Chapter 14, Delaware Valley - Final Part Summary and Analysis

The author has begun to describe the Delaware Valley more in terms of the states that is also known for being today. He discusses how the law courts were arranged in Pennsylvania and how these relate to the Quaker beliefs about personal freedom. Here William Penn continues to loom large. This man clearly delineated three basic rights "for every Englishman." These are: 1) rights to your own lives & estates (properties including land); 2) representative government; and 3) trial by jury. David Hackett Fischer explains that the legislators of Pennsylvania took such rights much further than they had ever been taken in England. These people created more liberty, through their laws, than the law-makers of the other colonies.

During the 1600s, slavery was legal in the colony of Pennsylvania. What occurred here, however, was that...