The new government recognized slavery as already instituted.

Penn himself acquired a few slaves; and in the first quarter of the eighteenth century the assembly legislated much as New York was doing, though somewhat more mildly, for the fuller control of the negroes both slave and free.

The number of blacks and mulattoes reached at the middle of the century about eleven thousand, the great majority of them slaves.

They were most numerous, of course, in the older counties which lay in the southeastern corner of the province, and particularly in the city of Philadelphia.
Occasional owners had as many as twenty or thirty slaves, employed either on country estates or in iron-works, but the typical holding was on a petty scale.

There were no slave insurrections in the colony, no plots of any moment, and no panics of dread.