Irish Immigrants Had a Friend in Pennsylvania

Billy Penn at 22

Perhaps 10 percent of Pennsylvania's Quaker settlers were Irish-born, according to the authors and editors of an excellent book, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675 - 1815. This surprised me. I thought all of the Quaker settlers were from England, but there were, in fact, a few Irish surnames on The Welcome's passenger list.

However, William Penn (1644-1718), the founder of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, had a checkered past with the Irish. He was sometimes their persecutor--especially Irish Catholics--and sometimes their protector.

Although Penn is celebrated as a crusader for religious freedom and tolerance, at the time of his religious conversion from Anglicanism to the Religious Society of Friends, he was wreaking havoc on the Irish countryside near Cork.

Oliver Cromwell had awarded Billy's father Sir William Penn with Irish estates seized from Catholics; the elder Penn had served Cromwell with valor as an admiral during the English Civil War. At the age of 22, the younger Penn was at loose ends after spending time at Oxford and the French court. His father packed him off to Ireland to husband the family's extensive holdings. While there, he took up soldiering, and quashed rebelling Irish Catholics. Peace be unto ye, too, friend!

But because he became an avowed Quaker, he suffered many persecutions. As a result, he sought safe haven for his congregation, and when he finally set foot on Penn's Landing in 1682, he was a markedly different man than the young, swashbuckling dandy who had railed against the Catholic Church as the whore of Babylon.

In due time, he welcomed all religious minorities to his 'greene countrie towne,' including Irish Catholics. And though the first families of Germantown were from Germany, the ground was laid to receive Irish immigrants there.

Between thee and me, in the end Billy was a friend.