The Proprietorships of William Penn

William Penn became interested in the Colonies when he acquired New Jersey as an investor, mainly concerned with selling real estate. When he later received Pennsylvania and Delaware from the King of England ( Charles II,the Stuart King) restored with the help of his Admiral father), he owned them and ruled them outright. But by then his main future intention was to found a refuge for Quakers and other religious dissenters, so he became the real estate Prioprietor, after merely satisfying himself about the government and other arrangements in a general way. At least half the original 13 colonies were proprietorships, but the terms of their grants had a lot of variation. Penn's intention for the proprietorship was to sell off as much of the property as possible, sort of benignly watching the process unfold in the parts he had sold. There were two unforeseen flaws in the idea; the first was that his sons and heirs would revert to the Anglican faith and have little interest in his holy experiment except for the revenue it would return. The second flaw was to fail to see that religious toleration might lead to the Quakers becoming outnumbered in their own refuge. Eventually, there does come a time in the real estate sell-off process when you have sold more than you retain. At that point, it is no longer yours.

Franklin

In land value, although perhaps not in land area, that point had been reached by the middle of the eighteenth century, and it led to a famous battle between the Penn descendants and Benjamin Franklin. The Penn family saw no reason to pay taxes to the new buyers on the land they hadn't yet sold, or obey laws created by the people to whom they had sold land. Franklin took the part of the settlers and immigrants, who resented paying taxes and fighting Indians on behalf of someone who still owned vast stretches of land within the colony. Both sides had a certain amount of justice in their positions, both sides appealed to the King. The Penns knew the King better, so Franklin lost. That was mostly what Franklin was doing in London in the years before the Revolution, and eventually it took the Revolutionary war to resolve the issue. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania did resolve the issue with fairness and generosity. To quote Sydney G. Fisher, writing in The Quaker Colonies, "When the people could have confiscated everything in Pennsylvania belonging to the proprietary family, they not only left them in possession of a large part of their land, but paid them handsomely for the part that was taken." The matter is generally considered to have been finally settled by the Confirming Act of 1787.

In New Jersey, on the other hand, the proprietorship still exists. The land between the North River (Hudson) and the South River (Delaware) was divided into two proprietorships by a line drawn between the waterfalls at Trenton and Egg Harbor. The southern segment was called the Proprietorship of West Jersey and retained a more strongly Quaker character than the Proprietorship of East Jersey, a fact that might well have led the two segments to take opposite sides of the 1860 Civil War except that it was the northern half that sympathized with slavery and the Southern confederacy, while the Proprietorship of West Jersey was mostly where the anti-slavery movement began, with a Quaker named John Woolman. The issue of taxing and legislating the unsold land of the Proprietorship was not a source of controversy in New Jersey at the time of the Revolution, but it hadn't been forgotten, either. A couple of the stockholders of the proprietorship were members of the Constitutional Convention. When the time came that the other delegates urgently needed New Jersey's vote to ratify the new constitution, the problem was "explained" to the other states. The outcome was that the proprietorship tacitly agreed to be taxed and regulated like any other property, but the ownership rights were tacitly respected as persisting under the new Constitution. So even today, when the ocean creates a new strip of beach, or a farmer abandons some land on the other side of a turnpike, it belongs to the Proprietorship. It belongs to a little group of stockholders who meet once a year in Burlington or Salem, under a tree, and who actually pay themselves annual dividends.

In Delaware, things are a little fuzzier. Delaware was once part of Pennsylvania, as the lower three counties. John Dickinson was once Governor of both states, but they have had two legislatures since 1700. The last time the proprietorship matter came up, so far as real estate lawyers can remember, was in the sandy beaches of Cape Henlopen; things were smoothed out by making the disputed land into a state park.

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