William and Hannah Penn entertained continually at their country home,
preferring Pennsbury to the town. Penn's daughter Letitia, however, who
was twenty years old, and a very lively, handsome girl, did not care so
much for the quiet of the country, and spent most of her time in
Philadelphia with the Markhams, the Logans, or the Shippens.
Penn always dealt fairly with the Indians, and they trusted him far more
than they did most of the white men. He traveled through New Jersey, New
York, and Maryland, being eager to see the country and also to spread
Quaker influence as widely as he could in the new world. The life of a
country gentleman suited him to perfection, and he was undoubtedly much
happier in Pennsylvania than he had been when a courtier at Whitehall in
London, or striving to make other people believe that King James was as
worthy a king as he himself thought him.
Still, the government of Pennsylvania did not run smoothly even while
Penn was there. Quakers and Church of England people were constantly
wrangling, and the Assembly would not pass the laws that Penn thought it
ought to. He was not making money from his province; he still had to pay
large salaries, and he was constantly being asked for money for various
purposes. Once he declared that the province had meant a loss to him of
£20,000. Occasionally he received payment from the sale of land or for
rent, but the settlers were hard people to deal with and paid out their
money grudgingly.
The limits of Pennsylvania were still very indefinite, and for the most
part were not settled until years later. The province was said to be
bounded on the north by the southern limits of New York, and on the
south by the northern limits of Maryland. Neither of these boundaries
was actually settled until 1768. Westward the boundary was yet more
vague, being defined by the words "as far to the westward as Maryland
extends." But boundaries were not of great importance then, when there
was so much vacant land, although by 1702 great numbers of Germans,
Swiss, Huguenots, and Scotch-Irish were coming into the province and
taking up homesteads west and north of the little Quaker settlement on
the Delaware.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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