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MODULE 2.3b The Regions of British Colonies 95

Leisler’s Rebellion erupted on estates in New Jersey and along the Hudson River in New
York.
These sample pages are distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
In the 1690s, Dutch landholding families and wealthy English merchants in New
York gained the backing of the newly appointed royal governor, who instituted rep-
resentative assemblies through elections dominated by elite landlords. New York City
already had a relatively diverse population, including small numbers of Jewish mer-
Copyright (c) 2024 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
chant families who had migrated when it was known as New Netherland, and it evolved
as a center of commerce in the Atlantic economy. The colony would exert extensive eco-
nomic, cultural, and social influence throughout the eighteenth century.
Strictly for use with its products. NOT FOR REDISTRIBUTION.
The emergence of an elite class of merchants in New York revealed growing colonial
inequality. Wealthy urban merchants and professionals lived alongside a middle class of
artisans and shopkeepers, as well as a growing underclass comprised of unskilled labor-
ers, widows, orphans, the elderly, the disabled, and the unemployed.
The colony of New York was also a society with an enslaved population. By the
1710s, New York City hosted the second-largest slave market in the mainland colonies.
While some enslaved people who passed through this market worked on agricultural
estates in the Hudson River valley and New Jersey, even more labored as dockworkers,
seamen, blacksmiths, and household servants in New York City. These enslaved labor-
ers sometimes lived in slaveholders’ homes, but more often they resided together in sep-
arate, impoverished communities. Black people accounted for about 14 percent of its
inhabitants by the late 1770s. Symbolizing their lack of acceptance by the white popu-
lation, Black people, both free and enslaved, were regularly taken outside the city limits
for burial.

REVIEW

■ How did international conflicts shape the colony of New York during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

Penn’s Goal of a Peaceable Kingdom

In 1681, King Charles II granted the lands that would become the colonies of Delaware
and Pennsylvania to William Penn, a convert to a pacifist Protestant sect known as the
Society of Friends, or Quakers. Quakers were considered radical and were severely per-
secuted in England, so Penn founded Pennsylvania as a safe place for Quakers to practice
their religious beliefs in North America. As governor of the colony, Penn moved to Phil-
adelphia in 1682, and, unlike other English colonial proprietors, personally governed it.
Penn provided a more inclusive model of colonial rule. He established friendly rela-
tions with the local Lenni-Lenape Indians and drew up a Frame of Government in 1682
that recognized religious freedom for all Christians and allowed all property-owning men
to vote and hold office. Under Penn’s leadership, Philadelphia grew into a bustling port city,
while the rest of Pennsylvania attracted thousands of middle-class farm families, most of
them Quakers, as well as artisans and merchants. During this time, Africans and African
Americans formed only a small percentage of Pennsylvania’s population, despite the nota-
ble concentration of enslaved Black dockworkers and porters in Philadelphia in the late sev-
enteenth century.
In its first four decades, the population of Pennsylvania boomed as immigrants were
drawn by Penn’s tolerant policies. These colonists demanded more land and pushed
westward to find unclaimed territory or purchase lands for sale. At the beginning of
the eighteenth century, German and Scots-Irish immigrants joined Anglo-American

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