Colonial Pennsylvania: From Penn’s Charter to the Paxton Boys

Colonial Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony founded in 1681 when King Charles II granted a charter to the Quaker William Penn for a large territory west of the Delaware River, and over the next century it became one of the most distinctive experiments in self-governance, religious tolerance, and ethnic diversity in the Atlantic world.¹ Its founding documents pioneered protections for liberty of conscience, trial by jury, and legislative self-rule. Its history also carried fraudulent dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the persistence of slavery alongside the earliest organized opposition to it, and frontier violence that tested every ideal Penn had set down on paper.

How the Colony Was Founded

On March 4, 1681, Charles II granted Penn a charter creating the “Province and Seigniorie” of Pennsylvania and naming Penn and his heirs “true and absolute Proprietaries.”¹ The grant settled a debt. Penn’s father, Admiral Sir William Penn, had done distinguished naval service, and the Crown owed his estate roughly £16,000.² The charter also cited Penn’s desire to “enlarge our English Empire” and to extend Christianity and civil society to Indigenous peoples.³

Penn received sweeping proprietary rights: control of all land, waterways, minerals, and wildlife; authority to enact laws with the consent of the freemen or their deputies; 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 discovered, compliance with the Navigation Acts, submission of all laws to the Privy Council within five years for possible annulment, and an obligation to accept an Anglican minister if twenty colonists petitioned the Bishop of London.¹

The boundaries ran along the Delaware River on the east, from twelve miles north of New Castle Town up to the 43rd degree of northern latitude, five degrees of longitude westward, and south to a circle drawn twelve miles from New Castle before running west along roughly the 40th parallel.³ A surveying ambiguity in that description would feed decades of conflict with Maryland: a strict reading of the 40th parallel would have placed Philadelphia inside Maryland’s territory.⁴

The Holy Experiment and the Limits of Tolerance

Penn called the colony his “Holy Experiment,” rooted in the Quaker conviction that “that of God in each person” would flourish in a society governed by love rather than coercion.⁵ Having been imprisoned and exiled in England for his own dissent, he made liberty of conscience the colony’s bedrock principle. The Great Law of 1682 guaranteed 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 extend such protection.⁶

The colony attracted Quakers, Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Mennonites, Amish, French Huguenots, Catholics, and Jews.⁷ The tolerance was not unlimited. 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 office. Even so, the arrangement was more permissive than any other English colony, and Penn actively recruited settlers from continental Europe, publishing promotional works for Dutch and German audiences.⁹

Penn’s Founding Laws

Penn did not simply rule from above. He drafted constitutional documents meant to balance proprietary authority with colonist rights. The first Frame of Government, dated April 25, 1682, created a 72-member Provincial Council that proposed legislation and an Assembly of up to 200 representatives that approved or rejected bills.¹⁰ Under this first Frame the Assembly could not initiate legislation.⁸

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 in ways that went far beyond English practice. The death penalty was limited to premeditated murder alone, a dramatic departure from an English code that imposed it for dozens of offenses.⁶ Prisons were to function as “work-houses” for redemption through labor, free of fees, with bail available in all but 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. Every child was required to learn a trade or skill by age twelve. All deeds and financial instruments above £5 had to be enrolled in a public registry to prevent fraud.¹⁰

The Frame was amended quickly. A second version in 1683 reduced the size of both houses. In 1696, Deputy Governor William Markham issued a more liberal frame that authorized the Assembly to propose bills for the first time.⁸

The document that would govern Pennsylvania for the next 75 years was the Charter of Privileges, signed by Penn on October 28, 1701, just before he sailed back to England for the last time. It replaced all earlier frames and served as the colony’s constitution until the American Revolution.¹¹ Its most consequential change was structural: the Provincial Council was stripped of its legislative role, leaving the Assembly as the sole lawmaking body. Members were elected annually, and the Assembly gained the power to choose its own speaker and officers, set its own adjournment schedule, judge the qualifications of its members, appoint committees, prepare bills, and impeach officials.¹² The proprietor or his governor kept a veto, but these Assembly powers were more extensive than those of any other colonial legislature in the English world.⁷

The Charter’s first article declared religious liberty “inviolably for ever,” guaranteeing that any monotheist living peaceably under the civil government could not be molested in person or property for their beliefs, and 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 were accommodated with the right to affirm rather than swear oaths.¹¹ Accused criminals received the same access to witnesses and counsel as prosecutors, property disputes went to ordinary courts rather than the governor and council, and estates were protected against forfeiture in cases of suicide or accidental death. Amending the Charter required the consent of the governor and six-sevenths of the Assembly.

The Lower Counties Become Delaware

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 1683.¹³ He tried to unite them with Pennsylvania under one assembly, but the relationship was fractious from the start. The Lower Counties had a distinct ethnic mix of Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, and English settlers, resented Philadelphia’s dominance, and disputed the legal basis of Penn’s title.¹⁴ In 1704 the two regions agreed to separate assemblies while sharing a governor, an arrangement that lasted until independence in 1776.¹⁵ Delaware’s first separate legislature met at New Castle on May 22, 1704, a date later commemorated on the Delaware state seal.

Who Held Power: Proprietors Versus the Assembly

Penn’s relationship with his own colonists was stormy. He expected settlers to cover the costs of government through taxes while keeping proprietary revenues from land sales and quitrents for himself. The Assembly disagreed, arguing that since Penn collected quitrents, he should pay for the governor’s salary and public expenses.¹⁶ Penn viewed the resistance as a betrayal of feudal loyalty; the colonists treated the relationship as a commercial transaction.

Penn was also a poor businessman. By 1685 he had spent £1,200 on land purchases from Indigenous peoples, and by 1711 the figure reached £4,000. Legal fees, colonization expenses, and a ruinous lawsuit with his agent Philip Ford drained his estate, forcing him to mortgage the province for £6,600 in 1708. He estimated that by 1705 at least 40,000 acres were occupied by squatters paying 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 1718.¹⁶

Much of the Assembly’s institutional growth was the work of David Lloyd, a Welsh lawyer who had served as Penn’s attorney general before turning sharply against proprietary power. Lloyd was elected to the Assembly 23 times between 1693 and 1729 and served as Speaker on 14 separate occasions. He drafted legislation expanding county court jurisdiction, helped frame the 1701 Charter, and set procedural rules that gave the Speaker control over debates. From 1717 until his death in 1731 he also served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.¹⁷

After Penn’s death the proprietary mantle passed to his sons, primarily Thomas Penn, who abandoned Quakerism and governed from England through appointed deputy governors. Taxation became the next battleground. The Penn family claimed exemption from taxes on their proprietary estates; the Assembly insisted the Penns should contribute to defense and public services like everyone else. In 1757 the Assembly sent Benjamin Franklin to London to lobby for a bill that would tax Penn family lands to secure paper money for the colony’s defense.¹⁸ Thomas and Richard Penn petitioned against it, fearing the Assembly’s real aim was to convert Pennsylvania into a royal colony. Franklin spent five years in England, argued before the Privy Council, and ultimately succeeded: by 1760 the King-in-Council passed the tax law, and a commission confirmed it had been assessed equitably. A 1764 compromise required the proprietors to pay taxes at the same rate as other inhabitants.¹⁹

The Lenape and the Walking Purchase

Penn’s early dealings with the Lenape (Delaware) people were, by the standards of the era, built on purchase rather than conquest. On arriving in the Delaware Valley he entered into agreements to bring lands under his proprietary title and reserved certain areas containing Lenape villages from sale.²⁰ The tradition of a “Great Treaty” at Shackamaxon in 1682 between Penn and the Lenape leader Tamanend became central to Pennsylvania’s founding mythology, though no original treaty document survives and its date conflicts with Penn’s documented schedule. Voltaire famously described it as “the only treaty between those people and the Christians that was not ratified by an oath, and was never infring’d.”²¹ Peaceful relations held during Penn’s lifetime but began to deteriorate after his death.

The most notorious betrayal was the Walking Purchase of 1737. Penn’s sons, Thomas chief among them, produced an unsigned deed purportedly dating to 1686 that claimed 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 1729.²² They used a compressed-scale map to deceive 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.²³ 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.

The consequences were severe. Thomas Penn enlisted the Iroquois Confederacy to enforce the unpopular seizure. In retaliation, many Lenape 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.²³ The Lenape were progressively pushed westward through the 18th century, eventually settling in areas including Indiana, Kansas, and what became Oklahoma.²⁰

The Maryland Border War and the Mason-Dixon Line

The ambiguous southern boundary of Penn’s charter overlapped with the Maryland charter that Charles I had granted to the Calvert family in 1632, creating a territorial dispute that lasted nearly a century. Both families claimed land between the 39th and 40th parallels, and the quarrel escalated into actual violence in the 1730s. The conflict, known as Cresap’s War, centered on Thomas Cresap, a Maryland land agent living in present-day Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, whom locals dubbed the “Maryland Monster.” 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, was marked by 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 when they met Native American opposition; the remaining 36 miles were completed in 1774 by the Philadelphia astronomer David Rittenhouse.²⁴ The line later gained far larger meaning as the symbolic boundary between free and slave states.

Who Settled There and What They Produced

Penn’s recruitment campaigns and religious tolerance drew waves of settlers from England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Philadelphia’s population grew from roughly 2,000 around 1692 to 23,000 by 1765.²⁵ By the 1730s Irish and German-speaking immigrants outnumbered the English in the city, ending the founding community’s numerical dominance. Scots-Irish settlers, most Presbyterian, numbered roughly 7,500 before 1740. German settlers formed community organizations such as the German Society, founded in 1764 to help newcomers find employment and housing.⁹

That diversity was not always welcomed. In 1717 Governor William Keith warned the Assembly about the “inconveniences” caused by an unlimited number of foreigners, and that year the Provincial Council imposed a tax on incoming Palatines. By 1727 the Assembly expressed fear that non-English speakers might prove a “dangerous Consequence to the Peace.”⁹ Scots-Irish and Irish settlers were often encouraged to move 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.²⁵ 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.²⁶ 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 itself became the financial center of British America, described as second only to London in economic influence within the empire.²⁷

The Quaker Crisis of the French and Indian War

The Seven Years’ War forced a reckoning between Quaker pacifism and the realities of 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, killing or wounding two-thirds of his men and leaving Braddock himself mortally wounded.²⁸ The defeat exposed the frontier to devastating raids.

The colony’s response was paralyzed by political deadlock. The proprietary faction wanted to minimize the Penn family’s financial liabilities, while the Quaker-dominated Assembly resisted funding a militia on both principled and practical grounds. Western frontier counties, which bore the brunt of the raids, had only 10 representatives in the Assembly compared with 26 for the eastern counties.²⁸ In 1755 Benjamin Franklin pushed through Pennsylvania’s first militia law, though Governor Robert Hunter Morris initially opposed it.²⁹

By 1756 the Penn family agreed to donate funds for defense, the Assembly appropriated money for a militia, and the province even declared war on hostile Indian groups and offered scalp bounties.²⁸ For many Quaker assemblymen this was a line they would not cross. Six resigned rather than violate their pacifist principles, and the fall 1756 elections allowed opposition groups to end the Quaker legislative majority that had governed Pennsylvania since its founding.²⁹

The Paxton Boys

The war’s aftermath brought an even more explosive 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 mob attacked the surviving Conestogas who had been placed in a Lancaster jailhouse for their protection, killing all of them.³⁰ An eyewitness, William Henry, described victims who had been “shot, scalped, hackled and cut to pieces.”³¹ The Conestogas were Christian converts living under the colonial government’s protection, and no evidence connected them to frontier raids.³²

Governor John Penn issued proclamations demanding arrests. No one was ever prosecuted, because frontier sympathies ran too strongly in the Paxton Boys’ favor. In January 1764 more than 250 armed frontiersmen marched on Philadelphia, targeting about 140 Indians who had sought sanctuary in the city. Benjamin 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.³⁰ Franklin wrote that the frontier people were “yet greater Barbarians than the Indians” for continuing to “murder them in time of Peace.”³¹

Slavery and the First Abolitionist Movement

Slavery existed in the Delaware Valley before Penn’s charter, practiced by Dutch and Swedish settlers. It remained a smaller institution than in the southern colonies, with roughly 1,000 enslaved people among 30,000 colonists in 1700 and peaking at about 6,000 out of 120,000 in 1750, but it was pervasive enough to shape daily life. Enslaved people in Pennsylvania 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.³³ 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.³⁴ 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 was passed upward through four levels of Quaker governance and at each stage was deemed “too weighty” to address. The Burlington Yearly Meeting ultimately declined to take a position.³⁵

Quaker 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 instrumental in shifting Quaker conscience toward abolition, and in 1775 the Pennsylvania Abolition Society was founded.³³

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 all children born to enslaved mothers after March 1, 1780, would become free upon reaching age 28, and required owners to register existing enslaved people by November 1, 1780, with automatic freedom for anyone not registered.³⁶ The enslaved population dropped from approximately 3,737 in 1790 to 64 by 1840, and the 1850 census recorded zero enslaved people in the state.³³

The End of the Proprietary Era

As tensions with Britain escalated in the 1770s, Pennsylvania’s political establishment was initially cautious. The Assembly, still operating under the 1701 Charter of Privileges, instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress to oppose independence as late as early 1776.³⁷ 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 conservative Assembly.³⁸ A Provincial Conference meeting June 18–25 at Car

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3
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24
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26
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27
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28
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29
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31
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32
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33
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34
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37
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38
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