Let’s put it this way: if William Penn had lived in the 1980s, there would have been no discrimination — neither of race, nor of virus, nor of creed… The bruised and battered would have had a better life.
But the friendship Billy had invested in and believed in so deeply did not last.
Once he died, his son would not follow in his footsteps, and the treaty sealed with the Turtle Clan of the Lenape would be swept away by the winds of war and conquest.
In the picture below — which, I discovered, comes from the Library of Congress — you can see him exchanging gifts with the Native Americans, among which was a small object much appreciated by tribal leaders: the jaw harp. Turns out Native chiefs loved the thing!
Penn was a troublemaker, a hothead, a disturber of pre-established peace. After the blow his father suffered in the Caribbean, the Admiral was stripped of the honors he’d been granted, and the family was forced to move to Ireland, where William first came into contact with the Society of Friends.
There he began to stand out — singing off-key, refusing the Anglican doctrine; and when he returned to England and enrolled at Oxford, it didn’t take long before he was expelled for his nonconformity.
His father, already overwhelmed by his own troubles, nearly had a stroke. Hoping to straighten out his son, he handed him an open ticket to Europe: Go, my boy, and come back when your ideas are clearer.
For a while things seemed to improve; upon returning, young William began studying law, and his ideas did indeed become clearer — but not in the way his father had hoped. They followed the Quaker light: the inner light, urging one to move forward with trust in one’s own resources and put them at the service of the community. A community built on brotherhood, equality, and fairness.
This nearly gave his father a heart attack, so he sent him back to Ireland to look after family properties. But there Billy met Thomas Loe, whose preaching convinced him to follow and join the Society of Friends.
At that point he had fully earned his diploma as a social disturber of peace — a qualification that would grant him admission into jail without much effort.
And in jail he wrote tirelessly: pamphlets and tracts against the political and religious system of the time. He had plenty of time for it — the Tower of London saw him come and go half a dozen times.
His father, in the end, could only resign himself and reconcile with his son and his ideas before dying — ideas that, through William Penn, would leave a lasting and benevolent mark in the New World for generations to come
In this vibrant painting we get a vivid snapshot of the era. The caption would be something like this:
Billy — the gentleman in the right foreground — promising his first wife (her name was Gulielma; she would later be succeeded by Hannah, who was more gifted not so much as a spouse as in recruiting new followers) a brighter future.
Come, my dear, don’t listen to them and trust me — over there we’ll start anew. We’ll found our own society of friends.
What Penn envisioned in the New World was not conquest — it was rebirth.
To be reborn and begin again, granting the Quakers and all the bruised and battered of the age a better government and a better existence.
The end of dogmas, persecutions, hierarchies, indulgences, and nonsense.
Light in place of obscurantism.
Brotherhood instead of subjugation.
Cooperation instead of exploitation.
Penn’s landing — seen in the top image — took place in 1682, and he was welcomed with great honors by the Lenape.
The huge parchment in the painting is not the Charter in which King George declared Penn proprietor of the entire state that would bear his name, but an informal sacred pact — The Treaty (which Voltaire would later call “the only treaty never sworn and never broken”) — in which William pledged to recognize the Lenape chief as equal in enjoyment of land rights.
No one would try to convert anyone; everyone would be free to be themselves.
The city of Philadelphia — the first true American city, capital of the United States when New York was still little more than a chaotic provincial town — was designed personally by Billy: a grid strategically laid out to make its inhabitants feel at peace and in harmony with the environment, enabling them to thrive effectively but peacefully.
In short: an eco-sustainable city — with gardens, orchards, and a structure expandable enough to guarantee growth for years to come.
The first image in the Boss’s video opens on this photo — one I took myself, though the one from Wikipedia is much better.
The statue on top of the dome is Billy, looking over his city.
Below him: the Lenape chief of the Turtle Clan, two representatives of the first Swedish and Finnish settlers who occupied the area, and four eagles — reminding us of the warning from another bold near-contemporary, Henry Hudson: only with the wings of an eagle can one fly high.
And Billy had the full wingspan.