The Lords of Trade rendered a decision Nov. 7, 1685, which secured to Penn the portion claimed by him of the Delaware peninsula, but which left undefined the southern boundary of Pennsylvania. The Maryland boundary was finally settled in 1760, upon an agreement which had been entered into in 1732 between the heirs of Lord Baltimore and those of Penn.[784] By this a line was to be drawn westward from Cape Henlopen[785] to a point half way between the bays of Delaware and Chesapeake. From thence it was to run northward so as to touch the most western portion of a circle of twelve miles radius around New Castle, and continue in a due northerly course until it should reach the same latitude as fifteen English statute miles directly south of the most southern part of Philadelphia. From the point thus gained the line was to extend due west. These lines were surveyed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. They commenced their work in 1763 and suspended it in 1767, when they had reached a point two hundred and forty-four miles from the Delaware River.
The Indians who inhabited Pennsylvania were of the tribe of the Lenni Lenape. Some of them retained the noble characteristics of their race, but the majority of them, through their intercourse with the Dutch, the Swedes, and the English, had become thoroughly intemperate. Penn desired that his dealings with them should be so just as to preserve the confidence which Fox and Coale had inspired. Besides the letter written by his commissioners, he had sent to them messages of friendship through Holme and others. In all the agreements he had entered into with purchasers, the interests of the Indians had been protected; and he was far in advance of his time in hoping to establish relations with them by which all differences between the white men and the red should be settled by a tribunal wherein both should be represented. The possibility of their civilization under such circumstances was not absent from his mind, and in his first contract with purchasers he stipulated that the Indians should have “the same liberties to improve their grounds and provide for the sustenance of their families as the planters.” Following the just precedent which had been laid down by settlers in many parts of the country, and the advice of the Bishop of London, he would allow no land to be occupied until the Indian title had been extinguished. To obtain the land which was required by the emigrants, a meeting with the principal Indian chiefs was held at Shackamaxon June 23, 1683. The territory then purchased was considerable; but what was of equal importance to the welfare of the infant colony was the friendship then established with the aborigines. Poetry, Art, and Oratory have pictured this scene with the elevating thoughts which belong to each; but no more graphic representation of it has been made than that which is suggested by the simple language of Penn used in describing it. “When the purchase was agreed,” he writes, “great promises passed between us of kindness and good neighborhood, and that the Indians and English must live in love as long as the sun gave light. Which done, another made a speech to the Indians in the name of all the Sachamakers, or kings: first, to tell them what was done; next, to charge and command them to love the Christians, and particularly live in peace with me, and the people under my government; that many governors had been in the river, but that no governor had come himself to live and stay here before; and having now such an one that had treated them well, they should never do him or his any wrong,—at every sentence of which they shouted and said amen in their way.”[786]
“On the 6th of October, 1683, there arrived in Philadelphia, from Crefeld and its neighborhood, a little colony of Germans. They were thirteen men with their families, in all thirty-three persons, and they constituted the advance-guard of that immense emigration which, confined at first to Pennsylvania, has since been spread over the whole country. They were Mennonites, some of whom soon after, if not before, their arrival, became identified with the Quakers. Most of them were linen-weavers.
Among the first to purchase lands upon the organization of the province were several Crefeld merchants, headed by Jacob Telner, who secured fifteen thousand acres. The purchasers also included a number of distinguished persons in Holland and Germany, whose purchase amounted to twenty-five thousand acres, which became vested in the Frankfort Land Company, founded in 1686. The eleven members of this latter Company were chiefly Pietists and people of learning and influence, among whom was the celebrated Johanna Eleanora von Merlau. Their original purpose was to come to Pennsylvania themselves; but this plan was abandoned by all except Francis Daniel Pastorius, a young lawyer, son of a judge at Windsheim, skilled in the Greek, Latin, German, French, Dutch, English, and Italian languages, and carefully trained in all the learning of the day. On the 24th of October, 1683, Pastorius, as the agent for the Crefeld and Frankfort purchasers, began the location of Germantown. Other settlers soon followed, and among them, in 1685, were several families from the village of Krisheim, near Worms, where more than twenty years before the Quakers had made some converts among the Mennonites, and had established a meeting. In 1688 Gerhard Hendricks, Dirck op den Graeff, Francis Daniel Pastorius, and Abraham op den Graeff sent to the Friends’ Meeting a written protest against the buying and selling of slaves. It was the first public effort made in this direction in America, and is the subject of Whittier’s poem, The Pennsylvania Pilgrim.”[787]
The progress made in the settlement of the Province between 1681 and 1689 was remarkable, and was largely owing to Penn’s energy. On the 29th of December, 1682, he wrote from Chester: “I am very well, ... yet busy enough, having much to do to please all.... I am casting the country into townships.” On the 5th of the next month he wrote: “I am day and night spending my life, my time, my money, and am not a sixpence enriched by this greatness.... Had I sought greatness, I had stayed at home.” The English were the most numerous among the settlers; but in 1685, when the population numbered seven thousand two hundred, in which French, Dutch, Germans, Swedes, Finns, and Scotch-Irish were represented, Penn did not estimate his countrymen at above one half of the whole.
Twenty-three ships bearing emigrants arrived during the fall of 1682 and the winter following, and trading-vessels soon began to frequent the Delaware. The counties of Philadelphia, Chester, and Bucks were organized in the latter part of 1682, but were not surveyed until 1685. Philadelphia, named before she was born, and first laid out in August or September, 1682,[788] contained in the following July eighty houses, such as they were, and by the end of the year this number had increased to one hundred and fifty. The founders of the city lived in caves dug out of the high embankment by the river, and the houses which succeeded these primitive habitations were probably of the very simple character described in Penn’s advice to settlers.[789] In July, 1683, a weekly post was established. Letters were carried from Philadelphia to the Falls of Delaware for 3d., to Chester 2d., to New Castle 4d., to Maryland 6d. Notices of its departure were posted on the Meeting-House doors and in other public places.
On the 26th of December of the same year the Council arranged with Enoch Flower, who had had twenty years’ experience as a teacher in England, to open a school. Four shillings per quarter was the charge for those who were taught to read English; six shillings, when reading and writing were studied; and eight shillings, when the casting of accounts was added. For boarding scholars and “scooling,” he was to receive “Tenn” pounds per annum.
[This was the house in Philadelphia in which Penn lived after his return to the colony in 1699. It stood on the southeast corner of Second Street and Norris’s Alley, and was demolished in 1868. A view of it taken just before its demolition is given in Gay’s Popular History of the United States, iii. 171, with an earlier view, ii. 496. There is an account of it by Mr. Townsend Ward, with a view, in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iv. 53; but the most extended account is in Lippincott’s Magazine, vol. i. pp. 29, 191, 298, by General John M. Read, Jr. For other views, see Egle’s Pennsylvania, p. 1016, and Day’s Historical Collections of Pennsylvania, p. 556. The above cut is a fac-simile of one given by Watson in his Annals of Philadelphia, 1845 edition, p. 158; 1857 edition, p. 158. It is lithographed in his 1830 edition, p. 151. Drawings of the interior are in the possession of the Hist. Soc. of Pennsylvania.—Ed.]