The Proprietor's Dilemma
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| William Penn |
During the century which elapsed after Charles II gave away Pennsylvania to William Penn, a couple hundred thousand people moved in and changed the local character of the place. This transformation of the wilderness explains why the terms of the grant were logical at the time, but proved almost impossible to manage at the time of the Revolution. The Penns with thirty million acres were the largest landholders in America, but by 1776 only five million acres had been sold.
Charles II had written in the Charter that the Penns could have the land if they could maintain order there, a provision reflecting some doubt about the ability of pacifists to shoot the necessary number of Indians, Frenchmen and Spaniards, while retaining the legal right to recover the land if they didn't. On the other hand, the motive for a King delegating away his authority became clear enough when the Penns experienced severe financial strain defending the Northeast corner of the state against the Connecticut invaders. It furthermore helps understand why Benjamin Franklin received such a cold reception when he was sent to London by the colonists to offer civil authority over the state to the crown. The King didn't want the problems, and particularly didn't want the expense. The ambiguities were of course shared all around. William Penn quite shrewdly saw that it was more sensible to treat the Indians decently than to fight with them, and cheaper too; the lesson was not lost on the British crown. But the French posed a much larger world-wide threat, finding it was economical to supply munitions to the Indians on the frontier and stir them up emotionally. The French and Indian War was a small component of the Seven Years War, but its cost utterly overwhelmed the ability of one family to underwrite local diplomacy, and indeed jeapardized the finances of the British Monarch. The result was a need to tax the colonies for their defense. From that, things went downhill and eventually to the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, and the Tea Tax. Everyone made lots of mistakes as the whole structure underwent revision, and it's all sort of a big pity.
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| John Penn |
With much to lose, the Penn family did pretty well with the resources at hand. By the time of the Revolution, three generations of Penns had divided up ownership shares of the Proprietorship.
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| Thomas Penn |
John Penn was the Governor of the state, residing in his mansion on the Schuylkill called Lansdowne, doing his best to ingratiate the locals. He struggled to be diplomatic when arguing for the decisions actually made by his Uncle Thomas in London. Thomas Penn, on the other hand, was an important friend of the British Ministry, and a notable person in aristocratic England. As the Revolutionary War approached, the problem was how to hold on to 25 million unsold acres, while unsure who was going to win the war.
The strategy adopted was to get out of the business of running local government. John Penn the Governor became a private citizen, just a local real estate agent. He took an oath of allegiance to the Revolutionary government, which in the chaos of the time was equivalent to becoming an American citizen. Meanwhile, the other members of the family remained in England, ready to revise the arrangement if the British won the war. It was all fairly transparent straddling of the issues, which was only even remotely likely to be effective because of the enormous store of goodwill built up over a century. In 1789 revolutionary France, for example, it would not have delayed the tumbrels to the guillotine, five minutes.
Meanwhile, an unexpected difficulty was created. By withdrawing from control of the local government, the Penn family also withdrew from the defense of the state borders against neighboring colonies. Under the circumstances, the Penns were afraid to appeal to the King, while the new government of Pennsylvania found the Articles of Confederation were merely a wartime tribal compact.(1136)
