Read Online The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands - Free Book Online Page A

common law.)
    At about this time Penn’s father died. The admiral had learned to accept his son’s sincerity if not his beliefs, and he left young William a sizable fortune. This included an annuity of £1,500 and, more portentously for English and American history, a claim of £16,000 upon the impecunious Charles for loans outstanding. The younger Penn was in and out of prison during this period—for declining to doff his hat in court, for further unauthorized preaching, for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown. When he was not behind bars, he spent extended periods in Europe disseminating Quaker ideas and values. In court, in prison, and on the Continent, he sharpened his arguments for religious toleration,and when a Quaker friend who had an interest in what would become the colony of New Jersey ran into financial trouble and needed rescue, Penn took the opportunity to draft a set of “concessions and agreements” for the venture, guaranteeing to settlers the most sweeping religious liberty anywhere in England’s empire. Unfortunately for freedom of conscience in New Jersey, the concessions never went into effect, being swallowed up in some further commercial restructuring of the colony.
    Disappointed but determined to try again, Penn pressed Charles to redeem his debt to him by granting him a large tract of land west of New Jersey. Charles consented, and after some haggling Penn became the proprietor of what may have been the largest single piece of real estate ever legally held by someone other than a monarch. Penn wanted to call the well-forested territory “Sylvania,” but Charles insisted on honoring the admiral—not the son—by prefixing “Penn.” Both parties were happy to portray the transaction as a case of balancing the royal books, but both understood that there was more involved. Speaking of himself and his fellow Friends, Penn observed, “The government was anxious to be rid of us at so cheap a price.”
    As proprietor of Pennsylvania, Penn enjoyed sweeping powers subject only to the constraints of the common law, applicable Parliamentary measures such as the navigation acts, and the sensitivities of imperial politics. This left a great deal of latitude in all his longitude. He immediately prescribed the closest thing to democracy within the empire, allowing the election of a representative council based on broad manhood suffrage. Not surprisingly, in light of his convictions—both the theological kind and those handed down by the courts—he guaranteed freedom of religion. Equally predictably, in light of the pacifism of the Quakers, he called for amicable relations with the Indian tribes that occupied his new possessions.
    In the autumn of 1682, just several months before Josiah Franklin left England for Boston, Penn traveled to America for the first time. He wished to see the forests and streams he had heard so much about; he also wanted to walk the streets—notional though they yet were—of the “large town or city” he had directed be laid out on the west bank of the Delaware River. Philadelphia—the name was a neoclassical rendering of “brotherly love”—was the first planned city in America andamong the first in the world; its plan reflected Penn’s desire to mitigate the ills attached to Old World cities. The great plague and fire of the 1660s still seared the memories of Londoners; Penn would combat these egregious civic afflictions by making Philadelphia airy and open, “a green country town, which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome.” The main streets would be one hundred feet across—wider than anything in London—and the lesser avenues fifty feet, all arranged in a regular, rectangular grid. Lots would be large—half an acre or an acre—with room enough for gardens and orchards to surround houses set well back from the street. Four squares of several acres each and a central square of ten acres would guarantee additional open space to the