The colonial possessions of Penn were bequeathed to his three sons, by whom, and their deputies, the government was administered until the American Revolution. Afterward, in 1779, the entire claim of the Penn family to the soil and jurisdiction of the state, was purchased by the legislature for a hundred and thirty thousand pounds sterling. The early history of the Keystone state is one of special interest and pleasure. The reader lingers over it because it recounts bloodless victories, and the triumph of kindness and right over violence and wrong.
When nations grow mercenary and grasping, the strong justifying their aggressions and conquests by the false plea that success, and the probable hereafter of the conquered races justify their assaults, the early annals of Penn’s state will stand a perpetual protest against fraud and violence, however successful for a time. Might does not make right, even when the highest civilization confronts the lowest barbarism. Even savages had rights that the most cultured Englishmen were bound to respect.
The brotherhood of man includes those of lowest estate. So thought the founder of the great state that bears his name. With his charter in hand he fearlessly plunged into the vast wilderness, saying, “I will here found a free colony for all mankind.” The words had the true ring, and the asylum was opened for men of every nation who loved liberty and hated the oppressor’s wrongs. And it was a most fitting thing that the “bells of his capital should ring out the first glad notes of American independence.”
Every philanthropist must take satisfaction in the founding of the colony in Georgia; for, perhaps beyond any other, it had its origin in the spirit of pure benevolence. The unfortunate debtor in England was by the laws liable to imprisonment; and thousands were, for this cause alone, languishing in prisons. The miserable condition of debtors and their desolate families, was at length thrust on the attention of Parliament. In 1728 a commission was appointed to inquire into the state of the poor, and report measures of relief. The work was accomplished, the jails thrown open, and the prisoners returned to their families. But, though liberated, they and their friends were in no condition to maintain themselves respectably in the land of their birth. There was a land beyond the sea where debt was not a crime, and poverty not necessarily a disgrace. To provide somewhere a refuge for the poor of England, and the distressed Protestants of other countries, the commission appealed to George II. for the privilege of planting a colony of such persons in America. A charter was issued giving the desired territory to a corporation, for twenty-one years, _to be held in trust for the poor_. In honor of the king the new province was named Georgia. The high-souled philanthropist who initiated and went steadily forward in this enterprise was James Oglethorpe. Born a loyalist, educated at Oxford, a high churchman, a soldier, a member of Parliament, benevolent, generous, full of sympathy, and far-sighted in comprehending the results of his enterprise, he sacrificed much, giving the best position of a life so full of energy and promise to the noble charity of providing homes for the poor, under such conditions that the largest benefit could be received by them without any sense of degradation. Ridpath says: “The magnanimity of the enterprise was heightened by the fact that he did not believe in the equality of men, but only in the duty of the strong to protect the weak, and sympathize with the lowly. Oglethorpe was the principal member of the corporation, and to him the personal leadership of the first colony planted on the banks of the Savannah was naturally intrusted. His associations were with cultured people, and his refined tastes would be subjected to some crucial tests by the rude scenes in the wilderness, and his association with unlettered men. But he was not a man to shirk responsibility, and promptly determined to share the privations, hardships, and dangers of his colony.