I spent the week before the US presidential election travelling west through Pennsylvania, from the river Delaware to the Ohio. And though I was there for the immediate intensity of the election, I want to try to make sense of Pennsylvania, a vast, curious territory, whose culture has deep roots in English thought of the 17th and 18th centuries. How has this state, conceived in the 17th century as a kind of utopia, become a battleground for America’s future?

The idealistic William Penn, son of the eponymous commander of Oliver Cromwell’s disastrous Caribbean adventure, the Western Design, was granted this great swathe of land by Charles II in 1681. Penn was a much-persecuted young Quaker who wanted to create a safe space for religious dissenters in the new world, an ocean away from the sectarian strife of the old continent, liberated from its ancient hierarchies and fealties. He christened it for his father, but the word he chose to append to the family name – ‘sylvania’ – could hardly have been more resonant. It recalls the forests of Edmund Spenser’s phantasmagorical epic The Faerie Queene, and the dark woods of As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: those alternate zones to which Shakespeare banishes his characters to see how they cope in adversity. In those plays, the sylvan woods become a hideout for dissenters, a place that twists and mocks authority. As Ben Haworth has written: ‘Shakespeare’s forest becomes a testing ground for alternative models of power, a landscape that allows, even promotes, aggressive change, resistance and rebellion.’ This was not total fantasy; in real life, as Jeffrey Theis has argued, the forest was a place for the rich to play at hunting, and for the poor to escape to when land was scarce.

A few decades after Shakespeare, Penn was handed a huge ideological playground by a king and set out to conduct his ‘holy experiment’. He hoped it would sow ‘the seed of a nation’, writing to a friend: ‘I shall have a tender care for the government, that it be well laid at first.’ He was determined to ensure that he and his successors would have ‘no power of doing mischief, that the will of one man may not hinder the good of a whole country.’ He wanted the colonists and the people whose land they were settling in to live in harmony. And to a degree, it worked; and the idea, at least, endures.

My initial foray into the state’s election campaign was to Allentown, listening to Donald Trump declare that he was ‘thrilled to be back in this incredible commonwealth’. At least to the English ear, it could hardly sound a clearer echo of the zealous egalitarianism of the 17th century, and what followed. Pennsylvania gave itself that designation when the colony broke free of British rule in the 1770s. The first history that confronts the visitor is not Penn’s quietism, but the idealistic fury of the Revolutionary War.

My journey into Pennsylvania started by taking the train from Manhattan’s Penn Station through New Jersey and across the Delaware – not far from the spot where George Washington crossed the river on Christmas night, 1776, to execute a surprise attack on Britain’s Hessian mercenaries. In Langhorne, a memorial marks the site where 168 soldiers lay buried among the trees. The houses round here are old enough and the landscape unspoiled enough to make it easy to imagine the crossing. For all the violence of the war, this feels like a hopeful place. In 1780, Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania became the first state to abolish slavery, decades before Britain did the same.

In Philadelphia, the cradle of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the war’s idealism is strongly to the fore, in the buildings that commemorate the Founding. This was a city dominated by a class of merchants who were Quakers, but wealthy and powerful with it – rich enough to fund the Continental Army in its revolt against the British and their onerous taxes. It was the city of radical presses, of Benjamin Franklin, and the fervent English exile Thomas Paine; today it’s still proud of its role as the intellectual engine-room of revolution.

I also had the sense of nagging thoughts being avoided. Down the street from Declaration House, a replica of the building where Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, is the Independence Visitor Center, adorned by Indelible, a 2003 ‘memory wall’ by Alison Sky. This foregrounds the Declaration’s insistence on the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, along with passages of Jefferson’s draft that condemned the slave trade, which were deleted before publication. The intention is to have the visitor ponder what might have been had those passages remained. This wishful thinking, though, excludes another element of the text: the Founders’ insistence that George III was conspiring to impose ‘absolute despotism’ on the colonists. With Harris calling Trump a fascist and Trump calling Harris a communist, the absence of this less uplifting passage seemed revealing.

North of Philadelphia lies the Lehigh Valley, carved out by a tributary of the Delaware. Here, Penn’s original vision is still legible – not least in the place-names: Jordan Creek, Emmaus, Nazareth. His promotion of his experiment in Germany brought in waves of peaceable religious dissenters: Mennonites, Lutherans, Reformed Calvinists, Dunkers, Pietists, and more. In 1741, a group of Moravians founded a community they decided to call Bethlehem. Even today, the name doesn’t seem absurd – on the hills on either side of the river, the leafy streets still have something of the utopian about them. It’s only down by the water that you come upon another reality. Stretching along the bank is a vast steel works: a powerhouse of that once-mighty company, Bethlehem Steel, now dead and rusting.

Down the road in another 18th-century settlement, Allentown, I found myself sitting, alone in an American city, waiting for the Greyhound to Harrisburg. I wanted to visit Harrisburg because of a speech Trump gave there on 29 April 2017, a hundred days into his first term, at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex & Expo Center on North Cameron Street. This was partly his way of spurning the White House Correspondents’ Dinner; it was the speech where he claimed he’d invented the term ‘fake news’. But he also delivered a plangent lament for the troubles of the ‘rust belt’:

For decades, our country has lived through the greatest jobs theft in the history of the world. You people know it better than anybody, in Pennsylvania. Our factories were shuttered, our steel mills closed down, and our jobs were stolen away and shipped far away… 

Trying to make my way to the Expo Center, I wandered along the bank of the Susquehanna, past the mansions with their Harris signs – then a few blocks inland, past boarded-up houses, to a graffitied scrapyard. A bartender told me more and more people were doing second jobs. He was mainly a realtor; politically, more than anything else, he just wanted to see interest rates come down so his business would pick up. It wasn’t hard to feel a sense of division.

It was only when I took the train across the Allegheny Mountains to Pittsburgh that I really began to get a feel for what this place had been. The railroad runs at first northwest, through the Tusacarora State Forest. Up to this point, I’d mostly seen a lot of streets dotted with foliage; now the view was of woodland and more woodland, opening here and there onto a clump of houses, and occasionally a little city – but still enveloped in the endless forest, the sun flickering through the trees. This was a little more like the land Penn had been handed by the king; once, there had been a forest here the size of Europe.

In the mountains, near the city of Altoona, I saw a freight train in the distance. Suddenly another was hammering past the window – and I realised they were the same train, miles-long. It was running all the way round the Horseshoe Curve, a great feat of 19th-century engineering endeavour, designed to get the railroad across the Allegheny Ridge. When we got around to the far side of the curve, the freight train was still running past: a straggler from the past, from the time when it was the railroad that held America together. The cities along the route sprang up with the rise of the railroad, and sank with it into decline. More recently there has been much effort expended to pull them back onto their feet. But still, as we chugged past, there were the dead industrial plants, and too many broken windows.

At times, there was something about this landscape that induced a feeling I hadn’t had in the state’s eastern towns and cities. As the sun began to dip towards the golden hour, it turned the rust of the old rails and old brick buildings the same russet colour as the fields. It was like a glimpse – however much it may have been a mirage – of a more harmonious past.

Pittsburgh began life as a fort at the exact point where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio. But the imagery associated with its founding is not really about anyone coming together: more about struggles for dominance. The Iroquois claimed control of the region and its tribes, as did the British, and the French. Fort Pitt was a product of the real first world war – the one between Britain and France that raged across continents in the mid-18th century, which William Pitt the Elder saw as the way to build an empire. Taking power when Britain seemed to be losing, he declared, ‘I can save the country and no one else can.’

I read this stirring quotation in the museum that sits in Point Park, right where the rivers join. It also records how the British seizure of this strategically vital spot brought scores of settlers of Ulster (‘Scots-Irish’) descent across the Alleghenies into the newly conquered land. And here it was at last – the other side of the history of Penn’s sylvan commonwealth. Like the German religious dissenters, the Scots-Irish were there because they did not take kindly to the burdens of authority. They were as pious as the dissenters, but they were frontier people, pioneers – violent and realistic, not the peaceable idealists Penn had had in mind. They were fleeing economic misery as much as oppression. Rather than settle into the pastoral idylls in the east, they pushed hard into the back country, clearing the trees, living by hunting and what they could scratch from the land. They detested the English, and the ‘Indians’. They fought for the revolution, but turned on the new government and its excise tax on liquor, which hit one of their main products: rye whiskey. The Point Park Museum relates that President Washington himself led an army across the mountains to put down their revolt. As the exhibit mildly notes: ‘the conflict revealed deep tensions between East and West, urban and rural, and rich and poor that would remain consistent themes in American history’. Well, indeed.

My furthest westward stop was the small town of Beaver, on the River Ohio, and near the state border with Ohio itself. After a long lean period as the steel mills closed down, it is recovering economically. And like most of the places I visited, it is rather beautiful: pillared porches, lawns, people raking the leaves into piles at the corner of the pavement. But with the election days away, it was hard not to detect signs of those old divisions, ready to flare up again.

As I walked past a graveyard, a swirl of leaves rose and crossed the road and whirled itself out in front of me. On one street, sloping gently down from the little run of shops, there were one or two Harris signs, then two houses with big Trump flags, then more Harris signs. On one house a sign exhorting neighbours and passers-by ‘Vote like your daughters rights depend on it’. And on many of the lawns, there were the relics of the annual American enthusiasm for Hallowe’en. Another sign said, Jesus Our Only Hope.

Back in Pittsburgh, the city was preparing to host rallies by both candidates on the final day before the vote. Outside the Point Park Museum, a technician told me they were having to relocate Kamala’s speech from the Point because the risk of an assassination attempt was too great. I heard a passer-by talking about how, had Trump and Harris supporters been a few blocks from each other, it wouldn’t be surprising if there were clashes. Instead, Harris’ rally was moved to the site of an old steelworks outside the city – the site of the Homestead strike, one of the bloodiest battles in American labour history.

Pennsylvania voted for Trump, of course, though not by all that much. I heard people on both sides yearning for unity – and suggesting that it could easily be achieved, if only the other side would come around. But neither Pennsylvania or the United States can be a land only for the descendants of idealistic religious dissenters, nor only for those who look back to the hard-headed tax-resisting pioneers. If the sylvan commonwealth is a place where political transformation is still possible, it’s hard to see what shape it may take. Meanwhile, Penn’s wish that ‘the will of one man may not hinder the good of a whole country’ could hardly be more relevant.