William Penn had become a Quaker in 1666, and suffered imprisonment for his beliefs, and he was determined to create a 'tolerant settlement' for Quakers and other persecuted sects from all over Europe. He called it his 'Holy Experiment.'
It was natural for Philadelphia to become, in a very short time, the cultural capital of America. Quaker Pennsylvania was the last great flowering of Puritan political innovation, around Philadelphia, its great city of brotherly love. It became in time the world center of Quaker influence, a Presbyterian stronghold, the national headquaters of American Baptists, a place where Catholics also felt at home and flourished, a center of Anglicanism, a key location both for German Lutherans and for the German Reformed Church, plus many other German groups, such as Moravians and Mennonites.
The Quakers had become rich. A tax-list of 1769 shows that they were only one in seven of the town's inhabitants but they made up half of those that paid over 100 pounds in taxes. Of the town's seventeen richest men, twelve were Quakers. The truth is, wherever the hard-working, intelligent Quakers went, they bred material prosperity which raised up others as well as themselves.
