If the Lower Counties Had Remained Part of Pennsylvania

This is a paper that I wrote for an assignment on alternative history in an American history class. It begins with a description of the true events which will change, and then goes into an essay on the changes to history. I would greatly appreciate any commentary on the paper itself, as well as additions to the history I created, especially changes in national history.

The Impact of the Birth of James Francis Edward on the History of Pennsylvania​

In 1684, William Penn returned to England after spending only a short time in Pennsylvania. He returned to settle territorial disputes with Lord Baltimore—settled in the fall of 1685—and to receive a finalized grant for the Three Lower Counties of Pennsylvania (Delaware) from his friend the Duke of York—received in December of 1688. While Penn was in England, Charles II died (February 6, 1685) and the Duke of York, a Catholic, became James II. In 1688, William Penn went on a speaking tour of England promoting the king’s Declaration of Indulgence, which was decried by Anglican ministers after being reissued in April. As king, James was able to finish the grant to “Lower Pennsylvania” with the most favorable conditions for Penn, but it was never given final approval.

On June 10, 1688, Queen Mary gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward. The birth of a Catholic heir to the throne of England set in motion a group of influential Protestants who could not stomach the threat of a Catholic dynasty on the throne of England. They invited Prince William of Orange and his wife Mary, both Protestants and grandchildren of Charles I, to invade England, become king and queen, and thereby “save the Protestant religion.” James II was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution and in December of 1689 William and Mary became king and queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland. William Penn was investigated and arrested by the Crown for his vocal support of James II, and in 1691 his proprietary rights were suspended. Thus, the Province of Pennsylvania and its Lower Counties became a royal colony under the control of Benjamin Fletcher, the royal governor of New York.

In 1694, the investigation of Penn ended and his proprietary rights were restored, but it took him 5 years to return to America. On February 23rd, his wife Gulielma Maria Penn nee Springett died and he married Hannah Margaret Callowhill on March 5, 1696. While Penn was in England, tensions had become incredibly strained between the Upper and Lower Counties of Pennsylvania. In 1691, he had appointed an uncompromising Quaker, Thomas Lloyd, deputy governor of Pennsylvania, which angered Anglicans in the Lower Counties, and was forced to appoint his non-Quaker cousin, William Markham, deputy governor of the Lower Counties. The Quakers had taken power in the Pennsylvania assembly and had annoyed the Anglicans in the Lower Counties by refusing to allow them to create military defenses in response to raids on their towns by enemy nations and pirates. Fletcher, as an Anglican, had been popular in the Lower Counties, and they were pleased that Markham became deputy governor after Fletcher left and until Penn returned in 1699.

Occasionally the legislature of Pennsylvania met in New Castle instead of Philadelphia, in deference to the equal representation of the Lower Counties, but the tensions between the Upper and Lower Counties came to a head when in the fall of 1701 the Upper County delegates to the assembly meeting in Philadelphia insisted that they confirm the laws passed while in New Castle to ensure that they were valid in the Upper Counties. This outraged the delegates from the Lower Counties, and Penn was forced to add an amendment to the most recent revision of his Frame of Government that allowed the Pennsylvania legislature to split into two assemblies if a majority of delegates from either region informed him that they no longer wished to meet together. This meant that the Province of Pennsylvania would be split between the Upper and Lower Counties, with different assemblies and different laws, but that they would share a governor.

As William Penn hurried back to England in 1701 to again defend his proprietary rights, he desperately wanted to retain both the Upper and Lower Counties under his domain. As he had written on July 31, 1683 in a letter to Colonel Thomas Tailleur in regard to the Lower Counties:
I, finding this place necessary to my Province and yt ye Presence of Ld. Balt. was agt Law, civil & common, I endeavoured to gett it, & have it, & will keep it if I can.
Penn believed that having a seaport was necessary to the survival and prosperity of Pennsylvania, and the Lower Counties offered that seaport. But with that amendment to his Frame of Government it was inevitable that the Pennsylvania assembly would be split in two, as it was in the fall of 1703 when the delegates from the Upper Counties declared that they no longer wished to meet with the delegates from the Lower Counties. Then, in the fall of 1704, the first separate assembly of the Lower Counties met in New Castle and the course of history was set for good. In June of 1776, when the Lower Counties severed their ties with the British Empire and became the State of Delaware, they also split from Pennsylvania, and American history would progress as we know it today.

If James II Had Never Had a Catholic Male Heir​
What if James II of England’s second wife, Queen Mary, had never had a male child? The spark that ignited the powder keg of anti-James sentiment in England prior to the Glorious Revolution was the birth of his son, James Francis Edward, on June 10, 1688. If this event had never occurred, if this son had never been born, then the Glorious Revolution would without a doubt at least been delayed until another event could spark a revolt. But besides what that would have done to the history of Britain, what effects would it have had on the life of William Penn and the history of the United States? In December of 1688, the grant transferring the Three Lower Counties on the Delaware from James II to Penn would have been completed, and in January of 1689 it would have been given final approval. Thus Penn would have decided that it was time to leave James’s court and return to Pennsylvania where a series of different governors—Lloyd & Markham, Fletcher, Markham—had intensified tensions between the Upper and Lower Counties. If Penn had returned in 1689, as James II had not had a son, the history of Pennsylvania and Delaware would differ greatly from what we know to have happened today, and these changes would also have drastically altered the map and history of the United States.

When William Penn returned to America, he landed in New Castle and met with men from the Lower Counties such as Andrew Hamilton, William Rodney (grandfather of Caesar and Thomas Rodney), and Samuel Chew (father of Benjamin Chew), as well as his deputy governor William Markham. Penn made it clear that it was his first priority to ensure that the Upper Counties and Lower Counties remained one entity as the Province of Pennsylvania with equal representation and equitable conditions for all, and all the men present welcomed this. Penn then travelled north to Philadelphia and met with prominent men there including David Lloyd (kinsman of Thomas Lloyd), William Allen (father of William Allen Jr., founder of Mt. Airy), and Samuel Carpenter. Here he made it clear that be believed that the Lower Counties were essential to Pennsylvania and that all efforts should be made to hold onto them, and he called a meeting of the General Assembly and Provincial Council for April of that year (1689).

This may seem to be a serious departure from the character of William Penn, but if he had returned to Pennsylvania at any time prior to the death of his first wife he would have been faced with the immediate realization that he was very close to loosing complete control of his domains in America and would have acted accordingly.

At the meeting of the General Assembly in April 1689 in Philadelphia, William Penn reluctantly forced the delegates to vote on the issue of military defense for the province. He realized that the Lower Counties as seaports were threatened by pirates and enemy ships, and he had been convinced by pleas from merchants that a militia should be created. After a close vote, the assembly passed legislation created a militia for the maritime defense of the colony that would be controlled by the deputy governor, now Samuel Carpenter, and would be based solely around the Delaware River, Delaware, and Atlantic Coast of the colony. This compromise pleased the delegates from the Lower Counties and alleviated much of the tension within the assembly. The delay in the occurrence of the Glorious Revolution left Penn’s proprietary rights unchallenged and he never returned to England. His wife died in 1694 in Pennsbury Manor, and he never remarried. Penn devoted the rest of his life to his Holy Experiment and the continuation of the society that he had created in Pennsylvania. He died in 1720 in Pennsbury Manor at the age of 75.

William Penn’s dedication to keeping Pennsylvania as it was and his negotiations between factions in Pennsylvania, allowed the province and then commonwealth to remain one through the French and Indian War, independence, and the Revolutionary War. Prior to the passage of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress, the Province of Pennsylvania declared itself the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with a new constitution and government independent of the British Empire. An enlarged Pennsylvania delegation to the Continental Congress—notably John Dickinson, Philemon Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas McKean, Robert Morris, George Read, Caesar Rodney, Benjamin Rush, James Tilton, and James Wilson—added many pro-Independence voices to the choir and were able to drone out the likes of John Dickinson who opposed independence. The diversity of Pennsylvania, as a result of the Lower Counties, made it an even more important colony and a true mesh of the sentiments present in the Northern and Southern colonies, but also made for a more metropolitan and merchant-orientated commonwealth due to the combined interests of Philadelphia, New Castle, and Wilmington merchants.

Pennsylvania had no major political upsets until its territorial disputes with Connecticut settlers in the Wyoming Valley came to a head at the end of the Revolutionary War. In the Decree of Trenton (December 30, 1782), the Congress of the Confederation ruled that the disputed lands between 41° N and 42° N belonged to Pennsylvania and not Connecticut. The Pennsylvania legislature then ruled that the Connecticut settlers in this area, then Northumberland County, were not citizens of the Commonwealth and that their property claims were void. Then in May of 1784, the Commonwealth forcibly removed the uncooperative settlers from the valley, but in November they returned in force and destroyed Fort Dickinson near Wilkes-Barre. They then proposed a new state separate from both Connecticut and Pennsylvania to be called the State of Westmoreland. At this point, Pennsylvanians, especially influential individuals from the Lower Counties, did not care much about the fate of this area, so to avoid further armed conflict they allowed this area—now Lackawanna, Luzerne, and Wyoming counties—to secede and create their own state. Within two years, Westmoreland had found nine states to support its entrance into the Confederation and was accepted by the Congress of the Confederation as a member. While at the time this seemed like a benign event—as this small state was not influential in any notable way—it would later have dire consequences for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. With the discovery of anthracite coal in Westmoreland—as well as in Columbia, Carbon, Schuylkill, and Northumberland counties in Pennsylvania—the economy of that state became dominated by the mining industry and the Commonwealth regretted letting it go.

Owing to the greater influence of Philadelphia and New Castle County in Pennsylvania—due to the fact that they were and remain to this day the most industrialized and metropolitan area of the Commonwealth with the manufacturing center of Pittsburgh in far second—the capital has remained in Philadelphia despite several proposals from Western Pennsylvania interests that it move closer to the center of the Commonwealth. With the State of Westmoreland as a model, a secessionist movement began in Western Pennsylvania after representatives from southeastern Pennsylvania defeated of a series of proposals to move the capital westward that has continued in some form or another to this day. In most states, this movement would never have been taken seriously, but ever since the secession of the Wyoming Valley from the Commonwealth—and especially after anthracite coal was discovered in that region—secession has been an important, divisive and frightening issue in state politics, and any threat to secede is taken incredibly seriously. During the Civil War for example, all regions of Pennsylvania were fully united behind the Union cause due to the general feeling of its populace on secession. However, it is possible that within the next decade Western Pennsylvania could experience a final push towards secession and split from the Commonwealth to form another state.

This paper focuses almost exclusively on the changes in the history of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania if William Penn had been able to return to America, take charge of his province, and thus retain the Three Lower Counties on the Delaware. The most outlandish assumption made here is that William Penn would have had the ability to adequately administrate Pennsylvania in any timeline, as he was perhaps one of the most incompetent men in history in terms of business, financial and administrative prowess. In fact, Philip Ford, Penn’s business manager, took advantage of the fact that Penn often did not read documents before signing them and fooled him into transferring ownership of Pennsylvania to Ford. But the idea that Pennsylvania and Delaware could have remained one state is not nearly as outlandish. Each and every powerful individual and family in the Lower Counties—termed “Philadelawareans” by the late and preeminent Delaware historian John A. Munroe—had strong mercantile and property connections to Philadelphia, and vice versa. Thus, it is not without reason that under certain circumstances they could have desired that the Lower Counties remained a part of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Delaware often sent non-resident representatives—like Thomas McKean, John Dickinson, Philemon Dickinson, and Samuel Wharton—as part of their Congressional delegates, that is their delegations to the Continental Congresses and the Congress of the Confederation. This use of non-resident representation speaks to Delaware’s belief in the value of the protection of a strong national government, which the Articles of Confederation did not create nor provide, and thus their willingness to send representatives to Congress who would represent national interests and not simply state interests. This paper does not explore the larger effects that this scenario would have on American history because those effects are too difficult and vast to predict and enumerate without serious research and consultation beyond the allotted time frame in which it was written. Simply, it can be said that the map of America might look quite different, as Delaware’s pleas for limits on the Western land claims of the larger colonies have been silenced by this scenario, thus the list of states in the Union may be different. It can also be said that the list of US presidents may differ from the one that we know due to the changes in states. But generally, I would posit that the overall history of the United States—the most important events, trends, and wars—would not be significantly different than the history that we know.
 
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