of the great territory granted him in America to reward his friends, and thereby laid the foundation for another great commonwealth with a unique history. New Jersey was given jointly to Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley, and in 1673, Lord Berkeley sold his share, illy-defined as the "southwestern part," to a Quaker named Edward Byllinge. Byllinge soon became insolvent, and his property was taken over by William Penn and two others, as trustees, and the seeds sown for one of the most interesting experiments in history.
There are few figures on the page of history more admirable, self-poised, and clear-sighted than this quiet man. He was born in London in 1644, the son of a distinguished father, and apparently destined for the usual career at the court of England. But while at Oxford, young Penn astonished everybody and scandalized his relatives by joining the Society of Friends, or Quakers, founded by George Fox only a short time before. His family at once removed him from Oxford and sent him to Paris, in the hope that amid the gayeties of the French capital he would forget his Quaker notions, but he was far from doing so. He returned home after a time, and his father threatened to shut him up in the Tower of London, but he retorted that for him the Tower was the worst argument in the world. We get some amusing glimpses of the contention in his household.
"You may 'thee' and 'thou' other folk as much as you like," his angry father told him, "but don't you dare to 'thee' and 'thou' the King, or the Duke of York, or me."
The Quakers insisted upon the use of "thee" and "thou," alleging that the use of the plural "you" was not only absurd, but a form of flattery, and this manner of address has been persisted in by them to this day. Penn, of course, continued to use them, much to his father's indignation, and even went so far as to wear his hat in the king's presence, an act of audacity which only amused that merry monarch. The story goes that the king, seeing young Penn covered, removed his own hat, remarking jestingly, "Wherever I am, it is customary for only one to be covered"; a neat reproof, as well as a lesson in manners which would have made any other young man's ears tingle, but Penn calmly enough replied, "Keep thy hat on, Friend Charles."
After his father's death, in 1670, Penn found himself heir to a great estate, and began to devote himself entirely to the defense and explanation of Quakerism. Again and again, he was thrown into prison and kept there for months on end, but gradually he began to win for the Friends a certain degree of respect and consideration, perhaps as much because of his high social station, gallant bearing and magnetic personality, as because of any of his arguments. In 1677, he made a sort of missionary tour of Europe, returning to England to set actively afloat the project for Quaker colonization in America which he had long been turning over in his mind.
Three years, however, passed before he could secure from the Duke of York a release of all his powers of sovereignty over West Jersey, but this was finally accomplished, and soon afterwards he secured from the crown a charter for a great strip of country in that region. Penn named this region "Sylvania," or "Woodland," but when the King came to approve the charter, he wrote the name "Penn" before "Sylvania," and when Penn protested, assured him laughingly that the name was given the country not in his honor but in that of his father, and so it stood.
Penn had been allowed a free hand in shaping the policy of his colony, and forthwith proclaimed such a government as existed nowhere else on earth. Absolute freedom of conscience was guaranteed to everyone; it was declared that governments exist for the sake of the governed, that to reform a criminal is more important than to punish him, that the death penalty should be inflicted only for murder or high treason, and that every man had a right to vote and to hold office. All of which are such matters of course to-day that we can scarcely realize how revolutionary they were two centuries ago.
To all who should come to his colony, Penn offered land at the rate of forty shillings for a hundred acres, and the experiment, denounced at first as visionary and certain of failure, was so successful that within a year, more than three thousand persons had sailed to settle along the Delaware. In the summer of 1682, Penn himself sailed for the New World, and late in the following autumn, at a spot just above the junction of the Schuylkill and Delaware, laid out a city as square and level as a checker-board, and named it Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. Before taking possession of the land, he concluded a treaty with the Delaware Indians, to whom it belonged, "the only treaty," as Voltaire says, "between savages and Christians that was never sworn to and never broken." Penn's stately and distinguished bearing, his affability and kindness of heart, made a deep impression upon the Indians; they always remembered him with trust and affection; and seventy years elapsed before Pennsylvania tasted the horrors of Indian warfare.
The growth of the new city was phenomenal. Settlers came so fast that cabins could not be built for them, and many of them lived for a time in caves along the river. The remainder of Penn's life was spent for the most part in England, where his interests demanded his presence, but he built a handsome residence in the city which he had founded and lived there at intervals until his death.
No consideration, however brief, of his life and work can be complete without some reference to the remarkable effect the establishment of his colony had on emigration to America. Pennsylvania gave a refuge and home to the most intelligent and progressive peoples of Europe, chafing under the religious restrictions which, at home, they could not escape. The Mennonites, the Dunkers, and the Palatines were among these, but by far the most important were the so-called Scotch-Irish—Scotchmen who, a century before, had been sent to Ireland by the English government, in the hope of establishing there a Protestant population which would, in time, come to outnumber and control the native Irish. The Scotch were Presbyterians, of course, and finding the Irish environment distasteful, began, about 1720, to come to America in such numbers that, fifty years later, they formed a sixth part of our entire population. Nearly all of them settled in Western Pennsylvania, from which a steady stream flowed ever southward and westward, furnishing the hardy pioneers of Kentucky and Tennessee, and forming the main strength of American democracy. We shall see, in the chapters which follow, how many of the men eminent in the country's history, traced their descent from this stock.
One more interesting experiment in colonization, conceived and carried out by a man of unusual personality, remains to be recorded. James Oglethorpe, born in 1689, for forty years led the usual life of the wealthy English gentleman—first the army, then a period of quiet country life, and finally parliament. There, however, he took a place apart, almost at once, by his interest in prison reform. The condition of the English prisons of the day was indescribably foul and loathsome, and as horror after horror was unearthed by his investigations, a great project began to take shape in his mind. This was nothing less than the founding in America of a colony where prisoners for debt should be encouraged to settle, and where they should be given means to make a new start in life. For in those days, a man who could not pay his debts was cast into prison and kept there, frequently in the greatest misery, as though that helped matters any.
In 1732, Oglethorpe succeeded in securing a charter for such a colony, which he named Georgia, in honor of the King. Trustees were appointed, the support of influential men secured, and on November 16, 1732, the first shipload of emigrants left England. Oglethorpe himself accompanied them. He had undertaken to establish the colony on the condition that he receive no recompense, and was authorized to act as colonial governor.
Charleston, South Carolina, was reached about the middle of January, and, after some exploration, Oglethorpe selected as the site of the first settlement a bluff on the rich delta lands of the Savannah. Thither the emigrants proceeded, and at once began to build the town, which was named Savannah after the river flowing at its feet. Oglethorpe himself was indefatigable. He concluded a treaty with the Indians, provided for the defense of the colony against the Spaniards, who held Florida, and, most important of all, welcomed a colony of Jews, who had come from London at their own expense, and who soon became as valuable as any of Savannah's citizens. Probably never before in history had a Christian community welcomed a party of this unfortunate race, which had been despised and persecuted from one end of Europe to the other, which could call no country home, nor invoke the protection of any government.
