History of Philadelphia

The written history of Philadelphia begins on October 27, 1682, when the city was founded by William Penn in the English Crown Province of Pennsylvania between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers.

In 1681, King Charles II gave Penn a large piece of his newly acquired American land holdings to repay a debt the king owed to Admiral Sir William Penn, Penn's father. This land included present-day Pennsylvania and Delaware, though the claim as written would create a bloody conflict with Maryland (dubbed Cresap's War) over the land grant already owned by Lord Baltimore. Penn put together a colonial expedition and fleet, which set out for America in the middle of the following summer. Penn, sailing in the vanguard, first set foot on American soil at the colony at New Castle, Delaware. An orderly change of government ensued, as was normal in an age used to the privileges and prerogatives of aristocracy and which antedated nationalism: the colonists pledged allegiance to Penn as their new Proprietor. The first Pennsylvania General Assembly was soon held in the colony.

Afterwards, Penn journeyed up the river and founded Philadelphia with a core group of accompanying Quakers and others seeking religious freedom on lands he purchased from the local chieftains of the Lenape or Delaware nation. This began a long period of peaceful co-operation between the colony and the Delaware, in contrast to the frictions between the tribe and the Swedish and Dutch colonists. However, the new colonists would not enjoy such easy relations with the rival and territorial Conestoga peoples to the west for a number of decades as the English and Dutch German settlers attracted to the religiously tolerant colony worked their way northwest up the Schuylkill and due west south of the hill country into the breadbasket lands along the lower Susquehanna River.Lord Baltimore and the Province of Maryland had circa 1652-53 finished waging a decade long declared war against the Susquehannocks and the Dutch, who'd been trading them furs for tools and firearms for some time. Both groups had uneasy relations with the Delaware (Lenape) and the Iroquois. Furthermore, Penn's Quaker government was not viewed favorably by the Dutch, Swedish, and English settlers in what is now Delaware. They had no "historical" allegiance to Pennsylvania, so they almost immediately began petitioning for their own Assembly. In 1704, they achieved their goal when the three southernmost counties of Pennsylvania were permitted to split off and become the new semi-autonomous colony of Lower Delaware. New Castle, the most prominent, prosperous and influential settlement in the new colony, became the capital. During its brief period of ascendancy as an empire following the victory by Gustav the Great battle of Leipzig Swedish settlers arrived in the area in the early 17th century to found a nearby colony, New Sweden in what is today southern New Jersey. With the arrival of more numerous English colonists and development of the port on the Delaware, Philadelphia quickly grew into an important colonial city.

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