The geography of Pennsylvania is complex, and the physical differences among the commonwealth's different regions have helped shape its history. Early colonists would have first encountered the coastal plain in what is now southeast Pennsylvania, along the Delaware River. This area is flat and fertile. Beyond the coastal plain is the Piedmont region, which covers most of southeastern Pennsylvania, and is very productive farmland. In the middle of Pennsylvania are the Appalachian Ridge and the Great Valley, the latter consisting of many small valleys that also provide good farmland. In the far northwest is the Lake Erie Lowland, the sandy soil of which has proven good for growing tubers such as potatoes and other vegetables.
Early History
The earliest human remains in the state indicate that a nomadic people archaeologists call Paleo-Indians began passing through Pennsylvania between 12,000 and 10,000 B.C. They hunted with spears, pursuing large game such as bison, and they may have trapped smaller game. Around A.D. 1000, modern Native Americans settled Pennsylvania, favoring the lowlands over the rough central plateau. They used bows and arrows more often than spears for hunting. They introduced the wigwam, a domed hut made of branches overlaid with tree bark or animal skins, and lived in small communities consisting of a few families.
By the time European colonists arrived, the Native Americans had developed the longhouse, a big structure made of branches and bark that housed several families. The longhouse was very important to the development of sophisticated Native American communities because it encouraged large groups of people to live and cooperate together.
European Settlement
When the first Europeans visited the area that is now Pennsylvania, the Native Americans of the region lived in a settled, complex mix of cultures. In the far east of Pennsylvania, on both sides of the Delaware River, lived the Leni-Lenapes (variously translated "the Original People," "the True People," and "the Real People"; they were also known as the Delawares). They sold their lands to English colonists and drifted westward.
In a large region around the Susquehanna River lived the Susquehannocks, a culturally Iroquois tribe that valued its independence. At the time Europeans arrived in their territory, the Susquehannocks were being exterminated by the Iroquois Confederacy, which came close to killing all the Susquehannocks by 1675. The few survivors of the Susquehannocks joined the Conestoga tribe. South of Pennsylvania were the Shawnees, who began migrating in the 1690s into the region formerly occupied by the Susquehannocks. Under pressure from colonists, they slowly migrated westward. Along the shore of Lake Erie lived the Erie tribe. During the era of colonial settlement, many other tribes lived in or moved through Pennsylvania, including the Munsees and the Mingos, who lived on the Allegheny Plateau. The Mahicans were driven out of their homes in New York by the Iroquois Confederacy and fled south, eventually joining the Leni-Lenapes in their westward migration.
Both England and the Netherlands claimed what are now Pennsylvania and Delaware by the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, with English explorers having visited the area as early as 1497. In 1608, England's John Smith traveled up the Susquehanna River, where he met some of the Susquehannock tribe. In 1609, Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch, sailed into what would be named Delaware Bay a year later, when Virginia's Samuel Argall sailed into it and named it for Thomas West, lord De La Warr, then the governor of Virginia. In the late 1630s, Swedes settled near the mouth of the Delaware River, and in 1643 they moved their settlement to Tinicum Island, which was near where Philadelphia would eventually be established.
The Dutch of New Amsterdam were unhappy with the Swedes' move into territory that they wanted for themselves. In 1647, they established a trading post in what is now Pennsylvania, part of a planned southward movement in which they hoped to claim the territories all the way to Virginia. By then, the Swedes were calling their small colony "New Sweden" and were establishing trading relationships with the local Native Americans. The Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant had armed parties move downriver in 1655, seizing the Swedish colony on Tinicum. He declared the region to be part of New Amsterdam. In 1664, England blunted the Dutch colony's ambitions by seizing the area east of the Susquehanna River in the name of the duke of York, the brother of Charles II. The Dutch regained control from 1673 through 1674, but were driven out by the English. In 1676, the duke of York declared the region to be under English law.
William Penn the elder had been a close friend and an admiral in service to Charles II of England. He had loaned Charles II £16,000, which became due to his heirs when he died. His son, William Penn the younger, had converted to Quakerismand been imprisoned for not honoring the Church of England. William Penn told the king that instead of repayment of the £16,000 owed to his father, he wanted a land grant in North America where he could establish a home for the Quakers. Wiping out the debt and getting rid of some of the troublesome Quakers seemed a good deal to Charles II, particularly since the area Penn wanted was considered to be of little value. The Charter of Pennsylvania—named by the king for young Penn's father—was granted 4 March 1681, and William Penn was named the territory's proprietor, meaning the land actually belonged to him. Any governor of Pennsylvania would actually serve Penn.
William Penn wanted Pennsylvania to be a place where people would not be jailed or otherwise persecuted for their religious beliefs, and he published advertisements urging oppressed people to move there. He drew up the First Frame of Government as the colony's first constitution. He sent his cousin William Markhamto Pennsylvania in April 1681 as his deputy. Penn arrived on the ship Welcome in the colony in October 1682. He picked the site for Philadelphia, "city of brotherly love," which was to be the capital city, and drew up a street plan for the city, with all avenues straight and meeting at right angles. On 4 December 1682, he summoned the first General Assembly, which became the colony's legislative body. On 7 December, the General Assembly enacted the Great Law, which was a statement of civil rights for the people of Pennsylvania. In 1683, the second General Assembly adopted a Second Frame of Government, which more plainly laid out what form Pennsylvania's government would take.
Pennsylvania was the twelfth of the original thirteen American colonies to be founded, but it quickly grew to be the second most populous after Virginia. Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics from Great Britain, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, and the Netherlands flocked to Pennsylvania, where they could worship in peace. Although the Quakers and many other colonists opposed slavery, Pennsylvania had about 4,000 slaves by 1730. However, thousands of African Americans were free in Pennsylvania, and they began founding their own Christian churches. Jews, too, found homes in Pennsylvania, adding to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Philadelphia and other cities. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia was the second most populous English-speaking city in the world after London, although German, Swedish, and other languages were often spoken as well. In the farms of the Piedmont region, the dialect Pennsylvania Dutch evolved out of German (the word "Dutch" coming from Deutsche, the German word for the German language).
Revolution
In the 1750s, France made a strong bid to control western Pennsylvania by erecting and manning a series of forts in the frontier. An allied army of French and Native American forces ambushed a British army at Monongahela in 1755, destroying it. The French built Fort Duquesne at the site of modern-day Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania might have lost about one-third of its territory had not combined British and colonial forces led by General John Forbes recaptured the area and seized the fort. In the early 1760s, Chief Pontiac of the Ottawas formed a coalition of tribes and tried to force colonists out of the western frontier; he was defeated in the Battle of Bushy Run by colonial forces led by Colonel Henry Bouquet in August 1763.
Although Philadelphia had not been the center of revolutionary fervor, in the 1770s it seemed the logical place for representatives of the rebellious colonies to meet, in part because it was a city open to peaceful divergence of opinions. It had become known as the "Athens of America," and was chosen to be the new nation's capital when the Continental Congress declared independence from Britain on 4 July 1776. By then, Pennsylvania had already renounced allegiance to England. On 28 September 1776, the state convention wrote a new state constitution, which included a "Declaration of Rights," intended to protect individual civil liberties.
For nine months in 1777, the British occupied Philadelphia, a severe blow to the young nation. From December 1777 to June 1778, the Continental Army camped in Valley Forge. The army lost about one-fourth of its troops to exposure and starvation, yet by June it was able to force the British to abandon Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress thereafter met. Native American allies of the British raided western Pennsylvania, killing farmers and burning hamlets, but in 1779 expeditions led by Daniel Brodhead and John Sullivan against the Iroquois Confederacy drove the Native American forces away.
In 1779, the government of Pennsylvania officially seized all lands owned by Penn family members. In 1780, while the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) was still underway, Pennsylvania's legislature passed a law providing for the "gradual abolition of slavery." Anyone born within Pennsylvania's borders was automatically free, regardless of ancestry.
On 17 September 1787, the Constitutional Convention, meeting in Philadelphia, offered a new national constitution for ratification by the American states. On 12 December 1787, Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify it. The new nation needed funds and therefore levied taxes. One tax was on whiskey, which resulted in Pennsylvanians creating one of the first major challenges to federal authority. Farmers in the Allegheny Plateau found shipping their grain to markets in the east to be very expensive because of numerous hills and valleys in their region, so they made whiskey at home; the new tax on whiskey forced them to stop making their own and to lose money shipping grain to whiskey makers in the east. In 1791, they rebelled, chasing away tax collectors. By 1794, they were a threat to the security of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. President George Washington raised an army of 13,000 troops, which marched on the rebels. Fighting was brief, one man was killed, the Whiskey Rebellion leaders were jailed (but soon released), and the new federal government had made its point.
Philadelphia served as America's capital from 1790 to 1800, when the capital moved to Washington, D.C. The state capital moved to Lancaster in 1799, and then to Harrisburg in 1812.
Industry and Labor
Pennsylvania created "Donation Lands," territory it gave for free to Revolutionary War veterans. This helped to spread the state's population westward. Presbyterian Irish immigrants seemed to have a preference for frontier lands, and as Pennsylvania became more populous, they moved westward. In the 1840s, a potato famine impelled a great migration of Irish to America, and many of them settled in Pennsylvania. Yet, Pennsylvania's traditionally open attitude was changing for the worse. In 1838, a mob burned down Pennsylvania Hall soon after its construction as a meeting place for antislavery activists and others. In the same year, African American citizens had their right to vote taken away. In 1844, there were riots in Kensington against Roman Catholics.
A state constitutional convention was called in 1837, and the new 1838 constitution established three years as a governor's term of office and added new constitutional offices. Although it seemed to enhance the voice of voters in governmental affairs by increasing the powers of the legislature while curtailing those of the governor, it included outrages such as denying black Americans the vote. Even so, a staunch abolitionist, David Wilmot, was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he fought in 1846 to make the new state of Texas a free state. Wilmot reflected the anxiety of many Pennsylvanians over the issue of slavery. Pennsylvania had a law that made capturing fugitive slaves and sending them back to slavery kidnapping, but in 1842 the U.S. Supreme Court in Prigg v. Pennsylvania overturned the law, opening the way for the bounty hunting of escaped slaves in free states. In defiance, Pennsylvania made it illegal to use its jails to hold fugitive slaves. The federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was meant to be a compromise between antislavery and proslavery forces in the United States, but it resulted in riots in Pennsylvania against its implementation; the Christiana Riot of 1851 against slave hunters was notorious for its violence.
In 1860, the Republicans, composed of antislavery groups encompassing disaffected Democrats and remnants of the Whigs, as well as Independents, won control of Pennsylvania's government. The Pennsylvanian James Buchanan was elected president of the United States in 1856, serving from 1857 to 1861. He tried to forge compromises between slave and free states, but the pending creation of more free states in America's western frontier spawned a revolt in his Democratic Party; the rebels ran a candidate of their own, splitting the Democratic vote and throwing the election to Abraham Lincoln. Among Buchanan's last acts as president was to send reinforcements to army posts in slave states.
During the Civil War (1861–1865), Confederate cavalry sometimes raided towns in Pennsylvania, and in June 1863, General Robert E. Lee tried to separate the Union's supply lines by driving toward Harrisburg. Pennsylvania was a major supplier of raw materials for the Union, and arms and other supplies moved through it south to the Army of the Potomac and west to armies led by Ulysses S. Grant. By taking control of central Pennsylvania, the Confederates could cut off Washington, D.C., from supply and threaten New England. The Union could be forced to sue for peace. The Union General George Meade had stationed infantry on high ground in Gettysburg, just in case Lee moved his men in that direction, and the citizens of Harrisburg fortified their city, burning a bridge between them and Lee's army. The two armies met at Gettysburg. After three days of relentless combat from 1 to 3 July, Lee retreated while trying to hold together his nearly shattered army. It was in Gettysburg that Lincoln made his famous address that declared America a nation "of the people."
After the Civil War, Pennsylvania became more industrialized, becoming a major source of Coal and petroleum. In 1874, the state created a new constitution, which set the office of governor to one four-year term. Women's rights came to the fore in political debates. In some areas, Pennsylvania was a leader in women's rights. In 1850, the Women's Medical College was founded in Philadelphia, and other women's colleges were created. The National Woman Suffrage Association was organized in Philadelphia in 1868. Yet, efforts to extend the right to vote to women failed; as late as 1915, a state constitutional amendment passed by the Assembly was voted down in a general election. On the other hand, in August 1920, Pennsylvania was the seventh state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote.
Another difficult area involved labor disputes. The industries of coal mining and steel production became dominant in the state, employing hundreds of thousands of people. As early as the 1840s, Pennsylvania passed laws to protect workers, but abuses persisted. The secretive Molly Maguires (named for a similar organization in Ireland whose members dressed in women's clothes as a disguise) organized coal miners in Pennsylvania. They terrorized owners, bosses, and foremen, sometimes murdering them. In 1877, the Molly Maguire organization was broken by private investigators hired by mine and railroad owners; several members of the group were convicted of murder.
In 1902, a coal strike created severe hardships for miners and those whose jobs depended on coal. President Theodore Roosevelt's intervention in the strike helped owners and union members to reach a peaceful agreement and set the precedent for presidential intercession in labor disputes. Laws slowly brought relief to workers. Whereas workers in some factories had to work ten hours a day, seven days a week in 1900, in the 1920s the government mandated eight-hour days, five days a week. Pennsylvania was fertile ground for the growth of unions, among the most powerful of which was the United Mine Workers.
Pennsylvania produced about 50 percent of America's steel in the first half of the twentieth century and was home to other industries as well. It maintained a strong farming culture and developed a powerful food processing industry. The Hershey Chocolate Company was started in 1894 as a subsidiary of Milton S. Hershey's Lancaster Caramel Company. The forerunner of the H. J. Heinz Company was founded in 1869 and built model factories that were well ventilated, spacious, and full of light. Railroads were also important, and George Westinghouse got his start by designing safety equipment for trains. Road building became an important source of income for workers during the depression of the 1930s, and in 1940, the Pennsylvania Turnpike was opened. Pennsylvania was a pioneer in communications, with the nation's first commercial radio station, KDKA of Pittsburgh, beginning broadcasting on 2 November 1920. The first all-movie theater opened on 19 June 1905 in Pittsburgh.
Modern Era
The economy of Pennsylvania did fairly well during World War II (1939–1945) because of demand for steel and coal, but after the war it had many problems. Steel strikes in 1952 were damaging to the nation's economy, inspiring President Harry S. Truman to try to nationalize the steel industry. Another steel strike in 1959 brought the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and inspired new federal laws restricting union activities. In the 1970s, union strength in Pennsylvania waned, in part because Pennsylvania's coal was high in sulfur and thus too polluting to meet the standards of the federal Clean Air Act of 1970. In 1957, America's first commercial nuclear power plant opened in Shippingport. In March 1979, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant had an accident, during which a small amount of radioactive gas was released into the atmosphere. This was another blow to the state economy.
In 1968, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania created yet another new constitution. This one allowed governors to seek reelection and modified some offices of the executive branch. There had been race riots in Philadelphia in 1964, and thus many Pennsylvanians took it as a good sign of racial harmony when W. Wilson Goode, an African American, was elected mayor of that city in 1983.
By 2000, Pennsylvania had a population of 12,281,054, although its population growth was one of the lowest in the United States, probably because of a large population of retirees. There were about 500,000 more women than men in the commonwealth. Although Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers, only about 15,000 lived in the state. The production of aluminum, the manufacturing of helicopters and small airplanes, and the processing of food were all major industries. Even so, big industries such as steel had declined markedly, with steel production dwindling to about 8 percent of national production. On the other hand, Pennsylvania's numerous scenic wonders, its mix of cultures, and its cosmopolitan cities drew tourists by the millions. Agriculture became the backbone of Pennsylvania's economy, marking a shift to farming after many decades of industrial growth, with over 51,000 farms. The Amish, still using farming techniques from the eighteenth century, had some of the most productive farms in the commonwealth.
Bibliography
Beers, Paul B. Pennsylvania Politics Today and Yesterday: The Tolerable Accommodation. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980.
Forrey, William C. History of Pennsylvania's State Parks. Harrisburg: Bureau of State Parks, Department of Environmental Resources, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1984.
Fradin, Dennis B. The Pennsylvania Colony. Chicago: Children's Press, 1988.
Heinrichs, Ann. Pennsylvania. New York: Children's Press, 2000.
Kent, Donald H. History of Pennsylvania Purchases from the Indians. New York: Garland, 1974.
Klein, Philip S., and Ari Hoogenboom. A History of Pennsylvania. 2d and enl. ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980.
Stevens, Sylvester K. Pennsylvania, Birthplace of a Nation. New York: Random House, 1964.
Wills, Charles A. A Historical Album of Pennsylvania. Brookfield, Conn.: Milbrook Press, 1996.
