Location

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania occupied a central position in colonial and founding history because it combined plural society, commercial wealth, print culture, and political experimentation more completely than almost any other colony. William Penn had founded the province on principles of religious toleration and ordered liberty, and by the eighteenth century Philadelphia had become the largest city in British North America and the intellectual center of much of the revolutionary generation. Benjamin Franklin, James Wilson, Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Mifflin, and Benjamin Rush all worked within Pennsylvania's political world, helping to shape debate over independence, constitutional design, and the meaning of republican citizenship. The province and state also contained deep disagreements, from the radical Pennsylvania constitution of 1776 to disputes over executive power and balanced government that fed directly into the national convention. In the 1790s western Pennsylvania became the scene of the Whiskey Rebellion, where Washington and Hamilton tested whether the new federal government could enforce its laws without collapsing into the impotence that had plagued the Articles of Confederation. Pennsylvania mattered to constitutional history because it was not merely the home of Philadelphia; it was one of the principal places where Americans worked out what liberty, representation, and federal authority would mean in practice once independence had been won.