III. among the more recent immigrants, that Pickering judged CHAPTER it expedient to withdraw for a season. During his absence, he had been chosen by the county of Luzerne a 1790. member of the Pennsylvania Convention for taking into consideration the new Federal Constitution, and, encouraged by this mark of confidence, he ventured, after the Convention was over, to return again and resume his duties as clerk of the county. But Franklin being still detained a prisoner, Pickering himself was presently seized in his bed and carried off into the woods, to be kept as a hostage for Franklin's safety. After a detention of nineteen days, the militia of the neighboring counties being called out, Pickering's captors became alarmed, and he was released. These disturbances in Luzerne, countenanced, it was believed, by the Connecticut members of the Susquehanna Company, had led to the suspension of the law confirming the old Connecticut titles, and, a few months before the meeting of the Constitutional Convention, to its total repeal After more April. than a year's imprisonment, the obstinacy of Franklin had yielded at last, and he had been released on a promise to make no more opposition to the authority of Pennsylvania. An indictment for high treason had been found against him at the first session of the Supreme Court held in Luzerne, but that indictment was never prosecuted. Pickering, elected to represent the county in the Constitutional Convention, put his hand in that capacity to the new Constitution. There was no more resistance to the jurisdiction of Pennsylvania, but the repeal of the confirming law left matters in a very feverish state. The question of title was thus thrown into the courts, and a ten years' litigation followed, but, from the combination among the settlers to maintain each other in possession, with very little fruit to the Pennsylvania CHAPTER claimants. The bitter feelings and strong prejudices III. thus created throughout the state against the New En1790. gland intruders, and hence against New England generally, were not without a powerful effect upon the politics of Pennsylvania, helping, among other things, to draw her off from her old New England connection, and to throw her into the political embrace of Virginia. Already the third state in point of population, indeed almost equal to Massachusetts in that respect, and destined soon to surpass her, with a central situation, genial climate, and fertile territory, communicating on the east with the Atlantic and on the west with the great valley of the Mississippi, and possessing in Philadelphia, lately the federal capital and again soon to become so, the largest and wealthiest city in the Union, Pennsylvania might have been expected to take a leading part in national politics. But from this she was disabled by several circumstances, of which the principal was the want of homogeneity and community of feeling among the various classes of her population. The Episcopalians, the Quakers, and the Presbyterians, the latter mostly of Scotch Irish origin, were kept apart by strong mutual antipathies, while the great body of the Germans, many of whom did not even speak the English language, formed a still more distinct class by themselves. Add to this those great differences in political sentiment which had sprung up in Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary war. A large portion of her inhabitants had been disaffected to the Revolution, while those who supported it had been divided into two very bitter and hostile parties, a state of things in strong contrast to the unanimity of feeling which had prevailed in Virginia and Massachusetts, and which had given to them that political leadership which they still retained. This unanimity, indeed, was soon a III. good deal broken in Massachusetts; but, being preserved CHAPTER in Virginia to a remarkable degree, it went far toward securing to that state the complete political ascendency 1790. to which she ultimately attained, and of which Pennsylvania served as but a passive instrument. In political consideration, apart from the mere number of her votes, that state long remained below even New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and South Carolina, an inferior position from which she has but very gradually and not yet entirely emerged. The political influence of the Quakers, once predominant, had disappeared before the Revolution, and they now labored also under the obloquy of having been disaffected or lukewarm toward that change. Yet they still strove, and not without success, to bring their own peculiar principles of trust in humanity and long-suffering patience to operate on the political institutions of the state. Their influence and efforts contributed not a little to the mitigation of the penal code, by restoring it to the state in which it had stood before the original Quaker enactments had been superseded by adopting the English law. To them also the state was indebted for that improved system of prison discipline then just beginning to be carried into practice, which has served for a study and a model, not to the sister states only, but to the most enlightened nations of Europe. Of their efforts on the subject of slavery and the slave trade, we have already seen something and shall see more. In another object which the Quakers had much at heart, they were not so successful. That object was the continued interdiction of theatrical entertainments, suspended throughout the states at the commencement of the Revolution, but which attempts were being made again to revive by that same company of actors which, CHAPTER in 1752, had first introduced into the North American III. colonies the regular performance of stage-plays. The 1790. company, of course, had undergone great changes, but it was still headed by Lewis Hallam, son of the original manager, and himself, though then a boy, one of the original theatrical emigrants to America. This company, in 1774, had theaters in New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, and Charleston. But the Continental Congress having passed a resolution recommending the discontinuance and discouragement of "shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments," "though strenuously urged by Governor Tryon and General Robertson to contravene the resolution" (so at least Hallam alleged, in a memorial to the Massachusetts Legislature), the company "determined to leave the Continent rather than offend the patriotic supporters of their country's freedom." They had sailed, accordingly, for Jamaica prior to the commencement of hostilities, "and in the torrid zone languished out ten tedious years," so says the memorial," consoling themselves with the pleasing anticipation of the glorious peace that was at length effected. During the whole distressful war they sympathized with their country, they drooped when she bled, they rejoiced when she triumphed. Reiterated applications were made to them by all the different commanders at New York, while the war continued, to return, accompanied with assurances of great encouragement and most flattering prospects of pecuniary advantages. But, though they were suffering great loss of property, and debilitating their constitutions in a burning climate, they scorned them all; they felt themselves Americans, and would not act in opposition to their country." Upon their return to the United States, and the reopening of their theaters in 1785 in Philadelphia and III. New York, these patriotic players had been received CHAPTER on the part of many with marked signs of aversion. Massachusetts had then lately re-enacted her old colonial 1790. statute prohibiting theatrical performances. A similar law was passed in Pennsylvania in 1786; and even South Carolina, by an act of the next year, had classed all persons representing publicly for hire "any play or entertainment of the stage" as vagrants, who might be required to give security for good behavior, or be committed to the county jail, and, at the option of the court, sold for a term not exceeding one year. An attempt to obtain a similar law in New York did not succeed. was at this inauspicious moment, in 1786, that the first American play ever performed on the stage was brought out at New York- The Contrast," a comedy by Royal Tyler, a young lawyer, afterward Chief Justice of Vermont, and whose story of the "Algerine Captives," designed to excite sympathy on behalf of the American citizens held in slavery by the Barbary pirates, had at one time no little celebrity. It The actors did not rest quiet under the legal restrictions thus imposed upon them. Their petition to the Pennsylvania Legislature, after the power had passed out of the hands of the Constitutionalists, had procured, in 1789, the repeal of the prohibitory act. Nor could the Quakers, though they made repeated efforts, ever again obtain its re-enactment. In 1790, Hallam presented to the Legislature of Massachusetts the memorial quoted above, asking leave to open a theater in Boston. This petition was rejected; but the next year the subject was brought before the town on the petition of several citizens, and a vote was passed in town meeting, instructing the Boston representatives to exert their influence with the General Court to obtain a repeal of the |