, at least for a time, to govern as 
 he pleased. Fortunately his commissioners never 
 attempted to carry out these instructions. There 
 would have been a rebellion and some very un- 
 pleasant history if they had undertaken to enforce 
 such oriental despotism in Pennsylvania. 
 
68 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 The five commissioners with Thomas Lloyd at 
 their head seem to have governed without seriously 
 troublesome incidents for the short term of two 
 years during which they were in power. But in 
 1687 Thomas Lloyd, becoming weary of directing 
 them, asked to be relieved and is supposed to have 
 advised Penn to appoint a single executive instead 
 of commissioners. Penn accordingly appointed 
 Captain John Blackwell, formerly an officer in 
 Cromwell's army. Blackwell was not a Quaker 
 but a "grave, sober, wise man," as Penn wrote to 
 a friend, who would "bear down with a visible 
 authority vice and faction." It was hoped that 
 he would vigorously check all irregularities and 
 bring Penn better returns from quitrents and 
 sales of land. 
 
 But this new governor clashed almost at once 
 with the Assembly, tried to make them pass a 
 militia law, suggested that the province's trade 
 to foreign countries was illegal, persecuted and 
 arrested members of the Assembly, refused to 
 submit new laws to it, and irritated the people by 
 suggesting the invalidity of their favorite laws. 
 The Quaker Assembly withstood and resisted him 
 until they wore him out. After a year and one 
 month in office he resigned at Penn's request or. 
 
TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS 69 
 
 according to some accounts, at his own request. 
 At any rate, he expressed himself as dehghted to 
 be relieved. As a Puritan soldier he found him- 
 self no match for a peaceable Quaker Assembly. 
 Penn again made the Council the executive with 
 Thomas Lloyd as its President. But to the old 
 causes of unrest a new one was now added. One 
 George Keith, a Quaker, turned heretic and car- 
 ried a number of Pennsylvania Quakers over to 
 the Church of England, thereby causing great 
 scandal. The "Lower Counties" or Territories, 
 as the present State of Delaware was then called, 
 became mutinous, withdrew their representatives 
 from the Council, and made William Markham 
 their Governor. This action together with the 
 Keithian controversy, the disturbances over Black- 
 well, and the clamors of Church of England people 
 that Penn was absent and neglecting his province, 
 that the Quakers would make no military defense, 
 and that the province might at any time fall into 
 the hands of France, came to the ears of King 
 William, who was already ill disposed toward 
 Penn and distrusted him as a Jacobite. It seemed 
 hardly advisable to allow a Jacobite to rule a Brit- 
 ish colony. Accordingly a royal order suspended 
 Penn's governmental authority and placed the 
 
70 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 province under Benjamin Fletcher, Governor of 
 New York. He undertook to rule in dictatorial 
 fashion, threatening to annex the province to 
 New York, and as a consequence the Assembly 
 had plenty of trouble with him. But two years 
 later, 1694, the province was returned to Penn, 
 who now appointed as Governor William Mark- 
 ham, who had served as lieutenant-governor under 
 Fletcher. 
 
 Markham proceeded to be high-handed with 
 the Assembly and to administer the government 
 in the imperialistic style of Fletcher. But the 
 Assembly soon tamed him and in 1696 actually 
 worried out of him a new constitution, which 
 became known as Markham's Frame, proved 
 much more popular than the one Penn had given, 
 and allowed the Assembly much more power. 
 Markham had no conceivable right to assent to 
 it and Penn never agreed to it; but it was lived 
 under for the next four years until Penn returned 
 to the province. While it naturally had opponents, 
 it was largely regarded as entirely valid, and ap- 
 parently with the understanding that it was to 
 last until Penn objected to it. 
 
 Penn had always been longing to return to 
 Pennsylvania and live there for the rest of his 
 
TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS 71 
 
 life; but the terrible times of the Revolution of 
 1688 in England and its consequences had held 
 him back. Those difficulties had now passed. 
 Moreover, William III had established free gov- 
 ernment and religious liberty. No more Quakers 
 were imprisoned and Penn's old occupation of 
 securing their protection and release was gone. 
 
 In the autumn of 1699 he sailed for Pennsyl- 
 vania with his family and, arriving after a tedious 
 three months' voyage, was well received. His po- 
 litical scrapes and mistakes in England seemed 
 to be buried in the past. He was soon at his old 
 enjoyable life again, traveling actively about the 
 country, preaching to the Quakers, and enlarging 
 and beautifying his country seat, Pennsbury, on 
 the Delaware, twenty miles above Philadelphia. 
 As roads and trails were few and bad he usually 
 traveled to and from the town in a barge which 
 was rowed by six oarsmen and which seemed to 
 give him great pride and pleasure. 
 
 Two happy years passed away in this manner, 
 during which Penn seems to have settled, not 
 however without difficulty, a great deal of busi- 
 ness with his people, the Assembly, and the Indian 
 tribes. Unfortunately he got word from England 
 of a bill in Parliament for the revocation of colonial 
 
72 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 charters and for the estabhshment of royal govern- 
 ments in their place. He must needs return to 
 England to fight it. Shortly before he sailed the 
 Assembly presented him with a draft of a new 
 constitution or frame of government which they 
 had been discussing with him and preparing for 
 some time. This he accepted, and it became 
 the constitution under which Pennsylvania lived 
 and prospered for seventy-five years, until the 
 Revolution of 1776. 
 
 This new constitution was quite liberal. The 
 most noticeable feature of it was the absence of 
 any provision for the large elective council or 
 upper house of legislation, which had been very 
 unpopular. The Assembly thus became the one 
 legislative body. There was incidental reference 
 in the document to a governor's council, although 
 there was no formal clause creating it. Penn and 
 his heirs after his death always appointed a small 
 council as an advisory body for the deputy gover- 
 nor. The Assembly was to be chosen annually 
 by the freemen and to be composed of four repre- 
 sentatives from each county. It could originate 
 bills, control its own adjournments without in- 
 terference from the Governor, choose its speaker 
 and other officers, and judge of the qualifications 
 
TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS 73 
 
 and election of its own members. These were 
 standard Anglo-Saxon popular parliamentary rights 
 developed by long struggles in England and now 
 established in Pennsylvania never to be relaxed. 
 Finally a clause in the constitution permitted the 
 Lower Counties, or Territories, under certain con- 
 ditions to establish home rule. In 1705 the Terri- 
 tories took advantage of this concession and set 
 up an assembly of their own. 
 
 Immediately after signing the constitution, in 
 the last days of October, 1701, Penn sailed for 
 England, expecting soon to return. But he be- 
 came absorbed in affairs in England and never 
 saw his colony again. This was unfortunate be- 
 cause Pennsylvania soon became a torment to 
 him instead of a great pleasure as it always seems 
 to have been when he lived in it. He was a 
 happy present proprietor, but not a very happy 
 absentee one. 
 
 The Church of England people in Pennsylvania 
 entertained great hopes of this proposal to turn 
 the proprietary colonies into royal provinces. 
 Under such a change, while the Quakers might 
 still have an influence in the Legislature, the 
 Crown would probably give the executive offices 
 to Churchmen. They therefore labored hard to 
 
74 THE QUAKER COLONIj:S 
 
 discredit the Quakers. They kept harping on the 
 absurdity of a set of fanatics attempting to govern 
 a colony without a militia and without administer- 
 ing oaths of office or using oaths in judicial proceed- 
 ings. How could any one's life be safe from foreign 
 enemies without soldiers, and what safeguard was 
 there for life, liberty, and property before judges, 
 jurors, and witnesses, none of whom had been 
 sworn .^^ The Churchmen kept up their complaints 
 for along time, but without effect in England. 
 
 Penn was able to thwart all their plans. The 
 bill to change the province into a royal one was 
 never passed by Parliament. Penn returned to 
 his court life, his preaching, and his theological 
 writing, a rather curious combination and yet one 
 by which he had always succeeded in protecting 
 his people. He was a favorite with Queen Anne, 
 who was now on the throne, and he led an expen- 
 sive life which, with the cost of his deputy gover- 
 nor's salary in the colony, the slowness of his quit- 
 rent collections, and the dishonesty of the steward 
 of his English estates, rapidly brought him into 
 debt. To pay the government expense of a small 
 colonial empire and at the same time to lead the 
 life of a courtier and to travel as a preacher would 
 have exhausted a stronger exchequer than Penn's, 
 
TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS 75 
 
 The contests between the different deputy gov- 
 ernors, whom Penn or his descendants sent out, 
 and the Quaker Legislature fill the annals of the 
 province for the next seventy years, down to the 
 Revolution. These quarrels, when compared with 
 the larger national political contests of history, 
 seem petty enough and even tedious in detail. 
 But, looked at in another aspect, they are impor- 
 tant because they disclose how liberty, self-govern- 
 ment, repubhcanism, and many of the constitu- 
 tional principles by which Americans now live 
 were gradually developed as the colonies grew 
 towards independence. 
 
 The keynote to all these early contests was 
 what may be called the fundamental principle of 
 colonial constitutional law or, at any rate, of con- 
 stitutional practice, namely, that the Governor, 
 whether royal or proprietary, must always be kept 
 poor. His salary or income must never become 
 a fixed or certain sum but must always be depend- 
 ent on the annual favor and grants of a legisla- 
 ture controlled by the people. This belief was 
 the foundation of American colonial liberty. The 
 Assemblies, not only in Pennsylvania but in other 
 colonies, would withhold the Governor's salary 
 until he consented to their favorite laws. If he 
 
76 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 vetoed their laws, he received no salary. One of 
 the causes of the Revolution in 1776 was the at- 
 tempt of the mother country to make the gover- 
 nors and other colonial officials dependent for their 
 salaries on the Government in England instead of 
 on the legislatures in the colonies. 
 
 So the squabbles, as we of today are inclined 
 to call them, went on in Pennsylvania — provin- 
 cial and petty enough, but often very large and 
 important so far as the principle which they in- 
 volved was concerned. The Legislature of Penn- 
 sylvania in those days was a small body composed 
 of only about twenty-five or thirty members, most 
 of them sturdy, thrifty Quakers. They could 
 meet very easily anywhere — at the Governor's 
 house, if in conference with him, or at the treas- 
 urer's office or at the loan office, if investigating 
 accounts. Beneath their broad brim hats and 
 grave demeanor they were as Anglo-Saxon at heart 
 as Robin Hood and his merry men, and in their 
 ninety years of political control they built up as 
 goodly a fabric of civil liberty as can be found in 
 any community in the world. 
 
 The dignified, confident message from a deputy 
 governor, full of lofty admonitions of their duty 
 to the Crown, the province, and the proprietor, 
 
TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS 77 
 
 is often met by a sarcastic, stinging reply of the 
 Assembly. David Lloyd, the Welsh leader of the 
 anti-proprietary party, and Joseph Wilcox, an- 
 other leader, became very skillful in drafting these 
 profoundly respectful but deeply cutting replies. 
 In after years, Benjamin Franklin attained even 
 greater skill. In fact, it is not unlikely that he 
 developed a large measure of his world famous 
 aptness in the use of language in the process of 
 drafting these replies. The composing of these 
 official communications was important work, for 
 a reply had to be telling and effective not only 
 with the Governor but with the people who learned 
 of its contents at the coffeehouse and spread the 
 report of it among all classes. There was not a 
 little good-fellowship in their contests; and Frank- 
 lin, for instance, tells us how he used to abuse a 
 certain deputy governor all day in the Assembly 
 and then dine with him in jovial intercourse in 
 the evening. 
 
 The Assembly had a very convenient way of 
 accomplishing its purposes in legislation in spite 
 of the opposition of the British Government. 
 Laws when passed and approved by the deputy 
 governor had to be sent to England for approval 
 by the Crown within five years. But meanwhile 
 
78 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 the people would live under the law for five years, 
 and, if at the end of that time it was disallowed, 
 the Assembly would reenact the measure and live 
 under it again for another period.. 
 
 The ten years after Penn's return to England 
 in 1701 were full of trouble for him. Money re- 
 turns from the province were slow, partly because 
 England was involved in war and trade depressed, 
 and partly because the Assembly, exasperated by 
 the deputy governors he appointed, often refused 
 to vote the deputy a salary and left Penn to bear 
 all the expense of government. He was being 
 rapidly overwhelmed with debt. One of his sons 
 was turning out badly. The manager of his es- 
 tates in England and Ireland, Philip Ford, was en- 
 riching himself by the trust, charging compound 
 interest at eight per cent every six months, and 
 finally claiming that Penn owed him £14,000. 
 Ford had rendered accounts from time to time, 
 but Penn in his careless way had tossed them 
 aside without examination. When Ford pressed 
 for payment, Penn, still without making any in- 
 vestigation, foolishly gave Ford a deed in fee 
 simple of Pennsylvania as security. ^Afterwards 
 he accepted from Ford a lease of the province, 
 
TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS 79 
 
 which was another piece of folly, for the lease 
 could, of course, be used as evidence to show that 
 the deed was an absolute conveyance and not 
 intended as a mortgage. 
 
 This unfortunate business Ford kept quiet dur- 
 ing his lifetime. But on his death his widow and 
 son made everything public, professed to be the 
 proprietors of Pennsylvania, and sued Penn for 
 £2000 rent in arrears. They obtained a judg- 
 ment for the amount claimed and, as Penn could 
 not pay, they had him arrested and imprisoned 
 for debt. For nine months he was locked up in 
 the debtors' prison, the "Old Bailey," and there 
 he might have remained indefinitely if some of his 
 friends had not raised enough money to compro- 
 mise with the Fords. Isaac Norris, a prominent 
 Quaker from Pennsylvania, happened at that time 
 to be in England and exerted himself to set Penn 
 free and save the province from further disgrace. 
 After this there was a reaction in Penn's favor. 
 He selected a better deputy governor for Pennsyl- 
 vania. He wrote a long and touching letter to 
 the people, reminding them how they had flour- 
 ished and grown rich and free under his liberal 
 laws, while he had been sinking in poverty. 
 
 After that conditions improved in the affairs 
 
80 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 of Penn. The colony was better governed, and 
 the anti-proprietary party almost disappeared. 
 The last six or eight years of Penn's life were free 
 from trouble. He had ceased his active work at 
 court, for everything that could be accomplished 
 for the Quakers in the way of protection and 
 favorable laws had now^ been done. Penn spent 
 his last years in trying to sell the government of 
 his province to the Crown for a sum that would 
 enable him to pay his debts and to restore his 
 family to prosperity. But he was too particular 
 in stipulating that the great principles of civil and 
 religious liberty on which the colony had been 
 established should not be infringed. He had seen 
 how much evil had resulted to the rights of the 
 people when the proprietors of the Jerseys parted 
 with their right to govern. In consequence he 
 required so many safeguards that the sale of 
 Pennsylvania was delayed and delayed until its 
 founder was stricken with paralysis. Penn lin- 
 gered for some years, but his intellect was now 
 too much clouded to make a valid sale. The 
 event, however, was fortunate for Pennsylvania, 
 which would probably otherwise have lost many 
 valuable rights and privileges by becoming a 
 Crown colony. 
 
TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS 81 
 
 On July 30, 1718, Penn died at the age of seventy- 
 four. His widow became proprietor of the prov- 
 ince, probably the only woman who ever became 
 feudal proprietor of such an immense domain. 
 She appointed excellent deputy governors and 
 ruled with success for eight years until her death 
 in 1726. In her time the ocean was free from 
 enemy cruisers, and the trade of the colony grew 
 so rapidly that the increasing sales of land and 
 quitrents soon enabled her to pay off the mort- 
 gage on the province and all the rest of her hus- 
 band's debts. It was sad that Penn did not live 
 to see that day, which he had so hoped for in his 
 last years, when, with ocean commerce free from 
 depredations, the increasing money returns from 
 his province would obviate all necessity of selling 
 the government to the Crown. 
 
 With all debts paid and prosperity increasing, 
 Penn's sons became very rich men. Death had 
 reduced the children to three — John, Thomas, 
 and Richard. Of these, Thomas became what 
 may be called the managing proprietor, and the 
 others were seldom heard of. Thomas lived in 
 the colony nine years — 1732 to 1741 — studying 
 its affairs and sitting as a member of the Council. 
 For over forty years he was looked upon as the 
 
82 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 proprietor. In fact, he directed the great province 
 for almost as long a time as his father had managed 
 it. But he was so totally unlike his father that it is 
 diflScult to find the slightest resemblance in fea- 
 ture or in mind. He was not in the least disposed 
 to proclaim or argue about religion. Like the rest 
 of his family, he left the Quakers and joined the 
 Church of England, a natural evolution in the case 
 of many Quakers. He was a prosperous, accom- 
 plished, sensible, cool-headed gentleman, by no 
 means without ability, but without any inclination 
 for setting the world on fire. He was a careful, 
 economical man of business, which is more than 
 can be said of his distinguished father. He saw no 
 visions and cared nothing for grand speculations. 
 Thomas Penn, however, had his troubles and 
 disputes with the Assembly. They thought him 
 narrow and close. Perhaps he was. That was 
 the opinion of him held by Franklin, who led the 
 anti-proprietary party. But at the same time 
 some consideration must be given to the position 
 in which Penn found himself. He had on his 
 hands an empire, rich, fertile, and inhabited by 
 liberty-loving Anglo-Saxons and by passive Ger- 
 mans. He had to collect from their land the pur- 
 chase money and quitrents rapidly rolling up in 
 
TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS 83 
 
 value with the increase of population into mil- 
 lions of pounds sterling, for which he was respon- 
 sible to his relatives. At the same time he had 
 to influence the politics of the province, approve 
 or reject laws in such a way that his family interest 
 would be protected from attack or attempted con- 
 fiscation, keep the British Crown satisfied, and 
 see that the liberties of the colonists were not 
 impaired and that the people were kept contented. 
 It was not an easy task even for a clear-headed 
 man like Thomas Penn. He had to arrange for 
 treaties with the Indians and for the purchase of 
 their lands in accordance with the humane ideas 
 of his father and in the face of the Scotch-Irish 
 thirst for Indian blood and the French desire to 
 turn the savages loose upon the Anglo-Saxon set- 
 tlements. He had to fight through the bound- 
 ary disputes with Connecticut, Maryland, and 
 Virginia, which threatened to reduce his empire 
 to a mere strip of land containing neither Phila- 
 delphia nor Pittsburgh. The controversy with 
 Connecticut lasted throughout the colonial period 
 and was not definitely settled till the close of the 
 Revolution. The charter of Connecticut granted 
 by the British Crown extended the colony west- 
 ward to the Pacific Ocean and cut off the northern 
 
84 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 half of the tract afterwards granted to WilHam 
 Penn. In pursuance of what they beheved to be 
 their rights, the Connecticut people settled in the 
 beautiful valley of Wyoming. They were there- 
 upon ejected by force by the proprietors of Penn- 
 sylvania; but they returned, only to be ejected 
 again and again in a petty warfare carried on for 
 many years. In the summer of 1778, the people 
 of the valley were massacred by the Iroquois In- 
 dians. The history of this Connecticut boundary 
 dispute fills volumes. So does the boundary dis- 
 pute with Maryland, which also lasted through- 
 out the colonial period; the dispute with Virginia 
 over the site of Pittsburgh is not so voluminous. 
 All these controversies Thomas Penn conducted 
 with eminent skill, inexhaustible patience, and 
 complete success. For this achievement the State 
 owes him a debt of gratitude. 
 
 Thomas Penn was in the extraordinary position 
 of having to govern as a feudal lord what was 
 virtually a modern community. He was exercis- 
 ing feudal powers three hundred years after all 
 the reasons for the feudal system had ceased to 
 exist; and he was exercising those powers and 
 acquiring by them vast wealth from a people in a 
 new and wild country w^hose convictions, both 
 
PENNSl 
 
 Soale of 
 
 s 
 
 .Limit cff 
 settled 
 
 VI 
 
 voodL. 
 
 1 
 
 
PENNSYLVANIA 
 
TROUBLES OF PENN AND HIS SONS 85 
 
 civil and religious, were entirely opposed to any- 
 thing like the feudal system. It must certainly 
 be put down as something to his credit that he 
 succeeded so well as to retain control both of 
 the political government and his family's increas- 
 ing wealth down to the time of the Revolution 
 and that he gave on the whole so little offense 
 to a high-strung people that in the Revolution 
 they allowed his family to retain a large part 
 of their land and paid them liberally for what 
 was confiscated. 
 
 The wealth which came to the three brothers 
 they spent after the manner of the time in country 
 life. John and Richard do not appear to have 
 had remarkable country seats. But Thomas pur- 
 chased in 1760 the fine English estate of Stoke 
 Park, which had belonged to Sir Christopher Hat- 
 ton of Queen Elizabeth's time, to Lord Coke, 
 and later to the Cobham family. Thomas's son 
 John, grandson of the founder, greatly enlarged 
 and beautified the place and far down into the 
 nineteenth century it was one of the notable 
 country seats of England. This John Penn also 
 built another country place called Pennsylvania 
 Castle, equally picturesque and interesting, on the 
 Isle of Portland, of which he was Governor, 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 
 
 There was no great change in political conditions 
 in Pennsylvania until about the year 1755. The 
 French in Canada had been gradually developing 
 their plans of spreading down the Ohio and Missis- 
 sippi valleys behind the English colonies. They 
 were at the same time securing alliances with the 
 Indians and inciting them to hostilities against 
 the English. But so rapidly were the settlers ad- 
 vancing that often the land could not be purchased 
 fast enough to prevent irritation and ill feeling. 
 The Scotch-Irish and Germans, it has already been 
 noted, settled on lands without the formality of 
 purchase from the Indians. The Government, 
 when the Indians complained, sometimes ejected 
 the settlers but more often hastened to purchase 
 from the Indians the land which had been occu- 
 pied. The Importance of the British Plantations in 
 America, published in 1731, describes the Indians 
 
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 87 
 
 as peaceful and contented in Pennsylvania but ir- 
 ritated and unsettled in those other colonies where 
 they had usually been illtreated and defrauded. 
 This, with other evidence, goes to show that up to 
 that time Penn's policy of fairness and good treat- 
 ment still prevailed. But those conditions soon 
 changed, as the famous Walking Purchase of 1737 
 clearly indicated. 
 
 The Walking Purchase had provided for the sale 
 of some lands along the Delaware below the Lehigh 
 on a line starting at Wrightstown, a few miles 
 back from the Delaware not far above Trenton, 
 and running northwest, parallel with the river, 
 as far as a man could walk in a day and a half. 
 The Indians understood that this tract would 
 extend northward only to the Lehigh, which was 
 the ordinary journey of a day and a half. The 
 proprietors, however, surveyed the line before- 
 hand, marked the trees, engaged the fastest walk- 
 ers and, with horses to carry provisions, started 
 their men at sunrise. By running a large part of 
 the way, at the end of a day and a half these men 
 had reached a point thirty miles beyond the Lehigh. 
 
 The Delaware Indians regarded this measure- 
 ment as a pure fraud and refused to abandon 
 the Minisink region north of the Lehigh. The 
 
88 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 proprietors then called in the assistance of the Six 
 Nations of New York, who ordered the Delawares 
 off the Minisink lands. Though they obeyed, the 
 Delawares became the relentless enemies of the 
 white man and in the coming years revenged them- 
 selves by massacres and murder. They also broke 
 the control which the Six Nations had over them, 
 became an independent nation, and in the French 
 Wars revenged themselves on the Six Nations as 
 well as on the white men. 
 
 The congress which convened at Albany in 1754 
 was an attempt on the part of the British Govern- 
 ment to settle all Indian affairs in a general agree- 
 ment and to prevent separate treaties by the differ- 
 ent colonies; but the Pennsylvania delegates, by va- 
 rious devices of compass courses which the Indians 
 did not understand and by failing to notify and se- 
 cure the consent of certain tribes, obtained a grant 
 of pretty much the whole of Pennsylvania west 
 of the Susquehanna. The Indians considered this 
 procedure to be another gross fraud. It is to 
 be noticed that in their dealings with Penn they 
 had always been satisfied, and that he had always 
 been careful that they should be duly consulted 
 and if necessary be paid twice over for the land. 
 But his sons were more economical, and as a 
 
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 89 
 
 result of the shrewd practices of the Albany pur- 
 chase the Pennsylvania Indians almost immedi- 
 ately went over in a body to the French and were 
 soon scalping men, women, and children among 
 the Pennsylvania colonists. 
 
 It is a striking fact, however, that in all the 
 after years of war and rapine and for generations 
 afterwards the Indians retained the most distinct 
 and positive tradition of Penn's good faith and 
 of the honesty of all Quakers. So persistent, in- 
 deed, was this tradition among the tribes of the 
 West that more than a century later President 
 Grant proposed to put the whole charge of the 
 nation's Indian affairs in the hands of the Quakers. 
 
 The first efforts to avert the catastrophe threat- 
 ened by the alliance of the red man with the French 
 were made by the provincial assemblies, which 
 voted presents of money or goods to the Indians 
 to offset similar presents from the French. The 
 result was, of course, the utter demoralization of 
 the savages. Bribed by both sides, the Indians 
 used all their native cunning to encourage the 
 bribers to bid against each other. So far as Penn- 
 sylvania was concerned, feeling themselves cheated 
 in the first instance and now bribed with gifts, 
 they developed a contempt for the people who 
 
90 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 could stoop to such practices. As a result this 
 contempt manifested itself in deeds hitherto un- 
 known in the province. One tribe on a visit to 
 Philadelphia killed cattle and robbed orchards 
 as they passed. The delegates of another tribe, 
 having visited Philadelphia and received £500 as 
 a present, returned to the frontier and on their 
 way back for another present destroyed the prop- 
 erty of the interpreter and Indian agent, Conrad 
 Weiser. They felt that they could do as they 
 pleased. To make matters worse, the Assembly 
 paid for all the damage done; and having started 
 on this foolish business, they found that the list 
 of tribes demanding presents rapidly increased. 
 The Shawanoes and the Six Nations, as well as 
 the Delawares, were now swarming to this new 
 and convenient source of wealth. 
 
 Whether the proprietors or the Assembly should 
 meet this increasing expense or divide it between 
 them, became a subject of increasing controversy. 
 It was in these discussions that Thomas Penn, in 
 trying to keep his family's share of the expense as 
 small as possible, first got the reputation for close- 
 ness which followed him for the rest of his life and 
 which started a party in the province desirous of 
 having Parliament abolish the proprietorship and 
 
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 91 
 
 put the province under a governor appointed by 
 the Crown. 
 
 The war with the French of Canada and their 
 Indian alHes is of interest here only in so far as it 
 affected the government of Pennsylvania. From 
 this point of view it involved a series of contests 
 between the proprietors and the Crown on the 
 one side and the Assembly on the other. The pro- 
 prietors and the Crown took advantage of every 
 military necessity to force the Assembly into a 
 surrender of popular rights. But the Assembly re- 
 sisted, maintaining that they had the same right 
 as the British Commons of having their money 
 bills received or rejected by the Governor without 
 amendment. Whatever they should give must be 
 given on their own terms or not at all; and 
 they would not yield this point to any necessities 
 of the war. 
 
 When Governor Morris asked the Assembly for 
 a war contribution in 1754, they promptly voted 
 £20,000. This was the same amount that Vir- 
 ginia, the most active of the colonies in the war, 
 was giving. Other colonies gave much less; New 
 York, only £5000, and Maryland £6000. Mor- 
 ris, however, would not assent to the Assembly's 
 bill unless it contained a clause suspending its 
 
92 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 effect until the King's pleasure was known. This 
 was an attempt to establish a precedent for giving 
 up the Assembly's charter right of passing laws 
 which need not be submitted to the King for five 
 years and which in the meantime were valid. The 
 members of the Assembly very naturally refused 
 to be forced by the necessities of the war into 
 surrendering one of the most important privileges 
 the province possessed. It was, they said, as much 
 their duty to resist this invasion of their rights 
 as to resist the French. 
 
 Governor Morris, besides demanding that the 
 supply of £20,000 should not go into force until 
 the King's pleasure was known, insisted that the 
 paper money representing it should be redeem- 
 able in five years. This period the Assembly con- 
 sidered too short; the usual time was ten years. 
 Five years would ruin too many people by fore- 
 closures. Moreover, the Governor was attempt- 
 ing to dictate the way in which the people should 
 raise a money supply. He and the King had a 
 right to ask for aid in war; but it was the right of 
 the colony to use its own methods of furnishing 
 this assistance. The Governor also refused to let 
 the Assembly see the instructions from the pro- 
 prietors under which he was acting. This was 
 
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 93 
 
 another attack upon their liberties and involved 
 nothing less than an attempt to change their char- 
 ter rights by secret instructions to a deputy gover- 
 nor which he must obey at his peril. Several bills 
 had recently been introduced in the English Par- 
 liament for the purpose of making royal instruc- 
 tions to governors binding on all the colonial 
 assemblies without regard to their charters. This 
 innovation, the colonists felt, would wreck all 
 their liberties and turn colonial government into 
 a mere despotism. 
 
 The assemblies of all the colonies have been 
 a good deal abused for delay in supporting the 
 war and meanness in withholding money. But in 
 many instances the delay and lack of money were 
 occasioned by the grasping schemes of governors 
 who saw a chance to gain new privileges for the 
 Crown or a proprietor or to weaken popular gov- 
 ernment by crippling the powers of the legislatures. 
 The usual statement that the Pennsylvania As- 
 sembly was slow in assisting the war because it 
 was composed of Quakers is not supported by the 
 facts. The Pennsylvania Assembly was not be- 
 hind the rest. On this particular occasion, when 
 their large money supply bill could not be passed 
 without sacrificing their constitutional rights, they 
 
94 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 raised money for the war by appointing a com- 
 mittee which was authorized to borrow £5000 on 
 the credit of the Assembly. 
 
 Other contests arose over the claim of the pro- 
 prietors that their estates in the province were 
 exempt from taxation for the war or any pur- 
 pose. One bill taxing the proprietary estates along 
 with others was met by Thomas Penn offering to 
 subscribe £5000, as a free gift to the colony's 
 war measures. The Assembly accepted this, and 
 passed the bill without taxing the proprietary 
 estates. It turned out, however, to be a shrewd 
 business move on the part of Thomas Penn; for 
 the £5000 was to be collected out of the quit- 
 rents that were in arrears, and the payment of 
 it was in consequence long delayed. The thrifty 
 Thomas had thus saddled his bad debts on the 
 province and gained a reputation for generosity 
 at the same time. 
 
 Pennsylvania, though governed by Quakers as- 
 sisted by noncombatant Germans, had a better 
 protected frontier than Maryland or Virginia; no 
 colony, indeed, was at that time better protected. 
 The Quaker Assembly did more than take care of 
 the frontier during the war; it preserved at the 
 same time constitutional rights in defense of which 
 
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 95 
 
 twenty-five years afterwards the whole continent 
 fought the Revolution. The Quaker Assembly 
 even passed two militia bills, one of which became 
 law, and sent rather more than the province's full 
 share of troops to protect the frontiers of New 
 York and New England and to carry the invasion 
 into Canada. 
 
 General Braddock warmly praised the assist- 
 ance which Pennsylvania gave him because, he 
 said, she had done more for him than any of the 
 other colonies. Virginia and Maryland promised 
 everything and performed nothing, while Penn- 
 sylvania promised nothing and performed every- 
 thing. Commodore Spy thanked the Assembly 
 for the large number of sailors sent his fleet at 
 the expense of the province. General Shirley, in 
 charge of the New England and New York cam- 
 paigns, thanked the Assembly for the numerous 
 recruits; and it was the common opinion at the 
 time that Pennsylvania had sent more troops to 
 the war than any other colony. In the first four 
 years of the war the province spent for military 
 purposes £210,567 sterling, which was a very con- 
 siderable sum at that time for a community of 
 less than 200,000 people. Quakers, though they 
 hate war, will accept it when there is no escape. 
 
96 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 The old story of the Quaker who tossed a pirate 
 overboard, saying, "Friend, thee has no business 
 here," gives their point of view better than pages 
 of explanation. Quaker opinion has not always 
 been entirely uniform. In Revolutionary times in 
 Philadelphia there was a division of the Quakers 
 known as the Fighting Quakers, and their meeting 
 house is still pointed out at the corner of Fourth 
 Street and Arch. They even produced able mili- 
 tary leaders: Colonel John Dickinson, General 
 Greene, and General Mifflin in the Continental 
 Army, and, in the War of 1812, General Jacob 
 Brown, who reorganized the army and restored its 
 failing fortunes after many officers had been tried 
 and found wanting. 
 
 There was always among the Quakers a ration- 
 alistic party and a party of mysticism. The 
 rationalistic party prevailed in Pennsylvania all 
 through the colonial period. In the midst of the 
 worst horrors of the French and Indian wars, 
 however, the conscientious objectors roused them- 
 selves and began preaching and exhorting what 
 has been called the mystical side of the faith. 
 Many extreme Quaker members of the Assembly 
 resigned their seats in consequence. After the 
 Revolution the spiritual party began gaining 
 
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 97 
 
 ground, partly perhaps because then the responsi- 
 bilities of government and care of the great po- 
 Htical and religious experiment in Pennsylvania 
 were removed. The spiritual party increased so 
 rapidly in power that in 1827 a split occurred 
 which involved not a little bitterness, ill feeling, 
 and litigation over property. This division into 
 two opposing camps, known as the Hicksites and 
 the Orthodox, continues and is likely to remain. 
 
 Quaker government in Pennsylvania was put to 
 still severer tests by the difficulties and disasters 
 that followed Braddock's defeat. That unfortu- 
 nate general had something over two thousand 
 men and was hampered with a train of artillery 
 and a splendid equipment of arms, tools, and sup- 
 plies, as if he were to march over the smooth high- 
 ways of Europe. When he came to drag all these 
 munitions through the depths of the Pennsylvania 
 forests and up and down the mountains, he found 
 that he made only about three miles a day and 
 that his horses had nothing to eat but the leaves 
 of the trees. Washington, who was of the party, 
 j&nally persuaded him to abandon his artillery 
 and press forward with about fifteen hundred 
 picked men. These troops, when a few miles 
 from Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh) , met about 
 
98 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 six hundred Indians and three hundred French 
 coming from the fort. The EngHsh maintained a 
 close formation where they were, but the French 
 and Indians immediately spread out on their flanks, 
 lying behind trees and logs which provided rests 
 for their rifles and security for their bodies. This 
 strategy decided the day. The English were shot 
 down like cattle in a pen, and out of about fifteen 
 hundred only four hundred and fifty escaped. The 
 French and Indian loss was not much over fifty. 
 
 This defeat of Braddock's force has become one 
 of the most famous reverses in history; and it 
 was made worse by the conduct of Dunbar who 
 had been left in command of the artillery, baggage, 
 and men in the rear. He could have remained 
 where he was as some sort of protection to the 
 frontier. But he took fright, burned his wagons, 
 emptied his barrels of powder into the streams, 
 destroyed his provisions, and fled back to Fort 
 Cumberland in Maryland. Here the governors 
 of Pennsylvania and Virginia as well as the Penn- 
 sylvania Assembly urged him to stay. But deter- 
 mined to make the British rout complete, he soon 
 retreated to the peace and quiet of Philadelphia, 
 and nothing would induce him to enter again the 
 terrible forests of Pennsylvania. 
 
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 99 
 
 The natural result of the blunder soon followed. 
 The French, finding the whole frontier of Penn- 
 sylvania, Maryland, and Virginia abandoned, 
 organized the Indians under French officers and 
 swept the whole region with a devastation of mas- 
 sacre, scalping, and burning that has never been 
 equaled. Hurons, Potawatomies, Ojibways, Otta- 
 was, Mingoes, renegades from the Six Nations, 
 together with the old treaty friends of Penn, the 
 Dela wares and Shawanoes, began swarming east- 
 ward and soon had killed more people than had 
 been lost at Braddock's defeat. The onslaught 
 reached its height in September and October. By 
 that time all the outlying frontier settlers and their 
 families had been killed or sent flying eastward to 
 seek refuge in the settlements. The Indians even 
 followed them to the settlements, reached the Sus- 
 quehanna, and crossed it. They massacred the 
 people of the village of Gnadenhutten, near Beth- 
 lehem on the Lehigh, and established near by a 
 headquarters for prisoners and plunder. Fami- 
 lies were scalped within fifty miles of Philadelphia, 
 and in one instance the bodies of a murdered fam- 
 ily were brought into the town and exhibited in 
 the streets to show the inhabitants how near the 
 danger was approaching. 
 
100 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Nothing could be done to stem the savage tide. 
 Virginia was suffering in the same way: the set- 
 tlers on her border were slaughtered or were driven 
 back in herds upon the more settled districts, and 
 Washington, with a nominal strength of fifteen 
 hundred who would not obey orders, was forced 
 to stand a helpless spectator of the general flight 
 and misery. There was no adequate force or army 
 anywhere within reach. The British had been put 
 to flight and had gone to the defense of New 
 England and New York. Neither Pennsylvania 
 nor Virginia had a militia that could withstand 
 the French and their red allies. They could only 
 wait till the panic had subsided and then see what 
 could be done. 
 
 One thing was accomplished, however, when the 
 Pennsylvania Assembly passed a Quaker militia 
 law which is one of the most curious legal docu- 
 ments of its kind in history. It was most aptly 
 worded, drafted by the master hand of Franklin. 
 It recited the fact that the province had always 
 been ruled by Quakers who were opposed to war, 
 but that now it had become necessary to allow 
 men to become soldiers and to give them every 
 facility for the profession of arms, because the 
 Assembly though containing a Quaker majority 
 
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 101 
 
 nevertheless represented all the people of the prov- 
 ince. To prevent those who believed in war from 
 taking part in it would be as much a violation of 
 liberty of conscience as to force enlistments among 
 those who had conscientious scruples against it. 
 Nor would the Quaker majority have any right 
 to compel others to bear arms and at the same 
 time exempt themselves. Therefore a voluntary 
 militia system was established under which a 
 fighting Quaker, a Presbyterian, an Episcopalian, 
 or anybody, could enlist and have all the military 
 glory he could win. 
 
 It was altogether a volunteer system. Two years 
 afterwards, as the necessities of war increased, 
 the Quaker Assembly passed a rather stringent 
 compulsory militia bill; but the governor vetoed 
 it, and the first law with its volunteer system re- 
 mained in force. Franklin busied himself to en- 
 courage enlistments under it and was very suc- 
 cessful. Though a philosopher and a man of 
 science, almost as much opposed to war as the 
 Quakers and not even owning a shotgun, he was 
 elected commander and led a force of about five 
 hundred men to protect the Lehigh Valley. His 
 common sense seems to have supplied his lack of 
 military training. He did no worse than some 
 
102 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 professional soldiers who might be named. The 
 valley was supposed to be in great danger since 
 its village of Gnadenhutten had been burned and 
 its people massacred. The Moravians, like the 
 Quakers, had suddenly found that they were not 
 as much opposed to war as they had supposed. 
 They had obtained arms and ammunition from 
 New York and had built stockades, and Franklin 
 was glad to find them so well prepared when he 
 arrived. He built small forts in different parts 
 of the valley, acted entirely on the defensive, and 
 no doubt checked the raids of the Indians at that 
 point. They seem to have been watching him 
 from the hilltops all the time, and any rashness on 
 his part would probably have brought disaster upon 
 him. After his force had been withdrawn, the In- 
 dians again attacked and burned Gnadenhutten. 
 
 The chain of forts, at first seventeen, afterwards 
 increased to fifty, built by the Assembly on the 
 Pennsylvania frontier was a good plan so far as 
 it went, but it was merely defensive and by no 
 means completely defensive, since Indian raiding 
 parties could pass between the forts. They served 
 chiefly as refuges for neighboring settlers. The 
 colonial troops or militia, after manning the fifty 
 forts and sending their quota to the operations 
 
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 103 
 
 against Canada by way of New England and New 
 York, were not numerous enough to attack the 
 Indians. They could only act on the defensive 
 as Franklin's command had done. As for the 
 rangers, as the small bands of frontiersmen acting 
 without any authority of either governor or legis- 
 lature were called, they were very efficient as indi- 
 viduals but they accomplished very little because 
 they acted at widely isolated spots. What was 
 needed was a well organized force which could pur- 
 sue the Indians on their own ground so far westward 
 that the settlers on the frontier would be safe. The 
 only troops which could do this were the British 
 regulars with the assistance of the colonial militia. 
 Two energetic efforts to end the war without 
 aid from abroad were made, however, one by the 
 pacific Quakers and the other by the combatant 
 portion of the people. Both of these were success- 
 ful so far as they went, but had little effect on the 
 general situation. In the summer of 1756, the 
 Quakers made a very earnest effort to persuade 
 the two principal Pennsylvania tribes, the Dela- 
 wares and Shawanoes, to withdraw from the 
 French alliance and return to their old friends. 
 These two tribes possessed a knowledge of the 
 country which enabled them greatly to assist the 
 
104 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 French designs on Pennsylvania. Chiefs of these 
 tribes were brought under safe conducts to Phila- 
 delphia, where they were entertained as equals 
 in the Quaker homes. Such progress, indeed, was 
 made that by the end of July a treaty of peace 
 was concluded at Easton eliminating those two 
 tribes from the war. This has sometimes been 
 sneered at as mere Quaker pacifism; but it was 
 certainly successful in lessening the numbers and 
 effectiveness of the enemy. 
 
 The other undertaking was a military one, the 
 famous attack upon Kittanning conducted by 
 Colonel John Armstrong, an Ulsterman from Car- 
 lisle, Pennsylvania, and the first really aggressive 
 officer the province had produced. The Indians 
 had two headquarters for their raids into the 
 province, one at Logstown on the Ohio a few 
 miles below Fort Duquesne, and the other at Kit- 
 tanning or, as the French called it, Attique, about 
 forty miles northeast. At these two points they 
 assembled their forces, received ammunition and 
 supplies from the French, and organized their 
 expeditions. As Kittanning was the nearer, Arm- 
 strong in a masterly maneuver took three hundred 
 men through the mountains without being discov- 
 ered and, by falling upon the village early in the 
 
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 105 
 
 morning, he effected a complete surprise. The 
 town was set on fire, the Indians were put to 
 flight, and large quantities of their ammunition 
 were destroyed. But Armstrong could not follow 
 up his success. Threatened by overwhelming num- 
 bers, he hastened to withdraw. The effect which 
 the fighting and the Quaker treaty had on the 
 frontier was good. Incursions of the savages were, 
 at least for the present, checked. But the root of 
 the evil had not yet been reached, and the Indians 
 remained massed along the Ohio, ready to break in 
 upon the people again at the first opportunity. 
 
 The following year, 1757, was the most depress- 
 ing period of the war. The proprietors of Penn- 
 sylvania took the opportunity to exempt their 
 own estate from taxation and throw the burden 
 of furnishing money for the war upon the colonists. 
 Under pressure of the increasing success of the 
 French and Indians and because the dreadful mas- 
 sacres were coming nearer and nearer to Phila- 
 delphia, the Quaker Assembly yielded, voted the 
 largest sum they had ever voted to the war, and 
 exempted the proprietary estates. The colony 
 was soon boiling with excitement. The Church- 
 men, as friends of the proprietors, were delighted 
 to have the estates exempted, thought it a good 
 
106 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 opportunity to have the Quaker Assembly abol- 
 ished, and sent petitions and letters and proofs of 
 alleged Quaker incompetence to the British Gov- 
 ernment. The Quakers and a large majority of the 
 colonists, on the other hand, instead of consent- 
 ing to their own destruction, struck at the root of 
 the Churchmen's power by proposing to abolish 
 the proprietors. And in a letter to Isaac Norris, 
 Benjamin Franklin, who had been sent to Eng- 
 land to present the grievances of the colonists, 
 even suggested that "tumults and insurrections 
 that might prove the proprietary government un- 
 able to preserve order, or show the people to be 
 ungovernable, would do the business immediately." 
 Turmoil and party strife rose to the most excit- 
 ing heights, and the details of it might, under cer- 
 tain circumstances, be interesting to describe. But 
 the next year, 1758, the British Government, by 
 sending a powerful force of regulars to Pennsyl- 
 vania, at last adopted the only method for ending 
 the war. Confidence was at once restored. The 
 Pennsylvania Assembly now voted the sufficient 
 and, indeed, immense sum of one hundred thou- 
 sand pounds, and offered a bounty of five pounds 
 to every recruit. It was no longer a war of defense 
 but now a war of aggression and conquest. Fort 
 
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 107 
 
 Duquesne on the Ohio was taken; and the next 
 autumn Fort Pitt was built on its ruins. Then 
 Canada fell, and the French empire in America 
 came to an end. Canada and the Great West 
 passed into the possession of the Anglo-Saxon race. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE DECLINE OF QUAKER GOVERNMENT 
 
 When the treaty of peace was signed in 1763, ex- 
 tinguishing France's title to Canada and turning 
 over Canada and the Mississippi Valley to the 
 English, the colonists were prepared to enjoy all 
 the blessings of peace. But the treaty of peace 
 had been made with France, not with the red man. 
 A remarkable genius, Pontiac, appeared among 
 the Indians, one of the few characters, like Tecum- 
 seh and Osceola, who are often cited as proof of 
 latent powers almost equal to the strongest quali- 
 ties of the white race. Within a few months he 
 had united all the tribes of the West in a disci- 
 pline and control which, if it had been brought 
 to the assistance of the French six years earlier, 
 might have conquered the colonies to the Atlantic 
 seaboard before the British regulars could have 
 come to their assistance. The tribes swept east- 
 ward into Pennsylvania, burning, murdering, and 
 
 108 
 
DECLINE OF QUAKER GOVERNMENT 109 
 
 leveling every habitation to the ground with a 
 thoroughness beyond anything attempted under 
 the French alliance. The settlers and farmers fled 
 eastward to the towns to live in cellars, camps, and 
 sheds as best they could.' Fortunately the colo- 
 nies retained a large part of the military organiza- 
 tion, both men and oflScers, of the French War, 
 and were soon able to handle the situation. De- 
 troit and Niagara were relieved by water; and an 
 expedition commanded by Colonel Bouquet, who 
 had distinguished himself under General Forbes, 
 saved Fort Pitt. 
 
 At this time the Scotch-Irish frontiersmen sud- 
 denly became prominent. They had been organ- 
 izing for their own protection and were meeting 
 with not a little success. They refused to join 
 the expedition of regular troops marching west- 
 ward against Pontiac's warriors, because they 
 wanted to protect their own homes and because 
 they believed the, regulars to be marching to sure 
 destruction. Many of the regular troops were 
 invalided from the West Indies, and the Scotch- 
 Irish never expected to see any of them again. 
 They believed that the salvation of Pennsylvania, 
 
 ^ For an account of Pontiac's conspiracy, see The Old Northwest, 
 by Frederic A. Ogg (in The Chronicles of America). 
 
no THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 or at least of their part of the province, depended 
 entirely upon themselves. Their increasing num- 
 bers and rugged independence were forming them 
 also into an organized political party with decided 
 tendencies, as it afterwards appeared, towards 
 forming a separate state. 
 
 The extreme narrowness of the Scotch-Irish, how- 
 ever, misled them. The only real safety for the 
 province lay in regularly constituted and strong 
 expeditions, like that of Bouquet, which would 
 drive the main body of the savages far westward. 
 But the Scotch-Irish could not see this; and with 
 that intensity of passion which marked all their 
 actions they turned their energy and vengeance 
 upon the Quakers and semicivilized Indians in 
 the eastern end of the colony. Their preachers, 
 who were their principal leaders and organizers, 
 encouraged them in denouncing Quaker doctrine 
 as a wicked heresy from which only evil could 
 result. The Quakers had offended God from the 
 beginning by making treaties of kindness with the 
 heathen savages instead of exterminating them 
 as the Scripture commanded: ''And when the 
 Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou 
 shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt 
 make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto 
 
DECLINE OF QUAKER GOVERNMENT 111 
 
 them.'" The Scripture had not been obeyed; the 
 heathen had not been destroyed; on the contrary, 
 a systematic poHcy of covenants, treaties, and 
 kindness had been persisted in for two genera- 
 tions, and as a consequence, the Ulstermen said, 
 the frontiers were now deluged in blood. They 
 were particularly resentful against the small set- 
 tlement of Indians near Bethlehem, who had 
 been converted to Christianity by the Moravians, 
 and another little village of half civilized basket- 
 making Indians at Conestoga near Lancaster. 
 The Scotch-Irish had worked themselves up into 
 a strange belief that these small remnants were 
 sending information, arms, and ammunition to the 
 western tribes; and they seemed to think that it 
 was more important to exterminate these little 
 communities than to go with such expeditions as 
 Bouquet's to the West. They asked the Governor 
 to remove these civilized Indians and assured him 
 that their removal would secure the safety of the 
 frontier. When the Governor, not being able to 
 find anything against the Indians, declined to re- 
 move them, the Scotch-Irish determined to attend 
 to the matter in their own fashion. 
 
 Bouquet's victory at Bushy Run, much to the 
 surprise of the Scotch-Irish, stopped Indian raids 
 
112 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 of any seriousness until the following spring. But 
 in the autumn there were a few depredations, which 
 led the frontiersmen to believe that the whole in- 
 vasion would begin again. A party of them, there- 
 fore, started to attack the Moravian Indians near 
 Bethlehem; but before they could accomplish their 
 object, the Governor brought most of the Indians 
 down to Philadelphia for protection. Even there 
 they were narrowly saved from the mob, for the 
 hostility against them was spreading throughout 
 the province. 
 
 Soon afterwards another party of Scotch-Irish, 
 ever since known as the "Paxton Boys," went at 
 break of day to the village of the Conestoga In- 
 dians and found only six of them at home — three 
 men, two women, and a boy. These they instant- 
 ly shot down, mutilated their bodies, and burned 
 their cabins. As the murderers returned, they 
 related to a man on the road what they had done, 
 and when he protested against the cruelty of the 
 deed, they asked, "Don't you believe in God and 
 the Bible.?" The remaining fourteen inhabitants 
 of the village, who were away selling brooms, were 
 collected by the sheriff and put in the jail at Lan- 
 caster for protection. The Paxtons heard of it 
 and in a few days stormed the jail, broke down the 
 
DECLINE OF QUAKER GOVERNMENT 113 
 
 doors, and either shot the poor Indians or cut 
 them to pieces with hatchets. 
 
 This was probably the first instance of lynch law 
 in America. It raised a storm of indignation and 
 controversy; and a pamphlet war persisted for 
 several years. The whole province was immedi- 
 ately divided into two parties. On one side were 
 the Quakers, most of the Germans, and conserv- 
 atives of every sort, and on the other, inclined 
 to sympathize with the Scotch-Irish, were the 
 eastern Presbyterians, some of the Churchmen, 
 and various miscellaneous people whose vindic- 
 tiveness towards all Indians had been aroused by 
 the war. The Quakers and conservatives, who 
 seem to have been the more numerous, assailed the 
 Scotch-Irish in no measured language as a gang 
 of ruffians without respect for law or order who, 
 though always crying for protection, had refused 
 to march with Bouquet to save Fort Pitt or to 
 furnish him the slightest assistance. Instead of go- 
 ing westward where the danger was and something 
 might be accomplished, they had turned eastward 
 among the settlements and murdered a few poor 
 defenseless people, mostly women and children. 
 
 Franklin, who had now returned from Eng- 
 land, wrote one of his best pamphlets against the 
 
114 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Paxtons, the valorous, heroic Paxtons, as he called 
 them, prating of God and the Bible, fifty-seven of 
 whom, armed with rifles, knives, and hatchets, 
 had actually succeeded in killing three old men, 
 two women, and a boy. This pamphlet became 
 known as the Narrative from the first word of its 
 title, and it had an immense circulation. Like 
 everything Franklin wrote, it is interesting reading 
 to this day. 
 
 One of the first effects of this controversy was 
 to drive the excitable Scotch-Irish into a flame 
 of insurrection not unlike the Whisky Rebellion, 
 which started among them some years after the 
 Revolution. They held tumultuous meetings de- 
 nouncing the Quakers and the whole proprietary 
 government in Philadelphia, and they organized 
 an expedition which included some delegates to 
 suggest reforms. For the most part, however, it 
 was a well equipped little army variously esti- 
 mated at from five hundred to fifteen hundred on 
 foot and on horseback, which marched towards 
 Philadelphia with no uncertain purpose. They 
 openly declared that they intended to capture the 
 town, seize the Moravian Indians protected there, 
 and put them to death. They fully expected to 
 be supported by most of the people and to have 
 
DECLINE OF QUAKER GOVERNMENT 115 
 
 everything their own way. As they passed along 
 the roads, they amused themselves in their rough 
 fashion by shooting chickens and pigs, frighten- 
 ing people by thrusting their rifles into windows, 
 and occasionally throwing some one down and 
 pretending to scalp him. 
 
 In the city there was great excitement and 
 alarm. Even the classes who sympathized with 
 the Scotch-Irish did not altogether relish having 
 their property burned or destroyed. Great prepa- 
 rations were made to meet the expedition. Brit- 
 ish regulars were summoned. Eight companies 
 of militia and a battery of artillery were hastily 
 formed. Franklin became a military man once 
 more and superintended the preparations. On 
 all sides the Quakers were enlisting; they had 
 become accustomed to war; and this legitimate 
 chance to shoot a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian was 
 too much for the strongest scruples of their religion. 
 It was a long time, however, before they heard 
 the end of this zeal; and in the pamphlet war 
 which followed they were accused of clamorously 
 rushing to arms and demanding to be led against 
 the enemy. 
 
 It is amusing now to read about it in the old 
 records. But it was serious enough at the time. 
 
116 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 When the Scotch-Irish army reached the Schuyl- 
 kill River and found the fords leading to the city 
 guarded, they were not quite so enthusiastic about 
 killing Quakers and Indians. They went up the 
 river some fifteen miles, crossed by an unopposed 
 ford, and halted in Germantown ten miles north 
 of Philadelphia. That was as far as they thought 
 it safe to venture. Several days passed, during 
 which the city people continued their preparations 
 and expected every night to be attacked. There 
 were, indeed, several false alarms. Whenever the 
 alarm was sounded at night, every one placed 
 candles in his windows to light up the streets. 
 One night when it rained the soldiers were allowed 
 to shelter themselves in a Quaker meeting house, 
 which for some hours bristled with bayonets and 
 swords, an incident of which the Presbyterian 
 pamphleteers afterwards made much use for satire. 
 On another day all the cannon were fired to let 
 the enemy know what was in store for him. 
 
 Finally commissioners with the clever, genial 
 Franklin at their head, went out to Germantown 
 to negotiate, and soon had the whole mighty dif- 
 ference composed. The Scotch-Irish stated their 
 grievances. The Moravian Indians ought not to 
 be protected by the government, and all such 
 
DECLINE OF QUAKER GOVERNMENT 117 
 
 Indians should be removed from the colony; the 
 men who killed the Conestoga Indians should be 
 tried where the supposed offense was committed 
 and not in Philadelphia; the five frontier counties 
 had only ten representatives in the Assembly 
 while the three others had twenty-six — this should 
 be remedied ; men wounded in border war should be 
 cared for at public expense; no trade should be car- 
 ried on with hostile Indians until they restored 
 prisoners; and there should be a bounty on scalps. 
 While these negotiations were proceeding, some 
 of the Scotch-Irish amused themselves by practic- 
 ing with their rifles at the weather vane, a figure 
 of a cock, on the steeple of the old Lutheran church 
 in German town — an unimportant incident, it is 
 true, but one revealing the conditions and char- 
 acter of the time as much as graver matters do. 
 The old weather vane with the bullet marks upon 
 it is still preserved. About thirty of these same 
 riflemen were invited to Philadelphia and were 
 allowed to wander about and see the sights of the 
 town. The rest returned to the frontier. As for 
 their list of grievances, not one of them was granted 
 except, strange and sad to relate, the one which 
 asked for a scalp bounty. The Governor, after 
 the manner of other colonies, it must be admitted. 
 
118 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 issued the long desired scalp proclamation, which 
 after offering rewards for prisoners and scalps, 
 closed by saying, "and for the scalp of a female 
 Indian fifty pieces of eight." William Penn's 
 Indian policy had been admired for its justice and 
 humanity by all the philosophers and statesmen of 
 the world, and now his grandson, Governor of the 
 province, in the last days of the family's control, 
 was offering bounties for women's scalps. 
 
 Franklin while in England had succeeded in 
 havmg the proprietary lands taxed equally with 
 the lands of the colonists. But the proprietors 
 attempted to construe this provision so that their 
 best lands were taxed at the rate paid by the 
 people on their worst. This obvious quibble 
 of course raised such a storm of opposition that 
 the Quakers, joined by classes which had never 
 before supported them, and now forming a large 
 majority, determined to appeal to the Government 
 in England to abolish the proprietorship and put 
 the colony under the rule of the King. In the 
 proposal to make Pennsylvania a Crown colony 
 there was no intention of confiscating the posses- 
 sions of the proprietors. It was merely the pro- 
 prietary political power, their right to appoint the 
 Governor, that was to be abolished. This right 
 
DECLINE OF QUAKER GOVERNMENT 119 
 
 was to be absorbed by the Crown with payment 
 for its value to the proprietors; but in all other 
 respects the charter and the rights and liberties 
 of the people were to remain unimpaired. Just 
 there lay the danger. An act of Parliament would 
 be required to make the change and, having once 
 started on such a change, Parliament, or the party 
 in power therein, might decide to make other 
 changes, and in the end there might remain very 
 little of the original rights and liberties of the 
 colonists under their charter. It was by no means 
 a wise move. But intense feeling on the subject 
 was aroused. Passionate feeling seemed to have 
 been running very high among the steady Quakers. 
 In this new outburst the Quakers had the Scotch- 
 Irish on their side, and a part of the Churchmen. 
 The Germans were divided. But the majority 
 enthusiastic for the change was very large. 
 
 There was a new alinement of parties. The east- 
 ern Presbyterians, usually more or less in sym- 
 pathy with the Scotch-Irish, broke away from 
 them on this occasion. These Presbyterians op- 
 posed the change to a royal governor because they 
 believed that it would be followed by the estab- 
 lishment by law of the Church of England, with 
 bishops and all the other ancient evils. Although 
 
120 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 some of the Churchmen joined the Quaker side, 
 most of them and the most influential of them were 
 opposed to the change and did good work in oppos- 
 ing it. They were well content with their position 
 under the proprietors and saw nothing to be gained 
 under a royal governor. There were also not a 
 few people who, in the increase of the wealth of 
 the province, had acquired aristocratic tastes and 
 were attached to the pleasant social conditions 
 that had grown up round the proprietary gover- 
 nors and their followers ; and there were also those 
 whose salaries, incomes, or opportunities for wealth 
 were more or less dependent on the proprietors re- 
 taining the executive offices and the appointments 
 and patronage. 
 
 One of the most striking instances of a change 
 of sides was the case of a Philadelphia Quaker, John 
 Dickinson, a lawyer of large practice, a man of 
 wealth and position, and of not a little colonial 
 magnificence when he drove in his coach and four. 
 It was he who later wrote the famous Farmer's 
 Letters during the Revolution. He was a member 
 of the Assembly and had been in politics for some 
 years. But on this question of a change to royal 
 government, he left the Quaker majority and op- 
 posed the change with all his influence and ability. 
 
DECLINE OF QUAKER GOVERNMENT 121 
 
 He and his father-in-law, Isaac Norris, Speaker of 
 the Assembly, became the leaders against the 
 change, and Franklin and Joseph Galloway, the 
 latter afterwards a prominent loyalist in the Re- 
 volution, were the leading advocates of the change. 
 
 The whole subject was thoroughly thrashed out 
 in debates in the Assembly and in pamphlets of very 
 great ability and of much interest to students of co- 
 lonial history and the growth of American ideas of 
 liberty. It must be remembered that this was the 
 year 1764, on the eve of the Revolution. British 
 statesmen were planning a system of more rigorous 
 control of the colonies; and the advisability of a 
 stamp tax was under consideration. Information of 
 all these possible changes had reached the colonies. 
 Dickinson foresaw the end and warned the people. 
 Franklin and the Quaker party thought there was 
 no danger and that the mother country could be 
 implicitly trusted. 
 
 Dickinson warned the people that the British 
 Ministry were starting special regulations for new 
 colonies and "designing the strictest reformations 
 in the old." It would be a great relief, he ad- 
 mitted, to be rid of the pettiness of the proprie- 
 tors, and it might be accomplished some time in 
 the future; but not now. The proprietary system 
 
122 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 might be bad, but a royal government might be 
 worse and might wreck all the liberties of the 
 province, religious freedom, the Assembly's con- 
 trol of its own adjournments, and its power of rais- 
 ing and disposing of the public money. The 
 ministry of the day in England were well known 
 not to be favorably inclined towards Pennsylvania 
 because of the frequently reported willfulness of 
 the Assembly, on which the recent disturbances 
 had also been blamed. If the King, Ministry, 
 and Parliament started upon a change, they might 
 decide to reconstitute the Assembly entirely, abol- 
 ish its ancient privileges, and disfranchise both 
 Quakers and Presbyterians. 
 
 The arguments of Franklin and Galloway con- 
 sisted principally of assertions of the good inten- 
 tions of the mother country and the absurdity of 
 any fear on the part of the colonists for their privi- 
 leges. But the King in whom they had so much 
 confidence was George III, and the Parliament 
 which they thought would do no harm was the 
 same one which a few months afterwards passed 
 the Stamp Act which brought on the Revolu- 
 tion. Franklin and Galloway also asserted that 
 the colonies like Massachusetts, the Jerseys, and 
 the Carolinas, which had been changed to royal 
 
DECLINE OF QUAKER GOVERNMENT 123 
 
 governments, had profited by the change. But 
 that v/as hardly the prevailing opinion in those colo- 
 nies themselves. Royal governors could be as petty 
 and annoying as the Penns and far more tyran- 
 nical. Pennsylvania had always defeated any at- 
 tempts at despotism on the part of the Penn fam- 
 ily and had built up a splendid body of liberal 
 laws and legislative privileges. But governors with 
 the authority and power of the British Crown be- 
 hind them could not be so easily resisted as the 
 deputy governors of the Penns. 
 
 The Assembly, however, voted — twenty-seven 
 to three — with Franklin and Galloway. In the 
 general election of the autumn, the question was 
 debated anew among the people and, though 
 Franklin and Galloway were defeated for seats in 
 the Assembly, yet the popular verdict was strong- 
 ly in favor of a change, and the majority in the 
 Assembly was for practical purposes unaltered. 
 They voted to appeal to England for the change, 
 and appointed Franklin to be their agent before 
 the Crown and Ministry. He sailed again for Eng- 
 land and soon was involved in the opening scenes 
 of the Revolution. He was made agent for all 
 the colonies and he spent many delightful years 
 there pursuing his studies in science, dining with 
 
124 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 distinguished men, staying at country seats, and 
 learning all the arts of diplomacy for which he 
 afterwards became so distinguished. 
 
 As for the Assembly's petition for a change to 
 royal government, Franklin presented it but never 
 pressed it. He, too, was finally convinced that 
 the time was inopportune. In fact, the Assembly it- 
 self before long began to have doubts and fears and 
 sent him word to let the subject drop; and amid 
 much greater events it was soon entirely forgotten. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 
 
 New Jersey, Scheyichbi, as the Indians called it, 
 or Nova Csesarea, as it was called in the Latin of 
 its proprietary grant, had a history rather different 
 from that of other English colonies in America. 
 Geographically, it had not a few attractions. It 
 was a good sized dominion surrounded on all sides 
 but one by water, almost an island domain, se- 
 cluded and independent. In fact, it was the only 
 one of the colonies which stood naturally separate 
 and apart. The others were bounded almost entirely 
 by artificial or imaginary lines. 
 
 It offered an opportunity, one might have sup- 
 posed, for some dissatisfied religious sect of the 
 seventeenth century to secure a sanctuary and 
 keep off all intruders. But at first no one of the 
 various denominations seems to have fancied it 
 or chanced upon it. The Puritans disembarked 
 upon the bleak shores of New England well suited 
 
 125 
 
126 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 to the sternness of their religion. How different 
 American history might have been if they had 
 estabhshed themselves in the Jerseys! Could 
 they, under those milder skies, have developed 
 witchcraft, set up blue laws, and indulged in the 
 killing of Quakers? After a time they learned 
 about the Jerseys and cast thrifty eyes upon them. 
 Their seafaring habits and the pursuit of whales 
 led them along the coast and into Delaware Bay. 
 The Puritans of New Haven made persistent ef- 
 forts to settle the southern part of Jersey, on the 
 Delaware near Salem. They thought, as their 
 quaint old records show, that if they could once 
 start a branch colony in Jersey it might become 
 more populous and powerful than the New Haven 
 settlement and in that case they intended to move 
 their seat of government to the new colony. But 
 their shrewd estimate of its value came too late. 
 The Dutch and the Swedes occupied the Delaware 
 at that time and drove them out. Puritans, how- 
 ever, entered northern Jersey and, while they were 
 not numerous enough to make it a thoroughly 
 Puritan community, they largely tinged its thought 
 and its laws, and their influence still survives. 
 
 The difficulty with Jersey was that its seacoast 
 was a monotonous line of breakers with dangerous 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 127 
 
 shoal inlets, few harbors, and vast mosquito in- 
 fested salt marshes and sandy thickets. In the 
 interior it was for the most part a level, heavily 
 forested, sandy, swampy country in its southern 
 portions, and rough and mountainous in the north- 
 ern portions. Even the entrance by Delaware 
 Bay was so difficult by reason of its shoals that it 
 was the last part of the coast to be explored. The 
 Delaware region and Jersey were in fact a sort of 
 middle ground far less easy of access by the sea 
 than the regions to the north in New England and 
 to the south in Virginia. 
 
 There were only two places easy of settlement 
 in the Jerseys. One was the open region of mead- 
 ows and marshes by Newark Bay near the mouth 
 of the Hudson and along the Hackensack River, 
 whence the people slowly extended themselves 
 to the seashore at Sandy Hook and thence south- 
 ward along the ocean beach. This was East Jersey. 
 The other easily occupied region, which became 
 West Jersey, stretched along the shore of the lower 
 Delaware from the modern Trenton to Salem, 
 whence the settlers gradually worked their way 
 into the interior. Between these two divisions lay 
 a rough wilderness which in its southern portion 
 was full of swamps, thickets, and pine barrens. So 
 
128 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 rugged was the country that the native Indians lived 
 for the most part only in the two open regions 
 already described. 
 
 The natural geographical, geological, and even 
 social division of New Jersey is made by drawing 
 a line from Trenton to the mouth of the Hudson 
 River. North of that line the successive terraces 
 of the piedmont and mountainous region form 
 part of the original North ximerican continent. 
 South of that line the more or less sandy level 
 region was once a shoal beneath the ocean; after- 
 wards a series of islands; then one island with a 
 wide sound behind it passing along the division 
 line to the mouth of the Hudson. Southern Jersey 
 was in short an island with a sound behind it very 
 much like the present Long Island. The shoal 
 and island had been formed in the far distant 
 geologic past b}^ the erosion and washings from 
 the lofty Pennsylvania mountains now worn down 
 to mere stumps. 
 
 The Delaware River flowed into this sound at 
 Trenton. Gradually the Hudson end of the sound 
 filled up as far as Trenton, but the tide from the 
 ocean still runs up the remains of the Old Sound 
 as far as Trenton. The Delaware should still be 
 properly considered as ending at Trenton, for the 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 129 
 
 rest of its course to the ocean is still part of Old 
 Pensauken Sound, as it is called by geologists. 
 
 The Jerseys originated as a colony in 1664. In 
 1675 West Jersey passed into the control of the 
 Quakers. In 1680 East Jersey came partially 
 under Quaker influence. In August, 1664, Charles 
 II seized New York, New Jersey, and all the 
 Dutch possessions in America, having previously 
 in March granted them to his brother the Duke 
 of York. The Duke almost immediately gave to 
 Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, members 
 of the Privy Council and defenders of the Stuart 
 family in the Cromwellian wars, the land between 
 the Delaware River and the ocean, and bounded 
 on the north by a line drawn from latitude 41° on 
 the Hudson to latitude 41° 40' on the Delaware. 
 This region was to be called, the grant said. Nova 
 Caesarea, or New Jersey. The name was a com- 
 pliment to Carteret, w^ho in the Cromwellian wars 
 had defended the little isle of Jersey against the 
 forces of the Long Parliament. As the American 
 Jersey was then almost an island and geologically 
 had been one, the name was not inappropriate. 
 
 Berkeley and Carteret divided the province 
 between them. In 1676 an exact division was 
 attempted, creating the rather unnatural sections 
 
130 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 known as East Jersey and West Jersey. The 
 first idea seems to have been to divide by a line 
 running from Barnegat on the seashore to the 
 mouth of Pensauken Creek on the Delaware just 
 above Camden. This, however, would have made 
 a North Jersey and a South Jersey, with the latter 
 much smaller than the former. Several lines seem 
 to have been surveyed at different times in the 
 attempt to make an exactly equal division, which 
 was no easy engineering task. As private land 
 titles and boundaries were in some places depend- 
 ent on the location of the division line, there 
 resulted much controversy and litigation which 
 lasted down into our own time. Without going 
 into details, it is sufficient to say that the accept- 
 able division line began on the seashore at Little 
 Egg Harbor at the lower end of Barnegat Bay and 
 crossed diagonally or northwesterly to the northern 
 part of the Delaware River just above the Water 
 Gap. It is known as the Old Province line, and 
 it can be traced on any map of the State by 
 prolonging, in both directions, the northeastern 
 boundary of Burlington County. 
 
 West Jersey, which became decidedly Quaker, 
 did not remain long in the possession of Lord 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 131 
 
 Berkeley. He was growing old; and, disappointed 
 in his hopes of seeing it settled, he sold it, in 1673, 
 for one thousand pounds to John Fenwick and 
 Edward Byllinge, both of them old Cromwellian 
 soldiers turned Quakers. That this purchase was 
 made for the purpose of affording a refuge in 
 America for Quakers then much imprisoned and 
 persecuted in England does not very distinctly 
 appear. At least there was no parade of it. But 
 such a purpose in addition to profit for the pro- 
 prietors may well have been in the minds of 
 the purchasers. 
 
 George Fox, the Quaker leader, had just re- 
 turned from a missionary journey in America, in 
 the course of which he had traveled through New 
 Jersey in going from New York to Maryland. 
 Some years previously in England, about 1659, 
 he had made inquiries as to a suitable place for 
 Quaker settlement and was told of the region north 
 of Maryland which became Pennsylvania. But 
 how could a persecuted sect obtain such a re- 
 gion from the British Crown and the Government 
 that was persecuting them.? It would require 
 powerful influence at Court; nothing could then 
 be done about it; and Pennsylvania had to wait 
 until William Penn became a man with influence 
 
132 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 enough in 1681 to win it from the Crown. But 
 here was West Jersey, no longer owned directly 
 by the Crown and bought in cheap by two Quak- 
 ers. It was an unexpected opportunity. Quak- 
 ers soon went to it, and it was the first Quaker 
 colonial experiment. 
 
 V Byllinge and Fenwick, though turned Quakers, 
 seem to have retained some of the contentious 
 Cromwellian spirit of their youth. They soon 
 quarreled over their respective interests in the 
 ownership of West Jersey; and to prevent a law- 
 suit, so objectionable to Quakers, the decision was 
 left to William Penn, then a rising young Quaker 
 about thirty years old, dreaming of ideal colonies 
 in America. Penn awarded Fenwick a one-tenth 
 interest and four hundred pounds. Byllinge soon 
 became insolvent and turned over his nine-tenths 
 interest to his creditors, appointing Penn and two 
 other Quakers, Gawen Lawrie, a merchant of 
 London, and Nicholas Lucas, a maltster of Hert- 
 ford, to hold it in trust for them. Gawen Lawrie 
 afterwards became deputy governor of East Jersey. 
 Lucas was one of those thoroughgoing Quakers just 
 released from eight years in prison for his religion/ 
 
 » Myers, Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West Jersey, and 
 Delaware, p. 180. 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 133 
 
 Fenwick also in the end fell into debt and, after 
 selling over one hundred thousand acres to about 
 fifty purchasers, leased what remained of his inter- 
 est for a thousand years to John Edridge, a tanner, 
 and Edmund Warner, a poulterer, as security for 
 money borrowed from them. They conveyed this 
 lease and their claims to Penn, Lawrie, and Lucas, 
 who thus became the owners, as trustees, of pretty 
 much all West Jersey. 
 
 This was William Penn's first practical experi- 
 ence in American affairs. He and his fellow trus- 
 tees, with the consent of Fenwick, divided the 
 West Jersey ownership into one hundred shares. 
 The ninety belonging to Byllinge were offered for 
 sale to settlers or to creditors of Byllinge who 
 would take them in exchange for debts. The 
 settlement of West Jersey thus became the distri- 
 bution of an insolvent Quaker's estate among his 
 creditor fellow religionists. 
 
 Although no longer in possession of a title to 
 land, Fenwick, in 1675, went out with some Quak- 
 er settlers to Delaware Bay. There they founded 
 the modern town of Salem, which means peace, 
 giving it that name because of the fair and peace- 
 ful aspect of the wilderness on the day they arrived. 
 They bought the land from the Indians in the 
 
134 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 usual manner, as the Swedes and Dutch had so 
 often done. But they had no charter or provi- 
 sion for organized government. When Fenwick at- 
 tempted to exercise poHtical authority at Salem, 
 he was seized and imprisoned by Andros, Gover- 
 nor of New York for the Duke of York, on the 
 ground that, although the Duke had given Jersey 
 to certain individual proprietors, the political con- 
 trol of it remained in the Duke's deputy governor. 
 Andros, who had levied a tax of five per cent on all 
 goods passing up the Delaware, now established 
 commissioners at Salem to collect the duties. 
 
 This action brought up the whole question of 
 the authority of Andros. The trustee proprietors 
 of West Jersey appealed to the Duke of York, 
 who was suspiciously indifferent to the matter, 
 but finally referred it for decision to a prominent 
 lawyer. Sir William Jones, before whom the Quaker 
 proprietors of West Jersey made a most excellent 
 argument. They showed the illegality, injustice, 
 and wrong of depriving the Jerseys of vested po- 
 litical rights and forcing them from the freeman 's 
 right of making their own laws to a state of mere 
 dependence on the arbitrary will of one man. 
 Then with much boldness they declared that "To 
 exact such an unterminated tax from English 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 135 
 
 planters, and to continue it after so many repeat- 
 ed complaints, will be the greatest evidence of 
 a design to introduce, if the Crown should ever 
 devolve upon the Duke, an unlimited government 
 in old England." Prophetic words which the 
 Duke, in a few years, tried his best to fulfill. But 
 Sir William Jones deciding against him, he ac- 
 quiesced, confirmed the political rights of West 
 Jersey by a separate grant, and withdrew any 
 authority Andros claimed over East Jersey. The 
 trouble, however, did not end here. Both the 
 Jerseys were long afflicted by domineering attempts 
 from New York. 
 
 Penn and his fellow trustees now prepared a 
 constitution, or Concessions and Agreements y as 
 they called it, for West Jersey, the first Quaker 
 political constitution embodying their advanced 
 ideas, establishing religious liberty, universal suf- 
 frage, and voting by ballot, and abolishing im- 
 prisonment for debt. It foreshadowed some of 
 the ideas subsequently included in the Pennsyl- 
 vania constitution. All these experiences were an 
 excellent school for William Penn. He learned the 
 importance in starting a colony of having a care- 
 fully and maturely considered system of govern- 
 ment. In his preparations some years afterwards 
 
136 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 for establishing Pennsylvania he avoided much of 
 the bungling of the West Jersey enterprise. 
 
 A better organized attempt was now made to 
 establish a foothold in West Jersey farther up the 
 river than Fen wick's colony at Salem. In 1677 
 the ship Kent took out some 230 rather well-to-do 
 Quakers, about as fine a company of broadbrims, 
 it is said, as ever entered the Delaware. Some 
 were from Yorkshire and London, largely creditors 
 of Byllinge, who were taking land to satisfy their 
 debts. They all went up the river to Raccoon 
 Creek on the Jersey side, about fifteen miles below 
 the present site of Philadelphia, and lived at first 
 among the Swedes, who had been in that part of 
 Jersey for some years and who took care of the 
 new arrivals in their barns and sheds. These Quak- 
 er immigrants, however, soon began to take care 
 of themselves, and the weather during the winter 
 proving mild, they explored farther up the river 
 in a small boat. They bought from the Indians 
 the land along the river shore from Oldman's Creek 
 all the way up to Trenton and made their first 
 settlements on the river about eighteen miles 
 above the site of Philadelphia, at a place they 
 at first called New Beverly, then Bridlington, and 
 finally Burlington. 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 137 
 
 They may have chosen this spot partly because 
 there had been an old Dutch settlement of a few 
 families there. It had long been a crossing of 
 the Delaware for the few persons who passed by 
 land from New York or New England to Mary- 
 land and Virginia. One of the Dutchmen, Peter 
 Yegon, kept a ferry and a house for entertaining 
 travelers. George Fox, who crossed there in 1671, 
 describes the place as having been plundered by 
 the Indians and deserted. He and his party swam 
 their horses across the river and got some of the 
 Indians to help them with canoes. 
 
 Other Quaker immigrants followed, going to 
 Salem as well as to Burlington, and a stretch of 
 some fifty miles of the river shore became strongly 
 Quaker. There are not many American towns 
 now to be found with more of the old-time pictur- 
 esqueness and more relics of the past than Salem 
 and Burlington. 
 
 Settlements were also started on the river 
 opposite the site afterwards occupied by Phila- 
 delphia, at Newton on the creek still called by 
 that name; and another a little above on Coop- 
 er's Creek, known as Cooper's Ferry until 1794. 
 Since then it has become the flourishing town of 
 Camden, full of shipbuilding and manufacturing, 
 
138 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 but for long after the Revolution it was merely a 
 small village on the Jersey shore opposite Phila- 
 delphia, sometimes used as a hunting ground and 
 a place of resort for duelers and dancing parties 
 from Philadelphia. 
 
 The Newton settlers were Quakers of the Eng- 
 lish middle class, weavers, tanners, carpenters, brick- 
 layers, chandlers, blacksmiths, coopers, bakers, hab- 
 erdashers, hatters, and linen drapers, most of them 
 possessed of property in England and bringing 
 good supplies with them. lake all the rest of the 
 New Jersey settlers they were in no sense adven- 
 turers, gold seekers, cavaliers, or desperadoes. 
 They were well-to-do middle class English trades- 
 people who would never have thought of leaving 
 England if they had not lost faith in the stabil- 
 ity of civil and religious liberty and the security 
 of their property under the Stuart Kings. With 
 them came servants, as they were called; that is, 
 persons of no property, who agreed to work for 
 a certain time in payment of their passage, to 
 escape from England. All, indeed, were escaping 
 from England before their estates melted away in 
 fines and confiscations or their health or lives end- 
 ed in the damp, foul air of the crowded prisons. 
 Many of those who came had been in jail and had 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 139 
 
 decided that they would not risk imprisonment 
 a second time. Indeed, the proportion of West 
 Jersey immigrants who had actually been in prison 
 for holding or attending Quaker meetings or re- 
 fusing to pay tithes for the support of the estab- 
 lished church was large. For example, William 
 Bates, a carpenter, while in jail for his religion, 
 made arrangements with his friends to escape to 
 West Jersey as soon as he should be released, and 
 his descendants are now scattered over the United 
 States. Robert Turner, a man of means, who 
 settled finally in Philadelphia but also owned 
 much land near Newton in West Jersey, had been 
 imprisoned in England in 1660, again in 1662, 
 again in 1665, and some of his property had been 
 taken, again imprisoned in 1669 and more prop- 
 erty taken; and many others had the same ex- 
 perience. Details such as these make us realize 
 the situation from which the Quakers sought to 
 escape. So widespread was the Quaker movement 
 in England and so severe the punishment imposed 
 in order to suppress it that fifteen thousand fami- 
 lies are said to have been ruined by the fines, 
 confiscations, and imprisonments. 
 
 Not a few Jersey Quakers were from Ireland, 
 whither they had fled because there the laws 
 
140 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 against them were less rigorously administered. 
 The Newton settlers were joined by Quakers from 
 Long Island, where, under the English law as 
 administered by the New York governors, they 
 had also been fined and imprisoned, though with 
 less severity than at home, for nonconformity 
 to the Church of England. On arriving, the 
 West Jersey settlers suffered some hardships dur- 
 ing the year that must elapse before a crop could 
 be raised and a log cabin or house built. During 
 that period they usually lived, in the Indian man- 
 ner, in wigwams of poles covered with bark, or in 
 caves protected with logs in the steep banks of 
 the creeks. Many of them lived in the villages 
 of the Indians. The Indians supplied them all 
 with corn and venison, and without this Indian 
 help, they would have run serious risk of starving, 
 for they were not accustomed to hunting. They 
 had also to thank the Indians for having in past 
 ages removed so much of the heavy forest growth 
 from the wide strip of land along the river that 
 it was easy to start cultivation. 
 
 These Quaker settlers made a point of dealing 
 very justly with the Indians and the two races 
 lived side by side for several generations. There 
 is an instance recorded of the Indians attending 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 141 
 
 with much solemnity the funeral of a prominent 
 Quaker woman, Esther Spicer, for whom they had 
 acquired great respect. The funeral was held at 
 night, and the Indians in canoes, the white men 
 in boats, passed down Cooper's Creek and along 
 the river to Newton Creek where the graveyard 
 was, lighting the darkness with innumerable 
 torches, a strange scene to think of now as having 
 been once enacted in front of the bustling cities 
 of Camden and Philadelphia. Some of the young 
 settlers took Indian wives, and that strain of 
 native blood is said to show itself in the features 
 of several families to this day. 
 
 Many letters of these settlers have been pre- 
 served, all expressing the greatest enthusiasm for 
 the new country, for the splendid river better than 
 the Thames, the good climate, and their improved 
 health, the immense relief to be away from the 
 constant dread of fines and punishment, the chance 
 to rise in the world, with large rewards for industry. 
 They note the immense quantities of game, the 
 Indians bringing in fat bucks every day, the veni- 
 son better than in England, the streams full of 
 fish, the abundance of wild fruits, cranberries, 
 hurtleberries, the rapid increase of cattle, and the 
 good soil. 
 
142 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 A few details concerning some of the interesting 
 characters among these early colonial Quakers 
 have been rescued from oblivion. There is, for 
 instance, the pleasing picture of a young man and 
 his sister, convinced Quakers, coming out together 
 and pioneering in their log cabin until each found 
 a partner for life. There was John Haddon, from 
 whom Haddonfield is named, who bought a large 
 tract of land but remained in England, while his 
 daughter Elizabeth came out alone to look after 
 it. A strong, decisive character she was, and 
 women of that sort have always been encour- 
 aged in independent action by the Quakers. She 
 proved to be an excellent manager of an estate. 
 The romance of her marriage to a young Quaker 
 preacher, Estaugh, has been celebrated in Mrs. 
 Maria Child's novel The Youthful Emigrant. The 
 pair became leading citizens devoted to good works 
 and to Quaker liberalism for many a year in 
 Haddonfield. 
 
 It was the ship Shields of Hull, bringing Quaker 
 immigrants to Burlington, of which the story is 
 told that in beating up the river she tacked close 
 to the rather high bank with deep water frontage 
 where Philadelphia was afterwards established; 
 and some of the passengers remarked that it was 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 143 
 
 a fine site for a town. The Shields, it is said, 
 was the first ship to sail up as far as Burlington. 
 Anchoring before Burlington in the evening, the 
 colonists woke up next morning to find the river 
 frozen hard so that they walked on the ice to their 
 future habitations. 
 
 Burlington was made the capital of West Jersey, 
 a legislature was convened and laws were passed 
 under the " concessions " or constitution of the pro- 
 prietors. Salem and Burlington became the ports 
 of the little province, which was well under way 
 by 1682, when Penn came out to take possession 
 of Pennsylvania. 
 
 The West Jersey people of these two settlements 
 spread eastward into the interior but were stopped 
 by a great forest area known as the Pines, or Pine 
 Barrens, of such heavy growth that even the 
 Indians lived on its outer edges and entered it 
 only for hunting. It was an irregularly shaped 
 tract, full of wolves, bear, beaver, deer, and other 
 game, and until recent years continued to at- 
 tract sportsmen from all parts of the country. 
 Starting near Delaware Bay, it extended parallel 
 with the ocean as far north as the lower portion 
 of the present Monmouth County and formed a 
 region about seventy-five miles long and thirty 
 
144 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 miles wide. It was roughly the part of the old 
 sandy shoal that first emerged from the ocean, 
 and it has been longer above water than any other 
 part of southern Jersey. The old name, Pine 
 Barrens, is hardly correct because it implies some- 
 thing like a desert, when as a matter of fact the 
 region produced magnificent forest trees. 
 
 The innumerable visitors who cross southern 
 Jersey to the famous seashore resorts always pass 
 through the remains of this old central forest and 
 are likely to conclude that the monotonous low 
 scrub oaks and stunted pines on sandy level soil, 
 seen for the last two or three generations, were 
 always there and that the primeval forest of colo- 
 nial times was no better. But that is a mistake. 
 The stunted growth now seen is not even second 
 growth but in many cases fourth or fifth or more. 
 The whole region was cut over long ago. The 
 original growth, pine in many places, consisted 
 also of lofty timber of oak, hickory, gum, ash, 
 chestnut, and numerous other trees, interspersed 
 with dogwood, sassafras, and holly, and in the 
 swamps the beautiful magnolia, along with the 
 valuable white cedar. De Vries, who visited the 
 Jersey coast about 1632, at what is supposed to 
 have been Beesley's or Somer's Point, describes 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 145 
 
 high woods coming down to the shore. Even to- 
 day, immediately back of Somer's Point, there is a 
 magnificent lofty oak forest accidentally preserved 
 by surrounding marsh from the destructive forest 
 fires; and there are similar groves along the road 
 towards Pleasantville. In fact, the finest forest 
 trees flourish in that region wherever given a 
 good chance. Even some of the beaches of Cape 
 May had valuable oak and luxuriant growths of 
 red cedar; and until a few years ago there were 
 fine trees, especially hollies, surviving on Wild wood 
 Beach. 
 
 The Jersey white cedar swamps were, and still 
 are, places of fascinating interest to the naturalist 
 and the botanist. The hunter or explorer found 
 them scattered almost everywhere in the old forest 
 and near its edges, varying in size from a few square 
 yards up to hundreds of acres. They were formed 
 by little streams easily checked in their flow 
 through the level land by decaying vegetation or 
 dammed by beavers. They kept the water within 
 the country, preventing all effects of droughts, 
 stimulating the growth of vegetation which by 
 its decay, throughout the centuries, was steadily 
 adding vegetable mold or humus to the sandy 
 soil. This process of building up a richer soil has 
 
146 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 now been largely stopped by lumbering, drainage, 
 and fires. 
 
 While there are many of these swamps left, the 
 appearance of numbers of them has largely changed. 
 When the white men first came, the great cedars 
 three or four feet in diameter which had fallen 
 centuries before often lay among the living trees, 
 some of them buried deep in the mud and preserved 
 from decay. They were invaluable timber, and 
 digging them out and cutting them up became an 
 important industry for over a hundred years. In 
 addition to being used for boat building, they made 
 excellent shingles which would last a lifetime. The 
 swamps, indeed, became known as shingle mines, 
 and it was a good description of them. An im- 
 portant trade was developed in hogshead staves, 
 hoops, shingles, boards, and planks, much of which 
 went into the West Indian trade to be exchanged 
 for rum, sugar, molasses, and negroes. ^ 
 
 ^ "Between the years 1740 and '50, the Cedar Swamps of the 
 county [Cape May] were mostly located; and the amount of lumber 
 since taken from them is incalculable, not only as an article of trade, 
 but to supply the home demand for fencing and building material 
 in the county. Large portions of these swamps have been worked 
 a second and some a third time, since located. At the present time 
 fl857] there is not an acre of original growth of swamp standing, 
 having all passed away before the resistless sway of the speculator 
 or the consumer." Beesley's Sketch of Cape May, p. 197. 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 147 
 
 The great forest has long since been lumbered to 
 death. The pines were worked for tar, pitch, res- 
 in, and turpentine until for lack of material the 
 industry passed southward through the Carolinas 
 to Florida, exhausting the trees as it went. The 
 Christmas demand for holly has almost stripped 
 the Jersey woods of these trees once so numerous. 
 Destructive fires and frequent cutting keep the 
 pine and oak lands stunted. Thousands of dol- 
 lars' worth of cedar springing up in the swamps 
 are sometimes destroyed in a day. But efforts 
 to control the fires so destructive not only to this 
 standing timber but to the fertility of the soil, 
 and attempts to reforest this country not only for 
 the sake of timber but as an attraction to those 
 who resort there in search of health or natural 
 beauty, have not been vigorously pushed. The 
 great forest has now, to be sure, been partially 
 cultivated in spots, and the sand used for large 
 glass-making industries. Small fruits and grapes 
 flourish in some places. At the northern end of 
 this forest tract the health resort known as Lake- 
 wood was established to take advantage of the 
 pine air. A little to the southward is the secluded 
 Brown's Mills, once so appealing to lovers of the 
 simple life. 
 
148 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Checked on the east by the great forest, the West 
 Jersey Quakers spread southward from Salem until 
 they came to the Cohansey, a large and beautiful 
 stream flowing out of the forest and wandering 
 through green meadows and marshes to the bay. 
 So numerous were the wild geese along its shores 
 and along the Maurice River farther south that 
 the first settlers are said to have killed them for 
 their feathers alone and to have thrown the car- 
 casses away. At the head of navigation of the 
 Cohansey was a village called Cohansey Bridge, 
 and after 1765 Bridgeton, a name still borne by 
 a flourishing modern town. Lower down near the 
 marsh was the village of Greenwich, the principal 
 place of business up to the year 1800, with a for- 
 eign trade. Some of the tea the East India Com- 
 V pany tried to force on the colonists during the 
 Revolution was sent there and was duly rejected. 
 It is still an extremely pretty village, with its 
 broad shaded streets like a New England town and 
 its old Quaker meeting house. In fact, not a few 
 New Englanders from Connecticut, still infatuated 
 with southern Jersey in spite of the rebuffs re- 
 ceived in ancient times from Dutch and Swedes, 
 finally settled near the Cohansey after it came 
 under control of the more amiable Quakers. There 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 149 
 
 was also one place called after Fairfield in Con- 
 necticut and another called New England Town. 
 The first churches of this region were usually 
 built near running streams so that the congrega- 
 tion could procure water for themselves and their 
 horses. Of one old Presbyterian Church it used to 
 be said that no one had ever ridden to it in a wheeled 
 vehicle. Wagons and carriages were very scarce 
 until after the Revolution. Carts for occasions 
 of ceremony as well as utility were used before 
 wagons and carriages. For a hundred and fifty 
 years the horse's back was the best form of con- 
 veyance in the deep sand of the trails and roads. 
 This was true of all southern Jersey. Pack horses 
 and the backs of Indian and negro slaves were 
 the principal means of transportation on land. 
 The roads and trails, in fact, were so few and so 
 heavy with sand that water travel was very much 
 developed. The Indian dugout canoe was adopted 
 and found faster and better than heavy English 
 rowboats. As the province was almost surrounded 
 by water and was covered with a network of creeks 
 and channels, nearly all the villages and towns were 
 situated on tidewater streams, and the dugout ca- 
 noe, modified and improved, was for several gener- 
 ations the principal means of communication. 
 
1,50 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Most of the old roads in New Jersey followed 
 Indian trails. There was a trail, for example, 
 from the modern Camden opposite Philadelphia, 
 following up Cooper's Creek past Berlin, then 
 called Long-a-coming, crossing the watershed, 
 and then following Great Egg Harbor River to 
 the seashore. Another trail, long used by the 
 settlers, led from Salem up to Camden, Burlington, 
 and Trenton, going round the heads of streams. 
 It was afterwards abandoned for the shorter route 
 obtained by bridging the streams nearer their 
 mouths. This old trail also extended from the 
 neighborhood of Trenton to Perth Amboy near 
 the mouth of the Hudson, and thus, by supple- 
 menting the lower routes, made a trail nearly the 
 whole length of the province. 
 
 As a Quaker refuge, West Jersey never attained 
 the success of Pennsylvania. The poHtical disturb- 
 ances and the continually threatened loss of self- 
 government in both the Jerseys were a serious 
 deterrent to Quakers who, above all else, prized 
 rights which they found far better secured in 
 Pennsylvania. In 1702, when the two Jerseys 
 were united into one colony under a government 
 appointed by the Crown, those rights were more 
 restricted than ever and all hopes of West Jersey 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW JERSEY 151 
 
 becoming a colony under complete Quaker control 
 were shattered. Under Governor Cornbury, the 
 English law was adopted and enforced, and the 
 Quakers were disqualified from testifying in court 
 unless they took an oath and were prohibited 
 from serving on juries or holding any ofiice of 
 trust. Cornbury's judges wore scarlet robes, 
 powdered wigs, cocked hats, gold lace, and side 
 arms; they were conducted to the courthouse by 
 the sheriff's cavalcade and opened court with great 
 parade and ceremony. Such a spectacle of pomp 
 was sufficient to divert the flow of Quaker im- 
 migrants to Pennsylvania, where the government 
 was entirely in Quaker hands and where plain 
 and serious ways gave promise of enduring and 
 unmolested prosperity. 
 
 The Quakers had altogether thirty meeting 
 houses in West Jersey and eleven in East Jersey, 
 which probably shows about the proportion of 
 Quaker influence in the two Jerseys. Many of 
 them have since disappeared; some of the early 
 buildings, to judge from the pictures, were of wood 
 and not particularly pleasing in appearance. They 
 were makeshifts, usually intended to be replaced by 
 better buildings. Some substantial brick buildings 
 of excellent architecture have survived, and their 
 
152 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 plainness and simplicity, combined with excellent 
 proportions and thorough construction, are clearly 
 indicative of Quaker character. There is a particu- 
 larly interesting one in Salem with a magnificent 
 old oak beside it, another in the village of Green- 
 wich on the Cohansey farther south, and another 
 at Cross wicks near Trenton. 
 
 In West Jersey near Mount Holly was born and 
 lived John Woolman, a Quaker who became emi- 
 nent throughout the English speaking world for 
 the simplicity and loftiness of his religious thought 
 as well as for his admirable style of expression. 
 His Journal, once greatly and even extravagantly 
 admired, still finds readers. "Get the writings 
 of John Woolman by heart," said Charles Lamb, 
 "and love the early Quakers." He was among 
 the Quakers one of the first and perhaps the first 
 really earnest advocate of the abolition of slavery. 
 The scenes of West Jersey and the writings of 
 Woolman seem to belong together. Possibly a 
 feeling for the simplicity of those scenes and their 
 life led Walt Whitman, who grew up on Long 
 Island under Quaker influence, to spend his last 
 years at Camden, in West Jersey. His profound 
 democracy, which was very Quaker-like, was more 
 at home there perhaps than anywhere else. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 PLANTERS AND TRADERS OF SOUTHERN JERSEY 
 
 Most of the colonies in America, especially the 
 stronger ones, had an aristocratic class, which was 
 often large and powerful, as in the case of Virginia, 
 and which usually centered around the governor, 
 especially if he were appointed from England by 
 the Crown or by a proprietor. But there was 
 very little of this social distinction in New Jersey. 
 Her political life had been too much broken up, 
 and she had been too long dependent on the gov- 
 ernors of New York to have any of those pretty 
 little aristocracies with bright colored clothes, and 
 coaches and four, flourishing within her bound- 
 aries. There seems to have been a faint sugges- 
 tion of such social pretensions under Governor 
 Franklin just before the Revolution. He was 
 beginning to live down the objections to his ille- 
 gitimate birth and Toryism and by his entertain- 
 ments and manner of living was creating a social 
 
 153 
 
154 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 following. There is said also to have been some- 
 thing a little like the beginning of an aristocracy 
 among the descendants of the Dutch settlers who 
 had ancestral holdings near the Hudson; but this 
 amounted to very little. 
 
 Class distinctions were not so strongly marked 
 in New Jersey as in some other colonies. There 
 grew up in southern Jersey, however, a sort of 
 aristocracy of gentlemen farmers, who owned 
 large tracts of land and lived in not a little style 
 in good houses on the small streams. 
 
 The northern part of the province, largely settled 
 and influenced by New Englanders, was like New 
 England a land of vigorous concentrated town life 
 and small farms. The hilly and mountainous nature 
 of the northern section naturally led to small hold- 
 ings of land. But in southern Jersey the level sandy 
 tracts of forest were often takv^n up in large areas. 
 In the absence of manuf actui ing, large acreage 
 naturally became, as in Virginia and Maryland, 
 the only mark of wealth and social distinction. 
 The great landlord was looked up to by the lesser 
 fry. The Quaker rule of discountenancing marry- 
 ing out of meeting tended to keep a large acreage 
 in the family and to make it larger by marriage. 
 A Quaker of broad acres would seek for his daughter 
 
PLANTERS AND TRADERS 155 
 
 a young man of another landholding Quaker family 
 and would thus join the two estates. 
 
 There was a marked difference between East 
 Jersey and West Jersey in county organization. 
 In West Jersey the people tended to become 
 planters; their farms and plantations somewhat 
 like those of the far South; and the political unit 
 of government was the county. In East Jersey 
 the town was the starting point and the county 
 marked the boundaries of a collection of towns. 
 This curious difference, the result of soil, climate, 
 and methods of life, shows itself in other States 
 wherever South and North meet. Illinois is an 
 example, where the southern part of the State is 
 governed by the county system, and the northern 
 part by the town system. 
 
 The lumberman, too, in clearing off the prime- 
 val forest and selling the timber, usually dealt in 
 immense acreage. Some families, it is said, can 
 be traced steadily proceeding southward as they 
 stripped off the forest, and started sawmills and 
 gristmills on the little streams that trickled from 
 the swamps, and like beavers making with their 
 dams those pretty ponds which modern lover? of 
 the picturesque are now so eager to find. A good 
 deal of the lumbering in the interior pines tract 
 
156 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 was carried on by persons who leased the premises 
 from owners who Hved on plantations along the 
 Delaware or its tributary streams. These opera- 
 tions began soon after 1700. Wood roads were 
 cut into the Pines, sawmills were started, and con- 
 stant use turned some of these wood roads into the 
 highways of modern times. 
 
 There was a speculative tinge in the operations 
 of this landed aristocracy. Like the old tobacco 
 raising aristocracy of Virginia and Maryland, they 
 were inclined to go from tract to tract, skinning 
 what they could from a piece of deforested land 
 and then seeking another virgin tract. The rough- 
 est methods were used; wooden plows, brush har- 
 rows, straw collars, grapevine harness, and poor 
 shelter for animals and crops; but were the Vir- 
 ginia methods any better.^ In these operations 
 there was apparently a good deal of sudden profit 
 and mushroom prosperity accompanied by a good 
 deal of debt and insolvency. In this, too, they 
 were like the Virginians and Carolinians. There 
 seem to have been also a good many slaves in West 
 Jersey, brought, as in the southern colonies, to 
 work on the large estates, and this also, no doubt, 
 helped to foster the aristocratic feeling. 
 
 The best days of the Jersey gentlemen farmers 
 
PLANTERS AND TRADERS 157 
 
 came probably when they could no longer move 
 from tract to tract. They settled down and enjoyed 
 a very plentiful, if rude, existence on the products 
 of their land, game, and fish, amid a fine climate 
 — with mosquitoes enough in summer to act as 
 a counterirritant and prevent stagnation from too 
 much ease and prosperity. After the manner of 
 colonial times, they wove their own clothes from 
 the wool of their own sheep and made their own 
 implements, furniture, and simple machinery. 
 There are still to be found fascinating traces of 
 this old life in out-of-the-way parts of southern 
 Jersey. To run upon old houses among the Jersey 
 pines still stored with Latin classics and old edi- 
 tions of Shakespeare, Addison, or Samuel John- 
 son, to come across an old mill with its machin- 
 ery, cogwheels, flywheels, and all, made of wood, 
 to find people who make their own oars, and the 
 handles of their tools from the materials fur- 
 nished by their own forest, is now unfortunately 
 a refreshment of the spirit that is daily becoming 
 rarer. 
 
 This condition of material and social self-suflB- 
 ciency lasted in places long after the Revolution. 
 It was a curious little aristocracy — a very faint 
 and faded one, lacking the robustness of the far 
 
158 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 southern type, and lacking indeed the real essen- 
 tial of an aristocracy, namely political power. 
 Moreover, although there were slaves in New 
 Jersey, there were not enough of them to exalt 
 the Jersey gentlemen farmers into such self-suf- 
 ficient lords and masters as the Virginian and 
 Carolinian planters became. 
 
 To search out the remains of this stage of Ameri- 
 can history, however, takes one up many pleasant 
 streams flowing out of the forest tract to the Dela- 
 ware on one side or to the ocean on the other. 
 This topographical formation of a central ridge or 
 watershed of forest and swamp was a repetition 
 of the same formation in the Delaware peninsula, 
 which like southern Jersey had originally been 
 a shoal and then an island. The Jersey water- 
 shed, with its streams abounding in wood duck 
 and all manner of wild life, must have been in its 
 primeval days as fascinating as some of the streams 
 of the Florida cypress swamps. Toward the ocean. 
 Wading River, the Mullica, the Tuckahoe, Great 
 Egg; and on the Delaware side the Maurice, 
 Cohansey, Salem Creek, Oldman's, Raccoon, Man- 
 tua, Woodberry, Timber, and the Rancocas, still 
 possess attraction. Some of them, on opposite j 
 sides of the divide, are not far apart at their' 
 
PLANTERS AND TRADERS 159 
 
 sources in the old forest tract; so that a canoe can 
 be transported over the few miles and thus traverse 
 the State. One of these trips up Timber Creek 
 from the Delaware and across only eight miles of 
 land to the headwaters of Great Egg Harbor 
 River and thence down to the ocean, thus cutting 
 South Jersey in half, is a particularly romantic 
 one. The heavy woods and swamps of this se- 
 cluded route along these forest shadowed streams 
 are apparently very much as they were three hun- 
 dred years ago. 
 
 The water in all these streams, particularly in 
 their upper parts, owing to the sandy soil, is very 
 clean and clear and is often stained by the cedar 
 roots in the swamps a clear brown, sometimes 
 almost an amber color. One of the streams, the 
 Rancocas, with its many windings to Mount Holly 
 and then far inland to Brown's Mills, seems to 
 be the favorite with canoemen and is probably 
 without an equal in its way for those who love 
 the Indian's gift that brings us so close to nature. 
 
 The spread of the Quaker settlements along 
 Delaware Bay to Cape May was checked by the 
 Maurice River and its marshes and by the Great 
 Cedar Swamp which crossed the country from 
 
160 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Delaware Bay to the ocean and thus made of the 
 Cape May region a sort of island. The Cape 
 May region, it is true, was settled by Quakers, 
 but most of them came from Long Island rather 
 than from the settlements on the Delaware. They 
 had followed whale fishing on Long Island and in 
 pursuit of that occupation some of them had mi- 
 grated to Cape May where whales were numerous 
 not far off shore. 
 
 The leading early families of Cape May, the 
 Townsends, Stillwells, Corsons, Leamings, Lud- 
 lams, Spicers, and Cresses, many of whose descend- 
 ants still live there, were Quakers of the Long 
 Island strain. The ancestor of the Townsend 
 family came to Cape May because he had been 
 imprisoned and fined and threatened with worse 
 under the New York government for assisting 
 his fellow Quakers to hold meetings. Probably 
 the occasional severity of the administration of the 
 New York laws against Quakers, which were the 
 same as those of England, had as much to do as 
 had the whales with the migration to Cape May. 
 This Quaker civilization extended from Cape May 
 up as far as Great Egg Harbor where the Great 
 Cedar Swamp joined the seashore. Quaker meet- 
 ing houses were built at Cape May, Galloway, 
 
PLANTERS AND TRADERS 161 
 
 Tuckahoe, and Great Egg. All have been aban- 
 doned and the buildings themselves have disap- 
 peared, except that of the Cape May meeting, called 
 the Old Cedar Meeting, at Seaville; and it has 
 no congregation. The building is kept in repair 
 by members of the Society from other places. 
 
 Besides the Quakers, Cape May included a 
 number of New Haven people, the first of whom 
 came there as early as 1640 under the leadership 
 of George Lamberton and Captain Turner, seeking 
 profit in whale fishing. They were not driven out 
 by the Dutch and Swedes, as happened to their 
 companions who attempted to settle higher up 
 the river at Salem and the Schuylkill. About 
 one-fifth of the old family names of Cape May 
 and New Haven are similar, and there is supposed 
 to be not a little New England blood not only 
 in Cape May but in the neighboring counties 
 of Cumberland and Salem. While the first New 
 Haven whalers came to Cape May in 1640, it is 
 probable that for a long time they only sheltered 
 their vessels there, and none of them became 
 permanent settlers until about 1685. 
 
 Scandinavians contributed another element to 
 the population of the Cape May region. Very 
 little is definitely known about this settlement. 
 
162 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 but the Swedish names in Cape May and Cum- 
 berland counties seem to indicate a migration of 
 Scandinavians from Wilmington and Tinicum. 
 
 Great Egg Harbor, which formed the northern 
 part of the Cape May settlement, was named from 
 the immense numbers of wild fowl, swans, ducks, 
 and water birds that formerly nested there every 
 summer and have now been driven to Canada 
 or beyond. Little Egg Harbor farther up the 
 coast was named for the same reason as well as 
 Egg Island, of three hundred acres in Delaware 
 Bay, since then eaten away by the tide. The 
 people of the district had excellent living from 
 the eggs as well as from the plentiful fowl, fish, 
 and oysters. 
 
 Some farming was done by the inhabitants of 
 Cape May; and many cattle, marked with brands 
 but in a half wild state, were kept out on the un- 
 inhabited beaches which have now become seaside 
 summer cities. Some of the cattle were still run- 
 ning wild on the beaches down to the time of the 
 Civil War. The settlers "mined" the valuable 
 white cedar from the swamps for shingles and 
 boards, leaving great "pool holes" in the swamps 
 which even today sometimes trap the unwary 
 sportsman. The women knitted innumerable 
 
PLANTERS AND TRADERS 163 
 
 mittens and also made wampum or Indian money 
 from the clam and oyster shells, an important 
 means of exchange in the Indian trade all over the 
 colonies, and even to some extent among the 
 colonists themselves. The Cape May people built 
 sloops for carrying the white cedar, the mittens, 
 oysters, and wampum to the outside world. They 
 sold a great deal of their cedar in Long Island, 
 Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Philadelphia fi- 
 nally became their market for oysters and also for 
 lumber, corn, and the whalebone and oil. Their 
 sloops also traded to the southern colonies and even 
 to the West Indies. 
 
 They were an interesting little community, 
 these Cape May people, very isolated and depend- 
 ent on the water and on their boats, for they were 
 completely cut off by the Great Cedar Swamp 
 which stretched across the point and separated 
 them from the rest of the coast. This troublesome 
 swamp was not bridged for many years ; and even 
 then the roads to it were long, slow, and too 
 sandy for transporting anything of much bulk. 
 
 Next above Cape May on the coast was another 
 isolated patch of civilization which, while not an 
 island, was nevertheless cut off on the south by 
 Great Egg Harbor with its river and marshes, and 
 
164 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 on the north by Little Egg Harbor with the MulKca 
 River and its marshes extending far inland. The 
 people in this district also lived somewhat to them- 
 selves. To the north lay the district which extended 
 to Sandy Hook, also with its distinct set of people. 
 
 The people of the Cape became in colonial times 
 clever traders in various pursuits. Although in 
 one sense they were as isolated as islanders, their 
 adventurous life on the sea gave them breadth of 
 view. By their thrift and in innumerable shrewd 
 and persistent ways they amassed competencies and 
 estates for their families. Aaron Leaming, for ex- 
 ample, who died in 1780, left an estate of nearly 
 $1,000,000. Some kept diaries which have become 
 historically valuable in showing not only their his- 
 tory but their good education and the peculiar cast 
 of their mind for keen trading as well as their rigid 
 economy and integrity. 
 
 One character, Jacob Spicer, a prosperous colo- 
 nial, insisted on having everything made at home 
 by his sons and daughters — shoes, clothes, leather 
 breeches, wampum, even shoe thread — calculating 
 the cost of everything to a fraction and economiz- 
 ing to the last penny of money and the last second 
 of time. Yet in the course of a year he used "fifty- 
 two gallons of rum, ten of wine, and two barrels of 
 
PLANTERS AND TRADERS 165 
 
 cyder." Apparently in those days hard labor and 
 hard drinking went well together. 
 
 The Cape May people, relying almost entirely 
 on the water for communication and trade, soon 
 took to piloting vessels in the Delaware River, and 
 some of them still follow this occupation. They 
 also became skillful sailors and builders of small 
 craft, and it is not surprising to learn that Jacocks 
 Swain and his sons introduced, in 1811, the cen- 
 terboard for keeping flat-bottomed craft closer 
 to the wind. They are said to have taken out a 
 patent for this invention and are given the credit 
 of being the originators of the idea. But the 
 device was known in England in 1774, was intro- 
 duced in Massachusetts in the same year, and 
 may have been used long before by the Dutch. 
 The need of it, however, was no doubt strongly 
 impressed upon the Cape May people by the diffi- 
 culties which their little sloops experienced in 
 beating home against contrary winds. Some of 
 them, indeed, spent weeks in sight of the Cape, un- 
 able to make it. One sloop, the Nanay, seventy-two 
 days from Demarara, hung off and on for forty- 
 three days from December 25, 1787, to Febru- 
 ary 6, 1788, and was driven off fifteen times be- 
 fore she finally got into Hereford Inlet. Sometimes 
 
166 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 better sailing craft had to go out and bring in such 
 distressed vessels. The early boats were no doubt 
 badly constructed; but in the end apprentice- 
 ship to dire necessity made the Cape May sailors 
 masters of seamanship and the windward art.' 
 
 Wilson, the naturalist, spent a great deal of 
 time in the Cape May region, because of the great 
 variety of birds to be found there. Southern 
 types, like the Florida egret, ventured even so 
 far north, and it was a stopping place for migrat- 
 ing birds, notably woodcock, on their northern 
 and southern journeys. Men of the stone age 
 had once been numerous in this region, as the 
 remains of village plats and great shell heaps bore 
 witness. It was a resting point for all forms of 
 life. That much traveled, adventurous gentleman 
 of the sea. Captain Kidd, according to popular 
 legend, was a frequent visitor to this coast. 
 
 In later times, beginning in 1801, the Cape 
 became one of the earliest of the summer resorts. 
 The famous Commodore Decatur was among the 
 first distinguished men to be attracted by the 
 simple seaside charm of the place, long before it 
 was destroyed by wealth and crowds. Year by 
 
 ^ Stevens, History of Cape May County, pp. 219, 229; Kelley» 
 American Yachts (1884), p. 165. 
 
PLANTERS AND TRADERS 167 
 
 year he used to measure and record at one spot 
 the encroachment of the sea upon the beach. 
 Where today the sea washes and the steel pier 
 extends, once lay cornfields. For a hundred years 
 it was a favorite resting place for statesmen and 
 politicians of national eminence. They traveled 
 there by stage, sailing sloop, or their own wagons. 
 People from Baltimore and the South more par- 
 ticularly sought the place because it was easily 
 accessible from the head of Chesapeake Bay by 
 an old railroad, long since abandoned, to New 
 Castle on the Delaware, whence sail- or steam- 
 boats went to Cape May. This avoided the tedious 
 stage ride over the sandy Jersey roads. Presidents, 
 cabinet officers, senators, and congressmen sought 
 the invigorating air of the Cape and the attrac- 
 tions of the old village, its seafaring life, the 
 sailing, fishing, and bathing on the best beach of 
 the coast. Congress Hall, their favorite hotel, 
 became famous, and during a large part of the 
 nineteenth century presidential nominations and 
 policies are said to have been planned within 
 its walls. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 SCOTCH COVENANTERS AND OTHERS IN EAST JERSEY 
 
 East Jersey was totally different in its topog- 
 raphy from West Jersey. The northern half of 
 the State is a region of mountains and lakes. As 
 part of the original continent it had been under the 
 ice sheet of the glacial age and was very unlike 
 the level sands, swamps, and pine barrens of West 
 Jersey which had arisen as a shoal and island from 
 the sea. The only place in East Jersey where 
 settlement was at all easy was along the open 
 meadows which were reached by water near the 
 mouth of the Hudson, round Newark Bay, and 
 along the Hackensack River. 
 
 The Dutch, by the discoveries of Henry Hudson 
 in 1609, claimed the whole region between the 
 Hudson and the Delaware. They settled part 
 of East Jersey opposite their headquarters at 
 New York and called it Pavonia. But their cruel 
 massacre of some Indians who sought refuge 
 
 168 
 
SCOTCH COVENANTERS AND OTHERS 169 
 
 among them at Pavonia destroyed the prospects 
 of the settlement. The Indians revenged them- 
 selves by massacring the Dutch again and again, 
 every time they attempted to reestablish Pavonia. 
 This kept the Dutch out of East Jersey until 1660, 
 when they succeeded in establishing Bergen be- 
 tween Newark Bay and the Hudson. 
 
 The Dutch authority in America was over- 
 thrown in 1664 by Charles II, who had already 
 given all New Jersey to his brother the Duke of 
 York. Colonel Richard Nicolls commanded the 
 British expedition that seized the Dutch posses- 
 sions ; and he had been given full power as deputy 
 governor of all the Duke of York's vast territory. 
 
 Meantime the New England Puritans seem to 
 have kept their eyes on East Jersey as a desirable 
 region, and the moment the Connecticut Puritans 
 heard of Nicolls' appointment, they applied to him 
 for a grant of a large tract of land on Newark 
 Bay. In the next year, 1665, he gave them another 
 tract from the mouth of the Raritan to Sandy 
 Hook; and soon the villages of Shrewsbury and 
 Middletown were started. 
 
 Meantime, however, unknown to Nicolls, the 
 Duke of York in England had given all of New 
 Jersey to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. 
 
170 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 As has already been pointed out, they had divided 
 the province between them, and East Jersey had 
 fallen to Carteret, who sent out, with some im- 
 migrants, his relative Philip Carteret as governor. 
 Governor Carteret was of course very much sur- 
 prised to find so much of the best land already 
 occupied by the excellent and thrifty Yankees. 
 As a consequence, litigation and sometimes civil 
 war over this unlucky mistake lasted for a hundred 
 years. Many of the Yankee settlers under the 
 Nicolls grant refused to pay quitrents to Carteret 
 or his successors and, in spite of a commission of 
 inquiry from England in 1751 and a chancery 
 suit, they held their own until the Revolution of 
 1776 extinguished all British authority. 
 
 There was therefore from the beginning a strong 
 New England tinge in East Jersey which has lasted 
 to this day. Governor Carteret established a vil- 
 lage on Newark Bay which still bears the name 
 Elizabeth, which he gave it in honor of the wife 
 of the proprietor, and he made it the capital. 
 There were also immigrants from Scotland and 
 England. But Puritans from Long Island and 
 New England continued to settle round Newark 
 Bay. By virtue either of character or numbers, 
 New Englanders were evidently the controlling 
 
SCOTCH COVENANTERS AND OTHERS 171 
 
 element, for they established the New England 
 system of town government, and imposed strict 
 Connecticut laws, making twelve crimes punish- 
 able with death. Soon there were flourishing little 
 villages, Newark and Elizabeth, besides Middle- 
 town and Shrewsbury. The next year Piscatawa 
 and Woodbridge were added. Newark and the 
 region round it, including the Oranges, was settled 
 by very exclusive Puritans, or Congregationalists, 
 as they are now called, some thirty families from 
 four Connecticut towns — Milford, Guilford, Brad- 
 ford, and New Haven. They decided that only 
 church members should hold office and vote. 
 
 Governor Carteret ruled the colony with an 
 appointive council and a general assembly elected 
 by the people, the typical colonial form of govern- 
 ment. His administration lasted from 1665 to 
 his death in 1682; and there is nothing very re- 
 markable to record except the rebellion of the 
 New Englanders, especially those who had received 
 their land from Nicolls. Such independent Con- 
 necticut people were, of course, quite out of place 
 in a proprietary colony, and, when in 1670 the 
 first collection of quitrents was attempted, they 
 broke out in violent opposition, in which the 
 settlers of Elizabeth were prominent. In 1672 
 
172 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 they elected a revolutionary assembly of their 
 own and, in place of the deputy governor, ap- 
 pointed as proprietor a natural son of Carteret. 
 They began imprisoning former officers and con- 
 fiscating estates in the most approved revolutionary 
 form and for a time had the whole government in 
 their control. It required the interference of the 
 Duke of York, of the proprietors, and of the British 
 Crown to allay the little tempest, and three years 
 were given in which to pay the quitrents. 
 
 After the death of Sir George Carteret in 1680, 
 his province of East Jersey was sold to William 
 Penn and eleven other Quakers for the sum of 
 £3400. Colonies seem to have been compara- 
 tively inexpensive luxuries in those days. A few 
 years before, in 1675, Penn and some other Quak- 
 ers had, as has already been related, gained con- 
 trol of West Jersey for the still smaller sum of 
 one thousand pounds and had established it as a 
 Quaker refuge. It might be supposed that they 
 now had the same purpose in view in East Jersey, 
 but apparently their intention was to create a 
 refuge for Presbyterians, the famous Scotch Cov- 
 enanters, much persecuted at that time under 
 Charles II, who was forcing them to conform to 
 the Church of England. 
 
SCOTCH COVENANTERS AND OTHERS 173 
 
 Penn and his fellow proprietors of East Jersey 
 each chose a partner, most of them Scotchmen, 
 two of whom, the Earl of Perth and Lord Drum- 
 mond, were prominent men. To this mixed body 
 of Quakers, other dissenters, and some Papists, 
 twenty-four proprietors in all, the Duke of York 
 reconfirmed by special patent their right to East 
 Jersey. Under their urging a few Scotch Cov- 
 enanters began to arrive and seem to have first 
 established themselves at Perth Amboy, which they 
 named from the Scottish Earl of Perth and an 
 Indian word meaning "point." This settlement 
 they expected to become a great commercial port 
 rivahng New York. Curiously enough, Robert Bar- 
 clay, the first governor appointed, was not only 
 a Scotchman but also a Quaker, and a theolo- 
 gian whose Apology for the True Christian Divinity 
 (1678) is regarded to this day as the best statement 
 of the original Quaker doctrine. He remained in 
 England, however, and the deputies whom he sent 
 out to rule the colony had a troublous time of it. 
 
 That Quakers should establish a refuge for 
 Presbyterians seems at first peculiar, but it was 
 in accord with their general philanthropic plan 
 to help the oppressed and suffering, to rescue 
 prisoners and exiles, and especially to ameliorate 
 
174 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 the horrible condition of people confined in the 
 English dungeons and prisons. Many vivid pic- 
 tures of how the Scotch Covenanters were hunted 
 down like wild beasts may be found in English 
 histories and novels. When their lives were spared 
 they often met a fate worse than death in the 
 loathsome dungeons into which thousands of Quak- 
 ers of that time were also thrust. A large part of 
 William Penn's life as a courtier was spent in rescu- 
 ing prisoners, exiles, and condemned persons of 
 all sorts, and not merely those of his own faith. 
 So the undertaking to make of Jersey two colonies, 
 one a refuge for Quakers and the other a refuge 
 for Covenanters, was natural enough, and it was 
 a very broad-minded plan for that age. 
 
 In 1683, a few years after the Quaker control 
 of East Jersey began, a new and fiercer persecution 
 of the Covenanters was started in the old country, 
 and shortly afterwards Monmouth's insurrection 
 in England broke out and was followed by a most 
 bloody proscription and punishment. The greatest 
 efforts were made to induce those still untouched 
 to fly for refuge to East Jersey; but, strange to 
 say, comparatively few of them came. It is an- 
 other proof of the sturdiness and devotion which 
 has filled so many pages of history and romance 
 
SCOTCH COVENANTERS AND OTHERS 175 
 with their praise that as a class the Covenanters 
 remained at home to estabhsh their faith with 
 torture, martyrdom, and death. 
 
 In 1685 the Duke of York ascended the throne 
 of England as James II, and all that was naturally 
 to be expected from such a bigoted despot was 
 soon realized. The persecutions of the Covenant- 
 ers grew worse. Crowded into prisons to die of 
 thirst and suffocation, shot down on the high- 
 ways, tied to stakes to be drowned by the rising 
 tide, the whole Calvinistic population of Scotland 
 seemed doomed to extermination. Again they 
 were told of America as the only place where 
 religious liberty was allowed, and in addition a 
 book was circulated among them called The Model 
 of the Government of the Province of East Jersey in 
 America. These efforts were partially successful. 
 More Covenanters came than before, but nothing 
 like the numbers of Quakers that flocked to Penn- 
 sylvania. The whole population of East Jersey 
 — New Englanders, Dutch, Scotch Covenanters, 
 and all — did not exceed five thousand and possibly 
 was not over four thousand. 
 
 Some French Huguenots, such as came to many 
 of the English colonies after the Revocation of the 
 Edict of Nantes of 1685, were added to the East 
 
176 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Jersey population. A few went to Salem in West 
 Jersey, and some of these became Quakers. In 
 both the Jerseys, as elsewhere, they became promi- 
 nent and influential in all spheres of life. There 
 was a decided Dutch influence, it is said, in the 
 part nearest New York, emanating from the Ber- 
 gen settlement in which the Dutch had succeeded 
 in establishing themselves in 1660 after the Indians 
 had twice driven them from Pavonia. Many de- 
 scendants of Dutch families are still found in 
 that region. Many Dutch characteristics were 
 to be found in that region throughout colonial 
 times. Many of the houses had Dutch stoops or 
 porches at the door, with seats where the family 
 and visitors sat on summer evenings to smoke and 
 gossip. Long Dutch spouts extended out from 
 the eaves to discharge the rain water into the 
 street. But the prevailing tone of East Jersey 
 seems to have been set by the Scotch Presbyterians 
 and the New England Congregationalists. The 
 College of New Jersey, afterward known as Prince- 
 ton, established in 1747, was the result of a move- 
 ment among the Presbyterians of East Jersey and 
 New York. 
 
 All these elements of East Jersey, Scotch Cov- 
 enanters, Connecticut Puritans, Huguenots, and 
 
SCOTCH COVENANTERS AND OTHERS 177 
 
 Dutch of the Dutch Reformed Church, were in a 
 sense different but in reahty very much in accord 
 and congenial in their ideas of religion and poli- 
 tics. They were all sturdy, freedom-loving Prot- 
 estants, and they set the tone that prevails in 
 East Jersey to this day. Their strict discipline 
 and their uncompromising thrift may now seem 
 narrow and harsh; but it made them what they 
 were; and it has left a legacy of order and pros- 
 perity under which alien religions and races are 
 eager to seek protection. In its foundation the 
 Quakers may claim a share. 
 
 The new King, James II, was inclined to reas- 
 sume jurisdiction and extend the power of the 
 Governor of New York over East Jersey in spite 
 of his grant to Sir George Carteret. In fact, he 
 desired to put New England, New York, and New 
 Jersey under one strong government centered at 
 New York, to abolish their charters, to extinguish 
 popular government, and to make them all mere 
 royal dependencies in pursuance of his general 
 policy of establishing an absolute monarchy and 
 a papal church in England. 
 
 The curse of East Jersey's existence was to be 
 always an appendage of New York, or to be threat- 
 ened with that condition. The inhabitants now 
 
178 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 had to enter their vessels and pay duties at New 
 York. Writs were issued by order of the King 
 putting both the Jerseys and all New England un- 
 der the New York Governor. Step by step the 
 plans for amalgamation and despotism moved on 
 successfully, when suddenly the English Revolution 
 of 1688 put an end to the whole magnificent scheme, 
 drove the King into exile, and placed William of 
 Orange on the throne. 
 
 The proprietaries of both Jerseys reassumed 
 their former authority. But the New York As- 
 sembly attempted to exercise control over East 
 Jersey and to levy duties on its exports. The 
 two provinces were soon on the eve of a little 
 war. For twelve or fifteen years East Jersey was 
 in disorder, with seditious meetings, mob rule, 
 judges and sheriffs attacked while performing 
 their duty, the proprietors claiming quitrents 
 from the people, the people resisting, and the 
 British Privy Council threatening a suit to take 
 the province from the proprietors and make a 
 Crown colony of it. The period is known in the 
 history of this colony as "The Revolution." Un- 
 der the threat of the Privy Council to take over 
 the province, the proprietors of both East and 
 West Jersey surrendered their rights of political 
 
SCOTCH COVENANTERS AND OTHERS 179 
 
 governraent, retaining their ownership of land and 
 quitrents, and the two Jerseys were united under 
 one government in 1702. Its subsequent history 
 demands another chapter. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE UNITED JERSEYS 
 
 The Quaker colonists grouped round Burlington 
 and Salem, on the Delaware, and the Scotch 
 Covenanters and New England colonists grouped 
 around Perth Amboy and Newark, near the mouth 
 of the Hudson, made up the two Jerseys. Neither 
 colony had a numerous population, and the stretch 
 of country lying between them was during most of 
 the colonial period a wilderness. It is now crossed 
 by the railway from Trenton to New York. It has 
 always been a line of travel from the Delaware to 
 the Hudson. At first there was only an Indian 
 trail across it, but after 1695 there was a road, and 
 after 1738 a stage route. 
 
 In 1702, while still separated by this wilderness, 
 the two Jerseys were united politically by the pro- 
 prietors voluntarily surrendering all their political 
 rights to the Crown. The political distinction 
 between East Jersey and West Jersey was thus 
 
 180 
 
THE UNITED JERSEYS 181 
 
 abolished; their excellent free constitutions were 
 rendered of doubtful authority; and from that 
 time to the Revolution they constituted one colony 
 under the control of a royal governor appointed 
 by the Crown. 
 
 The change was due to the uncertainty and an- 
 noyance caused for their separate governments 
 when their right to govern was in doubt owing to 
 interference on the part of New York and the 
 desire of the King to make them a Crown colony. 
 The original grant of the Duke of York to the 
 proprietors Berkeley and Carteret had given title 
 to the soil but had been silent as to the right to 
 govern. The first proprietors and their successors 
 had always assumed that the right to govern 
 necessarily accompanied this gift of the land. Such 
 a privilege, however, the Crown was inclined to 
 doubt. William Penn was careful to avoid this 
 uncertainty when he received his charter for Penn- 
 sylvania. Profiting by the sad example of the 
 Jerseys, he made sure that he was given both the 
 title to the soil and the right to govern. 
 
 The proprietors, however, now surrendered only 
 their right to govern the Jerseys and retained their 
 ownership of the land; and the people always 
 maintained that they, on their part, retained all 
 
182 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 the political rights and privileges which had been 
 granted them by the proprietors. And these rights 
 were important, for the concessions or consti- 
 tutions granted by the proprietdrs under the ad- 
 vanced Quaker influence of the time were decidedly 
 liberal. The assemblies, as the legislatures were 
 called, had the right to meet and adjourn as they 
 pleased, instead of having their meetings and 
 adjournments dictated by the governor. This 
 was an important right and one which the Crown 
 and royal governors were always trying to restrict 
 or destroy, because it made an assembly very in- 
 dependent. This contest for colonial rights was 
 exactly similar to the struggle of the English 
 Parliament for liberty against the supposed right 
 of the Stuart kings to call and adjourn Parlia- 
 ment as they chose. If the governor could ad- 
 journ the assembly when he pleased, he could 
 force it to pass any laws he wanted or prevent 
 its passing any laws at all. The two Jersey as- 
 semblies under their Quaker constitutions also 
 had the privilege of making their own rules of 
 procedure, and they had jurisdiction over taxes, 
 roads, towns, militia, and all details of govern- 
 ment. These rights of a legislature are familiar 
 enough now to all. Very few people realize. 
 
THE UNITED JERSEYS 183 
 
 however, what a struggle and what sacrifices were 
 required to attain them. 
 
 The rest of New Jersey colonial history is made 
 up chiefly of struggles over these two questions — 
 the rights of the proprietors and their quitrents 
 as against the people, and the rights of the new 
 assembly as against the Crown. There were thus 
 three parties, the governor and his adherents, the 
 proprietors and their friends, and the assembly 
 and the people. The proprietors had the best of 
 the change, for they lost only their troublesome 
 political power and retained their property. They 
 never, however, received such financial returns 
 from the property as the sons of William Penn 
 enjoyed from Pennsylvania. But the union of 
 the Jerseys seriously curtailed the rights enjoyed 
 by the people under the old government, and 
 all possibility of a Quaker government in West 
 Jersey was ended. It was this experience in the 
 Jerseys, no doubt, that caused William Penn to 
 require so many safeguards in selling his political 
 rights in Pennsylvania to the Crown that the sale 
 was, fortunately for the colony, never completed. 
 
 The assembly under the union met alternately 
 at Perth Amboy and at Biu^lington. Lord Corn- 
 bury, the first governor, was also Governor of 
 
184 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 New York, a humiliating arrangement that led to 
 no end of trouble. The executive government, the 
 press, and the judiciary were in the complete con- 
 trol of the Crown and the Governor, who was in- 
 structed to take care that " God Almighty be duly 
 served according to the rites of the Church of Eng- 
 land, and the traffic in merchantable negroes en- 
 couraged . ' ' Cornbury contemptuously ignored the 
 assembly's right to adjourn and kept adjourning 
 it till one was elected which would pass the laws 
 he wanted. Afterwards the assemblies were less 
 compliant, and, under the lead of two able men, 
 Lewis Morris of East Jersey and Samuel Jennings, 
 a Quaker of West Jersey, they stood up for their 
 rights and complained to the mother country. 
 But Cornbury went on fighting them, granted 
 monopolies, established arbitrary fees, prohibited 
 the proprietors from selling their lands, prevented 
 three members of the assembly duly elected from 
 being sworn, and was absent in New York so much 
 of the time that the laws went unexecuted and 
 convicted murderers wandered about at large. In 
 short, he went through pretty much the whole 
 list of offenses of a corrupt and good-for-nothing 
 royal governor of colonial times. The union of the 
 two colonies consequently seem.ed to involve no 
 
THE UNITED JERSEYS 185 
 
 improvement over former conditions. At last, the 
 protests and appeals of proprietors and people 
 prevailed, and Cornbury was recalled. 
 
 Quieter times followed, and in 1738 New Jersey 
 had the satisfaction of obtaining a governor all her 
 own. The New York Governor had always neg- 
 lected Jersey affairs, was difficult of access, made 
 appointments and administered justice in the in- 
 terests of New York, and forced Jersey vessels to 
 pay registration fees to New York. Amid great 
 rejoicing over the change, the Crown appointed 
 the popular leader, Lewis Morris, as governor. 
 But by a strange turn of fate, when once secure in 
 power, he became a most obstinate upholder of 
 royal prerogative, worried the assembly with ad- 
 journments, and, after Cornbury, was the most 
 obnoxious of all the royal governors. 
 
 The governors now usually made Burlington 
 their capital and it became, on that account, a 
 place of much show and interest. The last colonial 
 governor was William Franklin, an illegitimate 
 son of Benjamin Franklin, and he would probably 
 have made a success of the office if the Revolu- 
 tion had not stopped him. He had plenty of abili- 
 ty, affable manners, and was full of humor and 
 anecdote like his father, whom he is said to have 
 
186 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 somewhat resembled. He had combined m youth a 
 fondness for books with a fondness for adventure, 
 was comptroller of the colonial post office and clerk 
 of the Pennsylvania Assembly, served a couple 
 of campaigns in the French and Indian Wars, went 
 to England with his father in 1757, was admitted to 
 the English Bar, attained some intimacy with the 
 Earl of Bute and Lord Fairfax, and through the lat- 
 ter obtained the governorship of New Jersey in 1762. 
 The people were at first much displeased at his ap- 
 pointment and never entirely got over his illegiti- 
 mate birth and his turning from Whig to Tory as 
 soon as his appointment was secured. But he ad- 
 vanced the interests of the colony with the home 
 government and favored beneficial legislation. He 
 had an attractive wife, and they entertained, it is 
 said, with viceregal elegance, and started a fine 
 model farm or country place on the north shore of 
 the Rancocas not far from the capital at Burlington. 
 Franklin was drawing the province together and 
 building it up as a community, but his extreme loyal- 
 ist principles in the Revolution destroyed his chance 
 for popularity and have obscured his reputation. 
 
 Though the population of New Jersey was a 
 mixed one, judged by the very distinct religious 
 
THE UNITED JERSEYS 187 
 
 differences of colonial times, yet racially it was 
 thoroughly Anglo-Saxon and a good stock to build 
 upon. At the time of the Revolution in 1776 
 the people numbered only about 120,000, indi- 
 cating a slow growth; but when the first census 
 of the United States was taken, in 1790, they 
 numbered 184,139. 
 
 The natural division of the State into North 
 and South Jersey is marked by a line from Trenton 
 to Jersey City. The people of these two divisions 
 were quite as distinct in early times as striking dif- 
 ferences in environment and religion could make 
 them. Even in the inevitable merging of modern 
 life the two regions are still distinct socially, eco- 
 nomically, and intellectually. Along the dividing 
 line the two types of the population, of course, 
 merged and here was produced and is still to be 
 I found the Jerseyman of the composite type. 
 
 Trenton, the capital of the State, is very properly 
 in the dividing belt. It was named after William 
 Trent, a Philadelphia merchant who had been 
 speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly and who 
 became chief justice of New Jersey. Long ages 
 before white men came Trenton seems to have 
 been a meeting place and residence of the Indians 
 or preceding races of stone age men. Antiquarians 
 
188 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 have estimated that fifty thousand stone imple- 
 ments have been found in it. As it was at the 
 head of tidewater, at the so-called Falls of the 
 Delaware, it was apparently a center of travel and | 
 traffic from other regions. From the top of the 
 bluff below the modern city of Trenton there was i 
 easy access to forests of chestnut, oak, and pine, 
 with their supplies of game, while the river and its 
 tributary creeks were full of fish. It was a pleasant 
 and convenient place where the people of pre- 
 historic times apparently met and lingered during 
 many centuries without necessarily having a large 
 resident population at any one time. Trenton was 
 so obviously convenient and central in colonial 
 times that it was seriously proposed as a site for 
 the national capital. 
 
 Princeton University, though originating, as we 
 have seen, among the Presbyterians of North 
 Jersey, seems as a higher educational institution 
 for the whole State to belong naturally in the 
 dividing belt, the meeting place of the two divi- 
 sions of the colony. The college began its exist- 
 ence at Elizabeth, was then moved to Newark, 
 both in the strongly Presbyterian region, and 
 finally, in 1757, was established at Princeton, a 
 more suitable place, it was thought, because far 
 
THE UNITED JERSEYS 189 
 
 removed from the dissipation and temptation of 
 towns, and because it was in the center of the 
 colony on the post road between Philadelphia and 
 New York. Though chartered as the College of 
 New Jersey, it was often called Nassau Hall at 
 Princeton or simply "Princeton." In 1896 it be- 
 came known officially as Princeton University. 
 It was a hard struggle to found the college with 
 lotteries and petty subscriptions here and there. 
 But Presbyterians in New York and other prov- 
 inces gave aid. Substantial assistance was also 
 obtained from the Presbyterians of England and 
 Scotland. In the old pamphlets of the time which 
 have been preserved the founders of the college 
 argued that higher education was needed not only 
 for ministers of religion, but for the bench, the bar, 
 and the legislature. The two New England col- 
 leges. Harvard and Yale, on the north, and the 
 Virginia College of William and Mary on the south, 
 were too far away. There must be a college close 
 at hand. 
 
 At first most of the graduates entered the Pres- 
 byterian ministry. But soon in the short time 
 before the Revolution there were produced states- 
 men such as Richard Stockton of New Jersey, who 
 signed the Declaration of Independence; physicians 
 
190 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 such as Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia; sol- 
 diers such as "Light Horse" Harry Lee of Vir- 
 ginia; as well as founders of other colleges, gover- 
 nors of States, lawyers, attorney-generals, judges, 
 congressmen, and indeed a very powerful assem- 
 blage of intellectual lights. Nor should the names 
 of James Madison, Aaron Burr, and Jonathan 
 Edwards be omitted. 
 
 East Jersey with her New England influence at- 
 tempted something like free public schools. In 
 West Jersey the Quakers had schools. In both 
 Jerseys, after 1700 some private neighborhood 
 schools were started, independent of religious 
 denominations. The West Jersey Quakers, self- 
 cultured and with a very effective system of men- 
 tal discipline and education in their families as 
 well as in their schools, were not particularly in- 
 terested in higher education. But in East Jersey 
 as another evidence of intellectual awakening in 
 colonial times. Queen's College, afterward known 
 as Rutgers College, was established by the Dutch 
 Reformed Church in 1766, and was naturally 
 placed, near the old source of Dutch influence, 
 at New Brunswick in the northerly end of the 
 dividing belt. 
 
 New Jersey was fortunate in having no Indian 
 
THE UNITED JERSEYS 191 
 
 wars in colonial times, no frontier, no point of 
 hostile contact with the French of Canada or with 
 the powerful western tribes of red men. Like 
 Rhode Island in this respect, she was completely 
 shut in by the other colonies. Once or twice only did 
 bands of savages cross the Delaware and commit 
 depredations on Jersey soil. This colony, however, 
 did her part in sending troops and assistance to the 
 others in the long French and Indian wars; but she 
 had none of the pressing danger and experience of 
 other colonies. Her people were never drawn to- 
 gether by a common danger until the Revolution. 
 In Jersey colonial homes there was not a single 
 modern convenience of light, heat, or cooking, and 
 none of the modern amusements. But there was 
 plenty of good living and simple diversion — husk- 
 ing bees and shooting in the autumn, skating and 
 sleighing in the winter. Meetings and discussions 
 in coffeehouses and inns supplied in those days the 
 place of our modern books, newspapers, and maga- 
 zines. Jersey inns were famous meeting places. 
 Everybody passed through their doors — judges, 
 lawyers, legislators, politicians, post riders, stage 
 drivers, each bringing his contribution of informa- 
 tion and humor, and the slaves and rabble stood 
 round to pick up news and see the fun. 
 
192 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 The court days in each county were holidays 
 celebrated with games of quoits, running, jumping, 
 feasting, and discussions political and social. At 
 the capital there was even style and extravagance. 
 Governor Belcher, for example, who lived at Bur- | 
 lington, professed to believe that the Quaker in- 
 fluences of that town were not strict enough in 
 keeping the Sabbath, so he drove every Sunday 
 in his coach and four to Philadelphia to worship 
 in the Presbyterian Church there and saw no 
 inconsistency in his own behavior. 
 
 Almanacs furnished much of the reading for the 
 masses. The few newspapers offered little except 
 the barest chronicle of events. The books of the 
 upper classes were good though few, and consisted 
 chiefly of the classics of English literature and 
 books of information and travel. The diaries and 
 letters of colonial native Jerseymen, the pamphlets 
 of the time, and John Woolman's Journal, all 
 show a good average of education and an excellent 
 use of the English language. Samuel Smith's 
 History of the Colony of Nova-Ccesaria, or New 
 Jersey, written and printed at Burlington and 
 published there in the year 1765, is written in a 
 good and even attractive style, with as intelligent 
 a grasp of political events as any modern mind 
 
THE UNITED JERSEYS 193 
 
 could show; the type, paper, and press work, too, 
 are excellent. Smith was born and educated in 
 this same New Jersey town. He became a member 
 of council and assembly, at one time was treasurer 
 of the province, and his manuscript historical 
 collections were largely used by Robert Proud in 
 his History of Pennsylvania. 
 
 The early houses of New Jersey were of heavy 
 timbers covered with unpainted clapboards, usu- 
 ally one story and a half high, with immense 
 fireplaces, which, with candles, supplied the light. 
 The floors were scrubbed hard and sprinkled 
 with the plentiful white sand. Carpets, except 
 the famous old rag carpets, were very rare. The 
 old wooden houses have now almost entirely dis- 
 appeared; but many of the brick houses which 
 succeeded them are still preserved. They are 
 of simple well-proportioned architecture, of a dis- 
 tinctive type, less luxuriant, massive, and exuber- 
 ant than those across the river in Pennsylvania, 
 although both evidently derived from the Christo- 
 pher Wren school. The old Jersey homes seem to 
 reflect with great exactness the simple feeling of 
 the people and to be one expression of the spirit 
 of Jersey democracy. 
 
 There were no important seats of commerce in 
 
194 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 this province. Exports of wheat, provisions, and 
 lumber went to Philadelphia or New York, which 
 were near and convenient. The Jersey shores 
 near the mouth of the Hudson and along the 
 Delaware, as at Camden, presented opportunities 
 for ports, but the proximity to the two dominat- 
 ing ports prevented the development of additional 
 harbors in this part of the coast. It was not until 
 after the Revolution that Camden, opposite Phila- 
 delphia, and Jersey City, opposite New York, grew 
 into anything like their present importance. 
 
 There were, however, a number of small ports 
 and shipbuilding villages in the Jerseys. It is a 
 noticeable fact that in colonial times and even 
 later there were very few Jersey towns beyond the 
 head of tidewater. The people, even the farmers, 
 were essentially maritime. The province showed 
 its natural maritime characteristics, produced 
 many sailors, and built innumerable small vessels 
 for the coastmg and West India trade — sloops, 
 schooners, yachts, and sailboats, down to the 
 tiniest gunning boat and sneak box. Perth Am- 
 boy was the principal port and shipbuilding cen- 
 ter for East Jersey as Salem was for West Jersey. 
 But Burlington, Bordentown, Cape May, and 
 Trenton, and innumerable little villages up creeks^ 
 
THE UNITED JERSEYS 195 
 
 and channels or mere ditches could not be kept 
 from the prevailing industry. They built craft 
 up to the limit of size that could be floated away 
 in the water before their very doors. Plentifully 
 supplied with excellent oak and pine and with 
 the admirable white cedar of their own forests, 
 very skillful shipwrights grew up in every little 
 hamlet. 
 
 A large part of the capital used in Jersey ship- 
 building is said to have come from Philadelphia 
 and New York. At first this capital sought its 
 profit in whaling along the coast and afterwards 
 in the trade with the West Indies, which for a time 
 absorbed so much of the shipping of all the colonies 
 in America. The inlets and beaches along the Jer- 
 sey coast now given over to summer resorts were 
 first used for whaling camps or bases. Cape May 
 and Tuckerton were started and maintained by 
 whaling; and as late as 1830, it is said, there were 
 still signs of the industry on Long Beach. 
 
 Except for the whaling, the beaches were un- 
 inhabited — wild stretches of sand, swarming with 
 birds and wild fowl, without a lighthouse or life- 
 saving station. In the Revolution, when the 
 British fleet blockaded the Delaware and New 
 York, Little Egg, the safest of the inlets, was used 
 
196 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 for evading the blockade. Vessels entered there 
 and sailed up the Mullica River to the head of 
 navigation, whence the goods were distributed by 
 wagons. To conceal their vessels when anchored 
 just inside an inlet, the privateersmen would stand 
 slim pine trees beside the masts and thus very 
 effectively concealed the rigging from British 
 cruisers prowling along the shore. 
 
 Along with the whaling industry the risks and 
 seclusion of the inlets and channels developed a 
 romantic class of gentlemen, as handy with mus- 
 ket and cutlass as with helm and sheet, fond of 
 easy, exciting profits, and reaping where they had 
 not sown. They would start legally enough, for 
 they began as privateersmen under legal letters of 
 marque in the wars. But the step was a short one 
 to a traffic still more profitable; and for a hundred 
 years Jersey customs officers are said to have issued 
 documents which were ostensibly letters of marque 
 but which really abetted a piratical cruise. Piracy 
 was, however, in those days a semilegitimate 
 offense, winked at by the authorities all through 
 the colonial period; and respectable people and 
 governors and officials of New York and North 
 Carolina, it is said, secretly furnished funds for 
 such expeditions and were interested in the profits. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 LITTLE DELAWARE 
 
 Delaware was the first colony to be established 
 on the river that bears this name. It went through 
 half a century of experiences under the Dutch and 
 Swedes from 1609 to 1664, and then eighteen 
 years under the English rule of the Duke of York, 
 from whom it passed into the hands of William 
 Penn, the Quaker. The Dutch got into it by an 
 accident and were regarded by the English as in- 
 terlopers. And the Swedes who followed had no 
 better title. 
 
 The whole North Atlantic seaboard was claimed 
 by England by virtue of the discoveries of the 
 Cabots, father and son; but nearly a hundred 
 years elapsed before England took advantage of 
 this claim by starting the Virginia colony near the 
 mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in 1607. And nearly 
 a quarter of a century more elapsed before Eng- 
 lishmen settled on the shores of Massachusetts 
 
 197 
 
198 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Bay. Those were the two points most accessible 
 to ships and most favorable for settlement. The 
 middle ground of the Delaware and Hudson re- 
 gions was not so easily entered and remained un- 
 occupied. The mouth of the Delaware was full 
 of shoals and was always difficult to navigate. 
 The natural harbor at the mouth of the Hudson 
 was excellent, but the entrance to it was not at 
 first apparent. 
 
 Into these two regions, however, the Dutch 
 chanced just after the English had effected the 
 settlement of Jamestown in Virginia. The Dutch 
 had employed an Englishman named Henry Hud- 
 son and sent him in 1609 in a small ship called the 
 Half Moon to find a passage to China and India 
 by way of the Arctic Ocean. Turned back by the 
 ice in the Arctic, he sailed down the coast of North 
 America and began exploring the middle ground 
 from the Virginia settlement, which he seems to 
 have known about; and, working cautiously north- 
 ward along the coast and feeling his way with the 
 lead line, he soon entered Delaware Bay. But 
 finding it very difficult of navigation he departed 
 and, proceeding in the same careful way up along 
 the coast of New Jersey, he finally entered the 
 harbor of New York and sailed up the Hudson far 
 
LITTLE DELAWARE 199 
 
 enough to satisfy himself that it was not the desired 
 course to China. 
 
 This exploration gave the Dutch their claim to 
 the Delaware and Hudson regions. But though 
 it was worthless as against the English right by 
 discovery of the Cabots, the Dutch went ahead 
 with their settlement, established their headquar- 
 ters and seat of government on Manhattan Island, 
 where New York stands today, and exercised as 
 much jurisdiction and control as they could on 
 the Delaware. 
 
 Their explorations of the Delaware, feeling their 
 way up it with small light draft vessels among its 
 shoals and swift tides, their travels on land — 
 shooting wild turkeys on the site of the present 
 busy town of Chester — and their adventures 
 with the Indians are full of interest. The immense 
 quantities of wild fowl and animal and bird life 
 along the shores astonished them; but what most 
 aroused their cupidity was the enormous supply 
 of furs, especially beaver and otter, that could 
 be obtained from the Indians. Furs became their 
 great, in fact, their only interest in the Delaware. 
 They established forts, one near Cape Henlopen 
 at the mouth of the river, calling it Fort Oplandt, 
 and another far up the river on the Jersey side at 
 
-200 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 the mouth of Timber Creek, nearly opposite the 
 present site of Philadelphia, and this they called 
 Fort Nassau. Fort Oplandt was destroyed by the 
 Indians and its people were massacred. Fort 
 Nassau was probably occupied only at intervals. 
 These two posts were built mainly to assist the fur 
 trade, and any attempts at real settlement w^ere 
 slight and unsuccessful. 
 
 "^ Meantime about the year 1624 the Swedes heard 
 of the wonderful opportunities on the Delaware. 
 The Swedish monarch, Gustavus Adolphus, a man 
 of broad ambitions and energetic mind, heard 
 about the Delaware from Willem Usselinx, a mer- 
 chant of Antwerp who had been actively interested 
 in the formation of the Dutch West India Com- 
 pany to trade in the Dutch possessions in America. 
 Having quarreled with the directors, Usselinx had 
 withdrawn from the Netherlands and now offered 
 his services to Sweden. The Swedish court, nobles, 
 and people, all became enthusiastic about the pro- 
 ject which he elaborated for a great commercial 
 company to trade and colonize in Asia, Africa, and 
 America.' But the plan was dropped because, 
 soon after 1630, Gustavus Adolphus led his country 
 
 ^ See Willem Usselinx, by J. F. Jameson in the Papers of the Ameri- 
 can Historical Association, vol. ii. 
 
LITTLE DELAWARE 201 
 
 to intervene on the side of the Protestants in the 
 Thirty Years' War in Germany, where he was 
 killed three years later at the battle of Lutzen. 
 But the desire aroused by Usselinx for a Swedish 
 colonial empire was revived in the reign of his in- 
 fant daughter, Christina, by the celebrated Swedish 
 Chancellor, Oxenstierna. 
 
 An expedition, which actually reached the Dela- 
 ware in 1638, was sent out under another Dutch 
 renegade, Peter Minuit, who had been Governor 
 of New Netherland and after being dismissed 
 from office was now leading this Swedish enter- 
 prise to occupy part of the territory he had 
 formerly governed for the Dutch. His two ships 
 sailed up the Delaware and with good judgment 
 landed at the present site of Wilmington. At that 
 point a creek carrying a depth of over fourteen 
 feet for ten miles from its mouth flowed into the 
 Delaware. The Dutch had called this creek Min- 
 quas, after the tribe of Indians ; the Swedes named 
 it the Christina after their infant Queen ; and in mod- 
 ern times it has been corrupted into Christiana. 
 
 They sailed about two and a half miles through 
 its delta marshes to some rocks which formed a 
 natural wharf and which still stand today at the 
 foot of Sixth Street in Wilmington. This was the 
 
202 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Plymouth Rock of Delaware. Level land, marshes, 
 and meadows lay along the Christina, the remains 
 of the delta which the stream had formed in the 
 past. On the edge of the delta or moorland, rocky 
 hills rose, forming the edge of the Piedmont, and 
 out of them from the north flowed a fine large 
 stream, the Brandywine, which fell into the Chris- 
 tina just before it entered the Delaware. Here in 
 the delta their engineer laid out a town, called 
 Christinaham, and a fort behind the rocks on 
 which they had landed. A cove in the Christina 
 made a snug anchorage for their ships, out of the 
 way of the tide. They then bought from the In- 
 dians all the land from Cape Henlopen to the 
 Falls of the Delaware at Trenton, calling it New 
 Sweden and the Delaware New Swedeland Stream. 
 The people of Delaware have always regarded 
 New Sweden as the beginning of their State, and 
 Peter Minuit, the leader of this Swedish expedi- 
 tion, always stands first on the published lists of 
 their governors. 
 
 On their arrival in the river in the spring of 1638, 
 the Swedes found no evidences of permanent 
 Dutch colonization . Neither Fort Oplandt nor Fort 
 Nassau was then occupied. They always main- 
 tained that the Dutch had abandoned the river. 
 
LITTLE DELAWARE 203 
 
 and that it was therefore open to the Swedes for 
 occupation, especially after they had purchased 
 the Indian title. It was certainly true that the 
 Dutch efforts to plant colonies in that region had 
 failed; and since the last attempt by De Vries, 
 six years had elapsed. On the other hand, the 
 Dutch contended that they had in that time put 
 Fort Nassau in repair, although they had not oc- 
 cupied it, and that they kept a few persons living 
 along the Jersey shore of the river, possibly the 
 remains of the Nassau colony, to watch all who 
 visited it. These people had immediately notified 
 the Dutch governor Kieft at New Amsterdam of 
 the arrival of the Swedes, and he promptly issued a 
 protest against the intrusion. But his protest was 
 neither very strenuous nor was it followed up by 
 hostile action, for Sweden and Holland were on 
 friendly terms. Sweden, the great champion of 
 Protestant Europe, had intervened in the Thir- 
 ty Years' War to save the Protestants of Ger- 
 many. The Dutch had just finished a similar des- 
 perate war of eighty years for freedom from the 
 papal despotism of Spain. Dutch and Swedes 
 had, therefore, every reason to be in sympathy 
 with each other. 
 The Swedes, a plain, strong, industrious people. 
 
204 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 as William Penn aptly called them, were soon, 
 however, seriously interfering with the Dutch fur 
 trade and in the first year, it is said, collected 
 thirty thousand skins. If this is true, it is an 
 indication of the immense supply of fur-bearing 
 animals, especially beaver, available at that time. 
 For the next twenty -five years Dutch and Swedes 
 quarreled and sometimes fought over their re- 
 spective claims. But it is significant of the difficulty 
 of retaining a hold on the Delaware region that the 
 Swedish colonists on the Christina after a year or two 
 regarded themselves as a failure and were on the 
 point of abandoning their enterprise, when a vessel 
 fortunately for them arrived with cattle, agricul- 
 tural tools, and immigrants. It is significant also 
 that the immigrants, though in a Swedish vessel 
 and under the Swedish government, were Dutch- 
 men. They formed a sort of separate Dutch colony 
 under Swedish rule and settled near St. George's 
 and Appoquinimink. Immigrants apparently were 
 difficult to obtain among the Swedes, who were 
 not colonizers like the English. 
 
 At this very time, in fact, Englishmen, Puritans 
 from Connecticut, were slipping into the Delaware 
 region under the leadership of Nathaniel Turner 
 and George Lamberton, and were buying the land 
 
LITTLE DELAWARE 205 
 
 from the Indians. About sixty settled near Salem, 
 New Jersey, and some on the Schuylkill in Penn- 
 sylvania, close to Fort Nassau — an outrageous 
 piece of audacity, said the Dutch, and an insult 
 to their "High Mightinesses and the noble Direc- 
 tors of the West India Company. " So the Schuyl- 
 kill English were accordingly driven out, and their 
 houses were burned. The Swedes afterwards ex- 
 pelled the English from Salem and from the Cohan- 
 sey, lower down the Bay. Later the English were 
 allowed to return, but they seem to have done little 
 except trade for furs and beat off hostile Indians. 
 The seat of the Swedish government was moved 
 in 1643 from the Christina to Tinicum, one of the 
 islands of the Schuylkill delta, with an excellent 
 harbor in front of it which is now the home of the 
 yacht clubs of Philadelphia. Here they built a 
 fort of logs, called Fort Gothenborg, a chapel with 
 a graveyard, and a mansion house for the governor, 
 and this remained the seat of Swedish authority 
 as long as they had any on the river. From here 
 Governor Printz, a portly irascible old soldier, 
 said to have weighed "upwards of 400 pounds and 
 taken three drinks at every meal," ruled the river. 
 He built forts on the Schuylkill and worried 
 the Dutch out of the fur trade. He also built a 
 
206 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 fort called Nya Elfsborg, afterward Elsinboro, on 
 the Jersey side below Salem. By means of this 
 fort he was able to command the entrance to the 
 river and compelled every Dutch ship to strike 
 her colors and acknowledge the sovereignty of 
 Sweden. Some he prevented from going up the 
 river at all; others he allowed to pass on payment 
 of toll or tribute. He gave orders to destroy every 
 trading house or fort which the Dutch had built 
 on the Schuylkill, and to tear down the coat of 
 arms and insignia which the Dutch had placed on 
 a post on the site of Philadelphia. The Swedes 
 now also bought from the Indians and claimed 
 the land on the Jersey side from Cape May up to 
 Raccoon Creek, opposite the modern Chester. 
 
 The best place to trade with the Indians for furs 
 was the Schuylkill River, which flowed into the 
 Delaware at a point where Philadelphia was after- 
 wards built. There were at that time Indian vil- 
 lages where West Philadelphia now stands. The 
 headwaters of streams flowing into the Schuyl- 
 kill were only a short distance from the headwaters 
 of streams flowing into the Susquehanna, so that 
 the valley of the Schuylkill formed the natural 
 highway into the interior of Pennsylvania. The 
 route to the Ohio River followed the Schuylkill for 
 
LITTLE DELAWARE 207 
 
 some thirty or forty miles, turned up one of its 
 tributaries to its source, then crossed the watershed 
 to the head of a stream flowing into the Susque- 
 hanna, thence to the Juniata, at the head of which 
 the trail led over a short divide to the head of the 
 Conemaugh, which flowed into the Allegheny, and 
 the Allegheny into the Ohio. Some of the Swedes 
 and Dutch appear to have followed this route with 
 the Indians as early as 1646. 
 
 The Ohio and Allegheny region was inhabited 
 by the Black Minquas, so called from their custom 
 of wearing a black badge on their breast. The 
 Ohio, indeed, was first called the Black Minquas 
 River. As the country nearer the Delaware was 
 gradually denuded of beaver, these Black Minquas 
 became the great source of supply and carried the 
 furs, over the route described, to the Schuyl- 
 kill. The White Minquas lived further east, round 
 Chesapeake and Delaware bays, and, though spo- 
 ken of as belonging by language to the great 
 Iroquois or Six Nation stock, were themselves con- 
 quered and pretty much exterminated by the 
 Six Nations. The Black Minquas, believed to be 
 the same as the Eries of the Jesuit Relations, were 
 also practically exterminated by the Six Nations. ^ 
 
 ^ Myers, Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, pp. 103-104. 
 
208 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 The furs brought down the Schuylkill were de- 
 posited at certain rocks two or three miles above 
 its mouth at Bartram's Gardens, now one of the 
 city parks of Philadelphia. On these rocks, then 
 an island in the Schuylkill, the Swedes built a fort 
 which completely commanded the river and cut the 
 Dutch off from the fur trade. They built another 
 fort on the other side of Bartram's Gardens along 
 the meadow near what is now Gibson's Point; and 
 Governor Printz had a great mill a couple of miles 
 away on Cobb's Creek, where the old Blue Bell tav- 
 ern has long stood. These two forts protected the 
 mill and the Indian villages in West Philadelphia. 
 
 One would like to revisit the Delaware of those 
 days and see all its wild life and game, its islands 
 and shoals, its virgin forests as they had grown 
 up since the glacial age, untouched by the civiliza- 
 tion of the white man. There were then more 
 islands in the river, the water was clearer, and 
 there were pretty pebble and sandy beaches now 
 overlaid by mud brought down from vast regions 
 of the valley no longer protected by forests from 
 the wash of the rains. On a wooded island below 
 Salem, long since cut away by the tides, the pirate 
 Blackhead and his crew are said to have passed a 
 winter. The waters of the river spread out wide at 
 
LITTLE DELAWARE 209 
 
 every high tide over marshes and meadows, turning 
 them twice a day for a few hours into lakes, grown 
 up in summer with red and yellow flowers and the 
 graceful wild oats, or reeds, tasseled like Indian corn. 
 
 At Christinaham, in the delta of the Christina 
 and the Brandyv/ine, the tide flowed far inland to 
 the rocks on which Minuit's Swedish expedition 
 landed, leaving one dry spot called Cherry Island, 
 a name still borne by a shoal in the river. Fort 
 Christina, on the edge of the overflowed meadow, 
 with the rocky promontory of hills behind it, its 
 church and houses, and a wide prospect across the 
 delta and river, was a fair spot in the old days. 
 The Indians came down the Christina in their 
 canoes or overland, bringing their packs of beaver, 
 otter, and deer skins, their tobacco, corn, and veni- 
 son to exchange for the cloth, blankets, tools, and 
 gaudy trinkets that pleased them. It must often 
 have been a scene of strange life and coloring, and 
 it is diflScult today to imagine it all occurring close 
 to the spot where the Pennsylvania railroad station 
 now stands in Wilmington. 
 
 When doughty Peter Stuy vesant became Gover- 
 nor of New Netherland, he determined to assert 
 Dutch authority once more on the South River, as 
 the Delaware was called in distinction from the 
 
210 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Hudson. As the Swedes now controlled it by their 
 three forts, not a Dutch ship could reach Fort 
 Nassau without being held up at Fort Elfsborg or 
 at Fort Christina or at the fort at Tinicum. It 
 was a humiliating situation for the haughty spirit 
 of the Dutch governor. To open the river to Dutch 
 commerce again, Stuyvesant marched overland in 
 1651 through the wilderness, with one hundred and 
 twenty men and, abandoning Fort Nassau, built 
 a new fort on a fine promontory which then extend- 
 ed far out into the river below Christina. Today 
 the place is known as New Castle; the Dutch com- 
 monly referred to it as Sandhoeck or Sand Point; 
 the English called it Grape Vine Point. Stuyvesant 
 named it Fort Casimir. 
 
 The tables were now turned: the Dutch could 
 retaliate upon Swedish shipping. But the Swedes 
 were not so easily to be dispossessed. Three years 
 later a new Swedish governor named Rising arrived 
 in the river with a number of immigrants and sol- 
 diers. He sailed straight up to Fort Casimir, took 
 it by surprise, and ejected the Dutch garrison of 
 about a dozen men. As the successful coup oc- 
 curred on Trinity Sunday, the Swedes renamed 
 the place Fort Trinity. 
 
 The whole population — Dutch and Swede, but 
 
LITTLE DELAWARE 211 
 
 in 1654 mostly Swede — numbered only 368 per- 
 sons. Before the arrival of Rising there had been 
 only seventy. It seems a very small number about 
 which to be writing history; but small as it was 
 their "High Mightinesses," as the government of 
 the United Netherlands was called, were deter- 
 mined to avenge on even so small a number the 
 insult of the capture of Fort Casimir. 
 
 Drums, it is said, were beaten every day in Hol- 
 land to call for recruits to go to America. Gun- 
 ners, carpenters, and powder were collected. A 
 ship of war was sent from Holland, accompanied 
 by two other vessels whose names alone. Great 
 Christopher and King Solomon, should have been 
 sufficient to scare all the Swedes. At New Am- 
 sterdam, Stuyvesant labored night and day to fit 
 out the expedition. A French privateer which 
 happened to be in the harbor was hired. Several 
 other vessels, in all seven ships, and six or seven 
 hundred men, with a chaplain called Megapolen- 
 sis, composed this mighty armament gathered 
 together to drive out the handful of poor hard- 
 working Swedes. A day of fasting and prayer was 
 held and the Almighty was implored to bless this 
 mighty expedition which, He was assured, was 
 undertaken for "the glory of His name." 
 
212 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 It was the absurdity of such contrasts as this 
 running all through the annals of the Dutch in 
 America that inspired Washington Irving to write 
 his infinitely humorous History of New York from 
 the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch 
 Dynasty, by "Diedrich Knickerbocker." It is dif- 
 ficult for an Anglo-Saxon to take the Dutch in 
 America seriously. What can you do with a people 
 whose imagination allowed them to give such names 
 to their ships as Weigh Scales, Spotted Cow, and The 
 Pear Tree f So Irving described the taking of Fort 
 Casimir in mock heroic manner. He describes the 
 marshaling of the Dutch hosts of New York by fam- 
 ilies, the Van Grolls of Anthony's Nose, the Brinker- 
 hoffs, the Van Kortlandts, the Van Bunschotens of 
 Nyack and Kakiat, the fighting men of Wallabout, 
 the Van Pelts, the Suy Dams, the Van Dams, and 
 all the warriors of Hellgate "clad in their thunder- 
 and-lightning gaberdines," and lastly the stand- 
 ard bearers and bodyguards of Peter Stuyvesant, 
 bearing the great beaver of the Manhattan. 
 
 And now commenced the horrid din, the desperate 
 struggle, the maddening ferocity, the frantic desper- 
 ation, the confusion and self-abandonment of war. 
 Dutchman and Swede commingled, tugged, panted, and 
 blowed. The heavens were darkened with a tempest 
 
LITTLE DELAWARE ns 
 
 of missives. Bang! went the guns; whack! went the 
 broadswords; thump! went the cudgels; crash! went 
 the musket-stocks; blows, kicks, cuffs, scratches, black 
 eyes and bloody noses swelling the horrors of the scene ! 
 Thick, thwack, cut and hack, helter-skelter, higgledy- 
 piggledy, hurly-burly, heads-over-heels, rough-and- 
 tumble! Dunder and blixum! swore the Dutchmen; 
 splitter and splutter! cried the Swedes. Storm the 
 works! shouted Hardkoppig Peter. Fire the mine! 
 roared stout Risingh — Tantarar-ra-ra! twanged the 
 trumpet of Antony Van Corlear; — until all voice and 
 sound became unintelligible, — grunts of pain, yells of 
 fury, and shouts of triumph mingling in one hideous 
 clamor. The earth shook as if struck with a paralytic 
 stroke; trees shrunk aghast, and withered at the sight; 
 rocks burrowed in the ground like rabbits; and even 
 Christina creek turned from its course, and ran up a 
 hill in breathless terror! 
 
 As a matter of fact, the fort surrendered without 
 a fight on September 1, 1655. It was thereupon 
 christened New Amstel, afterwards New Castle, 
 and was for a long time the most important town 
 on the Delaware. This achievement put the Dutch 
 in complete authority over the Swedes on both 
 sides of the river. The Swedes, however, were con- 
 tent, abandoned politics, secluded themselves on 
 their farms, and left politics to the Dutch. Trade, 
 too, they left to the Dutch, who, in their effort to 
 monopolize it, almost killed it. 
 
214 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 This conquest by their High Mightinesses also 
 ended the attempts of the New Englanders, par- 
 ticularly the people of New Haven, to get a foot- 
 hold in the neighborhood of Salem, New Jersey, 
 for which they had been struggling for years. 
 They had dreams of a great lake far to northward 
 full of beaver to which the Delaware would lead 
 them. Their efforts to establish themselves sur- 
 vived in one or two names of places near Salem, 
 as, for example. New England Creek, and New 
 England Channel, which down almost into our 
 own time was found on charts marking one of the 
 minor channels of the bay along the Jersey shore. 
 They continued coming to the river in ships to 
 trade in spite of restrictions by the Dutch; and 
 some of them in later years, as has been pointed 
 out, secured a foothold on the Cohansey and in 
 the Cape May region, where their descendants are 
 still to be found. 
 
CHAPTER Xin 
 
 THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 
 
 It is a curious fact that the ancestor of the numer- 
 ous Beekman family in New York, after whom 
 Beekman Street is named, was for a time one of 
 the Dutch governors on the Delaware who after- 
 wards became the sheriff of Esopus, New York. 
 His successor on the Delaware had some thoughts 
 of removing the capital down to Odessa on the 
 Appoquinimink, when an event long dreaded 
 happened. In 1664, war broke out between Eng- 
 land and Holland, long rivals in trade and com- 
 merce, and all the Dutch possessions in the New 
 World fell an easy prey to English conquerors. 
 A British fleet took possession of New Amster- 
 dam, which surrendered without a struggle. But 
 when two British men of war under Sir Robert 
 Carr appeared before New Amstel on the Dela- 
 ware, Governor D'Hinoyossa unwisely resisted; and 
 his untenable fort was quickly subdued by a few 
 
 215 
 
216 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 broadsides and a storming party. This opposition 
 gave the conquering party, according to the cus- 
 tom of the times, the right to plunder; and it must 
 be confessed that the English soldiers made full use 
 of their opportunity. They plundered the town 
 and confiscated the land of prominent citizens for 
 the benefit of the officers of the expedition. 
 
 After the English conquest on the Delaware, not a 
 few of the Dutch migrated to Maryland, where their 
 descendants, it is said, are still to be found. Some 
 in later years returned to the Delaware, where on the 
 whole, notwithstanding the early confiscations, Eng- 
 lish rule seemed to promise well . The very first docu- 
 ments, the terms of surrender both on the Delaware 
 and on the Hudson, breathed an air of Anglo-Saxon 
 freedom. Everybody was at liberty to come and go 
 at will. Hollanders could migrate to the Delaware 
 or to New York as much as before. The Dutch sol- 
 diers in the country, if they wished to remain, were 
 to have fifty acres of land apiece. This generous set- 
 tlement seemed in striking contrast to the pinching, 
 narrow interference with trade and individual rights, 
 the seizures and confiscations for private gain, all 
 under pretense of punishment, bad enough on the 
 Delaware but worse at New Amsterdam, which had 
 characterized the rule of the Dutch. 
 
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 217 
 
 The Duke of York, to whom Delaware was 
 given, introduced trial by jury, settled private 
 titles, and left undisturbed the religion and local 
 customs of the people. But the political rule of 
 the Duke was absolute as became a Stuart. He 
 arbitrarily taxed exports and imports. Executive, 
 judicial, and legislative powers were all vested in 
 his deputy governor at New York or in creatures 
 appointed and controlled by him. It was the sort 
 of government the Duke hoped to impose upon all 
 Great Britain when he should come to the throne, 
 and he was trying his 'prentice hand in the colonies. 
 A political rebellion against this despotism was 
 started on the Delaware by a man named Konigs- 
 marke, or the Long Finn, aided by an Englishman, 
 Henry Coleman. They were captured and tried 
 for treason, their property was confiscated, and 
 the Long Finn branded with the letter R, and 
 sold as a slave in the Barbados. They might be 
 called the first martyrs to foreshadow the Eng- 
 lish Revolution of 1688 which ended forever the 
 despotic reign of the Stuarts. 
 
 The Swedes continued to form the main body of 
 people on the Delaware under the regime of the Duke 
 of York, and at the time when William Penn took 
 possession of the country in 1682 their settlements 
 
218 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 extended from New Castle up through Christina, 
 Marcus Hook, Upland (now Chester), Tinicum, 
 Kingsessing in the modern West Philadelphia, 
 Passyunk, Wicaco, both in modern Philadelphia, 
 and as far up the river as Frankford and Penny- 
 pack. They had their churches at Christina, Tini- 
 cum, Kingsessing, and Wicaco. The last, when 
 absorbed by Philadelphia, was a pretty little ham- 
 let on the river shore, its farms belonging to a 
 Swedish family called Swanson whose name is 
 now borne by one of the city's streets. Across the 
 river in New Jersey, opposite Chester, the Swedes 
 had settlements on Raccoon Creek and round 
 Swedesboro. These river settlements constituted 
 an interesting and from all accounts a very attrac- 
 tive Scandinavian community. Their strongest 
 bond of union seems to have been their interest in 
 their liUtheran churches on the river. They spread 
 very little into the interior, made few roads, and 
 lived almost exclusively on the river or on its 
 navigable tributaries. One reason they gave for 
 this preference was that it was easier to reach the 
 different churches by boat. 
 
 There were only about a thousand Swedes along 
 the Delaware and possibly five hundred of Dutch 
 and mixed blood, together with a few English, all 
 
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 219 
 
 living a life of abundance on a fine river amid 
 pleasing scenery, with good supplies of fish and 
 game, a fertile soil, and a wilderness of opportunity 
 to the west of them. All were well pleased to be 
 relieved from the stagnant despotism of the Duke 
 of York and to take part in the free popular gov- 
 ernment of William Penn in Pennsylvania. They 
 became magistrates and oflScials, members of the 
 council and of the legislature. They soon found 
 that all their avenues of trade and life were quick- 
 ened. They passed from mere farmers supplying 
 their own needs to exporters of the products of 
 their farms. 
 
 Descendants of the Swedes and Dutch still 
 form the basis of the population of Delaware.' 
 There were some Finns at Marcus Hook, which 
 was called Finland ; and it may be noted in pass- 
 ing that there were not a few French among the 
 Dutch, as among the Germans in Pennsylvania, 
 
 * Swedish names anglicized are now found everywhere. Gostafs- 
 son has become Justison and Justis. Bond has become Boon; 
 Hoppman, Hoffman; Kalsberg, Colesberry; Wihler, Wheeler; Joc- 
 com, Yocum; Dahlbo, Dalbow; Konigh, King; Kyn, Keen; and 
 so on. Then there are also such names as Wallraven, Hendrickson, 
 Stedham, Peterson, Matson, Talley, Anderson, and the omnipresent 
 Rambo, which have suffered little, if any, change. Dutch names are 
 also numerous, such as Lockermans, Vandever, Van Dyke, Van- 
 gezel, Vandegrift, Alricks, Statts, Van Zandt, Hyatt, Cochran (origi- 
 nally Kolchman), Vance, and Blackstone (originally Blackenstein). 
 
220 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Huguenots who had fled from rehgious persecution 
 in France. The name Jaquette, well known in 
 Delaware, marks one of these families, whose im- 
 migrant ancestor was one of the Dutch governors. 
 In the ten or dozen generations since the English 
 conquest intermarriage has in many instances 
 inextricably mixed up Swede, Dutch, and French, 
 as well as the English stock, so that many persons 
 with Dutch names are of Swedish or French de- 
 scent and vice versa, and some with English names 
 like Oldham are of Dutch descent. There has 
 been apparently much more intermarriage among 
 the different nationalities in the province and less 
 standing aloof than among the alien divisions of 
 Pennsylvania. 
 
 After the English conquest some Irish Presby- 
 terians or Scotch-Irish entered Delaware. Finally 
 came the Quakers, comparatively few in colonial 
 times but more numerous after the Revolution, 
 especially in Wilmington and its neighborhood. 
 True to their characteristics, they left descendants 
 who have become the most prominent and use- 
 ful citizens down into our own time. At pres- 
 ent Wilmington has become almost as distinctive 
 a Quaker town as Philadelphia. "Thee" and 
 "thou" are frequently heard in the streets, and 
 
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 221 
 
 a surprisingly large proportion of the people of 
 prominence and importance are Quakers or of Quak- 
 er descent. Many of the neat and pleasant charac- 
 teristics of the town are distinctly of Quaker origin ; 
 and these characteristics are found wherever Quaker 
 influence prevails. 
 
 Wilmington was founded about 1731 by Thomas 
 Willing, an Englishman, who had married into the 
 Swedish family of Justison. He laid out a few 
 streets on his wife's land on the hill behind the 
 site of old Fort Christina, in close imitation of the 
 plan of Philadelphia, and from that small begin- 
 ning the present city grew, and was at first called 
 Willingtown. ^ William Shipley, a Pennsylvania 
 Quaker born in England, bought land in it in 1735, 
 and having more capital than Willing, pushed the 
 fortunes of the town more rapidly. He probably 
 had not a little to do with bringing Quakers to 
 Wilmington; indeed, their first meetings were held 
 in a house belonging to him until they could build 
 a meeting house of their own in 1738. 
 
 Both Shipley and Willing had been impressed 
 w^th the natural beauty of the situation, the wide 
 view over the level moorland and green marsh 
 
 ^ Some years later in a borough charter granted by Penn, the name 
 was changed to Wilmington in honor of the Earl of Wilmington. 
 
222 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 and across the broad river to the Jersey shore, as 
 well as by the natural conveniences of the place 
 for trade and commerce. Wilmington has ever 
 since profited by its excellent situation, with the 
 level moorland for industry, the river for traf- 
 fic, and the first terraces or hills of the Piedmont 
 for residence; and, for scenery, the Brandy wine 
 tumbling through rocks and bowlders in a long 
 series of rapids. 
 
 The custom still surviving in Wilmington of 
 punishing certain classes of criminals by whipping 
 appears to have originated in the days of Willing 
 and Shipley, about the year 1740, when a cage, 
 stocks, and whipping-post were erected. They 
 were placed in the most conspicuous part of the 
 town, and there the culprit, in addition to his legal 
 punishment, was also disciplined at the discretion 
 of passers-by with rotten eggs and other equally 
 potent encouragements to reform. These gratui- 
 tous inflictions, not mentioned in the statute, as 
 well as the public exhibition of the prisoner were 
 abolished in later times and in this modified form 
 the method of correction was extended to the two 
 other counties. Sometimes a cat-o'-nine-tails was 
 used, sometimes a rawhide whip, and sometimes 
 a switch cut from a tree. Nowadays, however, 
 
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 223 
 
 all the whipping for the State is done in Wilming- 
 ton, where all prisoners sentenced to whipping in 
 the State are sent. This punishment is found to 
 be so efficacious that its infliction a second time 
 on the same person is exceedingly rare. 
 
 The most striking relic of the old Swedish days 
 in Wilmington is the brick and stone church of 
 good proportions and no small beauty, and today 
 one of the very ancient relics of America. It was 
 built by the Swedes in 1698 to replace their old 
 wooden church, which was on the lower land, and 
 the Swedish language was used in the services 
 down to the year 1800, when the building was 
 turned over to the Church of England. Old Peter 
 Minuit, the first Swedish governor, may possibly 
 have been buried there. The Swedes built another 
 pretty chapel — Gloria Dei, as it was called — at 
 the village of Wicaco, on the shore of the Delaware 
 where Philadelphia afterwards was established. 
 The original building was taken down in 1700, and 
 the present one was erected on its site partly with 
 materials from the church at Tinicum. It re- 
 mained Swedish Lutheran until 1831, when, like 
 all the Swedish chapels, it became the property of 
 the Church of England, between which and the 
 Swedish Lutheran body there was a close affinity. 
 
224 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 if not in doctrine, at least in episcopal organiza- 
 tion.^ The old brick church dating from 1740, 
 on the main street of Wilmington, is an interesting 
 relic of the colonial Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in 
 Delaware, and is now carefully preserved as the 
 home of the Historical Society. 
 
 After Delaware had been eighteen years under 
 the Duke of York, William Penn felt a need of the 
 west side of the river all the way down to the sea 
 to strengthen his ownership of Pennsylvania. He 
 also wanted to offset the ambitions of Lord Balti- 
 more to extend Maryland northward. Penn ac- 
 cordingly persuaded his friend James, the Duke 
 of York, to give him a grant of Delaware, which 
 Penn thereupon annexed to Pennsylvania under 
 the name of the Territories or Three Lower Coun- 
 ties. The three counties. New Castle, Kent, and 
 Sussex, "^ are still the counties of Delaware, each 
 one extending across the State and filling its whole 
 length from the hills of the Brandywine on the 
 Pennsylvania border to the sands of Sussex at 
 Cape Henlopen. The term "Territory" has ever 
 since been used in America to describe an outlying 
 
 ^ Clay's Annals of the Swedes, pp. 143, 153-4. 
 ' The original names were New Castle, Jones's, and Hoerekili, as it 
 was called by the Dutch, or Deal. 
 
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 225 
 
 province not yet given the privileges of a State. 
 Instead of townships, the three Delaware counties 
 were divided into "hundreds, " an old Anglo-Saxon 
 county method of division going back beyond 
 the times of Alfred the Great. Delaware is the 
 only State in the Union that retains this name 
 for county divisions. The Three Lower Counties 
 were allowed to send representatives to the Penn- 
 sylvania Assembly; and the Quakers of Delaware 
 have always been part of the Yearly Meeting in 
 Philadelphia. 
 
 In 1703, after having been a part of Pennsyl- 
 vania for twenty years, the Three Lower Counties 
 were given home rule and a legislature of their own; 
 
 : but they remained under the Governor of Pennsyl- 
 vania until the Revolution of 1776. They then be- 
 came an entirely separate community and one of the 
 thirteen original States . Delaware was the first State 
 to adopt the National Constitution, and Rhode Is- 
 land, its fellow small State, the last. Having been 
 first to adopt the Constitution, the people of Dela- 
 ware claim that on all national occasions or ceremo- 
 nies they are entitled to the privilege of precedence. 
 They have every reason to be proud of the represent- 
 
 , ative men they sent to the Continental Congress, 
 and to the Senate in later times. 
 
 IS 
 
226 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 Agriculture has, of course, aways been the 
 principal occupation on the level fertile land of 
 Delaware; and it is agriculture of a high class, for 
 the soil, especially in certain localities, is particu- | 
 larly adapted to wheat, corn, and timothy grass, 
 as well as small fruits. That section of land cross- 
 ing the State in the region of Delaware City and 
 Middleton is one of the show regions in America, 
 for crops of wheat and corn. Farther south, grain 
 growing is combined with small fruits and vege- 
 tables with a success seldom attained elsewhere. 
 Agriculturally there is no division of land of similar 
 size quite equal to Delaware in fertility. Its sand 
 and gravel base with vegetable mold above is 
 somewhat like the southern Jersey formation, but 
 it is more productive from having a larger deposit 
 of decayed vegetation. 
 
 The people of Delaware have, indeed, very little 
 land that is not tillable. The problems of poverty, 
 crowding, great cities, and excessive wealth in few 
 hands are practically unknown among them. The 
 foreign commerce of Wilmington began in 1740 
 with the building of a brig named after the town, 
 and was continued successfully for a hundred 
 years. At Wilmington there has always been 
 a strong manufacturing interest, beginning with 
 
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 227 
 
 the famous colonial flour mills at the falls of 
 the Brandywine, and the breadstuffs industry at 
 Newport on the Christina. With the Brandywine 
 so admirably suited to the water-power machinery 
 of those days and the Christina deep enough for 
 the ships, Wilmington seemed in colonial times to 
 possess an ideal combination of advantages for 
 manufacturing and commerce. The flour mills 
 were followed in 1802 by the Du Pont Powder 
 Works, which are known all over the world, and 
 which furnished powder for all American wars 
 since the Revolution, for the Crimean War in 
 Europe, and for the Allies in the Great War. 
 
 "From the hills of Brandywine to the sands 
 of Sussex" is an expression the people of Dela- 
 ware use to indicate the whole length of their 
 little State. The beautiful cluster of hills at the 
 northern end dropping into park-like pastures 
 along the shores of the rippling Red Clay and 
 White Clay creeks which form the deep Chris- 
 tina with its border of green reedy marshes, is in 
 striking contrast to the wild waste of sands at 
 Cape Henlopen. Yet in one way the Brandy- 
 wine Hills are closely connected with those sands, 
 for from these very hills have been quarried the 
 hard rocks for the great breakwater at the Cape, 
 
228 THE QUAKER COLONIES 
 
 behind which the fleets of merchant vessels take 
 refuge in storms. 
 
 The great sand dunes behind the lighthouse at 
 the cape have their equal nowhere else on the 
 coast. Blown by the ocean winds, the dunes work 
 inland, overwhelming a pine forest to the tree 
 tops and filling swamps in their course. The 
 beach is strewn with every type of wreckage of 
 man's vain attempts to conquer the sea. The 
 Life Saving Service men have strange tales to tell 
 and show their collections of coins found along 
 the sand. The old pilots live snugly in their neat 
 houses in Pilot Row, waiting their turns to take 
 the great ships up through the shoals and sands 
 which were so baffling to Henry Hudson and his 
 mate one hot August day of the year 1609. 
 
 The Indians of the northern part of Delaware 
 are said to have been mostly Minquas who lived 
 along the Christiana and Brandywine, and are 
 supposed to have had a fort on Iron Hill. The 
 rest of the State was inhabited by the Nanticokes, 
 who extended their habitations far down the 
 peninsula, where a river is named after them. 
 They were a division or clan of the Delawares or 
 Leni Lenapes. In the early days they gave some 
 
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 229 
 
 trouble; but shortly before the Revolution all left 
 the peninsula in strange and dramatic fashion. 
 Digging up the bones of their dead chiefs in 1748, 
 they bore them away to new abodes in the Wyo- 
 ming Valley of Pennsylvania. Some appear to have 
 traveled by land up the Delaware to the Lehigh, 
 which they followed to its source not far from the 
 Wyoming Valley. Others went in canoes, starting 
 far down the peninsula at the Nanticoke River 
 and following along the wild shore of the Chesa- 
 peake to the Susquehanna, up which they went 
 by its eastern branch straight into the Wyoming 
 Valley. It was a grand canoe trip — a weird pro- 
 cession of tawny, black-haired fellows swinging 
 their paddles day after day, with their freight of 
 ancient bones, leaving the sunny fishing grounds 
 of the Nanticoke and the Choptank to seek a 
 refuge from the detested white man in the cold 
 mountains of Pennsylvania. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 A LARGE part of the material for the early history of 
 Pennsylvania is contained of course in the writings and 
 papers of the founder. The Life of William Penn by 
 S. M. Janney (1852) is perhaps the most trustworthy 
 of the older biographies but it is a dull book. A biog- 
 raphy written with a modern point of view is The True 
 William Penn by Sydney G. Fisher (1900). Mrs. Col- 
 quhoun Grant, a descendant of Penn, has published 
 a book with the title Quaker and Courtier y the Life and 
 Work of William Penn (1907). The manuscript papers 
 of Penn now in the possession of the Historical Society 
 of Pennsylvania, together with much new material gath- 
 ered in England, are soon to be published under the able 
 editorship of Albert Cook Myers. 
 
 There is a vast literature on the history of Quakerism. 
 The Journal of George Fox (1694), Penn's Brief Account 
 of the Rise and Progress of the People called Quakers 
 (1695), and Robert Barclay's Apology for the True 
 Christian Divinity (1678) are of first importance for the 
 study of the rise of the Society of Friends. Among the 
 older histories are J. J. Gurney's Observations on the 
 Religious Peculiarities of the Society of Friends (1824), 
 James Bowden's History of the Society of Friends in 
 America, 2 vols. (1850-54), and S. M. Janney 's History 
 of the Religious Society of Friends, 4 vols. (1860-67). 
 
 231 
 
232 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Two recent histories are of great value: W. C. Braith- 
 waite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (1912) and Rufus 
 M. Jones, Tiie Quakers in the American Colonies (1911). 
 Among the older histories of Penn's province are 
 The History of Pennsylvania in North America, 2 vols, 
 (1797-98), written by Robert Proud from the Quaker 
 point of view and of great value because of the quota- 
 tions from original documents and letters, and History 
 of Pennsylvania from its Discovery by Europeans to 
 the Declaration of Independence in 1776 (1829) by T. F. 
 Gordon, largely an epitome of the debates of the Penn- 
 sylvania Assembly which recorded in its minutes in 
 fascinating old-fashioned English the whole history of 
 the province from year to year. Franklin's Historical 
 Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsyl- 
 vania from its Origin (1759) is a storehouse of informa- 
 tion about the history of the province in the French and 
 Indian wars. Much of the history of the province is to 
 be found in the letters of Penn, Franklin, Logan, and 
 Lloyd, and in such collections as Samuel Hazard's 
 Register of Pennsylvania, 16 vols. (1828-36), Colonial 
 Records, 16 vols. (1851-53), and Pennsylvania Archives 
 (1874-). A vast amount of material is scattered in 
 pamphlets, in files of colonial newspapers like the 
 Pennsylvania Gazette, in the publications of the Histori- 
 cal Society of Pennsylvania, and in the Pennsylvania 
 Magazine of History and Biography (1877-). Recent 
 histories of the province have been written by Isaac 
 Sharpless, History of Quaker Government in Pennsyl- 
 vania, 2 vols. (1898-99), and by Sydney G. Fisher, The 
 Making of Pennsylvania (1896) and Pennsylvania, 
 Colony and Commonwealth (1897). A scholarly History 
 of Proprietary Government in Pennsylvania has been 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 233 
 
 published by William R. Shepherd in the Columbia 
 University Studies (1896) and the Relations of Pennsyl- 
 vania with the British Government, 1696-1765 (1912) 
 have been traced with painstaking care by Winfred 
 T. Root. 
 
 Concerning the racial and religious elements in Penn- 
 sylvania the following books contribute much valuable 
 information: A. B. Faust, The German Element in the 
 United States, 2 vols. (1909); A. C. Myers, Immigration 
 of the Irish Quakers into Penny slvania, 1682-1750 
 (1902); S. W. Pennypacker, Settlement of Germantown, 
 Pennsylvania, and the Beginning of German Immigration 
 to North America (1899); J. F. Sachse, The German 
 Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania, 169^-1708 (1895), 
 and The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania, 1708-1800, 
 2 vols. (1899-1900); L. O. Kuhns, The German and 
 Stoiss Settlements of Colonial Pennsylvania (1901); H. J. 
 Ford, The Scotch-Irish in America (1915); T. A. Glenn, 
 Merion in the Welsh Trad (1896). 
 
 The older histories of New Jersey, like those of Penn- 
 sylvania, contain valuable original material not found 
 elsewhere. Among these Samuel Smith's The History 
 of the Colony of Nova Ccesaria, or New Jersey (1765) 
 should have first place. E. B. O'Callaghan's History of 
 New Netherland, 2 vols. (1846), and J. R. Brodhead's 
 History of the State of New York, 2 vols. (1853, 1871) 
 contain also information about the Jerseys under Dutch 
 rule. Other important works are: W. A. Whitehead's 
 East Jersey under the Proprietary Governments (New Jer- 
 sey Historical Society Collections, vol. i, 1875), and "The 
 English in East and West Jersey" in Winsor's Narrative 
 and Critical History of America, vol. iii, L. Q. C. Elmer's 
 The Constitution and Government of the Province and 
 
234 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 State of New Jersey (New Jersey Historical Society Col- 
 lections, vols. Ill and vii, 1849 and 1872) . Special studies 
 have been made by Austin Scott, Influence of the Pro- 
 prietors in the Founding of New Jersey (1885), and by 
 H. S. Cooley, Study of Slavery in New Jersey (1896), both 
 in the Johns Hopkins University Studies; also by E. P. 
 Tanner, The Province of New Jersey (1908) and by E. J. 
 Fisher, New Jersey as a Royal Province, 1738-1776 
 (1911) in the Columbia University Studies. Several 
 county histories yield excellent material concerning the 
 life and times of the colonists, notably Isaac Mickle's 
 Reminiscences of Old Gloucester (1845) and L. T. 
 Stevens's The History of Cape May County (1897) which 
 are real histories written in scholarly fashion and not 
 to be confused with the vulgar county histories gotten 
 up to sell. 
 
 The Dutch and Swedish occupation of the lands 
 bordering on the Delaware may be followed in the 
 following histories: Benjamin Ferris, A History of the 
 Original Settlements of the Delaware (1846); Francis 
 Vincent, A History of the State of Delaware (1870) ; J. T. 
 Scharf, History of Delaware, 1609-1888, 2 vols. (1888); 
 Karl K. S. Sprinchorn, Kolonien Nya Sveriges Historia 
 (1878), translated in the Pennsylvania Magazine of 
 History and Biography, vols, vii and viii. In volume iv 
 of Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America is 
 a chapter contributed by G. B. Keen on "New Sweden, 
 or The Swedes on the Delaware." The most recent 
 minute work on the subject is The Swedish Settlements 
 on the Delaware, 2 vols. (1911) by Amandus Johnson. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Academy of Natural Sciences 
 
 founded, 60 
 Adams, John, on Quaker feasts, 
 
 31 
 Agriculture, in Pennsylvania, 
 
 25; in New Jersey, 156-58; on 
 
 Cape May, 162; in Delaware, 
 
 226 
 Albany Treaty (1754), 88 
 American Philosophical Society, 
 
 58 
 Andros, Sir Edmund, Governor 
 
 of New York, 134 
 Anne, Queen, colonial policy 
 
 under, 44; Penn and, 74 
 Appoquinimink, Dutch at, 204 
 Aquidneck (Rhode Island), 
 
 Quakers in, 7 
 Archdale, John, Governor of 
 
 North Carolina, 7 
 Armstrong, Colonel John, 104- 
 
 105 
 Attique, see Kittanning 
 
 Baltimore, Lord, 11; boundary 
 dispute with Penn, 19, 24, 224 
 
 Baptists in Pennsylvania, 36 
 
 Baxclay, Robert, Governor of 
 East Jersey, 173; Apology for 
 the True Christian Divinity, 
 173 
 
 Bartram, John, botanist, 57, 58 
 
 Bartram's Garden, Swedes build 
 fort near, 208 
 
 Bates, William, Quaker immi- 
 grant, 139 
 
 Beekman, Dutch Governor in 
 Delaware, 215 
 
 Beesley, Sketch of Cape May, 
 quoted, 146 (note) 
 
 Belmont, country seat near Phila- 
 delphia, 33 
 
 Berkeley, Lord, Quakers buy 
 West Jersey from, 6, 131; and 
 New Jersey, 9, 129, 169 
 
 Berwyn, Welsh origin of name, 
 37 
 
 Black Minqua Indians (Eries), 
 207 ; see also Minqua Indians 
 
 Blackhead, pirate, 208 
 
 Blackwell, Captain John, Gov- 
 ernor of Pennsylvania, 68-69 
 
 Blue Anchor, tavern in Phila- 
 delphia, 28 
 
 Blue Bell tavern, 208 
 
 Bouquet, Colonel Henry, expedi- 
 tion, 109, 111 
 
 Bowden, James, History of the 
 Friends in America, cited, 
 5 (note) 
 
 Braddock, General Edward, 95; 
 defeat, 97-98 
 
 Bridgeton (N. J.), 148 
 
 Bridlington, old name for Bur- 
 lington (N. J.), 136 
 
 Bright, John, 61 
 
 Brinser Brethren in Pennsyl- 
 vania, 42 
 
 Brown, General Jacob, 61, 96 
 
 Brown's Mills (N. J.), 147 
 
 Bryn Mawr, Welsh origin of 
 name, 37 
 
 Bucks County (Penn.), Quakers 
 in, 55 
 
 Budden, Captain, brings chimes 
 from England, 30 
 
 235 
 
236 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Burlington (N. J.), 26, 136, 137, 
 192; capital of West Jersey, 
 143, 183; Quakers at, 180 
 
 Burr, Aaron, 190 
 
 Bushy Run, Bouquet's victory 
 at. 111 
 
 Bute, Earl of, 186 
 
 Byllinge, Edward, 131, 132, 133 
 
 Cadwalader, Welsh name in 
 
 Pennsylvania, 38 
 Cadwalader, Thomas, 59 
 Camden (N. J.), 137-38; Walt 
 
 Whitman at, 152 
 Canada, English gain possession 
 
 of, 107, 108 
 CarHsle (PennO,48 
 Carolinas, proprietorship in, 12; 
 
 royal government in, 122-23; 
 
 see also North Carolina 
 Carr, Sir Robert, 215 
 Carteret, Sir George, and New 
 
 Jersey, 9, 129, 169-70; death 
 
 (1680), 172 
 Carteret, Philip, Governor of 
 
 East Jersey, 170, 171 
 Casimir, Fort, 210, 212 
 Chambersburg (Penn.), 48 
 Charles II, and Penn, 9, 63; 
 
 seizes Dutch possessions in 
 
 America, 129, 169 
 Cherry Island, 209 
 Chester (Penn.), name of Upland 
 
 changed to, 18; Penn, at, 19; 
 
 Swedes settle near, 206, 218 
 Chew, Benjamin, Chief Justice, 
 
 32 
 Child, Mrs. Maria, The Youthful 
 
 Emigrant, 142 
 Christina, Swedish settlement, 
 
 218; see also Christinaham 
 Chistina, Fort, 209 
 Christinaham, 202, 209; see also 
 
 Christina 
 Church of England in Penn- 
 sylvania, 36, 38-39, 48, 52, 
 
 73-74, 119, 120 
 Churches, Christ Church in 
 
 Philadelphia, 30; in West 
 
 Jersey, 149; Quaker meeting 
 houses in New Jersey, 151-52, 
 160-61 ; in Delaware, 223-24 
 
 Clay, Annals of the Swedes, cited, 
 224 (note) 
 
 Cliveden, country seat near Phila- 
 delphia, 33 
 
 Coach and Horses, Philadelphia 
 tavern, 33 
 
 Coale, Josiah, 5 
 
 Cohansey Bridge (Bridgeton), 
 148 
 
 Coleman, Henry, 217 
 
 Collins, Stephen, entertains John 
 Adams, 31 
 
 Collinson, Peter, 58 
 
 Commerce, Pennsylvania, 25- 
 26, 28-29; of Cape May, 
 163 
 
 Conestoga, Indians at, 111; 
 massacre at, 112 
 
 Connecticut, boundary dispute 
 with Pennsylvania, 83-84; 
 Cape May trades with, 163 
 
 Cooper's Ferry (Camden), 137; 
 see also Camden 
 
 Cope, Edward, 59 
 
 Cornbury, Edward Hyde, Vis- 
 count, Governor of New Jer- 
 sey, 151, 183-85 
 
 Cornell, Ezra, 59 
 
 Corson family of Cape May, 1 
 160 j 
 
 Cress family of Cape May, 
 160 
 
 Cumberland, Fort, Braddock 
 retreats to, 98 
 
 Cumberland Valley, Scotch-Irish 
 in, 48 
 
 Dalton, John, 59 
 
 Deal or Hoerekill, original names 
 of Sussex County (Del.), 224 
 (note) 
 
 Delaware, Penn given control of, 
 10, 13; suggestion that Church 
 of England be given, 39; with- 
 draws from Pennsylvania, 69, 
 225; Dutch and Swedes in. 
 
INDEX 
 
 237 
 
 Delaware — Continued 
 
 197 et seq.\ English conquest, 
 215 et seq.; nationalities in, 
 219-21; home rule for, 225; 
 "hundreds," 225; adopts Na- 
 tional Constitution, 225; agri- 
 culture, 226; topography, 227- 
 228; Indians of, 229; bibli- 
 ography, 234 
 
 Delaware Indians, 90, 99, 103, 
 229; and Walking Purchase, 
 87-88 
 
 Delaware River navigation, 165- 
 166 
 
 Depellians in Pennsylvania, 42 
 
 De Vries, David, 203; describes 
 Pine Barrens, 144-45 
 
 Dickinson, John, Farmer s Let- 
 ters, 61, 120; Colonel, 96; 
 opposes change to royal gov- 
 ernment, 120-21 
 
 Drummond, Lord, 173 
 
 Duffrin Mawr (Great Valley), 
 Welsh name for Chester Val- 
 ley, 37 
 
 Du Pont Powder Works, 227 
 
 Duquesne, Fort (Pittsburgh), 
 97-98, 106-07 
 
 Dutch, on the Delaware, 126, 
 197 et seq. ; in New Jersey, 154; 
 in East Jersey, 168, 176 ; names, 
 219 (note) 
 
 Dutch Reformed Church estab- 
 lishes college, 190 
 
 Dyer, Mary, 4 
 
 East Jersey, location, 127-28, 
 130; town system of govern- 
 ment, 155; topography, 168; 
 government under Carteret, 
 171; New Englanders rebel 
 against, 171-72; sold to Quak- 
 ers, 172; population, 175; char- 
 acter of people, 176-77; "The 
 Revolution," 178; united to 
 West Jersey, 179, 180 et seq. ; 
 see also New Jersey, West 
 Jersey 
 
 Edridge, John, 133 
 
 Education in New Jersey, 188- 
 
 190 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 190 
 Egg Island, 162 
 Elfsborg, Fort, 210; see also Nya 
 
 Elfsborg 
 Ehzabeth (N. J.), 171; founded, 
 
 170; college at, 188 
 Elsinboro (N. J.), 206 
 English in Delaware, 204-05, 
 
 215 et seq.; see also Puritans 
 Esopus (N. Y.), Beekman sheriff 
 
 of, 215 
 Estaugh, Quaker preacher, 142 
 
 Fairfax, Lord, 186 
 
 Fairfield (N. J.), 149 
 
 Fenwick, John, 131, 132, 133 
 
 Fletcher, Benjamin, Governor of 
 New York, 70 
 
 Ford, Philip, manager of Penn's 
 estate, 78-79 
 
 Fox, George, project of estab- 
 lishing colony, 4-6; travels 
 in America, 131, 137 
 
 Frankford (Penn.), Swedes at, 
 218 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 30, 77, 185 ; 
 estimate of population, 52; 
 scientific discoveries, 56-57; 
 opinion of Thomas Penn, 82; 
 drafts militia law, 100; com- 
 mands militia, 101-02; letter 
 to Norris, 106; pamphlet 
 against the Paxtons, 113-14; 
 negotiates with Scotch-Irish, 
 116; succeeds in taxing pro- 
 prietary lands, 118; advocate 
 of change to royal government, 
 121, 122; sent as agent to 
 England, 123-24 
 
 Franklin, William, Governor of 
 New Jersey, 153, 185-86 
 
 Franklin Institute, 60 
 
 French, explorations of 1682, 20- 
 21; and Indians, 86; see also 
 French and Indian War; lose 
 empire in America, 107; in 
 Delaware, 219-20 
 
238 
 
 INDEX 
 
 French and Indian War, 86 et 
 
 seq., 191 
 Fuller, William, 6 
 
 Galloway, Joseph, 121, 122, 
 123 
 
 Galloway (N. J.), Quaker meet- 
 ing house at, 160 
 
 George III, 122 
 
 Germans, in Pennsylvania, 26, 
 41-44; "the sects," 42-44; 
 "church people," 44; and 
 Scotch-Irish, 48; sectionalism 
 of, 51; Quakers and, 52-53; 
 expansion, 55; and Indians, 
 86; on making Pennsylvania 
 Crown colony, 119; bibli- 
 ography, 233 
 
 Germantown (Penn.), Scotch- 
 Irish at, 116-17 
 
 Gettysburg (Penn.), 48 
 
 Gibson's Point, Swedish fort 
 near, 208 
 
 Gichtelians in Pennsylvania, 42 
 
 Girard, Stephen, 26 
 
 Gnadenhiitten, massacre at, 99; 
 second attack on, 102 
 
 Godfrey, Thomas, 58 
 
 Gothenborg, Fort, 205 
 
 Grant, U. S., proposes that 
 Quakers take charge of Indian 
 affairs, 89 
 
 Great Christopher (ship), 211 
 
 Great Egg (N. J.), Quaker meet- 
 ing house at, 161 
 
 Great Egg Harbor, 162 
 
 Greene, General Nathanael, 60- 
 61,96 
 
 Greenwich (N. J.), 148; Quaker 
 meeting house in, 152 
 
 Gustavus Adolphus, 200-01 
 
 Gwynedd, Welsh origin of name, 
 37 
 
 Haddon, Elizabeth, 142 
 Haddon, John, 142 
 Haddonfield (N. J.), 142 
 Half Moon (ship), 198 
 Harris, John, Indian trader, 54 
 
 Harrisburg (Penn.), founded, 54 
 
 Haverford, Welsh origin of name, 
 37 
 
 Hayes, Isaac Israel, Arctic ex- 
 plorer, 60 
 
 Hicksites, see Quakers 
 
 Hinoyossa, Alexander d', 215 
 
 Hoerekill or Deal, original name 
 of Sussex County (Del.), 224 
 (note) 
 
 "Holy Experiment," 15, 27, 63 
 
 Hopkins, Johns, 59 
 
 Hopkinson, friend of Franklin, 
 57 
 
 Hudson, Henry, 198, 228 
 
 Hudson River, exploration of, 
 198-99 
 
 Huguenots in East Jersey, 176 
 
 Huron Indians, 99 
 
 Importance of the British Plan- 
 tations in America cited, 86- 
 87 
 
 Indians, and Quakers, 20, 23, 86, 
 133-34, 140-41; and Scotch- 
 Irish, 49, 50, 86; Thomas 
 Penn and, 83; Albany treaty, 
 88-89; and Dutch, 168-69; 
 Swedes buy land from, 206: 
 trade with, 209; of Delaware, 
 229; see also French and In- 
 dian War, names of tribes 
 
 Inspired (German sect) in Penn- 
 sylvania, 42 
 
 Irving, Washington, History of 
 New York, 212; quoted, 212- 
 213 
 
 James II, Quaker policy, 36, 65; 
 Penn and, 63-64, 67; and 
 Covenanters, 175; joins New 
 England, New York, and New 
 Jersey, 177 
 
 Jameson, J, F., Willem Usselinx, 
 cited, 200 (note) 
 
 Jaquette, family of Delaware, 
 200 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 58 
 
 Jennings, Samuel, 184 
 
INDEX 
 
 Jones, R. M., The Quakers in the 
 
 American Colonies, cited, 7 
 
 (note) 
 Jones, Sir William, 134, 135 
 Jones's, original name of Kent 
 
 County (Del), 224 (note) 
 
 Kane, Elisha Kent, Arctic ex- 
 plorer, 60 
 Keith, George, 69 
 Kelley, American Yachts, cited, 
 
 166 (note) 
 Kent (ship), 136 
 Kent County (Del.), 224 
 Kidd, Captain William, 166 
 Kieft, William, Governor of New 
 
 Netherland, 203 
 King Solomon (ship) , 21 1 
 Kingsessing, Swedish settlement, 
 
 218 
 Kinnersley, friend of Franklin, 
 
 57 
 Kittanning, attack on, 104- 
 
 105 
 "Knickerbocker, Diedrich, "212 
 Konigsmarke (the Long Finn), 
 
 217 
 
 Labadists in Pennsylvania, 42 
 
 Lake wood (N. J.), 147 
 
 Lamb, Charles, quoted, 152 
 
 Lamberton, George, 161, 204 
 
 Lancaster (Penn.), rifles manu- 
 factured in, 50 
 
 Lancaster County (Penn.), Ger- 
 mans in, 42, 43, 55 
 
 Lancaster Road, 53, 54 
 
 Landsdowne, seat of one of the 
 Penn family, 34 
 
 La Salle, Rene-Robert Cavelier, 
 Sieur de, 20-21 
 
 Lawrie, Gawen, 132, 133 
 
 Learning, Aaron, 164 
 
 Leaming family of Cape May, 
 160 
 
 Lee, "Light Horse" Harry, 190 
 
 Little Egg Harbor, 162 
 
 Llovd, David, 38, 77 
 
 Llovd, Thomas, 67, 68, 69 
 
 Logstown, Indian headquarters 
 
 at, 104 
 Long-a-coming (Berlin), 150 
 Long Island, Quakers on, 7, 19, 
 
 140, 160; Cape May trades 
 
 with, 163; Puritans in East 
 
 Jersey from, 170 
 Louisiana claimed for France, 20 
 Lucas, Nicholas, 132, 133 
 Ludlam, family of Cape May, 
 
 160 
 Lumbering in New Jersey, 155- 
 
 156 
 Lutheran Church, 44 
 
 Madison, James, 190 
 
 Maine, proprietorship in, 12 
 
 Marcus Hook, Swedish settle- 
 ment, 218; Finns at, 219 
 
 Markham, William, Governor of 
 Delaware, 69; Governor of 
 Pennsylvania, 70 
 
 Markham's Frame, new con- 
 stitution of Pennsylvania, 70 
 
 Maryland, proprietorship in, 12; 
 Penn visits, 19; boundary 
 dispute with Pennsylvania, 
 83, 84; and French and Indian 
 War, 91, 95; Baltimore's ambi- 
 tion for, 224 
 
 Massachusetts, law against 
 Quakers in, 4; royal govern- 
 ment in, 122-23; English settle, 
 197-98 
 
 May, Cape, settlement of, 159- 
 167 
 
 Mennonites, 43 
 
 Meredith, Welsh name in Penn- 
 sylvania, 38 
 
 Merion, Welsh origin of name, 
 37 
 
 Middletown (N. J.), 169, 171 
 
 Mifflin, General Thomas, 61, 96 
 
 Mingo Indians, 97 
 
 Minqua Indians, 229; see also 
 Black Minqua, White Minqua 
 
 Minuit, Peter, leads Swedish 
 expedition, 201, 202; buried 
 at Wilmington, 223 
 
240 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Mississippi River, French explor- 
 ers on, 20 
 
 Model of the Government of the 
 Province of East Jersey in 
 America, 175 
 
 Moravians and war, 102 
 
 Morris, Governor of Pennsyl- 
 vania, 91, 92 
 
 Morris, Lewis, 184; Governor of 
 New Jersey, 185 
 
 Morris, Robert, 26 
 
 Mountain Men in Pennsylvania, 
 42 
 
 Murray, Lindley, 59 
 
 Myers, Narratives of Early Penn- 
 sylvania, West Jersey, and 
 Delaware, cited, 132 (note), 
 207 (note), 233 
 
 Myrtilla (ship), 30 
 
 Nancy (sloop), 165 
 Nanticoke Indians, 229 
 Nassau, Fort, 200, 202, 203, 205, 
 
 210 
 Nassau Hall at Princeton (Prince- 
 ton University), 189; see also 
 
 Princeton 
 New Amstel (New Castle), 213, 
 
 215; see also New Castle 
 New Amsterdam, British take 
 
 possession of, 215 
 New Beverly, old name for Bur- 
 lington (N. J.), 136 
 New Born (German sect), in 
 
 Pennsylvania, 42 
 New Castle, original name for 
 
 New Castle County (Del.), 224 
 
 (note) 
 New Castle (Del), 26, 210, 213, 218 
 New Castle County (Del.), 224 
 New England, Puritans in East 
 
 Jersey from, 169, 170-71, 180; 
 
 joined to New York and New 
 
 Jersev, 177 
 New England Town (N. J.), 149 
 New Hampshire, proprietorship 
 
 in, 12 
 New Haven, settlers on Cape 
 
 May from, 161 
 
 New Jersey, Penn and, 10; pro- 
 prietorship in. 12; religious 
 liberty in, 15; royal govern- 
 ment, 122-23; beginnings of, 
 125 et seq. ; and the Puritans, 
 126; topography, 128-29, 158- 
 159; origin of name, 129; 
 granted to Berkeley and Car- 
 teret, 129; roads, 150; social 
 distinctions, 153-54; rivers, 
 158-59; government, 181-83; 
 struggle between proprietors 
 and people, 183-85 ; population, 
 186-87; education, 188-90; 
 and French and Indian War, 
 190-91; life in, 191-96; books 
 and newspapers, 1 92-93 ; 
 houses, 193; commerce, 193- 
 194; shipbuilding, 194-95; 
 whaling industrj^ 195-96; 
 bibliography^ 233-34; see also 
 East Jersey, West Jersey 
 
 New Jersey, College of (Prince- 
 ton University), 176; see also 
 Princeton University 
 
 New Mooners, 42 
 
 New Sweden, 202 
 
 New York, and Quakers, 4, 160; 
 Penn travels in, 18; contribu- 
 tion in French and Indian 
 War, 91; and New Jersey, 134- 
 135, 177-78 
 
 Newark (N. J.), 171, 180; college 
 moved to, 188 
 
 Newton (N. J.), 137, 138 
 
 Nicolls, Colonel Richard, 169 
 
 Norris, Isaac, 79, 106, 121 
 
 North Carolina, Quakers in, 7; 
 Germans in, 43 
 
 Nova Csesarea (New Jersey), 
 125, 129 
 
 Nya Elfsborg, Fort (Elsinboro), 
 206; see also Elfsborg, Fort 
 
 Odessa, capital of Delaware 
 
 moved to, 215 
 Ogg, F. A., The Old Northwest, 
 
 cited, 109 (note) 
 Ojibway Indians, 99 
 
INDEX 
 
 241 
 
 Old Pensauken Sound, 129 
 Oplandt, Fort, 199, 200, 202 
 Ottawa Indians, 99 
 Oxenstierna, Swedish Chancel- 
 lor, 201 
 
 Passyunk, Swedish settlement, 
 218 
 
 Pastorius, Mennonite leader, 21, 
 43 
 
 Pavonia, Dutch at, 168-69, 176 
 
 "PaxtonBoys," 112-13 
 
 Penllyn, Welsh origin of name, 
 37 
 
 Penn, John, son of Thomas, 85 
 
 Penn, John, son of William, 81, 
 85 
 
 Penn, Richard, son of William, 
 81,85^ 
 
 Penn, Thomas, son of William, 
 81-85, 90, 94 
 
 Penn, William, joins Quakers, 
 1-2; and Quaker colony pro- 
 ject, 6; becomes trustee of 
 Quaker refuge, 6-7; early life, 
 8; granted domain in America, 
 9-10; charter, 10-11, 41, 181; 
 forms colony, 13 et seq.; in 
 America, 17 et seq.; and 
 Philadelphia, 18; treaty with 
 Indians, 22-23; returns to 
 England, 24; missionary tours 
 in Germany, 41; in England, 
 63-70; and James II, 64-65, 
 67; authority suspended, 69; 
 province restored, 70; returns 
 to Pennsylvania, 70-71; trav- 
 els in America, 71; sails again 
 for England, 72, 73; life in 
 England, 74, 78, 174; and Ford, 
 78-79; in prison, 79; last 
 years, 80; death (1718), 81; 
 and Indians, 88, 89; decides 
 contention over West Jersey, 
 132, 133; Concessions and 
 Agreements, 135; buys East 
 Jersey, 172; plans sale of po- 
 litical power in Pennsylvania, 
 183; and Delaware, 197, 217, 
 i6 
 
 219, 224; opinion of the 
 Swedes, 204; bibliography, 231 
 
 Penn, Mrs. William, as proprie- 
 tor of Pennsylvania, 81 
 
 Pennsbury, country seat of Wil- 
 liam Penn, 71 
 
 Pennsylvania, as proprietorship, 
 11 et seq.; government, IS- 
 IS, 26, 55, 67, 72-73, 75-78; 
 population, 36 et seq.; during 
 Penn's absence, 6G; part in 
 French and Indian War, 86 
 et seq.; Indian massacres, 99; 
 Quaker militia law, 100-01; 
 builds chain of forts, 102; 
 party strife, 105-06; decline 
 of Quaker government, 108 
 et seq.; proposal to make 
 Crown colony of, 118-24; 
 bibliography, 232-33 
 
 Pennsylvania Castle, country 
 seat of John Penn, 85 
 
 Pennsylvania Railroad, 54 
 
 Pennsylvania, University of, 59 
 
 Penny Pot Inn, 33 
 
 Pennypack, Swedish settlement, 
 218 
 
 Perth, Earl of, 173 
 
 Perth Amboy (N. J.), Scotch 
 Covenanters at, 173, 180; 
 Assembly meets at, 183 
 
 Philadelphia, founded, 18, 19-20; 
 houses, 22; life in, 25 et seq.; 
 seat of commerce, 26, 27- 
 29; love of good living, 31- 
 32; country seats near, 33-34; 
 streets, 34-35; medicine and 
 science, 59-60; Indian raids, 
 90; Braddock in, 98; Indians 
 brought to, 104, 112; Scotch- 
 Irish expedition to, 114-17; 
 market for Cape May, 163; 
 absorbs Swedish settlements, 
 218 
 
 Philadelphia College, see Penn- 
 sylvania, University of 
 
 Pine barrens of New Jersey, 
 143-44 
 
 Piscatawa (N. J.), 171 
 
242 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Pitt, Fort, 107, 109 
 
 Pontiac's Conspiracy, 108-09 
 
 Potawatomie Indians, 99 
 
 Presbyterians, Quakers establish 
 refuge for, 172, 173-74; estab- 
 lish College of New Jersey 
 (1747), 176 
 
 Princeton University, 176, 188- 
 190 
 
 Printz, John, Governor of New 
 Sweden, 205, 208 
 
 Prison reform in Pennsylvania, 
 15,56 
 
 Proud, Robert, History of Penn- 
 sylvania, 193 
 
 Puritans and East Jersey, 169, 
 171 
 
 Quakers, William Penn joins, 1- 
 2; origin, 2; principles, 2-3; 
 "quietism" in Europe, 3; laws 
 against, 4; temporary settle- 
 ments in America, 6-7; and 
 prison reform, 15; immi- 
 gration to Pennsylvania, 19- 
 20, 36; relations with Indians, 
 20, 23, 86, 123-34, 140-41; 
 type of immigrants, 22; char- 
 acteristics, 26; number in 
 Pennsylvania, 26-27; James 
 II and, 36, Q5; opposed by 
 Church of England, 38-40; and 
 Scotch-Irish, 47, 113; in Phila- 
 delphia, 48; Germans and, 52- 
 53; number in 1750 in Penn- 
 sylvania, 52; liberalism, 5Q', 
 activities, 5Q; prominent men 
 among, 56-61; and war, 95- 
 96; as conscientious objectors, 
 96; split into Hicksites and 
 Orthodox, 97; try to end war 
 (1756), 103-04; decline of 
 Quaker government, 108 et 
 seq.\ propose making Crown 
 colony of Pennsylvania, 118 et 
 seq.\ in West Jersey, 130 et 
 seq., 180; found Salem, 133; 
 lose control of West Jersey, 
 150-51 ; meeting houses in New 
 
 Jersey, 151-52; settle Cape 
 May region, 160; buy East 
 Jersey, 172; in Wilmington, 
 220-21; bibliography, 231-32 
 
 Queen's College (Rutgers Col- 
 lege), 190, 
 
 Quietism, 3 
 
 Quietists in Pennsylvania, 42 
 
 Radnor, Welsh origin of name, 
 
 37 
 " Redemptioners, " 44-45 
 Reformed Church, 44 
 Religion, religious liberty under 
 
 Quakers, 15; see also Churches, 
 
 names of denominations 
 Revolution of 1688, Quakers and, 
 
 66 
 Revolutionary War, Penn family 
 
 in, 13; Scotch-Irish and, 51 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 61 
 Rhode Island, religious liberty, 
 
 15; Cape May trades with, 
 
 163; and National Constitu- 
 tion, 225 
 Rising, Swedish Governor of 
 
 Delaware, 210 
 Rittenhouse, David, astronomer, 
 
 38, 57 
 River Brethren in Pennsylvania, 
 
 42 
 Roads, Pennsylvania, 53-54; 
 
 New Jersey, 150 
 Ronsdorfer (German sect) in 
 
 Pennsylvania, 42 
 Rush, Dr. Benjamin, 190 
 Rutgers College, 190 
 
 St. Davids, Welsh origin of, 37 
 St. George's, Dutch at, 204 
 Salem (N. J.), 26, 133, 136, 137, 
 
 143, 152, 176, 180, 205 
 Sandhoeck (Sand Point), 210 
 Scandinavians in New Jersey, 
 
 161-62; see also Swedes 
 Scheyichbi, Indian name for 
 
 New Jersey, 125 
 Schuylkill Valley, Germans in, 55 
 
INDEX 
 
 243 
 
 Schwenkf elders in Pennsylvania, 
 42 
 
 Scotch Covenanters, refuge in 
 East Jersey for, 172-75, 180 
 
 Scotch-Irish, in Pennsylvania, 
 26, 40, 45 et seq. ; and Indians, 
 49, 50, 86, 109 et seq. ; section- 
 alism of, 51-52; on making 
 Pennsylvania Crown colony, 
 119; in Delaware, 220 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, cited, 174 
 
 Seaville, Old Cedar Meeting at, 
 161 
 
 Separatists in Pennsylvania, 42 
 
 Shawanoe Indians, 90, 99, 103 
 
 Shields of Hull (ship), 142-43 
 
 Shipley, William, 221, 222 
 
 Shirley, General William, 95 
 
 Shrewsbury (N. J.), 169, 171 
 
 Six Nations, 54-55, 88, 90, 207 
 
 Slavery, Quaker attitude to- 
 ward, 56; in New Jersey, 156, 
 158 
 
 Smith, Provost of College of 
 Philadelphia, estimates num- 
 ber of Quakers, 52 
 
 Smith, Samuel, 193; History of 
 the Colony of Nova-Caesaria, 
 or New Jersey, 192 
 
 Smith, Rev. William, 39-40 
 
 Spicer, Esther, funeral, 141 
 
 Spicer, Jacob, 164 
 
 Spicer family of Cape May, 160 
 
 Spy, Commodore, 95 
 
 Stenton, country seat near Phila- 
 delphia, 33 
 
 Stevens, L. T., History of Cape 
 May County, cited, 166 (note) 
 
 Stillwell family of Cape May, 
 160 
 
 Stockton, Richard, of New Jer- 
 sey, 189 
 
 Stoke Park, country seat of 
 Thomas Penn, 85 
 
 Stuyvesant, Peter, Governor of 
 New Netherland, 209-10 
 
 Susquehanna Indians, Quakers 
 treat with, 5 
 
 Sussex County (Del.), 224 
 
 Swain, Jacocks, 165 
 
 Swedes, in Pennsylvania, 18; 
 
 in New Jersey, 126, 136; in 
 
 Delaware, 197, 200 et seq.; 
 
 anglicized names, 219 (note) 
 Swedes boro, Swedish settlements 
 
 around, 218 
 Sydney, Algernon, 13 
 Syng, friend of Franklin, 57 
 
 Thirty Years' War, Gustavus 
 Adolphus and, 201 
 
 Tinicum, seat of Swedish govern- 
 ment in Delaware, 205, 218; 
 fort at, 210 
 
 Townsend familv of Cape May, 
 160 
 
 Trent, William, 187 
 
 Trenton (N. J.), 187-88 
 
 Trinity, Fort, 210 
 
 Tuckahoe (N. J.), Quaker meet- 
 ing house at, 161 
 
 Tunkers in Pennsylvania, 42 
 
 Turner, Nathaniel, 161, 204 
 
 Turner, Robert, 139 
 
 Ulstermen, see Scotch-Irish 
 Upland (Chester), Swedish vil- 
 lage in Pennsylvania, 18, 218 
 Usselinx, Willem, 200, 201 
 
 Virginia, Germans in, 43; Scotch- 
 Irish in, 47; boundary dis- 
 pute, 83, 84; and French and 
 Indian War, 91, 95; colony 
 established (1607), 197 
 
 Walking Purchase of 1737, 87 
 
 Warner, Edmund, 133 
 
 Washington, George, 97 
 
 Weiser, Conrad, 90 
 
 Welcome (ship), 17 
 
 Welsh in Pennsylvania, 36-38; 
 
 sectionalism of, 51 
 West, Benjamin, 61 
 West Jersey, Quaker refuge in, 
 
 6-7, 130 e/ seq.; location, 127; 
 
 Berkeley sells, 131; Quaker 
 
244 
 
 INDEX 
 
 West Jersey — Continued 
 
 constitution, 135; type of 
 settlers, 138 et seq.; forests, 
 143-45, 147; cedar swamps, 
 145-46; churches, 149; trans- 
 portation, 149; united to East 
 Jersey (1702), 150; county 
 organization, 155; see also ^asi 
 Jersey, New Jersey 
 
 Westchester County (N. Y.), 
 Quakers, in, 7 
 
 Whisky Rebelhon, 49 
 
 White Minqua Indians, 207 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 152 
 
 Whittier, J. G., 61 
 
 Wicaco, village on site of Phila- 
 delphia, 218, 223 
 
 Wilcox, Joseph, 77 
 
 William III, and Penn, 12, 69- 
 70; and toleration, 36, 71; 
 placed on throne, 66, 178 
 
 William and Mary, College of, 
 189 
 
 William of Orange, see William 
 III 
 
 Willbg, Thomas, 221 
 
 Willington (Wilmington), 221 
 
 Wilmington (Del.), 26, 201, 
 209; a Quaker town, 220-21; 
 
 founding of, 221-22; customs of 
 punishment, 222-23; churches, 
 223-24; commerce, 226; manu- 
 facturing, 226-27 
 
 Woman in the Wilderness, So- 
 ciety of, in Pennsylvania, 
 42 
 
 Woodbridge (N. J.), 171 
 
 Woolman, John, Journal, 152, 
 192 
 
 Wynnewood, Welsh origin of 
 name, 37 
 
 Wyoming Valley of Pennsyl- 
 vania, Indians seek refuge i», 
 229-30 
 
 Yegon, Peter, 137 
 
 York, Duke of, and William 
 Penn, 9, 13, 64, 224; ascends 
 throne as James II, 63; 
 given Dutch possessions in 
 America, 129, 169; and West 
 Jersey, 134; and East Jersey, 
 173; rule in Delaware, 217, 
 21 9 ; 5ee also James II 
 
 York (Penn.), 48 
 
 Zion's Brueder in Pennsylvania; 
 
 42 
 
AN OUTLINE OF THE PLAN OF 
 THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA 
 
 The fifty titles of the Series fall into eight topical sequences or groups, 
 each with a dominant theme of its own — 
 
 I. The Morning of America 
 time: 1492-1763 
 
 THE theme of the first sequence is the struggle of nations for the 
 possession of the New World. The mariners of four European king- 
 doms — Spain, Portugal, France, and England — are intent upon the 
 discovery of a new route to Asia. They come upon the American continent 
 which blocks the way. Spain plants colonies in the south, lured by gold. 
 France, in pursuit of the fur trade, plants colonies in the north. Englishmen, 
 in search of homes and of a wider freedom, occupy the Atlantic seaboard. 
 These Englishmen come in time to need the land into which the French 
 have penetrated by way of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, and a 
 mighty struggle between the two nations takes place in the wilderness, 
 ending in the expulsion of the French. This sequence comprises ten volumes: 
 
 I. THE RED man's CONTINENT, by EUsworth Huntington 
 1. THE SPANISH CONQUERORS, by Irving Berdine Ric/iman 
 
 3. ELIZABETHAN SEA-DOGS, by William Wood 
 
 4. CRUSADERS OF NEW FRANCE, by William Bennett Munro 
 
 5. PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTH, by Mary Johnston 
 
 6. THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND, by Charks M. Jndrews 
 
 7. DUTCH AND ENGLISH ON THE HUDSON, by Maud Wilder Goodwih 
 
 8. THE QUAKER COLONIES, by Sydney G. Fisher 
 
 9. COLONIAL FOLKWAYS, by Charks M. Andrews 
 
 10. THE CONQUEST OF NEW FRANCE, by George M. Wrong 
 
II. The Winning of Independence j 
 
 time: 1763-1815 
 
 The French peril has passed, and the great territory between the Alle- 
 ghanies and the Mississippi is now open to the Englishmen on the seaboard, 
 with no enemy to contest their right of way except the Indian. But the 
 question arises whether these Englishmen in the New World shall submit 
 to political dictation from the King and Parliament of England. To decide 
 this question the War of the Revolution is fought; the Union is born: 
 and the second war with England follows. Seven volumes: 
 
 II. THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION, by Carl BeckcT 
 
 !2. WASHINGTON AND HIS COMRADES IN ARMS, by GeoTge M. Wrong 
 
 13. THE FATHERS OF THE CONSTITUTION, by Max Furrand 
 
 14. WASHINGTON AND HIS COLLEAGUES, by Henry Jones Ford 
 
 15. JEFFERSON AND HIS COLLEAGUES, by Alkn JohnSOn 
 
 16. JOHN MARSHALL AND THE CONSTITUTION, by Edward S. Corwtn 
 
 17. THE FIGHT FOR A FREE SEA, by Ralph D. Paine 
 
 III. T/ie Vision of the West 
 
 time: 1750-1890 
 
 The theme of the third sequence is the American frontier — the conquest 
 of the continent from the Alleghanies to the Pacific Ocean. The story covers 
 nearly a century and a half, from the first crossing of the Alleghanies by 
 the backwoodsmen of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas (about 
 1750) to the heyday of the cowboy on the Great Plains in the latter part 
 of the nineteenth century. This is the marvelous tale of the greatest migra 
 tions in history, told in nine volumes as follows: 
 
 18. PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST, by Consiance Lindsay Skinnef 
 
 19. THE OLD NORTHWEST, by Fvedevtc Austin Ogg 
 
 20. THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON, by Frederic Austin Ogg 
 
 21. THE PATHS OF INLAND COMMERCE, by Archer B. Hulbert 
 
 22. ADVENTURERS OF OREGON, by Constance Lindsay Skinner 
 
 23. THE SPANISH BORDERLANDS, by Herbert E. Bolton 
 
 24. TEXAS AND THE MEXICAN WAR, by Nathaniel IV. Stephenson 
 
 25. THE FORTY-NINERS, by Stewart Edward White 
 
 26. THE PASSING OF THE FRONTIER, by Emerson Hough 
 
IV, The Storm of Secession 
 time: 1830-1876 
 
 The curtain rises on the gathering storm of secession. The theme of the 
 fourth sequence is the preservation of the Union, which carries with it the 
 extermination of slavery. Six volumes as follows: 
 
 27. THE COTTON KINGDOM, by JVUliam E. Dodd 
 
 28. THE ANTI-SLAVERY CRUSADE, by Jesse Macy 
 
 29. ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE UNION, by Nathaniel W. Stephenson 
 
 30. THE DAY OF THE CONFEDERACY, by Nathaniel W. Stephenson 
 
 31. CAPTAINS OF THE CIVIL WAR, by fVHUam Wood 
 
 32. THE SEQUEL OF APPOMATTOX, by Walter Lynwood Fleming 
 
 V. The Intellectual Life 
 
 Two volumes follow on the higher national life, telling of the nation's great 
 teachers and interpreters: 
 
 22' THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION, by Edwin E. Slosson 
 
 34. THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE, by BHsS Perry 
 
 VI. The Epic of Commerce and Industry 
 
 The sixth sequence is devoted to the romance of industry and business, 
 and the dominant theme is the transformation caused by the inflow of 
 immigrants and the development and utilization of mechanics on a great 
 scale. The long age of muscular power has passed, and the era of mechanical 
 power has brought with it a new kind of civilization. Eight volumes: 
 
 35. OUR FOREIGNERS, By Samuel P. Orth 
 
 36. THE OLD MERCHANT MARINE, by Ralph D. Pawe 
 
 37. THE AGE OF INVENTION, by Holland Thompson 
 
 38. THE RAILROAD BUILDERS, by John Moody 
 
 39. THE AGE OF BIG BUSINESS, by Burton J. HendrUk 
 
 40. THE ARMIES OF LABOR, by Samuel p. Orth 
 
 41. THE MASTERS OF CAPITAL, by John Moody 
 
 42. THE NEW SOUTH, by Holland Thompson 
 
VII. The Era of IForld Power 
 
 The seventh sequence carries on the story of government and diplomacy 
 and political expansion from the Reconstruction (1876) to the present day, 
 in six volumes: 
 
 43. THE BOSS AND THE MACHINE, by Samuel P. Ofth 
 
 44. THE CLEVELAND ERA, by Henry Jones Ford 
 
 45. THE AGRARIAN CRUSADE, by Solon J. Buck 
 
 46. THE PATH OF EMPIRE, by Carl Rus Sell Fish 
 
 47. THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND HIS TIMES, by Hurold Howlund 
 
 48. wooDROw WILSON AND THE WORLD WAR, by Chorks SeymouT 
 
 VIII. Our Neighbors 
 
 Now to round out the story of the continent, the Hispanic peoples on ' 
 the south and the Canadians on the north are taken up where they were 
 dropped further back in the Series, and these peoples are followed down 
 to the present day: 
 
 49. THE CANADIAN DOMINION, by Oscar B. Skelton 
 
 50. THE HISPANIC NATIONS OF THE NEW vfov^hD^ by William R. Shepherd 
 
 The Chronicles of America is thus a great synthesis, giving a new projec- 
 tion and a new interpretation of American History. These narratives are 
 works of real scholarship, for every one is written after an exhaustive 
 examination of the sources. Many of them contain new facts; some of them 
 — such as those by Howland, Seymour, and Hough — are founded on inti- 
 mate personal knowledge. But the originality of the Series lies, not chiefly 
 in new facts, but rather in new ideas and new combinations of old facts. 
 
 The General Editor of the Series is Dr. Allen Johnson, Chairman of the I 
 Department of History of Yale University, and the entire work has been ' 
 planned, prepared, and published under the control of the Council's 
 Committee on Publications of Yale University. 
 
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 143 ELM STREET, NEW HAVEN 
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