Frontier Country. Patrick Spero

relations had become so poisonous that they could not even agree on how to conduct their negotiations. Penn wanted the two to adopt diplomatic protocols that resembled the way two nations negotiated treaties. He proposed that both men retire to separate houses with their respective advisers by their sides and then “treat by way of written memorials,” so their words could not have “the mistakes or abuses that may follow from ill designs, or ill memory.” Baltimore declined this invitation by blaming poor weather, but it was clear he had little interest in negotiating. After this failed meeting, Baltimore began issuing proclamations in the contested zone, offering more land for cheaper prices than Pennsylvania in an attempt to build a solid bulwark of loyal Marylanders who rejected Penn’s authority.¹⁹

      The race was on to see who could establish the strongest claims to the territory. Penn, realizing that Baltimore rejected Penn’s own admittedly self-serving sense of neighborliness, began to adopt Baltimore’s more cutthroat tactics in order to bolster his legal standing in an English court. In October 1683, just two months after the failed treaty, Penn traveled to the Susquehanna River to secure an Indian deed to this contested area. Penn’s “purchase of the mouth of the Susquehanna River” was one of the shortest and vaguest of his original purchases. He purchased the land from Machaloha, a Delaware whose right to sell it scholars have deemed “questionable.” Penn ignored any doubts, however, reasoning that he could use the purchase to show that Indians invested with the original right to the land recognized his ownership. As his biographers have pointed out, Penn’s purpose was “to solidify his claim and to notify the Lords of Trade,” the imperial organization that mediated disputes between colonies. Driven by a feud with his neighbor and guided by his understanding of the precedents imperial officials might privilege in a case before them, Penn took the actions he believed necessary to secure his domain.²⁰

      Figure 3. William Penn’s first purchases of Indian lands, shown here in aggregate. One of Penn’s first objectives was to secure title to the land bordering the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers, believing that control of both arteries was essential to the future prosperity of his colony. Machaloha’s grant, the approximate extent of which is noted above, overlapped with other purchases of Penn’s. Penn made his purchase from Machaloha under duress, fearing that if he did not secure a claim to the land near the mouth of the Susquehanna from a Native representative, Lord Baltimore would win this valuable waterway. After Pencak and Richter, eds., Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods (University Park, PA, 2004).

      Although the Susquehanna purchase instructed all settlers to “behave themselves justly and lovingly” toward the Indians, the dubious nature of the purchase suggests that when English colonies competed over land, Penn, like others, would push aside Native concerns. Indeed, such times laid bare the driving assumption of Penn’s enterprise: expansion was essential to colonial success in the Middle Colonies. In this early case, Penn surrendered some of his principles to preserve his larger vision. Indeed, Penn may have considered this treaty simply a short-term expedient that did not compromise his core principles because in 1701, he negotiated a new purchase with the Conestoga Indians, the group with the strongest claim to the land he had purchased from Machaloha.²¹

      “The Securitie of the Fronteers”

      Penn left for England aboard the Endeavour in 1684 to defend his case against Baltimore. He departed feeling confident, his optimism about the future of the colony buoyed by signs of success. Just before he left, he wrote his close friend John Alloway a letter brimming with enthusiasm, bragging that Philadelphia had about six hundred people and hundreds of homes. The city supported a tavern, and colonists constructed a three-hundred-foot-long dock that jutted out into the Delaware River to accommodate the more than forty-five ships arriving annually. Penn’s expansionary dreams were also coming to fruition. He boasted to another friend that Pennsylvania would eclipse its rival Maryland within seven years, and he told another with a little pride, if not vanity, “I must say, without vanity, I have led the greatest colony into America that ever any man did upon a private credit.”²²

      Matters back in England gave Penn more reason for cheer. Penn and Baltimore presented their case to the Lords of Trade, the body the Crown designated to mediate such disputes. Baltimore hoped to secure the Lower Counties and receive recognition of the fortieth degree as the boundary between the two colonies. Much to his chagrin, the Lords of Trade decided largely in Penn’s favor. They recognized Penn’s claim to the Lower Counties, thus ensuring he had access to the Delaware River. They refused to draw the exact boundary between the Lower Counties and Maryland, however, leaving the proprietors responsible for hashing it out. Moreover, the question of the fortieth degree remained unaddressed, largely because, with Pennsylvanian settlement still hugging the banks of the Delaware and Marylanders focusing more on their southern lands, this dispute seemed too far removed.²³

      Things then took a turn for the worse for Penn when in 1688 zones of invasion—that is, frontiers—began to appear on the geopolitical landscape of North America when England became embroiled in a war with France, known as King William’s War in North America. This war was the first that the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, founded on the principle of pacifism, had to confront. Although Pennsylvania itself was well insulated from the fighting, imperial officials expected Pennsylvania’s government would aid its fellow colonies that were waging a war. For Penn, rumors circulated that he was a secret agent for the Catholic belligerent. He eventually faced charges of treason in England. The Crown, understandably, revoked his charter. Though treason was the key reason for its revocation, Penn’s pacifism was also a concern. The Crown worried that a pacifist colony would fail to provide the military protection for its frontiers that was expected of its colonial governments.²⁴

      Indeed, the colony’s wartime behavior proved that the administration’s fears had merit and that frontiers were something Pennsylvanians took pride in avoiding. In 1692, the Crown wrote to Benjamin Fletcher, New York’s governor who also temporarily replaced Penn as Pennsylvania’s governor, instructing him that New York’s neighbors should offer defensive aid. The geopolitics of frontiers drove the request. Albany was the chief frontier in England’s grand imperial vision of its North American domain because it was the site at which they expected a French invasion. Without New York’s successful “defence of Albany, its frontiers against the French,” the Crown warned, the English colonies to the south would “not be able to live, but in Garrison.” A shared concern about frontiers was thus supposed to compel colonies to cooperate. Further, the Crown’s orders revealed something about life on frontiers: they were militarized zones—“garrisons”—in which people lived in constant fear of invasion.²⁵

      Fletcher traveled to Pennsylvania to make his case for men and money, noting that “the securitie of the fronteers” in New York depended on Pennsylvania’s support. Such a request, New Yorkers believed, was a pittance compared with what they were already doing in Pennsylvania’s interest because the strength of New York’s frontiers secured Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania deferred, confirming for imperial officials that Pennsylvania, under its current regime, was incapable of fulfilling one of its chief responsibilities to the empire: managing frontiers. As a frustrated Fletcher wrote to the Board of Trade in 1694, “They [Quaker Pennsylvanians] will rather die than resist with carnal weapons,” a sentiment that portended the fractious future of frontier politics in Pennsylvania.²⁶

      “Better Adapted to Answer the Present Circumstances and Conditions”

      Penn eventually won his charter back in 1694 as the war wound down. He then prepared to return to Pennsylvania. Continuing strife with his personal affairs, however, kept Penn away until 1699, when he finally visited again. Penn found a much-changed colony when he arrived. In his absence, Philadelphia had undergone explosive growth and had begun to look more like a town than some small colonial outpost. There were many taverns, a courthouse, and all sorts of houses, from mansions of stone and slate to ramshackle huts. Within two years of his return, the population of the city passed two thousand souls, making it one of the largest settlements in British North America. Most of the new arrivals were Quakers attracted by Penn’s promise of a refuge that protected liberty of conscience and provided a just government. The economy boomed