Pennsylvania was handed to William Penn to settle a king's debt
Charles II owed money to Admiral Sir William Penn. In 1681, rather than pay it, the king granted the admiral's son a vast stretch of North America covering what is now Pennsylvania and Delaware. The son was a Quaker who had been expelled from Oxford and jailed for his faith, and he planned an experiment.
Penn meant the colony to run on Quaker ideals of peace and equality, with representative government and room to prosper. In 1682 he sailed up the Delaware River and founded Philadelphia on its western bank, and he became known for friendly relations and treaties with the Lenape people who already lived there. Not everyone welcomed him: Dutch, Swedish and English settlers in the southern counties disliked his Quaker government, and Maryland's proprietors claimed part of the land. In 1704 those three counties won the right to form a semi-autonomous Delaware Colony.
His path to all this ran through conflict with authority. Born in London on 24 October 1644, he was a small boy when Charles I was beheaded. A bout of smallpox cost him his hair, so he wore wigs for much of his life. As a teenager in Ireland, where his family had been sent after one of the admiral's failed missions, he heard a Quaker preacher named Thomas Loe and later described feeling divine impressions. At Oxford his sympathies lay with persecuted dissenters, and in 1662 the university expelled him for refusing to conform.
He was locked in the Tower of London more than once. While imprisoned he wrote No Cross, No Crown, published in 1669, which became a classic of Christian writing. He argued throughout his life for freedom of conscience against the Church of England's restrictions on dissent.
Penn also looked beyond his own colony. He was among the earliest advocates of uniting all the British colonies, and the democratic ideas in his Frame of Government for Pennsylvania influenced delegates who drafted the United States Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787. His portrait now hangs in the dining hall of Christ Church, the Oxford college that once threw him out.
Source: William Penn
