Which colony was first established for religious reasons as a home for quakers?

Religious Tolerance

Penn and other Quakers believed that everyone had to seek God in his or her own way.  Penn also thought that religious tolerance – or “liberty of conscience” – would create stronger governments and wealthier societies.  Other English thinkers in the 1600s shared these ideas.  But Penn had the opportunity to act on his beliefs. In Pennsylvania, religious tolerance was the law.

Penn welcomed settlers from all faiths to Pennsylvania.  Each of the other American colonies had established an official church, but Penn did not.  He sought out religious groups suffering in Europe, and invited them to his colony.  He even gave some groups land.  Yet religious tolerance did not mean that colonists of all faiths had equal rights.  Only Christians could vote or hold political office.  But all settlers could take part in the social and economic life of Pennsylvania.

Penn’s belief that “Religion and Policy…are two distinct things, have two different ends, and may be fully prosecuted without respect on to the other” took hold and became one of America’s most important ideals.

Representative Government

During Penn’s time, older forms of government such as the “divine right of kings” were slowly giving way to a belief that stressed individual  rights.  In 1681, Penn crafted a government for Pennsylvania based on these Enlightenment principles. He rejected models of government that forced laws on citizens against their will. Penn emphasized self-government for the people.

In 1696  the Assembly, an elected body of 36 men with power to accept or reject laws, demanded the power to make laws.  While Penn disagreed, he nevertheless believed strongly in representative government.  So he reluctantly changed the way Pennsylvania was governed. The will of the people was more important to him than his own ideas about government.

Penn’s ideas inspired our nation’s founding fathers.  Penn’s vision lives on in the American government’s most important document, the United States Constitution.

Diversity in early Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania quickly became America’s most diverse colony.  Lenape Indians lived near the Delaware River.  Dutch and Swedish settlers had farmed and traded in the region since the 1620s.  During the 1680s, other European settlers arrived at Penn’s invitation.  Some of them purchased slaves from Africa or the Caribbean.

Penn needed settlers with many different skills to build his new colony.  So he invited people from many backgrounds and classes to Pennsylvania.  Some wealthy colonists immediately became leaders in the fledgling colony.  Middle-class people  worked as free laborers or small businessmen.  And members of the “lower sorts” came as indentured servants.

Pennsylvania, from the beginning and by Penn’s design, was a complex society of people of different ethnic, racial, and economic backgrounds.  This model of diversity became the basis for the American “melting pot.”

Visit Pennsbury Manor and discover how William Penn’s ideals inspired the founding fathers.

Atwater-Kent Museum

Portrait of Young William Penn in Armor, date and artist unknown.

William Penn (October 14, 1644–July 30, 1718) founded the Province of Pennsylvania, the British North American colony that became the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. The democratic principles that he set forth served as an inspiration for the United States Constitution. Ahead of his time, Penn also published a plan for a United States of Europe, "European Dyet, Parliament or Estates."

Religious beliefs

Although born into a distinguished Anglican family and the son of Admiral Sir William Penn, Penn joined the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers at the age of 22. The Quakers obeyed their "inner light", which they believed to come directly from God, refused to bow or take off their hats to any man, and refused to take up arms. Penn was a close friend of George Fox, the founder of the Quakers. These were times of turmoil, just after Cromwell's death, and the Quakers were suspect, because of their principles which differed from the state imposed religion and because of their refusal to swear an oath of loyalty to Cromwell or the King (Quakers obeyed the command of Christ to not swear, Matthew 5:34).

Penn's religious views were extremely distressing to his father, Admiral Sir William Penn, who had through naval service earned an estate in Ireland and hoped that Penn's charisma and intelligence would be able to win him favor at the court of Charles II. In 1668 he was imprisoned for writing a tract (The Sandy Foundation Shaken) which attacked the doctrine of the trinity.

"If thou wouldst rule well, thou must rule for God, and to do that, thou must be ruled by him....Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants." –William Penn

Penn was a frequent companion of George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, travelling in Europe and England with him in their ministry. He also wrote a comprehensive, detailed explanation of Quakerism along with a testimony to the character of George Fox, in his Introductionto the autobiographical Journal of George Fox.

Persecutions

Penn was educated at Chigwell School, Essex where he had his earliest religious experience. Thereafter, young Penn's religious views effectively exiled him from English society — he was sent down (expelled) from Christ Church, Oxford for being a Quaker, and was arrested several times. Among the most famous of these was the trial following his arrest with William Meade for preaching before a Quaker gathering. Penn pleaded for his right to see a copy of the charges laid against him and the laws he had supposedly broken, but the judge, the Lord Mayor of London, refused — even though this right was guaranteed by the law. Despite heavy pressure from the Lord Mayor to convict the men, the jury returned a verdict of "not guilty". The Lord Mayor then not only had Penn sent to jail again (on a charge of contempt of court), but also the full jury. The members of the jury, fighting their case from prison, managed to win the right for all English juries to be free from the control of judges. (See jury nullification.)The persecution of Quakers became so fierce that Penn decided that it would be better to try to found a new, free, Quaker settlement in North America. Some Quakers had already moved to North America, but the New England Puritans, especially, were as negative towards Quakers as the people back home, and some of them had been banished to the Caribbean.

The founding of Pennsylvania

In 1677, Penn's chance came, as a group of prominent Quakers, among them Penn, received the colonial province of West New Jersey (half of the current state of New Jersey). That same year, two hundred settlers from the towns of Chorleywood and Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire and other towns in nearby Buckinghamshire arrived, and founded the town of Burlington. Penn, who was involved in the project but himself remained in England, drafted a charter of liberties for the settlement. He guaranteed free and fair trial by jury, freedom of religion, freedom from unjust imprisonment and free elections.

King Charles II of England had a large loan with Penn's father, after whose death, King Charles settled by granting Penn a large area west and south of New Jersey on March 4, 1681. Penn called the area Sylvania (Latin for woods), which Charles changed to Pennsylvania in honor of the elder Penn. Perhaps the king was glad to have a place where religious and political outsiders (like the Quakers, or the Whigs, who wanted more influence for the people's representatives) could have their own place, far away from England. One of the first counties of Pennsylvania was called Bucks County, named after Buckinghamshire (Bucks) in England, where the Penn's family seat was, and from whence many of the first settlers came.

Although Penn's authority over the colony was officially subject only to that of the king, through his Frame of Government he implemented a democratic system with full freedom of religion, fair trials, elected representatives of the people in power, and a separation of powers — again ideas that would later form the basis of the American constitution. The freedom of religion in Pennsylvania (complete freedom of religion for everybody who believed in God) brought not only English, Welsh, German and Dutch Quakers to the colony, but also Huguenots (French Protestants), Mennonites, Amish, and Lutherans from Catholic German states.

Penn had hoped that Pennsylvania would be a profitable venture for himself and his family. Penn marketed the colony throughout Europe in various languages and, as a result, settlers flocked to Pennsylvania. Despite Pennsylvania's rapid growth and diversity, the colony never turned a profit for Penn or his family. In fact, Penn would later be imprisoned in England for debt and, at the time of his death in 1718, he was penniless.

Atwater-Kent Museum

Wampum belt, legend dated 1682. Lenape Tribe; clam and whelk shell beads, leather.

From 1682 to 1684 Penn was, himself, in the Province of Pennsylvania. After the building plans for Philadelphia ("Brotherly Love") had been completed, and Penn's political ideas had been put into a workable form, Penn explored the interior. He befriended the local Indians (primarily of the Leni Lenape (aka Delaware) tribe) , and ensured that they were paid fairly for their lands. Penn even learned several different Indian dialects in order to communicate in negiotiations without interpreters. Penn introduced laws saying that if a European did an Indian wrong, there would be a fair trial, with an equal number of people from both groups deciding the matter. His measures in this matter proved successful: even though later colonists did not treat the Indians as fairly as Penn and his first group of colonists had done, colonists and Indians remained at peace in Pennsylvania much longer than in the other English colonies.

Penn began construction of Pennsbury Manor, his intended country estate in Bucks County on the right bank of the Delaware River, in 1683.

Penn also made a treaty with the Indians at Shackamaxon (near Kensington in Philadelphia) under an elm tree. Penn chose to acquire lands for his colony through business rather than conquest. He paid the Indians 1200 pounds for their land under the treaty, an amount considered fair. Voltaire praised this "Great Treaty" as "the only treaty between those people [Indians and Europeans] that was not ratified by an oath, and that was never infringed." Many regard the Great Treaty as a myth that sprung up around Penn. However, the story has had enduring power. The event has taken iconic status and is commemorated in a frieze on the United States Capitol.

Penn visited America once more, in 1699. In those years he put forward a plan to make a federation of all English colonies in America. There have been claims that he also fought slavery, but that seems unlikely, as he owned and even traded slaves himself. However, he did promote good treatment for slaves, and other Pennsylvania Quakers were among the earliest fighters against slavery.

Penn had wished to settle in Philadelphia himself, but financial problems forced him back to England in 1701. His financial advisor, Philip Ford, had cheated him out of thousands of pounds, and he had nearly lost Pennsylvania through Ford's machinations. The next decade of Penn's life was mainly filled with various court cases against Ford. He tried to sell Pennsylvania back to the state, but while the deal was still being discussed, he was hit by a stroke in 1712, after which he was unable to speak or take care of himself.

Penn died in 1718 at his home in Ruscombe, near Twyford in Berkshire, and was buried next to his first wife in the cemetery of the Jordans Quaker meeting house at Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire in England. His family retained ownership of the colony of Pennsylvania until the American Revolution.

Odds and Ends

Atwater-Kent Museum

Open Arm Chair with caned seat and back, c. 1695-1715.

On November 28, 1984 Ronald Reagan, upon an Act of Congress by Presidential Proclamation 5284 declared William Penn and his second wife, Hannah Callowhill Penn, each to be an Honorary Citizen of the United States.

There is a widely told, entirely apocryphal, story of an en encounter between Penn and George Fox, in which Penn expressed concern over wearing a sword (a standard part of dress for people of his station), and how this was not in keeping with Quaker beliefs. Fox responded, "Wear it as long as thou canst." Later, according to the story, Penn again met Fox, but this time without the sword. Penn then said, "I have taken thy advice; I wore it as long as I could." Though this story is entirely unfounded, it serves as an instructive parable about Penn's Quaker beliefs.

There is a statue of William Penn atop the City Hall building of Philadelphia, built by Alexander Milne Calder. At one time, there was a gentlemen's agreement that no building should be higher than Penn's statue. One Liberty Place was among the first of several buildings in the late 1980s to be built higher than Penn.

There is a common misconception that the smiling Quaker found on boxes of Quaker Oats is William Penn. The Quaker Oats Company has stated that this is not true.

Where did the Quakers settle first?

What was founded by the religious group called the Quakers?

Where did the Quaker religion start?