%50. The Beginnings of Pennsylvania.%--The part which Penn took in
the settlement of New Jersey suggested to him the idea of beginning a
colony which should be a refuge for the persecuted of all lands and of
all religions.

[Illustration]

Now it so happened that Penn was the son of a distinguished admiral to
whom King Charles II. owed £16,000, and seeing no chance of its ever
being paid, he proposed to the King, in 1680, that the debt be paid with
a tract of land in America. The King gladly agreed, and in 1681 Penn
received a grant west of the Delaware. Against Penn's wish, the King
called it Pennsylvania, or Penn's Woodland. It was given almost
precisely the bounds of the present state.[1] In 1683 Penn made a famous
treaty with the Indians, and laid out the city of Philadelphia.

[Footnote 1: There was a long dispute, however, with Lord Baltimore,
over the south boundary line, which was not settled till 1763-67, when
two surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, came over from England
and located it as at present. In later years, when all the Atlantic
seaboard states north of Maryland and Delaware had abolished slavery,
this "Mason and Dixon's Line" became famous as the dividing line between
the slave and the free Atlantic states.]

%51. The Three Lower Counties: Delaware.%--If you look at the map of
the British Colonies in 1764, you will see that Pennsylvania was the
only English colony which did not have a seacoast. This was a cause of
some anxiety to Penn, who was afraid that the settlers in Delaware and
New Jersey might try to prevent his colonists from going in and out of