He regretted the “unkindness and injustice” that Indians had experienced from other Europeans and promised that Pennsylvania would be different. One year before his trip across the Atlantic Ocean, Penn had written a letter to the “Kings of the Indians,” explaining that he was coming to settle in their land. Like all Quakers, he was a pacifist, and he was adamant that his new colony would avoid the bloodshed and war between Indians and other English colonists that had occurred in New England and Virginia. Penn had high hopes that the colony would enjoy religious freedom, as well as peace with the Lenni Lenapes and other American Indians who had lived in this land for centuries. Now, in 1682, Penn finally stood on the shores of the colony of Pennsylvania. This dream became a reality when King Charles II offered him title to a large expanse of land in the New World to pay off a substantial debt the crown owed to Penn’s family. During the 1670s, he began to dream of a colony where Quakers – and all kinds of Christians – would be free to worship as they saw fit. As a result, he became an ardent activist for religious freedom. Even though he was an English aristocrat, the young Penn had been imprisoned for his illegal preaching and publication of Quaker doctrines. During the 1660s, Englishmen harshly persecuted the Quakers, whom they considered to be dangerous radicals because of their teachings on social and religious equality. Its members were called “Quakers” by their enemies because their intense meetings sometimes led members to shake in fits of spiritual fervor. Penn was part of a religious sect known as the Society of Friends. The thirty-eight-year-old Englishman could not help contrasting this strange, expansive land with memories of the cramped prison cell he had occupied twenty years earlier back in England. After reading this Narrative, students can further explore the development of the Pennsylvania colony in the following Primary Sources: Penn’s Letter Recruiting Colonists, 1683 and the Germantown Friends’ Antislavery Petition, 1688.Īs he disembarked from his ship onto the western shore of the Delaware River in 1682, William Penn surveyed the green country in front of him. This Narrative should be assigned to students at the beginning of Chapter 2, following The English Come to America and The Founding of Maryland Narratives.
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