Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Who founded Philadelphia, and why?

On 4 March 1681 King Charles II granted a huge piece of America to William Penn, partly to pay off a debt the Crown owed to Penn’s late father, an admiral. Penn was a Quaker, a member of the Religious Society of Friends. He called his colony a holy experiment: a place where people could worship freely and help govern themselves.

Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony. It belonged to Penn and later his sons, who appointed its governors, rather than being run directly by the king. Penn arrived in late October 1682 on the ship Welcome with about 100 fellow Quakers. He named his new city Philadelphia, meaning brotherly love.

What was William Penn’s plan for Philadelphia?

Penn wanted what he called a “greene Country Towne”, with space and gardens around the houses so it would never burn and always stay healthy.

His surveyor general, Thomas Holme, drew the plan. Holme’s map of 1683, the first printed plan of the city, showed a neat grid of straight streets running about two miles between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. Two broad main streets, High Street (now Market Street) and Broad Street, crossed at a central square. Four more squares, one in each quarter, were kept as open ground. They survive today as Rittenhouse, Logan, Franklin and Washington Squares, and City Hall stands on the central one.

Real life was messier than the map. People crowded close to the Delaware: in 1700 most townspeople lived along about half a mile of the riverfront.

How did Quakers govern Philadelphia, and how free was religion?

Penn’s Frame of Government of 1682 gave more religious freedom than almost anywhere in Europe. People of many faiths could worship as they chose, so Quakers were joined by French Protestants, Lutherans, Mennonites, Amish, Catholics and others. Voting and holding office were more limited: those rights were kept for Protestants.

In the early years Quakers ran the government. In 1701 Penn gave the colony its Charter of Privileges, which made the elected assembly unusually powerful, and gave the city its own charter. He sailed for England that October and never returned.

Estimates of its size differ. One careful count gives about 2,000 people in the town centre in 1700 and 2,684 in 1710, rising to about 10,000 by 1740 as Germans and Scots-Irish arrived. Within a few decades non-Quakers outnumbered Quakers in their own city.

What did Philadelphia trade in 1715?

The rich farmland of south-eastern Pennsylvania grew plenty of grain. A report to the customs commissioners in 1700 noted large exports of bread and flour, already the staples of the city’s trade with the West Indies.

Philadelphia ships carried flour, bread, lumber and barrel staves south and came back with sugar, rum and other island goods. Those goods paid for cloth and tools from England. In 1718 the deputy governor, William Keith, told his council that the island colonies relied on Pennsylvania’s bread.

The trade built ships too. By 1720 at least a dozen shipyards lined the waterfront, building wooden vessels of up to about 300 tons from local pine, pine tar and iron.

What was Penn’s treaty with the Lenape?

The land was the home of the Lenape, also called the Delaware. Penn wrote to their leaders asking permission to live there, and bought land from them rather than simply taking it. In June 1683 he and Lenape leaders, including the respected Tamanend, signed land deeds, perhaps at Shackamaxon.

A famous story says Penn made a great treaty of friendship with the Lenape under an elm at Shackamaxon, in today’s Fishtown. No written record of that meeting survives, and historians think the tradition may blend several real agreements into one. Benjamin West’s painting of the scene dates from 1771–72.

Later dealings were far less fair. In 1737, after Penn’s death, his sons Thomas and John and their agent James Logan used an unsigned draft deed of 1686 that claimed as much land as a man could walk in a day and a half. They hired fast walkers, one of whom covered over 60 miles. This Walking Purchase took perhaps over a million acres from the Lenape, whose leaders protested.

Was there slavery in Quaker Philadelphia?

Yes. In 1684 the ship Isabella brought about 150 enslaved Africans to the city, and Quaker colonists bought them. Penn himself held several enslaved people at Pennsbury, his country house. Historians estimate that by 1710 between one in ten and one in five people in the city were enslaved. In the early 1700s new laws limited where enslaved people could go and set harsh punishments for them.

Some Friends objected early. In 1688 four men in Germantown, including Francis Daniel Pastorius who drafted it, wrote a protest based on the Golden Rule: treat others as you would be treated. It was the first protest against slavery by a religious group in the English colonies, but the Quaker meetings passed it upwards and took no action. It was forgotten until 1844. Quakers did not bar their members from owning slaves until 1776.

One life stands out. Alice, an enslaved woman born in 1686, lived in slavery in Philadelphia all her long life (she died in 1802), collected tolls at Dunk’s Ferry on the Delaware, and was remembered as one of the city’s first oral historians, a keeper of its memories.

Did Blackbeard attack Philadelphia ships?

Yes, though at the mouth of Delaware Bay, not in the city. In October 1717 Blackbeard, then sailing the sloop Revenge with Stede Bonnet aboard, captured a ship from Liverpool and Dublin carrying about 150 passengers off the Delaware capes. His crews took several more vessels there that month, including the sloop Robert of Philadelphia. The Boston News-Letter reported some of the raids from Philadelphia letters.

On 11 August 1718 Keith told his council that Teach, whom he called a noted pirate, had been lurking around Philadelphia, and issued a warrant for his arrest. Teach was not caught. Pirates troubled the bay again in July 1722, when they kept ships from leaving port for about a week.

When did Benjamin Franklin come to Philadelphia?

On Sunday 6 October 1723 a 17-year-old runaway apprentice from Boston stepped off a boat at the Market Street wharf. Benjamin Franklin later wrote that he bought three large, puffy bread rolls and walked up Market Street eating one, then fell asleep in a Quaker meeting house. He soon found work with a printer, Samuel Keimer.