American Heroes (18 page)

How was she carried? Perhaps in a cart? What was she pelted with? With refuse? With rocks? Who were the people who pelted her? Were they the same people who passed drink to the wheelbarrow men? Were the wheelbarrow men themselves among them? What kind of people still believed in witches in 1787? Nothing in the record tells us. But the picture is extraordinary. While America's great men sat in solemn conclave, working out the compromise that saved the union and established the form of government under which we still live, Korbmacher was carried through the streets, her tormenters reciting her supposed acts of sorcery, inviting the throng to pelt her. And the story does not end there: eight days later she was dead. The newspapers tell us what she died of:

It was a pious wish, shared by “several respectable citizens” who at the time of the second attack expressed a willingness to testify in the woman's behalf, and by a “gentleman of the law” who proposed to undertake the prosecution of her tormenters. The case evidently did come to trial at the “city sessions” held by the Mayor's Court in October. The docket of that court in the City Archives is extant from 1782 to 1785 and from 1789 to 1792, but is missing for the years from 1786 to 1788. Hence once again, we know of the case only from the newspapers, which do not even record the outcome and would perhaps not have mentioned it at all, had not the judge made it the occasion for a labored exercise of tasteless wit. Here is the story, offered first in the
Pennsylvania Evening Herald
for October 27:

So the episode closed. What did the great men make of it? What did Washington think? What did Madison think? What did Roger Sherman or Elbridge Gerry think, or the other New Englanders with their not so ancient heritage of witchcraft? And what did Philadelphians, other than newspaper correspondents and facetious judges, think? Again, the record is silent. The attacks on Korbmacher and her death passed unnoticed in the diaries and letters that have thus far come to light.

That fact may itself suggest something—namely, that the episode did not seem as bizarre to people of the time as it does to us. The year 1787 was less than a century from 1692. It is worth reminding ourselves that Benjamin Franklin once spoke with Cotton Mather. He and the other fifty-four men who labored in the State House that summer may have been working against greater odds than we have realized. Superstition dies hard, and witch hunts have generally proceeded from the bottom up. Even the Spanish Inquisition was less ardent in pursuing witches than popular demand would have had it be. The members of the Constitutional Convention have often been taken to task by historians for their seeming distrust of the people. And although that distrust has been greatly exaggerated, and although it affected some members much more than others, it was real. It shocks us a little, as we read Madison's notes of what his colleagues said, to find them at the very outset of the Convention fearful of an “excess of democracy,” worried that the people “are constantly liable to be misled.” If, however, we bear in mind the actions of this particular mob (will anyone insist on calling it a “crowd”?) on the very doorsteps of the Convention, we may perhaps take a more charitable view of the bias recorded in Madison's journal. Enlightenment still had, and has, a long way to go.

—1983

C
HRIST SAID THAT
his kingdom was not of this world and embodied the message in his other teachings. His followers have nevertheless had to live in the world, trying in spite of his warning to bring it under his dominion or else bending his precepts almost beyond recognition in order to fit them to the ways of the world. Over the centuries Christianity has vibrated uneasily between what its founder prescribed and what the world demands. When the church becomes too fat and comfortable with the world, the contrast between the medium and the message will always prompt some prophet to summon true believers out of so unchristian an institution and into a way of life and worship that will more closely resemble Christ's. We may call them protesters, but in the course of time they become Protestants, with a capital
P
, against whom new prophets must in turn raise the flag of protest.

When William Penn was born, in 1644, England was filled with prophets, each with his own version of what the Christian life entailed. The Church of England, which had been Protestant with a capital
P
from its inception, was under challenge not only by Presbyterians and Congregationalists but by a host of more radical visionaries, many of whom thought that Christ's kingdom was shortly to commence, not by subduing the world, but by putting an end to it: Antinomians, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchists, Anabaptists, Seekers, and so on. Penn's father and mother were none of these. They were genteel Protestants, good Church of England folk, but perhaps with some sympathy for Presbyterianism or Congregationalism. The father, also named William, certainly had no scruples about working for a government run by a Congregationalist, for he made a brilliant career in Oliver Cromwell's navy, before bringing himself to disgrace in an unsuccessful expedition against the Spanish in the Caribbean. But he also had no scruples about working for Charles II. When Charles returned to the throne in 1660, he restored Penn to his command as admiral and to a handsome living from lands in Ireland that had been confiscated from their Catholic owners. The elder Penn had reason to be content with a world that had served him well.

His son was cut from another cloth. From an early age, at least from his early teens, William Penn was preoccupied with religion to an extent that his parents found disconcerting in a young gentleman with a career in the highest places before him. They wanted him to have all the advantages that his father's position entitled him to. They saw to it that he met all the right people, that he learned all the social graces. And indeed it all came easy to him. He was lively, energetic, and quickwitted. People liked him, and he liked them, including apparently a lot of pretty girls. But he had this unseemly bent for religion and for pursuing accepted religious beliefs to unacceptable conclusions.

When he was sixteen, they packed him off to Oxford, where the learned clergymen with which the place abounded might be able to keep him on track. But he proved too hot to handle. In less than two years the learned clergy sent him back, expelled for his outspoken contempt for them and their church. In desperation his parents sent him on the grand tour of the Continent with other young gentlemen, in hopes that there he would get the spirit and the flesh sorted out into the right proportions. And though he spent some of his time in France studying theology, when he returned to London in 1664, not quite twenty, his religious zeal had momentarily abated. He was full of fashionable continental mannerisms, and he showed a proper appreciation for the sensual pleasures awaiting a young gentleman in Restoration London.

In London he attended Lincoln's Inn to learn the smattering of law appropriate to a gentleman of property; and he also attended at the King's Court, where his father was in high favor, especially with the Duke of York, the king's brother. The duke was in charge of naval affairs, with Sir William Penn, now knighted, as his leading admiral. The elder Penn, who could not have been more pleased with the way his son had seemingly turned out, introduced him to the duke, and the two quickly became friends. In 1666 Sir William sent the boy to Ireland to look after the family estates, and young William at once made friends among the Anglo-Irish nobility. But his career as proper young gentleman was short-lived. At Cork he met up with Thomas Loe, a Quaker preacher who had entranced him as a teenager ten years before. By the end of 1667, after a brief spell in an Irish jail, he was back in London, where Samuel Pepys, a clerk in the navy office, made that classic entry in his diary: “Mr. Will Pen, who is lately come over from Ireland, is a Quaker again, or some very melancholy thing.”

T
HE
P
ROPHET

He was indeed a Quaker, and for his father and mother it was indeed a melancholy thing. Quakerism appeared to be another of those visionary, fringe movements that the 1640s and 1650s had continued to spawn, and of them all it may have seemed the most offensive. Its members were not content to depart from established institutions; they seemed to enjoy dramatic confrontations with authority, in which they defied not only the established church and all its ways but also the customary forms of good behavior. They wore their hats in the presence of their superiors, right up to the king himself. They refused to address people by their proper titles: they would not even vouchsafe a Mr. before the names of their betters. Some of them appeared naked at local church services. And instead of meeting in secret, where the authorities could ignore their violation of the laws against dissenting religions, they insisted on making their meetings public, in effect daring the sheriffs and constables to arrest them, a dare that was often taken.

Their beliefs were as offensive as their conduct. They claimed what amounted to direct revelation from God—the inner light they called it—of the same kind that the apostles had had from Christ himself. The Holy Scriptures, therefore, on which the whole Protestant movement rested, were no more to them than an imperfect record of past revelations of people like themselves. They denied that Christ's sacrifice was sufficient in itself to bring redemption, but they thought that all men were capable of redemption, if they followed the inner light. Thus they denied the central Christian doctrines of atonement and predestination. They rejected not only all other churches and ministers, refusing to pay their tithes to the established church, but also all sacraments and sermons. Their only preaching came from those who claimed to be enunciating messages from on high via the inner light. And they rejected original sin, too, in its usual sense, for they claimed that with the assistance of the inner light they could completely free themselves from sin in their daily lives.

In espousing such beliefs, William Penn appeared to be repudiating his heritage, repudiating the society in which he had grown, repudiating his education, repudiating his class, repudiating his parents. And there can be no doubt that he thought he was doing so. His first important tract,
No Cross No Crown
, written in 1669 while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, had as its theme the conflict between the world and the cross, the import of its title being that no crown of eternal glory could be won without taking up the cross and undergoing the suffering and humiliation ever inflicted by the world on those who reject its ways.

There may have been something of adolescent, youthful rebellion in Penn's stance, but it persisted throughout his life in a posture of no compromise with the world. In counseling other adherents to the cause, he continually admonished them that they should “Keep out of base Bargainings or Conniving at fleshly Evasions of the Cross,” that they should avoid “Reasonings with Opposers,” lest the purity of their commitment be sullied.

This last piece of advice was one that Penn was never able to follow himself, for Penn, in spite of being a likable person, had a contentious streak that impelled him not only to reason with opposers but even to denounce them. Although the Quakers officially professed an aversion to controversy, Penn took it upon himself (with the blessing of other Quaker leaders) to defend them against all comers and especially against the Church of England and the more respectable dissenters of Presbyterian or Congregational persuasion. Nearly all his voluminous writings are polemical. In a three-year span alone, from 1672 to 1674, he published twenty-two tracts, several of them lengthy, in which he went on the attack with no holds barred.

When one critic disclosed in a preface that he was sixty years of age, Penn, then at the ripe age of twenty-seven, mocked the man's “decrepit” reasoning and rang the changes on the fact “that any Man should live so long, and to so little Purpose.” To Richard Baxter, perhaps the foremost dissenting divine of the Restoration period, he announced, “Scurvy of the minde is thy distemper; I feare its Incurable.” He was fond of proclaiming his own moderate spirit as enjoined by his faith, but even in doing so he could not resist a jab at his opponents, as when in an answer to one critic he began by saying, “I would give the Worst of Men their Due,” and then added, “I justly esteem him of that Number.”

In a running controversy with John Faldo, an Anglican minister, he addressed Faldo successively as Whistling Priest, Busie Priest, ungodly Priest, cavilling Priest, rude priest, ignorant priest, and told his readers,

This diatribe was not mere youthful exuberance. In one of his last tracts, written when he was fifty-four, he described his opponent as a “snake-in-the-grass” and then specified what kind, a rattlesnake.

Penn coupled his unrelenting hostility to conventional Christians with an anti-intellectualism that attributed the whole apparatus of Christian theology and ecclesiastical institutions, both Catholic and Protestant, to the pursuit of forbidden knowledge that had caused the expulsion from paradise. It was one of the marks of purity in the early followers of Christ, Penn thought, that “for the first Hundred Years, scarce an Eminent Scholar was to be found amongst the
Christians.
”

In his first publication he warned against “Extollers of Humane Learning,” and throughout his life in offering advice to the godly he warned them against “that Thirsting Spirit after much Head-Knowledge,” which would only clog the passages to truth that lay within them. “My Friends,” he would write, “disquiet not your Selves to comprehend Divine Things, for they that do so are of the Flesh.”

Those who claim direct access to divinity, whether they call it the inner light or the oversoul or by any other name, have always discounted the learning to be had from books, though they often, like Penn, couch their antibook message in books of their own (Penn's bibliography runs to over 130 titles). Penn from the time of his conversion professed to be wary of books. Solitude and silence, not books, he thought, were the way to reach the Spirit. In his final testimony of advice to his children, he cautioned them that “reading many Books is but a taking off the Mind too much from Meditation…. much reading is an Oppression of the Mind, and extinguishes the natural Candle; which is the Reason of so many senseless Scholars in the World.”

The senseless scholars he had encountered personally in his stay at Oxford, and his impatience with human learning rose to a climax whenever he considered what went on in universities, those places of “Folly, Ignorance, and Impiety,” which “infect the whole Land with Debauchery, and at best Persecution, and anti-Christian clumsy-witted Pedants, and useless pragmaticks.” The universities were simply the last stop in the long line of degeneration from the simple truth of Christ and the prophets. God's message had been lost in “the obscure, unintelligible and unprofitable
Metaphysicks
of the
Heathen
, too greedily received and mischievously increased by
Fathers, Councils, School-Men
and our modern
Universities
, to the corrupting of Christian Doctrine, and disputing away the Benefit of Christian life.” He was not against secular learning that devoted itself to secular things, to “Building, Improvement of Land, Medicine, Chirurgery, Traffick, Navigation, History, Government.” But when brought to bear on religion, human learning was only a block to the true knowledge that came from within.

Penn's hostility to universities extended to the ministers trained there. Their objective, he claimed, was only to make a living out of religion, and their ministry was unavailing because they relied on book learning instead of the inner light. Penn thought of himself as a minister, unpaid and unordained but called, like all true ministers, directly by God. He advised others like him,