Province of Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania is a province of the United Kingdom of America of about 13 million people, lying between the Lower Counties on the Delaware and the Atlantic provinces on one side and the Ohio country on the other, and divided down its length by the Appalachian ridges. It is the third most populous polity of the Realm and returns seventeen members to the House of Commons, and no ministry has been formed in a century without it.

It is the province the Realm was argued out in. The negotiation at Philadelphia that followed the Four-Year War sat here from 1779, the final text of the Charter of Union was adopted in the Pennsylvania State House in June 1783, and Parliament itself sat at Philadelphia from 1785 until 1801, because New Westminster did not yet exist. The Realm’s first Prime Minister, Benjamin Franklin, was a Philadelphian. Its thirty-sixth, Thomas Markham, was an auditor from Erie who died in office in 2025.

It is also the province that paid for the Realm’s industrial century and was not thanked for it. Its anthracite heated the eastern cities, its bituminous coal and coke made the steel, its railway was the greatest corporation of its age, and the valleys that produced all three lost their industries within a generation and have not replaced them. What crosses Pennsylvania now is other people’s freight.

Its record is the Realm’s in miniature and in full view. The Holy Experiment of its founder is answered by a land fraud and a massacre, neither of them punished. Its abolition statute freed nobody then living. Its private company police shot strikers under provincial licence for fifty years. Its largest city dropped a bomb on its own street in 1985. And at Kittanning, a federal ordnance works poisoned a town’s water, the Ministry of Defence closed the wells in 1981 without telling anybody, and over four hundred people died before a weekly newspaper with three reporters broke it in 1998.

The name

Pennsylvania is Penn’s woods, and it was not William Penn’s idea. The name was fixed by the Crown in the charter of 1681 in honour of his father the admiral, and Penn, a Quaker who disliked the appearance of vanity, tried to have it changed and was refused. The province has been named after a man who did not want it named after him for three and a half centuries.

Its nickname is the Keystone Province, from the stone at the centre of an arch that holds the others in place, and the claim behind it is partly geographic, partly historical and partly a boast about its seventeen seats. The province uses it constantly. Its neighbours point out, accurately, that a keystone bears load rather than choosing direction.

The demonym is Pennsylvanian, and beneath it the province is a set of regional identities that do not much like being aggregated: people from the west say western Pennsylvania before they say anything else, the north-east says the coal region, and the south-east often just says Philadelphia.

History

The nations before, and what became of them

The country was held by the Lenape along the Delaware and its creeks, the Susquehannock on the great river that carries their name, the Shawnee in the west and south, the Munsee in the north, and, over all of them from the middle of the seventeenth century, the confederated Iroquois nations to the north, whose diplomacy governed who might live in the Susquehanna valley and on what terms.

There is no treaty nation in Pennsylvania today, and the article states the reason rather than letting the absence pass. The Susquehannock were destroyed by war and epidemic within a lifetime of contact. The Lenape were defrauded of the Delaware valley, pushed to the Susquehanna, pushed again to the Ohio, and removed west of the Mississippi altogether in the nineteenth century. The Shawnee went the same way. The Iroquois nations retained their country to the north, in what is now another polity and in New Albion. A province founded on the promise of fair dealing with its neighbours has no neighbour left to deal with, and the reason is that the dealing was not fair.

Penn’s Holy Experiment

William Penn received the proprietary in 1681 in settlement of a Crown debt to his father, and did something with it that nobody else in the English colonies attempted at that scale. The Holy Experiment was a colony of religious liberty: no established church, no religious test for office, liberty of conscience written into the frame of government, an assembly with real power, and a settled policy of buying land from the Lenape rather than taking it.

It worked well enough to be worth defending. Pennsylvania drew Quakers, German Lutherans, Reformed, Mennonites, Amish, Moravians, Schwenkfelders, Huguenots, Scots-Irish Presbyterians and, by the eighteenth century, more religious variety than any comparable ground in the English-speaking world. Philadelphia became the largest city in the colonies, the centre of its printing, its medicine and its science.

Penn’s own dealings with the Lenape were, by the standard of his century, honourable, and the province has never stopped saying so. What the province says less often is what his sons did.

The Walking Purchase and the Paxton men

In 1737 the proprietors produced a deed, probably forged and certainly never executed by anybody with authority to execute it, by which the Lenape were said to have sold as much land as a man could walk in a day and a half. The proprietors then cleared a path in advance, hired the three fastest runners in the province, and took more than a million acres. The Lenape protested, appealed to the Iroquois as their nominal overlords, and were told to move. It is the founding fraud of the province and it was done by the founder’s sons within a generation of the founder’s death.

In the winter of 1763, frontier settlers from the Paxton country murdered the last Conestoga people, first in their village and then, days later, in the workhouse at Lancaster where the magistrates had put the survivors for protection. Nobody was ever convicted. The Paxton men marched on Philadelphia to demand a bounty system and were met by a delegation that included Franklin, who talked them into going home. He also wrote the pamphlet that is the best contemporary account of what they had done, and the province’s failure to punish it.

These two facts are the answer to the Holy Experiment, and the province’s own historians make the answer rather than dodging it: the experiment was real, it was better than what surrounded it, and it did not survive contact with a second generation of proprietors and a frontier that the province would not police.

The Four-Year War

Pennsylvania entered the war of 1775 to 1779 more divided than almost any other colony, because it contained the largest pacifist population in the Americas and the most radical popular movement. Quakers would not fight and were punished by both sides for it. The German farming counties wanted to be left alone. Philadelphia’s mechanics and militia were the most advanced democratic force in the colonies, and the province’s own government was overturned by them in 1776 in favour of a constitution with a single chamber, annual elections, and no governor at all.

The war was fought across the province. Philadelphia was occupied and evacuated; the army wintered in the hills west of it and lost a quarter of its strength to cold and disease without a battle; the frontier burned in a war between settlers and the Iroquois nations that the Congress answered with a campaign of destruction against Iroquois towns.

When the fighting ended, Pennsylvania was the obvious ground for the settlement, being central, populous, and, in Philadelphia, in possession of the only building on the continent that had been used to argue about the continent.

The negotiation, and the Charter

The Philadelphia negotiations ran from 1779 to 1783 under provisional congressional government, in and around the Pennsylvania State House, and the final text of the Charter of Union was adopted there on 21 June 1783.

It was signed at Boston, in the Old State House, on 4 July 1783, because the Peace had been signed there in 1779 and the Realm wanted the two instruments in the same room.

Pennsylvania’s attitude to this is not resentment and never has been. The province treats the negotiation as the achievement and the signing as the ceremony: four years of argument, committee by committee, in its own building, produced the Realm, and a day of signatures in another polity’s chamber did not. The State House is the province’s proudest possession and nobody here has ever wanted it to be a place where a document was merely signed.

Parliament at Philadelphia

From 1785 to 1801 the Parliament of the United Kingdom of America sat at Philadelphia, and the province was the seat of the Realm. That period has its own section below, because it is the largest single fact in Pennsylvania’s history and the one the Realm forgets.

The Crown Assumption of 1790

In 1790 the Penn family surrendered its proprietary authority and Pennsylvania became a Crown province governed under the Realm’s constitution rather than under a family’s grant.

The same instrument settled the position of the Lower Counties on the Delaware, whose first draft it had proposed to merge into Pennsylvania and which, after nine days of an assembly sitting without adjourning at New Castle, it did not. The two polities have shared a Lieutenant-Governor ever since, in two capacities and under two seals, which is treated below.

For Pennsylvania the Assumption was less dramatic than for its smaller neighbour: it removed a proprietor whose practical power had been broken by the war, confirmed the Assembly, and converted a private relationship into a public one. The province’s inheritance from Penn is the constitutional temperament, not the land titles.

Abolition, escape and the riots

Pennsylvania passed an act for the gradual abolition of slavery early, and its effect must be stated exactly, because the province has spent two centuries rounding it up. It freed nobody then living. It provided that children born to enslaved mothers after its passage would serve until their late twenties, registered the existing enslaved population as property, and left the institution to die out over sixty years. People were still held in bondage in this province in the nineteenth century under a statute that the province quotes as proof of its conscience.

What the province did better was refuse to help anybody else. Pennsylvania’s Quaker meetings and free Black congregations organised the most effective escape routes in the Realm; its courts were hostile to recaptures; and its statutes forbade provincial constables and gaols to be used in the retaking of people claimed as fugitives, which made this province the practical northern boundary of slavery.

In 1851 a slaveholder came to a farm in the south of the province to reclaim four men, and was killed by the Black community that gathered to defend them. The federal prosecution that followed, for levying war against the Realm, ended in acquittals, and it remains the case the province is proudest of.

And the other side of the same decades: Philadelphia’s free Black population, the largest in the Realm, was attacked by white mobs repeatedly. A hall built by subscription for abolition meetings was burned by a mob within days of its opening, and the city’s authorities blamed the abolitionists for provoking it. The province that would not lend its constables to a slaveholder would not protect a meeting house in its own largest city.

Nativism, 1844

In 1844 Philadelphia’s nativist riots burned two Catholic churches, a seminary and a quarter of a block of Irish houses, and were ended only by militia firing on crowds with cannon. A province founded on religious toleration burned churches over religion within a hundred and sixty years of its founding. The article states it in exactly that way because no softer statement is true.

Coal, iron and the private armies

The province’s industrial century ran on anthracite in the north-east and bituminous coal and coke in the west, and it produced, along with the wealth, the most violent labour history in the Realm.

The coal and iron police were the defining institution: a private force, raised, paid and directed by the companies, commissioned with public powers by the province on payment of a fee per man. They policed company towns, company houses and company stores, and for fifty years the province’s answer to the question of who governed the coal regions was that the companies did, with a warrant.

In the 1870s a secret organisation among Irish miners was broken by a prosecution built on the evidence of an informer employed by a railway company, and twenty men were hanged. The trials were conducted by company lawyers as private prosecutors before juries from which Irish Catholics were excluded. The province pardoned one of them posthumously a century later, which its own courts described as the least that could be done and less than was required.

In the 1890s a steel company at a river town locked out its men, shipped in a private army by barge, and lost a day-long battle to the town. The province then sent the militia, which did not fight the town and did not need to: the works reopened, the union was broken, and the arrangement the strike had been about was not restored for forty years.

The one bright thread is the anthracite strike at the turn of the century, which stopped the Realm’s coal in the middle of a winter and was ended by the Crown’s own intervention when the ministry compelled the owners to submit to arbitration. That settlement is the origin of the Realm’s industrial arbitration machinery, and it was made necessary by this province’s owners and possible by this province’s miners.

The Civil War

The war of 1861 to 1863 was fought on Pennsylvanian farmland at its turning point, in three days of July that ended the last northern invasion. The field is the Realm’s greatest war cemetery and its most visited ground.

The province was also raided: a town in the south was burned to the ground for refusing a ransom, and the southern counties lived for two summers with the expectation of cavalry. The war is therefore a local memory here and not only a national one, and the province furnished more men to it, in proportion, than any polity north of the line except one.

Railways, steel and the corporation

The Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest corporation in the Realm for the better part of a century, with more employees than the Realm’s army, its own police, its own hospitals, its own pension funds and a lobby at Harrisburg that was for thirty years the effective second chamber of a province that had abolished its first. The reforming constitutional settlement of the 1870s was written against it and did not contain it.

Steel followed the coke, and the river valleys of the west made more of it than any comparable ground on earth. The province’s own account of the period is that it built the Realm: its rails, its bridges, its ships, its cities’ frames, the guns of two great wars.

The dam, the smog and the fire

Three disasters belong to the same industrial world and are in the article for the same reason.

In 1889 a dam above a steel town failed and destroyed it, killing more than two thousand people in an afternoon. The dam belonged to a private club of rich men who had bought it for fishing, lowered it to carry a carriage road and screened its spillway to keep the fish in. No court ever held any of them liable.

In 1948 a temperature inversion held the smoke of a mill town against the valley floor for five days and killed dozens of people, with thousands more ill. That produced the Realm’s first clean air legislation and, eventually, the recovery of two cities that had been unbreathable within living memory.

In the 1960s a fire started in a coal seam beneath a north-eastern borough and has not gone out. The borough was bought out and abandoned over three decades, its streets are grass, and the fire is expected to burn for another century.

Deindustrialisation

The coal went first, then the railway, then the steel. The anthracite region was in decline by the 1920s and finished by the 1950s. The Pennsylvania Railroad collapsed in the second half of the twentieth century in the largest corporate failure the Realm had then seen. The steel valleys lost their mills in the 1970s and 1980s, and the towns lost a third to a half of their people.

What the province learned from it is the thing that made Thomas Markham’s politics: that a place can pay for a Realm’s prosperity and be handed the bill for its own decline.

The modern province

The province of the present century is a polity of two recovering cities and a great deal of country that has not recovered, living on medicine and universities, on gas under its western and northern counties, on the warehouses of an eastern Realm that must cross it, and on the farms of the German counties. Its politics is the argument between those things, conducted in a chamber of two hundred and three members.

The capital that left

For sixteen years Pennsylvania was the seat of the United Kingdom of America. Parliament sat at Philadelphia from 1785 until 1801, because the capital on the Columbia had been agreed and not yet built, and the city that had housed the Congress and the negotiation housed the Realm.

What it meant

It meant everything that a capital means. The ministries were here in rented houses. The Commons sat in a chamber of the State House and the Lords in a building across the square. The Realm’s first Prime Minister, Benjamin Franklin, formed his ministry here in 1785 at the age of seventy-nine, and his three successors governed from here.

Around Parliament grew the trades that follow one: the printers who published the statutes and the debates, the law publishers whose reports are still cited, the booksellers, the bankers who lent to a new Treasury, the coffee houses where the factions met. The Realm’s oldest learned institutions, its first hospital, its first medical school, its scientific society and its first national bank were either founded here in that period or became national because the Realm’s government was in the room.

The campaign, and the loss

The province campaigned to keep it. Pennsylvania’s members argued that a capital already built, already housing the Realm’s institutions and already the largest city in it, should not be abandoned for a scheme on a swamp; that the cost of building a capital was a tax on the whole Realm for the convenience of two southern polities; and that Parliament’s business was being conducted perfectly well where it sat.

They lost, and they lost partly by their own doing. The removal had been temporary in law from the start, part of the bargain that had allowed the Charter’s financial settlement to pass, and when the question was reopened Pennsylvania’s own members were divided, some of them holding to the original bargain because the province had gained by it. The vote was close. The Commons preferred a capital owned by nobody, which was exactly the argument the Charter had been written to serve.

Parliament rose at Philadelphia for the last time in 1801 and assembled at New Westminster in the same year.

The wound

This is the founding wound of Pennsylvania’s politics, and it explains a tone that visitors to the province find hard to place: a settled conviction of having been central, and a settled suspicion of a capital built to be nobody’s. Pennsylvania’s members at New Westminster are, by reputation, the most parochial in the Realm and the most effective at supply, and the province’s own explanation for both is that it once kept the government in its own city and has been negotiating with somebody else’s ever since.

The State House now

The Pennsylvania State House is a federal property, transferred to the Realm in the nineteenth century and maintained as the museum of the negotiation. The province retains a reserved right written into the transfer: the General Assembly sits there once a year, in a ceremonial sitting on the anniversary of the adoption of the Charter’s text, does a single item of formal business, and adjourns to Harrisburg. The Realm pays for the building and the province keeps the key to one day of it, which is the sort of arrangement this province considers a victory.

Kittanning

At Kittanning, in the west of the province, a federal ordnance works poisoned the town’s water and the Ministry of Defence concealed it for twenty-seven years. The Ministry of Defence article sets out what the department knew and when. This article states what it did to a Pennsylvania town, because the town was in Pennsylvania and the province failed it too.

The town

The Kittanning Works has been a federal ordnance establishment since the First Great War. It was the town’s largest employer for four generations, its married quarters were part of the town, and it drew its water, as the town did, from the same aquifer.

From the 1950s the works disposed of its solvent and propellant residues on the site. By the 1960s they were in the groundwater. The wells served the works, the quarters and part of the town.

What was done to it

The Ministry established the contamination in 1971, surveyed it three times, and was told in 1979 that not less than eleven thousand people had been exposed for fifteen years or more, that the compounds were associated with cancers and with adverse outcomes of pregnancy, and that an excess of cases should be assumed to have begun already.

It closed the wells in 1981 without telling anybody. It did not notify the workers, the families in the quarters, the town, or the province. It refused a tracing study in 1983 and again in 1994, on written advice that a study would create a duty toward a class of people the department could not presently identify.

Over four hundred people died, on the most conservative estimate put before the courts, across four decades.

The province’s part

The province’s part in this is not concealment. It is credulity, and thirty years of asking the wrong questions.

Pennsylvania’s own environment ministry inspected the site periodically throughout the period, accepted the Ministry’s assurances that the matter was in hand, and did not test the municipal supply independently because a federal establishment was understood, by a settled practice nobody had ever written down, to be the Realm’s business rather than the province’s. When the town’s doctors raised the cluster in the 1980s, the provincial ministry passed the correspondence to the federal department and closed its file.

The Kittanning Sentinel broke it across eleven weeks in 1998, a weekly with a circulation under eleven thousand and a newsroom of three, after its reporter had read the county coroner’s findings every week for eleven years and seen the pattern.

What followed

Nobody was charged in either direction. Four ministries declined to prosecute the paper for paying a clerk for the surveys, on the assessment that no Pennsylvania jury would convict and that an acquittal would be worse than no trial; and no jury in this province would have acquitted the department either, which is why nothing was brought against it. The clerk who supplied the documents lost a pension and never got a trial.

Compensation came, late and partial, under a scheme that paid against medical records many families did not have for deaths that had occurred decades earlier.

The families built the memorial themselves, by subscription, on ground the borough gave. The reading of the names, which began as a protest of about forty people outside the works’ gate, is now an annual observance that ministers of the Realm attend and at which they are not invited to speak.

The town halved. Nobody would buy a house on the affected side of it, and the people who could leave did.

What it changed in the province

Two things, and one of them is large.

The province no longer defers to federal installations. Every federal establishment in Pennsylvania is now subject to provincial environmental audit as of right, under legislation passed in the years after the disclosure and litigated to the Realm’s Supreme Court, which upheld it. The province tests its own water, at its own cost, and publishes.

And the province’s own environment ministry has never recovered its standing. It is, by every measure anybody takes, the least trusted public body in Pennsylvania, and it deserves the position it is in. A department that accepted assurances for thirty years about a poisoning it could have detected with a sampling van cannot easily ask to be believed about anything else.

The environmental rights clause in the province’s constitution, an enforceable right to clean air, pure water and the preservation of the province’s natural values, was adopted in the years after Kittanning, and is the province’s answer to what was done to it. What it has done since is treated under Constitutional system.

Geography

Pennsylvania is a rectangle of about 119,000 square kilometres crossed diagonally by the Appalachian ridges, with the Atlantic drainage on one side, the Ohio and the Mississippi drainage on the other, and Lake Erie touching its north-western corner.

The five regions

Philadelphia and the south-east. The city, its suburbs and the rich limestone farmland beyond them: about a third of the province’s people, most of its money, its medical and university economy, and the politics that the rest of the province defines itself against.

The Dutch country and the central valleys. Lancaster, Berks, Lebanon and the long limestone valleys to the north and west: the best non-irrigated farmland in the Realm, the plain communities, the German-speaking farm culture, the market towns, and the capital at Harrisburg.

The anthracite north-east. Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and the hard-coal valleys: a landscape of culm banks, subsidence, abandoned collieries, and towns built for twice the people they now hold. The province’s poorest region by most measures and the one with the longest memory.

The Wilds and the northern tier. The forested plateau across the north: the emptiest country in the eastern Realm, state forest and game land, elk, second-growth timber on ground logged bare a century ago, and gas wells among the trees.

The west. Pittsburgh at the forks of the Ohio, the steel valleys around it, and the farming and coal country out to the Ohio line: industrial in memory, medical and academic in fact, and permanently convinced that the province is run from the wrong end of it.

The mountains and the rivers

The ridge and valley country through the middle of the province is the reason Pennsylvania is five places rather than one: parallel ridges running north-east to south-west, crossed by water gaps, which made every east-west route an engineering problem and every north-south valley a separate world.

The Delaware forms the eastern boundary. The Susquehanna, the longest river on the eastern seaboard and one of the shallowest, drains the middle of the province to the Chesapeake. The Allegheny and the Monongahela meet at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio, which is why the west faces west.

Climate

Continental and four-seasoned, colder and snowier in the north and west, milder in the south-east. The lake effect buries Erie. The province floods: the Susquehanna’s valley has been inundated repeatedly, most destructively by a tropical storm in the 1970s that put the anthracite cities under water and accelerated their decline.

Constitutional system

The Crown in right of Pennsylvania

The province holds its property, makes its contracts and conducts its litigation in the Crown in right of Pennsylvania, which is a separate legal person from the Crown in right of the Realm and from the Crown in right of the Lower Counties, notwithstanding that one human being represents two of them.

The Lieutenant-Governor

The Crown’s representative is the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties on the Delaware, acting in right of Pennsylvania when acting here. Theodore Rittenhouse has held the office since 2019.

In right of Pennsylvania the Lieutenant-Governor assents to bills of the General Assembly, commissions the Premier, opens and dissolves the Assembly, and holds the reserve powers. The appointment is made on the advice of both ministries, which has twice in two centuries produced a vacancy while two Premiers failed to agree.

The shared office is a convenience of 1790 that has survived because neither polity has found a reason to end it that outweighs the argument it would start. For Pennsylvania it is a small and constant reminder of an older, larger self; for the Lower Counties it is a daily constitutional exercise. The Delaware Blur, the phrase used in both polities when somebody implies that the smaller province is part of the larger, is answered from Dover in writing whenever it appears in print, and the answer is always accepted.

The Premier

The Premier of Pennsylvania is the head of government, commissioned as the member able to command the Assembly. The Ministry is large by provincial standards, twenty-two members, because a province of thirteen million with counties, boroughs and townships of its own generates an extraordinary amount of administration.

Katherine Bittner (CCU) has been Premier since 2023. She is from the centre of the province, sat for a valley seat for a decade, and was elected on the suburbs and the small towns rather than on either city. Her ministry is occupied with the shale levy, a school funding settlement the courts have twice found inadequate, the province’s audit powers over federal installations, and a running quarrel with Philadelphia about the city’s ordinances.

The General Assembly

The General Assembly of Pennsylvania is unicameral, of 203 members elected from single-member districts for four-year terms, and is the largest legislative chamber of any polity in the Realm.

It has never had an upper house. Penn’s frame of government provided a single assembly, the radical constitution of 1776 confirmed it, and every subsequent proposal for a second chamber, of which there have been five, has been defeated. The province’s argument against one has not changed in three centuries: a second chamber in a polity that is not a federation is a delay mechanism owned by whoever has the money to work it, and this province has had ample experience of who that is.

A chamber of 203 in a province of 13 million produces districts of about 64,000 people, which is the point. Pennsylvanian members are local to a degree that astonishes other polities’ legislators: they attend funerals, they are telephoned about potholes, and they are removed for neglecting either. The cost is a chamber that is slow, parochial, and easy for a determined lobby to work district by district, which is exactly how the railway worked it for thirty years and how the shale companies are accused of working it now.

The courts and the elected bench

Pennsylvania elects its judges on party labels, alone among the great polities of the Realm. Candidates for the provincial bench stand as party nominees, campaign, and raise money, and the province’s own bar association has campaigned against the system for fifty years without ever persuading the electorate to give up a vote.

The strongest argument against it was made in a north-eastern county, where two elected judges took payments from the owners of a private juvenile detention company and sent thousands of children into its custody, many of them without counsel, many for trivial matters. The convictions were quashed years later, wholesale, by order of the province’s Supreme Court. The judges went to prison. Nothing was changed about how judges are chosen.

The environmental rights clause

The province’s constitution guarantees, in terms enforceable in its courts, clean air, pure water and the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the environment, and declares those values the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come, held in trust by the province.

It was adopted after Kittanning and it has done two things. It has been used to strike down the province’s own attempt to take shale licensing away from the counties, which is the largest provincial judgment in a generation. And it is the constitutional basis of the audit powers over federal installations, because a province that holds its water in trust cannot be told that the water inside a federal fence is not its business.

Representation in the Realm

The province returns seventeen members to the House of Commons: four in Philadelphia, four in its suburbs and the south-east, three in the west around Pittsburgh, and six across the centre, the north-east and the northern tier.

Its two members of the House of Lords are returned by the General Assembly, not elected directly. By convention one comes from each side of the mountains. Direct election has been proposed three times, in the wave when the smaller eastern polities adopted it and twice since, and has been voted down three times, on the argument, which the Assembly makes without embarrassment, that the Assembly is perfectly capable of choosing two people.

Local government

Pennsylvania has more units of local government than any polity in the Realm and is not proud of it. Counties run courts, records, elections and human services. Beneath them are boroughs, townships and cities, of which there are more than two thousand five hundred, many of them serving a few hundred people, each with a council, a solicitor and a police arrangement.

Consolidation has been proposed by every Premier since the war and achieved by none. The province’s own commissions report, at intervals of about a decade, that its local government is fragmented, duplicative and expensive, and the province agrees and does nothing, because each of those two and a half thousand units is a set of people who vote.

The province and Philadelphia

The relationship between the Assembly and the province’s largest city is bad, and it is bad in a specific constitutional way: the Assembly pre-empts the city. Philadelphia’s ordinances on wages, firearms, tenancies and local taxation have been overridden, forbidden or capped by provincial statute, and the city’s power to raise its own revenue is limited by an Assembly in which it holds a fifth of the seats.

The city’s answer is that it is governed in part by members who campaign against it, whose constituents use its hospitals and its airport and its orchestra, and who describe it in their own districts as a place of danger and waste. The province’s answer is that the city has been governed badly for a century by its own people and that the Assembly’s restraints are what stands between it and insolvency. Both answers have evidence behind them and neither is offered in good faith.

The cities

Philadelphia

The largest city of the province and the fifth or sixth of the Realm, and the room the Realm was argued in. Its centre is the State House square and the grid Penn laid out, its river frontage is a working port and a line of refineries, and its economy is now medicine and learning: the Realm’s oldest hospital, its oldest medical school, Franklin’s university, and a cluster of research institutions that between them employ more people than anything the city ever manufactured.

It is also a poor city. Its poverty rate is among the highest of the Realm’s great cities, its schools have been under provincial supervision more than once, and the argument between the Philadelphia of the institutions and the Philadelphia of the row-house neighbourhoods has been running for a century without resolution.

In 1985 the city’s police dropped an explosive device from a helicopter onto a row house occupied by a radical group with whom the city had been in conflict for a decade. Eleven people died, five of them children. The fire was allowed to burn, and it destroyed sixty-one houses on two streets of a Black neighbourhood. The commission of inquiry called the decision unconscionable and the operation reckless, and nobody was prosecuted. The city apologised formally decades later. The families’ compensation took years, the rebuilt houses were built so badly that the city had to buy them back, and the remains of some of the dead were later found to have been kept for study in institutions without the families’ knowledge, which is the part of the story most Pennsylvanians still do not know.

Pittsburgh

At the forks of the Ohio, the city that made the Realm’s steel and now does not. Its mills employed a hundred thousand people in the middle of the last century and employ a fraction of that; what replaced them is hospitals, universities, robotics and software, on the same rivers, in some of the same buildings.

The air is the measure of the change. Pittsburgh was the city where street lights burned at noon and men carried a second shirt. The province’s clean air legislation came out of its valley and out of the smog that killed a mill town downstream, and the city that is now in every list of pleasant places to live is the same city, cleaned.

Its grievance is directional. Pittsburgh looks west and is governed from the east, sends its taxes across the mountains, and considers that the province’s tone, its accent and its assumptions are set in Philadelphia by people who have never crossed the ridges.

Harrisburg, Erie, Scranton, Allentown, Lancaster

Harrisburg is the capital because the province moved its government inland in the early nineteenth century, as settlement crossed the mountains, so that the west would not be governed from tidewater. Pennsylvanians give a second reason more often than the first: the province had been the Realm’s capital and wanted its own government out from under the Realm’s shadow, in a town of its own choosing rather than in the city where Parliament had sat.

Erie is the province’s only port on the lakes, its fourth city, a manufacturing town that lost much of its manufacturing, and the city of Thomas Markham, thirty-sixth Prime Minister of the Realm, whose politics came out of its municipal budget office.

Scranton and the anthracite cities built the Realm and were left with the holes. Their coal heated the eastern seaboard for three generations, their valleys subsided into the workings, and their populations are half what they were.

Allentown and the Lehigh valley made steel for the Realm’s bridges and now hold the warehouses that serve the whole eastern seaboard, which is the province’s industrial history in one substitution.

Lancaster is the market town of the Dutch country, one of the oldest inland cities in the Realm, and the place where the province’s agricultural wealth is counted.

Economy

Medicine and learning

The province’s largest employers are hospitals and universities, and this is now true of both cities at once. Philadelphia’s medical complex and Pittsburgh’s teaching hospitals are the two largest concentrations of clinical employment in the eastern Realm outside the capital, and the research money that follows them is the province’s most reliable income.

The province is candid, in its own economic statements, that this is a substitution rather than a recovery: the mills and the mines employed men without degrees at wages that bought houses, and the hospitals employ a smaller number of highly trained people and a larger number of poorly paid ones. The valleys did not get the hospitals.

Shale gas

The gas under the western and northern counties made the province an energy exporter again, and split every party in it down the middle. The LSDP is divided between its unions and its cities, the CCU between its farmers and its landowners, the Greens are united and small, and the AfR is the only party in the province with a simple position.

Three things are argued about. Water: what is pumped down, what comes back up, where it is disposed of, and who tests the wells. Since Kittanning nobody in this province accepts an operator’s assurance about groundwater, and the testing regime is the most intrusive in the Realm. Land: split estates, where one family owns the surface and another the minerals, which is the oldest grievance in the coal counties transposed. And money: the levy is paid to the counties rather than to the province, which is why the rural counties defend the industry and Harrisburg cannot tax it properly, and why every provincial budget for fifteen years has contained a failed attempt to change that.

Logistics

Pennsylvania is where the eastern Realm’s warehouses are, for the simple reason that everything crosses it. The interchange country along the turnpike and the Lehigh valley holds distribution centres by the hundred, serving a day’s drive that reaches a third of the Realm’s population.

It is employment, and the province’s own assessment of it is unsentimental: the work is hard, the wages are ordinary, the buildings are enormous, and a county that has traded coal for warehouses has traded a dangerous job that built a town for a safe one that does not.

Agriculture

The province is a first-rank agricultural polity, which surprises people who think of it as industrial. Dairy through the limestone counties, mushrooms in the south-east in quantities that supply most of the Realm, orchards on the ridges, poultry and hogs, and the plain communities’ farms, which are among the most productive small holdings anywhere.

Steel and manufacture

What remains of steel is speciality rather than tonnage: alloys, tool steel, and the particular grades that are worth making in a high-wage polity. The province also retains machine tools, rail equipment, pharmaceuticals and chemicals, and a food industry built on its own agriculture, including a chocolate town that is still a company town in everything but law.

Tourism

The battlefield, the State House, the Dutch country, the ski and resort country of the north-east, and the forests of the Wilds. The province is the Realm’s most visited polity for history, and the battlefield alone draws more visitors than the whole coast of the Lower Counties.

Transport

The turnpike was the Realm’s first long-distance motorway, driven through the ridges in the 1930s on the tunnels and grades of a railway that had been abandoned half-built fifty years earlier. Every subsequent motorway in the Realm descends from it, and the province still charges to use it.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was the greatest corporation of its age, and its collapse in the later twentieth century was the largest corporate failure the Realm had seen. The surviving passenger service on its eastern line is the busiest railway in the Realm; the freight lines through the mountains carry the coal and the containers; and the remains of its empire, in stations, tunnels and rights of way, are visible in every county it touched.

The port of Philadelphia and the refineries along the Delaware handle fruit, oil and containers. The crossing is the fact that governs everything else: the province lies between the Atlantic ports and the interior, its passes carry the Realm’s eastern freight, and its warehouse economy exists because of the ridges rather than in spite of them.

Demographics and society

The peoples

About 13 million people. The province’s layers are legible in its counties: English and Welsh Quakers in the south-east, Germans through the centre, Scots-Irish along the frontier and into the west, then the industrial migrations, Irish to the coal and the cities, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians to the mills and the mines, and Black Pennsylvanians, present since the seventeenth century and arriving in far greater numbers in the great migrations to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The newest arrivals are Hispanic communities in the cities and the mushroom country, and South and East Asian communities in the suburbs and the university towns.

Pennsylvania German

Pennsylvania German is the older and larger of the Realm’s two German vernaculars, older than Wisconsindeutsch by a century and a half, and spoken continuously in this province since the 1680s. It is the first language of the plain communities, is still spoken by farm families outside them, and survives in the province’s English in word order, vocabulary and intonation that outsiders mistake for error.

The Realm’s alliance with Germany made it ordinary. In countries where German was the language of an enemy, its speakers were pressed to give it up; here the province’s German counties sent men to fight beside German armies in two wars, and the language was never a liability. That is the single largest reason it is still spoken.

The plain communities

The province holds the largest concentration of plain communities in the Realm: Amish, Old Order Mennonite, Brethren and others, farming the best non-irrigated soil in the country.

Their position in law is a negotiated exemption rather than a granted one: schooling to the eighth grade and then apprenticeship on the family’s farm, exemption from military service in exchange for alternative service, exemption from the contributory pension and insurance schemes on the undertaking that their communities carry their own, and a settled arrangement about carriages, lighting and road use that is revisited whenever somebody is killed on a road.

The pressure on them now is economic. Land in the Dutch country is worth more for houses than for hay, tourism has made their farms a spectacle, and the children who want to farm cannot buy ground at the prices the suburbs will pay. The communities’ answer has been to move: there are now Pennsylvania Amish settlements in a dozen polities, founded by families priced out of the county their ancestors farmed for two centuries.

Religion

Quakers are few and disproportionate: a meeting in most old towns, a handful of members, and an influence on the province’s self-image, its schools, its prison reform and its peace politics out of all proportion to the numbers.

Catholic parishes built the civic life of the industrial cities and valleys, Irish first, then Italian, Polish, Slovak and Hungarian, each with its own church, often on the same street. They are closing and merging now, and the closure of a parish in a valley town is a bereavement of a specific kind: the last institution that was built by the people who worked there.

Black churches in both cities are political institutions as much as religious ones, as they are in most of the Realm, and in Philadelphia they are the oldest such institutions in the country.

Lutheran and Reformed country churches run through the German counties, often in pairs sharing a graveyard, and their records are the province’s genealogy.

The Church of America is the established church of the Realm and has never been the established church of this province, which had none and was founded on having none. Its old parishes in Philadelphia are among the oldest of the Church anywhere in the Realm, their vestry books run continuously from before the Union, and the diocese has furnished bishops to the Lords Spiritual for two centuries.

What it has never had here is primacy. In a province of Quakers, Germans, Scots-Irish Presbyterians and the largest Catholic population of any polity north of Maryland, the Church of America is one denomination among many with a disproportionate share of the civic furniture: the prayers at the opening of the Assembly, the memorial services, the chaplaincies. Pennsylvanians of every other confession regard this as harmless, which is the most that establishment achieves in a province that refused it from the beginning.

Education

Four institutions carry the province’s name in the Realm: the ancient university at Philadelphia founded by Franklin, the great land-grant university in the centre, the technical university at Pittsburgh, and an old Black college in the south-east, among the first founded anywhere in the Realm for Black students and still one of its most consequential.

School funding is the province’s longest-running legal argument. A system resting heavily on local property means that districts a few miles apart spend very different sums per child, the province’s courts have twice found the settlement inadequate, and the Assembly has twice produced a formula that improved it without fixing it.

Culture

Food is regional and argued about. The two cities conduct a permanent quarrel about a sandwich, which outsiders find tiresome and which is genuinely about the cities. The Dutch country eats pork and scrapple, sweet-and-sour vegetables and a weekly market tradition that is one of the province’s pleasures. The valleys eat pierogi, halushki and kielbasa, and the church halls that make them are the last functioning institutions in some towns.

Football matters here more than almost anywhere in the north, from the schools upward. A Friday fixture in a valley town is the civic event of the week, the province supplies coaches and players to the Realm out of proportion to its size, and its two professional clubs are followed with a seriousness that the rest of the Realm finds slightly alarming.

Hunting is universal outside the cities. The first day of deer season is a school holiday in a good part of the province, by long practice and in some districts by rule, and the province’s forests and game lands are managed as a public resource with more than a million licence holders.

Drink is sold by the province. Spirits and wine are retailed through provincial shops, a survival of temperance-era politics that everybody complains about, that every Premier for forty years has proposed to end, and that survives because the shops’ employees are organised, the revenue is large, and the province’s dry counties still vote.

Failings

The Walking Purchase and the Paxton men. The Holy Experiment was answered within a generation of its founder’s death by a land fraud of more than a million acres, executed on a forged deed by his sons, and by the murder of the last Conestoga people in a workhouse where the province had put them for safety. Nobody was punished for either. A modern claim arising from the purchase was dismissed by the province’s own courts on limitation grounds, which is worse than refusing it on the merits.

An abolition that freed nobody. The province’s gradual abolition act is quoted as proof of its conscience and freed not one person then living, registering the enslaved as property and providing for their children to serve into their late twenties. People were still held in bondage here in the nineteenth century.

The riots. Philadelphia’s white mobs attacked its free Black population repeatedly in the abolition decades, and a hall built for abolition meetings was burned within days of its opening while the authorities blamed the abolitionists. In 1844 the same city burned Catholic churches over religion and immigration, in a province founded on toleration.

The private armies. The coal and iron police were a private force with public powers, licensed by the province for a fee per man, and the province’s answer to who governed the coal regions was, for fifty years, the companies. Twenty Irish miners were hanged on the evidence of a company informer before juries from which their coreligionists were excluded. The militia was used to break what a private army could not.

The dam. A club of wealthy men lowered a dam and screened its spillway for fishing, and in 1889 it failed and destroyed a town, killing more than two thousand people. No court ever held any of them liable.

The bombing. In 1985 the city of Philadelphia dropped an explosive device on a house in a Black neighbourhood, killed eleven people including five children, and let the fire take sixty-one homes. The inquiry called it unconscionable, nobody was prosecuted, the rebuilt houses were so defective the city bought them back, and some of the dead were later found to have been retained for study without their families’ knowledge.

Kittanning. Over four hundred deaths across four decades, a federal department that arranged not to know, and a provincial government that accepted its assurances for thirty years and asked the wrong questions.

The children. Two elected judges of this province took money from a private detention company and sent thousands of children into its custody, many without counsel. The convictions were quashed wholesale, the judges imprisoned, and the method of choosing judges was not changed.

The valleys. The anthracite and steel country paid for the Realm’s industrial century and was handed the bill for its end: subsidence, culm banks, poisoned streams, abandoned workings, and towns built for twice the people who remain. The province’s own transition programmes have been, by its auditors’ account, too small and too late, in every decade in which they were tried.

Symbols

The flag is a dark blue field with a green stripe at the hoist for the woods the province is named for, charged at the centre with a gold keystone for the province’s place in the arch of the Realm. On the keystone is an open book, the Charter of Union, whose text was adopted in the State House at Philadelphia. Above the keystone is the Crown, for the Assumption of 1790 that made the province the Crown’s rather than a family’s. Along the bottom run blue and white waves for the three great rivers, the Delaware, the Susquehanna and the Ohio.

The province’s older banners carried the Penn arms, and their removal after 1790 was deliberate and is not regretted.

The motto is Ex multis una tabula, from many, one charter, which is both a statement about the Charter of Union and a claim about the province itself: Quakers, Germans, Scots-Irish, Irish, Italians, Poles and the rest under one frame of government. The Assembly adopted the Latin in place of an English version in the modern period, to match the practice of the older polities.

The province’s tree is the eastern hemlock, its stone is the anthracite it no longer mines in quantity, and its greatest ground is a federal battlefield it does not own.

Assessment

Pennsylvania is the Realm’s most consequential province and the one that has spent the longest time being crossed.

Its claim on the Realm is real and mostly historical. The Charter was argued out here, four years of it, committee by committee, in a building the province still keeps a key to one day of. Parliament sat here for sixteen years. The first Prime Minister was a Philadelphian and the thirty-sixth was an Erie auditor. The coal, the coke, the steel and the railway that made the Realm an industrial power came out of these valleys, and the men who cut and poured them are buried in towns that are now half empty.

Its record is not gentle, and the article has not made it gentle. The founder’s experiment was answered by his sons’ fraud. The abolition statute freed nobody. The company police shot strikers under a licence the province sold. A city bombed its own street. A federal department poisoned a town for thirty years while the province’s own inspectors took its word. Every one of those is a Pennsylvania failing and not merely a failing that happened in Pennsylvania.

What is genuinely admirable here is small-scale and durable: a single chamber that has resisted five attempts to give it a master, a constitutional right to clean water that the province wrote after somebody poisoned its own, an audit power over federal installations that no other polity has bothered to take, and a habit of local politics so granular that two hundred and three members can be reached by telephone about a pothole.

The open question is whether it is one polity at all. Philadelphia faces the Atlantic and Pittsburgh faces the Ohio; the coal region remembers an industry the Wilds never had; the Dutch country farms ground that has been in the same families since before the Realm existed; and the five regions agree on very little beyond hunting season and a dislike of being told what to do by the other four. The keystone was the province’s own metaphor and it was a good one while there was an arch: a Realm that needed a middle, a capital in its largest city, an industrial spine running through it. What the keystone holds together now, apart from a freight corridor and seventeen seats, is the thing Pennsylvanians argue about when they are honest, and they are honest about it more often than most polities are.

Chronology

See also

• Lower Counties on the Delaware
• Daily Life in Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties
• The Philadelphia Negotiations
• Charter of Union of the American Colonies
• Benjamin Franklin
• Thomas Markham
• Ministry of Defence
• Province of New Jersey
• Wisconsindeutsch
• Elections and Constituencies

Trivia

Categories

Polities & the Federation · Provinces · The Delaware Valley · Coal & Steel · The Charter of Union