Reading William Penn’s Letter Recruiting Colonists to America | Primary Source Close Reads Explained

0:05 What was the last time you heard a sales pitch? My guess is within the last hour. Pick your social media, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, even standard old cable or radio. They’re all full of sales pitches. These products will make you cool or more efficient or healthier, the list goes on and on. This modern form of advertisement and marketing of products and goods

0:28 emerged at the end of the 19th century and has been evolving with us ever since. But selling products, attracting customers, recruiting participants, that’s a tale as old as time. It turns out recruiting individuals to the colonies in North America was just such a recruiting effort. Often called promotional literature, sponsors and organizers of colonies wrote

0:49 letters and journals intended to promote investment in settlement in North America. Today, we’re going to be looking at one of those documents, William Penn’s letter recruiting columnist from 1683. Specifically, I want to look at the document and talk about how historians think about documents like this and what we can learn from them. After receiving a grant from the English

1:09 King, Charles II, in recognition of his father’s service to the Crown, Penn formed a joint stock company and began the process of recruiting colonists for his settlements in the territory he called Pennsylvania. This letter was an attempt at recruiting individuals to come over to North America, risking the voyage, risking settlement in the New World.

1:30 So let’s take a look at how he went about trying to get them to join. So Penn opens the letter with these lines. It says, the country itself, in its soil, air, water, seasons and produce, both natural and artificial, is not to be despised. The land contains diverse sorts of earth as sand, yellow and black, poor and rich, also gravel or loamy and dusty,

1:53 and in some places, full fat earth like to produce our best values in England, especially by inland brooks and rivers. So what’s he calling out here? The soil. Why is the soil important? Well, if you’re going to come over and you’re going to farm in this territory, soil is the one thing that you know is going to be critical to the success of your farming. So the first thing he’s trying to conjure up is that these lands are bountiful,

2:16 that they’re going to produce plentiful crops and that they’re attractive. And so he’s really trying to paint a picture of, look, this land is a land of plenty. It’s prosperous, it’s wonderful, it’s here to be farmed, and it’s here for you to come and to produce your life that you have in England, except more bountiful, more opportunity in painting it in this

2:37 beautiful sort of idealized way that’s important for, again, recruiting. So if you think about advertisements that you may see, what you see is an idealized version of what your life will be like once you purchase this item. But the reality is often different, right? He’s doing the same thing here. If you look I have a postcard here from the early part of the 20th century.

2:57 It’s this beautiful, sort of idealistic, romantic, even a landscape of Pennsylvania. And again, it’s calling to mind the same kind of thing. It’s bountiful, productive. It’s a place that you want to come to, that you want to be, and that’s the picture that Penn is trying to paint. So then he goes on. He talks about the climate even more so. The air is sweet and clear, the heavens serene,

3:19 like south parts of France rarely overcast, and as the woods come by numbers of people to be more cleared, that itself will refine. So we’re talking about a wooded area that is beautiful. And if you think about south of France, it’s this sort of nice Mediterranean climate that’s fairly temperate, that’s just a very comfortable place to go.

3:41 Even now, many people think we can go on vacation in the south of France. People in France vacation in south of France. It’s just this idealized, beautiful place. That’s what he’s wanting to call to mind, even for these individuals that have probably never even been to the south of France. That sort of idea, that sense of that kind of climate, is what he wants them to be picturing when they’re thinking about making this move across the Atlantic.

4:02 And he says the waters are generally good for the rivers, and brooks have mostly gravel and stony bottoms, and a number hardly credible. So there’s these rivers all over the place, these brooks that are all over the place. Rivers and brooks also sort of point toward fertility of the soil of the land. It’s also this pleasant landscape, this idea that it is just this sort of land of milk and honey, if you will.

4:25 There’s this beautiful, bountiful, serene place that you’re going to absolutely want to come and sell. Finally, it says the artificial produce of this country is wheat, barley, oats, rye peas beans squashes pumpkins, watermelons muskmelons and all herbs and roots that our gardens in England usually bring forth.

4:45 Just calling to mind again this idea that this land is going to be bountiful, but the harvest is going to be immense, and that what is going to be farmed there is what’s being farmed in England. Now, why is that important? Well, if these are English individuals and they’re coming over, that’s the farming that they know. They know how to grow these different items.

5:05 So to come over, if they had to start growing totally new crops, that would be a huge adjustment, then say, no, this is great territory for you to be growing. These things that you already know how to grow in your garden is going to produce exactly what it produces in England. But in this more bountiful, this rich setting, this land of what to them is just boundless opportunity. That’s what William Penn here is really trying to pitch.

5:27 So now, skipping ahead, and this letter is much longer. And if you go to the link that we have included here in the description, it will take you and you can see the entire document, or at least sections of the document that we’ve outlined on our website. But there’s also a link to the full document as well. So we’re only looking at a few sections. But here, I think, is another interesting point. And this is where Penn goes next, he says,

5:49 and for the well government of the said counties, courts of justice are established in every county, with proper officers as justices, sheriff’s, clerks, constable, et cetera, which courts are held every two months. But to prevent lawsuits, there are three peacekeepers chosen by every county court in the nature of common arbiters to hear and end

6:10 differences between man and man in spring and fall. And there is an orphans court in each county to regulate the affairs of orphans and widows. So what’s going on here? Well, here you have Penn, he’s already talked about the soil. He’s talking about how wonderful it is. But what also is important is how are you going to live your life? What’s going to protect the land that you have?

6:32 What kind of system is going to be in place for sort of governing the day to day interactions that you have with your neighbors and the people around you? Well, here we’re talking about laws. And so not only is in courts and systems of governance, right? Not only is it important that the soil is rich, but also that a system of governance is in place. Because again, for these colonists, they’re thinking of this land as empty, though we know it’s not.

6:55 And there are Native people that are already living and inhabiting in these areas. But from the perspective of Penn, who’s coming over, many Europeans, their idea was that this is a new world, that they were populating. And if you want to know more about the new world, check out the video that we did last week thinking about that term and what that means. But their perspective is that that’s what they’re coming into.

7:15 And so they talk about interactions with different Native peoples within this letter, most of it is always that they are there, but that’s sort of an aside thing. But here we’re talking about setting up governance. What it’s going to mean for them to come to this land and live there and this is sort of establishing what for them will be their communities and accounts. So the fact that that is a part of this sort of letter, that idealized sort of beautiful painting of what this colony looks like

7:42 and it’s going to feel like and what it’s going to produce, that they include laws here, shows that that is also something that is important to the people who are thinking about coming over to North America. So what can we learn from a document like this? So we’re putting on our historian hat, why are we looking at something like this? Well, a few reasons. One is what I was just talking about perspective. Right. This is written by who?

8:03 William Penn. Two, who well, other individuals who he’s trying to recruit to be a part of his joint stock venture to settle in Pennsylvania. So what does that audience tell us? Well, it tells us that there’s a particular perspective that’s being given to us. And we can understand how it is that these individuals were thinking about making this jump and what it was that was enticing them to do so.

8:26 We can see that it’s agriculturally based. We can see that it’s going to be common with England, a similar climate. That’s important. And it’s going to have laws and a justice system that is going to align with what they’re used to in England. Right. So you can start to get a picture for how it is that these individuals who are thinking about emigrating to North America are making this calculation.

8:46 What matters to them? How are they organizing their lives to do so? That’s really important. That tells us something about those people. It tells us something about how you’re thinking about this. Again, thinking about that climate aspect is really important too. That the climate is similar to what they’re coming from and it means that they’re not going to have to adapt. You can imagine if they were going to,

9:06 say, the southwest of the United States, right, where it’s much more dry and arid climate, what they would do would be very different. And so that would be a much rougher adjustment, much more challenging, trying to figure out the fact that they’re being pitched, that they can bring their agricultural knowledge to Pennsylvania, to this new land, and that it’s going to be beautiful

9:27 and bountiful and consistent with what they know is really important. So what does this document not tell us? Well, it doesn’t tell us what the perspective was for native peoples who are already in the New World. It doesn’t tell us about other colonists who are already there, how they thought about this Pennsylvania colony. Maybe if Penn is writing to other columnists who have already settled in,

9:49 say, Virginia, maybe he would have changed the way that we were at this. That kind of communication is missing here. It also doesn’t tell us what happened. What was the experience of individuals like when they got here? But we’ve gotten from clues in this document certain things that we could follow up on. How bountiful were the harvests? Did it meet expectations?

10:10 What was the average life expectancy for individuals coming over? What was feeding that life expectancy? Was it a lack of the ability to produce? Or was it an inability to get supplies? All of those different parts and pieces we can start to put together to form a history, meaning an understanding of what it was like to live during this period.

10:30 And what it was like to actually come into contact with this, because oftentimes the idealized way that something is being pitched to us is not actually the way that it plays out. So thank you all again for joining me. I hope you enjoyed taking this quick look at William Penn’s letter recruiting columnist to North America in 1683. We’ll be continuing this series,

10:51 looking at different documents and sort of grappling with how it is that historians think about these different things. But for now, next time you hear a sales pitch to you, maybe think about what they’re trying to sell you and how they’re idealizing it and whether or not it’s similar or different than the way that this played out for the columnist or for the potential columnists who are thinking about coming to North America.

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