Mur­phy is a polit­i­cal sci­ence prof in New Jer­sey and has writ­ten a new bio of William Penn. I sus­pect this Aeon post is a bit of spon­sored con­tent to pro­mote the book but it’s still worth a read:

Penn was a man of para­dox­i­cal qual­i­ties. He espoused a rad­i­cal­ly egal­i­tar­i­an Quak­er the­ol­o­gy, insist­ing that some­thing divine resided with­in each indi­vid­ual, yet he owned slaves on his Amer­i­can estate. He praised rep­re­sen­ta­tive insti­tu­tions such as par­lia­ment and the jury sys­tem, but spent years in hid­ing for his loy­al­ty to an abso­lutist king. ‘I am like to be an adopt­ed Amer­i­can,’ he wrote short­ly after arriv­ing in Penn­syl­va­nia in 1682, but spent only four of his remain­ing 36 years there. And he was chron­i­cal­ly inca­pable of man­ag­ing mon­ey, spend­ing eight months in an Eng­lish debtors’ prison in his 60s, even while his colony quick­ly became a com­mer­cial success. 

https://​aeon​.co/​i​d​e​a​s​/​h​e​s​-​n​o​t​-​t​h​e​-​g​u​y​-​o​n​-​q​u​a​k​e​r​-​o​a​t​s​-​h​e​s​-​m​u​c​h​-​m​o​r​e​-​i​n​t​e​r​e​s​t​ing