Search Results

This chapter discusses promotional literature on Pennsylvania. William Penn and other English Quakers developed the first translingual project of promoting and settling a New World colony. Translation and multilingual dissemination became the central tools for constructing and representing this new settlement. In promoting Pennsylvania to religious radicals in Germany and Holland, Penn emphasized spiritual and linguistic utopianism in his promotional writings.

This chapter investigates three of the foundational texts of American culture: John Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity, William Penn’s plan for the city of Philadelphia, and Thomas Jeffersons Declaration of Independence. Each document is analyzed in itself and as a prototype for later cultural practices. Legacies include religious and psychological confessionalism; phrenology; the grid system of the American landscape; the passion for numeracy; and the occlusion of racial minorities, especially Blacks.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to William Penn’s political thought, illuminating the Restoration backdrop of his theorizing on behalf of civil and religious liberty. It surveys the scholarly literature on Penn and notes how little attention Penn has received compared to his more famous contemporaries such as John Locke. Penn’s significance becomes even more pronounced given the emergence of the “British Atlantic” as a locus of scholarship on religious and political contestation during the early modern period, and the fact that Pennsylvania played a central role in the seventeenth-century British Empire. Briefly laying out the main arguments for and against the toleration of religious dissent, and the role Penn played in the development of Quakerism in both England and America, the chapter sets the stage for the in-depth exploration of Penn’s thinking that will follow.

This chapter considers four aspects of William Penn’s legacy in the history of political thought and practice. First, Penn played an important role in the seventeenth-century articulation of religious toleration as a necessary element of legitimate government. His role as a colonial founder, second, made possible his practical attempts to instantiate tolerationist commitments into political institutions in America and sets him apart from others (such as his contemporary John Locke) who, while often involved in political life, never wielded governmental authority the way Penn did. Third, Penn and his colony played a central role in the nascent British Empire, in the increasingly wide circulation of goods, people, and ideas. And finally, Penn is considered as an American, alongside another colonial founder, Roger Williams, whose Rhode Island colony has historically vied with Pennsylvania for pride of place in the story of American religious liberty.

This chapter traces the relationship between theory and practice in the founding of Pennsylvania (1681–1684). The “theory” that William Penn was attempting to realize in Pennsylvania’s “practice” had been worked out in dozens of drafts of founding documents—correspondence, promotional literature, agreements with investors, plans for governmental institutions—over many months, for multiple constituencies. These documents expressed Penn’s intentions as proprietor and framed his attempts to instantiate theoretical arguments about liberty of conscience and representative institutions into Pennsylvania’s political practice; the colony’s political practice is inconceivable without the extensive theorizing in which Penn had engaged during the 1670s. But Penn theorized within fundamentally different contexts as a colonial proprietor than he had as an English Dissenter, and in their transportation to American shores, his theories encountered challenges unforeseen by their English author. The chapter elaborates Penn’s difficult attempts to translate theory into practice during the colony’s early years.

The accession of James II paved the way for William Penn to play an increasingly prominent political role. Liberty of conscience appeared closer than ever, under a sympathetic king who cultivated Penn’s personal involvement in advancing his tolerationist program of repealing penal legislation and the Test Acts. In insisting that legitimate laws are made by consent-based political institutions, and that they ought to be motivated by civil interest and the common good, Penn was able to endorse immediate toleration through the king’s prerogative powers and simultaneously urge the legitimation of James’s Declarations by Parliament. However, Penn’s association with James would bring about his downfall, as he quickly became identified with an unpopular (and, after 1688, deposed) ruler. This chapter elaborates Penn’s high hopes for James, his theoretical and practical contributions to the tolerationist effort, and the eventual downfall of the campaign for liberty of conscience and James’s reign more generally.

This chapter examines the political implications of illicit sea marauding in the British Empire during the period 1697–1701. Beginning in 1692, waves of sea marauders arrived in the North American colonies from the Indian Ocean, settling down in port towns or buying farms and marrying local women. They probably could not have imagined they would play a central role in a political drama. From 1697 to 1701, pirates sparked riots in nearly every colony. However, the true source of radicalism was the colonial gentry. The chapter first considers Cotton Mather's criticism of the piratical economy before turning to fundamental questions about the source of political power in colonial communities. It then looks at accusations against Quakers for their alleged support and protection for pirates and William Penn's views about the piracy problem. It also discusses two laws passed by Parliament in 1700 to address illicit sea marauding: the Act for the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy and An Act to Punish Governors of Plantations in This Kingdom for Crimes by Them Committed in the Plantations.

This chapter describes how William Penn's understanding of how to identify and create healthy living spaces guided his approach to settling Pennsylvania and to governing it, setting the stage for conflict with settlers and constituents who did not share his assessments of the local conditions or his priorities for the city's development. It was far from clear that any city could provide both wealth and well-being; most of the era's major cities were filthy, pestilential places. Penn's own sentiments were haunted by the living memory of London beset by plague and conflagration. At stake was more than just the proprietor's power, but broader anxieties about whether English life would survive the journey to America, whether people made their environments or were made by them, and whether commerce and a healthy constitution could coexist.

This chapter illustrates the problems Penn faced in colonizing Pennsylvania. When he departed the colony in 1684, he was confident that his plan was solid enough and his settlers public-spirited enough that his direct supervision was unnecessary. However, both inclination and obligation limited Penn's ability to impose his plan against the will of his colonists. People ambitious enough to traverse the ocean were unwilling to accede meekly to proprietary demands, and the proprietor ultimately found himself unable to make any demands at all upon a population that came to his colony for their own reasons. With his authority further attenuated by distance, Penn could only rebuke his colonists and lament his impotence as Philadelphia came to embody his most hated aspects of both wilderness and city.

This chapter explores William Penn’s political thought as it developed during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1678–1681). During these years, Penn became an increasingly prominent member of the Quaker leadership, defending Friends in print and before Parliament. He also remained active in the nation’s political life and, given increasingly dim prospects for toleration in England, began exploring the possibility of securing land in America. Penn’s political thinking during these years focused on two primary issues: Parliament and popery. He reiterated his long-standing commitment to Parliament’s role in the governance of the realm and, while echoing popular concerns about the seditious potential of English Catholics, also attempted to find ways to guarantee loyal English Catholics their civil rights. In all these endeavors, Penn sought to articulate a social and political vision that would enable individuals to build a common life together despite their religious differences.

This chapter explores several aspects of William Penn’s political career during the 1690s: the ongoing difficulties that his colony continued to cause him (including the Keithian schism in Pennsylvania’s Quaker community), Penn’s 1693 Essay toward the present and future peace of Europe, and finally the legal and political implications of his eventual return to Pennsylvania at the end of the decade. None of these episodes rises to the level of the events that had first made Penn a public figure and kept him in the public eye for more than twenty years; and he engaged in little explicit political theorizing during the 1690s. Yet each one illustrates Penn’s ongoing involvement in public affairs and the ways in which the political principles that he had refined during the 1670s and 1680s continued to shape his thinking about politics, as the eighteenth century approached and he attempted to return to Pennsylvania.

Chapter two turns to the earliest phases of market-making in British North America. When America's European invaders tried to apply their models of market management to the unfamiliar territory and its people, their efforts frequently foundered on the rocky shores, or languished in the wooded glades, of this expansive and unknowable landscape. Our story of the fate of the early modern market in America must therefore begin with a thorough exploration of the encounter between existing economic assumptions and the colonization process. In other words, before we can inquire into the creation of European-style marketplaces in America, we need to find out what happened when colonists arrived to discover nothing that looked like a marketplace to them, and few people who shared their vision.

This chapter traces the emergence of William Penn as a national political figure by examining his published writings between 1668 and 1671, in the context of the public upheavals surrounding the passage of the Second Conventicle Act in 1670. It traces not only the political, philosophical, and epistemological arguments for religious toleration that were advanced during these years—a debate to which Penn contributed, most particularly with his The great case of liberty of conscience (1670)—but also the thought of those opposed to toleration, and who advanced their own, equally sophisticated, arguments for religious uniformity. The chapter also explores Penn’s commitment to the idea of fundamental law and Magna Carta, and concludes with a consideration of his broader defense of Quaker social practices such as refusing to observe conventional markers of social deference and to swearing oaths.

This chapter argues that the “transcript” of William Penn’s 1670 trial, The peoples ancient and just liberties asserted, represents a sophisticated and substantive work of political theory. Peoples presents embedded principles (a coherent vision of legitimate government, justified by reference to authoritative texts and historical practices); it also communicates political content through the embodied performance of a politics of Dissent, in which what matters is less what the defendants (Penn and fellow Quaker William Mead) say than how they interact with other participants in the court, and what those interactions show about the exercise of legal, social, and political power. This performative aspect of the text illustrates Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “dramatization.” Peoples presents the Penn-Mead trial as epitomizing a politics of dissent against arbitrary authority, of written law against prosecutions built on vague appeals to common law, and of juries as defenders of popular liberties against power-hungry judges.

In his letter of July 12, 1703, to William Penn, Daniel Defoe pointed out that he had been urged by some friends to take advantage of his bail to flee. He apparently thought that he might yet avoid the pillory, and urged Penn to continue his services. The government had succeeded in punishing the body of Defoe, but his images of a type of persecution that most people in England were no longer willing to accept had blunted the attack upon the Dissenters. Defoe was to tell the story of his release in moving terms in Appeal to Honour and Justice. He was attempting to explain his sense of gratitude toward Robert Harley and Queen Anne as a justification for his loyalty to both of them from that point forward. This was not exactly the way Defoe became a secret agent for the Queen and a propagandist for Harley. Defoe probably had difficulty getting Harley to provide exact orders about the kind of propaganda he wanted.

This chapter argues that the distinctive role of land cession treaties in the dispossession of indigenous people in the United States can be traced to historical circumstances in North America and England during the second half of the seventeenth century. Proprietary titles derived from the English Crown were confused, overlapping, and contested by colonists who rested their titles on grants from other colonial powers or on purchases from Native Americans. In practical terms European sovereign claims could seldom be enforced, but neither (in English law) could those derived from treaties of purchase. The imperfect solution that English proprietors of William Penn’s generation discovered was to bring the two sorts of claims together. In theory royal titles remained supreme, but those who held them henceforth had to use the treaty process to extinguish native claims before lands could be sold to settler-colonists.

This book examines sea marauding in the Spanish Indies, the southern Pacific, and the Indian Ocean during piracy's Golden Age, that is, before the turn of the eighteenth century. It argues that piracy flourished during the period because of the support and protection received by illicit sea marauders from the merchant elite on the margins of the British Empire. It also considers the important role played by deep-sea pirates—through their goods and services—in the political and social development of the colonial maritime communities in the areas where they carried out their swashbuckling activities. Finally, the book discusses William Penn's conception of the complexity and malleability of sea marauding as well as the political, legal, and cultural conflicts triggered by the support of maritime banditry.

Chapter 3 surveys Tourgée’s “Bystander” column in the Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, showing how it fostered a national dialogue about the race question by incorporating long extracts from the private letters and public statements of African Americans and whites representing different political opinions and regional identities. The chapter also highlights some of the issues Tourgée addressed in the column: the “lawless violence” directed against African Americans, the horrors of the Southern prison system, the fallacies of scientific racism, the accusations of “ingratitude” whites frequently levelled against African Americans, the Republican party’s abandonment of African Americans, the founding of the National Citizens’ Rights Association through which Tourgée hoped to influence the party, and economic policy. In addition, the chapter explores Tourgée’s stormy relationship with the Inter Ocean’s editor, William Penn Nixon, and with the Republican party bosses who sought to censor and ultimately to abolish the “Bystander” column.