A beginner's historyMace, William H. (William Harrison)
History
A beginner's history
Mace, William H. (William Harrison)
United States -- History
Penn next turned his attention to founding the great Quaker city to
which he gave the name Philadelphia, signifying brotherly love--a name
truly expressing Penn's feeling toward other men. He marked off the
streets right in the midst of a great forest, and called them Walnut,
Mulberry, Chestnut, and so on, after the trees that grew there. Some of
the streets in Philadelphia are still so named.
[Sidenote: =Some settlers lived in caves=]
But the settlers came faster than houses could be built, and some
families had to live in caves dug in the banks along the river.
Philadelphia grew faster than the other colonial towns, and soon led
them all.
[Sidenote: =Penn visits the Indians=]
William Penn won the love and the respect of the Indians of
Pennsylvania. He visited them in their own towns and ate with them. He
even took part in their athletic games and outran them all. Like Roger
Williams, he believed that the Indians should be paid for their lands.
Accordingly, he made them rich gifts and entered into solemn treaties
with the chiefs.
[Sidenote: =Kind treatment produced kind treatment=]
At a treaty under a great elm tree on the banks of the Delaware, Penn
said to the Indians: "We are the same as if one man's body were divided
into two parts: We are all one flesh and one blood." In return the
Indians said: "We will live in love with William Penn and his children
as long as the moon and the sun shall endure." If the Indians admired a
white man they said: "He is like William Penn."
[Sidenote: =The coming of the "Pennsylvania Dutch"=]
The news of the establishment of free government and free religious
worship brought crowds of settlers from Germany. Hundreds of German
families in the valleys of the Rhine and the Neckar escaped to "Penn's
Woods," and there their children's children are to be found to-day
under the name of the "Pennsylvania Dutch." Without boasting, William
Penn could say that no other one man, at his own expense, had planted
so great a colony in the wilds of America as he had. Few nobler men
ever lived than William Penn. He died July 30, 1718.
QUAKER WAYS IN OLD PENNSYLVANIA
[Sidenote: =Believed in simple things=]
=57. How Quakers Differed from other Colonists.= The people who formed
Penn's colony were unlike those of any of the other settlements. They
did not wear gorgeous clothes and jewelry like the Virginia cavaliers.
The men carried no swords or pistols. They were not stern like the
Puritans. Games and social pleasures were not to be seen among them as
in Dutch New Netherland.
[Sidenote: =Quakers called themselves the Society of Friends=]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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