The Penn family, pious Quakers, owned slaves. Sometimes, they promised to free their slaves when they died. They didn’t.
As Quakers and pacifists, the Penn family did not fight in the French & Indian War. They did not fight in the Revolutionary War. They did not fight in the War of 1812, the later war with Mexico, or the War Between the States. They did, however, sell goods used to fight those wars.
During this period of pious pacifism, the Penn’s private army waged war against settlers from Connecticut and other colonies. The Penns fought three Pennamite Wars to keep their fellow colonists our of their private preserve, Pennsylvania.
Many settlers from Germany, Ireland, Scotland, and England moved into Pennsylvania. Their votes were carefully gerrymandered to keep legislative control of Pennsylvania in the hands of Philadelphia’s Quakers. Philadelphia’s Quakers ran, and taxed, the state the way they wanted. Their power was based squarely upon the double Quaker hypocrisy of loving their fellow man while owning slaves and eschewing war while profiteering from it and hiring their own private army of mercenaries to burn, loot, kill, and pillage their enemies.
The City of Philadelphia still depends on looting the rest of Pennsylvania. It justifies what outsiders see as rank parasitism by proclaiming itself to be an invaluable center of moral and social values. In their minds, Philadelphia has become such a vitally important moral center as to be worthy of forced subsidization by the rest of Pennsylvania.
It is a hollow city, perhaps the hollowest city in the world, a gas balloon of puff and hype. So far, it’s working.
