“My Friends, that are gone and going over to plant and make outward plantations in America, keep your own plantations in your hearts, with the Spirit and Power of God, that your own vines and lilies be not hurt.” – George Fox, 1682
Rainer Forst (Reference Forst and Cronin2013, 519) writes that “talk of a ‘tolerant society’ is ambiguous.” Few cases better illustrate this point than the English Quaker William Penn’s (1644–1718) self-described “holy experiment” to create a tolerant society along the banks of the Delaware River Valley. Although a fascinating political thinker in his own right, Penn has been mythologized in hagiographic accounts as the peaceful colonial founder of Pennsylvania who concretized tolerationist ideals in law and deed by “drawing up treaties” with the Indigenous inhabitants of the land chartered to him in 1681, the Lenape and Susquehannock.Footnote 1 Suffice to say, lopsided accounts of any sort are unfortunate because they obscure the considerable insights that Penn’s story can provide contemporary political scientists about the promises and pitfalls of theorizing toleration in colonial contexts. Taking Penn’s transatlantic story as its point of departure, this article joins insights from intellectual history with a particular conception of critical theory to shed light on the downstream consequences of how one underappreciated champion of liberty of conscience, William Penn, justified toleration in the “New World.”
Penn’s relative absence from the last century of political science literature is notable, given the admiration he drew from subsequent thinkers and statesmen. Thomas Jefferson dubbed him “the greatest lawgiver the world has produced,” and Montesquieu saw in Penn’s figure a “true Lycurgus” with “peace for his object” (quoted in Murphy Reference Murphy and Murphy2021, 2; Montesquieu [1748] Reference Montesquieu, Cohler, Miller and Stone1989, 37). The radical political activist Thomas Paine reprinted Penn’s 1683 letter to the Free Society of Traders in the March 1775 issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine as a model of neighborly relations for Americans to emulate on the eve of revolution (Keane Reference Keane1995, 148; cf. Claeys Reference Claeys1989, 102–3).Footnote 2 Voltaire (Reference Voltaire, Leigh and Steiner2007, 12–13) celebrated Penn for enacting “wise laws” in Pennsylvania and for maintaining good relations with neighboring Indigenous nations, describing him as “a sovereign who called others ‘thou’ and ‘thee’” and the Quakers as “citizens all equal before the law, and neighbors devoid of envy.” Penn was indeed so esteemed by eighteenth-century French theoreticians of civil society that one of the six columns of Hubert Robert’s Temple de la Philosophie Moderne at Ermenonville, built under the directive of René Louis de Girardin (1735–1808), bears his name.Footnote 3
Taken together, Penn’s cultural and historical significance makes the omission of scholarly work on his unique political thought rather perplexing. As Teresa Bejan (Reference Bejan and Murphy2018, 487) put it, “political theorists’ neglect of Penn and of the other founding figures associated with the colonies of British North America cries out for explanation.” What is curious about Penn’s frequent omission from scholarly literatures on Atlantic republicanism, toleration, and liberty of conscience is that he was an important interlocutor of the defining figures of these debates. Although Penn is commemorated as a key figure in the history of toleration, John Locke, Roger Williams, and Thomas Hobbes have received the bulk of scholarly attention (see Barry Reference Barry2012; Bejan Reference Bejan2011; Reference Bejan2017, 50–81; Reference Bejan2023; Fradkin Reference Fradkin2025; Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum2008, 34–71; Young Reference Young2022). This oversight is especially striking, considering that at least Locke read Penn carefully, owning personal copies of Penn’s Great Case of Liberty of Conscience and each of his three Letters from a Gentleman (Marshall Reference Marshall2006, 153). Richard Tuck (Reference Tuck1999, 178) suggests that Locke’s Second Treatise was written in response to Penn’s Frame of Government, and Teresa Bejan (Reference Bejan2017, 125–26) indicates that Locke studied the “Great Law of Pennsylvania” published in 1682, the same year he offered revisions to the Fundamental Constitutions of the Carolinas.Footnote 4 In view of the long shadow cast by early modern arguments for toleration over embattled multicultural societies today, and with the recent addition of Penn’s political writings to the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series, the time has come to put Penn back in play.
This article takes up Penn’s work on toleration to see what it can tell us about the challenges and forgotten possibilities of seeding toleration in a pluralistic world. I begin by situating his thought within the broader political history of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world, following it from the tumult of the English pamphlet wars to its troubled implantation on Delaware shores. By viewing his career as it spanned two poles of the Atlantic, we are better positioned to see why Penn’s efforts to translate theory into practice in Lenapehoking did not culminate in the peaceful haven to which the Quaker aspired. As the editors of an influential volume on Pennsylvania politics and history put it, “tension rather than harmony was the norm” (Pencak and Richter Reference Pencak and Richter2004, xii).
One compelling explanation for this tension—which I explore in what follows—is that the radical impulse of Penn’s theory of toleration is incompatible with the narrow catalog of “ancient rights and liberties of Englishmen” on which it is based. In practice, this meant that Penn’s attempts to retool an essentially English theory of toleration to meet the exigencies of colonial founding often misfired in confrontation with Indigenous lifeworlds that were largely incommensurable with prevailing English valuations of life, liberty, and estate. And yet, even though the “holy experiment” tended to generate more factional heat than brotherly light, it would be a mistake to conclude that we have nothing to gain from early modern attempts to live less violently together. Without minimizing or condoning the extent to which his defense of toleration helped facilitate English colonial expansion, contemporary readers stand to learn of the imperfect possibilities for what, following Penn, I call “creaturely preservation” that were lost in that moment.
To this end, the last decade of scholarly work on Penn and his interlocutors recalls the sheer diversity of approaches to toleration that were articulated, practiced, and contested in the early modern Atlantic world. Some of these approaches grew out of Lenape peacekeeping traditions rooted in nonsovereign land use practices and reciprocal treaty making (Goode Reference Goode, Murphy and Smolenski2019, 217–31; Soderlund Reference Soderlund2014). Roger Williams, founder of Providence Plantations, had a more minimalist conception of toleration with practices that prioritized a shared commitment to “mere civility,” rather than utopian dreams of religious (and hence social) uniformity (Bejan Reference Bejan2011; Reference Bejan2017; cf. Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum2008).Footnote 5 Other scholarship has discerned still more elaborate forms of toleration practiced in the early modern Atlantic. Historian David Hackett Fischer identifies a form of “reciprocal” toleration at play in Quaker communities in the early Delaware Valley that was distinct from both the “Puritan conception of ordered liberty” for the elect and the “cavalier notion of hierarchical liberty” professed by slaveholding societies farther south (Fischer Reference Fischer1989, 596–97). Likewise, Rainer Forst (Reference Forst, Williams and Waldron2008; Reference Forst and Cronin2013) finds in the work of Penn’s contemporaries, John Locke and Pierre Bayle, a “reflexive” theory of toleration rooted in equal respect for difference. Penn’s work should be of interest to all those concerned with the wider lessons to be drawn from debates—then and now—about the proper scope, meaning, and even moral feasibility of toleration in pluralistic societies.Footnote 6
In England, Penn devised a theory of toleration that drew on principles of rational justification, a “creaturely” sense of moral equality, and the finitude of human reason without tethering toleration to a generalized monotheism. His unique blend of Whig polemics, Quaker spiritualism, and Tory historicism folds into a coherent and often compelling set of political, moral, economic, epistemological, and spiritual justifications for “indulging” dissent. The result, one contemporary observer remarks, was often quite “radical” (Harris Reference Harris2024, 891). And yet, even though Penn vowed to extend these same rights to both “Planters” and “Natives” in his proprietary colony, what tended to occur instead was the civic protection of the “Fundamental Rights and Privileges” of the former at the expense of inadvertently stripping the latter—the Lenape and Susquehannock—of the ability to contest the scope and meaning of these privileges on their own terms. The crux of the issue, Vicki Hsueh (Reference Hsueh2010), Daniel Richter (Reference Richter2013), and others indicate, centered on the question of land use in general and on Penn’s emergent conception of land in commodity form in particular. Although Penn promised to respect the Lenape’s “liberty to do all things relating to the improvement of their Ground … that any of the Planters enjoy” and even regarded them as the “right owners” of the land, such tolerant inclusion into the fold of English liberties often meant uprooting long-standing practices of negotiating shared land claims that were basic to the political and economic foundations of Lenape society (PWP 2: 100, 423).
The internal tension generated by these incommensurable conceptions of liberty, property, and treaty making risked boiling over by the late spring of 1687. Penn found himself back in England campaigning for toleration while simultaneously corresponding with associates in Pennsylvania about prickly land disputes between Friends and Lenapes. In May of that year, he wrote to King James II in praise of how the Declaration of Indulgence both “reliev[ed] his distressed subjects from their cruel sufferings” imposed by anti-tolerationist legislation “and raised to himself a new & larger Empire” (PWP 3: 154–55; emphasis added). This remark is revealing considering that 20 years earlier, Penn had expressed a similar sentiment to an Irish colonial administrator, advising that persecution is “a bad argumen[t] to Invite English hither” (PWP 1: 52).Footnote 7 He saw toleration as both good governance and, suggestively, as a tool of empire, among many other things.
At the same time that the Quaker campaigned for the king, Frederick Tolles ([1948] Reference Tolles1963, 12) reports that, back in Pennsylvania, he had a copy of the Magna Carta printed and put on public display in Philadelphia to ensure that Planters never forget the “inestimable inheritance” of their English liberties. Penn saw no contradiction between his defense of the “Liberty and Property” that he claimed were proper to both “Free-men and Inhabitants of the Province of Pennsilvania” and his directives as colonial proprietor to survey and “plow up new Indian fields” (Penn Reference Penn1687, n.p.; PWP 3: 138). This apparent dissonance is revealing of how freedom and domination comingled in the political and rhetorical strategies for deescalating conflict in the early modern Atlantic world. The infant years of the “holy experiment” therefore provide an enriching historical window into how English ancient constitutionalist ideals, transatlantic tolerationist discourses, and Lenape practices of reciprocal treaty making were contested on unequal footing in the newly established town of Philadelphia. By studying these conflicts closely, we can gain greater insight into a peculiar modality of English colonialism while working to recover some forgotten possibilities for honoring the resolute pluralism of the world.
I begin by briefly canvassing the broader political, legal, theological, and rhetorical contexts of the tolerationist debates that Penn engaged in during the Restoration. Next, I reconstruct the main components of Penn’s theory of toleration and compare it with other theories and practices of toleration throughout the early modern Atlantic world. I then show how Penn’s egalitarian commitments to honoring the “creaturely preservation” of plural forms of life came into direct conflict with his colonial obligations to clear the “Indian incumbrance [sic]” on the land through peacefully negotiated treaties (SA 292). I conclude with some tentative reflections on what contemporary readers stand to gain by reconsidering Penn’s legacy in its full complexity in the aftermath of empire.
Anti-Tolerationist Thought: 1658–1673
Penn’s defense of toleration was not conceived ex nihilo. By the time The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience was printed in 1670, a rich and influential body of work debating the question of toleration had garnered wide circulation. Penn studied anti-tolerationist literature carefully and responded directly to the arguments of royalist clergymen like Ralph Farmer (d. 1668), Samuel Parker (1640–88), and Richard Perrinchief (1620–73). Therefore, to get a better grasp of Penn’s many arguments in support of toleration and the types of claims he fought to overturn, a brief foray into Restoration England’s “anti-tolerationist edifice” is in order.Footnote 8
First, several consequential acts restricting the rights of itinerant preachers, dissenters, and suspected nonconformists were passed in the decade prior to the publication of The Great Case. In 1664, Parliament issued the first of two Conventicle Acts forbidding religious gatherings of more than one family plus five persons. Historian Jane Calvert (Reference Calvert2009, 58) explains that despite carrying the threat of “imprisonment, stiff fines, and or banishment,” Friends continued to meet, and even though “Quakers often met in complete silence and bodily stillness,” they were sometimes charged with rioting (see also Barbour and Frost Reference Barbour and Frost1988, 66). The Five Mile Act was passed the following October, prohibiting nonconforming and itinerant preachers from “inhabiting” or “preaching” within five miles (hence the name) of a parish from which they had been expelled previously. George Southcombe (Reference Southcombe, Allen and Moore2018, 172) argues that the two Acts, in conjunction with the Act of Uniformity passed in 1662 implementing a common book of prayer, constituted a “comprehensive legal attempt to destroy dissent” and maintain order (see also Bell Reference Bell, Allen and Moore2018, 263–86).
Parliament was not the only threat to nonconformists. Samuel Parker, soon to become the influential bishop of Oxford, published his Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie some months prior to The Great Case. Mark Goldie (Reference Goldie and Burns1991, 614) explains, “Parker’s Discourse [was] the most ferocious of Restoration assaults upon the dissenters.”Footnote 9 He argued that all religious ceremonies are fundamentally “arbitrary” because voluntaristic inner persuasion is too fickle to make dissenting practices worthy of civil protection: “As all Forms, and Ceremonies, and Outward Actions of External Worship are in a manner equally Significant, so are they equally Arbitrary” (Parker Reference Parker1670, 106–7). Associations become “meaningful,” Parker argued, when they rest on consent: “Actions are made Significant by Agreement, those are most so whose signification is ratified by Publick Consent” (107). He concluded that dissenters who do not heed the “Pacts and Covenants” on which society rests pose a threat to the prevailing civil order. “To permit different Sects of Religion in a Common-wealth, is only to keep up so many incurable pretences and occasions of publick disturbance…. Toleration [is] only cried up by opprest Parties, because it gives them opportunity to overturn the settled frame of things” (136).
Royalist churchman Richard Perrinchief voiced similar concerns in Indulgence Not Justified, the second of two pamphlets written in response to the nonconformist John Corbett’s Discourse of Toleration (see Murphy Reference Murphy2016, 36–39). Perrinchief (Reference Perrinchief1668, 32) warned that “Non-Conformists rest [not] in bare Dissent from the Publick Rule”—implying that they do not hold specific disagreements about existing laws of observance—but rather that they “use their utmost endeavours to abrogate that Rule, to repeal the Laws, which establish it.” He claimed that nonconformists wished to undermine the entire system of religious laws, not simply to be excused from particular observances. Like Samuel Parker (Reference Parker1670, 60), who also feared that “Ambitious and Enterprizing” dissenters would overthrow the government on the pretence of conscience, Perrinchief (Reference Perrinchief1668, 32) excoriated “those Factious men which lately overthrew our Laws and Government, [and] did but pretend [it was] for the Liberty of Godly, and Tender Consciences.” In the aftermath of Cromwell, “civil warre” became the watchword of the anti-tolerationist canon. Parker, Perrinchief, and others like Bristol clergyman Ralph Farmer warned that nonconformists would plunge the kingdom back into chaos as they had done in decades prior. It was not simply the “damnable and blasphemous Doctrines of the Quakers” that risked the “utter ruine of the true Christian Religion,” Farmer (Reference Farmer1658, 60) warned, but the public practice of their “unbridled and licentious liberties” by which, if left unchecked by civil Magistrates, “the whole Nation and Government, may bee rolled away.”
Viewed as a whole, the central claim of the anti-tolerationist pamphleteers was that permitting dissent posed a threat to civil order. According to Andrew Murphy (Reference Murphy2016, 39), churchmen like Parker, Perrinchief, and others feared that dissenters wanted more than liberty of conscience. When nonconformists spoke of freedom of conscience, they really meant free liberty of action: “It is not the freedom of Conscience, but its power and sovereignty, for which they contend,” Parker (Reference Parker1670, 318–19) argued, adding, “they will endure none to rule over them but themselves.” For Penn to produce a coherent defense of the liberty of conscience, he would therefore have to demonstrate that (a) Quakers were no threat to the Crown, (b) tolerating dissent would not endanger the stability of the kingdom, (c) dissenters were denied equal protection before the law, (d) inner faith is about more than following the design of civil compacts, and (e) force onto death cannot overturn belief.
Penn’s Theory of Toleration
The first edition of The Great Case was published in Dublin in 1670, shortly after the passage of the Second Conventicle Act, while Penn toured County Cork seeking testimonies of Quaker sufferings and tended to his family’s Irish estates.Footnote 10 The work was revised one year later while he was jailed in Newgate Prison, now promising “a General Reply to such late Discourses, as have Opposed a Tolleration” (TGC 163). In the dedication, he sketched out, in telegraphic fashion, the political issues at stake in denying toleration to a wide array of nonconformists (i.e., not just Quakers) and offers a coherent definition of liberty of conscience.
Penn lamented that for the past decade, dissenters had been subjected to “Cruel Sufferings,” the “cancel[lation] of Bonds,” and the denial of “Freedoms … entituled by English Birthrigh[t]” (TGC 163). He expands the list of grievances to include “the unspeakable pressure of nasty Prisions”—perhaps a nod to the young Quaker martyr James Parnel—and “daily Confiscation of our Goods, to the apparent ruine of intire Families” (163).Footnote 11 He argued that anti-tolerationist policies impede the right to external possession and secure investment, subject Englishmen to torture, and imperil the industry of the kingdom. Penn clarified that indulging dissent is “not only the most Christian and Rational, but Prudent” practice; anti-tolerationist policies were, in contrast, “the most injurious to the Peace, and destructive to the discreet Ballance, which the Best and Wisest States, have ever carefully Observ’d” (164). To illustrate that persecution is anti-Christian, he appealed to scripture and patristic history and demonstrated toleration’s political prudence with 30 examples of wise kingdoms and lawgivers who granted it (174–79, 190–97).Footnote 12
Penn’s definition of liberty of conscience in “plain English” consisted of “the Free and Uninterrupted Exercise of our Consciences in that Way of Worship … we are most clearly perswaded … which being [a] matter of FAITH, we Sin if we omit” (TGC 166). He later expanded this definition to include a wider set of moral, political, theological, and historical justifications for toleration:
By Liberty of Conscience, we understand not only a meer Liberty of the Mind, in believing or disbelieving this or that Principle or Doctrine, but the exercise of ourselves in a visible Way of Worship, upon our believing it to be indispensibly required at our hands…. Yet we would be so understood to extend and justifie the lawfulness of our so meeting to Worship God, as not to contrive, or abet any Contrivance distructive of the Government and Laws of the Land, tending to matters of an external nature … but so far only, as it may refer to Religious Matters, and a Life to come (170–71).
Penn distinguished between “beliefs” and “practices,” arguing that toleration must go beyond protecting private beliefs to guard the associational capacities for speech, dissent, refusal, and “worship in a visible way.” Building on this, he insisted that “visible” worship should be extended to groups and not be restricted to individuals (see Murphy Reference Murphy, Karpov and Svensson2020, 84–90). He argued that genuine religion is a product of inner persuasion and that faith issues from within. It follows from this that forced worship in a manner that is inconsistent with the dictates of conscience induces a state of sin: “we sin if we omit” (TGC 166). No mortal being can compel another to adopt religious beliefs they judge to be correct, for doing so would usurp the divine power of judgment possessed by God alone. Penn explained that the binding force of the Christian “light within” does not issue from external compacts as Parker thought, but from “the works of Grace” and the “invisible operation of [the] eternal Spirit” (172; cf. Owen Reference Owen1667, 15). Therefore, restraining the spiritual life of another through force “enthrones man as King over Conscience” that “alone [is the] just claim and privilege of his Creator” (TGC 172). Dissenters are concerned only with “the life to come”; civil magistrates who wish to police otherworldly matters of conscience overstep their legitimate jurisdiction.
Building on this definition, Penn proceeded to map these three interwoven lines of thought onto clearer theological, epistemological, economic, and political justifications for toleration.Footnote 13
Economic Justifications
Penn argued that dissenters are hard-working and productive members of society who tended toward “Sober, Just, and Industrious Living” (TGC 187). Punishment would therefore be deleterious to the economic interests of the Crown. In One Project for the Good of England, written in 1679, he reasoned that “since the Industry, Rents and Taxes of the Dissenters are as current as their Neighbours, who loses by such narrowness more than England…? For till it be the Interest of the Farmer to destroy his Flock … it cannot be the Interest of England to let a great part of her Sober & Useful Inhabitants be destroy’d about things that concern another world” (OP 219). Anti-tolerationists like Perrinchief who claimed that Quakers were a threat to the unity or prosperity of England were deeply misguided.
Penn argued that toleration is economically viable and even beneficial to the industry and improvement of the kingdom.Footnote 14 Indeed, his defense had merit: By 1670, Quaker merchants played a disproportionally large role in the transatlantic commodities trade (Haefeli Reference Haefeli, Beneke and Grenda2015, 31–3). Expansive Friends networks, extending from the Netherlands to Barbados and beyond, transported considerable portions of the national GDP across the Atlantic.Footnote 15 In the evaluation of historian Gary Nash, “the richest Trading Men in London” circa 1680 were Quakers (Nash Reference Nash1968, 11–12; see also Grubb Reference Grubb1930; Tolles [1948] Reference Tolles1963).
Theological and Epistemological Justifications
Penn further insisted that coercive force cannot compel inner belief, which is the essence of “true” religion. In The Great Case, he argued that belief is a faculty of the understanding, not the will. Only rational persuasion can convince another to adopt a new set of beliefs—an insight that Kant, whose Pietist upbringing instilled in him a deep respect for Quakers, would later systematize.Footnote 16 “The Understanding,” Penn remarked, “can never be convinc’d, nor properly submit, but by such Arguments, as are rational, perswasive, and sutable to its own Nature” (TGC 179). Voluntaristic inner persuasion is the prerequisite for redemption and cannot be imputed from without, as Samuel Parker mistakenly thought.Footnote 17 It is both “cruel” and “irrational,” Penn explained, “to imagine those barbarous Newgate Instruments of Clubbs, Fines, Prisions” are “fit Arguments to convince the Understanding … [or] convert it to their Religion.” Only faith rooted in “knowledge and consent” makes a Christian; force makes “hypocrites” (179; cf. PWP 1: 92–93).
Political and Historical Justifications
What sets Penn’s case apart from other prudence-based and Christian arguments against persecution is that he joins these claims with a richer understanding of political action than that possessed by many of his contemporaries. Toleration is political because it secures the capacities for speech, action, association, refusal, dissent, and self-determination. The task of the lawgiver is not to mitigate dissent in service of preserving the body politick but to protect the prerequisites of civil association that are the sine qua non of all worldly politics. “[T]he very Remedies apply’d to cure Dissension increase it,” he remarked in England’s Present Interest Discover’d. “The more vigorously an [sic] Uniformity is coercively prosecuted, the wider Breaches grow” (EPI 86). Penn defined “good governance” as an “external order of justice,” meaning that it deals with the right ordering of earthly affairs, not with otherworldly salvation (TGC 179). For the “Government of this World to intermeddle with what belong to the Government of Another,” he argued, “shews more of Invasion then Right and Justice” (180). The earthly lawgiver must enact “prudent” and “proportional” laws that preserve the rights of self-determining moral equals against the rule of force.
Elsewhere, Penn joined the broadly humanistic reasoning reflected above with far-reaching rights-based arguments in support of toleration. He warned that denying liberty of conscience meant depriving Englishmen of their fundamental rights and privileges that were enshrined in the “Ancient Compact and Original of our Laws”—that is, the Magna Carta—and subsequently confirmed through the centuries (TGC 185; see also Penn Reference Penn1687). He advised that dissenters seek only for the recognition of the “Freedoms of which we are entituled by English Birthright” and that “are not limited to particular Perswasions in matters of Religion” (TGC 163; PAL 42). These rights and freedoms include (i) property (i.e., “Right and Title to … Lives, Liberties and Estates”; (ii) representative government (i.e., “a voting on every law that is made”); and (iii) trial by jury (EPI 88–89; cf. PAL 58–59; EGI 142–43; TGC 184–85; see also Buranelli Reference Buranelli1962, 145; Tolles [1948] Reference Tolles1963, 13).
Over the course of his public career, Penn rehearsed arguments about the ancient origins of English liberties with regularity and precision equal to the likes of Edward Coke and John Selden before him (see Pocock [1957] Reference Pocock1987, 21–29). Indeed, Penn made explicit or implicit references to Coke and other early English humanists associated with the “ancient constitution” in many of his most influential tracts during this period (e.g., Penn Reference Penn1675, 4; PAL 58–59; EPI 88–89; EGI 142–43; TGC 184–85). He saw the “Antient Fundamental Laws, which relate to Liberty and Property” as the plenipotentiary for indulgence and—we will see—the wellspring of his actions as a colonial lawgiver (PAL 42; PWP 2: 149). According to Vincent Buranelli (Reference Buranelli1962, 148), Penn “could … invoke Coke’s notion of the immemorial common law of England, or Harrington’s theory that English freedom came out of the German forests” and did so to defend the “legal, political, and social inheritance of Englishman” threatened by anti-tolerationist campaigns.
Viewed in context, Penn’s multifaceted argument for toleration reveals a great deal about the moment in which it was conceived. Contrary to the claims of Royalist churchmen like Farmer, Perrinchief, and Parker, Penn endeavored to show that tolerating dissent was both perfectly Christian and posed no threat to the established political order. Nonconformists pleaded only for the recognition of their “fundamental rights” and privileges; their demands were neither excessive nor without precedent. Penn inverted the script with the zeal of a radical Whig pamphleteer: It was not dissenters, but civil magistrates who thought that understanding could be convinced “by club-law & Corporall extremetys” who posed the bigger threat to peace, reason, and the lawful exercise of English freedoms (PWP 1: 92–93).
Finally, Penn always understood these arguments to be in the best interests of the Crown. Although expansive, his politics of toleration often led back to the (credulous) acceptance of ideas about the ancient origins of English liberties. In The Continued Cry of the Oppressed for Justice (1675, 4), Penn counseled that anti-tolerationist legislation is not only unreasonable but also “seems to be an Alternation in the ancient English Government by making an ECCLESSIASTICAL CONFORMITY the Grand and Necessary Qualification” for Englishmen to partake in “the Peaceable Enjoyment of their NATURAL and CIVIL INHERITANCES.” Not for the last time, he argued that the dangers of imposed conformity accrue to the kingdom at large. The “spoiling” of confiscated goods, the “Decay of Trade,” “Depopulation of the Country,” and the “Impoverishing of … Usefull Inhabitants” harm only the “peaceable People of this Kingdom” who are “hourly exposed to Ruine” (4–5).
Penn made these grievances known to the Crown and, notably, to newfound “Pennsylvanians” when tension risked boiling over. What these early documents reveal is that even prior to receiving the colonial charter, toleration, colonization, improvement, and industry were linked closely together in Penn’s mind. This constellation of ideas was by no means unique to him but rather expressed the hopes and anxieties of landed English society in an age of colonial expansion and economic contraction.Footnote 18
This brings us to the transatlantic dimension of Penn’s story. Come the next decade, he would find himself in the so-called “New World” tasked with giving laws in a “Country … not furnished with Law-Books” (Penn Reference Penn1687, n.p.). He might have known that this would prove all the more difficult, because none other than the chief mythologist of the ancient constitution Edward Coke denied that English common law extended beyond the seas.Footnote 19 As legal scholar Daniel Hulsebosch explains (Reference Hulsebosch2003, 439), “Whether or not the ancient constitution existed time out of mind, it did not extend to land out of sight.” Questions about the colonial reach of the ancient constitution would grow more urgent still, Penn would find, when colonists framed Indigenous “threats” to English estates as threats to the “inestimable inheritance” of Friends and Planters alike.
From Theories of Toleration to Practices of “Creaturely Preservation”
William Penn was, of course, not the only influential proponent of toleration. Most political scientists today have some familiarity with John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration; thanks to recent high-powered works of “historically informed” political theory, we also know a great deal more about the forgotten contributions of Roger Williams and Pierre Bayle in shaping early modern European tolerationist discourses (Bejan Reference Bejan2017; Reference Bejan2020; Forst Reference Forst, Williams and Waldron2008; Reference Forst and Cronin2013). There have also been welcome efforts to develop a more nuanced understanding of Indigenous political systems, including Lenape peacekeeping traditions, which provide tantalizing evidence of a deeper history of practicing toleration in the Delaware Valley than truncated histories beginning with Penn imply (Goode Reference Goode, Murphy and Smolenski2019; Soderlund Reference Soderlund2014; Reference Soderlund, Gallup-Diaz and Plank2019; Spady Reference Spady, Pencak and Richter2004). Before proceeding, it is worth canvassing where Penn falls among these overlapping traditions to better clarify the discursive antecedents of his colonizing rhetoric and to map some potential points of conceptual reverberation between Penn and his contemporaries.
Locke’s objective in the Letter Concerning Toleration was to construe and deny the claim that a Christian prince has a moral obligation to impose his best assessment of the requirements of Christian practice on the kingdom (see Dunn Reference Dunn and Shapiro2003, 272–77). Like Roger Williams, he challenged the false notion that persecution is a Christian duty. Both rejected the idea that civil magistrates possess special knowledge of ecclesiastical matters. “Neither the right, nor art of ruling,” Locke ([1689] Reference Locke and Shapiro2003, 230) argued, implies “certain knowledge” of otherworldly affairs. In The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, Williams ([1644] Reference Williams and Trumbull1963, 132) advised that a “pagan or anti-Christian [i.e., Catholic] pilot may be as skillful to carry the ship to its desired ports, as any Christian mariner or pilot in the world.” Both concluded that civil magistrates have no business saving souls, just as the Christian prince does not have the final say on orthodoxy. Their job is not to legislate the bounds of “authentic” belief but to secure a well-ordered society through contract and consent.
It is instructive to compare these ideas with Penn’s short tract, The Proposed Comprehension, written in 1672 and directed against short-sighted claims for extending civil protections to theologically moderate dissenters only. There we find clear arguments against granting political rights exclusively to authentic believers. Penn asks, “What Reason is there that one Party should be Tolerated, and another Restrained…? For if the Former say, They are Orthodox, so say the Latter too” (TPC 209–10).Footnote 20 Claims to orthodoxy are specious indeed, Locke ([1689] Reference Locke and Shapiro2003, 225) reasoned because “every church is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical.” The Frenchman Pierre Bayle ([1697] Reference Bayle and Jenkinson2000, 277) developed a similar formulation in his Dictionnaire of 1697, lamenting how “every sect carries animosity to its ultimate limits and accuses the others of teaching frightful impieties and blasphemies.” For Bayle, this animosity, combined with the limited capacity of human reason to conclusively adjudicate theological claims, meant that “one should practice forthwith a mutual toleration” (277). Penn, Locke, and Bayle all relativized claims to orthodoxy and thereby rejected orthodoxy itself as a reasonable source of moral authority from which to gauge the appropriate limits of toleration. Yet it may well be worth considering that Penn—not Locke or Bayle—was arguably the first to arrive at this insight without tethering toleration to a generalized monotheism.
In The Great Case, Penn reasoned that no political or religious authority should have free license to determine the authenticity of inner belief: “‘Twere high Incharity to affirm … This, or That People meet only under a Colour of Religion … we conceive their Authority lame and imperfect that persecute us by it” (TGC 202). Remarkably, he inculpated the king, Parliament, both the House of Lords and Commons, and the liturgy of the Church of England in unjustly assuming the power to adjudicate what constitutes sincere dissent. Penn, like Locke and Bayle, was skeptical of coercive appeals to orthodoxy insofar as they “carry an evident claim to … infallibility,” meaning they cannot be reconciled with the finitude of human reason (171–72). To claim certain knowledge is to assume the power of judgment possessed by God alone (see also PWP 3: 79–80).
More broadly, Penn argued that no “Fellow Creature”—the common early Quaker mode of address for conveying the underlying moral worth of all life—should harm another in body or soul by claiming to act on God’s behalf. “Shall we not have Unity with that which proceeds from a Fellow Creature?” (Penn [1681] Reference Penn2002, 278). No earthly being can presume certain knowledge of God’s ultimate design; hence, one must not deny another the right to pursue their own vision of how to live and worship so long as it does not violate the ability of another to author their own actions. In a key passage, he counseled that God “strips not Mankind of what suits their Creaturely Preservation; Christians themselves, have no more peculiar Privilege in the Natural Benefits of Heaven, then [sic] Turks or Indians.” He continued, asking, “Would it not be strange, that Infidels themselves much less any sort of Christians should be deprived of Natural Privileges for meer Opinion, by those who pretend to be the Best Servants of God?” (TPC 211).
These passages are of more than historical interest once we remember that they issue from the same figure who inadvertently stripped his “brothers”—the Lenape—of the land and practices that best “suit their Creaturely Preservation.” According to Jean Soderlund (Reference Soderlund, Gallup-Diaz and Plank2019, 29), a leading Pennsylvania historian, it was just this sort of anthropological minimalism rooted in political expediency and the “respect for the culture and freedom of others” that characterized Lenape peacekeeping traditions. She argues that the Lenape maintained their sovereignty while promoting “the principles of peaceful resolution of conflict and personal liberty long before Penn founded his colony” through their strategic interactions with early Dutch, Swedish, and Finnish settlers (Soderlund Reference Soderlund, Gallup-Diaz and Plank2019, 29; 2014; see also Haefeli Reference Haefeli2012). Michael Goode (Reference Goode, Murphy and Smolenski2019, 222–23) concurs, adding that a deeper history of peacekeeping—rancontyn marenit, “to make peace”—rooted in Lenape commitments to reciprocity and preservation, flourished in the Delaware Valley well before Penn’s arrival (see Soderlund Reference Soderlund2022).Footnote 21 To quote from the journal of David de Vries, representative of the Dutch West India Company, in 1632, “rancontyn marenit” is what the Lenape say to “make a firm peace” (quoted in Cook Meyers Reference Albert1912, 16).
Taken together, Penn’s move to relativize orthodoxy while affirming the “creaturely” worth of plural forms of life represented both a highpoint in the early modern intellectual history of toleration and a normative standard by which his holy experiment fell short in practice. How different the Delaware Valley might be today had Penn understood the Lenape’s insight that freedom and reciprocity—“peace and freedom,” as Soderlund (Reference Soderlund, Gallup-Diaz and Plank2019, 29) puts it—go hand in hand. However, despite the discursive overlap between Penn’s rhetoric of brotherly peace and the practices for living together forged by Lenapes well before his arrival, his actions as proprietor tended to prioritize the preservation of English freedoms at the expense of honoring a shared sense of “creaturely” reciprocity.
Toleration, Treaty, Liberty, and Property in Penn’s Woods
The charter granting Penn sole proprietorship of a vast plot of land where the Delaware river meets the Schuylkill was finalized on March 4, 1681.Footnote 22 Five months later, he wrote to Friend James Harrison detailing his hope to establish an “example” of a peaceful and tolerant society in America: “there may be room there, tho not here, for such an holy experiment” (PWP 2: 108). He explained his wish to provide a haven for dissenters to live in quiet prosperity, and he was adamant that this required maintaining good relations with Indigenous nations. In another letter enumerating the conditions and concessions to the first purchasers of land in the new colony, Penn stipulated that “noe man shall by any ways or meanes in word or Deed, affront or wrong any Indian,” adding that the penalties for doing so would be the same “as if he had Committed it against his Fellow Planter” (PWP 2: 102). It also required that “all Differenes between the Planters and the Natives shall … be ended by Twelve Men,” split down the middle, and further clarified that “the Indians shall have Liberty to doe all things Relating to the Improvem[ent] of their ground & providing Sustenence for their Familyes” that all Planters enjoy (102).
Penn’s first fruits as a lawgiver were two unpublished drafts, of varying length, of the Fundamental Constitutions developed between 1681 and 1682 and only circulated among select Friends. Both documents elaborate a civic republican vision in keeping with many of his earlier texts.Footnote 23 Point I of the longer draft enumerates that because “this unpeopled Country can never be planted if there be not due encouragement given to Sober people of all sorts to plant,” no one can be made to “forfeit … their Conscience” (PWP 2: 143). Both drafts recite the program for toleration outlined earlier, but with a notable revision. The Fundamental Constitutions guarantees “Free Possession” of faith and worship in the way “most acceptable to God” but now made conditional on civic virtue: “so long as ever Person useth not this Christian liberty to Lincentiousness [sic]” (PWP 2: 143).
Months later in the Frame of Government, published in the spring of 1682, protections for liberty of conscience were again made conditional on civic virtue. “That all Persons living in this Province,” it explains, “who confess and acknowledge the One Almighty and Eternal God, … and that hold themselves obliged in Conscience to live peaceably and justly in Civil Society, shall in no ways be molested or prejudiced for their Religious Perswasion or Practice in matters of Faith and Worship” (PWP 2: 225). In the Fundamental Constitutions, Penn maintained the definition of conscience found in The Great Case but tames it with a strict monotheistic qualifier, likely to pull it within the scope of the charter, which stated that laws must be “consonant to reason and … not repugnant or contrary” to the laws of England (quoted in WPFP, 43). In the Frame of Government, Penn’s expansive definition of the liberty of conscience is dropped, and adherence to “One Almighty and Eternal God” is required. The Frame also includes stipulations for a Committee of Manners, Education, and Arts to ensure “that all Wicked and Scandalous Living may be prevented” (PWP 2: 217). Of course, some tempering is not surprising considering the scope of the charter. But it does cast light on a wider question: If, for Planters, the free exercise of individual liberties was made contingent on civic virtue and belief in one God, what might that have meant for the Lenape who, as Penn thought, were “under a dark night [i]n things relating to religion” and “without the help of metaphisicks” (PWP 2: 451)?
Different interpretations of civic virtue and spiritual practice between all parties to the holy experiment—including between colonists and the Quaker elite—were not the only fundamental concerns that Penn dealt with. More pressing questions emerged over how to peacefully negotiate treaties, purchase land titles, and deescalate boundary disputes. Penn’s letter to the Free Society of Traders dated August 16, 1683, is instructive in this regard. It offers remarkable insight into the lifeworld of an influential figure in the history of English colonialism. The letter begins with an anthropological description that uses some common stereotypes, but proceeds to cover Algonquin language systems, childrearing practices, housing, planting, and migratory cycles in considerable detail (PWP 2: 448; cf. Williams [1643] Reference Williams and Trumbull1963). It also provides firsthand descriptions of land transfers and treaty-making procedures. Vicki Hsueh (Reference Hsueh2010, 84) and others have shown that Penn relied on the power of treaty making, which was one of the few sovereign powers granted in the charter, to sidestep proprietary oversight, negotiate boundary disputes, and amass colonial power, in addition to more prosaic uses (Mancke Reference Mancke, Daniels and Kennedy2002; Richter Reference Richter2013). Although some political theorists today wish to revitalize radical treaty politics as a way to democratize and decentralize federalism, this was far from the case in the settling of Pennsylvania (see Young Reference Young, Ivison, Patton and Saunders2000, 246).Footnote 24 Rather, the letter to the Free Society of Traders demonstrates the extent to which treaty functioned as a tool for amassing power:
I have occasion to be in Councell with them [upon Treaties for] land & to a[djust the terms of] trade. their or[der is thus]: the King sits in the middle of an half moon, & has (his councell) the old & wise men … on each hand, behind them … sett the younger fry in the same figure; having consulted, the & resolved their business; the King ordered one of them to speak to me …. [H]e first asked m pray’d me to excuse them that they had … no comply’d with me the last time … besides, it was the cust Indian usage [custom], to deliberate & & take up much time in councel before they resolv’d, & that if the younger people & the owners of the had had been ready as he, I had not mett with so much de[lay. Hav]ing thus introdu[ced his matter, he] fell to the bounds [of the Land they had] agreed to dispose of & the price; w[hich] now is little & dear (PWP 2: 452–53; deletions in original).
The interpreter explains that the discrepancy between “the King” and “the owners” of the land (which Penn appeared baffled by) was the cause of their previous failure to comply with the Quaker. Penn described with apparent interest the “Indian [custom] to deliberate,” detailing how the “younger fry” are equal stewards of the land and party to any deliberation about what happens on, with, or to it. Penn relayed that their land was “dispose[d] of” for a “pecuniary” price, indicating a profound misunderstanding between the two parties. According to Soderlund (Reference Soderlund2014, 57), “when the Lenapes made agreements with the Europeans …, they had no intention of transferring all rights to the [land]. They aimed to stay in their villages and retain free access”; they only granted use rights. In Penn’s account, however, the land was “dispose[d]” of and the title “cleared.” He understood it as a permanent, one-way transfer of the land in commodity form, rather than a tentative extension of usufructuary rights that could be revoked. “The Justice they have is pecuniary,” he claimed (PWP 2: 453).
Similar language appears in the first land deed brokered in April of 1682 by Penn’s agent, William Markham. There we hear how the twelve sachems present peacefully, “[clearly & absolutely] Grant Bargane sell & deliv’r unto … William Penn and his Heires & Assignes forever … those Tracts of Land lyeing & being in the Privince of Pennsylvainia” (PWP 2: 262). Notwithstanding the professed transparency of proceedings, at least four sachems who were present—Oreckton, Mamarakiekon, Nanacussy, and Sackoquewan—had already “sold” land that Penn thought he was “purchasing” to New York Governor Edmund Andros several years prior (Soderlund Reference Soderlund2014, 169). The deed also stipulates that “William Penn his Heires & Assignes” acquire exclusive right to determine “the onely proper use & behoofe” of the land (PWP 2: 263). Roughly two weeks later, an addendum was added to the treaty clearing the titles of three additional sachems “who wer[e] the right owners of the Land” (PWP 2: 264). Confusion, rather than clarity, redounded two years later when Penn instructed James Graham and William Haige to negotiate with the Susquehannock for the title to lands along the Susquehanna River. He directed them to first present gifts and then, with “utmost skill & Dispatch,” convince them “to sell those Lands to none else but me” (PWP 2: 423). If they need further assurances, the proprietor explained, “our own Indians … that often meet with {them} in the Woods, will inform can tell, I am not the worst man that have in my Condition come into this part of the World.”
These examples are noteworthy insofar as they lay bare the extent to which peaceful, well-intended treaties served as a tool for amassing colonial power. Surely a good deal of strategic language was used to “oblige” the “right owners” of the land, but this was no clear-cut example of outright conquest by sword nor the uniform imposition of an established English colonial agenda. He did not act disingenuously nor with malicious intent. Instead, dispossession was facilitated through quasi-legal means that were wholly within the scope of the charter. Penn’s job was to “clear the kings & Indians Title,” which was a clear enough task for the proprietor who sincerely professed nonviolence, yet the scope and meaning of these transactions quickly degenerated into confusion, frustration, and sometimes outright violence (PWP 2: 109). “The issues of morality,” writes Francis Jennings (Reference Jennings, Dunn and Dunn1986, 195), “were simple compared to the issues of practice.” The disconnect between the two was evident to the Lenape and Susquehannock and even some of the colonists, but this did not stop Penn from insisting, into the 1690s, that Europeans “settle with their consent” (Penn [1690] Reference Penn1904, 60–61).
In the treaty procedures outlined earlier, Penn viewed the exchange of money as a permanent one-way transfer of the land. In contrast, the Lenape saw the agreement as little more than the extension of usufructuary rights subject to continuous renewal, renegotiation, and partnership. According to James Spady (Reference Spady, Pencak and Richter2004, 36), “Penn actively sought to ‘extinguish’ the ‘Indian encumbrance’ on the land through English property law, but the Lenapes … expected to receive regular payments for the colonists’ continued residence upon the land.” Vicki Hsueh (Reference Hsueh2010, 106) explains that “the English tended to view land as a commodity to be bought and sold: Deeds conveyed absolute right to land, and gifts of rum, wampum, and goods were seen as payment for land title. By contrast, Indigenous conceptions of territory emphasised land usufruct: Deeds were largely viewed as provisional agreements.” In the letter to the Free Society of Traders mentioned earlier, Penn expressed his understanding that the Lenape held different views about property rights and external possession. He described how “wealth circulates like blood, all parts partake,” and in a crossed-out portion of the surviving manuscript, he remarked that they “seem pleasd with the sight” of an Englishmen burdened by “more household stuf then they can [easeley] carry” (PWP 2: 450–51; deletions in original). Nonetheless, he also described Lenapes as “exact observers of property” in the same letter, suggesting that these differing views were not irreconcilable (450).Footnote 25
By the winter of 1684, Penn had returned to London when Nicolas More wrote to him with news of ongoing land disputes with the Lenape. More explained that Nanacussy, signatory to at least two land treaties brokered by Penn, had grown inpatient, “saying that William Penn shall be his brother no more” (PWP 2: 607–9, quote at 608; cf. Soderlund Reference Soderlund2014, 171–72). He also warned that the “Indians are much displeased at our English settling upon their land, and seem to threaten us, saying that William Penn hath deceived them not paying for what he bought of them” (PWP 2: 608). Similar episodes were reported by Surveyor General Thomas Holme, who sent notice that a Lenape sachem named Tamany “played the rogue in hindring our peopl to plant and setl upon their lands” in present-day Bucks County. Holme, an English Quaker with deep ties to Ireland, relates that he reviewed the governor’s records and found that “he [Tamany] hath sold the Govenor all his land between Pemapecca & Neshemineh Creek” and now asked the absentee governor how to proceed (quoted in Weslager Reference Weslager1972, 169).Footnote 26 Penn eventually responded in the summer of 1685, expressing his disappointment that the Lenapes failed to discipline Tamany, adding, “if the Indians will not punish him, we will & must, for they must never see you afraid of executing the justice they ought to do” (cf. Soderlund Reference Soderlund2014, 171–72, quoted in Weslager Reference Weslager1972, 169).
The most troubling report, however, came roughly a year later from William Markham, when Israel Taylor took to surveying land north of Neshaminy Falls before it was paid in full (PWP 3: 107, 113 n. 83). This time, Nanacussy, now joined by Tamany and other sachems, threatened to kill Taylor to defend their land (Soderlund Reference Soderlund, Gallup-Diaz and Plank2019, 25). Markham, Holme, and the sachems quickly negotiated a tentative framework for a treaty, though it was not one that Penn had the funds to pay; it went unsigned.Footnote 27 If ever there was a time for “toleration,” the clock may well have been showing the eleventh hour.
As news of land disputes with Lenapes and in-fighting between colonists intensified, a curious slew of documents titled The Excellent Privilege of Liberty and Property appeared on public display in Philadelphia at Penn’s directive. Included were prints of the Magna Carta, Edward I’s “Confirmation of the Charter of Liberties of England and of the Forrest,” a commentary on the Statute De tallagio non concedendo , and excerpts from Pennsylvania’s Charter of Liberties and the Frame of Government. Footnote 28 The unattributed motto on the title page reads “a greater heritage comes to each one of us from rights and the laws than from our parents”—the same motto appearing on part I of Edward Coke’s Institutes, which the author explains “hath many excellent Observations” (Penn Reference Penn1687, 23). In the short preface affixed to the documents, Penn—this time writing under the pseudonym “Philopolites”—explained that the following documents are both the ancient “Root” of all Englishmen’s “unparalleled privilege of Liberty and Property” and, suggestively, “the Line by which they must be squared.” The reason to make them public, he explained, was to provide “information” about an Englishman’s “native Right and Inheritance” to all “who may not have leisure from their Plantations to read large Volumes.” He concludes by expressing hope that their publication “may raise up Noble Resolutions in all the Freeholders in these new Colonies, not to give away any thing of Liberty and Property” and to instead “take up the good Example of our Ancestors, and understand, that it is easie to part with or give away great Privileges, but hard to be gained, if once lost.”
What are we to make of this all? Why would Penn take pains to compile abstruse statutes and republicize Pennsylvania’s governing documents when he had neither the funds nor the patience of his colonists? One reason may be that this maneuver is similar to the defense of English freedoms he had performed under duress many times previously. By “squaring” colonial law with the ancient charter, Penn labored once more to show that not only were his politics reasonable but that, in fact, giving away “any thing of Liberty and Property” was itself unreasonable. In this moment, two distinct threats to the “peaceful enjoyment” of English freedoms seemed to crystallize in the ‘holy experiment’: internal dissent between settlers over the scope and function of the infant colonial government and external threats in the form of land disputes with Indigenous treaty partners who now threatened violence. With respect to the latter, Penn insisted that his dealings with the “right owners” of the land were wholly reasonable, in contrast to the reputed actions of sachems who now endeavored to prevent Englishman from taking hold of their legal property. As tales of unrest in the woods of Pennsylvania continued to circulate through London, Penn again tried to deflect negative attention away from Friends by appealing to the fundamental rights and freedoms they were entitled to enjoy. This time, the parallel presentation of foundational texts and statutes alongside the governing documents of Pennsylvania perhaps even lent the colonial lawgiver historical authority.
One way we can better appreciate the significance of this moment is to step back and consider what it might reveal about the disjuncture between the theory and practice of toleration in colonial contexts. As a lawgiver, Penn’s egalitarian impulses—which we gain nothing by dismissing ex cathedra—came into conflict with the narrow catalog of “ancient” rights and privileges on which his conception of good governance was based. His self-prescribed role as proprietor was to “clear the title” of Indigenous lands, though it seems not to have registered that doing so undermined his spiritual commitments to living in unity with all “Fellow Creatures.” Penn viewed treaty making as an extension of the Quaker egalitarian principle, insofar as it turned on the mutual recognition of moral equals pursuing nonviolent means of conflict resolution. And yet, his theoretical commitment to honoring the creaturely worth of different ways of being in the world could not be reconciled in practice with the “inestimable inheritance” of English liberties he was now tasked to protect. Reciprocal land-use practices were viewed by many early Pennsylvanians—perhaps Penn included—as a threat to the rights and freedoms they were promised, because some uses were plainly incompatible with others. As forests became fields and trees bore the mark of property lines, one form of creaturely preservation was elevated to a standard to which all inhabitants of Pennsylvania were expected to comply. Penn viewed treaty making as a one-way pecuniary exchange commensurate with upholding one’s fundamental right to external possession. Lenapes saw it instead as a reciprocal framework for, we might even say, “creaturely” preservation subject to renewal and revision.
Although these are only abbreviated sketches of how treaty making proceeded during Penn’s tenure, they compel us to rethink the enduring cultural mythology of a peaceful founding long recycled about Penn. Consider, for example, how Edwin Bronner (Reference Bronner1962, 63–4) describes Penn’s approach to treaties: “According to tradition [it] was a great occasion, with solemn councils on the one hand and games and contests on the other.” Penn’s colonial legacy, according to whig historians like Bronner, Mary Maples Dunn, and others, is one of peace and mutual understanding. They present treaty making as a joyous occasion because they view it as an equal trade carried out in contexts free of coercion; hence, an historical episode deservingly memorialized in the words of Voltaire and commemorated in the paintings of Benjamin West.Footnote 29 But Penn’s legacy is, of course, far more complicated. Setting aside the fanfare, careful study of his life and thought can still help shed light on the imperfect possibilities for “creaturely” coexistence that were lost, perhaps indefinitely, in the early years of the holy experiment.
Conclusion
I began this article by invoking the disconnect between the historical significance of William Penn and the relative dearth of general scholarly interest in his life and thought. It is fitting, then, to conclude with some tentative reflections on what political scientists in general and political theorists in particular stand to gain by reconsidering his legacy in view of the watershed moment facing the wider discipline. What are we to make of Penn’s account of toleration in view of its colonial entanglements? What can contemporary democracies learn from Penn about the underlying tension between universal ideals and historically located modes of contestation, social action, and dissent—that is to say, politics—that liberalism has arguably failed to contain? Were the shortcomings of the “holy experiment” a matter of implementation, or do they speak to a historical defect of all such attempts to universalize political truths?Footnote 30 Finally, what might Penn’s fraught attempt to link theory with practice in the “New World” reveal about the connective tissue between seventeenth-century English tolerationist ideals and empire—Quaker constitutionalism and Atlantic commercialism—in the early modern world?
In a recent note from the book review editors of the present journal, they remarked, “Foregrounding the legacies of racial slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and European empire tends to rewrite the commonsense historical narratives that orient the discipline of political science” (Bufkin, Wolf, and Bachleitner Reference Bufkin, Wolf and Bachleitner2025, 305). The politics, history, and ecological transformations of the early modern Delaware River Valley in the wake of Penn’s arrival confirm this thesis while offering a modest challenge to it. Some hagiographers of Penn surely thought that the Quaker and his peaceful bunch marked the beginning of toleration as an organizing principle of political life in the mid-Atlantic region. The last two decades of work on Penn and early Pennsylvania history have demonstrated conclusively, in my view, just how premature this diagnosis was. Thanks to Vicki Hsueh, Jean Soderlund, Michael Goode, and many others, we can now better grasp the deeper history of peacekeeping practices rooted in Indigenous commitments to reciprocity and negotiation that, after Penn’s arrival, were either critically enfeebled or discursively reframed as examples of European “toleration” in practice.
The larger takeaway of these works is indeed that the intellectual history of toleration in the “New World” does not begin with Penn and associates—perhaps for the simple reason that ideas do not simply “begin”—but rather that it lost its basis in reciprocity, and hence its claim to universality, with Penn as its figurehead. For this reason, it is all the more difficult to square the undeniable intellectual rigor of impressive political histories of toleration penned by the likes of Scott Sowerby (Reference Sowerby2013) and Rainer Forst (Reference Forst and Cronin2013) with their quietude on the global reverberations of colonial founding. Just as European conceptions of toleration could not be neatly transplanted, unaltered, onto colonial shores, nor could the diverse and hybrid forms of living together that were forged through moments of encounter be confined to the banks of the Delaware.Footnote 31 It is no simple coincidence that the mass proliferation of European theories of toleration coincided with the discovery of radical alterity in the New World.
But to take Penn’s story seriously also mandates that we proceed with greater discernment when broaching questions of empire, for the simple reason that Quaker history so often stands in marked contrast to “commonsense historical narratives” about the uniformity of European empires (Bufkin, Wolf, and Bachleitner Reference Bufkin, Wolf and Bachleitner2025, 305). Although many early members of the Society of Friends surely understood themselves first and foremost as Englishmen, they were not made to the mold of any coherent ideal of a “European” colonizer wedded to a clearly defined civilizational discourse. Penn was arguably the most prototypical of the lot, “old friend” to William Petty and the genteel heir to Irish estates (which he promptly bungled).Footnote 32 But in many cases, early Quakers were themselves desperate to escape the clutches of empire. The radical face of English Quakerism represented the possibility for an alternative community rooted in a shared sense of creaturely worth and moral reciprocity. That is to say, they were heretics. They studied Kabbalah and translated hermetic texts on the recycling of the human soul; drafted pamphlets professing “that God is in all Creatures, Man and Beast, Fish and Fowle, and every green thing”; and pledged to act in “unity with the [sic] creation” (Bauthumley Reference Bauthumley1650, 4; Fox [1652] Reference Fox and Nickalls2010, 110; cf. Birkel Reference Birkel2016).Footnote 33 Some of the most outgoing were indeed actively hostile to the “domineering hierarchy” of English cultural life prior to and still during the Restoration (Anon Reference Anon1687, 30; see also Hill [1972] Reference Hill2019, 174–94). Women preached openly and held equal status in many Quaker communities, and several of the first abolitionists were convinced Quakers. So too were they jailed en masse, denied civil standing, and often existed at the very fringes of mainstream English political life. Hence to better appreciate the particularity of how systems of Indigenous dispossession were facilitated in the New World, we only stand to gain by foregrounding the fractious nature of empire itself.
With respect to Penn, I have suggested that we can glean a surprisingly radical set of arguments in support of toleration from his many pamphlets and epistles. Although he was not a self-styled radical (indeed, a great deal of seventeenth-century Quaker morality was unduly repressive) he wrote with force and clarity to protect the ability for all to live “Peaceably under [their] own Vine” (PM 234).Footnote 34 But Penn’s defense of toleration, indeed his wider statement of what liberty of conscience entails, is markedly distinct from what our inherited vocabulary might suggest Restoration-era tolerationist debates were about. In a remarkable concluding passage to A Perswasive to Moderation, Penn appealed to the total continuity of Being and creation—an infinitely interconnected whole, of which the “Humane Race” is only one part—to defend the Quaker tolerationist ideal:
We see the God of Nature has taught us softer Doctrine in his great Book of the World: His Sun shines, and his Rain falls upon all. All the Productions of Nature are by Love, and shall it be proper to Religion only to propagate by Force? The poor Hen instructs us in Humanity, who, to defend her feeble Young, refuses no danger. All the Seeds and Plants that grow for the use of Man, are produc’d by the kind and warm influences of the Sun. ‘Tis kindness that upholds Humane Race. People don’t Multiply in spight (PM 268).
Here toleration is not merely a common-sense political solution to social and economic turmoil but is presented in mystical terms linking divine nature to the “inner light” and connecting both manifestations of divine love to the creative self-expression of all living creatures.
Nonetheless, Penn struggled greatly as a colonial lawgiver to translate these ideals into practice, even at times reproducing the imposed conformity he and other dissenters had sought to evade by venturing to the New World. Through a careful reconstruction of the differences between Penn’s precolonial pamphlets and his drafts of the founding documents of Pennsylvania, we can see how his once expansive argument in favor of the liberty of conscience contracted into a narrow defense of civil liberties for Christian nonconformists. Hsueh (Reference Hsueh2010, 83–111) explains that one plausible reason for this contraction is that, as a proprietary governor, Penn was held responsible for ensuring that the laws of Pennsylvania were “consonant” with the laws of England, thereby restricting the parameters of what could be deemed socially acceptable. In a draft of the Fundamental Constitutions, Penn explicitly noted that Pennsylvania laws are to, “in what ever we can, resemble the Ancien[t] Constitution of England” (PWP 2: 149). He tried to apply these laws equally to both freeborn English subjects and to the Lenape, although in doing so he arguably helped to extenuate “the unkindness and Injustice that has been too much exercised towards [the “Indians”] by the People of thes Parts off the world” (PWP 2: 128).
When tensions flared over questions of land use and the terms of treaties, Penn was willing to compromise only as far as the bedrock of an Englishman’s ancient liberties would give. Despite suffering at the hand of the English legal system many times before, Penn the colonial lawgiver saw to it that English law and customs were applied to settle disputes between treaty partners by a jury comprising “Six planters and Six natives” (PWP 2: 102). But trial by jury, James Spady (Reference Spady, Pencak and Richter2004, 32) observes, “was an English institution not necessarily consistent with the kin-based system practiced by the Lenapes. The colonists promised to make amends for offenses of ‘Word and Deed’ but assumed that legitimate disputes would confirm to English definitions of authority as recognized by ‘fellow planters.’” Much the same can be said of the “liberty” Penn guaranteed the Lenape “to do all things relating to the improvement of their Ground … that any of the Planters enjoy” (PWP 2: 100). The quiet pretext of both cases is that matters of right and liberty can be freely adjudicated so long as they conformed to English standards of what these concepts entailed.
Although subsequent generations of early Pennsylvanians would harmonize with the observations of Governor Patrick Gordon, who remarked in 1731 that Penn “embraced” “all the Indians” and “made a firm League of Friendship with them,” the Lenapes’ perspective looked very different (quoted in PA 1:1, 303, cf. 211). Such a narrative of Pennsylvania’s founding, as Spady (Reference Spady, Pencak and Richter2004, 38) remarks, “that portrays as uniquely just [the] dispossession of the Delawares—the name given to the Lenapes who left their river behind—perpetuates a colonial understanding of the discourse of early treaty councils and the history they produced.” The tangible implication is that if we wish to better grasp how early modern systems of colonial dispossession worked, and to what extent those systems are still in place in our “tolerant” world, we should no longer ignore Penn’s role in shaping the political vocabulary we inherit today.
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