William Penn's Commissioners

William Penn's Commissioners Richard Alan Ryerson I I N HIS FATHER'S NATIVE TOWN of Bristol, England, on September 30, 1681, William Penn put his hand to his "Instructions . To My Trusty and loving Friends, William Crispin, John Bezar, and Nathaniel Alen, my Commissioners for the Settling of the present Collony."1 Penn's projected capital city for his new colony did not yet have a name, but in his "Instructions" he had devised an elaborate plan for its foundation, and selected three men with particular credentials for carrying it out. Allen and Bezar promptly sailed from Bristol for America with a shipload of Pennsylvania colonists. Penn returned to London, where he appointed a fourth commissioner, William Haig, on October 25; and on October 28, he issued a brief "Memorandum of Additional Instructions to Wm Markham & Wm Crispin & Jn° Bezer," in which he finally granted his city a name— Philadelphia. 2 William Penn's "Instructions" of September 30, his earlier "Concessions" of July 11, 1681, his letters to friends and colonizing colleagues, and the 1683 Holme plan for Philadelphia all afford the historian an unusually full view of the establishment of a colonial city.3 Penn's motives for planning Philadelphia in the way that he did, the changes that local conditions effected in his original plan, and the execution of the modified plan are well understood, and have been the subject of extended commentary, most fully by Hannah Benner Roach in her 1968 article on "The Planting of Philadelphia." The men entrusted with the founding of Philadelphia, however, are not well known, nor has attention been directed to the reasons for their selection for this vital task. In the next several issues of The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine, the first three commissioners to reach Pennsylvania—Nathaniel Allen, John Bezar, and William Haig will be the subject of individual biographical and genealogical portraits by three members of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. The present essay has a different objective: to explain why William Penn chose each of these men, as well as William Crispin, to lay out his city. The central questions in understanding his choice are 95 96 The Pennsylvania Gtnealagical Magazine three: What was the nature of the task that the commissioners would have to perform? How did Penn meet each of these men? Finally, what features of each man's background, convictions, and achievements convinced Penn that they would make suitable commissioners? II The first key to understanding William Penn's selection of his commissioners is an appreciation of the nature of his land policy for all of Pennsylvania, of which his plan for Philadelphia was an integral part. When Penn began selling Pennsylvania land in July 1681, he did not sell located, surveyed plots, but the right to stated amounts of land. These land rights, which ranged from 125 to 10,000 acres, might then be located virtually anywhere on unpatented land on or near the western bank of the Delaware River, from present day Marcus Hook to Bristol. The laying out of these shares in specific locations was made in America, primarily by Penn's surveyor-general, Thomas Holme, who did not reach the Delaware until August 1682, several months after Penn's three commissioners had arrived in Pennsylvania. The procedure for assigning rural land to particular purchasers only began after lots in Philadelphia were assigned, and this was not the work of Penn's commissioners; they had first to perform a similar task on a smaller, yet still challenging scale.5 A common feature of land allotment plans in seventeenth-century English colonies was the granting or sale of a stated acreage of land, or of a stated fractional share of some roughly defined area, to be plotted out in several parcels, with one or more rural plots, containing the bulk of the share, and one or more smaller urban plots. Most early New England towns began in this fashion. Their founders, beginning in the 1630s, implemented quite elaborate land distribution schemes that reflected agricultural traditions imported from one or more regions of England, prevailing concepts of social hierarchy, and the Puritan determination to gather even the most agricultural of settlers into tight communities.6 Quaker colonies established in the 1670s had simpler, less communitarian land systems, but they, too, began with the sale of unlocated acres or shares, which were then surveyed into relatively large rural plots and much smaller urban lots. in 1676, the Quaker colonizer John Fenwick divided each of several 500-acre purchases in his Salem, New Jersey colony into a 468-acre rural parcel and two 16-acre lots, located in the towns of Salem and Cohansey.7 In the same year, the Quaker colonizer Edward Byllynge and his trustees, Gowen William Penn's Commissioners 97 Lawrie, Nicholas Lucas, and William Penn, sold fractional shares of West New Jersey, which were grouped into several "tenths." Upon reaching America in 1677, the purchasers surveyed portions of their shares and also divided them into large rural and small urban plots. Two groups of settlers, organized as the "London" and the "Yorkshire" tenths, decided to share a town at a particularly favorable river bank location; they created Burlington, New Jersey by granting each "Yorkshire" purchaser a lot on the north side of High Street, and each "London" purchaser a lot on the south side.8 Thus when William Penn set out to create a land policy for Pennsylvania in 1681, ample colonial precedent and his own direct knowledge of land policy in West New Jersey offered him a proven way to establish an orderly, successful colony in which all settlers would be encouraged in both agricultural and commercial pursuits, in which all settlers would be encouraged to associate with all others, and in which each land purchaser would feel equitably treated by all others, and by the proprietor. Yet from the outset William Penn did not conceive of Pennsylvania as a society that should make any room for truly urban life. In his first public announcement and promotion of his new colony, entitled Some Account of the Province of Pennsilvania (London, ca. April 1681), he spoke of grouping every 100 adventurers onto tracts of 50,000 acres, of which "some of the best [acres} shall be set out for towns or cities; and there shall be so much ground allotted to each in those towns as may maintain some cattle and produce some corn; then the remainder of the fifty thousand acres shall be shared among the said adventurers . whereby every adventurer will have a considerable quantity of land together; likewise every one a proportion by a navigable river, and then backward into the country."9 Penn advanced this idea as a tentative proposal, not as a fixed plan, but it suggests that when he received his charter, he was envisioning an essentially rural, agrarian colony, dominated by communities that would resemble both John Fenwick's Salem tenth and the more rural New England towns. In April, Penn made no provision for one large commercial capital in which all adventurers in the colony would have a share. Between April and July 1681, William Penn's thoughts about the proper foundation for Pennsylvania underwent one important change. No record survives to show the causes of this alteration, but it is probable that he held several informal meetings with Quaker merchants and tradesmen from London and other cities in southern England, and that several prospective investors in his colony argued for 98 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine the immediate development of a large commercial port on the Delaware. On July 11, 1681, Penn and several prospective purchasers issued the first detailed plan for the settlement of Pennsylvania, entitled "Certaine Conditions or Concessions agreed upon by William Penn, Proprietary & Governor of the Province of Pennsylvania, & those who are the adventurers and purchasers in the same Province."'° William Penn's "Concessions" provided that as soon as his settlers reached Pennsylvania, "a certaine Quantity of Land or Ground plans shall be laid out for a large Towne or Citty in the most Convenient place upon the River foi- health & Navigation, and every Purchaser & Adventurer shall by loft have soe much Land therein. as will Answer to the Proportion he bath bought or Taken up upon Rent." In this first section, Penn established the foundation of settlement in Pennsylvania: a grand commercial town in which every settler in the colony, purchaser or renter, would have a share. Subsequent provisions show how central this town was to Penn's larger plan. Those sections of the "Concessions" which dealt with the distribution of Pennsylvania's rural acres made no special provision for villages and towns within townships, as Penn had suggested in April, but concentrated the entire urban life of the colony in one community on the Delaware." In the fifth section of the "Concessions," Penn set the dividend of town land as one acre for every fifty purchased or rented. This would create an extensive city of 10,000 acres (over 15 square miles) for the "First Purchasers," those persons who bought the first 500,000 acres that Penn offered far sale. It was not Penn's intention that all First Purchasers live in his capital city all the time: he made elaborate provisions in the "Concessions" to plot purchasers' lands adjacent to the lots of their friends and relatives in the countryside, to prevent the creation of large speculative tracts, and to insure that actual clearing and planting of the land would begin immediately after the completion of plot surveys. Yet Penn's plan did encourage every colonist to have a direct interest in his great town. All first settlers, even renters, would be drawn into maintaining city houses, settling factors or agents on their urban lots, renting out city plots and becoming landlords, or becoming involved in buying and selling those lots. Nor had he yet exhausted his means for making his city central to his new colony.12 Between July 14 and September 30, 1681, William Penn traveled across southern England selling Pennsylvania at a rapid rate. In eleven weeks he and his agents made out deeds for over 300,000 acres to over 250 purchasers, primarily Quaker merchants, tradesmen, and prosperous farmers who were heavily concentrated in two areas of William Penn's Commissioners 99 England: greater London, and Bristol and nearby Wiltshire. He traveled from London to Bristol twice, first in late July, and then again in his second trip was the signing, on September. The highpoint September 30, of his "Instructions given by me William Penn, Proprietor and Governor of Pennsylvania, To My Trusty and loving Friends, William Crispin, John Bezar, and Nathaniel Allen, my Commissioners for the Settling of the present Collony this yeare transported into the said Province." He then intrusted one copy of the "Instructions" to Nathaniel Allen and John Bezar, who immediately embarked on the Bristol Factor with the first shipload of Penn's settlers to leave England.13 Penn's "Instructions" of September 30, 1681 confirmed and developed his vision off my for his grand commercial city. The commissioners' first business, after insuring the safety and adequate provisioning of the settlers that came with them, was to sound the Delaware River and select the best site for a large seaport city." As in July, the city was to contain 10,000 acres, one acre for every fifty acres bought by a "First Purchaser." The "Instructions's" fifth section revealed Penn's determination that his city would become the center of Pennsylvania for all colonists. Here he directed "That no more Land be Surveyed or Sett out, till this be first fixt, and the people upon it, which is best, both for Comfort, Safety and Traffique. In the next Season the Lord willing I shall be with you, and then I shall proceed to larger Lotts; This was the Resolution of a great part of the Purchassers at London the fifteenth day of September 1681, and I find it generally approved." In plain language, Penn and his purchasers had agreed—in a resolution that has been lost—that no purchaser could simply plunge out into the countryside, negotiate with (or push aside) Indians, and drive claim stakes into the ground.15 Pennsylvania would see no land rush, but an orderly settlement of land that was designed to give William Penn maximum control over the character of his colony's development. Penn projected a carefully planned sequence of events for each purchaser or renter. Each adventurer would first purchase or lease an amount of Pennsylvania land, in England. He would then immigrate to Penn's great new town on the Delaware. In America each settler would first receive a piece of urban land, to be located by a lottery drawn by the commissioners, and equal to Qne fiftieth of his purchase or lease of rural acres. He would finally receive, from Penn or his surveyor-general, surveyed plots of rural land, in maximum sizes of 1000 acres; and he could take up only as much rural land as he could develop immediately, regardless of the total acreage to which he was entitled, and would eventually receive. 100 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine The remainder of the "Instructions" reveal the kind of great town that Penn hoped to construct. The central feature of these clauses was the considerable area of ground that Penn was determined to secure for his town, with the accompanying low population density that he thought it should have. Thus his sixth and tenth clauses dealt with buying land from any Europeans who were already on the site, and from any Indians who had valid claims to it, while making no sales to anyone. The commissioners were particularly directed to secure as much Delaware River frontage as possible, to try to secure a full 10,000 acres, and to accept less if necessary, but not less than 5000 acres. The seventh, fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth clauses set forth Penn's conception of his town, a conception that was strikingly different from the city that emerged in 1682-83. Clause seven directed the commissioners to subdivide the 10,000-acre tract, "in which observe, that you must narrower spread by the Waterside, and run Backwards more or less, according to the compass you have by the Water side, to bring in the hundred Share[s] for their Proportion in the said Ten Thousand Acres." In simpler words, every First Purchaser would have frontage on the Delaware River. That each of the one hundred lots would have to have relatively narrow frontage and run deep into the country - was obvious; if each lot were a perfect square, Philadelphia would have been a strip city 2100 feet deep and 40 miles long! But in subsequent clauses, Penn designed a town that was far from compact. Each house was to stand two hundred paces, and preferably a quarter-mile back from the river, and all on one line (clause 14). More important, each lot was to be "fifty Poles"-825 feet—wide, and one mile deep (clause 16). This would result in a town over fifteen miles long, and even humble purchasers of 250 acres might secure over 80 feet of waterfront.16 A plan of this character suggests that in September 1681, William Penn—and perhaps the majority of his purchasers as well—had a concept of urban life that little resembled either English or European urban experience. Penn's town bespoke both a keen interest in trade and a deep ambivalence toward economic specialization and true urbanization. These Quaker pioneers wanted the economic activity that only cities offered, but hoped to avoid all of the problems that came with every city that they knew. Penn's first vision of Philadelphia was impractical, utopian, and, in a word just coming into currency in Penn's lifetime, "romantic"; he saw his city as an exceptionally large commercial—and agricultural—ocountry town.I7 His Philadelphia was to be a city such as the world had never seen (and never would William Perm's Commissioners 101 see), and which the transportation technology of the seventeenth century could not have held together as a city. Yet just such a community strongly appealed to this idealistic, atavistic Englishman, and would later appeal to equally atavistic Americans, such as Thomas Jefferson. Penn, a survivor of London's plague and fire of the 1660s, summarized his personal feelings about his plan in his famous fifteenth clause, in which he directed that "every House be placed, if the Person pleases in the middle of its Platt as to the breadth way of it, that so there may be ground on each side, for Gardens or Orchards or fads, that it may be a greene Country Towne, which will never be burnt, and allways be wholsome."18 This review of William Penn's knowledge of colonial land development—the precedents that he had before him--and the evolution of his own ideas, and those of his purchasers, about the proper course for land development in Pennsylvania should help to make clear the qualities and experiences that he sought in his commissioners. First, they would need to be men of demonstrated competence in business—men who knew how to plan, how to recognize problems and opportunities, and how to overcome the first and seize the second. The first task that they faced, through the winter and spring of 1682, directly utilized these skills. They had to select the best site for a town and then negotiate with any settlers who were already on it, or who had valid claims to it, to get the land they needed. Second, they had to be skillful diplomats. Once they had obtained the site, they would have to balance the competing claims and interests of large and small purchasers, merchants, tradesmen, and farmers, and relatives, friends, and settlers from the same English towns or counties, to produce a harmonious plan of settlement. Finally, they had to act with energy and dispatch; delay would only discourage faint-hearted colonists, while encouraging the more aggressive to press ahead and settle land before surveys could be made. In choosing his commissioners, William Penn had need to choose wisely. HI By 1681, William Penn had made a thorough acquaintance of three worlds that shaped his views on the correct management, the true value, and the proper destiny of American colonization. Each of these worlds suggested one or more vital criteria that his commissioners must meet, and each supplied him with one or more commissioners. Penn's first world, the one to which he was born and which he never quite left, was that Hof establishment England. Its foundations were wealth (preferably landed), a classical education, public and/or 102 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine military service, the manners of a gentleman, and the mutual favors and obligations embodied in the establishment's central behavioral characteristic—patronage. Penn knew this world intimately. By the time young William was twelve, his father was a famous admiral and the owner of 10,000 acres in County Cork, Ireland. At the age of sixteen Penn entered Christ Church College, Oxford, the social school of Restoration England; at nineteen he went to France for travel and study; at twenty-one he entered Lincoln's Inn, one of England's leading law schools. In that same year, young Penn moved easily and familiarly at Court, and accompanied his father to the fleet, commanded by James, the Duke of York, who would become his lifelong friend. At twenty-one he played the landlord in Ireland, collecting rents and perhaps taking up arms to suppress an army mutiny.° Thus before he became a Quaker, Penn fit easily into the English establishment, as did his father and, at more modest levels, several of his relatives. At twenty-three, William Penn entered his second world; he became a Quaker. As an intelligent, energetic, and wealthy young Friend, he was immediately drawn into the national—and soon the international—network of itinerant preachers, writers, organizers, and sufferers who were the heart of Quakerism, and within three years he had made his mark in each of these endeavors. By 1681, he had a vast Quaker circle of personal friends, acquaintances, and colleagues in London and Bristol, Lancashire and Yorkshire, Dublin, Aberdeen, and Rotterdam, and a dozen other places. He had become perhaps the best known Quaker in England, after his close friend, George Fox. He knew the widely scattered yet tightly organized Quaker world thoroughly, and it knew hirn.20 Penn came upon his third world—the one upon which he would leave the greatest mark beyond his lifetime—rather by accident. Proprietary colonization, which had been a minor form of colonizing activity early in the seventeenth century, gained momentum after the Restoration; by the rate 1670s proprietors had established new colonies in New jersey and the Carolinas. Penn initially paid no attention to this activity, or to America, but late in 1674 his life took an unexpected turn. Although he was already burdened with a myriad of Quaker activities, he was asked to arbitrate a dispute between Edward Byllynge and John Fenwick, two Friends who claimed an interest in New jersey, In settling their argument Penn became a trustee, and in effect a founder, of West New Jersey. Directly involved in organizing that colony, he could hardly help noticing that after a slow start, West Jersey quickly began earning money for its major proprietor, Edward William Penn's Commissioners 103 Byllynge. Before his trusteeship ended Penn would himself invest in both West New Jersey, where he bought out John Fenwick's Salem tenth, and in East New Jersey. By 1680, Penn knew something about colonizing first hand, both of its problems and its opportunities. 21 When William Penn decided to seek a charter for a colony in America from his good friend, King Charles II, the worlds of establishment England, English Quakerism, and proprietary colonization informed his every decision: how he would lobby to secure his charter, what that charter should say, whom he should recruit as settlers, what terms and inducements he should offer them, and what sort of men should aid him in this great venture.22 He decided that his own principal activity would be selling land; that he would direct his sales pitch primarily, but not exclusively, at Quakers; and that he would emphasize the rapid development of the colony by those who would go to America, rather than by absentee landowners. These decisions shaped William Penn's choice of commissioners. He immediately realized that he needed men of business and administrative experience who knew something about land, who would themselves go to America as Pennsylvania landowners, and who would, preferably, be Quakers. Commissioners with these attributes would enjoy several advantages in performing their difficult task. They would understand the nature of the work that they faced and the people with whom they had to deal; they would have the trust of the settlers, who would share their economic and religious condition; and they would have William Penn's trust, as his purchasers, as coreligionists, and as men of proven business ability. IV It is doubly fitting that William Penn named as his first and chief commissioner a relative by marriage, and a veteran naval officer and military bureaucrat, William Crispin. The importance of Crispin's qualifications for his position can only be appreciated in the context of seventeenth-century English society. In the twentieth century, both commerce and politics are conducted through a host of powerful institutions—colleges and professional schools, banks and corporations, and government agencies which are linked closely together by telecommunications, and whose members' proper and effective behavior can be largely controlled and guaranteed through the operation of those institutions, with unavoidable cases of dereliction of duty provided against by all manner of 104 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine insurance. These rapid communications, administrative mechanisms, and fiscal safeguards were either primitive or nonexistent in the seventeenth century. The small size of most institutions, the near absence of guarantees of correct behavior, and above all the Slow pace of transAtlantic communication all made the efficient conduct of international trade and intercontinental colonization especially difficult. There were two principal solutions to this problem, and William Penn employed both of them. The first was to use a trusted relative, by blood or marriage, to conduct all business at a distance. Boston's midseventeenth-century Puritan mercantile community and the highly interconnected Quaker trading communities of London, Bristol, Barbados, Rhode Island, New York, Philadelphia, and several European ports that emerged by 1700 were alike dominated by firms of fathers and sons, brothers, uncles and nephews, sons-in-law, cousins, or other family relations.23 In an age when marriages were commonly designed to ally property and talents and to promote careers, and were rarely dissolved, relations by marriage were regarded almost as blood relatives.24 When the twenty-five year old naval officer William Crispin married Rachel Bradshaw, the niece of his thirty-one year old commander, William Penn, in 1652, he became a member of the extended Penn family. Young William Penn, then eight, probably attended this wedding; by 1681 he would have known Crispin for nearly thirty years.25 Crispin's second qualification for his new post was perhaps even more important. He was a self-made member of the lower ranks of that service establishment in which his mentor, Admiral Penn, had climbed so high. By appointing Crispin both commissioner arid chief justice of Pennsylvania, the younger Penn was behaving in a manner which his first world, establishment England, would thoroughly understand, and of which that world could not help but approve. He was honoring his father's memory by honoring his father's old friend, just as Charles II and James, Duke of York, had honored the memory of their trusted servant, the Admiral, by watching out for his difficult Quaker son and by granting him a colony named in the old sailor's memory. The younger Penn was thus participating in that most central of establishment rituals, dispensing patronage along the proper guidelines: honoring one's ancestors, caring for one's loyal relatives, and rewarding evident talent. This last matter of talent was not the least important. Penn had other relatives who might have served in Pennsylvania, including his brother-in-law Anthony Lowther, a younger man of higher social William Penn's Commissioners 105 standing than Crispin. But of all Penn's near relations, Crispin had achieved the most, and what he had achieved was especially appropriate to the task of colonizing Pennsylvania. 26 William Crispin had served in the Parliamentary navy from the age of fifteen until he was thirty, at least six of these years under the command of Admiral Penn. Sometime thereafter he moved to Ireland, where the Admiral had retired in official disfavor. Crispin shared Penn's disillusionment with Oliver Cromwell; both men favored the Restoration, and would in turn be favored by it. Penn returned to England to receive a knighthood and join the Navy Board; Crispin remained in Ireland, where for fifteen years he served the Crown, first as deputy victualer of the troops at the fortified port of Kinsale, and then as clerk of the cheque and muster master, a chief administrator, at that post. His immediate predecessor as clerk was another William Penn, a cousin of the Admiral's and another of his proteges. Young William Penn visited his "cousin" Crispin in Kinsale in 1669, as he doubtless had on previous occasions, both in Ireland and in England.27 William Crispin, in short, had every qualification that most proprietors would look for in a colohial administrator. He had known his patron for thirty years, and had been a close and loyal friend of his patron's father. He had decades of administrative experience, had dealt with sailors, soldiers, and civilians, had lived and fought in temperate and tropical climates, had handled large sums of money, and had functioned effectively in England's quasi-colony in southern Ireland. His establishment credentials with the Stuart monarchy were excellent, if modest—he had been a patriot in England's struggles with the Dutch, the Spanish, and the Irish, but had put distance between himself and Cromwell, and then served the Restoration government for over a decade. And he was willing both to go to Pennsylvania with his family and to buy a full 5000-acre share in the colony. From young William Penn's point of view, Crispin had only one serious drawback, one that Penn's establishment friends would have found a recommendation: there is no evidence that William Crispin ever became a Quaker.28 V Another bond between men in the seventeenth century that has lost much of its power in the twentieth is religion. A tightly organized, intensely pietistic religious sect was particularly effective in creating mutual trust between its members. This made the Quaker faith an unusually powerful tie between businessmen who were geographically separated and unrelated by blood or marriage. A Quaker who deceived 106 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Mazazine or defrauded a patron, business associate, or customer could be formally disciplined by his local meeting, and informally ostracized by his coreligionists, even for offenses which prevailing law ignored. For William Penn, this would have been reason enough to appoint Quakers to colonial office. For the post of commissioner in charge of locating plots of land in Pennsylvania, however, there was a more powerful inducement. From the outset, Penn hoped that most of his colonists would be Quakers. He advertised Pennsylvania most vigorously among Friends and made most of his first land sales to them. These settlers, denied any official rote in running English society, and still vigorously persecuted by that society, were keen to seize and hold enough power in Pennsylvania to assure their religious freedom.29 It was all very well for William Penn to name his cousin William Markham his deputy governor, and his cousin-by-marriage William Crispin his first commissioner and chief justice, but to gain his colonists' trust, he had to appoint Quakers to high office. To identify potential Quaker commissioners was not difficult; between July and September 1681, hundreds of Friends bought land, and the majority of them planned to embark quickly for America. Penn understandably decided that his commissioners must be purchasers of his land; this would tie them more closely to him, and give them a bond with the colonists whose fate they, as purchaser -settlers, would share. But who, among the hundreds of Quaker purchasers, should Penn select? The first consideration in choosing any commissioner was administrative ability. For Penn's first two Quaker commissioners, Nathaniel Allen and John Bezar, there is unfortunately too little biographical information to determine just what administrative experience they brought to their task. Enough facts are known about these men, however, to suggest why Penn thought that they would serve competently. Once Penn had advertised his colony thrpughout the British Quaker community, he made his sales quickly, both to raise needed funds and to collect the first shiploads of settlers without delay so that he could begin the actual work of colonization." His haste forced him to travel to areas where potential purchasers lived. Many Friends resided in or near London, and several of them bought land in the first few weeks of sales, but Penn was confident that his business manager Philip Ford could handle his land business in the metropolis. 31 He would go west, to the great Quaker strongholds in Wiltshire and William Penn's commissioners 107 Bristol. Penn knew this part of England well: his own family had roots in IrViltshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Bristol, and he had passed through the West Country on his journeys to and from Ireland in the 1660s, and had visited Bristol in the late 1670s to help quell the Wilkinson-Story schism within Quakerism.32 Penn's first sales trip to Bristol, which he reached about August 1 , 1681, was a great success. In a few days he sold 48,500 acres of land to over forty purchasers. Among the buyers were several of Bristol's most eminent, tong-suffering Friends, including Thomas Callowhill, Charles Jones, Jr, . and Richard Vickris. The first of these men would become Penn's father-in-law in 1695; the second would become his son William Penn, jr.'s father-in-law in 1699. Several of these purchasers, however, would not go to Pennsylvania, and some probably never intended to go. For them Pennsylvania was both the good cause of a distinguished Friend and a good investment in land that younger members of their own families, and other young Friends, would make profitable for them.33 Penn probably did not select any commissioners on this first trip, but he must have been thinking about his choice, determining who among his purchasers would soon be ready to sail for America, and asking who among them had a reputation for honesty and a good head for business. His first choice for a West Country commissioner, which he probably deferred making until his second visit to Bristol in late September, when he could see who was really ready to sail, fell upon Nathaniel Allen. Allen was not a famous Friend, and he was probably not an exceptionally wealthy one. He had been active in the Bristol Quaker meeting in the early 1670s, but he apparently took no part in either furthering or quelling the Wilkinson-Story schism, which deeply divided the Bristol meeting. The son of a Bristol "tucker"—some sort of cloth worker—he became a cooper and a metchant. In 1681 he bought 2000 acres of Pennsylvania, one of the largest amounts that Penn sold in Bristol, and his purchase headed the list of sales in that city in Penn's catalogue of October 1681. This last fact suggests either that he was the first man in Bristol to buy Pennsylvania land, or that he was considered to be a leader of those Bristol Quakers who were interested in Penn's new colony.34 Nathaniel Allen had several advantages as a commissioner for Penn. Unlike many purchasers of full shares, he was ready to sail immediately for Pennsylvania. His record in the Bristol Men's Monthly Meeting of Friends had been without a blemish for ten years, indicating a man that Bristol Quakers knew and trusted, and had 108 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine found to be a fair dealing man of business. And Penn had sold so much land in Bristol that it made sense to have a Bristol man as commissioner. Moreover, to a commission that had to lay out a city, Allen brought the experience of city Eying. Finally, as a medium-sized purchaser, Allen would be more likely to earn the trust of the great bulk of Penn's purchasers, especially those of Bristol, most of whom had bought 1000, 5Q0 or as little as 250 acres °Hand, and would appreciate any assurance that the 5000-acre purchasers would not get ail the best Delaware River frontage in Philadelphia. If William Crispin was the commissioner as Penn relative and self-made member of England's military-political establishment, Nathaniel Allen was the commissioner as dependable Quaker businessman and urbanite. VI Both upon his journey to Bristol and upon his return, Penn passed through Wiltshire, a predominantly rural county with a large number of Quaker inhabitants. Here, too, he met with great success in selling land. In just a few days, he sold over 24,000 acres to about 45 purchasers, with many buying the smallest amount that Penn would sell, 250 acres. Few Wiltshire Quakers bought their land merely as an investment, as did many Friends in Bristol and London; these men intended to go to America. A large number of these purchasers were yeoman fanners; others were engaged in a variety of semi-rural craft and manufacturing ,trades. One of these was John Bezar, a maltster from a family long established in Bishops Canning, a small town in central Wiltshire, a few miles south of one of the main roads from London to Bristol that Penn probably travelled.35 Even less is known about John Bezar than about Nathaniel Allen; that Bezar was a man of some means and ability, however, seems evident from the few facts that we do know about him. First, among a group of rural farmers and craftsman who purchased quite small lots-230 or 500 acres—Bezar could afford the 00 needed for 1000 acres. Second, on the ocean crossing to America, Bezar, like his colleague Nathaniel Allen, shipped a sizeable quantity of manufactured goods. He directed this merchandise for sale in Virginia, to which he had previously shipped cargoes.36 Bezar must, therefore, have been a man of some means and some credit, with good connections to Bristol's Quaker mercantile community. This fact would recommend him to Penn as a man with a sound understanding pf business. For William Penn, John Bezar presented qualifications that closely resembled those of Nathaniel Allen. He was ready to sail to America in William Penn's Commissioners 109 the fall of 1681 (and like Allen, he was probably chosen at the last minute, from among those ready to embark). Second, he too was a middling purchaser, and could identify with other middling purchasers. And he was a Quaker in good standing, sailing with fellow Quakers of his native county. Wiltshire, while less important in the English Quaker world than Bristol, had supported Penn's colony as strongly as any part of the country, so it was politic to appoint a Wiltshire man. Finally, although a high proportion of First Purchasers were of an urban background in England, many others lived in the countryside. In Bezar, they had a commissioner more like themselves. John Bezar, rural manufacturer and merchant, joined William Crispin, establishment relative, and Nathaniel Allen, urban manufacturer and mer chant, as Penn's third commissioner. VII When William Penn returned to London, he found that at least one and possibly two ships were nearly , ready to said for Pennsylvania.17 William Crispin, too, was ready to depart, and would take second copies of the July "Concessions" and the September "Instructions" to America. Penn then decided to appoint a fourth commissioner. His reason for this decision is not known, but one motive immediately suggests itself. London's settlers, like Bristol's and Wiltshire's, were mostly Quakers, but the only commissioner whom Penn had named to accompany them, an official entrusted with their immediate welfare in America, as well as the survey and distribution of their land, was not a Friend—and not a Londoner. 38 A London Friend in good standing and a man .of business ability was obviously called for, and Penn quickly found his man. On October 25, he appointed William Haig his fourth commissioner, and directed him to join Crispin, Allen, and Bezar in laying out Philadelphia.39 Like Nathaniel Allen and John Bezar, William Haig was a fairly obscure Quaker and Englishman. William Penn, however, had known Haig for years, and he had good reason to believe that Haig, unlike his three colleagues, knew something about the colonization of America. William Haig was born in 1646, just two years after William Penn. His origins are obscure, but his family name occurs both in Cheshire and in Scotland. By 1671 he was a merchant in London, where he married the daughter of Gowen Lawrie in a Quaker ceremony at Devonshire House. For the next decade, William and Mary Haig lived in the City of London and had four children, the last born on October 110 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine 4, 1681, just three weeks before Penn named Haig a commissioner.4° But Haig was not merely a merchant. In 1675 his father-in-law, Gawen Lawrie, joined Nicholas Lucas and William Penn as a trustee for the Quaker Edward Byllynge's proprietary investment in New jersey. in July 1676, Byllynge and his trustees arranged for Byllynge to receive the southwestern half of the colony, and in August they devised a radically republican constitution, the West New Jersey "Concessions," for their new colony. William Haig promptly bought a "share"—one one-hundredth of the colony—and .signed the "Concessions" before they were sent to America:" It seems likely, then, that Penn knew William Haig from 1675 through Gawen Lawrie, if not earlier, and on several occasions in 1677 and 1678 Penn was at Haig's home or place of business in London. Haig's investment in West jersey, his mercantile background, and his religion all recommended- him as an ideal commissioner for Pennsylvania. Like his fellow commissioners, Haig bought land in Pennsylvania, but he bought the smallest quantity-500 acres—of any of them. Perhaps he was already thinking that he would eventually settle in West New Jersey, where his share entitled him to several thousand acres of land, although it would be to East New Jersey that he would move after serving William Penn.42 But Haig's relatively small investment in Penn's colony was no indication of the role that he would play there. William Haig, London Quaker merchant and investor in colonization, now joined Penn's relative, the soldier-administrator William Crispin, the Bristol Quaker merchant Nathaniel Allen, and the Wiltshire maltster John Bezar as commissioner For Pennsylvania. He would quickly become the dominant member of the commission. VIII At the end of October, William Crispin and William Haig sailed for America, probably in the same ship, the John and Sarah, possibly in separate vessels, with Crispin embarking on the Amity. Crispin's career, however, was at an end. He fell ill, and died in Barbados, where his ship had made port, in late 1681 or early 1682.43 William Haig, however, reached the Delaware River by early January, where he joined Allen and Bezar, who had arrived in December, and Penn's deputy, William Markham, who had been in the valley since August." With three of the four commissioners in America, work on selecting a site for Philadelphia and purchasing land for the city could proceed. Back in London, Penn learned of William Crispin's death by April. William Penn's Commissioners 111 On the eighteenth of that month he appointed Thomas Holme, a fifty-seven year old Quaker from Waterford, Ireland, as surveyorgeneral of Pennsylvania, and on April 21, he named Holme to be William Markham's first assistant, the post that Crispin had received in the fall of 1681. Penn did not name Holme a commissioner, however. Holme had been an eminent Quaker preacher and sufferer in Cheshire, Wales, and Ireland in the 1650s and early 1660s, and was well known among Friends. On April 23, he sailed for America. In late May, Penn signed further instructions for Holme, Haig, Bezar, and Allen to lay out lots in Philadelphia according to the revised, expanded catalogue of First Purchasers and the several sets of 1681 instructions, all of which he had sent to America with Holme.45 These were apparently the last directives that William Penn sent to his commissioners from England. Commissioners Alen, Bezar, and Haig, and surveyor-general,Holme were now on their own until Penn joined them at the end of 1682. The plan which the commissioners, working with William Markham, William Penn, and others, finally devised for Philadelphia bore almost no relationship to Penn's original idea for his city. The evolution of the city's plan to its 1683--and largely its present—form, and the reasons for that evolution, have been ably told elsewhere, and need no repeating here." But the work of the commissioners, Markham, and Penn in devising that final plan, and then in overseeing the distribution of the First. Purchasers' Philadelphia lots, was crucial to the city's rapid and relatively painless early growth, and ultimately to its great success as a center of colonial British American commerce and politics. No small share of the credit for this success must go to the care with which William Penn chose the men who assisted him. All except William Crispin reached Pennsylvania quickly and shared in the First Purchasers' early struggle to establish the city and the colony, although they were not equally prominent in this effort. John Bezar served as a director of the Free Society of Traders, as well as commissioner, but his American career was cut short by his death in September 1684.47 Nathaniel Allen was one of the many cave dwellers on the bank of the Delaware during Philadelphia's first years, and remained in the city as a merchant until his death in 1692, but he played a relatively minor role in public affairs." William Haig, however, immediately became one of Pennsylvania's most prominent leaders. He served as a director of the Free Society of Traders, was named to 112 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine Penn's first council in November 1682, and won a seat on the elected Provincial Council in 1683, and again in 1684. In these two years he was directly involved in nearly every aspect of developing both Philadelphia and the whole colony. He then moved to East New jersey, where his father-in-law Gawen Lawrie had just become governor, to take the position of surveyor-genera1.49 Finally, Thomas Holme, Penn's surveyor-general, carefully designed and set out the City of Philadelphia, and then surveyed the First Purchasers' half million rural acres, running along the Delaware from Chester to the falls at Trenton. Holme preserved his work, and immortalized his name, in several spfendid maps; his map of Philadelphia (1683) occupies a major place in the development of the modern American city. Only. William Penn was more important in the establishment of the colony." William Penn was fortunate in his commissioners. They were, from all accounts, honest, energetic men who made his colony succeed brilliantly in those first years when many English colonies, both earlier in the century and in Penn's own day, struggled just to survive. But more than good fortune was involved. It seems reasonably certain that William Penn did not select as commissioners men to whom he was personally close, or with whom he had been long associated in his religious or political endeavors. He had known William Crispin for thirty years, but he may not have seen him for ten. He had known Haig for at least four years, and Haig may have worked with Penn and Gawen Lawrie, father-in-law, in settling many of West jersey's problems between 1676 and 1680. But Penn and Haig appear to have been business associates rather than close friends. Nor were his Quaker commissioners the best known Friends who could be per-. suaded to go to America. Christopher Taylor, Griffith Jones, and Penn's lawyer Thomas Rudyard, all immigrants to Pennsylvania or New Jersey in 1682-1683, were more prominent in English Quakerism than William Haig or Nathaniel Allen, not to mention the Wiltshire maltster, John Bezar.51 William Penn used other criteria for his selection than friendship or fame, for he kept his eye firmly upon the needs of his young colony. Whatever else they had to recommend them, his commissioners had to be men of business or public affairs, who had years of experience in dealing with other men, and in handling money and property. And they had to come well recommended, preferably by the Quaker emigrants with whom they would sail to America. This explains how Penn could name a man whom he had probably never met before July- William Penn's Commissioners 1 13 August 1681— John Bezar and another whom he probably knew only slightly—Nathaniel Allen—to serve along with his "cousin" William Crispin, William Haig, and his surveyor-general Thomas Holme, men with whom he had had some dealings for years. William Penn trusted his commissioners on two accounts. First, he understood the worlds from which they came—the Anglo-Irish military establishment of William Crispin; the Quaker West Country of Nathaniel Allen and John Bezar; and the Quaker London of William Haig, of which Penn was himself a member,,despite his country manor in Sussex. Perhaps, too, Penn sensed that by involving his commissioners in Pennsylvania as First Purchasers, and by granting them an opportunity to engage their talents on a wider stage than they had ever seen, or perhaps even dreamt of, he could make his colony their colony. William Penn's commissioners were themselves purchasers, immigrants, settlers; like Penn, they planned to live, and die, in America. Unlike Penn, they all did so, 52 The stories of three of these commissioners, Nathaniel Alen, John Bezar, and William Haig, and of their families, will be the subjects of three articles, by three different authors, in succeeding issues of The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine. NOTES Mr. Ryerson is Associate Editor of The Pagers of William Penn, a four-volume letter-press edition of the correspondence and unpublished writings of the founder of Pennsylvania. The Papers are being edited by Mary Maples Dunn and Richard S. Dunn, with the assistance of jean R. SoderluO, Scott M. Wilds, and Mr. Ryerson,-at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The project is being sponsored by The Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies at The University of Pennsylvania, and the volumes are being published by The University of Pennsylvania Press. L. A signed copy of the "Instructions" is in the Penn Papers, in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's manuscript department (hereafter HSP), and is included in the microfilm edition of "The Papers of William Penn" (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1975), reel 3, frame 310 (hereafter cited as Micro. 3:310). The "Instructions" will appear, with annotation, as document 41 in The Papers 61 William Penn, Volume Two, /680-1684, which will appear in 1982. An quotations in this essay, whether of titles or of text, preserve the spelling and capitalization of the originals. Abbreviated words and superscripts, however, are written out on the line (except for the names of persons), and punctuation has been added or altered for clarity, at the author's discretion. These liberties are generally not taken in The Papers of William Penn, which strives to present exact texts. 2. Penn's commission to Crispin, Allen, Bezar, and Haig, dated October 25, 1681, appears as Micro. 3:357. His "Memorandum" survives in transcript in the Albert Cook Myers Collection, Chester County Historical Society, West Chester, Pa. Myers made the transcript From a contemporary copy made by Samuel Carpenter. It appears as Micro. 3:360, and will be document 4-6 in The Papers of William Penn, 1680-1684, 3. The most revealing 1681 letters on the subject of Penn's hopes and plans for his colony are to Friends in the Country," an undated open letter to Quakers throughout England, and to James Harrison, August 25, 1681. These are Micro. 3:139, and Micro. 3:272; the second letter will appear as document 37 in The Paper of William Penn 1680-1584. The Holme map is entitled " Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia in The Province of Pennsylvania in America," 1682, drawn by Thomas Holme, sold by Andrew Sowle, London, 1683. For the "Concessions" of July 11, 1681, see n. 10, below. A 114 William Penn's commissioners 4. Hannah Benner Roach, "The Naming of Philadelphia, A Seventeenth-Century Real Estate Development," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (hereinafter PMHB), 92(1968):3-47, 143-94. See also William E. Lingelbach, "WiDiana Penn and City Planning," PAMB, 68(1944098407; Anthony N. B. Garvan, "Proprietary Philadelphia as Artifact," in Oscar Handlin and John Borchard. eds., The Historian and the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 177-201; John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America (Princeton, N.J., 1965); and Sylvia Doughty Fries, The Urban Idea in Colonial America (Philadelphia, 1977), chap. 3. 5. See Roach, "The Planting of Philadelphia," PAlliB, 92:25-27, on Thomas Holrne; and the catalogue of the First Purchasers printed in Hannah Benner Roach, ed., "The First Purchasers of Pennsyivania," in Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr., ed., Passengers and ShOs Prior to 1664, Publications of the Welcome Siicirty of Pennsylvania, No. 1 (Baltimore, 1970), pp. l 95-208. The full catalogue, with additional information, will appear in the appendix to The Papers of William Penn, MOO- /684. 6. Of many studies, those best illustrating this process are Sumner Chilton Powell, Purito.n Village, The Formation of a New England Town (Middletown, Conn., 1963); Philip J. reven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts ( Ithaca, N.Y., 1970); and David Greyson Allen, in English Ways; The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to _Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Centug (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981). . New Jersey Archives, I st ser., 21:555; The Papers of William Penn, Volume One, 1544-1679 (Philadelphia, 1981; hereafter PWP, 1), pp. 383-85., 410-15, 649-54; John E. Pomfret, The Province of West New Jersey 1609-1702 (Pripreton, 1956), chap. 5, 8. Pomfret, West New jersey, chaps. 6-7; MVP, 1:410-14. 9. William Penn, Some Account of the Province cf . Pennsilvania in America; Lately Granted under the Great Seal of England to William Penn, eec. (London, 1681). Also see A Brief Account of the Province of Pennsiivania in America (London, c. June 1681). 10. Penn's "Concessions" survives in a roughly contemporary copy in the Fallon Scrap Book, HSP, has been reprinted in Pennsylvania Archives, 8th ser., 1:x1i-xlvi, and is Micro. 3:249. [t will be document 32 in The Papers of William Penn, 16804684. 11, See sections 3-4 of the "Concessions." 12. See sections 3-4, and 10 of the "Concessions." 13. The first extant deed to Pennsylvania latid was for 5000 acres, for £100, made out to Philip Ford, Penn's business manager, and dated July 14, 1681. This deed is in the Bedford Record Office, Bedford, England, and will appear as document 33 in The. Papers of William Penn, 1580-1684. On the date of the departure of the Bristol Factor, see Marion Balderston, "William Penns Twenty-Three Ships, With Notes on Some of their Passengers," Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine (hereinafter PGM), 23:31-34. 14-, William Markham, Penn's cousin and deputy governor of Pennsylvania, with the assistance of his councilors, Lasse Cock and Thomas Fairman, had already begun taking soundings and surveying the west bank of the Delaware by October 1681. They would consult with Penn's commissioners about their findings upon the commissioners' arrival in America. Roach, "The Planting of Philadelphia," PMHB, 92:12-13. 15. Sections 11-15 of Penn's "Concessions" and section 9 of his "Instructions" strictly reg. elated ail dealings between European settlers and na.tille American tribes. 16. Penn did not define either "paces" or "poles" in his "Instructions." By "pace" he could have meant either a military, pace, the distance between the position of one foot and the next in walking, generally figured at two and one-half feet, or a geomeiricai pace, the distance between the position of one foot and the same foot on the next stride in walking, figured at five feet, but his use of the _term in conjunction with a "quarter of a mile," suggests the larger measurement A statute "poie," or rod, was sixteen and one-half feet, which was probably Penn's intention, and gives a lot width of of 825 feet. "Poles" as short as nine and one-half feet were occasionally used; such a use here would make narrower, deeper lots. Purchasers of as little as 250 acres could have gotten over 80 feet of frontage only if the purchasers of fractions ola 5000-acre share could agree to divide their dividend lot in long, narrow strips; the instruction are silent on whether Penn would favor such a division. 17. The English word "romantic" appeared in print, as an adjective, as early as 1659 (see the Oxford English Dictionag). Penn's waterfront town resembled the tong, narrow strip towns found in .both old and New England, but these were usually a mile or less in length, with lotsof 100 feet William Penn's Commissioners 115 or less in breadth, rather like 'eighteenth-century Germantown. These town plans were not "n-iodern" or particularly efficient for commerce, even by rate seventeenth-century standards, but (unlike Penn's initial plan for Philadelphia) they were not hopelessly impractical. See Fries, The Urban Ideas, pp. 91, 99-101, 103; and the plans of English towns and parishes in Powell, Puritan Village. by the outbreak of the plague in the 18. Penn's legal studies at Lincoln's Inn were in spring of 1(65, which drove thousands of Londoners, especially those in the upper classes, into the countryside, Penn was in Ireland during the great London fire of September 1666, but he certainly heard of this event from his father, who lived and worked in the city, and from friends and acquaintances. Thus it seems likely that his celebrated resolve, "that [Philadelphia] may be a greene County Towne, which will never be burnt, arid allways be wholesome," was a reaction to the dangerous London of his early manhood. See PUT, 1:39-42. 19, For a convenient introduction to Penn's early years, see Catherine Owens Peare, William Penn, A Biography (Philadelphia, 1957), chaps. 1-3; and PRP, 1:1-50. 20. Penn's years as a young Quaker controversialist are Fully covered in Peace, William Penn, chaps. 4-6, 8, 10-11; and in PWP, volume I, 21, See Pomfret, vest New jersey, chaps. 5-7; Pomfret, The Province'of East New jersey, 1609-1702 (Princeton, 1%2), chaps. 7-8; and PDT, 1;383-421. In the forthcoming The Papers of William Penn, 1680-1684, several documents will trace Penn's interest in both East and leVest New jersey to 1684. 22. The fullest analyses of Penn's efforts to secure the charter, and of the contents of that document, appear in Stephen Saunders Webb, "4The Peaceable Kingdom': Quaker Pennsylvania In the Stuart Empire," a paper given at "The World of William Penn," a conference held in Philadelphia, on March 21, 1981; and in the opening section of the Forthcoming The Papers of William Penn, /680-1681. 23. Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Centug (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), especially chap. 4; and Frederick B. Mlles, Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1948). 24. For an amusing example of how far seventeenth-century Englishmen could extend the concept of family, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma.. The Story of John Winthrop (Boston, 1958), p. 23. MHB 53(1929):103-4. The wedding 25. M. Jackson Crispin, "Captain William Crispin," P, took place at St. Dunstan's in Stepney, about two miles east of the Tower Liberty, where both Crispin and Admiral Penn's family lived. In 1653, Crispin's first son was baptised at St. (Nave's, Hart Street, where Admiral Penn would worship in the 1660s. 26. Lowther, a Yorkshire gentleman of a prominent old family, was quite friendly with his brother-in-law. In 1676 he considered moving his family to Worrninghurst, Penn's Sussex manor, at Penn's invitation, and in 1683 he thought of moving to Pennsylvania. But Lowther was both lazy and without ambition, as he freely admitted to Penn. See MVP, 1:47n, 354-55, 366-67; and the letters of Margaret and Anthony Lowther to Penn, August 4 and 5, 11683. The Lowther letters are Micro. 4:4405, and 4:409, and will appear in The Papers of William Penn, /680-1684. 27. M. Jackson Crispin, "Captain Crispin," PMIILI, 53:101-25, Crispin's direct association with Admiral Penn may have begun as early as 1642, when he (Crispin) first went to sea, because his father, also named William Crispin, was the sailing master (second in command) to the young commander Penn from 1642 to. 1644, when he died on Penn's vessel, off the Irish coast. See "Captain Crispin,'" PMHB, 53:100. 28. Crispin fought the Dutch in 1652 and took part in the 1654-55 expedition against the Spanish which seized Jamaica, both under Admiral Penn. Crispin, "Captain Crispin," AVM, 33:105-6, 112-18, 120. For CrisFiin's purchase of 5000 acres in Pennsylvania, see Roach, "First Purchasers" p. 204. 29. For William Penn's own hope that Friends would dominate the government of Pennsylvania, see Penn to Jasper Batt, February 5, 1683, Micro, 4:045. This letter will appear as document WI in The Papers of William Penn, 1680-16N. 30. Penn planned to go to America in 1681, but the work of pianning a colony, and the time it took many of his First Purchasers to settle their affairs in England, delayed him for over a year. 1 16 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine See Penn to James Harrison, August 25, 1681, Micro. 3:272. This letter will be published as document 37 in The Papers of William Penn, 1680-1584. 31. On the role of Philip Ford, and also of Penn's principal lawyer Thomas Rudyard, in selling Pennsylvania land, see Penn to Thomas Janney, August 21, 168 L, and Penn to Robert Turner, August 25, 1681, Micro. 3:269, and 3:278. These will be documents 36, and 38 in The Papers of William Penn, /689-.1684. Rudyard accompanied Penn on his July-August trip to Bristol (see Micro. 3:262). 32. See Howard M. Jenkins, The Family of William Penn, Founder of Pennsylvania: Ancesto, and Descendants (Philadelphia, 1899), pp. 1-16; and PWP, 1:327-37, 363, 367-68, 370-373, 376n, 511-14, 520-32, 555-57. 33. See Roach, "First Purchasers," pp. 199-200; and Jenkins, 1,-„„,i0 of William Penn, pps. 67-68, 107-9, for Penn's marriage ties to Bristol. 34. See Russell Mortimer, ed., Minute Book of the Men's Meeting of the Society of Friends in. Bristol 16674696 (Bristol, 1971), pp. 32, 39, 46, 47, 48, 49,15.4, 56, 148, 193, 194; Oxford Engti,s•h Dictionary (under "tucker"); and Roach, "First Purchasers," p. 199. Penn 's first catalogue of purchasers, dated October 25, 1681, does not establish precisely when or in what order the purchasers bought their land, although it probably gives the approximate order of purchase. Penn probably did not put this list together until late October, arranging the sales in the catalogue in 10.000acre blocks, primarily by the area of England from which the purchasers came. Although he did not enter any dates of purchase in the catalogue, he may have listed the sales made in each area of Britain approximately in the order in which they were made. These considerations leave open the question of whether Nathaniel Allen was placed at the head of the Bristol purchasers because of the date of his purchase, or because Penn had appointed him a commissioner. Compare the deeds prepared for Thomas Callowhill, William Lane, and Edward Martindale, of Bristol, and for John ap John and Thomas Wynne of Wales (Micro. 3:282, 305, 307, and 308) with the entries for these men in the first catalogue (Roach, "First Purchasers," pp. 200, 202). 35. An examination of the residences of Penn's Wiltshire purchasers shows that all lived in west-central and northwest Wiltshire, and all were within ten miles of the main highway that ran From London through Newbury, Berkshire, and .Marlborough and Chippenham, Wiltshire, to Bristol. See Roach, 'First Purchasers," pp. 202-3. 36. Balderston, "William Penn's Twenty-Three Ships," PGM, 23:31-32. 37. See p, 16, and note 43 below, 38. On the commissioners' responsibility for seeing that newly arrived settlers were Fairly provisioned by established settlers, see section 1 of Penn's "Instructions" of September 30, 1681, Micro. 3:360 (to be document 41 in The Papers of William Penn, /680-1684). 39. The commission is Micro. 3:357. 40. Miles White, jr., "William Haige," Pi141-1B, 24(190482-83. • 41. See PWP, 1:383-421; and Pomfret, West New jersey, chaps. 5-6. 42. Haig's share of West New jersey would entitle him to about 20,000 acres of land if of the land were distributed, with the exact amount depending upon the location of the boundary between East and West New Jersey, which was not first surveyed until the late 1680s. 43. On the tangled question of when the ship Amity sailed from England, who was on it, and where it went, see Balderston, "William Penn's Twenty-Three Ships," PGM, 23:33-35; and Roach, "The Planting of Philadelphia," PMHB, 92:17. 44. Haig's arrival in January 1682 is established in Augustine Herrman's endorsement to William Penn's letter of September 16, 1681, to several planter's in Maryland. This is Micro. 3:287, and will be document 39 in The Papers of William Penn, 16804684. 45. Floime'S commission as surveyor-general is printed in Samuel Hazard, Annals of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1850), pp. 555-57, and is Micro. 3:475; his commission as Markham's first assistant is Micro. 3:478. Penn's instructions of May 22, 1682, are printed in Hazard, Annals, p. 576, and in Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 1:39. His instructions of May 31, 1682 (but dated April 31 [siej, 1682, leaving the correct date in some doubt) is Micro. 3:500; see Roach, The Planting of Philadelphia," PAIIIB, 92:26. On Holmes ministry and sufferings, see Joseph B-esse, Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers (London, 1753), 1:99, 74-0, 747, 748. 2:466, 471. William Perm's Commissioners 117 46, Roach, The Planting of Philadelphia," PMlin, 92:3-47, 143-94; Fries, The Urban idea, chap. 47. Marion Balders ton, ed., James Claypoole's Letter Book, London and Philadelphia, 1681-1684 (San Marino, Cal., 1967), p. 11B; Philip Theodore Leimman to William Penn, September 23, 1684, Micro. 4:1074. 48. Roach, "The Planting of Philadelphia," PMHB, 92:42n. 49. White, " Haige," PMHB, 24:134-X); Pomfret, Easi New Jersey pp. 199, 209, 226-27, 233. 50. See Oliver Hough, "Captain Thomas Holme, Surveyor-General of Pennsylvania and Provincial Councillor," PM B, 19(1895013-27, 20(18%):128-31, 248-56; Hazel Shields Garrison, "Cartography of Pennsylvania before 1800," PMHB, 59(1935):263-69; William E. Lingelbach, "William Penn and City Planning," PMHB, 68(1944)398, 4)4-6; Roach, "The Planting or Philadelphia," PMHB, 92:251; and Fries, The Urban Idea, chap. 3. 51. It is interesting, and probably significant, that almost hone of William Penn's associates in establishing Pennsylvania were Friends whom he had known well, or even met, through his own Quaker ministry and sulierings, or through his lobbying for the Quaker cause at Court in Westminster. Those Friends who had preached and had suffered—Thomas Holme from 1553 to 1661, John Bezar from 1656 to 165B, and Nathaniel Allen in 1664 and 1670—generally did so either before Penn became a Quaker, or in areas far removed from his own activities. Thus while Penn may ha‘;e known Allen in Bristol and liolnrie in Ireland as early as 1667-1670, they Leave no traces in the surviving record of his early years as a Quaker. In each case, Penn appears to have known these men, but only slightly, through the broader Quaker network of religion and trade. The only exceptions to this are Haig, and of course Thomas Rudyard, with whom Penn had had regular legal and religious contact since 1670, if not earlier. On the sufferings of Allen, Bezar, and Holme, see Mortimer, ed., Bristol Minite Book, p. 193 (Allen); and Besse, Sufferings, 1:42, 2:39, 40 (Bezar), and 1:99, 740, 747, 748, and 2:466, 471 (Holme). 52. The year and place of death of Crispin, Bezar, and Allen have been anted. Haig died in 1688, apparently in Fast New Jersey. Holme was the last to die, in 1695, in Pennsylvania. William Items from the Philadelphia Public Ledger contributed by Edwin S. Dunkerley "Dr. Franklin endeavoring to kill a turkey by an electrical shock, received the whole battery himself, when he good humorously observed, that instead of killing a turkey, he had nearly put an end to a goose." Monday, February 18, 1850 "Model epitaph furnished by the Snuotown Gazette Here lies the body of Ephraim Snubby, Who got his living by mending tubs, He caught his death while it was raining, And met his fate without complaining_" January 19, 1850 "Peter Smith, the watchmaker, insisted upon calling his oldest boy, Peter, after himself, as he considered his little treasure valuable enough to be called a re-Peter. He much admired his little face and hands." Thursday, April 5, 1849