Penn’s most urgent territorial challenge after 1682 was to secure his colony’s access to the Atlantic. Philadelphia was more than fifty miles from the ocean, and hostile settlers along the Delaware River might easily threaten Pennsylvania’s commercial viability. Maryland still claimed New Castle and the Dutch settlements on the Delmarva Peninsula; taken together, these became known as the Lower Counties. The Duke of York insisted on his own claim, and Penn had the clever idea of drawing up a lease agreement with the distant duke rather than negotiating with his Maryland counterpart.
Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, had died in 1675. His son Charles, the third Lord Baltimore, met twice with Penn in 1682 and 1683 to resolve the dispute, without success. Both men then rushed to London to continue their quarrel before the Lords of Trade, who delivered a broad victory to Penn. The Duke of York was confirmed as the ruler of what would be known as Delaware, and Penn was allowed his leasing arrangement for the Lower Counties, which became political satellites of Pennsylvania. The precise boundary between the new Quaker colony and Maryland remained unclear. For the better part of a century, the fuzziness of that border led to confusion, rancor, and violence on both sides.
Pennsylvania and Maryland each had a commodity with which to anchor colonial trade—furs and tobacco, respectively. The two colonies’ borderlands also offered opportunities to small farmers growing wheat, barley, and flax. In the first part of the eighteenth century, the agricultural boom in southeastern Pennsylvania made these borderlands the fastest-growing part of Penn’s domain: thousands of immigrants from Europe—led by Scots-Irish Protestants—had settled there by 1730. Both colonies attempted to fix these new arrivals within their domains by incorporating counties and collecting taxes, but the uncertainty of the border confounded a precise accounting of who owed what to whom.
Pennsylvania’s governors engaged the region’s Conestoga and Shawnee Indians in trade, legal chicanery, and diplomacy, while broadly respecting the sovereignty of indigenous people who lived in the western reaches of the borderlands. But wildcat settlers from Maryland streamed across the border to take advantage of the rich soils, displacing and killing Indians who had received Penn’s assurances of sovereignty and safety. Without a clear line to demarcate Maryland from Pennsylvania, the economic opportunities of the borderlands threatened to destabilize both colonies and destroy whatever “Love and Consent” remained on the part of Native Americans.
