CHAPTER IX.

THE "FRIENDS" OR "QUAKERS WILLIAM PENN OBTAINS A CHARTER FOR PENNSYLVANIAEMIGRATION TO PENNSYLVANIA-PENN VISITS AMERICA-THE SWEDES ON THE DELAWARE TREATY WITH THE INDIANS-PENN VISITS NEW YORK-MEETS THE FIRST PENNSYLVANIA ASSEMBLY-VISITS LORD BALTIMORE--FOUNDS PHILADELPHIA-SETTLERS IN NORTH CAROLINA -THE CAROLINAS GRANTED TO ROYAL FAVORITES -SETTLEMENTS ON THE CAPE FEAR~~~ CHARLESTON FOUNDED-GOVERNMENT FOR THE CAROLINAS FRAMED.

L

ATER in the seventeenth century than the period of settlement in Delaware and New Jersey, was the domain called Pennsylvania colonized, chiefly by a sect called Quakers in derision. That sect appeared in England at about the time when Roger Williams was there to procure a charter for Rhode Island. Their founder and preachers were among the boldest and yet the meekest of the non-conformists. Their morality was so strict that the world called them ascetics-persons who devote their lives to religion only. They carried this strictness into all departments of life and personal habits. Fashionable dress, extravagance in expenditure, dancing, attendance at theatres, games of chance and other amusements were forbidden; and music was discouraged as a seductive vanity. Taking part in war, slavery, lawsuits, intemperance and profanity of speech, was a sufficient reason, if persisted in, for the expulsion of a member from the Society; and the whole body was bound to keep a watch upon the actions of each other. Their practices so generally agreed with their principles that society was compelled to admit that the profession of a Quaker or "Friend," as they styled themselves, was a guaranty of a morality above the level of the world.

George Fox, a shoemaker of Leicestershire, England, was the founder of this sect. At the age of nineteen years, conceiving himself to be called by God to preach the gospel of Jesus, he went from place to place exhorting his hearers to repentance and newness of life. He complained of the coldness and spiritual deadness of all the modes and forms of religious worship around him, and thereby he soon excited a persecuting spirit by which his ministerial life of about forty years was marked as a pilgrimage from one prison to another. When, in 1650, he was called before Justice Bennet, of

Derby, he admonished that magistrate to repent, and "tremble and quake before the word of the Lord," at the same time his own body was violently agitated by emotion. Then and there the sect received the name of Quakers.

Among the multitude of converts to the moral and religious doctrines of George Fox was young William Penn, a son of the distinguished admiral of that name. He embraced the doctrines and adopted the mode of life of George Fox and his followers, while he was yet in college. Then he had a

PENN AS UMPIRE.

long and severe struggle with his father, a
worldly and ambitious man, for the privi-
lege of following the directions of his con-
science. He was beaten and turned out
of doors by the angry admiral; he was
sent to France to be lured with gayety;
and he was dazzled with promises of
wealth and distinction. He suffered with
his sect. On one occasion he was tried,
with another, on a charge of preaching in
the streets. The jury, after being kept.
without fire, food or water two days and
nights, brought in a verdict of
"not
guilty," when they were each heavily fined
by the court and committed to Newgate;
and Penn and his companion were also
fined and imprisoned for contempt of
court in wearing their hats in the presence
of that body. The young Quaker was
then only about twenty-four years of age.

Many "Friends" had emigrated to America, and two had become proprietors of New Jersey. Penn acted as umpire between them, in a dispute that arose, and so his particular attention was drawn toward this country. He looked with longing eyes across the Atlantic for a home for himself and his sectarian friends, out of the reach of persecution. From the crown he obtained a charter for a vast territory beyond the Delaware, in payment of a debt of eighty thousand dollars due to his father from the government, with perpetual proprietaryship given to him and his heirs, in the fealty of an annual payment of two beaver skins. Penn proposed to call the domain "New Wales," in honor of the land of his ances

CHAP. IX.

FOUNDING OF PENNSYLVANIA.

279

tors, but the Welch secretary of state objected. Then he suggested “Sylvania" as appropriate for such a woody country. The secretary who drew up the charter prefixed the name of Penn to Sylvania, in the document. The proprietor offered him a hundred dollars if he would leave it off. On his refusal to do so, Penn complained to the king-the "merrie. King Charlie "who insisted that the province should be called "Pennsylvania,' in honor of his dead friend the admiral. And so it was. The domain extended north from New Castle in Delaware three degrees of latitude, and five degrees of longitude west from the Delaware River. To Penn was given power to ordain all laws with the consent of the freemen, subject to the approval of the king. No taxes were to be raised except by the Provincial Assembly; and clergymen of the Anglican Church were to be allowed to reside in the province without molestation.

Penn's charter was granted on the 14th of March, 1681. In May he sent his kinsman, William Markham, to take possession of his province and to act as deputy governor. A large company of emigrants went with him. They were employed by the "Company of Free Traders," who had purchased lands in Pennsylvania of the proprietor. They seated themselves near the Delaware and "builded and planted." With the help of Algernon Sidney, the sturdy republican martyr who perished on the scaffold soon afterward, Penn drew up a code of wise, liberal and benevolent regulations for the government of the colony, and sent them to the settlers the next year for their approval. It was not a formal constitution, but a body of wholesome laws for the benefit of all concerned.

Penn found that the want of a seaboard for his province would be a serious bar to its future prosperity. He coveted Delaware for that purpose, and resolved to have it if possible. It was claimed by Lord Baltimore as a part of Maryland, and had been a matter of dispute between him and the Duke of York. The latter, for the sake of peace, offered to buy the territory of Baltimore. The baron would not sell. Penn then assured the duke that Lord Baltimore's claim was "against law, civil or common." The duke gladly assented to the opinion, and the worldly-wise Quaker obtained from his grace a quit-claim deed for the territory comprising the whole State of Delaware, then, as now, divided into the counties of Newcastle, Kent, and Sussex; also for all of his interest in the soil of Pennsylvania.

When Penn had gained these coveted possessions, he made immediate preparations for going to America; and within a week after the bargain was officially settled, he set sail in the ship Welcome with about one hundred emigrants, many of whom died of small-pox on the voyage. That was at the close of August, 1682. On his arrival at New Castle early in November,

he found almost a thousand new emigrants there. These, with the three thousand old settlers-Swedes, Dutch, Huguenots, Germans and Englishcomposed materials for the solid foundation of a state. There, in the presence of the people, he received from the agents of the Duke of York a formal surrender into his hands of that fine domain. The Dutch had, long before, conquered and absorbed the Swedes on the Delaware; and by virtue of his charter, giving him a title to all New Netherland, the duke claimed this territory as his own. By this transfer, Penn inherited for himself and descendants a dispute with the proprietors of Maryland. In honor of the duke, the courteous Quaker called Cape Henlopen Cape James, but the two capes of the Delaware-Henlopen and May-have preserved their original name given to them by the Dutch.

Having secured his domain, Penn went many miles up the Delaware River, to the present Kensington district of Philadelphia, and there, under a

wide-spreading elm, just shedding its foliage, he concluded a treaty with Indian chiefs, not for the purchase of lands, but to confirm what Markham had promised them for him, and to make an everlasting covenant of peace and friendship with them. "We meet," Penn said, "in the broad pathway of good faith and good will; no advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be openness and love. I will not call you children; for parents sometimes chide their children too severely; nor brothers, only; for brothers differ. The friendship between me and you, I will not compare to a chain;