Colonial Penn Quotes

relatives. His most notable service in home politics was his reform of the postal system; but his fame as a statesman rests chiefly on his services in connection with the relations of the Colonies with Great Britain, and later with France. In 1757 he was sent to England to protest against the influence of the Penns in the government of the colony, and for five years he remained there, striving to enlighten the people and the ministry

William Penn planned to use this land for a colony where Quaker ideas would be followed. He wanted the settlers to be like brothers, all equal to each other. The capital city would be called the City of Brotherly Love--in Greek, Philadelphia.

In his earlier years, however, Penn had written pamphlets arguing strenuously against the same sort of despotic schemes that James was now undertaking; and this contradiction of his former position seriously injured his reputation even among his own people.

With forty thousand or so inhabitants, Philadelphia was the largest metropolis in British America, and it offered just about everything money could buy. Yet half the population owned no taxable property, and the bottom 60 percent could claim a mere 8 percent of the total wealth.54 The entire colony was in a very real sense the private property of an aristocratic family in England—the well-fed descendants of William Penn—and it was divided internally between an extremely wealthy oligarchy, concentrated in Philadelphia and the southeast, and a vast population of farmers, laborers, slaves, and immigrant hordes, many of them German, who read newspapers in their own language and washed down their pickled cabbage with the bitter ale of resentment.

In Philadelphia the disorders inaugurated by young Penn broke out at short intervals, assuming not infrequently the proportions of a dangerous riot.

As the years passed, these two religious worlds would continue to collide, as one would try to convince the other of their ideological superiority. And in this struggle, it must be said that it was the Puritans who bared their teeth.

In many ways, this charter for West Jersey (later to become Pennsylvania) was a forerunner of what the actual United States Constitution would entail. “Concession and Agreements” contains general guidelines for the community, with an additional listing of allowed civil liberties, which are very much in line with what would eventually become the US Bill of Rights. William Penn, who lived one hundred years before the founding of the United States, is not usually considered a Founding Father, but there are those who would argue that he very well should be.

the evil one was no laughing matter for the Puritans, and almost anyone preaching a different doctrine than what they were used to was immediately suspect.