William Penn's Holy Experiment

In the autumn of sixteen eighty-two, a thirty-eight-year-old English Quaker stepped off a ship at New Castle and walked into a colony he had never seen but had been imagining for years. William Penn had received a royal land grant from King Charles the Second the previous year, partial repayment of a debt the Crown owed Penn's late father, Admiral Sir William Penn. The grant was enormous: forty-five thousand square miles of mid-Atlantic wilderness.

Penn called it a 'holy experiment.' The phrase was not poetic ornament. Penn was serious about it in the way a scientist is serious about a hypothesis.

Pennsylvania was to be a living test of whether a government could be founded on conscience rather than compulsion, on religious tolerance rather than enforced conformity. In seventeenth-century Europe, that was a genuinely radical idea. England had been executing Quakers.

Penn himself had been imprisoned several times for his beliefs, once for months in the Tower of London. The Frame of Government Penn drafted for Pennsylvania in sixteen eighty-two was unlike anything then existing in the English-speaking world. It guaranteed liberty of conscience to all who believed in God.

It established a representative assembly. It prohibited imprisonment for debt. It created a penal code that, by the standards of the era, was startlingly humane, replacing most capital offenses with fines and labor.

Settlers came quickly: Quakers from England and Wales, German pietist sects fleeing persecution in the Rhineland, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Welsh Baptists. By seventeen hundred, Philadelphia was already the second-largest city in British North America. By seventeen fifty, Pennsylvania's unusual openness had attracted what historians call the most ethnically diverse population in the colonies.

Penn himself returned to England in sixteen eighty-four and never came back permanently, dying in seventeen eighteen with the experiment still very much in progress. But the architecture of tolerance he designed outlasted him. When the founders gathered in Philadelphia nearly a century later to write a new nation's governing documents, they were working, in part, in Penn's shadow.