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The Hidden Flaw
There is a fundamental principle about frontiers in the early modern world. A frontier did not exist without a government to defend it, and a government would cease to exist if it could not protect its frontiers. The developments on the eighteenth-century American frontiers, then, can only be appreciated by understanding the creation of the colonial government to which those frontiers belonged. For Pennsylvania, that founding moment came with the Frame of 1701, a document that scholars have described with many superlatives: “the most famous of all colonial constitutions,” “radically democratic,” “remarkably innovative,” “a landmark of religious liberty,” one of the “most influential documents protecting individual rights,” and “comparable in the development of political institutions to the development of the wheel in transportation.” In its own time, the Frame was credited with the economic prosperity that the eastern areas of Pennsylvania enjoyed for much of the eighteenth century. The colony’s remarkable progress, a leading assemblyman noted in 1739, “is principally, and almost wholly, owing to the excellency of our constitution; under which we enjoy a greater share both of civil and religious liberty than any of our neighbors.”1
There was, however, a fatal oversight in the Frame of 1701. It failed to address the issue of political expansion. Rather than creating a stable political environment, as most have assumed it did, the Frame created a formula for the colony’s ultimate demise. This flaw only became apparent as the colony tried to incorporate new territory in the eighteenth century. By the time of the American Revolution, the revolutionaries who drafted a new constitution in 1776 knew of this and other problems, declaring “we are determined not to pay the least regard to the former constitution of this province, but to reject everything therein that may be proposed, merely because it was part of the former constitution.” To understand how the authors of the revolutionary constitution of Pennsylvania came to this conclusion, we must turn to where the seeds of this revolt were first planted: the flawed founding.2
Figure 2. This map is based on a colored version of the 1755 London-printed A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America, with the Roads, Distances, Limits, and Extent of the Settlements, also known as the Mitchell Map, named for its designer John Mitchell, a Virginia-born doctor. Pennsylvania’s boundaries in this version are farther north than they are today and include parts of modern-day western New York, while its western border mirrors the Delaware River. The borders appear clear on this British map, although in practice, they were much harder to establish in the colonies. New York’s boundaries, for example, were never quite as expansive as this map depicts.
“A Just, Plain, and Honest People That Neither Make War upon Others nor Fear War from Others”
For three days, the English ship Welcome made its course up the Delaware River, as anxious passengers scanned the shore for signs of life. The vessel carried William Penn and about a hundred others who had come to launch a new English colony called Pennsylvania. On the night of October 26, 1682, they came upon a clearing with a small fort and scattered houses. They had reached their destination.3
The boat’s appearance came as a surprise to those on shore. As soon as the ship moored, several magistrates left the fort and paddled a small canoe out to investigate. Penn showed them his charter from King Charles II declaring Penn the proprietor of the land that these magistrates governed. The magistrates, appointed by the Duke of York, the previous proprietor, seemed uncertain. They took Penn’s papers and told him to stay put while they went ashore to review his documents. The magistrates conferred that night. Given that Penn had sent advance agents to the colony, the magistrates’ behavior was likely a performance of protocol—or at least, they wanted to ensure that the man claiming to be Penn was not an imposter. By morning, they had determined that his charter was valid and readied the ritual that would recognize Penn’s power as the head of this new colony.4
Penn had prepared for what happened next. When he went ashore, the magistrates handed him the keys to the fort, the strongest symbol of political sovereignty in the area. Penn unlocked its door, entered, and closed the door behind him. He stood alone in the fort—now his fort—for a moment, then opened the door and walked back out. The magistrates greeted him with twigs from the forests beyond, a piece of earth, and a bowl containing river water, representations of Penn’s new authority over the woods, land, and streams of this English colony.5
Penn’s journey to the banks of the Delaware River was an arduous one. Penn, the son of a distinguished naval hero whose exploits had won the family fortune, received art education at the most elite institutions in England and on the Continent. His privilege meant that he had access to the finest things in life. Indeed, a life of indulgent complacency seemed his likely destiny. Penn, however, chose to take a different path while in his twenties. Troubled by the violent world around him, Penn became a critic of the reigning order in England. Always a searcher, he converted to Quakerism after discovering his Inner Light. He rejected the life of compliance and comfort that his father had cleared for him. Instead, he embraced the faith’s tenets of individual introspection and communal harmony. Imprisoned and exiled for his beliefs, Penn fought for years to regain his stature. By 1681, Penn had won the favor of Charles II’s court, and with it, the colony he would call Pennsylvania—or Penn’s woods, named not for him, but for his father, Admiral William Penn, whose past service to the Crown the younger Penn had leveraged to secure a colony.6
The ritual Penn performed outside the fort was the culmination of his work. The “turf, twig, and water” ritual was an ancient one, dating to the days of feudalism when warring English lords needed a way to show their lieges that they had surrendered their powers to another. Now, centuries later, the tradition, known more formally as the livery of seisin, found a new purpose in the New World as a symbolic means to establish sovereignty over acquired land. Penn’s acceptance of the keys and the gifts signaled the dawn of a new era. Harkening back to a lord’s feudal controls over people and territory, it also showed just how much power proprietors could have in the colonies they possessed.7
The symbolism fit the circumstances. Charles II granted Penn a colony from the Dutch territory the Crown acquired in 1664. Charles’s gift made Penn the largest landowner in the English Empire, save for the king himself. Penn’s charter gave him an expanse that stretched from the Delaware River five degrees west and between the fortieth and forty-third parallels in breadth, more than twenty-five million square acres of land. Charles had carved this territory out of the holdings of his brother, the Duke of York, who held a tract of land that ran from the southern tip of modern-day Delaware all the way north, through New York City, to Canada. With the transfer of twigs, water, and earth at the fort, the Duke of York’s magistrates recognized the shift of sovereignty from their previous master to their new one.8
The ritual also encapsulated the very peculiar nature of a proprietary government. In proprietary colonies, individuals—in this case William Penn—were vested with inordinate power. As the person who controlled the waterways, land, and woods, Penn’s powers resembled those of a feudal lord. Likewise, his responsibilities were similar to those that lords had to their tenants. Penn—and, after him, his sons—would dispense land, control the courts, create governments, and form a very personal relationship with colonists based on an allegiance that resembled the loyalties tenants held toward their manorial lords. Every landowner, for instance, was to provide the proprietary with a quitrent, an annual payment given in exchange for the security and prosperity the proprietorship’s good governance provided. This reciprocal relationship in which colonists gave their loyalty in exchange for protection had feudal roots, but it also mimicked the bond that knitted subjects to the English Crown in the early modern world. Indeed, it is what held all colonial governments
