Pennsylvania is presented as a colony whose local political arrangements and material resources illuminate the need for continental authority. It appears in Thomas Paine’s argument not as a self-sufficient political unit, but as a participant in a larger union: local representation must be fair, disputes must be settled at the level where they arise, and the colony’s lands and revenues could help sustain a government of the continent.

Pennsylvania in a Continental Union

In the proposed system, each colony would be divided into six, eight, or ten convenient districts, with each district sending delegates to Congress. Every colony would send at least thirty delegates, producing a Congress of at least 390 members. Pennsylvania would therefore participate as one of thirteen colonies within a representation scheme designed to give the whole continent a common political voice rather than leave continental questions to provincial institutions.

Paine’s wider institutional proposal also assigns distinct functions to different levels of government. Colonial assemblies would meet annually, with a president, and handle domestic business under the authority of a Continental Congress. This arrangement makes Pennsylvania’s local government part of a layered system: provincial affairs remain local, while matters affecting the continent are entrusted to a body broad enough to address them collectively.

Representation and Local Power

Pennsylvania provides a concrete warning about how a small and unevenly attended assembly can distort public representation. When the Associators’ petition came before the provincial House of Assembly, only twenty-eight members were present. All eight members from Bucks County voted against it; had seven members from Chester County done the same, two counties alone would have determined the province’s position. For Paine, the episode shows how a decision made by a small portion of a legislature can claim to speak for an entire colony.

He connects that danger to a further dispute over authority. In the Assembly’s last sitting, Paine says, the House attempted to exercise undue authority over Pennsylvania’s delegates. Instructions for those delegates, which he disparages as inadequate in judgment and practical sense, were approved by very few people outside the House and then passed as if they represented the whole colony. The episode turns representation into a question of who actually authorizes public action: a few legislators or the people whose interests they purport to express.

These examples support Paine’s broader insistence that both the number of electors and the number of representatives matter, and that unequal representation compounds the risk of concentrated power. Pennsylvania’s experience thus serves as an argument for carefully constituted representation, rather than a claim that any existing assembly automatically speaks for the people.

Continental Authority and Material Resources

A dispute between Pennsylvania and Connecticut over unlocated lands is cited as proof that British government is incapable of regulating continental affairs. The problem, in Paine’s account, is not merely that the two provinces disagree; it is that a matter crossing provincial lines requires authority at the continental level. The example helps establish why a common government is necessary to settle common questions.

Pennsylvania’s back lands also enter the argument over public finance and sovereignty. Paine says that lands in some provinces, which he describes as clandestinely lost through an unjust extension of Canada’s limits, were valued at more than twenty-five million Pennsylvania currency at five pounds sterling per hundred acres. Their quit-rents, calculated at one penny sterling per acre, would amount to two million yearly. Under an independent continental government, he argues, proceeds from land sales could pay down public debt without burdening individuals, while the continuing quit-rents could gradually support the annual expenses of government. Congress would act as trustee for the continent in applying those proceeds.

Significance in the Independence Argument

Pennsylvania’s examples link the pamphlet’s institutional proposals to its case for independence. The colony’s representation disputes show the hazards of allowing a small body to act in the name of a larger public; its disagreement with Connecticut shows the limits of provincial authority; and its lands and revenues supply a proposed material basis for continental government. Across these arguments, Pennsylvania matters as both a place with particular political and fiscal circumstances and a component of a union whose strength, Paine insists, must be continental rather than provincial.