The Ifs of History/Chapter 10
WHEN an English father, irascible and opinionated, disowns and turns out of doors a son who has not only disobeyed him but proved false to the traditions and obvious interests of the family, he is very apt to adhere to his action. A very great deal turned upon a case, once, in which an English father, after making a very firm show of disowning his son, at last relented and took him back to his heart.
Pennsylvania, to wit, turned upon it; and all the amazing success of William Penn's great experiment in colonization. There has never been anything quite like that success in the world's history, for the great trek of the already established American population in the nineteenth century was a readjustment, an extension, rather than a colonization in the true sense. The planting of Pennsylvania was a true colonization. Not only did it amount to the creation of a great and model commonwealth, full-fledged, with a composite new-world population, in twenty or even ten years' time, but it furnished the keystone to the arch of states that constituted the American republic in the next century after Penn's settlement.
Philadelphia led the American towns in the seven years of the Revolution. It was their capital commercially as well as politically. It supplied most of the sinews of war. Without Robert Morris's $1,400,000, all of which came from Philadelphia, the final and crucial campaign of the war could not have been fought. More than that, without just the sort of commonwealth that Pennsylvania had already become, standing in the center of things—cosmopolitan, independent of royalist or aristocratic influence, populous, well-to-do, democratic, steady—it is hard to see how the Revolution could have been undertaken at all.
But for the incident which permitted Penn's settlement, the vast territory which afterward constituted Pennsylvania would have become merely an extension of New York, or of New Jersey, or of Maryland, or of Virginia, or of all of them. The chances are that its resources would have been exploited by slave labor. The greater part of the state might have remained slave territory up to 1861. In any case its development would have been much more slow, its peopling much less rapid. Not only must Indian wars have checked growth, but the spectacle of the arrival of five hundred thousand stalwart Germans, the creation of the largest city in the colonies within fifty years, and the upbuilding, in that time, of a trade from the Delaware River that employed more than five hundred ships and seven thousand sailors, could never have been presented.
The part which Pennsylvania began to play from the moment of Penn's arrival, and which it still plays, in American affairs, was directly dependent upon Penn's character and genius, and, for a long time, upon his wealth and social position. Without the wealth which William Penn inherited from his father, Admiral Sir William Penn, he could not have organized his Pennsylvania Society, nor bought the site of Philadelphia. Without the position, as well as the wealth, which he inherited, he could not, in the first place, have aspired to the acquaintance with and confidence of King Charles II; and these were absolutely essential to the extraordinary charter, in behalf of a despised and distrusted people, which Penn received at the king's hands.
Had Penn always been in this favorable position? We shall see. The admiral, his father, was a good churchman and a conservative man. King Charles held him in very high estimation. The son was brilliant, and of noble character. He was sent to Oxford University; and what was the father's astonishment, after the boy had been there some little time, to hear that he had joined the despised and persecuted sect of the Quakers! This was very much as if, at the present day, the son and heir of a great multi-millionaire should join, not merely the Socialists, but the Anarchists at Paterson!
Sir William raved and scolded. The son only grew more firm in the faith. Sir William endured much; but finding the young man actually inclined to address the king as "thou," he told him that if he committed this impropriety, or "thee-ed" and "thoued" either him, the admiral, or the Duke of York, he would disown him, and cut him off without a shilling. On the very first opportunity after this, young William addressed King Charles as "thou!" The king, having a more than royal sense of humor, made a jest of the matter, but Sir William did not. He was as good as his word. He turned his son out of doors, and bade him begone. The youth went abroad, and took up for a time a very much discredited existence. He had already been expelled from the university.
Here, for a time, the fate of Pennsylvania certainly trembled in the balance. It was quite within the outraged admiral's power to make the ban permanent. If he had done so, there would never have been a Quaker-German commonwealth in America.
It is known that the son accepted his banishment as permanent. But his mother did not. She pleaded with the father for his forgiveness. She reminded him of the boy's great natural goodness, his brilliancy, his affectionateness. He would, Lady Penn maintained, recover from his distemper of Quakerism. She begged her husband, before it was too late, to relent and recall him.
At length, moved by this appeal and the promptings of his own heart, the admiral called the young man home. Once or twice afterwards he was on the point of a more radical banishment of him. But, fortunately for the New World, Sir William's heart was soft after all. The son was reëstablished in his good graces. After the admiral's death, in 1670, it was found that he had bequeathed all his wealth to the son, and, owing to the son's influence, the Quakers improved their position not a little, and in due time Penn organized and put through the Pennsylvania experiment. But King Charles took good care to inform him that the name "Pennsylvania," officially bestowed on the colony, was not in honor of the founder, but in compliment to the admiral, his father.
Narrow as this contingency may have been, since so great an event depended on the impulse of one man, it was after all a moral contingency, and not due of physical accident, as so many others have been. It is the more impressive for this reason. It is good to know that a few heartbeats the more, in the breast of a man who can be kind as well as hot-tempered, may create a mighty empire.