William Penn's Holy Experiment: Tolerance and Its Limits

William Penn received the Pennsylvania charter from King Charles the Second in sixteen eighty-one as payment of a debt owed to Penn's father. He was thirty-six years old, a Quaker who had been imprisoned twice in England for his faith, and he had a specific idea about what to do with nearly twenty eight million acres of North America.

He called it the Holy Experiment. Pennsylvania would be a refuge where no one would be persecuted for their religious beliefs, where the Lenape people would be treated as neighbors and paid for their land, where taxes would be set by an elected assembly, where the justice system would be governed by proportionality rather than brutality. He sent broadsides across Europe inviting Quakers, Mennonites, German pietists, Huguenots, Welsh Baptists, and anyone else fleeing persecution to come. They came in enormous numbers.

Penn's personal conduct in Pennsylvania was, by the standards of his time and in comparison with every other colonial proprietor, genuinely unusual. He learned enough Lenape to address councils without an interpreter. He signed treaties he believed were equitable. He wrote to his colonists that the native people of Pennsylvania were his friends and must be treated accordingly.

His sons did not share his commitments. When Penn died in seventeen eighteen, heavily in debt, Thomas and John Penn inherited the proprietorship. Nineteen years later, they executed the Walking Purchase, covering seventy miles with trained runners and stripping the Lenape of twelve hundred square miles through a manipulated deed. The Holy Experiment's founding principle, that tolerance extended to everyone regardless of power, lasted one generation under the Penns' own governance.

Pennsylvania still carries Penn's legacy in its politics, its landscape of religious communities, its early abolition law. It also carries the Walking Purchase, the MOVE bombing, and a dozen other instances of the same pattern: tolerance declared as principle, practiced selectively, and withdrawn when it became inconvenient.