"Who first of all their testimonial gaveAgainst the oppressor, for the outcast slave."
"Who first of all their testimonial gaveAgainst the oppressor, for the outcast slave."
And, in consequence, though slaves were still imported, they were humanely treated. Penn interested himself in the improvement of their condition. He was also concerned in the progress of the prison reforms which he had proposed in the original establishment of the colony. He employed a watchman to cry the news, the weather, and the time of day in the Philadelphia streets. Regarding the Constitution, about which there had been so much contention, he addressed the council and the assembly in terms of characteristic friendliness. "Friends," he said, "if in the Constitution by charter there be anything that jars, alter it. If youwant a law for this or that, prepare it." He advised them, however, not to trifle with government, and wished there were no need to have any government at all. In general, he said, the fewer laws, the better. The result was a new Constitution. It provided that the council should be appointed by the governor, and that the assembly should have the right to originate laws. It was more simple and workable than the previous legislation, and lasted until the Revolution.
Meanwhile, Penn was journeying about the country in his old way, preaching. At Merion, a small boy of the family where he was entertained, being much impressed with the great man's looks and speech, peeped through the latchet-hole of his chamber door, and both saw and heard him at his prayers. Near Haverford, a small girl, walking along the country road, was overtaken by the governor, who took her up behind him on his horse, and so carried her on her way, her bare feet dangling by the horse's side.
Clarkson, the chief of the biographers of Penn, who collected these and other incidents, gives us a glimpse of him as he appeared at this time at Quaker meetings. "He was of such humility that he used generally to sit at the lowest end of the space allotted to ministers, always taking care to place above himself poor ministers, and those who appeared to him to be peculiarly gifted." He liked to encourage young men to speak. When he himself spoke, it was in the simplest words, easy to be understood, and with many homely illustrations. At the same time, on state occasions, as the proprietor of Pennsylvania and representative of the sovereign, he used some ceremony, marching through the Philadelphia streets to the opening of the assembly with a mace-bearer before him, and having an officer standing at his gate on audience days, with a long staff tipped with silver. Acquainted with affairs, and with a knowledge of the relations between government and human nature drawn from a wide experience, he knew the distinction, at which some of his Quaker brethren stumbled, between personal humility and the proper dignity of official station.
In the intervals left him by the demands of church and state, he busied himself with the improvement of his place at Pennsbury. Here he had a considerable house in the midst of pleasant gardens. He took great pleasure in personal superintendence of the grounds and buildings, planting vines and cutting vistas through the trees. "The country is to be preferred," he wrote in "Fruits of Solitude." "The country is both the philosopher's garden and library, in which he reads and contemplates the power, wisdom, and goodness of God." "The knowledge and improvement of it," he declared, is "man's oldest business and trade, and the best he can be of."
Within were silver plate and satin curtains, and embroidered chairs and couches. The proprietor's bed was covered with a "quilt of white Holland quilted in green silk by Letitia," his daughter. "Send up," he writes to James Logan, at Philadelphia, "our great stewpan and cover, and little soup dish, and two or three pounds of coffee if sold in town, and three pounds of wicksready for candles." Mrs. Penn asks Logan to provide "candlesticks, and great candles, some green ones, and pewter and earthen basins, mops, salts, looking-glass, a piece of dried beef, and a firkin or two of good butter."
Penn rode a large white horse, and had a coach, with a black man to drive it, and a "rattling leathern conveniency," probably smaller, and a sedan chair for Mrs. Penn. In the river lay the barge, of which William was so fond that he wrote from England to charge that it be carefully looked after. Somebody expressed surprise one day when Penn went out in it against wind and tide. "I have been sailing all my life against wind and tide," he said.
Much of the work of the estate was done by slaves. The fact troubled the proprietor's conscience. He laid it upon his own soul, as he did upon the souls of his brethren in the colony, "to be very careful in discharging a good conscience towards them in all respects, but more especially for the good of their souls, that they might, as frequent as maybe, come to meeting on first-days." A special meeting was appointed for slaves once a month, and their masters were expected to come with them. Finally, Penn liberated all his slaves. In his will of 1701, "I give," he says, "to my blacks their freedom, as is under my hand already, and to old Sam 100 acres, to be his children's after he and his wife are dead, forever."
The Pennsbury house had a great hall in the midst, where the governor in an oak armchair received his neighbors, the Indians. Here they came, in paint and feathers,—"Connoondaghtoh, king of the Susquehannah Indians; Wopaththa, king of the Shawanese; Weewinjough, chief of the Ganawese; and Ahookassong, brother of the emperor of the five nations;" and many other humbler braves. John Richardson, a Yorkshire Quaker, visited Penn at Pennsbury and saw them. William gave them match-coats, he says, and "some other things," including a reasonable supply of rum, which the chiefs dispensed to the warriors severally in small portions: "So they came quietly, and in asolid manner, and took their draws." He did not smoke, a fact which the Indians must have noted as a curious eccentricity. Then they made a small fire out of doors, and the men sat about it in a ring, singing "a very melodious hymn," beating the ground between the verses with short sticks, and, after a circling dance, departed. Penn got on most happily with the Indians. The peaceful Quakers went about unarmed and were never in danger. The only disorderly folk thereabout were white men.
In the midst of these rural joys, news came that a movement was on foot to put an end to proprietary governments, thereby bringing all colonies under the immediate control of the crown. Penn felt that it was necessary for him to return to England to block this inconvenient legislation. On the 28th of October, he assembled the citizens of Philadelphia, and presented them with a charter for their city. In the Friends' meeting, he said that he "looked over all infirmities and outwards, and had an eye to the regions of the spirit, wherein was our sweetest tie."Then, says Norris, "in true love he took his leave of us." Thus, after two years wherein peace and quietness prevailed over all misunderstanding and opposition, he set sail in 1701, and never saw Pennsylvania again.
His house at Pennsbury fell into ruins,—due in large part to the leakage of a leaden reservoir on the roof,—and was taken down before the Revolution. The furniture was gradually dispersed. For some years it was "deemed a kind of pious stealth," among those who were most loyal to the proprietor, to carry away something out of the house when they chanced to visit its empty halls. One gentleman rejoiced in the possession of the mantelpiece; another had a pair of Penn's plush breeches.
William Penn's four years of actual residence gave him all the satisfaction which he ever got from his colonial possessions. All else was worry, labor, and expense. The province was a sore financial burden. As proprietor he was charged with the payment, in large part, of the expenses of government. The returns from rents and sales were slowand uncertain. The taxes on imports and exports, to which he had a charter right, he had generously declined. When he asked the assembly, in remembrance of that liberality, to send him money in his financial straits, they were not minded to respond. Penn belonged to that high fraternity of noble souls who do not know how to make bargains. His impulses were generous to a fault, and he had an invincible confidence that his neighbors would deal with him in the same spirit. The consequence was that year by year the expenses grew, and there was but a slender income. "O Pennsylvania," he cries, "what hast thou cost me? Above thirty thousand pounds more than I ever got by it; two hazardous and most fatiguing voyages, my straits and slavery here, and my child's soul, almost."
The last allusion is to Guli's son, William, whose dissipation Penn always attributed to a lack of fatherly care during his first visit to the province. Penn finally sent the boy to Pennsbury, hoping that the quiet, the absence of temptation, and the wholesome joysof a country life, might amend him. But William went from bad to worse, was arrested in Philadelphia in a tavern brawl, was formally excommunicated by the Quakers, and came home to England to give his father further pain.
To the financial burdens of the province were added the difficulties of government. Penn succeeded very well in keeping his colony,—he defended his boundaries against Lord Baltimore, and he defeated those who would have taken away his rule and given it to the king; but the governing of the colony across three thousand miles of sea was another matter. The moment he withdrew the restraining influence of his personal presence, all manner of contentions came into the light of day.
The question of the prudence of bearing arms was vigorously debated. James Logan, secretary of the province, and Penn's ablest counselor, urged the need of military defenses. Conservative Friends opposed it.
Churchmen had been settling in the province. One of William's oldest friends,George Keith, who had accompanied him on his religious mission to Holland, had gone into the Episcopal ministry. Logan says, in a letter to Penn, that "not suffering them to be superior" was accounted by the churchmen as the equivalent of persecution.
Colonel Quarry, a judge of the admiralty, appointed by the British government to enforce the navigation laws in the colony, was responsible to the Board of Trade in London, and independent of the governor and of the assembly. He exercised his office of critic and censor to the annoyance of Penn.
To these various sources of trouble was added an unending strife between the governor's deputy and the people. Penn's habit of looking always on the best side made him a bad judge of men, and the deputies whom he sent were few of them competent; some were not even respectable. Penn, with his characteristic invincible blindness, took their part.
Finally, the disputations, protests, and complaints, with direct attacks upon Penn's interests, and even upon his character, gotto such a pass that he addressed a letter of expostulation to the people. "When it pleased God to open a way for me to settle that colony," he wrote, "I had reason to expect a solid comfort from the services done to many hundreds of people.... But, alas! as to my part, instead of reaping the like advantages, some of the greatest of my troubles have sprung from thence. The many combats I have engaged in, the great pains and incredible expense for your welfare and ease, to the decay of my former estate ... with the undeserved opposition I have met with from thence, sink into me with sorrow, that, if not supported by a superior hand, might have overwhelmed me long ago. And I cannot but think it hard measure, that, while it has proved a land of freedom and flourishing, it should become to me, by whose means it was principally made a country, the cause of grief, trouble, and poverty."
So heavy was the financial burden, and so vexatious and disheartening the bickering and ingratitude, that Penn thought seriouslyof selling his governorship; and it was in the market for several years awaiting a purchaser. Indeed, in 1712, he had so far perfected a bargain to transfer his proprietary rights to the crown for £12,000, that nothing remained to be done save the affixing of his signature. Before his name was signed, he fell suddenly ill, and the transaction went no farther.
In the midst of these many troubles, in themselves serious enough, there came another. Penn's business manager for his estates in England and Ireland was Philip Ford. For a long time, Ford's payments had been less and less; Penn was continually complaining that he got so little from his property. Still, Ford's accounts went without examination, and some of his financial reports were not so much as opened. William had his customary confidence in his agent's honesty. At last, when things got so bad that something had to be done, it appeared by Ford's books that, instead of Ford's being in debt to Penn, Penn was in debt to him for more than ten thousandpounds. This was the result of long, ingenious, and unmolested bookkeeping. And Penn had made himself liable by his careless silence. Then Ford died, and his widow and children claimed everything which stood in Penn's name. Penn, it appeared, had borrowed money of Ford, and had given him a mortgage on his Pennsylvania estates as security. When the loan was paid, the mortgage had not been returned. Not only did Mrs. Ford retain it, but she sued Penn for three thousand pounds rent, which was due, she said, from the property of which William was once owner, but which he now held as tenant of the Fords. So far was this iniquitous business pursued, that Penn was arrested as he was at a religious meeting in Gracechurch Street, and was imprisoned for debt in the Fleet, or its precincts.
This was the turn in the tide. Everybody disapproved of treatment so unjust and extortionate. William's friends raised money, and made a compromise with the Fords, and got him free. In Pennsylvania, too, the contentions were quieted by a goodgovernor. And as the wars came to an end, trade so increased that the province presently yielded a substantial income.
Penn retired to Ruscombe, in Berkshire, in the pleasant country. Here he had his family about him. He was now a grandfather, his son William having a son and a daughter. "So that now we are major, minor, and minimus. I bless the Lord mine are pretty well,—Johnny lively; Tommy a lovely, large child; and my grandson, Springett, a mere Saracen; his sister, a beauty." Of his second marriage there were six children, four of whom—John, Thomas, Margaret, and Richard—became proprietors of Pennsylvania. Thomas had two sons, John and Granville; Richard had two, John and Richard. When the proprietary government ended, in 1776, it was in the hands of the heirs of William Penn.
In 1711, Penn wrote a preface to John Banks's Journal, dictating it, as his custom was, walking to and fro with his cane in his hand, thumping the floor to mark the emphasis. "Now reader," he concludes, "before I take leave of thee, let me advise thee to hold thy religion in the spirit, whether thou prayest, praisest or ministerest to others, ... which, that all God's people may do, is, and hath long been the earnest desire and fervent supplication of theirs and thy faithful friend in the Lord Jesus Christ,W. Penn." This is the last word of his writing which remains.
The next year he had a paralytic stroke, and another, and another. This impaired his memory and his mind. Thus he continued for six years, as happily as was possible under the circumstances. He went often to meeting, where he frequently spoke, briefly, but with "sound and savory expressions." He walked about his gardens, saw his friends, and delighted in the company of his wife and children. Each year left him weaker than the year before; but his days were filled with serenity. He was surrounded with all the comforts which a generous income, an affectionate family, the respect of his neighbors, and the approval of God, could give him.
"He that lives to live forever," he had written in his "Fruits of Solitude," "never fears dying. Nor can the means be terrible to him, that heartily believes the end. For though death be a dark passage, it leads to immortality; and that is recompense enough for suffering of it.... And this is the comfort of the good, that the grave cannot hold them, and that they live as soon as they die."
Into the fullness of this life he entered on the 30th of July, 1718, being seventy-four years old.
The chief authorities for facts concerning William Penn are—
The Riverside Press
Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Transcriber's noteThe following changes have been made to the text:Page 23: "seventeeenth" changed to "seventeenth".Page 42: "Quaker brethen" changed to "Quakerbrethren".Page 49: "died when he" changed to "died whenshe".Page 57: "serious inprisonment" changed to "seriousimprisonment".Page 62: "body prevented" changed to "body preventedit".
The following changes have been made to the text:
Page 23: "seventeeenth" changed to "seventeenth".
Page 42: "Quaker brethen" changed to "Quakerbrethren".
Page 49: "died when he" changed to "died whenshe".
Page 57: "serious inprisonment" changed to "seriousimprisonment".
Page 62: "body prevented" changed to "body preventedit".