USA > Pennsylvania > The making of Pennsylvania; an analysis of the elements of the population and the formative influences that created one of the greatest of the American states > Part 14
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The buildings of Trinity and St. David's, dated respec- tively from 1711 and 1714, still stand, and are among the most interesting relics in the country of the old colonial architecture. They also had congregations at Chester, Bristol, Perkiomen, Pequea, Lancaster, Huntington, and other places. The eight or ten clergymen had to supply all these in turn, and one man often had charge of three or four congregations.
Far out on the frontier, among the Scotch-Irish and Germans, they had a mission in charge of the Rev. Thomas Barton, a courageous, devoted man, who, with the Presbyterian ministers, was ready at any time either to preach and pray or to lead his congregation to war against the Indians. He was a firm believer in the im- portance of establishing the English control of the con- tinent as against the French. He was close to Brad- dock's defeat and Fort Pitt, and familiar with every movement of the enemy. It seems to have delighted him when his congregation appeared at service with their muskets, and he reported the event to England with evident satisfaction. His situation at first was nominally at Carlisle, but he appears to have ranged the whole country and even penetrated into the interior of New York. His descendants formed for a long time a well-known family in Philadelphia.
In a certain sense all the clergy in Pennsylvania were missionaries. They were sent out by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which paid them their salaries, and they were supposed to be under the jurisdiction of the bishop of London.
The number of the laity is not known, and any attempt to state it would be a mere guess. They
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formed a part of that third which Franklin described as the miscellaneous fraction of the population. They were most numerous in Philadelphia, where they shared the control with the Quakers. As in all the Middle and Southern colonies, they naturally assumed to them- selves the leadership in society, and it was readily accorded them. When the proprietors became of their faith they had the additional advantage of being part of the government, and the offices within the proprietary control were usually distributed among them.
An interesting essay might be written on the different ways in which little aristocracies were developed in the different colonies. In Virginia and in Massachusetts, where the population was homogeneous in race and religion, where there was no proprietary government, and where the people had enjoyed at times a large measure of independence, the better and more intelli- gent classes gradually became small aristocracies in what seems to have been a very natural way. Their roots went down among a united people, who gave them support and much respect.
In Pennsylvania, however, there was a very curious condition of affairs, and the aristocratic class was divided among the Quakers and the Churchmen. The Quakers, as the creators of the province, were entitled to the first place, and many of them took the position. Religious scruples about dress and amusements, of course, held back many of them from such a life, and they formed a distinct society of their own, with a great deal of good living and enjoyment, and their own rules about dress. Those who entered the fashionable life of the Episco- palians were very apt to join that faith. In the govern-
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ment of the colony the Quakers controlled the assembly, and the Churchmen controlled the executive offices in the gift of the proprietors; social life was divided up in very much the same way between the two religious bodies ; and they have always formed two distinct socie- ties in Philadelphia.
The men who formed the Church of England aristoc- racy, as it may be called, had many fine traits. The Chews, Provost Smith, Richard Peters, Judge Peters, Robert Morris, the Binghams, the Willings, the Hamil- tons, William Moore, of Moore Hall, and others were all accomplished, talented men, full of public spirit and enterprise, who, so far as they were allowed to shape the community, did it wisely and well, and would have been men of note in any city of that age. We might add to them Chief-Justice Allen, who, though a Presbyterian, always acted with them, and was one of the leaders of the proprietary party, and very lavish of his wealth in every public improvement. John Dickinson, a Quaker, was also of the proprietary party, and, like Allen and the others, of unquestioned high character and ability.
Unfortunately, these men depended for part of their position upon the proprietary interest, or were believed to depend upon it, which, so far as results were con- cerned, was the same thing. The proprietorship was not popular, and the rest of their hold, the Church of England, was equally unpopular, and the Quakers were against them. They had the misfortune to live in a very mixed commonwealth, where any position they had must be given them by a mere faction. They had no broad roots extending all through the community like the aristocracies in Virginia and Massachusetts, and
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when the Revolution came they went to pieces and disappeared. In Virginia and Massachusetts, on the contrary, the colonial aristocracies went through the Revolution without harm, played a large and important part in it, and afterwards flourished more abundantly than ever, and produced the greatest statesmen in the Union.
In a previous chapter we called attention to the striking individualism of the Scotch-Irish, and men- tioned their three great chief justices, McKean, Gibson, and Black. It may be well, therefore, by way of con- trast, to speak of another great chief justice, William Tilghman, who was not the product of Scotch-Irish and Calvinistic influences, but was bred among Church of England people in Maryland and afterwards in Penn- sylvania. He was the very opposite of Mckean, Gibson, and Black. He had none of that excitable aggressive- ness, no instinct for impressing everything with his individuality. He was colorless, retiring, modest. He had no vividness, originality, or picturesqueness, either in language or manner. Like Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson, who were also bred as Churchmen, his style, though showing ability in conception, was rather dry and uninteresting. Yet his judicial opinions are generally regarded as equally sound, consistent, and valuable as the work of either Mckean, Gibson, or Black .*
* Perry's Collections, American Church in Pennsylvania; White's Memoirs of the P. E. Church; H. W. Smith's Life of Provost Smith ; Perry's History of the American Episcopal Church; Dorr's History of Christ Church; Records of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel; Wickersham's History of Education in Pennsylvania.
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CHAPTER VIII.
THE WELSH.
FOR the first fifteen or twenty years after the founding of Pennsylvania, in 1682, the Welsh were the most numerous class of immigrants, and they have left many traces of themselves for many miles round Philadelphia in the names of places. Their migration, however, soon ceased, and after 1700, with the incoming of English, Germans, and Scotch-Irish, they became comparatively few in numbers, and of less importance and influence. But still they were a distinct element, and increased for a time the incongruous and mixed character of the colony's population.
Most of the Welsh that came were Quakers, with a sprinkling of Baptists and Churchmen. They spoke their own language, and scarcely any of them had mastered English. When William Penn preached among them at Haverford, in 1701, very few could understand him.
As descendants of the ancient Britons, who had been driven into a corner of England by the Saxon and Norman invaders, they felt that they were still a separate people, and, like the Germans, they hoped to have a country of their own in Pennsylvania. For the first half-century of the colony's existence it afforded the rather unusual spec- tacle of an English province in which the three languages, German, Welsh, and Swedish, were spoken by quite a large portion of the people. During that time, when the
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Germans were upbraided for not learning English, they always asked why no complaint was made of the Swedes or Welsh. But the Welsh, like the Swedes, were soon absorbed, and their language disappeared.
They had, however, been assisted in retaining their language and customs by an agreement they made with Penn before they emigrated. He had promised them a tract of forty thousand acres, where they could have a little government of their own, and live by them- selves. When they began to arrive, in 1682, the tract was surveyed for them west of the Schuylkill, and it in- cluded that beautiful stretch of country which has now become very familiar to Philadelphians for its suburban homes along the line of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
There was something peculiarly suitable in giving the Welsh this tract, for it more nearly resembled their own country than any other land that could be found near Philadelphia. That it was given for this reason does not appear, but it is not at all unlikely that the woodsman's instinct of the first Welsh explorers led them to follow that ridge of high land, which is the water-shed between the western side of the Schuylkill and the Delaware. This ridge, which is more or less of a table-land, several miles wide, rises steadily from the west bank of the Schuylkill for about twenty-five miles until the summit is reached, near Paoli, about six hun- dred feet above the level of Philadelphia. As we ad- vance along it westward the country becomes more and more diversified; more rolling and hilly, with longer vistas, and the climate cooler and dryer. On the north- ern side very extensive views are obtained over what we now call the Chester Valley, and the descent into it be-
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comes steeper and steeper as we approach Paoli. The Welsh called it Duffrin Mawr, or the Great Valley.
They insisted that their forty thousand acres con- stituted a barony, or county palatine, and it was known as the Welsh Barony until modern times changed it to Welsh Tract. It was a manor with the right of Court Baron, like the one occupied by the Moravians on the Lehigh, and if circumstances had been favorable it could easily have been developed into a sort of palatinate. It was certainly a magnificent domain of hill and dale cov- ered with enormous oaks, sycamores, and poplars, which the greatest earl or duke might have envied. The red- haired, freckle-faced Owens and Winns were well con- tent with it. They enjoyed most heartily the game and sport it afforded, and their descendants still hunt the fox there as of old. Most of them had some means, and were of the gentleman-farmer class. In fact, the few glimpses we have of them in the old records imply an amount of enjoyment and expenditure for dress and en- tertainment unusual on a provincial frontier.
They might have made a most interesting place of their barony if they had been allowed to go on in the course they had chosen. They undertook to rule it in their own way, and had none of the usual county and township officers. Their Quaker meetings exercised civil authority, and this curious system prevailed for eight or nine years. In 1690 the three townships within the tract, Merion, Haverford, and Radnor, were organized in the usual way, and the jurisdiction of the Quaker meetings was abolished.
As time went on and immigration increased, the Welsh spread out into other townships,-Newtown, Goshen, and
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Uwchlan. Some of them spread out into Montgomery County, north of the city, where places like Gwynedd and Penllyn still stand as their memorials.
Their tendency to cling together and retain their lan- guage was largely overcome in 1685, when Merion was separated from Haverford and Radnor, and made a town- ship of Philadelphia County. Up to that time they had been a controlling influence in Chester County. But the change placed them in the minority in both counties and hastened their assimilation. They resisted the change very strenuously, and for a time refused to pay taxes.
They were also much annoyed by having the barony thrown open to settlement for people who were not Welsh. This was done because they refused to pay Penn quit-rents on the whole forty thousand acres. They contended that they should pay rent only on the land they used or cultivated; but as the returns from this were small, Penn insisted on rent from the whole barony, and, when it was refused, destroyed the autonomy of their little empire. It was just as well, perhaps, for the Welsh; the direct descendants of the ancient Britons were English in sympathy, and it was useless to keep up a distinction which had long since ceased to be any- thing more than a barren sentiment.
Most of their names are now Anglicized. Ap Hum- phrey has become Pumphrey ; Ap Howell, Powell; and Ap Hugh, Pugh. Such names as Roberts, Owen, and Thomas remain as they were, and there are still town- ships called Tredyffrin, Eastcaln, and Uwchlan. The Pennsylvania Railroad has also helped to preserve the remembrance of these ancient Britons in the names of
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its stations Merion, Wynnewood, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, Radnor, St. David's, and Berwyn. Some of these names are very old in Wales, and go back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Merion, the name of an old British prince, Meyreon or Meiriawn, appears often in Wales in the form Meiron, Merioneth, and Merionethshire. Montgomery County was also named from the Welsh.
The patron saint of the Welsh was St. David, and this name was given to the little Episcopal Church which has now survived nearly two hundred years in one of the most charming and secluded valleys of Radnor. The touching, simple beauty of its architecture and surround- ings inspired one of the poems of Longfellow, but he hardly did the subject justice. The great overshadowing oaks, the deep impression of the past, the quaint graves of the old colonists, with William Moore and General Wayne resting in their midst, seem to have been unable to arouse the great poet to his best. Several of his verses are querulous and belittle the subject, and only one verse, where he touches on the impression of rest and seclusion, is of any merit.
Members of the Welsh element in our population can still be found in prominent positions in many of our in- dustrial enterprises; but they have produced few very remarkable men. In the early days of the colony, how- ever, previous to 1700, all the physicians in the province appear to have been Welshmen. Thomas Lloyd, several times deputy governor under Penn, was a Welshman, and so was David Lloyd, the leader of the popular party in the assembly, and afterwards chief justice. In the Revolution and more recent times, the Welsh names of Cadwalader and Meredith have been of much distinction.
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It was through this Welsh barony, and following close to the highest points of the ridge, that the great western highway of colonial times, now long known as the Lancaster turnpike, took its way. Begun by the footsteps of the first wandering Welshman, for a time a trail in the woods, then a rough road leading to clearings, then a better road, improved here and there with logs, and afterwards with cobble-stones, always pointing west- ward to the Pacific, it grew and grew until it reached the Susquehanna, crossed it and wound through the Alle- ghanies to Fort Pitt, its terminus for many years. Though not always on the same line as the present Lancaster turnpike, it followed the same general route, and it always was, and still is, one of the highways to the boundless West. When the Pennsylvania Railroad was built, the engineers found they could make but little im- provement on the Welshman's skill, and they laid their tracks along the summit of the ridge, close beside the turnpike, and perpetuated the old colonial line of western travel, which has now become one of the throbbing arteries of civilization.
In colonial days its throbs were less hurried and nervous, but equally full of life, and perhaps more pic- turesque. A class of hardy humorous characters grew up who were the teamsters and wagoners to Fort Pitt, and afterwards to Pittsburg. Horses were bred for the service, and the great canvas-covered wagons became a familiar sight on the highway of the barony.
People who can remember the old days of stage travel in England assure us that it had its compensations and some advantages. The turnpikes and mail routes, always kept in thorough repair, were lively scenes, thronged
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with coaches and private travelling carriages, with excel- lent inns every few miles. Each inn had its own peculiar characteristics and reputation, and travellers in their own wagons made their day's journey as long or as short as they pleased. The old Lancaster road to the west was somewhat similar.
Not in such good repair as the roads in England, and wilder and rougher in every way, it still must have often reminded the colonists of highway scenes in their old home. The inns on the eastern end were very numerous. At one time there were sixty-two between Philadelphia and Lancaster, which was an average of one to each mile. They were of all grades, high and low. Pressy Robin- son's, otherwise known as the Blue Ball, seems to have been decidedly low. There were quarrels, and traditions of strange disappearances, which were confirmed in 1877, when some workmen dug up a number of uncoffined human remains from the old orchard. On the other hand, the Paoli Inn, which still survives, was of the highest class, and has entertained beneath its roof some very distinguished men.
The people living along the old turnpike have always had interesting stories to tell of its scenes. It was not so very long ago that some were alive who remembered the troops marching westward to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791. Those who could remember the recruits straggling along the road to join in the War of 1812 would now be hard to find. But there are still some who saw the companies from the Alleghanies as they marched to the war with Mexico .*
* Histories of Chester County and Delaware County ; Glenn's Merion in the Welsh Tract.
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CHAPTER IX.
THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE AND THE MECHANIC ARTS.
THE peculiarities of the Pennsylvania population, the freedom from dogma of most of the sects which com- posed it, and their extreme advancement in the line of the Reformation seem to have produced certain results which gave the province a character of its own totally different from what we find in the other colonies.
One of the first and most natural results was a consti- tution and laws unusually liberal for that time. The credit of this is due to Penn and the Quakers, for they made the laws, and continued to have a controlling influence in them for nearly a hundred years. Religious liberty was the law of the land in Pennsylvania at a time when in Massachusetts and several other colonies there were statutes punishing heresy with death. Treason and murder were the only crimes punished with death in Pennsylvania at a time when in England there were over two hundred capital offences, the same number in New York, and over twenty in Massachusetts and South Carolina. Prison reform, hospitals, and charitable insti- tutions of all kinds were flourishing in Pennsylvania long before they were regarded as desirable in the other colonies.
The general tone of the whole province was free. The Quakers were inspired with the latest ideas of liberty, and the large German population, whatever their igno-
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rance and faults may have been, were all unquestionably in favor of liberty and free conscience, and lived up to their belief. The Episcopalians and Presbyterians, even if they had other inclinations at the beginning, were soon carried along by the others.
In the other colonies the population belonged to older and more conservative forms of religion, like the Church of England or the Puritans. The New England colonies, though independent and vigorous, were very illiberal, and at the time Pennsylvania was founded had only recently finished persecuting the Quakers, and were just about entering on the witchcraft delusion. In Virginia the Church of England was established by law, and dis- senters were treated with no little severity.
Philadelphia and Pennsylvania stood out conspicuously as the home of American liberalism, and for a hundred years and more occupied a very important position, and claimed an unusually large share of the attention of the civilized world. They were regarded as the most re- markable and successful instance of liberalism that had yet appeared, and such instances were valuable. The leaders of advanced thought in those, as in all other, times were supposed to be impractical theorizers, and when they could point to an instance of practical success their triumph was great. Men like Voltaire hailed Penn- sylvania with delight, and looked to it as a refuge and an asylum. They called it the home of philosophers ; and when Franklin began to make his discoveries in electricity, they were more convinced than ever.
Voltaire was always very much attracted by the Quakers. When he was in England he sought them out and investigated their religion, which astonished
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him. If their habit of trembling when they spoke in their meetings and some other customs could be abol- ished, he declared that they were of all men the wor- thiest of respect. "In my life," he said of one of them, " I have never seen a presence more noble nor more engaging."
Their stiffness and solemnity occasionally troubled him, especially when he dined with Claude Gay, a Phila- delphia Quaker, in Paris. But he never would give up his ideal, and he clung to Pennsylvania and her founders to the last.
" Their colony is as flourishing as their morals have been pure. Phil- adelphia, or the city of the Brothers, their capital, is one of the most beautiful cities in the universe; and they reckon that in 1740 there were one hundred and eighty thousand men in Pennsylvania. These new citizens are not all primitives or Quakers; half of them are Germans, Swedes, and people of other countries, who form seventeen religions. The primitives, who govern, regard all those strangers as their brothers." (Parton's Voltaire, vol. i., 470.)
He compared Pennsylvania with the other colonies, most of which he despised, especially the New England settlements. At one time in his life, when exiled and per- secuted, he thought quite seriously of taking refuge in the Quaker paradise, as Priestley afterwards did, and he never altogether gave up the idea. "It was," he said, "the only province on earth to which peace had fled, banished as she was from every other region."
" I love the Quakers ; yes, if the sea did not cause me an insupportable sickness, it would be in thy bosom, O Pennsylvania, that I should finish the remainder of my career, if there is any remainder ! Thou art situated at the fortieth degree, in a climate the most mild and favorable; thy fields are fertile, thy houses commodiously built, thy inhabitants indus- trious, thy manufactures esteemed. Unbroken peace reigns among thy citizens. Crimes are almost unknown, and there has been but a single
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example of a man banished from the country. He well deserved it; he was an Anglican priest, who, having turned Quaker, was unworthy to be one. This wretch was doubtless possessed of the devil, for he dared to preach intolerance. George Keith was his name; I know not where he has gone, but may all the intolerants go with him.
" So, of the three hundred thousand people who live happily in Penn- sylvania, there are two hundred thousand foreigners. For twelve guineas you can acquire a hundred acres, and within those hundred acres you are a veritable king, for you are free, you are a citizen. You can do no harm to any one, and no one can do harm to you ; you think what you please, and you say it without any one's persecuting you ; the burden of imposts continually doubled, you know not; you have no court to pay; you do not dread the insolence of a consequential subaltern." (Parton's Voltaire, vol. ii., 171.)
It would be easy to fill several pages with quotations from Kalm and other travellers and writers describing the position then occupied by the province, and its won- derful advancement. It was not merely the fertility of soil and the mildness of climate, but the liberal laws and customs which, in their opinion, had attracted settlers and forced on development.
At that time the opinion was rapidly gaining ground that liberty of conscience was not only right in itself, but that it had an important effect in encouraging trade and commerce. Even James II. seems to have been con- vinced of this result, and Penn often called attention to it in his writings, and gave Holland as an instance of unusual material prosperity as the result of extending religious liberty. His own province of Pennsylvania soon proved to be another instance.
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