Province of Pennsylvania

From Freepedia

The Province of Pennsylvania, better known to Americans as Pennsylvania Colony, was a North America colony granted to William Penn in 1681 by King Charles II of England. William Penn received the colony as payment for a $100,000 award that the Crown owed his father, naval hero Sir William Penn. The name itself means "Penn's Woods" in Latin.

The 1st governor was William Marrkham, a relative of Penn. A large tract of land north and west of Philadelphia, in Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware Counties, was settled by Welsh Quakers and called the "Welsh Tract".

One of the Middle Colonies, Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony. Unlike other propietary colonies, its taxes were enforced by the British Parliament. The three counties of the Delaware Colony, captured from the Swedish, were originally part of the Province of Pennsylvania, but regained a separate existence in 1704. The rest of the colony was demarcated from sea to shining sea by its latitudinal borders with New York and Maryland (the latter defined by the historic 1763 Mason-Dixon line geographical survey) as well as an irregular border with the coastal Province of New Jersey.

It was also sometimes called the Quaker Province because of the founder's religion, the Society of Friends, better known as the "Quakers." Pennsylvania had religious freedom for all religions, as well as acceptance for Native Americans. This extreme tolerance led to significantly healthier relationships with the local Native tribes (the Lenape and Susquehanna, mainly) than most other colonies had. It also encouraged the rapid growth of Philadelphia into America's most important city, and of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country hinterlands, where German (or "Deutsch") religious and political refugees prospered.

As the colony grew, however, colonists and British military forces came increasingly into conflict with Natives in the Western half of the state. With the debilitating French and Indian War just over and Pontiac's War beginning, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 banned colonization beyond the Appalachian Mountains. This proclamation affected Pennsylvanians and Virginians the most, as they had been racing towards the rich lands surrounding Fort Pitt. Heightened revolutionary sentiment among Pennsylvanians, along with the pre-eminent position of Philadelphia, made that city the natural choice for the Continental Congress to meet, the first coordinated act towards independence. The publication of the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 by locally-elected revolutionaries ended the history of the Colony and began the history of the Commonwealth.