From "The Family of William Penn" by Howard M. Jenkins.
Four of William Penn's Grandchildren.
Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
The picture shows the children of Thomas Penn—Juliana, Louisa Hannah, John, and Granville.
The soldiers did not fire, and the Paxton boys thereupon helped themselves to all the horses they wanted, took the ammunition wagons belonging to the regulars, and set out for Philadelphia. There were almost a thousand of them when they arrived on the high ground of Germantown, and there demanded that certain Indians who were being kept under guard in the Northern Liberties[2] should be given to them on pain of their sacking the city otherwise.
The citizens found that the regular troops could not be relied on, and sent some deputies to treat with the rebels. By agreeing to all the latter demanded, except the massacre of the Indians, the deputies were finally able to induce the mountaineers to return to their homes.
Very soon afterward the Assembly petitioned the English Parliament to abolish the Proprietary government. Before Parliament did this, however, another misadventure had occurred in the province. About 1762 fifty families from Connecticut had moved to the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, and believing the country there to be very productive, they had made some clearings, built log cabins, and grown some fields of corn. John Penn, the governor, heard of this, and in 1764 he sent constables to this settlement to order the pioneers off, claiming that they were on land that had been granted to his grandfather.
The Wyoming settlement now numbered about three thousand persons, and naturally they were unwilling to give up their lands. Then a company was formed in Philadelphia to buy that section of the country from John Penn, and, making use of the improvements of the Connecticut settlers, market it as the company saw fit. They would only buy it, however, on condition that John Penn should first drive out the settlers.
So John Penn, in 1770, hired a crowd of rascals to go into the Wyoming Valley and drive the pioneers away from their cabins and fields. The settlers answered Penn's demands by building a fort which they christened Forty Fort, in honor of the first settlers, who were forty in number. They were always referred to as the First Forty, and were held in high esteem. They had been sent by the Susquehanna Company of Connecticut into the Wyoming Valley.
After some fighting the settlers managed to hold their ground. This became known as the Pennamite War; and, although the governor was backed by some of the leading men of Philadelphia, his attempts to oust the settlers made his rule more distasteful than ever to a people who were growing more and more fond of liberty.
The American Revolution was now at hand, and the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety decided that it was time to annul the charter that had been granted to William Penn, and abolish the Proprietary government. Therefore, two months after the Declaration of Independence was signed, in 1776, the Committee of Safety, now calling itself the "Supreme Executive Council," deposed John Penn from his office, and decreed that what had been the province of Pennsylvania should become a state in the new American Union.
The boundaries of Pennsylvania were by that time definitely settled, and incidentally those boundaries included the rich Wyoming Valley, where now stands the prosperous city of Wilkes-Barre. The title that had belonged to the Penn family was now vested in the state, and the state appropriated £130,000 to be paid to the heirs of William Penn. In addition to this amount the heirs of William Penn, having sided with the Tories during the Revolution, claimed a large sum from the English government after the Revolution, basing their claim on the Act of Parliament that agreed "to indemnify loyal subjects of his Britannic Majesty for losses suffered in the American War." The English government settled this claim by paying William Penn's heirs £500,000. As a result these heirs secured from Pennsylvania and from England more than three million dollars, besides retaining the private estates in Pennsylvania that they had always owned.
Eventually, therefore, Penn's province proved of very great value to his children and grandchildren, although the people who had opened up and settled that new country had gained little from those descendants; they had to look back to the great founder, William Penn, the noble and steadfast Quaker, for the liberty-loving ideas and wise principles of government that helped to make Pennsylvania one of the greatest of the new union of states. It is well that his name should forever be associated with that state, for it is the name of a man of noble character and a fearless champion of liberty.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] It is interesting to recall that this term, "Liberties," had been applied to certain tracts of land lying north and west of the original limits of Philadelphia. The soil contained in these tracts was called "liberty land" or "free lots" because William Penn had made a gift of land in these sections to the first purchasers of lots in the city proper, the amount of "free" land given being in proportion to the amount of "town" land that was bought. The term, "City and Liberties of Philadelphia," was commonly used in the early days of the province, the city containing about 1820 acres, and the Liberties about 16,236 acres. Later, the Northern Liberties became a part of the city of Philadelphia.
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