American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  A public letter was distributed in England and the colonies with the Concessions and Agreements of the Proprietors, Freeholders, and Inhabitants of the Province of New Jersey in America. In this letter, foreshadowing the ideals of his great descendents in birthing democracy who would follow a century later, Penn wrote, “In the fear of the Lord and in true sense of his Divine Will we try here to lay foundations for after ages to understand their liberty as Christians and as men, that they may not be brought into bondage but by their own consent; for we put the power in the people.”

  In 1677, two hundred and thirty Quakers from London and Yorkshire sailed on the Kent to Salem and New Castle on the banks of the Delaware River. All purchasers of land had been required to sign the Concessions and Agreements before leaving England. Those among them who had purchased land from Byllynge higher up the river continued on by canoe and by Indian trail, where they founded a settlement which would become Burlington.

  A year later, the Shield sailed, with the Bortons and Woolmans aboard to join them.

  Pilgrims to a New World

  1678-1720

  As the Shield made its way slowly up the Delaware River, gradually the twenty-five-mile-wide bay in which they had anchored for their first night in America narrowed. By the end of the day the mouth of the Delaware had closed to within a mile or two of them on each side. The frigid but crystal clear weather held and the next day, by midmorning, the forested banks had come close enough to see clearly.

  A sense of quiet solemnity descended over the ship as it glided ever further inland up a river more gigantic than anything they had beheld in their native England. They were at last penetrating into the strange new continent. No longer was the Atlantic visible behind them.

  The land was vast, silent, empty.

  Yet… not altogether empty. Who could tell… Indians might be watching them from amidst those very trees, most leafless now. Despite all they had heard about the friendliness of the Delaware tribes, they could not prevent a feeling of trepidation as they progressed ever more deeply into the interior.

  Nearly everyone on board had bought the land they hoped to tame and settle sight unseen. They had put every penny they possessed into the purchase, the ship passage, and the initial supplies they would need. As they went, the men were therefore understandably nervous as well as excited. This was gamble on which they had risked everything, including the lives of their families.

  William Woolman and John Borton stood silently at the rail taking in the sight. A man of about forty walked up behind them and took a place beside Borton.

  “It is an awe-inspiring sight, is it not?” he said at length.

  “It is indeed, Friend Harland,” sighed Borton, glancing toward the newcomer, a man from Durham named Obadiah Harland. “William and I were just reflecting on what brought us here, and the hard work that lies ahead now that we have arrived.”

  “Hard but happy work,” rejoined Harland. “We have been waiting for it a long time.”

  “What brought thee on such a difficult journey, Obadiah?” asked Woolman.

  “Have not we all asked ourselves that question over and over since departing!” laughed Harland. “Of course there are a host of reasons. I want to live in peace. I am concerned for my family and hope that here my sons will be able to walk in simplicity and peace.”

  “Why Burlington?”

  “I considered settling further north, for I have some acquaintances there,” answered Harland. “But the Puritans care no more for religious freedom than does the king or Parliament. That they could hang fellow Christians for not believing as they do is beyond my comprehension. I pray with all my heart that things will be different here in New Jersey and in Penn’s new colony.”

  “I believe they will,” said Borton. “We Quakers take the living of Christianity more seriously than do the Puritans. For them, doctrine is everything. For us, life is everything. We will find a way to get along because we are ruled by the love of Christ.”

  “I hope thee is right. Several of my brothers are waiting to hear from me before making their own plans to come. They are contemplating property across the river.”

  Suddenly a shout went up and the three men turned.

  “Look… it’s a windmill!” cried someone on the other side of the ship. Their conversation abruptly halted, they joined others in running to the port side.

  On the left in the distance the Dutch settlement of New Castle now came gradually into view. Though England and the Netherlands had been at war on and off for years, and the most recent conflict had ended a mere four years earlier, the Dutch sight was as manna in the wilderness for the weary travelers. They anchored in the middle, and took several small rowing boats of men ashore. They did not so much need supplies, though fresh water would be welcome, as they simply wanted to set foot again on dry land and greet others from their homeland.

  But Captain Taws, who would remain aboard the Shield, urged a brief visit.

  “Our destination is still more than a day away,” he told them. “We must get under way before sunset and move at least another hour north before anchoring. Then, if we embark at first light, and ride the incoming tidal current, and as long as the wind continues from the south, we just may make Burlington by nightfall tomorrow. I am not eager for a delay, for I fear ice. I have been watching it accumulate in the shadows along the shoreline as we have progressed. And the river will continue to narrow.”

  The men nodded in agreement. They were more anxious than he to reach their destination. Many had family and friends who had come a year before and were waiting for them in the small Quaker settlement now only forty or forty-five miles further on.

  “We will see what supplies are available here,” replied John Borton, “and deliver the mail in our possession for New Castle and Salem, then return to the ship as quickly as possible.”

  In two hours, with little daylight remaining, the Shield weighed anchor and continued up the Delaware. At the wheel, Captain Taws waited until the last possible moment, when at last he knew his squinting eyes could see neither shoreline, then gave the order to drop sail and anchor for what everyone hoped would be their last night before reaching Burlington. As cold as it had been, this night was the coldest yet.

  When John Borton and his future son-in-law John Woolman found Captain Taws on the ship’s deck in the gray of dawn the following morning, he was peering at the shore through his spyglass.

  He lowered it as he heard their steps behind him, and turned.

  “The ice has crept toward us in the night,” he said. “But the center of the river is clear. It will not hamper us today. But it is time to rouse the men and weigh anchor and be off!”

  It was a day of unparalleled excitement. About halfway through the day the river widened suddenly and bent sharply to the right as another smaller river poured into it. Then came almost a direct ninety-degree bend left and northward, and a gradual narrowing. By then all the passengers crowded the railings of the top deck, anxiously peering ahead for any sign of their destination.

  Yet the hours continued to pass slowly. Gradually the sun arced lower and lower westward and the brilliant blue of the sky began to grow pale and they began to despair of reaching their destination before dark. But they had already passed the mouth of the creek the Indians called Rancocas, upstream on which lay both the Borton and Woolman purchased tracts of land. They were closer to Burlington Island than they knew.

  At last, as the freezing dusk was closing down upon them, the island began to come faintly into view. Again a great cheer went up for Captain Taws and his crew.

  They had arrived!

  But as anxious as they were to set their feet on solid ground, it was clearly too late by the time the anchor had splashed into the river to lower the smaller boats now. They would have to spend one more night aboard the Shield.

  It was hard to sleep, knowing that their fellow Quakers and friends and relatives were so close! They could see the lights of their homes from on deck!
Had those on shore seen them arrive in the thickening dusk, or heard their cheering voices? Did the little settlement of Burlington know that the Shield had arrived?

  There was no doubt at first morning’s light that the word had spread. The December day dawned bright and sunny. To the shore to greet the passengers of the Shield flocked those who had come a year before.

  But everyone was in for a surprise, especially the passengers of the Shield when they rose from their bunks and hurriedly dressed in the cold, and climbed up on deck. They were anxious to lower the small boats and go ashore.

  But the blue green river had disappeared! It had turned white in the night. The Shield was locked fast in ice!

  “Oh, no!” said Elizabeth Borton as she saw the sight. “What will we do, Mother?”

  “I do not know, Elizabeth,” replied her mother, who held three-year-old Susanna in her arms. “We must see what Captain Taws says.”

  “We will have to wait until it thaws,” said their husband and father walking toward them with young John. “If the mercury remains below freezing all day, it will not break up for some time.”

  “Why do we not walk across it, Papa?” asked the nine-year-old boy. The rest of the Borton family, his older sisters Ann, Elizabeth, and Esther, his younger brother William all stood beside him.

  “It is too thin to hold thee, John,” replied his father. “Thee would be into the river and frozen to death in seconds.”

  “Come over…. What is thee waiting for?” cried a voice shouting from shore.

  They looked to see a man among the gathering crowd of welcome waving his arms and beckoning them toward him.

  “The ice!” shouted Taws.

  “It will hold!” came the voice echoing back from shore.

  And then, to prove his point, the man began walking toward them. Several others nearby joined him.

  “Look, Papa!” cried young John Borton. “They are walking on the ice! Can I too, Papa? Can I please!”

  Still shaking his head at the sight before him, John Borton thought a moment. Suddenly he turned to Captain Taws.

  “Captain,” he said, “how much would thee say our oak water barrels weigh? Is it equal to a man?”

  “Empty or full, Borton? Empty, perhaps the equal of old Bill Woolman there. But he is a wiry man, and it would not be your equal.”

  “Then let us send a full barrel over the side! What use have we for water now? We have all the rivers and streams of New Jersey before us!”

  A few questioning glances were exchanged, until they realized what Borton had suggested. All at once half a dozen of the men bolted together below deck. Within minutes they were struggling to hoist one of several remaining casks of water up the stairway. With a great banging and crashing, they managed it, then rolled the barrel to the side of the ship.

  “Permission to throw one water barrel overboard, Captain?” said Borton.

  “Granted!” laughed Taws.

  “Up, men!” said Borton, lifting the side of one end.

  “Give me an end of that, John,” said young John Woolman, stepping in beside him.

  Two other men set their hands under the rim of the other side, and up over the rails they lifted it.

  “Mind my ship!” said Taws.

  The four men heaved with all their might and released the cask overboard. For a second all was silence, then a great crash sounded of splintering wood. The barrel would never be of use again for anything but firewood. It lay shattered on the surface. But not so much as a crack was visible in the ice.

  “That’s good enough for me!” said John Borton. “Ladders over-board! Come, John,” he said to his son. “We’re going ashore!”

  And so it was that within the hour a stream of men and women walking gingerly across the ice met their welcoming neighbors, some on the ice, some on shore, with hugs and excited introductions and greetings brought from England.

  The Quaker community of Burlington, New Jersey had just doubled its population.”*

  The next few days were busily spent unloading the Shield, aided enormously by the thick ice. It soon began to break up, however, as a thaw set in. Operations had to cease until smaller boats could navigate back and forth to shore with the goods and possessions that had made the long journey. Among the most important commodities on board were sufficient English bricks, used as ballast in the lower portions of the ship, to build a dozen or more houses the following spring. Other building materials and tools were also on hand, though there was no hurry to unload anything but necessities. The Shield would not return to England until the weather turned and it could be loaded with merchandise, primarily animal skins, to take back to England. Most of their things would be safer kept on board until spring than anywhere else.

  The Bortons and Woolmans and the others, staying in the homes of those who had arrived the previous year, survived the winter. The men were of course anxious to survey the lands they had purchased. As soon as the ship was unloaded, and as the weather permitted, they explored their environs and began to cut trees and plan where to build their houses. They would not be able to do a great deal before spring, when the work of clearing and planting would get under way in earnest. But these were not men to sit idly by while time passed. Unless it was snowing a blizzard or blowing a hurricane or raining a torrent, they were hard at work.

  The Woolmans and Bortons had together, with William Petty, purchased a large joint tract on Rancocas Creek of some 350 acres. In establishing their homesteads they were a big help to one another. The eight Bortons possessed the advantages women bring to a household, cooking, mending, and the simple women’s touch added to a rough life. The Woolman father and son contributed the strength of two men to the informal partnership. But it remained for another five years to pass before John Woolman and Elizabeth Borton were married.

  John Borton and William and John Woolman cleared the land for their plantations on Rancocas Creek and built sizeable brick houses from the bricks carried in the hold of the Shield, and planted crops, and prospered. The Borton and Woolman names were for generations respected leaders of the colonial Quaker “Meetings” and passed down thriving estates to their heirs. Both family names were known among American Quakers not merely for decades, but for centuries.2 Most of their men were ministers and many also served as representatives to the colonial government.

  The Quaker community in Burlington thrived and grew. More ships arrived bringing more settlers, and the banks of the Delaware sprouted communities and towns. Venison, fowl, and fish were plentiful, as was wood for construction and warmth.

  The Indians along the Delaware were friendly and fascinated by the courteous white Quaker settlers, in whose eyes they appeared superhuman in their capabilities and knowledge and power to transform a wilderness. The Indians proudly taught them the ways of the forests and weather and instructed them in what crops to plant in the spring, introducing yet another group of Europeans for the first time to corn.

  The newcomers did not take long to acclimate themselves to their new surroundings. In awe the natives watched as first houses then whole towns were raised before their eyes. Wagons and plows, iron implements and bronze, hammers and saws, jewelry of gold and silver, forges, mills, enormous boats, windmills, clothes, looms… the sights and skills they witnessed were stupendously unlike anything in their ken. Towns and communities became almost immediately self-sustaining and grew quickly. Truly these people had the skills and gifts and ingenuity and knowledge and inventiveness of gods in the eyes of the Indians, for whom even the wheel was at first a simple yet by them an undiscovered mystery.

  George Harland of Durham, England, who had recently fled to Ireland to avoid persecution, sailed with his wife Elizabeth Duck and their first four children, along with George’s unmarried brother Michael, in 1687. They settled near New Castle, then moved higher up the river near Brandywine Creek, and were leaders in the new government of Pennsylvania. They dropped the final letter of their name and were henceforth known as Harlan. The grand
son of George and Elizabeth, Ezekiel Harlan, became a Quaker minister of the Chester County Meeting. Among others who came during this influx of Quakers were those of the name Mueller from Germany, Brannon from Ireland, and the name Davidson from England, whose descendents would migrate south into Virginia.

  A son, Samuel, was born to John and Elizabeth Borton Woolman, and in time a son would also be born to him, the most famous son to bear the proud family name. The Bortons and Harlans and Davidsons also increased and married and gave the life and energy of their seed to a continent which they would help subdue.

  William Penn’s father died in 1670. Ten years later, after the New Jersey “experiment” was off to a strong start, Penn requested of the king, in exchange for his father’s debt, a tract of land in America west of the New Jersey colony.

  The request was granted.

  It was an enormous expanse of land, the largest of its kind in the New World, measuring approximately 160 miles by an incredible 300 miles westward. Penn suggested the name Sylvania (Latin: woods) for the land, but, against Penn’s objections, the king added the name Penn, in honor of Admiral Penn, William Penn’s father.

  Suddenly a second, and far larger Quaker colony in the New World was born.

  William Penn immediately began planning to make the land available for colonization, primarily to Quakers, who were now flocking to the New World in droves, but to anyone willing to live under the terms and conditions he envisioned. He drew up a charter of liberties along similar lines as that which now governed New Jersey. Truly, William Penn was the father of what was to become American democracy. His writings and the two charters he had drawn up for Quaker New Jersey and Pennsylvania were later studied by Benjamin Franklin, the Quaker Thomas Paine, and others.

  The colony of Pennsylvania was well under way, and a vision for the city of Philadelphia (“Brotherly Love”), laid out and planned by the time Penn himself was able to set sail and lay eyes on his new colony for the first time in 1682. His arrival in the colonies was eagerly anticipated by everyone who owed so much to this singular man and his vision of peaceful life and peaceful coexistence between peoples in America. As the Welcome sailed up the Delaware River, the shores were lined with settlers and half-naked Indians all anxious to see the man about whom they had heard so much.