A popular history of the United States of America, Vol. 1 (of 2)

Forty years before the grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn, the western bank of the Delaware river was settled by Swedes, as we have already related. Penn received a territory, the soil of which was already broken by the European planter.

Of William Penn himself, one of the most remarkable men of his age, and the greatest of the American legislators, we must be allowed to say a few words. By his mother’s side he was of Dutch origin, and his father was Admiral Penn, commander of the English fleet at the conquest of Jamaica, and who afterwards distinguished himself under the Duke of York in the war with the Dutch.

William Penn, born in 1644, was the only son of his parents. At so early an age as eleven, as he himself relates, he was suddenly surprised “with an inward comfort and an external glory in the belief of God, and his communion with the soul.” His attention was first turned to the Quakers by the preaching of Thomas Loe; and while at Oxford he and other students withdrew themselves from the established worship, and held their own private religious meetings. They were fined for nonconformity, but to no purpose; and finally were expelled for refusing to wear surplices, which custom was then revived in the college, as well as for disrobing others of them, as a relic of popery. His father, displeased by these religious excesses, and hoping to turn his mind from them, sent him to travel for two years on the continent, after which he studied law in Lincoln’s Inn. Thus, in early manhood perfected by travel and study, he is described as being of “engaging manners, of great natural vivacity and gay good humour, and so skilled in the use of the sword, that he could easily disarm his antagonist.” Every worldly advantage was prepared for him, through the influence of his father and the favour of his sovereign. But his mind was still deeply impressed with “a sense of the vanity of the world, and the irreligiousness of its religion.”

In 1666 he went to Ireland to manage his father’s estates, where he became an openly professing Quaker. “God,” says he, “in his everlasting kindness having guided my feet, in the flower of my youth, when about two-and-twenty years of age.” Apprehended at a Quakers’ meeting held at Cork, he and others were committed to prison, he refusing to find bail for himself.

Admiral Penn now summoned his son home, being greatly annoyed at this open profession of quakerism. At home, the demeanour of his son, which exhibited all the rigid peculiarities of the sect, still further displeased him. He tried every means; even blows, to obtain conformity; but in vain. As regarded “hat worship,” the admiral would have been satisfied if his son would merely have uncovered his head in presence of the king, the Duke of York and himself; but even that the young man would not concede. The scoffs, jeers and wonderment of his gay London acquaintance mattered nothing to him. He bore all meekly, steadfast to that which appeared to him the requirements of duty; and finally his father in anger turned him out of doors penniless.

The affection of his mother preserved him from absolute want; and soon he became quaker preacher and author; and his “Sandy Foundation Shaken” was published, which led to his imprisonment in the Tower. Here he remained for seven months, during which he wrote his “No Cross, No Crown,” the most celebrated of his works. The steadfastness of his spirit was shown by this imprisonment. In vain the good-natured Charles II. wished to lure him to submission; he could not or would not gainsay his conscience. After his liberation, in 1669, he was reconciled to his father through the intervention of the Duke of York, but his adherence to his quaker principles remained unshaken.

The following year, the Conventicle Act being passed, Penn was one of the first sufferers under it. He was committed to Newgate for preaching at what was called “a riotous and seditious assembly,” which was merely one of those out-of-doors meetings which the resolute Quakers held when driven out by force from their meeting-houses. The famous trial of Penn and Mead at the Old Bailey followed, in which an English jury, as resolute in the right as the Quakers themselves, asserted and maintained the prerogative of independent judgment in defiance of the bench, though they were fined forty marks each, and Penn was returned to prison. The same year Admiral Penn died, testifying to his son on his death-bed, that if the Quakers remained true to that which was in them, they would regenerate the world.

William Penn inherited from his father property to the value of £1,500 per annum, and a claim on government to the amount of £16,000. The following year he was again a prisoner in Newgate, one of the most wofully noisome prisons at that time in London, where he lay for six months.

In 1677, in company with George Fox and Robert Barclay, he paid a “religious visit” to Holland and Germany, distributing pamphlets wherever they went, seeds of liberty and truth, which sprang up into after plentiful harvest. And not alone did they address the people, but kings and princes, palatine-princes and magistrates, promulgating everywhere the universal principle of truth, and awakening many souls to its consciousness. The year after his return, Penn pleaded before a committee of the House of Commons, that the affirmation of the Quaker might be legalised instead of an oath; and an enactment for this purpose would have passed but for the sudden prorogation of parliament.

The sufferings of the people to whom he was attached led William Penn to seek for them an asylum in the New World, and his efforts on their behalf were blessed, as we have seen, by their establishment in West Jersey. This great and benevolent act, this planting of “the truth” on a new and prolific soil, led to the extension of still more magnificent plans of philanthropy; and in 1681 William Penn applied to Charles II. for an extensive tract of land, lying on the other side of the Delaware, in liquidation of the debt due to his father. Had Penn demanded the amount of the debt itself from the lavish and impoverished monarch, he would have asked in vain; but to ask the payment of a debt by a grant of land was to make the thing easy to the monarch, while to William Penn the land had fourfold the value of the money. The application was seconded by the Duke of York, who had ever shown a friendly interest in the son of his former naval associate. Besides which, it has been said, that belonging to a persecuted sect himself, he had strong sympathy with a man who, like Penn, had suffered so unflinchingly for conscience-sake.

“At length, after many waitings, watchings, solicitings and disputes in council,” writes William Penn, “my country was confirmed to me under the great seal of England. God will bless and make it the seal of a nation.”

Penn, now in the thirty-seventh year of his age, became the sovereign of a vast province, which was called by the king, Pennsylvania, though Penn himself would have dispensed with the first syllable of the name, as being a species of self-glorification; but the monarch insisted upon its retention.

In April, 1681, Penn issued his proclamation as absolute proprietary, in the following words, addressed to his subjects in the New World:—

“My Friends,—I wish you all happiness here and hereafter. These are to let you know that it hath pleased God in his providence to cast you within my lot and care. It is a business that, though I never undertook before, yet God has given me an understanding of my duty and an honest mind to do it uprightly. I hope you will not be troubled at your change and the king’s choice, for you are now fixed at the mercy of no governor that comes to make his fortune great. You shall be governed by laws of your own making, and live a free, and if you will, an industrious people. I shall not usurp the right of any, or oppress his person. God has furnished me with a better resolution, and has given me his grace to keep it. In short, whatever sober and free men can reasonably desire for the security and improvement of their own happiness, I shall heartily comply with. I beseech God to direct you in the way of righteousness, and therein prosper you and your children after you.—I am, your true friend, William Penn.”

The grant to Penn made him sovereign proprietary not only of Pennsylvania, but of the settlements of the Swedes, Dutch and English, on the western bank of the Delaware and the mouth of the Schuylkill. A royal proclamation, announcing this fact to these settlers, accompanied by the letter to his new subjects above given, was immediately sent over by William Penn by the hand of his young relative, William Markham. At the same time companies were formed in London for commercial purposes, and for the purchase of land and emigration; lands were sold at the rate of 40s. for every 100 acres, the purchasers being entitled also to lots in the city, all land being subject to a quit-rent of 1s. for each 100 acres. In the course of the summer, three vessels of emigrants, with three commissioners on board, set sail for the new land; but good fortune seemed not to attend them; one was driven to the West Indies, another frozen up on the Delaware.

Penn, though he inherited a considerable property from his father, was not by any means a wealthy man. Owing to the liberality of his expenditure on behalf of his suffering brethren, his circumstances were straitened, and he had a growing family; yet such was the integrity of his mind, that he refused £6,000 which were offered him by a London trading company, for a monopoly of the Indian traffic between the Delaware and the Susquehannah. Monopoly was contrary to his principles of justice, and he replied, nobly, that “he would not abuse the love of God, nor act unworthy of his providence, by defiling what came to him clean.” No; his government in Pennsylvania was to be “a Holy Experiment,” for which there was no room in England, and self-aggrandisement, even though himself profited by it, could have no place there.

In September, Penn sent out instructions regarding the laying out of the new city. Wishing to avoid the fault of the cities of the Old World, which, built during times of disquiet, were crowded within narrow bounds, so as to be easily defended in case of need, he desired that his new city should be laid out with ample space, allowing to each house its garden, so as to form “a green country town.” He also sent a friendly letter to the Indians, addressing them as brethren, as children of the same Heavenly Father, “having the same law written in their hearts, and alike bound to love and help to do one another good.”

The “Grand Model” constitution was not the result of more thought than was the frame of government which the deeply religions mind of Penn prepared for his province. According to his views, government, like religion, was based on love, and had for its purpose the advancement and happiness of the people, even more than the correction of evil-doers. Although acknowledging in himself the supreme head of the state, “yet for the matters of liberty,” said he, “I purpose that which is extraordinary—to leave myself and successors no power of doing mischief; that the will of one man may not hinder the good of a whole country.” And again, “It is the great end of government to support power in reverence with the people, and to secure the people from the abuse of power; for liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.” Shaftesbury counselled with Locke, and the intellect of the age produced the “Grand Model;” Penn counselled with Algernon Sidney and his quaker brethren, who, like himself, listened to the Divine Voice within their own souls, and a frame of government suitable to the “Holy Experiment” was the result; and fundamental principles of government were acknowledged, which, though too pure for that age and for that province even, have since become not only the avowed basis of legislature in Pennsylvania, but in Great Britain itself. Truth is immortal, and no “Holy Experiment” is ever tried in vain.

According to the proposed constitution, the legislative and executive authority was vested in a council of seventy-two persons, elected by the freemen for three years, one-third to go out annually; the proprietary or his deputy to preside and have a triple vote. Laws thus proposed were to be submitted for approval or rejection to an assembly of freemen. To this frame of government were subjoined forty “fundamental laws,” agreed upon by Penn and his intending emigrants, religious toleration being of course one of these. The words of this provision were:—“All persons living in this province, who confess and acknowledge the one Almighty and Eternal God to be the creator, upholder and ruler of the world, and that hold themselves obliged in conscience to live peaceably and justly in civil society, shall in nowise be molested or prejudiced for their religious persuasion or practice in matters of faith and worship.”

The proposals which Penn had published soon attracted attention; and a “Free Society of Traders” was immediately formed, who took up, on his terms, 20,000 acres of land, and received in consequence their appurtenant city lots of 100 acres, constituting an entire street of the new city. A German emigration society was also formed, and from the neighbourhood of Frankfort and “the highlands above Worms,” where the simple peasantry had gladly embraced quaker principles at the preaching of Penn, Fox, and others, great numbers not only now, but for several years, continued to flock over to the new land of hope and promise; and Germantown, among other settlements, was founded.

In August, 1682, Penn obtained from the Duke of York a surrender of all claims on his part to the province of Pennsylvania; and soon afterwards a grant of the settlements on the western and southern banks of the Delaware river and bay, which had hitherto been included in the duke’s charter, and claimed as an appurtenance of New York. These now took the title of “The Territories,” and furnished to Pennsylvania the important advantage of an ocean-outlet.

These measures being secured, Penn prepared to embark, together with 100 of his friends, emigrants to the new country. Penn took leave of his wife, the noble and beautiful daughter of Isaac Pennington, to whom he was sincerely attached, in an affecting letter, recommending his children to her love and care, and praying her “to live sparingly till his debts were paid;” yet, as regarded the education of the children, to “let it be liberal; to spare in that respect no cost, for by such parsimony all is lost,” said he, “that is saved.”

The voyage was long and disastrous, owing to the small-pox which broke out in the ship and destroyed one-third of the passengers. On the 27th of October, the ship arrived at Newcastle, on the Delaware, where crowds were gathered to receive their distinguished governor. The following day, the surrender of the Duke of York being read in the court-house, Penn received from the duke’s agent earth and water, in token of the solemn delivery of “the territory” into his hands. After this, he addressed the people, recommending to them peace and sobriety, and assuring them on his part of liberty of conscience and civil freedom. He then proceeded up the broad majestic Delaware to Upland, or Chester, where again crowds of rejoicing simple people, like dwellers in Arcadia, thronged to bid him welcome.

He found the inhabitants of this province, Swedes, Dutch and English, to amount already to between 2,000 and 3,000—“plain, strong and industrious people.” There were six religious societies established, three of Swedish Lutherans and three of the Quakers. “The land itself,” he wrote, “was good, the air clear and sweet, the springs plentiful, and provisions good and easy to come at; an innumerable quantity of wild-fowl and fish; in fine, what an Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would be well contented with.”

“Tradition,” says Bancroft, “describes the journey of Penn and his friends from Chester, in an open boat, in the earliest days of November, to the beautiful banks, fringed with pine-trees, on which the city of Philadelphia was soon to rise.” Markham had already began to build, on Pennsbury Manor, “a stately brick house” as the proprietary residence.

After visits to East and West Jersey and to New York, in compliment to his friend, the duke, and after a meeting with the Friends of Long Island, Penn returned to Chester, where the first assembly was convened. The body of freemen present amounted to seventy-two, and these petitioning that they, “owing to the fewness of the people and their unskilfulness in matters of government, might constitute both assembly and council,” it was enacted that, in future, “the assembly should consist of thirty-six members only, six from each county, to be chosen annually, with a council composed of three members for each county, to hold their seats for three years, one to be chosen each year. The governor and council to possess, jointly, the right of proposing laws.” This latter enactment, as regarded the power of the proprietary governor, which was now made at the special request of the assembly, gave rise to after dissatisfaction and reproaches against Penn as a violation of his original engagement.

It was about this time, in the winter season, that Penn made his celebrated treaty with the Indians, under the great elm-tree of Shakamaxon, which was then leafless, and not heavy with foliage as represented by West. Here Penn met the delegated Indians of the Leni-Lenape, or Delaware confederacy, not for the purchase of land, but to cement with them the covenant of friendship of which he had written. He had written to them as to men and brethren, to whom the same moral obligations referred; he had promised, and his agent Markham had carried out the same principle, that they should be secure in their pursuits and possessions, and that all differences should be adjusted by a peaceful tribunal, composed of an equal number of each race. The representation of this treaty, by West, is not accurate. Bancroft gives it to us thus:—“The delegated chiefs of the forest, men of lofty demeanour and grave aspect, are assembled without their weapons; the old men sit in a half-moon upon the ground; the middle-aged are in a like figure at a little distance behind them; the young foresters form a third semicircle in the rear. Before them stands William Penn, graceful in the summer of life, in dress distinguishable only from his friends, principally young men, by whom he was surrounded, by a light blue silk sash, which was bound round his waist.”

William Penn stood thus in the dignity of noble manhood, upright intentions and brotherly love; and gazing around, beheld, “far as his eye would carry,” the plumed and painted chieftains of the forest gathering round him. It was like the realisation of Christ’s own mission of peace and good will to man; the bow and the tomahawk of the savage were laid aside, and the oldest sachem of the peaceful Delawares announced to the benevolent Onas that “the nations were ready to listen to his words, believing him to be a messenger sent to them from the Great Spirit.”

“We meet,” said William Penn, in reply, “on the broad pathway of good works 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, for that the rains might rust, or a falling tree break. We are the same as if one man’s body were divided into two parts; we are all one flesh and blood.”

The simple sons of the forest, believers in the “Great Spirit,” comprehended these words in their inmost soul; and receiving in good faith Penn’s presents, returned the wampum belt of peace. “We will live,” said they, “in love with Father Onas and his children as long as moon and sun shall endure;” and so saying, the treaty was formally signed, the chieftains marking the emblems of their various tribes. The purchases of Markham were ratified, and others made.

As regards the tree which was in its prime when this group, beautiful in the sight of heaven, stood under its branches, our readers may have an interest in knowing that it was situate on the northern side of Philadelphia, and was standing until March 3rd, 1810, when it was blown down. A marble monument now marks the place where it stood. “It was a remarkably wide-spreading rather than lofty tree, its main branch measuring 150 feet; its age, as computed by its circles of annual growth, was 283 years. While it stood, the Methodists and Baptists held their summer meetings under its shade.” It was truly a “gospel tree.”

The treaty of peace made on this occasion was never broken on either side for seventy years—as long as the Quakers retained the government of the province. The terrible and bloody Indian war of New England was but a few years passed; Maryland and Virginia were in a state of continual hostility with these very Algonquin or Delaware Indians, who were naturally inclined for peace; so also the Dutch. It remained alone for William Penn and his friends, who believing God’s word implicitly—that Christ’s law was one of love, not of violence—came in the guise of peace; and through all the numerous records of quaker life in America, even in the midst of Indian warfare and outrage, not one drop of quaker blood was shed. To be a Quaker, to possess no “weapon of war,” was to be safe from Indian danger. Many a beautiful and touching narrative is related, in the early Friends’ books, of solitary dwellers in the great woods of Virginia and Maryland, when, on the approach of the Indians, who had left fire and desolation behind them, “the fierce dogs that usually kept the place” were cowed into silence, and the pious people, to use their own phraseology, “not having been free in their minds” to take in the string which lifted the latch—their only means of security—lay wakeful, listening to the coming footsteps of the foe, who, on finding the latch-string trustfully outside the door, “spake a few Indian words, and went on.”

Once only was the calm of peace disturbed. A rumour passed through the province, in the year 1688, that 500 Indians were assembled on the Brandywine to massacre the settlers. On this, Caleb Pusey and five other Friends presented themselves unarmed before them, to inquire the cause of this report. “The great God,” said the Quaker, addressing the sachem, “who made all mankind, extends his love to Indians and English. The rains and the dews fall alike on the ground of both; the sun shines on us equally, and we ought to love one another.” “What you say is true,” returned the red chieftain; “go home, and harvest the corn which God has given you: we mean you no harm.”

In January, or the First Month, as Friends called it, of 1683, the ground having been purchased from the Swedes, who had already a church there, the new city was laid out on a neck of land between the confluence of the Schuylkill and the Delaware, “a situation,” said William Penn, “unsurpassed by any of the many places he had seen in the world.” To the infant city, thus pleasantly situated, the name of Philadelphia, or the City of Brotherly Love, was given. The streets were designated from the native groves of chesnut, pine or walnut through which they ran; and so rapid was the growth of the city, that it contained eighty houses by the end of the year; and in two years time it contained 2,500 inhabitants; schools were established, and a printing-press was at work. In three years it was larger than New York in half a century. Well might Penn observe, that he might without vanity say that he had led the greatest colony into America that ever man did on private credit, and that the most prosperous beginnings which ever were are to be found among them. Well might he say so; for in 1682 alone, the year in which Philadelphia was founded, twenty-two vessels, bringing over 2,000 persons, arrived. Many, coming late in the autumn, took up their temporary abode in caves dug in the river banks to receive them; and provisions falling short, they were fed, as if by Providence, by unusual flocks of pigeons and extraordinary “draughts of fishes,” while the friendly Indians themselves brought them game which they had hunted.

In March, the second legislative assembly of the province was held in Philadelphia, though many of the inhabitants as yet lived in hollow trees. Fifty-four representatives, nine from each of the six counties, “Swedes, Dutch and quaker preachers,” were appointed to draw up a charter of liberties which altered and amended the previous laws; William Penn having liberally announced at the opening of the assembly, that as regarded the frame of government prepared in England, “they might amend, alter, or add, and that he was ready to settle such foundations as might be for their happiness.” This principle of legislating for the happiness of the people was ever acknowledged by Penn. To his dying day he declared, even though in this Eden of his planting many poison growths had sprung up which embittered his life, that if the people needed anything to make them happier, he would grant it. The constitution now established was democratic, with the exception of an hereditary proprietary, whose power, however, was controlled by the people. As regarded a revenue, he was offered a tax on all exports, as was the case in Maryland, the revenue of Lord Baltimore being derived from a tax on tobacco; but this he declined, unwilling to “burden his colony with taxes.” What a contrast is this to the views taken by the Lords Culpepper, Arlington and Lovelace! Orphan courts were established for administering the affairs of deceased persons, and for the prevention of lawsuits three “peacemakers” were appointed in each county, thus carrying out the quaker principle of arbitration instead of action at law. Liberal and upright as was Penn’s conduct as head of a government, a signal mistake was made by the incompatible union of two opposing elements, democracy and feudality; Penn’s principles accorded to his colony the utmost popular liberty, but his circumstances made him absolute ruler. Hence for ninety years Pennsylvania was distracted with the jarring of these two discordant elements.

Penn, soon after his arrival in America, visited Lord Baltimore in Maryland, partly as a visit of friendship, and partly for the arrangement of boundaries, which from the very first was an intricate and perplexing question. The defined boundaries, both of Penn’s and Baltimore’s charter, were inconsistent with each other, more especially as the number of miles contained in a degree was now altered to sixty-nine from sixty, by which measurement Baltimore’s grant had been made. This question was no way adjusted, when Penn, in 1684, having organised, as he hoped, a satisfactory government, entered into a treaty of lasting peace with the natives, and seen his city and his colony flourishing in unexampled prosperity, returned to England, “intrusting the great seal to his friend Lloyd, one of the principal quaker settlers, and the executive power to a committee of the council.”

As yet not a cloud dimmed the social or civil horizon of Pennsylvania; and leaving his mansion of Pennsbury, “the sweet quiet” of which seems to have been delicious to his soul, he thus wrote, on board, a farewell to the people of his land of promise, which he sent to them before he sailed:—“My love and my life,” said he, “are to you and with you, and no water can quench it, nor distance bring it to an end. I have been with you, cared for you, and served you with unfeigned love; and you are beloved of me and dear to me beyond utterance. I bless you in the name and power of the Lord, and may God bless you with his righteousness, peace and plenty all the land over! You are come to a quiet land,” continued he, “and liberty and authority are in your hands. Rule for Him under whom the princes of this world will one day esteem it their honour to govern.” Then, addressing the city which he had planted, he breaks forth like an apostle to one of the churches: “And thou Philadelphia, the virgin settlement of this province, my soul prays to God for thee that thou mayst stand in the day of trial, and that thy children may be blessed.”

William Penn reached London in October, 1684, after an absence of two years; and the hot dispute between himself and Lord Baltimore, regarding boundaries, was submitted to a Committee of Trade and Plantations, by which it was decided that the so-called Territories, now constituting the state of Delaware, and which Lord Baltimore claimed, formed no part of Maryland. They were therefore once more formally assigned to Penn, to whom was thus secured that outlet to the ocean which he so much coveted. The northern line of boundary was settled the following year, and that again to the disadvantage of Baltimore.

When the Duke of York ascended the throne as James II., Penn used his influence with him to obtain general liberty of conscience; and through his means 1,200 Quakers alone were liberated from imprisonment for conscience-sake. Nor did his own people only claim his interposition of mercy; it was suffering humanity for which he appealed, and so widely extended was the reputation of his philanthropy and power, that all the oppressed thronged to him for aid; even Massachusetts, just then in the agony of losing her charter, sent to the head of “the abominable sect of Quakers” to beseech his interference on their behalf with the king. And though he could not save the chartered liberties of the other sister-states, yet so great was the esteem with which the monarch regarded him, that Pennsylvania was the only one against whose charter a quo warranto was not issued.

It has been endeavoured to throw obloquy on Penn’s name from his political connexion with James II.; but as the tree must be known by its fruits, Penn’s reputation may safely be left to the test of his works. He founded a state based on the most liberal principles; self-exaltation or self-aggrandisement never formed a part of his plan; and the soundness of his legislative wisdom is shown by the fundamental principles of his government remaining to be those of Pennsylvania to the present time. Penn’s happiness in his province was, like all human happiness, of a very mixed character. Discontents and heart-burnings arose; a democratic assembly warred against a feudal proprietary, each wronging the other, because they were brought into unnatural juxtaposition. Besides the anxieties arising from the dissatisfied condition of a province which he had established with so much care and hope, Penn was harassed by embarrassed circumstances. Nobly refusing a revenue from his state, he was imprisoned for debt in his advancing years; and, to add still further to his distress, when his friend James II. was deposed, and an exile in France, he was imprisoned on an unsupported charge of keeping up a treasonable correspondence with him. In 1692, the government of Pennsylvania was taken from him, and placed in the hands of Fletcher, governor of New York. Two years afterwards, the suspicions against him being removed, he was restored to his rights—“the Territories,” or three lower counties on the Delaware, which in 1691 had withdrawn from their connexion with Pennsylvania and been indulged with a deputy-governor by Penn, now becoming once more a portion of his jurisdiction, having been reunited to the larger state by Fletcher, during his governorship.

The only drawback that appears in the character of the philanthropic legislator of Pennsylvania, is at the same time so incongruous with the spirit of his life and actions, that it seems to stand forth in startling deformity. This refers to negro slaves, whom he held apparently without much sense of injustice. True, he used his influence to insure the slave “moral and religious culture, and the rights and comforts of domestic life,” yet, when he was unsuccessful in so doing, he continued to hold slaves, as, indeed, did other Friends. The poor Germans, “the little handful of Friends from the highlands above the Rhine,” in accordance with the doctrines of George Fox, were the only body in Pennsylvania who at that time saw clearly that it was not lawful for Christians to keep slaves. The unlettered Swedes, half a century before, who settled on the western bank of the Delaware, and now were numbered among William Penn’s people had, however, early borne their testimony against slavery. “The Swedes,” said they, arguing from the sound principle of human nature, “will gain more with a free people, with wives and children, than by slaves, who labour with reluctance and soon perish by hard usage.” The simple wisdom of these peasants was, in this respect, superior to the wisdom of more elevated men whether of that age or the present.