The "Friends" or "Quakers"

LATER in the seventeenth century than the period of settlement in Delaware and New Jersey, was the domain called Pennsylvania colonized, chiefly by a sect called Quakers in derision. That sect appeared in England at about the time when Roger Williams was there to procure a charter for Rhode Island. Their founder and preachers were among the boldest and yet the meekest of the non-conformists. Their morality was so strict that the world called them ascetics-persons who devote their lives to religion only. They carried this strictness into all departments of life and personal habits. Fashionable dress, extravagance in expenditure, dancing, attendance at theatres, games of chance and other amusements were forbidden; and music was discouraged as a seductivie vanity. Taking part in war, slavery, lawsuits, intemperance and profanity of speech, was a sufficient reason, if persisted in, for the expulsion of a member from the Society; and the whole body was bound to keep a watch upon the actions of each other. Their practices so generally agreed with their principles that society was compelled to admit that the profession of a Quaker or "Friend," as they styled themselves, was a guaranty of a morality above the level of the world.

George Fox, a shoemaker of Leicestershire, England, was the founder of this sect. At the age of nineteen years, conceiving himself to be called by God to preach the gospel of Jesus, he went from place to place exhorting his hearers to repentance and newness of life. He complained of the coldness and spiritual deadness of all the modes and forms of religious worship around him, and thereby he soon excited a persecuting spirit by which his ministerial life of about forty years was marked as a pilgrimage from one prison to another. When, in 1650, he was called before Justice Bennet, of Derby, he admonished that magistrate to repent, and "tremble and quake before the word of the Lord," at the same time his own body was violently agitated by emotion. Then and there the sect received the name of Quakers.

Among the multitude of converts to the moral and religious doctrines of George Fox was young William Penn, a son of the distinguished admiral of that name. He embraced the doctrines and adopted the mode of life of George Fox and his followers, while he was yet in college. Then he had a long and severe struggle with his father, a worldly and ambitious man, for the privilege of following the directions of his conscience. He was beaten and turned out of doors by the angry admiral; he was sent to France to be lured with gayety; and he was dazzled with promises of wealth and distinction. He suffered with his sect. On one occasion he was tried, with another, on a charge of preaching in the streets. The jury, after being kept without fire, food or water two days and nights, brought in a verdict of "not guilty," when they were each heavily fined by the court and committed to Newgate; and Penn and his companion were also fined and imprisoned for contempt of court in wearing their hats in the presence of that body. The young Quaker was then only about twenty-four years of age.

Many "Friends" had emigrated to America, and two had become proprietors of New Jersey. Penn acted as umpire between them, in a dispute that arose and so his particular attention was drawn toward this country. He looked with longing eyes across the Atlantic for a home for himself and his sectarian friends, out of the reach of persecution. From the crown he obtained a charter for a vast territory beyond the Delaware, in payment of a debt of eighty thousand dollars due to his father from the government, with perpetual proprietaryship given to him and his heirs, in the fealty of an annual payment of two beaver skins. Penn proposed to call the domain "New Wales," in honor of the land of his ancestors, but the Welch secretary of state objected. Then he suggested "Sylvania" as appropriate for such a woody country. The secretary who drew up the charter prefixed the name of Penn to Sylvania, in the document. The proprietor offered him a hundred dollars if he would leave it off. On his refusal to do so, Penn complained to the king-the "merrie King Charlie"- who insisted that the province should be called "Pennsylvania," in honor of his dead friend the admiral. And so it was. The domain extended north from New Castle in Delaware three degrees of latitude, and five degrees of longitude west from the Delaware River. To Penn was given power to ordain all laws with the consent of the freemen, subject to the approval of the king. No taxes were to be raised except by the Provincial Assembly; and clergymen of the Anglican Church were to be allowed to reside in the province without molestation.

Penn's charter was granted on the 14th of March, 1681. In May he sent his kinsman, William Markham, to take possession of his province and to act as deputy governor. A large company of emigrants went with him. They were employed by the "Company of Free Traders," who had purchased lands in Pennsylvania of the proprietor. They seated themselves near the Delaware and "builded and planted." With the help of Algernon Sidney, the sturdy republican martyr who perished on the scaffold soon afterward, Penn drew up a code of wise, liberal and benevolent regulations for the government of the colony, and sent them to the settlers the next year for their approval. It was not a formal constitution, but a body of wholesome laws for the benefit of all concerned.