Excerpt from:
https://erenow.net/common/fourbritishfolkwaysinamerica1989/
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America
The wealth ways of the Quakers revealed a deep irony in their system of social values. On the one hand, these good people had an abiding belief in spiritual equality. On the other, their ideals and institutions slowly created a system of material inequality which was increasingly at war with their own intentions.
Throughout the Quaker colonies, land was distributed in a manner very different from that of Massachusetts and Virginia. In Pennsylvania and Delaware, William Penn’s land policy was meant to serve two purposes. The first was to provide a source of capital for the founding of his colony—even a “holy experiment” needed a material base. The second purpose was to create a rural society of independent farming families without great extremes of wealth or poverty. Despite many difficulties and defeats along the way, Penn succeeded remarkably in that design.1
To capitalize his colony, William Penn hoped to sell land in large blocks of 5,000 or 10,000 acres to rich English buyers. Most of these tracts came with strings attached. Residence was normally required for continued possession. Absentee owners were compelled to subdivide their tracts into smaller holdings for individual settlers. A proprietary Land Office and a Board of Property were made responsible for managing the system.
Between 1681 and 1685, Penn actually sold about 715,000 acres to 589 “First Purchasers,” many of whom were affluent Quakers in London and Bristol. Perhaps half of these buyers did not come to America, and a large number of purchases were forfeited for nonpayment or nonresidence.2 Many tracts were subdivided among “underpurchasers” who actually occupied the land. Most holdings in Pennsylvania were between 100 and 500 acres. The average was about 250 acres—twice as large as town grants to individual families in Massachusetts, but less than half the average size of land patents in Virginia during the seventeenth century.3
William Penn’s system proved to be a highly efficient way of promoting settlement. As early as the year 1715, it was reported that no unsettled land remained within fifty miles of Philadelphia. The proprietor and his agents distributed their land very rapidly, at the same time that they prevented the growth of a small landowning oligarchy. The proprietor explained:
The regulation of the country being a family to each five hundred acres. … many that had right to the land were at first covetous to have their whole quantity without regard to this way of settlement, tho’ by such wilderness vacancies they had ruined the country, and then our interest of course. I had in my view, society, assistance, busy commerce, instruction of youth, government of people’s manners, conveniency of religious assembling, encouragement of mechanicks, distinct and beaten roads, and it has answered in all those respects, I think, to an universal content.4
For a long period, the distribution of wealth in the Delaware Valley continued to be more egalitarian than any other region of British America. Tax lists in rural Chester County showed that the richest 10 percent held only 23.8 percent of assessed taxable wealth in 1693—an unusually small share by comparison with other cultures. In the Chesapeake colonies, as we have seen, the richest 10 percent held more than two-thirds of the taxable wealth.5
The pattern of wealth-holding was not perfectly uniform throughout the Delaware Valley. Wealth was more concentrated in urban Philadelphia than in rural Chester County. But even the metropolis of the Delaware Valley was remarkably egalitarian by comparison with other seaport cities in the American colonies. The richest 10 percent held only 36 percent of the wealth in Philadelphia during the late seventeenth century, according to the evidence of probate records. In Boston, by comparison, the top
10 percent owned more than half of the assets in the town. In Virginia, they possessed two-thirds or more.6
This pattern of wealth distribution was maintained in part by inheritance customs. In cases of intestacy, the laws of West Jersey and Pennsylvania at first followed the biblical pattern of double partible inheritance, widows’ thirds, and small shares for prodigal children. But in subsequent statutes, the double partible rule yielded to the principle of equal shares for all children. This law of intestacy in the Quaker colonies conformed to actual practices which were more egalitarian than in New England or the Chesapeake. The norm in Quaker families was equal division of the estate—not only between the first-born son and his brothers but also (for personal property) between brothers and sisters. By and large, daughters did not inherit land. But they were given “portions” at marriage and a share of the personal estate.7
Similar patterns also appeared in the wills of English Quakers. Thus, Dionnis Davy, a Quaker of Steeton, Yorkshire, left one-third of his property to his wife Alice, and the rest he “did give unto his children equally.”8 There were many variations. Other Quakers assigned small landholdings to a single heir, but divided their personal estate equally; James Sanderlands of Cheshire in 1692 left his house to his wife, his lands to a son, and his personal estate to be equally divided among all his sons and daughters.9 Quakers often remembered their grandchildren, who shared equally in small gifts of esteem. John Hart of Nottingham in 1712 left equal legacies to his grandchildren to be paid when they reached the age of twenty-four; if any died, the remaining share was to be divided equally among the survivors.10 Edmund Gibson left all his estate to “Hannah my loving wife,” for her lifetime, and then to be sold and the proceeds divided equally among all grandchildren, both male and female.11 There were many other arrangements: sometimes a surviving son received all real estate, and a surviving daughter the personal estate.12 Quakers who owned small rural properties would leave the farm to one child with instructions that payments must be made to other children.13
While inheritance practices among English Quakers varied in detail from one family to another, there were also strong general trends. First, widows usually received their “third” (sometimes adjusted to a quarter or a half) “according to the custom,” as many documents noted. Second, primogeniture was uncommon and partible inheritance was the general rule. Third, daughters normally received their inheritance in forms other than land. Fourth, grandchildren were often remembered in at least token ways. This pattern developed not merely from Quaker beliefs but from a fusion of those religious ideas with inheritance customs in the North Midlands of England. Among families of middling and lower ranks throughout that region, partible inheritance had long been a common practice. To this tradition, Quakers added the extra weight of a religious imperative.14
In the New World, Quakers moved even farther away from primogeniture and closer to the partible ideal. One study finds that no fewer than 87 percent of English and Welsh Quaker families in Pennsylvania with more than one son practiced simple partible inheritance.15
Quakers in both England and America deliberately used inheritance as an instrument of communal control over the young, specially in regard to the problem of outmarriage. Some meetings required members to disinherit children who wed nonbelievers, or at least to refuse to give marriage portions. Thus, the Cheshire Quarterly Meeting agreed:
If any friends child marry any that’s no friend the parents of such child shall not communicate by way of a portion unto such without the advice and consent of the Quarterly Meeting, or whom they shall depute excepting at their decease at which time the said parents are at liberty to do as they shall see meet.16
American Friends also did not hesitate to disinherit children who left the fold. The affluent Quaker William Wynne, for example, ordered that half of his large personal estate should go to his wife, and that the other half should be divided equally among all his children except his daughter Tabitha Wynne who had “fallen away from friends.” Tabitha received only a token legacy of fifty shillings; her brothers and sisters each got more than fifty pounds. In 1748, an observer noted that disinheritance for religious reasons was very common among Quaker families in the Delaware Valley.17
The execution of a will was a social event that involved many more people than the testator alone. Quakers often consulted some learned Friend in the neighborhood, who helped them to prepare the document and to shape its contents. John Woolman remembered “an ancient man of good esteem in the neighborhood who came to my house to get his will written.” This neighbor owned slaves, and Woolman refused to draw up the will until their freedom was assured.18
Quaker wills often included charitable bequests. This occurred in small estates as well as large ones. Philanthropy was an important part of this culture—more so than in New England or Virginia. In all of these various ways, the inheritance customs of Quakers in the Delaware Valley were an instrument of equality.
As time passed, the pattern of wealth distribution in the Delaware Valley began to change, moving slowly in the direction of greater inequality. The trend was very gradual until after 1750. In some rural areas of the Delaware Valley it did not begin until the nineteenth century; a few remote counties actually shifted in the opposite direction. But in most parts of the Delaware Valley, inequality of material condition increased after 1750.
Tenancy also tended to increase throughout the Delaware Valley after the mid-eighteenth century. Comparatively few tenants had lived in that region during the first and second generations. But by 1760, perhaps one-third of families in older counties of Pennsylvania did not own the land they farmed.19 In cultural terms, however, the institution of tenancy was not the same in the Delaware Valley as in the Chesapeake colonies. Rhoda Barber remembered that tenancy was not a permanent but a transitional status in the Quaker colonies. She wrote:
The people who had served a time with the owner of the land or had been employed to work for them seemed to claim a kind of patronage from their master. They seldom left the place but contrived to get a little dwelling in the neighborhood, often on the land of their former master. They had a little garden and potato patch, their rent was so many day’s work in harvest.20
Tenancy in Chester County rose to a peak circa 1760, then leveled off and declined until the War of Independence. This was so because land was easier of access for small holders in Pennsylvania than in the Chesapeake.21
Even so, the central tendency in the Delaware Valley was toward increasing inequality. Quaker moralists complained bitterly of this trend. John Woolman warned tirelessly against the concentration of riches, and argued that “Large possessions in the hands of selfish men have a bad tendency, for by their means too small a number of people are employed in things useful … while others would want business to earn their bread, were not employments invented which, having no real use, serve only to please the vain mind.”22 Joshua Evans wrote angrily of prosperous Haverford and Merion, “Here they build large farms but little meeting houses.”23
Ironically, Quakers such as Joshua Evans and John Woolman were themselves the principal beneficiaries of the trend which they condemned. The leading victims were immigrants who arrived at a later date. At the bottom of society in the Delaware Valley a proletariat slowly began to form—a growing underclass of very poor people.24
The Quakers always showed much solicitude for the poor. Probably no other English culture was so strongly committed to philanthropy. From the start, charity for the poor had been a deep concern of the Society of Friends. This sect did more to relieve poverty in proportion to their numbers than did their more affluent Anglican and Calvinist neighbors. In England, monthly meetings maintained a “publick stock” for the support of those in need, and collections were also taken for a “national stock” which was maintained by the London yearly meeting. Women’s meetings were specially active in this work. Each month, every member was expected to pay something, if only a penny or two. Among the Quakers, charity became an engrained cultural habit.25
Charity was always an important part of their world, perhaps because so many of them had been poor themselves. Studies of American philanthropy repeatedly find that the poor give a larger proportion of their assets to charity than do the rich. Among Friends, charity also arose from their exceptionally strong sense of responsibility toward other “creatures.” Most Quaker charity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries went to indigent Friends. But as early as 1683, the Philadelphia meeting was actively relieving the needs of non-Quakers.26 Where possible, an attempt was made to put people to work rather than merely to give them alms. The Chesterfield monthly women’s meeting in 1698, for example, invited the men’s meeting to “assist them in raising some money to buy some tow … to set some poor friends to work so they may not be burdensome to friends as they have been.” But among Quakers there was an exceptionally strong sympathy for the unfortunate, and a determination to relieve their needs.27
Here was yet another irony. The Quakers created a social system in Pennsylvania which gave them increasing opportunity to exercise their charitable impulses. They became deeply concerned about a class of paupers which their own values and institutions had helped to create. Some Quakers understood this system very well. John Woolman observed that “the money which the wealthy receive from the poor, who do more than a proper share in raising it, is frequently paid to other poor people.”28
This intricate cultural system of wealth and poverty was constructed in the Delaware Valley during the first decade of settlement. It survives to this day.
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