Colonial Pennsylvania: From Penn’s Charter to Independence

Colonial Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony chartered to William Penn by King Charles II in 1681 and governed under Penn’s family until the American Revolution, distinguished from the other English colonies by broad religious liberty, a powerful elected Assembly, unusually diverse immigration, and a founding Quaker vision that eventually collided with frontier warfare, dispossession of the Lenape, and the persistence of slavery. Over nearly a century, it grew from a wilderness grant into the intellectual and commercial center of British America, and its charters and constitutions shaped ideas that reappeared in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.¹

How Pennsylvania Was Founded

On March 4, 1681, Charles II granted William Penn a charter creating the “Province and Seigniorie” of Pennsylvania and named Penn and his heirs “true and absolute Proprietaries.”² The grant partly settled a debt of roughly £16,000 that the Crown owed Penn’s late father, Admiral Sir William Penn.¹ The charter also cited Penn’s stated aim to “enlarge our English Empire” and to bring Christianity and civil society to Indigenous peoples.³

The territory ran along the Delaware River on the east, from twelve miles north of New Castle Town up to the 43rd degree of northern latitude, extended five degrees of longitude westward, and dropped south along a circle drawn twelve miles from New Castle before running west along roughly the 40th parallel.³ That description carried a surveying ambiguity that would fuel decades of conflict with Maryland, because a strict reading of the 40th parallel would have put Philadelphia inside Maryland.⁴

As proprietor, Penn received sweeping rights: control of the land, waterways, minerals, and wildlife; authority to enact laws with the consent of the freemen or their deputies; and power to appoint judges, establish courts, incorporate towns, and raise men for defense. In return he owed the Crown two beaver skins per year delivered to Windsor Castle, one-fifth of any gold or silver ore, compliance with the Navigation Acts, and submission of colonial laws to the Privy Council within five years for possible annulment. He was also required to accept an Anglican minister whenever twenty colonists petitioned the Bishop of London.²

The Holy Experiment and Religious Liberty

Penn described his colony as a “Holy Experiment,” grounded in the Quaker conviction that “that of God in each person” could shape a society governed by conscience rather than coercion.⁵ Having been imprisoned in England for his own religious dissent, he made liberty of conscience the colony’s bedrock principle. The Great Law of 1682 provided that no person acknowledging “one Almighty God” would be “molested or prejudiced” for their religious persuasion, making Pennsylvania the only large political unit in the western world at that time to guarantee such protection.⁶

Quakers, Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Mennonites, Amish, French Huguenots, Catholics, and Jews all settled in Pennsylvania.⁷ The tolerance had limits, though. Voting and officeholding were restricted to Protestants, and after 1706, officeholders had to make a declaration against Roman Catholic doctrines such as transubstantiation.⁸ Jews, Muslims, and Catholics could worship freely but could not hold political office. Even so, the arrangement was more permissive than any other English colony, and Penn recruited settlers from continental Europe through promotional works aimed at Dutch and German readers.⁹

How the Colony Was Governed

Penn drafted a series of constitutional documents rather than simply imposing rule. The first Frame of Government, dated April 25, 1682, created a 72-member Provincial Council to propose laws and an Assembly of up to 200 to approve or reject them, with the proprietor presiding over the Council. The Assembly could not initiate legislation.¹⁰⁸

Alongside the Frame, Penn and the first settlers enacted the Great Law at Upland (now Chester) on December 4–7, 1682. It reshaped criminal and civil law well beyond governance. The death penalty was limited to premeditated murder alone, a sharp departure from English law, which imposed it for dozens of offenses.⁶ Prisons were to function as work-houses for redemption through labor, free of fees, and prisoners were entitled to bail except in capital cases. Trials were to be held by twelve-member juries in open court, with proceedings recorded in plain English and all fees posted publicly. All children were required to learn a trade or skill by age twelve, and deeds and financial instruments above £5 had to be enrolled in a public registry.¹⁰

The Frame was amended quickly. A second Frame in 1683 reduced the size of both houses. A 1696 frame from Deputy Governor William Markham authorized the Assembly to propose bills for the first time.⁸

The 1701 Charter of Privileges

The document that governed Pennsylvania for the next 75 years was the Charter of Privileges, which Penn signed on October 28, 1701, just before sailing back to England for the last time. It replaced the earlier frames and served as the colony’s constitution until the Revolution.¹¹

Its most consequential change was structural: the Provincial Council was stripped of its legislative role, leaving a unicameral Assembly as the sole lawmaking body.¹²⁷

The Charter’s first article declared religious liberty “inviolably for ever” for any monotheist living peaceably under the government and provided that no one could be compelled to attend or support any ministry against their will.¹² Christians of any denomination were eligible for office, and Quakers could affirm rather than swear oaths.¹¹ Accused criminals were guaranteed the same access to witnesses and counsel as prosecutors, property disputes had to be handled by ordinary courts, and estates were protected against forfeiture in cases of suicide or accidental death. Amending the Charter required the governor’s consent and a six-sevenths vote of the Assembly.

Proprietors Versus the Assembly

Penn’s relationship with his own colonists was stormy. He expected settlers to fund government through taxes while he retained proprietary revenues from land sales and quitrents for himself. The Assembly argued that since Penn collected quitrents, he should pay the governor’s salary and public expenses. By 1685 Penn had spent £1,200 on land purchases from Indigenous peoples, and by 1711 the figure reached £4,000. Legal fees and a ruinous lawsuit with his agent Philip Ford forced him to mortgage the province for £6,600 in 1708. He estimated that by 1705 at least 40,000 acres were occupied by squatters who paid no rent. In 1712 he tried to sell his proprietary rights back to the Crown, but a stroke left him unable to finalize the papers before his death in 1718.¹³

After Penn’s death, the proprietary title passed primarily to his son Thomas Penn, who abandoned Quakerism and governed through appointed deputies from England. Taxation fights sharpened. The Penn family claimed exemption from taxes on their proprietary estates; the Assembly wanted them to contribute like everyone else. In 1757 the Assembly sent Benjamin Franklin to London to press for a bill taxing Penn family lands to fund the colony’s defense.¹⁴ By 1760 the King-in-Council approved the tax, and a 1764 compromise required the proprietors to pay at the same rate as other inhabitants.¹⁵

Delaware’s Separation From Pennsylvania

Penn was also proprietor of the “Three Lower Counties on the Delaware” — New Castle, Kent, and Sussex — which the Duke of York had deeded to him in 1683.¹⁶ He tried to govern them under a single assembly with Pennsylvania, but their Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, and English settlers resented Philadelphia’s dominance and disputed the legal basis of Penn’s title over their territory.¹⁷ In 1704 the two regions established separate assemblies while continuing to share a governor, an arrangement that lasted until independence.¹⁸ Delaware’s first separate legislature met at New Castle on May 22, 1704.

Who Settled Pennsylvania and How the Economy Worked

Penn’s recruitment and the colony’s religious tolerance drew waves of settlers from England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Philadelphia grew from roughly 2,000 people around 1692 to 23,000 by 1765.¹⁹ By the 1730s, Irish and German-speaking immigrants outnumbered the English in the city. Scots-Irish settlers, most of them Presbyterian, numbered about 7,500 before 1740. German settlers organized institutions such as the German Society, founded in 1764 to help newcomers find work and housing.⁹

The diversity was not universally welcomed. In 1717 Governor William Keith warned the Assembly about the “inconveniences” of unlimited foreign arrivals, and the Provincial Council imposed a tax on incoming Palatines. By 1727 the Assembly expressed fear that non-English speakers could prove a “dangerous Consequence to the Peace.”⁹ Scots-Irish and Irish settlers were often steered to the frontier, where they served as a buffer between colonial settlements and Native American territory.

The economy was anchored by agriculture. Southeastern Pennsylvania, known as the “Breadbasket of North America,” produced wheat, corn, rye, flax, and hemp. Wheat in the form of grain and flour was the leading export.¹⁹ Roughly 38 percent of vessels clearing Philadelphia between the mid-1730s and 1760 sailed directly for the West Indies, carrying grain products, staves, and lumber.²⁰ Flaxseed became a significant export to Ireland in the 1730s, and iron production, which began in 1716, grew into a major industry after 1750. Philadelphia became the financial center of British America, described as second only to London in economic influence within the empire.²¹

Relations With the Lenape and the Walking Purchase

Penn’s early dealings with the Lenape (Delaware) people were built on purchase rather than conquest. On arriving in the Delaware Valley, he negotiated agreements bringing land under proprietary title and reserved certain areas containing Lenape villages from sale.²² A “Great Treaty” at Shackamaxon in 1682 between Penn and the Lenape leader Tamanend entered Pennsylvania mythology, though no original treaty document survives and its traditional date conflicts with Penn’s documented schedule. Voltaire described it as “the only treaty between those people and the Christians that was not ratified by an oath, and was never infring’d.”²³ Peaceful relations held during Penn’s lifetime and deteriorated after his death.

The rupture came with the Walking Purchase of 1737. Penn’s sons, led by Thomas Penn, produced an unsigned deed purportedly dating to 1686, claiming their father had been promised land extending as far as a man could walk in a day and a half from Tohickon Creek. They pre-sold land before the walk even occurred, including 20,000 acres to William Allen in 1729.²⁴ They used a compressed-scale map to mislead Lenape leaders about the scope of the claim, hired three of the colony’s fastest runners, cleared paths in advance, and offered a prize for the greatest distance.²⁵ On September 19, 1737, starting from the Wrightstown Friends Meetinghouse, the fastest runner, Edward Marshall, covered roughly 65 miles at a pace exceeding four miles per hour. The result was the seizure of approximately 1,200 square miles of Lenape territory.

Thomas Penn enlisted the Iroquois Confederacy to enforce the seizure. Many Lenape later allied with the French during the French and Indian War and attacked the Pennsylvania frontier. In 1758 the northern half of the purchase was relinquished to the Iroquois, and in 1762 the Lenape received £400 in compensation for that portion.²⁵ The Lenape were progressively pushed westward through the 18th century, eventually settling in areas including Indiana, Kansas, and what became Oklahoma.²²

The Maryland Border Dispute and the Mason-Dixon Line

The ambiguous southern boundary in Penn’s charter overlapped with the Maryland charter that Charles I had granted to the Calvert family in 1632. Both families claimed land between the 39th and 40th parallels. In the 1730s the dispute produced actual violence, in what became known as Cresap’s War. Thomas Cresap, a Maryland land agent living in present-day Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, was called the “Maryland Monster” by locals. Militias from both colonies clashed, and in 1736 Pennsylvanians captured Cresap after setting his home on fire and accusing him of murder.⁴

A 1738 peace treaty and a 1750 court ruling fixed the border at roughly 39 degrees and 40 minutes north latitude.⁴ In 1763 the Penn and Calvert families commissioned English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to mark the line definitively. The survey, conducted from 1763 to 1767, placed stones engraved with “P” and “M” at every mile and larger crownstones bearing the family arms every five miles. Mason and Dixon halted at the Cheat River in July 1767 after encountering Native American opposition. The remaining 36 miles were completed in 1774 by the Philadelphia astronomer David Rittenhouse.²⁶ The line took on a much larger meaning after Pennsylvania’s 1780 abolition law and the 1820 Missouri Compromise, when it came to mark the symbolic boundary between free and slave states.

War on the Frontier and the End of Quaker Dominance

The Seven Years’ War (1756–63) forced a reckoning with the tension between Quaker pacifism and frontier defense. General Edward Braddock used Philadelphia as a staging area for his 1755 expedition against French Fort Duquesne, but his force was ambushed near the Monongahela River on July 9. Two-thirds of his men were killed or wounded, and Braddock himself was mortally wounded.²⁷ The defeat exposed the frontier to devastating French and Indian raids.

The colony’s response was slowed by political deadlock. The proprietary faction wanted to limit the Penn family’s financial exposure, and the Quaker-dominated Assembly resisted funding a militia on both principled and practical grounds. Western frontier counties, which took the brunt of the raids, had only 10 representatives in the Assembly against 26 for the eastern counties.²⁷ In 1755, Benjamin Franklin pushed through Pennsylvania’s first militia law, though Governor Robert Hunter Morris initially opposed it.²⁸ By 1756 the Penn family agreed to donate funds for defense, the Assembly appropriated money for a militia, and the province declared war on hostile Indian groups and offered scalp bounties. Six Quaker assemblymen resigned rather than violate pacifist principles, and the fall 1756 elections ended the Quaker legislative majority that had governed Pennsylvania since its founding.

The Paxton Boys

The war’s aftermath brought a still more shocking episode. On December 14, 1763, during Pontiac’s Rebellion, a group of roughly 57 armed Scots-Irish frontiersmen from the Paxton area of Dauphin County murdered six Conestoga Indians at their village. On December 27 the same mob killed the surviving Conestogas who had been placed in a Lancaster jailhouse for their protection.²⁹ An eyewitness, William Henry, described victims who had been “shot, scalped, hackled and cut to pieces.”³⁰ The Conestogas were Christian converts living under the colonial government’s protection, and no evidence linked them to frontier raids.³¹

Governor John Penn issued proclamations demanding arrests, but no one was prosecuted, because frontier sympathies favored the killers. In January 1764 more than 250 armed frontiersmen marched on Philadelphia, targeting about 140 Indians who had sought sanctuary in the city. Franklin led a delegation that intercepted the marchers and negotiated a peaceful dispersal in exchange for a formal hearing of their grievances, though the Assembly ultimately provided no redress.²⁹ The episode further eroded Quaker influence. By 1765, Presbyterian leaders held 11 of the 36 Assembly seats. Franklin wrote that the frontier people were “yet greater Barbarians than the Indians” for continuing to “murder them in time of Peace.”³⁰

Slavery and Early Abolitionism

Slavery existed in the Delaware Valley before Penn’s charter, practiced by Dutch and Swedish settlers, and it continued under proprietary rule. The institution remained smaller than in the southern colonies: roughly 1,000 enslaved people among 30,000 colonists in 1700, peaking at about 6,000 out of 120,000 in 1750. Enslaved people worked as house servants, farmhands, iron-furnace laborers, and craftsmen. Colonial “Black codes” prohibited them from assembling in groups larger than four, traveling more than ten miles without permission, marrying Europeans, receiving trial by jury, or purchasing alcohol.³² Penn himself held enslaved people at his estate, Pennsbury.⁷

Pennsylvania also produced the earliest sustained antislavery movement in America. In 1688, four German Quakers in Germantown — Francis Daniel Pastorius, Garret Hendericks, Derick op de Graeff, and Abraham op de Graeff — drafted what is recognized as the first formal antislavery protest in the British colonies.³³ Their petition invoked the Golden Rule, asked how Quakers could condemn stealing while purchasing stolen human beings, and warned that enslaved people had as much right to fight for their freedom as masters had to keep them in bondage. The petition moved up through the monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings, and at each stage was deemed “too weighty” to address. The Burlington Yearly Meeting declined to take a position.³⁴

Quaker antislavery activism continued to build. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting criticized slave importation in 1696, objected to slave trading in 1754, and in 1775 moved to disown members who refused to free their enslaved people. Anthony Benezet and John Woolman were central figures. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society was founded in 1775.³²

On March 1, 1780, four years after independence, Pennsylvania passed the Gradual Abolition Act, the first legislative enactment for the abolition of slavery in America. The law did not immediately free anyone already enslaved. It declared that children born to enslaved mothers after March 1, 1780, would become free at age 28. Owners were required to register existing enslaved people by November 1, 1780, and failure to register produced automatic freedom.³⁵ The enslaved population dropped from about 3,737 in 1790 to 64 by 1840, and the 1850 census recorded zero enslaved people in the state.³²

Independence and the 1776 Constitution

As tensions with Britain sharpened in the 1770s, Pennsylvania’s political establishment moved cautiously. The Assembly, still operating under the 1701 Charter of Privileges, instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress to oppose independence as late as early 1776.³⁶ The push came from below. Radical patriots organized a “Provincial Congress” at Carpenters’ Hall, and on May 20, 1776, a public meeting of roughly 4,000 citizens in the State House Yard voted to replace the existing Assembly.³⁷

A Provincial Conference meeting June 18–25 at Carpenters’ Hall — with delegates including Franklin, Thomas McKean, and Benjamin Rush — abolished the old property qualification for voting, extended the franchise to adult militia members, and on June 24 formally instructed Pennsylvania’s congressional delegates to vote for independence.³⁷ On July 2, 1776, the Pennsylvania delegation voted 3–2, with two abstentions, to support Richard Henry Lee’s resolution that the United Colonies “are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States.” The formal Declaration was approved on July 4 and read publicly for the first time in the State House Yard on July 8.³⁶

A constitutional convention met from July 15 to September 28, 1776, and produced what has been called the most democratic state constitution of the era. It was not submitted to the public for ratification.³⁸ All legislative power was vested in a single house of representatives elected annually, with members limited to four years of service in any seven-year period. The office of governor was abolished and replaced by a twelve-member Supreme Executive Council serving rotating three-year terms, with a president chosen annually by joint ballot of the Assembly and Council.³⁹ A Council of Censors, elected every seven years, was empowered to review whether the constitution had been faithfully observed and could call a new constitutional convention. Suffrage was extended to all freemen age 21 and older who had resided in the state for one year and paid taxes, replacing the old property qualification. A Declaration of Rights guaranteed freedom of worship, speech, and the press, protected the right to bear arms, and provided for a speedy public trial by an impartial jury with protections against unreasonable search and seizure.⁴⁰National Constitution Center. Pennsylvania

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26
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28
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40