Province of Pennsylvania

The Province of Pennsylvania, also called the Pennsylvania Colony, was a British colony on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard of North America. It was founded for the Quaker religious thinker William Penn, who received the land through a 1681 grant from Charles II. The charter was issued in 1681 with the stated aim of enlarging the English Empire and bringing the indigenous peoples to Christianity 'by gentle and just manners'. Penn obtained unusually broad powers of administration and used them to build a 'Holy experiment' based on religious toleration, liberal property rights, free trade with Native Americans and a representative assembly. Philadelphia, the colony's capital, was founded shortly upstream on the Delaware and grew into one of the most important ports in British America. Settlers spread westward from the Delaware valley, and by the American Revolution in 1776 Pennsylvania's borders extended across the Appalachian mountains. In that year the province became the independent Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia later served as the meeting place of the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention.