The Free Society of Traders and the Early Politics of Pennsylvania
THE political history of Pennsylvania in the first decade of settlement is the confused and confusing tale of chronic friction between sections, groups, and individuals. Upper and lower houses of the legislature matched strength; the lower counties (later the state of Delaware) jockeyed for power with the three initial Pennsylvania counties; proand anti-proprietary factions were pitted against each other; and within factions individuals vied for position. "For the love of God, me and the poor country, be not so governmentish, so noisy and open in your dissatisfactions/' wrote William Penn, proprietor and founder of the colony, only three years after the "Holy Experiment" had been launched. A year later he would write in disgust at political affairs in Pennsylvania, "It almost temps me to deliver up the colony to the K[ing]—and lett a mercenary government have the tameing of them." If the political process in colonial Pennsylvania was the despair of its founder, it has been no less so of historians writing of the colony's early history. Most have taken little account of the almost ceaseless political friction or have passed it off as the first signs of restiveness in the popular assembly—a sort of early ground-swell of democratic sentiment which would ultimately transform the Quaker colony into the equalitarian and majoritarian leader of the American colonies. To some extent the political instability that beset Pennsylvania in its early years was not uncharacteristic of the American colonial experience, for it seemed to illustrate the proposition that rerooting