Pennsylvania

The colony founded on toleration as a principle rather than a compromise, and the most religiously diverse place in the English-speaking world. Charles II granted the land to William Penn in 1681 in settlement of a debt to his father, and Penn, a Quaker who had himself been imprisoned for his beliefs, wrote a frame of government guaranteeing freedom of worship to anyone believing in God and an elected assembly with real power. He also paid the Lenape for land rather than seizing it, and the peace held for some seventy years before his sons broke it with the fraudulent Walking Purchase of 1737. The policy drew Germans in such numbers that they were a third of the population by the revolution, along with Scots-Irish, Welsh, Huguenots, Moravians and Amish, and Philadelphia became the largest city in the colonies and its printing and scientific centre under Franklin. Both the Declaration and the Constitution were written there. The state's Quaker inheritance made it an abolitionist stronghold and a terminus of the underground railroad, and Gettysburg in July 1863 was the war's turning point. Coal, steel and oil - the world's first commercial well was drilled at Titusville in 1859 - built its industry. It is called a commonwealth rather than a state. Harrisburg is the capital, Philadelphia the largest city and Pittsburgh the second. The name means Penn's woods, after the founder's father. Philadelphia was the national capital from 1790 to 1800. The state is still about sixty per cent forest. Hershey and Heinz both began there.

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