William Penn's Holy Experiment: Debtor's Prison and the Walking Purchase

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William Penn was the son of Admiral Sir William Penn, who served Oliver Cromwell, helped restore Charles II and lent the crown so much that the king owed him 16,000 pounds. The younger Penn rejected that world to join the Quakers, a group seen as subversive for refusing oaths and doffing hats to superiors, and persecuted to the point of hangings in Massachusetts Bay. In 1681 he asked Charles II to settle the family debt with land, and received Pennsylvania, named for his late father, for two beaver skins delivered to Windsor Castle each January 1 and a fifth of any gold or silver found. The charter made Penn a feudal proprietor entitled to quit rents, which he saw as a shield for his holy experiment.

His 1683 Frame of Government promised freedom of worship for believers in God, checks and balances, jury trials and sharply reduced use of the death penalty. Yet in 1684 the ship Isabella brought 150 enslaved Africans to Philadelphia, and the colony later adopted black codes. Penn negotiated with the Lenape at Shackamaxon in 1682 and paid for land the king had already granted him. His finances collapsed: he spent 10,000 pounds in two years against 9,000 from land sales, left in 1684 to fight Maryland's Calvert family over the border, and stayed away 15 years. He served nine months in a debtors' prison and was about to sell Pennsylvania to the crown in 1712 when a stroke stopped him.

• German Quakers in Germantown wrote an antislavery petition in 1688, and colonial leaders called the matter too weighty to meddle with.
• Voltaire called the Lenape agreement the only treaty never sworn to and never broken.
• Penn speculated in hosiery and horse collars and was caught diverting tax revenue to cover personal debts.
• The 1701 Charter of Privileges curbed his power in favor of the elected assembly.
• In the 1737 Walking Purchase, Penn's sons Thomas and John used a cleared trail and three fast runners to claim over 750,000 acres from the Lenape.