William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania (1681)

William Penn founded Pennsylvania after King Charles II granted him a royal charter on 4 March 1681. A wealthy Quaker convert, Penn designed the colony as a “holy experiment”: a society with freedom of worship, representative government and peaceful relations with the Lenape people. His colony, and its planned capital of Philadelphia, became one of the most prosperous and diverse in English America.

Background: Penn and the Quakers

William Penn was born in London in 1644, the son of Admiral Sir William Penn, a naval commander who helped bring about the restoration of Charles II in 1660. As a young man Penn joined the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, a movement founded by George Fox in the 1650s. Quakers rejected paid clergy, oaths and formal sacraments, refused to remove their hats before social superiors and held that an “inner light” of God was present in every person.

Under the Restoration Church of England, Quakers were fined and imprisoned in their thousands. Penn himself was jailed several times. While locked in the Tower of London in 1668–1669 he wrote No Cross, No Crown. In 1670 he and William Mead were tried for preaching in the street; when the jury refused to convict, the jurors were themselves imprisoned, and the resulting decision in Bushel’s Case became a landmark for the independence of juries.

Penn also gained colonial experience. In the 1670s he helped manage West New Jersey, a Quaker settlement whose founding document of 1677 promised religious freedom and jury trials.

The charter of 1681

In 1680 Penn petitioned the king for land west of the Delaware River. The Crown owed some £16,000 to his late father, and a grant of American land, which cost the king nothing, was a convenient way of settling the debt. Some at court also welcomed the chance to send Dissenters across the Atlantic.

The charter, signed on 4 March 1681, made Penn the proprietor of a territory of about 45,000 square miles (some 120,000 square kilometres) between New York and Maryland. He could appoint officials, make laws with the consent of the freemen, and sell land, but laws had to be sent to England for review and the colony had to obey the Navigation Acts. Penn proposed calling it “Sylvania”; the king added “Penn” in honour of the admiral. In 1682 the Duke of York also leased Penn the three “Lower Counties” on the Delaware, which later became the state of Delaware.

The holy experiment and the Frame of Government

Penn described his aim as a “holy experiment”, a model society that would show the world how Christians could govern themselves justly. He advertised the colony widely, publishing promotional tracts in English, Dutch and German and selling land to hundreds of “first purchasers”, mostly Quakers from England, Wales and Ireland.

His Frame of Government, issued in April 1682, set up an elected council and assembly alongside the governor. It was accompanied by laws guaranteeing liberty of conscience to everyone who acknowledged one God, trial by jury and limits on capital punishment, which was reserved mainly for murder rather than the scores of offences punished by death in England. The Great Law, passed by the first assembly at Chester in December 1682, confirmed these principles. Office-holding, however, was restricted to Christians, a limit similar to that of Maryland’s earlier Toleration Act.

The constitution proved contested. Colonists pressed for more power for the elected assembly, and Penn revised the frame in 1683; a further frame followed in 1696, and finally the Charter of Privileges of 1701, which remained Pennsylvania’s constitution until 1776.

Penn and the Lenape

The land Penn received was home to the Lenape, also called the Delaware, as well as smaller numbers of Susquehannock and other peoples, along with earlier Swedish, Finnish and Dutch settlers. Before sailing, Penn wrote a letter to the Lenape expressing his wish to live with them in friendship. Unlike many colonial founders, he insisted on buying land from them through formal agreements before settling it, and his officials made a series of documented purchases from 1682 onward.

Tradition holds that Penn met Lenape leaders, including the sachem Tamanend, beneath a large elm at Shackamaxon, on the Delaware north of Philadelphia, and agreed a treaty of lasting friendship. No written text of this “Great Treaty” survives, and historians treat the details as legend built around real meetings and purchases. Benjamin West’s famous painting of 1771–1772 created the popular image. Relations remained largely peaceful during Penn’s lifetime, but later proprietors, including his sons, broke with his approach, notably in the fraudulent Walking Purchase of 1737.

Building Philadelphia

Penn sent his cousin William Markham as deputy governor in 1681 and arrived himself aboard the ship Welcome, reaching New Castle on the Delaware on 27 October 1682. About a third of the Welcome’s passengers had died of smallpox on the voyage.

Penn chose a site for his capital, Philadelphia, Greek for “brotherly love”, between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. With the surveyor-general Thomas Holme he laid out a grid of straight, wide streets with a large central square and four smaller public squares. Remembering the plague and Great Fire of London, Penn wanted a spacious “green country town” with houses set in gardens. Settlers soon crowded towards the riverfront instead, but the grid survives in central Philadelphia today.

Immigration was rapid. In 1683 German Mennonites and Quakers led by Francis Daniel Pastorius founded Germantown, whose residents issued the Germantown petition against slavery in 1688. Estimates suggest Pennsylvania had around 18,000–20,000 colonists by 1700, and Philadelphia was becoming a major Atlantic port.

Penn’s later life

Penn returned to England in 1684, partly to defend his boundaries in a long dispute with Lord Baltimore of Maryland; the issue was settled only by the Mason–Dixon survey of 1763–1767. His closeness to James II led to suspicion after the Glorious Revolution, and he briefly lost control of the colony in 1692–1694. He visited again in 1699–1701, then left for good.

Penn made little money from Pennsylvania and was imprisoned for debt in 1708 after a dispute with his former steward. Strokes from 1712 left him incapacitated, and he died at Ruscombe, Berkshire, on 30 July 1718. Like many wealthy colonists of his time, he also owned enslaved Africans, a fact that sits uneasily with his reputation.

Timeline

• 1644, 14 October: William Penn is born in London.
• 1670: The Penn–Mead trial leads to Bushel’s Case on jury independence.
• 1681, 4 March: Charles II signs the Pennsylvania charter.
• 1682, April–May: Penn issues the Frame of Government and accompanying laws.
• 1682, 27 October: Penn arrives at New Castle aboard the Welcome.
• 1682, December: The first assembly passes the Great Law at Chester.
• 1683: Thomas Holme publishes the plan of Philadelphia; Germantown is founded.
• 1701: The Charter of Privileges becomes the colony’s constitution.
• 1718, 30 July: Penn dies in England.

Why it matters

Pennsylvania put into practice ideas of religious freedom, jury rights and representative government that later shaped the United States; the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall stand in Penn’s capital. Its founding also shows the gap between ideals and reality, from the failures of later land dealings with the Lenape to the presence of slavery in a colony founded on liberty of conscience.