USA > Pennsylvania > Chronicles of Pennsylvania from the English revolution to the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1688-1748, Vol. I > Part 11
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in trade, and sympathetic in religion, with the people surrounding the little township, and became English in everything but pedigree and, perhaps, some peculiari- ties of disposition.
Penn early hoped that the French Protestants in England and elsewhere would join in the colonization, and to the poorer ones among them, he was looking more particularly for renters, who might become pur- chasers, instead of purchasers at once for cash down. It is said that Anthony Duche came over in the ship with him. Without being part of a projected French community or separate group of settlers, others of the race, although perhaps not of the religion, followed. Among them was Charles De la Noe, of whom Penn, calling him "the French minister," speaks in 1685 as intending to come over with servants as a vigneron, and whose will, calling him "minister," is dated 7mo. 11, 1686, and was probated in the same year, giving all his real and personal estate in the Province to Jacob Pelkison of the County of Philadelphia, merchant, who may have been a religious exile. Watson, the Annalist, was inclined to identify De la Noe as the "old priest in Philadelphia" mentioned in Penn's letter of 1686 to Harrison, and to conclude from the word "priest," which Penn applied as well to the Anglican clergy, that De la Noe was a Roman Catholic. Andrew Doz was at one time Penn's vigneron.
After Penn's return to England from his first visit to America, Sir Mathias Vincent, Kt., of Islington, Middlesex, and Dr. Daniel Coxe, who was one of King Charles II's physicians, became interested in establish- ing a settlement of French Protestants in Pennsylvania. These two speculators, as well as Major Robert Thomp- son of Newington Green, Middlesex, bought 10,000 acres each, the deeds bearing date April 20, 1686. All were located within a large tract which on Holme's map is appropriated to Vincent, Coxe, Adriaen Vroesen,
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and Benjamin Furly, but in which Thompson's pur- chase took the place of those of Vroesen and Furly. The tract lies on the Schuylkill within the present Chester County, and is crossed by French Creek, doubt- less so called in memory of the people early coming there, and includes the present townships of Chester County called East and West Vincent in memory of Sir Mathias. Dr. Coxe, after getting some French Protestants and perhaps other immigrants, abandoned the project for schemes in South Carolina and New Jersey, and sold out in 1691 to certain persons called the West Jersey Society. Vincent executed articles of agreement on Sep. 13, 1686, with Capt. Jacques Le Tort, and, on Sep. 18, with Gousee Bonnin. There is pre- served among the MSS. of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania the certificate in French from Le Sauv- age, minister, dated at London, Jany. 1, 1686 (probably N. S.), that le Sieur Jaques Le Tort, native of France, aged thirty-five years, reared in "our Religion" (Re- formed), was some time member of the flock at Alençon, and at the date was desiring employment under the Elector of Brandenburg. Apparently on failing to obtain this employment, or diverted by the opportunity of a career in the New World, he, when making the agreement with Vincent, was bringing over, at the sug- gestion of Coxe, a number of French Protestants. Several families of them settled on Vincent's land. Nicole Godin, a native of London, whose father had come from Paris, was brought over "with a French gentleman who came hither upon the account of Dr. Cox (sic)," probably Le Tort. Possibly Peter and Richard Bezellon (often spelt Bizalion) were brought over at the same time. It is stated that the emigrants led to the region by Le Tort deserted, but that he remained until 1696. On a voyage to England, he was captured by the French, but he came back to the Prov- ince. The sons and executors of Vincent and of his
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wife conveyed on Dec. 30, 1698, the 10,000 acres to Joseph Pike, subject to the aforesaid agreements with Le Tort and Bonnin, and to 10s. quit rent. Le Tort and his son of the same name, as well as Godin and the two Bezellons, figured for many years as traders with the Indians. Although a Protestant and a native of London and son of an English mother, Capt. James (Jacques) Le Tort the younger, was at times an object of suspicion because his father had been French.
When Penn received the charter for Pennsylvania, the scattered residents north of what is now Delaware included a number of natives of the British Isles. So great was the stream of people immigrating under him, and in it so largely did the Anglo-Saxon element pre- dominate, that by 1688 Pennsylvania was already a colony practically of Englishmen. For thirty years longer, this stream was replenished from England proper : so that afterwards the population of the thickly settled part of the Province was so thoroughly English that it could not be affected by the Scotch Irish or the Germans, commonly called the "Pennsylvania Dutch," when those semi-Scots and those Palatinates and Swiss took possession of the mountainous region. Separate chapters will be devoted to such: we will now confine ourselves to the condition and ideas of the element dominant throughout the time of this history.
Penn had contemplated as his holy experiment a Quaker colony, within which all religions should be tolerated. While he made laws with the latter object, freeing the planters from tithes, and from any require- ment to frequent or maintain any worship contrary to their own mind, and permitted any Christian to hold office, he induced to immigrate from Europe such num- bers of his co-religionists as gave them an enormous preponderance during the rest of that century, whether or not we include after 1692 the Separatist Quakers. Meetings for worship had been held on the Delaware
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before Penn received the royal grant. Those worship- ping at the Falls of the River and at Chester united in a Monthly Meeting at the latter place before his first arrival in the Province. A Monthly and a Quarterly Meeting at Philadelphia were established in 1682, and, under the latter, there were started in the following year Monthly Meetings at Radnor and Abington. Bucks Quarterly Meeting started with Falls and Middletown Monthly Meetings and in 1684 Darby and Concord Monthly Meetings were established under Chester Quarterly Meeting. The Quarterly Meetings within Pennsylvania associated with those in New Jersey and Maryland in a Yearly Meeting, which, first held in Burlington on 6, 31, 1681, was arranged in 1685 to alternate at Philadelphia and Burlington, and finally in 1760 was fixed at Philadelphia.
The earliest meeting-house erected within the limits of the capital city of the Province was on Delaware Front Street about 60 ft. N. of Arch, and was probably what was known as the "boarded meeting-house," from its material : a brick building, known as "Bank Meet- ing" or "Meeting on Delaware Side," was soon put on its site. A meeting-house at the Centre, presumably on the lot intended by Penn for it at Twelfth and High Streets, was commenced in 1685, completed in 1689, and torn down after 1700. The "great meeting house" of the period of this history was at the S. W. cor. Market and Delaware Second streets, begun in 12th month, 1695, and used from 6th month following, and pulled down in 1755, to give place to a larger structure (George Vaux's article on Early Friends Meeting- Houses written for centennial of Fourth and Arch Meeting).
By the time of the English Revolution, the "Children of the Light," as they first called themselves, or "Quakers," as they were nicknamed, or "Friends," as they themselves came to speak of those composing their
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Society, had been gathering together for about forty years, and had had an organization for more than half that period. The distinguishing doctrine was as to the Inner Light, and led those confident of or seeking di- rection by that Light to shut themselves off from the distractions of the world, such as music, the fine arts, bright colors, the flattery paid to rank, luxury, etiquette, &ct., and to reject sacraments, priesthood, ritual, and even to some extent the Protestants' dependence upon the Bible. Rather as afterthoughts came the peculi- arities most popularly known: the refusal to take an oath, the non-support of ministers, the avoidance of bloodshed, and the wearing of a certain garb. All these peculiarities seem to have been pretty generally adopted among the Quakers by the year 1688. The garb of course has been changed from time to time, the Quakers of that year, at least in America, probably wearing the dress of English tradespeople with an avoidance of ornament. Penn had soon found that wearing a sword, as was the fashion among men of his station in life, made him unpleasantly conspicuous at the meetings, and his wig is described as a small circle to cover the baldness resulting from imprisonment without a barber, and later as an inexpensive article to keep head and ears warm.
How far was carried the discouragement of music and painting is shown in two instances. The Phila- delphia Monthly Meeting of 8th month, 1696, hearing that Walter Long had sold Jews-harps, sent to ad- monish him to take them back, refund the money, and return the Jews-harps whence they came. The Meet- ing sent also to speak to the widow Culcop to hand over those which she had bought from Long. Long agreed to sell no more, and take back those sold, and stand half the loss. About fifty years later, when, in boyhood, Benjamin West, who was born near the site of Swarthmore College was showing a talent for paint-
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ing, it was a serious question among the Quakers influ- ential with his parents whether it would be right to permit the exercise of his skill. Fortunately the weight- iest appreciated that the talent was God-given. Perhaps the world owes to the Quaker predilection for the mat- ter of fact rather than the imaginative the revolution which West made in the portrayal of modern battles, when he refused to dress General Wolfe and the Indians as Roman soldiers.
Before the Keithian separation, to be narrated in a special chapter, there was no lasting congregation as- sembled in Pennsylvania outside of the Society of Friends and the Church of Sweden, except two little groups-hardly congregations-of Baptists, one being at Cold Spring, Bucks County, which was established under Rev. Thomas Dungan from Rhode Island about the year 1682, and the other on the Pemmapecka (or Pennypack) Creek in Philadelphia County, of which latter group Samuel Jones and some persons named Eaton had come about 1686 from the Baptist Congrega- tion of Rev. Henry Gregory in Radnorshire followed by John Baker from the congregation at Kilkenny, Ireland, and Samuel Vaus from England. Elias Keach, son of the celebrated English Baptist, Rev. Benjamin Keach, was ordained by Dungan, baptized John Watts and sev- eral others, and became in Jany., 1687-8, minister at Pennypack, afterwards going to England, and taking charge of a congregation there. John Holmes, said to have been from Somersetshire, and some time in the West Indies, and to have arrived in Pennsylvania in 1686, who married the widow of Dr. Nicholas More, seems to have been the most conspicuous Baptist lay- man in the colony before 1700.
The cost of maintaining non-Quaker services was deterring. Quakerism had financial advantages inde- pendent of numerical strength. The Quakers felt no call to set apart a place for hallowed uses, and could
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meet in private houses until those attending were too numerous to be so accommodated, and too numerous to feel the cost divided among them of buying and building and occasionally warming: and the Quakers paid no salaries to their ministers. When the Society of Friends had the only religious gatherings in a local- ity, in fact when Quaker meetings were the only gather- ings of any sort, the Society was likely to gain acces- sions. Also we must notice the fact that Deists and Roman Catholics would find it less troublesome to masquerade as Quakers than as any other Protestants, being required only to sit still in meetings, where no sacraments were administered, and rarely, if ever, a chapter in the Bible was read. When the civil authori- ties relaxed the persecution of Quakers, or when public opinion was tolerant of them, as was not the case with either those who denied Christ, or those who acknowl- edged the supremacy of a foreign ecclesiastic, some infidels and Papists, no doubt, let themselves be sup- posed to be Quakers, there being no formality involving a profession of faith. The remark applies more par- ticularly to the growth of Quakerism in other regions than Pennsylvania, and is not to be understood as im- pugning the sincerity of any of the ministers here or elsewhere.
From 1688 to 1692, the Monthly and Quarterly Meet- ings in Pennsylvania itself, although it was not so in Delaware, were practically the organization of the Province ecclesiastically as much as the Governor and freemen represented in Council and Assembly were the organization secularly. During those years, and for some time afterwards, the leaders in the former organi- zation were leaders in the latter. It was natural that the spiritual relationship through which the emigrants had first known of one another should be so reflected in their civil government as to make it a theocracy. By popular choice, the Quaker ministers took a more
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important part in the temporal business of the infant commonwealth than by custom or statute the bishops did in England. This union of capacities in the same individuals, whereby retributive justice was to be en- forced by those who were to preach and exemplify meekness, long suffering, and forgiveness, was very awkward for them. Even when the ministers were seldom members of the Council or Assembly, but those bodies were largely, sometimes entirely, composed of those who had scruples against war, the reference of the question of participation in military measures to those bodies worked badly for the group of British colonies, and for the empire of which this community was a part.
The Society of Friends had been recruited from those social classes which were considerably above George Fox, its recognized Founder, a shoemaker, and considerably below Robert Barclay, its great Apologist, almost a noble, descended in the female line from the Gordons and the first King James of Scotland. It became the Pennsylvania Assembly's boast, as ex- pressed on Dec. 18, 1706, that "this Province was not at first settled, as some others were, either at the charge of the Crown or of any private man; nor was it peopled with the purges of English prisons, but by men of sobriety and substance, who were induced chiefly by the Constitution which by contract with the Proprietary was to be established as that the purchasers and ad- venturers were to have greater privileges than they enjoyed in their native countries." Of course, there were persons brought over at other's expense and even without their own volition, as some of the servants and sailors, but a number who came as servants or sailors were very shortly afterwards to be described as prop- erty-holders or officers. When, in 1685, a large number -Penn says, about 1000-of Monmouth's rebels were to be transported, Penn, before Oct. 2, begged and ob-
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tained twenty as a present from King James. It would be interesting to identify these. It may be confidently asserted that they welcomed the diversion to Penn's dominions, and obtained with their safety a fair posi- tion in life: and the same may have been the fate of several runaways, who came certainly "to have greater privileges" than where they had been residing. So the exceptions to the Assembly's generalization were few.
On the other hand, Fox's only visit to the Delaware was in 1672, Barclay never saw it, Penn can not truly be called a settler, and, as a rule, the wealthiest and the most important Quakers did not transfer them- selves to this "land of promise;" in fact, as we learn from Hugh Roberts's letter to Penn (Penna. Mag. Hist., Vol. XVIII, p. 205), many Friends disapproved of the movement. The richest of the Quakers who came were probably Robert Turner, some time a merchant in Dublin (ancestor of the Rawle family), Samuel Car- penter, some time in the West Indies, and Edward Shippen, some time a merchant in Boston. Turner and Carpenter were among the first purchasers, and came in the earliest years of William Penn's rule: Penn agreed in 1690 to sell to Shippen for 100l. about 250 acres adjoining Philadelphia on the south, nearly all of which afterwards descended to his family, but he did not come until in or after 1693, in which year it is said that a meteor had been seen in Boston, and had been interpreted by some inhabitants as a Divine warn- ing to be more active against Baptists and Quakers, so that Shippen felt that it would be pleasanter outside of Massachusetts. Turner was perhaps less rich than Carpenter or Shippen: Carpenter was ultimately obliged to sacrifice much property : while Shippen, "the biggest man," and afterwards celebrated for "the big- gest house and the biggest coach," was hardly exalted much above ordinary men of property by the fortune of 10,000l, which he is said to have brought on arrival,
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multiplied as was in those days its present purchasing value. Thomas Lloyd, for whom a royal descent has been traced, had no prestige on account of it. In promi- nence as an apostle of the doctrines, George Keith alone of the settlers could be classed with Fox, Barclay, and Penn. Thus there came men who had lived at one time under the English Commonwealth, pious, self respect- ing, and, except when indentured as servants, indepen- dent, all, including many of their "help," sprung from early surroundings of no great variety, none looked up to except for their "gift" of the ministry, and such really of secondary importance in the sect at large. To be sure, counting both the Quakers and non-Quakers, the settlers of Pennsylvania in Penn's day above the grade of day laborers averaged as high in the matter of original worldly station as the emigrants above the grade of day laborers to other parts of the United States. A different impression may have been received from particular items, and from the talk about the "cavaliers" of "the Old Dominion" and the lords of manors in the land of the "Knickerbockers" and the religious exiles among the progenitors of the Carolina "chivalry :" but it should be borne in mind that nearly every lord, baronet, and knight who went to Virginia died without issue male, that the prefix "van," which looks so much like the aristocratic "de" or "von," was used in America as a rule to introduce the name of the place from which the immigrant came, instead of the estate of his ancient ancestors, and that the Huguenots who crossed the ocean except a few petty "seigneurs" were tradespeople or mechanics. It can be shown that the immigrant ancestor of nearly every one of the first families of those colonies where subsequently there was a following of fashion, had his equal among those con- temporaries whose children or grandchildren came to the region of Quaker plainness. Yet the summary can be made that the emigrants from the British Isles
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hither, except some Welsh gentlemen of little or no estate, nearly all came from a worldly station one or more degrees below the poorer gentry.
Thanks to the political and religious excitation in every British community and the number of schools partly free within reach, mental development and lit- erary information were not engrossed by those in higher station. A lower class had produced John Bunyan and Cardinal Wolsey; while Shakspeare could not, if Bacon could, be said to have belonged to a higher. No small number of polemic and didactic pamphlets came from the ranks of the Quakers; and even such a mere local celebrity as Caleb Pusey, in an answer to George Keith, wrote like a great theologian. The first printing press in the part of the world between Massachusetts and Mexico was set up in Philadelphia, before this history opens. The printer was William Bradford, a Quaker from Yorkshire, who had worked for Andrew Sowle in London. In Bradford's pam- phlets appear Greek and Hebrew letters. While many of the Welsh who came over were physicians, a number of the English were schoolmasters, and it was a time when Latin and Greek and Hebrew were more com- monly studied in schools than at present. Of course, there were not the same number of matriculates of English colleges as had gone to New England as Puri- tan divines two or three generations before. Never- theless, some of the early Friends in Pennsylvania, were graduates of colleges in the British Isles, and had been ministers of non-Quaker congregations. An ex- monk, John Gray, alias Tatham, of the Benedictine congregation at St. James's, came over, and joined Charles Pickering and others in obtaining a survey of ore lands. The King ordered Gray to return. Penn declared the survey irregular, perhaps because contra- vening the rule to keep the ore land for the Proprietary. Penn was accused, by those who wished to prove him
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a Papist in disguise, of having the aforesaid ex-monk kidnapped and taken over to England, to be delivered to those whom he had forsaken. However, he declared Penn not guilty, and returned to Pennsylvania before Oct. 20, 1688, and was afterwards an important man in New Jersey, where he lived with a wife Elizabeth. A son survived him. While the Established Churches of the Old World had institutions of learning, and the anti-prelatists of New England had Harvard College, the Society of Friends did not train young men for the profession of preaching; so the scholars in divinity in Pennsylvania and Delaware were to be looked for among non-Quakers. In fact, the immigrants or so- journers from Continental or Scandinavian Europe included most of the men who had taken any University course.
The Quakers, moreover, tried to adjust disputes between one another, the Meetings hearing and acting upon complaints against a member, even by persons not in good standing in the Society, and it was a viola- tion of Gospel order to obtain satisfaction at law, unless private appeal to the delinquent and the decision of examiners appointed by the Meeting had been in vain. So the Quakers rather looked askance at those who argued in court. We know of a Welsh attorney, Griffith Jones, in Kent County, with the reputation of an orator, evidently the person of that name who headed a petition to Sir Edmund Andros (Penna. Archives, 2nd Series, Vol. VII, p. 815), closing with the words: "That age may crowne your Snowy haires with Cæsar's honours and with Nestor's yeares." There was con- temporary with him another Griffith Jones, a merchant in Philadelphia, who was a Quaker. When, in 1695, the Churchmen of the province got up a petition to have the services of a minister and the right to arm for defence, the Welsh attorney Griffith Jones was sup- posed to have written the petition, so he was probably
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a Churchman. At that time there seem to have been but two other lawyers in Penn's dominions, viz: John Moore, a Churchman, and David Lloyd, who had read at the Temple, and who, Gov. Gookin relates, had been bred under Lord Jefferies, but, marrying in Pennsyl- vania, had turned Quaker. Burton Alva Konkle has prepared a Life of David Lloyd, to which the reader is referred when the account in this book of Lloyd and his political party and their labors does not seem ex- haustive or sufficiently laudatory. What grade Moore or Lloyd had in their profession at home, we do not know. About a half a dozen persons trained to the law came over about the time of Penn's second visit. Finally, Acts of Assembly made provision for a body of attorneys admitted by the courts to practise.
Those non-Quakers who might have claimed to be the patricians of the immigration in Penn's time were mostly his relatives or connections or the companions in arms of his father, glad to get public office or a cheap habitation. Of the Quakers or non-Quakers who came before 1688, several had been captains in the navy: William Markham, the first Deputy Governor, William Crispin, one of the three commissioners appointed on Sep. 30, 1681, and Thomas Holme, the first Surveyor- General. There was also Major Jasper Farmer from Ireland (see early editions of Burke's Landed Gentry). Farmer, who is said, probably incorrectly, not to have reached our shores, died in 1685. He and his son Jasper, who had bought together 5000 acres, received a patent in 1684 for land fronting upon the Schuylkill, covering the greater part of what is now Whitemarsh Township, Montgomery County. Having brought over a number of servants, the family long lived there. About the time of Penn's second visit, Robert Assheton, of Salford, Lancashire, whose mother was Penn's near re- lation, and whose father was a Deputy Herald, was in- duced to come to take a court clerkship. Capt. Samuel
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