William Penn's life was, at its core, a search for peace. This study concentrates attention on his greatest effort to secure true peace for all--his undertaking to populate and cultivate the region of North America granted him by the English Crown in March 1681. Penn intended that Pennsylvania should be a haven for seekers of religious freedom and liberty of conscience, especially those who, for the sake of faith and principle, had suffered property forfeiture or bodily imprisonment during the persecutions of the English Civil War, Commonwealth, Protectorate, and Restoration. In commenting on how he had acquired Pennsylvania and what ends it might serve, Penn wrote to William Harrison: For my country, [I eyed] the Lord in the obtaining of it; and more was I drawn inward to look to Him, and to o[we it] to His hand and power, than to any ot[her way]. I have so obtained it and desire that I may not be unworthy of His love, but do that which may answer yet His kind providence and serve His Truth and people; that an example may be set up to the nations. There may be room there, though not here, for such a holy experiment This book traces the historical progress of the foremost themes of the holy experiment from 1681, when Penn wrote the above letter to Harrison. These themes were most fully realized by the 1750s, but the holy experiment continued until 1781, when the experiment was finally laid down. The great themes of the experiment, in addition to the founding principles of peace grounded in religious freedom and liberty of conscience, were public education, preserving friendship with the Native Americans, and abolishing the evil of slavery. By the end of the experiment in 1781, both successes and failures had been realized, successes and failures that continue to underlie the society America has become since those days of its birthing at Philadelphia when the founding fathers gave order to the United States. James Proud is an attorney, now retired, and a priest of the Episcopal Church. Proud is the editor of John Woolman and the A airs of Truth, published by Inner Light Books in 2010.

An explanation of Pennsylvania history between the years 1681 and 1701. The chapters contain material about the religion, the philosophy, the economic life, and the social life of the people in Pennsylvania.

William Penn established Pennsylvania in 1682 as a "holy experiment" in which Europeans and Indians could live together in harmony. In this book, historian Kevin Kenny explains how this Peaceable Kingdom--benevolent, Quaker, pacifist--gradually disintegrated in the eighteenth century, with disastrous consequences for Native Americans. Kenny recounts how rapacious frontier settlers, most of them of Ulster extraction, began to encroach on Indian land as squatters, while William Penn's sons cast off their father's Quaker heritage and turned instead to fraud, intimidation, and eventually violence during the French and Indian War. In 1763, a group of frontier settlers known as the Paxton Boys exterminated the last twenty Conestogas, descendants of Indians who had lived peacefully since the 1690s on land donated by William Penn near Lancaster. Invoking the principle of "right of conquest," the Paxton Boys claimed after the massacres that the Conestogas' land was rightfully theirs. They set out for Philadelphia, threatening to sack the city unless their grievances were met. A delegation led by Benjamin Franklin met them and what followed was a war of words, with Quakers doing battle against Anglican and Presbyterian champions of the Paxton Boys. The killers were never prosecuted and the Pennsylvania frontier descended into anarchy in the late 1760s, with Indians the principal victims. The new order heralded by the Conestoga massacres was consummated during the American Revolution with the destruction of the Iroquois confederacy. At the end of the Revolutionary War, the United States confiscated the lands of Britain's Indian allies, basing its claim on the principle of "right of conquest." Based on extensive research in eighteenth-century primary sources, this engaging history offers an eye-opening look at how colonists--at first, the backwoods Paxton Boys but later the U.S. government--expropriated Native American lands, ending forever the dream of colonists and Indians living together in peace.