A History of the American People

Into this colony radiating from Philadelphia, Penn poured multitudes of Quakers, from Bristol
and London, many of considerable property, who bought the best lots in the city, but also from
Barbados, Jamaica, New York, and New Jersey, from Wales-forming a separate, Welsh-speaking
area which kept its culture for generations-and from the Rhineland, founding a city they called
Germanopolis. Penn wanted the settlement dense for cultural as well as economic reasons: I had in my view Society, Assistance, Busy Commerce, Instruction of Youth, Government of Peoples' Manners, Conveniency of Religious Assembling, Encouragement of Mechanics, distinct and beaten roads.' He wrote home:We do settle in the way of townships or villages, each of which
contains 5,000 acres or at least ten families ... Our townships lie square; generally the village in
the Center, for near-neighbourhood. But it rarely proved possible to carry out these schemes. In
practice, land was simply sold off in lots of a hundred acres or more. Again and again in early
America, planning-good, bad, or indifferent-was defeated by obstinate individualism. The
European notion of the docile, contented peasant, living in agricultural villages under a squire,
was an anachronism, or becoming one. A new pattern of owner-occupiers, producing food for
the market, was already to be found in England, where they were known as yeomen. America
was a natural paradise for such a class, where they were called simply farmers. And
Pennsylvania, with its rich soil, was particularly well adapted to promote their numbers and
interests. These farmers pushed inland from the river valleys into the low hills of piedmont of the
interior, and then across the first range or corrugation of the Appalachian mountains in what was
known as the Great Valley. Here was the best poor man's country,' the ideal agricultural setting for a farmer with little capital to carve out not only a subsistence for his family but, through hard and skillful work, a marketable surplus for cash. So Pennsylvania soon became known as the Bread Colony,' exporting a big surplus not only of grain but of livestock and fruit. Huge
numbers of immigrants arrived and most did well, the Quakers setting the pattern. They were
well dressed, they ate magnificently, and they had money jingling in their pockets.
Amid this prosperous rural setting, it was natural for Philadelphia to become, in a very short
time, the cultural capital of America. It can be argued, indeed, that Quaker Pennsylvania was the
key state in American history. It was the last great flowering of Puritan political innovation,
around its great city of brotherly love. With its harbor at Philadelphia leading up the Delaware to
Pittsburgh and so to the gateway of the Ohio Valley and the west, and astride the valleys into the
southern back country, it was the national crossroads. It became in time many things, which
coexisted in harmony: the world centre of Quaker influence but a Presbyterian stronghold too,
the national headquarters of American Baptists but a place where Catholics also felt at home and
flourished, a center of Anglicanism but also a key location both for German Lutherans and for
the German Reformed Church, plus many other German groups, such as Moravians and
Mennonites. In due course indeed it also housed the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the
first independent black denomination. With all this, it was not surprising that Philadelphia was an
early home of the printing press, adumbrating its role as the seat of the American Philosophical
Society and birthplace of the American Declaration of Independence.
But much, indeed most, of this was for the future. The question has to be asked: was early
America a hard-working but essentially a prosaic, uncultured place? Were the attitudes of early
Americans, when they were not narrowly religious, equally narrowly mercantile? It is a curious
fact that, whereas in England the 17th century was an age of great literature-and the actual
language used by those New Englanders, such as Winthrop and Roger Williams, who did set
down their thoughts on paper, was often expressive and powerful-the New World was strikingly
slow to develop its own literature. There is more than one argument here, however. Cultural