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Chapter 2

RECALLING A COMMERCIAL SEAPORT

Between the time William Penn left his colony in 1701 after his second visit and the outbreak of disputes with Great Britain in 1764 that would lead to the American Revolution, Philadelphia became the largest commercial center in English-speaking America. Penn’s liberal immigration policy encouraged rapid development of the region, and along with natural increase this drove Pennsylvania’s population upward from a mere 18,000 in 1700 to about 220,000 in 1765. The urbanized Philadelphia region grew from about 2,200 in 1700 to 19,000 in 1760, and then to about 30,000 as the Revolution erupted in 1775. Around 1720, a little-known painter named Peter Cooper caught the bucolic nature of the sleepy riverfront town of the early eighteenth century (Figure 17), carved out of forests, with its two rude Quaker meetinghouses, a few primitive wharves, and streets extending only several blocks from the Delaware River.

When William Penn’s son Thomas Penn commissioned George Heap to draw a panoramic view of Philadelphia thirty years later, artisans, merchants, mariners, and ordinary laborers—many of the latter indentured or enslaved—transformed Philadelphia into one of the English empire’s prize overseas capitals (Figure 18). Although Heap’s panorama is not strictly accurate—it exaggerates the height of public buildings and presents the curved waterfront as a straight line—it does not overstate the importance of maritime commerce to Philadelphia’s economy. Approximately seventy wharves and twelve shipyards dotted the area shown, graphic evidence that Philadelphia had grown mightily by becoming the entrepôt that imported manufactured goods for a thriving region and exported foodstuffs, wood products, furs, and other commodities throughout the Atlantic basin. Many Philadelphians would have agreed with Lord Adam Gordon, a British colonel who fought in the Seven Years’ War. Visiting Philadelphia in 1765, he called it “a great and noble city” and “one of the wonders of the world.”

To the leaders of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions, looking back from the nineteenth century, the prerevolutionary city was a marvelous success. Some modern planners, developers, and city dwellers have tried to recreate the imagined charm of Philadelphia in the mid-eighteenth century. Visitors to Cliveden in Germantown, the stately home of the Chew family, the restored Powel House on Third Street, the recreation of the Georgian drawing rooms of wealthy Philadelphia merchants at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum outside Wilmington, Delaware, are appropriately dazzled by the restrained gentility of early Philadelphia aristocrats. But they are not seeing prerevolutionary Philadelphia, only the Georgian grandeur of a very small fraction of even the upper class.¹

FIGURE 17. Peter Cooper, The South East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia, c. 1720, LCP. Cooper’s Southeast Prospect is thought to be the oldest surviving painting of a North American city. Cooper took liberties. The Quaker meeting houses, identified by key numbers, had no pinnacles, which would have offended Quaker values. Nor did the Court House, identified as #18, have a tower as depicted by the artist. Cooper’s eight-foot-long painting on canvas was sent to London in 1744. In a fine example of the vagaries of collecting, it was discovered 113 years later in a London curiosity shop. The member of Parliament who found it took it to the American minister to the Court of St. James, Philadelphia-born George Mifflin Dallas, who gave it to the Library Company.

FIGURE 18. Scull and Heap, An East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia, engraving, 1756, LCP. William Penn’s son Thomas commissioned an engraved view of Philadelphia to boast about the city’s rapid growth and to stimulate further immigration and investment. The four plates constituting the view (only one is shown here) were engraved in London because of Philadelphia’s chronic lack of engravers before the 1790s. The scene encompassed almost a mile and a half of the city’s waterfront. The Delaware River here fairly boils with merchantmen riding on stylized waves.

Today’s historians view the bustling city through several lenses. In one light, it was a thriving shipping center where some merchants and officials built gracious houses and some artisans, like Benjamin Franklin, followed the way to wealth through industriousness, sobriety, and excellent craftsmanship. But another city can also be seen: one whose economic growth, spurred by population explosion and war contracting, made it a city of economic instability, of exploited indentured and slave labor, of a growing gap between the top and bottom of society that led to the emergence of an impoverished class. This underside of commercial development is not well documented in the city’s early historical collections because the leaders of cultural agencies in the nineteenth century were not interested in the lives of the lower classes. However, historians have explored this side of the city’s history through later acquisitions of the Historical Society, the Library Company, and more recently founded institutions such as the Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia History and the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies. But most important has been the Archives of the City of Philadelphia, which by mandate systematically preserved such invaluable sources as vagrancy dockets, almshouse admission books and minutes, tax lists, deed and mortgage books, and probate records with inventories of personal possessions upon the death of the rich, the poor, and those in between (Figure 19).

Wheels of Commerce

Philadelphia’s merchants and shopkeepers, whose records are abundant in the Historical Society’s collections, became legendary. Dozens of colonial merchants were memorialized in street names—Shippen, Willing, Pemberton, Norris, Powel, and many more. These were the merchants who reached inland to tap the Indian fur trade and to gather the produce of the fertile rolling farmlands watered by the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. They dispatched their ships to Africa, Europe, the West Indies, and—by 1785—to China. The wharves jutting into the Delaware River and the dense settlement for several miles along the river clearly displayed Philadelphia’s “vigorous spirit of enterprise,” as one merchant called it.²

Philadelphia’s merchants established their fortunes by transporting the agricultural products of the hinterland—beef, pork, wheat, corn, and lumber—to wood-and food-hungry parts of the flourishing British empire. In the early decades of settlement, many business transactions took the form of barter, the direct exchange of goods and services. More complicated transactions became common in the 1700s, involving letters of credit, bills of exchange, and specie, or money in coin. An innovation was paper money, first issued in Pennsylvania in 1723 to help ease the city’s earliest severe recession.

Not every merchant made a fortune, and taken together merchants did not form a cohesive group. A study in the 1980s shows that the city had about 320 merchants in the early 1770s, and that fully 85 percent of them were not part of the city’s social elite, itself sharply split between Quakers and Anglicans. Only half owned a horse, and most lived in cramped housing not much different from that of a successful furniture maker or silversmith.³ All were part of an intensely competitive milieu, and all faced uncertain markets, unpredictable storms at sea, and frequent periods of war when they could speculate in disrupted overseas markets to their advantage or plummet into bankruptcy. No merchant could sit in his countinghouse and count on anything.

FIGURE 19. Pages of 1772 Philadelphia tax list, HSP. Until social historians in the 1970s began to use tax lists such as this one, the extent of slavery in colonial Philadelphia was discussed only impressionistically, if at all. The left page of the list shown here gives Benjamin Franklin’s assessment for one slave but not for three others he took with him to London. The right page includes many of Franklin’s neighbors who owned slaves, listed along with horses and cows as chattel property. Merchant Daniel Williams and gentlemen John Ross and John Lawrence owned three slaves each, along with much Philadelphia property rented out. Innkeeper Henry Funk owned one. Probate records for several thousand prerevolutionary Philadelphians confirm that slavery was extensively practiced in the City of Brotherly Love.

FIGURE 20. W. L. Breton, The London Coffee House, Watson, Annals (1830), LCP. Merchants bringing slaves to Philadelphia usually auctioned them at the London Coffee House at Front and High (Market) Streets. When Thomas Paine arrived in 1774, he boarded in a building looking down on the slave auctions. Offended by what he saw, he wrote one of his first essays, attacking the slave trade and the use of slaves.

Between the merchant importer and the consumer stood the shopkeeper. Philadelphia had hundreds of them, and female entrepreneurs were numerous, especially as retailers of imported luxury wares. Catering to a thirst for British goods, part of the surging consumer demand throughout the world rimming the Atlantic Ocean, women shopkeepers became leading arbiters of taste. We are so accustomed to thinking of eighteenth-century women as guardians of domestic life, largely restricting themselves to the private realm, that it takes an adjustment of our angle of vision to appreciate that entrepreneurship flourished among single women and widows, especially after about 1750. As purveyors of British wares, women shopkeepers were drawn into the political sphere after 1764, when new British policies led to heated campaigns for nonimportation.⁴

The ships dispatched from the city wharves laden with wheat, wood, and meat often returned with human cargo: Irish and German indentured servants and Africans enslaved in places such as Senegambia, Angola, and Dahomey. The slave trade was especially active during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), when the flow of white indentured servants from Ireland and Germany stopped. Many account books of eighteenth-century merchants acquired over the years by the Historical Society show the sale of a shipload of newly arrived Africans, sometimes with entries showing the expenses incurred in “going after Negroes” or “taking up Negroes”—clues to how desperate Africans bolted into the wilderness after a torturous long voyage across the Atlantic, into Delaware Bay, and up the Delaware River (Figure 20). Neither the Historical Society nor any other institution collected materials that would interpret the experience from the viewpoint of the enslaved Africans, and indeed accounts of this kind were set down only rarely. But newspapers bristled with advertisements for slave sales and runaway slaves and servants, an important source of revenue for newspaper publishers such as Benjamin Franklin. In the absence of much material in the papers of Philadelphia’s slaveimporting merchants, the newspaper slave ads have been nearly the most valuable source of information on the experience of slaves and indentured servants.⁵

Beyond quickening the slave trade, the Seven Years’ War, like most colonial wars, provided a special opportunity for war contractors, merchants prominent among them. The privateer was another such agent. Licensed by the government to prey on enemy shipping, an intrepid ship captain could leapfrog to the top of society if luck came his way. Such a man was Philadelphia’s John Macpherson, who snared eighteen French vessels on a single voyage in 1758. So vast was Macpherson’s haul that five years later he could afford to pour £14,000 sterling into building Mount Pleasant, his 160-acre estate outside the city (now Fairmount Park) to which this son of a Scottish immigrant soon retired in Georgian splendor. When John Adams saw Macpherson’s Mount Pleasant, he called it “the most elegant country seat in the Northern colonies.”⁶

In the 1760s, those profiting the most from the Seven Years’ War initiated the first era of the construction of country seats within a day’s journey from the city. The country house or mansion afforded the opportunity to retreat from urban disease, heat, and hubbub; it was also a place to display wealth and status. About fifteen years after Macpherson built Mount Pleasant, a visitor to Philadelphia observed that “the country round Philadelphia is … finely interspersed with genteel country seats, fields, and orchards, for several miles around, and along both the rivers for a good many miles.”⁷ Still, only about forty merchants owned a country seat by 1770, and many of the residences were hardly more than what today would serve as a summer cottage.

A Philadelphia merchant was no better than the ships he sent to sea and the sailors who manned them. Indeed, many merchants were ship captains as well or trained their sons as ship captains plying the Atlantic trade routes. Indispensable to Philadelphia’s commercial economy, mariners and dockside laborers composed about 10 percent of all working males. The crews of many blue-water vessels included African Americans and occasionally Native Americans. Historians have often classified mariners as unskilled laborers, but no ship captain or vessel owner would have entrusted his seagoing property to “unskilled” hands. The lives of deep-sea sailors (and other Philadelphians at the bottom of the social scale) are sadly elusive, but historians have traced them in recent years in tax lists, deeds, poorhouse records, church marriage and baptism entries, and probate records, where inventories of the goods left at death have survived for some. Best recorded in printed materials are the lives and adventures of the pirates, some of whom lived in Philadelphia in the city’s early years.

A romanticized picture of blue-water sailors clouds our picture of maritime reality. For example, the Seven Years’ War seemingly brought flush times for mariners because the privateering boom put a premium on the seaman’s labor. As early as 1756, one merchant was writing about the “Scarsity of seamen as Most of them are gone privateering.”⁸ Yet few of the fortune seekers realized their dreams. Privateering crews distributed their booty according to rank, and usually half the shares went to the ship’s financial backers. The rest was distributed according to position, with the lowly cabin boys getting one-half to three-quarters of one share. Many privateersmen came home empty-handed, and many went to a watery grave because the already hazardous life at sea became even more hazardous. The main rewards went to the owner-investors, the officers, and the maritime artisans ashore. As a result of the rush to scoop up enemy riches from an English-dominated sea, it was they who received unparalleled wages while enjoying safe billets.

Mercantile wealth created colonial Philadelphia, although personal fortunes were as often made in real estate and the social elite probably had more gentlemen of inherited wealth than active merchants. The merchants’ and shopkeepers’ wealth also made the trades hum because much of the money earned by importers, exporters, and retailers was money spent on house construction or home furnishings. The building boom during and after the Seven Years’ War nearly doubled the number of houses in the city between 1760 and 1777—from 2,969 to 5,470. This required the labor and skills of an army of house carpenters, glaziers, painters, stonecutters, masons, sawyers, and ordinary laborers. That several dozen city merchants were contracting for elegant new houses in and outside the city explains the need for a Philadelphia edition of The British Architect, or The Builder’s Treasury of Staircases.

We often associate the design of colonial America’s more elaborate buildings with cultivated amateur architects such as Thomas Jefferson or Philadelphia’s lesser known Dr. John Kearsley, who designed Christ Church, built in 1727. But the subscription list for the 1775 Philadelphia edition of The British Architect tells a different story. The original 181 “encouragers” of the first architectural publication in North America included only two gentlemen and two merchants but 62 master builders, 111 house carpenters, two painters, and two plasterers. Such information about the history of early building has become the absorbing interest of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Founded in 1814 as a subscription library, it has now become the nation’s most important repository of early American architectural history with extensive holdings of architectural drawings and books as well as material on fine furniture and the decorative arts.

All but forgotten to public memory about the humming commercial city on the Delaware in the colonial era are the enslaved Africans and free blacks. These two groups were indubitably important to the workings of commerce and the city’s rapid expansion in the decades preceding the American Revolution. Close to fifteen hundred slaves lived with masters in the city in 1767, when nearly one of every six households contained at least one slave. Some of them moved ships, often going to sea with the sea captain who owned them; more moved goods, at dockside as stevedores or through the streets as wagon drivers. Others toiled in ropewalks, saw pits, shipyards, and tanneries, all connected to the fitting out of ships. Still others worked alongside masters in the shops of blacksmiths, blockmakers, and coopers. In every such instance they contributed to the turning of the wheels of commerce. Those who were domestic servants, including most of the enslaved women, contributed indirectly to the commercial success of white city dwellers by making life more comfortable for their masters and mistresses in kitchens, nurseries, stables, and taverns.⁹

The post-World War II restoration of Philadelphia’s old commercial center of the eighteenth century has whisked slave history aside as cleanly as did the creation of Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s, when the Rockefeller fantasy of eighteenth-century Virginia life took form. Anyone visiting Franklin Court today, ambling through the courtyard where the print shop, post office, and Venturi steel outline of the Franklin home recall the heyday of Printer Ben’s fame, will see no evidence that Franklin acquired four slaves in the 1750s—Peter, Jemima, King, and Othello. Not a trace of John Cadwalader’s seven slaves can be found in Nicholas Wainwright’s Colonial Grandeur in Philadelphia: The House and Furniture of General John Cadwalader (1964). Careful attention by the author to the building and lavish furnishing of the house on Second Street makes this book the finest account of the mid-century Georgian efflorescence in colonial Philadelphia, yet it shrouds the details of how the Cadwalader mansion was partially built by enslaved labor and carefully cared for by his retinue of slaves. Visitors to Cliveden, now a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, will learn a lot about its builder, Benjamin Chew, attorney general and provincial councillor of Pennsylvania. But they will learn little about the dozens of slaves employed by Chew at Cliveden and on his Kent County, Delaware plantation, including the family of Richard Allen, who would found the African Methodist Episcopal Church. John Dickinson is etched in public memory as the “Pen man of the Revolution” for his famous protest pamphlet Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1768), but he is forgotten as the owner of about fifty-five slaves on the eve of the Revolution. Yet none of these famous white men could have ascended so high within the city’s rising commercial sector of the mid-eighteenth century without the advantage provided by unpaid laborers—the silent, shadowy figures of the seaport’s history.

Artisans and Artisanry

While planning his colony in London, Penn realized the importance of attracting skilled craftsmen to Pennsylvania, and in this he succeeded. By 1690, about 120 craftsmen were practicing their trades in the city. Eighty years later, on the eve of the Revolution, about half of Philadelphia’s households were headed by craftsmen—or “leather-apron men,” as they called themselves. The craftsmen took pride in their skills, knowing them to be indispensable to the community. They believed in the dignity of laboring with one’s hands and regarded their skills, to be passed on to apprentices and journeymen, as a form of property. “The humblest workman thinks nobly of his trade” went the French saying in the eighteenth century, and it applied equally in Philadelphia.¹⁰

The dignity conferred by craft labor had its basis not only in the Protestant concept of calling, which held that in God’s eyes the mason was as worthy as the merchant, but also in the awareness that no community could exist without the products of its dexterous artisans. Craft skill represented indispensable knowledge, and upon that knowledge rested a claim to a certain authority in the community. Moreover, craft skill was a form of capital, nonmaterial to be sure but at least as important as cash or real estate. Artisans invested their skill in products, and these handcrafted objects, to the craftsman’s way of thinking, always bore his personal stamp and therefore, in an indirect way, were his possessions.

Conditions in North America fostered a corollary attitude that intensified this belief in the dignity of labor. In the seaboard cities, the incentives for industriousness went beyond a search for “a decent competency,” as the phrase went in this era, because the availability of land and the persistent shortage of labor produced a more fluid social structure than in Europe. Penn’s open-door policy and the liberal terms for purchasing land brought a rich array of skilled artisans to the Delaware, and in the early decades many forged ahead. The Bristol Factor that landed at Chester in October 1681, a year before Penn arrived and even before Philadelphia was laid out, brought Cesar Ghiselin, an eighteen-year-old silversmith who prospered; Thomas Wharton, a tailor whose sons would become important merchants; Nehemiah Allen, a cooper whose business thrived; Josiah Carpenter, a brewer who became a large landowner; Thomas Paschall, a pewterer who made a small fortune; and Abraham Hooper, a cabinetmaker who could hardly keep up with the demand for his furniture. In this single ship arrived the core of the artisan and commercial enterprises of the early decade. Each established a family that prospered.

Such generally favorable conditions encouraged unremitting labor as men found they could rise from journeyman to master more swiftly than in the German Palatinate, Ulster, or East Anglia. One result of the new attitude toward industriousness was the abandonment in Philadelphia and other cities of “St. Monday,” the English artisan’s habit of taking Monday as well as Sunday off from work. If more work meant only lower daily wages, as was often the case in England, where a surplus of labor existed, then a shorter workweek made perfect sense. But in the seaboard towns of colonial America, where labor was often in short supply, St. Monday fell victim to the conviction that laboring people, by the steady application of their skills, could raise themselves above the ruck.¹¹

Working in their small shops, Philadelphia’s diversified artisans created fine silver hollowware, exquisitely carved furniture, and much more. Seen from one perspective, these artifacts are a tribute to the good taste of the wealthy families who commissioned them. But seen from another, they become a lasting reminder of the imagination and skill of the craftsmen who created them.

FIGURE 21. Iron stoveplate with German inscription, 1741, PMA. Pennsylvania’s rich reserves of iron ore made possible a flourishing iron industry that demonstrated craft traditions, cultural preferences, and American ingenuity. This stove plate, forged at Durham Furnace in Bucks County, displays an inscription in German that translates as “Cain killed his brother Abel.” Many other stove plates told moral stories. One with a war and peace motif shows two grenadiers with guns facing off while two short bearded men with broad-brimmed hats shake hands. Another portrays a family quarrel inspired by the devil himself where husband and wife, encouraged by their children, trade blows. Benjamin Franklin fused two fireplace traditions—English and German. His “New Invented Pennsylvania Fireplace” of 1744 combined the German tradition of cast iron heating stoves and the English tradition of open fireplaces with iron firebacks to protect the masonry and throw heat into the room. Franklin’s fireplace—widely copied down to the present day—fitted an open-fronted stove into a fireplace opening.

Philadelphia’s many craftsmen produced articles on demand for urban customers, then called “bespoke work,” but they produced as well for the entire Delaware River valley. For example, a Philadelphia blacksmith or cabinetmaker was intimately tied to the countryside surrounding the city not only because of the demand for his handicrafts but also because that is where he got the materials for fabricating his products. The stove plate shown in Figure 21 was made from ore refined in one of the thirty-nine furnaces and forges that operated in Philadelphia’s hinterland. These operations drew heavily on slave and indentured servant labor for the incessant work of cutting timber and making charcoal.

FIGURE 22. William Russell Birch, Preparation for War to defend Commerce, engraving, LCP. Though this scene of Joshua Humphreys’s shipyard in Southwark was captured in about 1799, shipbuilding had not changed since before the Revolution. The frigate Philadelphia is under construction. Workmen at the top of the scaffolding use ropes and pulleys to lift a curved beam aboard the ship’s prow. In the background is Gloria Dei Swedish Lutheran Church. Birch’s engravings were commercially successful, but buyers of this one probably prized it for the rustic scene and patriotic overtones, not the representations of artisans’ work.

Many Philadelphia artisans worked in small shops with only a few other craftsmen, and they prided themselves on fashioning their product, whether pewter bowl, ladder-back chair, or suit of clothes, from beginning to end. But some artisanal activities required the cooperative labor of many different craftsmen. The most important and complicated involved the construction of ships and buildings. Among the artisans involved in building and outfitting a vessel were ship carpenters, caulkers, wood carvers, painters, mastmakers, sailmakers, ropemakers, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, glassmakers, instrument makers, and ship chandlers. The products of these construction craftsmen’s hands were hardly collectible, and the endless impulse to modernize has wiped away almost all traces of the eighteenth-century ropewalks and shipbuilding sites, so documenting the work of such craftsmen is difficult. In the background of William Birch’s Preparation for War to Defend Commerce (Figure 22), we have one of the few glimpses of ship construction as it was carried out in the preindustrial period.

House construction tradesmen, like shipbuilders, worked in groups with a premium placed on coordination and cooperation. In overall charge was the master carpenter, who was often the architect and general contractor as well. He subcontracted work to bricklayers, stonemasons, plasterers, painters, glaziers, joiners, and laborers. Edmund Woolley was such a master builder in Philadelphia, engaging and coordinating the labor of scores of artisans in the construction of the State House, later to be called Independence Hall. His supervision of the job was long—“a quagmire of contention, shortages of funds, and interminable construction.”¹² Started in 1732, the interiors of the State House were not completed until 1748, and the brick tower, lodging the now iconic Liberty Bell, was finally finished in 1753. In an example of how the passing of time can alter public memory, Woolley for many years was credited as the master builder of the State House but not as its architect. Andrew Hamilton, speaker of the state assembly and famous for his defense of the New York printer John Peter Zenger, was for many years credited with designing the State House. But receipts found in the Penn Papers at the Historical Society in the early twentieth century suggest that Woolley prepared the drawings from which the State House was built.

Most of the products from the hands of Philadelphia’s preindustrial artisans that have survived come from the luxury trades, whose craftsmen produced fine house furniture, silver, and other furnishings for the wealthy. For generations these have been the most sought after items from the early American past for two reasons. First, such artifacts symbolize a bygone era of careful craftsmanship and elegant taste, a time of the individually crafted rather than mass-produced articles. Second—perhaps more important—the exquisite desk, chair, or silver bowl, like a precious work of art, is an affirmation of the power and prestige of the elite and of the social system in which they governed.¹³

The Historical Society acquired the furniture, paintings, uniforms, and other possessions of the elite from the beginning, and the commitment to collecting the products of the luxury trades has not wavered down to the present day. Not until the end of the nineteenth century did interest arise in collecting and studying the artifactual history of nonelites. Swimming bravely against the tide, Henry Mercer, an antiquarian collector and amateur archaeologist, began gathering ordinary objects—apple parers, claw hammers, tin dinner horns, straw beehives, fireplace tongs, flax brakes—anything from what he called the “valueless masses of obsolete utensils or objects which were regarded as useless.”¹⁴ His fascination with discovering people from the distant past through their material remains began when Mercer, as a boy, unearthed arrowheads, fragments of pottery, and other objects from a Lenape camping ground on his father’s property in Bucks County.

Much later, when associated with a group of archaeologists at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Mercer went about creating an object-centered rather than book-and document-centered museum at the Bucks County Historical Society in Doylestown. Only by collecting and displaying the ordinary and commonplace, he reasoned, could the story of the American people be truly told. For Mercer, work was at the center of how a society and nation were built; therefore, through collecting and examining ordinary objects historians could tell the stories of the people who did most of the work. His first exhibition in Bucks County, in 1897, displayed 761 ordinary objects in a show titled “Tools of the Nation Maker.” More than law books and politicians or field pieces and soldiers, Mercer argued, these simple tools and those who used them skillfully were the true makers of the nation. History was best written, he explained, “from the standpoint of objects rather than from laws, legislatures, and the proceedings of public assemblies.” Trying to overthrow a document-based academic textual history of the elites, Mercer used tools and everyday objects to illuminate the lives of ordinary people (Figure 23). Sure of his method and his populist instincts, he spent decades scouring “penny lots” at country sales—the flea markets of an earlier era—and “rummaging the bake-ovens, wagon-houses, cellars, hay-lofts, smoke-houses, garrets, and chimney-corners” across the countryside.¹⁵

FIGURE 23. Interior of Mercer Museum, Bucks County Historical Society. This photograph of the central court of the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, shows how Henry Chapman Mercer wanted to create what one historian has called “carefully classified confusion.” This “tight packing” of artifacts, reminiscent of an old-fashioned hardware store, gives a good sense of how objects were fashioned by craftsmen and used in daily work processes.

Deeply involved in collecting ordinary objects, Mercer explained in 1909 that he was sure that “the history of Pennsylvania was here profusely illustrated and from a new point of view.”¹⁶ In no other way could a more inclusive history be presented. Councillors of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions paid little attention to Mercer’s ideas that history resides with the common people and that people will flock to see what was part of their ancestors’ daily life. So the fabulous collection he assembled of some 60,000 ordinary household objects filled up the fantastic six-story concrete castle he completed in 1916 in Doylestown for the Bucks County Historical Society, which he had helped found in 1880.

Visitors came in small numbers to Mercer’s castle, but his ideas gained new currency during the Great Depression. Just seven years after Mercer died in 1930, the wealthy radio magnate Atwater Kent established a Museum of Philadelphia History that more or less adopted Mercer’s mission: to collect material culture that would bring to light the social and cultural importance of daily urban life. Exhibiting for the first time in 1939, the museum has collected about eighty thousand artifacts, though only a small fraction of them tell stories of Philadelphia life before 1850.

The works of luxury craftsmen so prized by collectors cannot give the full picture of artisan life, but they tell a great deal. For example, the tall-case clocks of Peter Stretch, acquired by the Historical Society, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Atwater Kent Museum, are examples of English artisanry transplanted to Philadelphia. Immigrating to the city in 1702, when he was thirty-two years old, Stretch produced dozens of tall-case hour-hand clocks that graced the city’s finest houses. With two sons pursuing clock and watch making, the Stretch family became Philadelphia’s unofficial timekeepers. Peter produced the town clock in 1717; his eldest son made the clock for the State House in 1753. Stretch, like other American clockmakers, began copying European counterparts by putting minute hands on the clocks to make them easier to read—an example of the highly derivative nature of American craftsmanship. Reflecting Philadelphia’s growth and commercial vigor, Stretch’s restrained, flat-topped, plain-doored clocks of the early years became more ornate: rather than a molded base standing directly on the floor, a fancier clock stood on bun or bracket feet; rather than a simple flat top, the improved clock had carved moldings and cast iron or brass spandrels; mahogany sometimes replaced pine or poplar.

Philadelphia’s rising wealth turned the city into North America’s undisputed furniture capital by the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The well-heeled merchant owners of fine city houses and country seats required a massive amount of furniture, and increasingly they wanted it stylish enough to signal their authority and power. Orders for bespoke work poured into the shops of several hundred chair, chest, and table makers. One of the best-known and most prosperous was William Savery. He finished his apprenticeship about 1741 and soon became one of Philadelphia’s leading chairmakers and a member of the Library Company. Engaged in producing top-of-the-line chairs, Savery also crafted handsome chests of drawers and tables. When the London cabinetmaker Thomas Affleck arrived in Philadelphia in 1763 bearing the third edition of Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, which the Library Company shortly acquired, Savery began to produce rococo furniture in the Chippendale style. Like Stretch, Savery was a member of the Society of Friends, and both were patronized by Quakers throughout their careers.

Of all the trades for which Philadelphia’s artisans became famous, none exceeded printing in establishing the city’s reputation as a capital of culture. By the end of the colonial era, the city was a center of book, pamphlet, and newspaper publishing, and its most famous artisan, Benjamin Franklin, was a printer. By 1795, Philadelphia boasted forty-three printers, evidence of a print explosion in its early stages. Some printers also made printing presses and type, Franklin being the first of his trade in the English colonies to do the latter.

From its beginnings the Library Company, American Philosophical Society, and Historical Society were avid collectors of early Pennsylvania imprints that came from the hands of a host of German and English printers. William Bradford, the city’s first printer, had established himself by 1685, and his Kalendarium Pennsilvaniense, or America’s Messinger, Being an Almanack for the Year of Grace 1686 is the earliest Philadelphia imprint in the Historical Society’s collections. The society made its first large purchase of titles in 1879, received its first large gift of early books and pamphlets in 1882, and a year later received from a descendant of William Bradford a rich collection of works produced by successive generations of Bradfords. By that time, the Library Company’s collections, after a century and a half of collecting, were unsurpassed, and the Philosophical Society had continued to develop its collection of Franklin imprints.

Eighteenth-century artisans are known primarily for what they produced: the beautiful and highly collectible objects created out of silver, pewter, wood, clay, leather, cloth, glass, steel, and iron. But behind the product lies a shrouded history of a person who was not only a craftsman but a head of family and a participant in the community’s affairs. Not a single piece of furniture was joined, nor a boot cobbled, nor a weathervane smithied, nor a pot turned except by a man wielding his tools in a social and political context. The distance between the workbench and street was very small in towns such as Philadelphia, and the relationship between the craftsman and his clientele had political and social dimensions. As Philadelphia developed, craftsmen became more and more involved in life beyond their shop doors. Peter Stretch was not only a clockmaker but also a city councilman for thirty-eight unbroken years and unceasingly involved in the affairs of his Quaker monthly meeting—seeing that the youth were orderly, mentoring orphaned children, presenting incoming Quakers with their certificates of removal from their previous meeting. William Savery was not only a chair and cabinet maker but a member of the Fellowship Fire Company and by 1757 keeper of the keys for its engine; ward tax assessor at age thirty-four; a supporter of the Friendly Association, which tried to forge an enlightened Indian policy in the difficult mid-century era; and an active member of the Society of Friends.

Although history books teach us to think of the urban economy as male-driven and the artisan’s world as masculine, Philadelphia’s economy depended in no small way on women’s paid and unpaid labor, and women by the hundreds were retailers, proprietoresses, and artisans. Most artisans lived and worked in the same structure; and in a world where home and shop were contiguous, the artisan’s wife would often tend the shop when he was away and help in the ordering and processing of materials. Other women took over their husbands’ or fathers’ trades when they died. For example, in the early national era, three of Philadelphia’s printers were women: Jane Aitken, who took over the business of her father, Robert Aitken, when he died in 1802; Lydia Bailey, who took over the business after the death of her husband, Robert Bailey; and Margaret Bache, widow of Benjamin Franklin Bache, who published the Aurora from November 1798 to March 1800.

Female trades also flourished in the preindustrial city. Anyone walking through the commercial district of the late colonial era would encounter tavernkeeper Rachel Draper, upholsterer Elizabeth Lawrence, tallow chandler Ann Wishart, optician shopkeeper Hannah Breintnall, dry goods shopkeeper Elizabeth Rawle, and dozens more. At least one third of all retailers were women, and perhaps one fifth of all inns, taverns, and boardinghouses were female managed. Though males dominated the craft shops, they included female bakers and braziers, distillers and winemakers; mantua makers, glovers and tailors; tinkers and sieve makers; soap boilers and spinners. Women served as well as healers, nurses, and midwives; teachers and preachers; keepers of inns, taverns, and boardinghouses. Much of women’s work has been hidden from view because of the scarcity of records relating to both paid and unpaid labor. Yet account books of a few of these women found their way into the collections of the Historical Society and even into the holdings of Philadelphia’s College of Physicians. Skillfully exploiting these scarce accounts and supplementing them with tax records, wills, and early census reports, women’s historians in recent years have restored women to the urban economy.¹⁷

FIGURE 24. Woman’s pocket, c. 1745-55, PMA. Women’s dresses were not made with pockets during this period. Instead, separate pockets, like this one, were tied around the waist or neck to hold small necessities. Like most other clothes signifying status, pockets came in many fabrics and styles. Female domestics probably wore plain cotton or muslin pockets, while the mistress of a well-to-do household expected to have one highly decorated and made of silk and linen as pictured here.

More familiar than women whose labor made them a conspicuous part of Philadelphia’s street life was the labor of women in domestic settings. The chatelaine or “pocket” (Figure 24) was the badge of the mistress of the house and sometimes the shop—the manager who was responsible for conserving and distributing household stores. One historian has suggested that the pocket is a better symbol of eighteenth-century women than the spinning wheel because “this homely object symbolizes the obscurity, the versatility, and the personal nature of the housekeeping role. A woman sat at a wheel, but she carried her pocket with her from room to room, from house to yard, yard to street…. Whether it contained cellar keys or a paper of pins, a packet of seeds or a baby’s bib, a hand of yarn or a Testament, it characterized the social complexity as well as the demanding diversity of women’s work.”¹⁸

Symbols of Affluence, Signs of Distress

The absence of great wealth or dire poverty in Philadelphia’s early decades, what some called “a pleasing mediocrity,” was yielding to a new social order by the eve of the American Revolution. The range of social conditions had widened, and the distance between top and bottom had grown. Mixing together on the streets and wharves were merchant moguls, middling shopkeepers and artisans, and struggling—sometimes impecunious—mariners, laborers, and less successful artisans.

The collections of the city’s cultural institutions have been repeatedly replenished with objects reflecting the comfort of the merchant-rentier class in the colonial city, so much so that it sometimes seems that everybody in the city prospered. But beneath the surface of genteel Philadelphia resided other layers of society that historians have disclosed only recently. Most of the physical evidence that would document the lives of ordinary Philadelphians has been used up, torn down, or thrown away. But historians are beginning to discover the lives of the laboring classes in tax lists, poor relief rolls, pay records, newspaper notices of runaway servants and slaves, vagrancy dockets, almshouse admission ledgers, and other records. Especially important are the inventories of household goods taken when a person died. But a full picture of life in the growing colonial city remains half-visible.

As today’s builders of outsized mansions can appreciate, the house was the greatest symbol of wealth and social status in eighteenth-century America. Many of Philadelphia’s successful merchants and gentlemen living on investments and inherited wealth built houses befitting their affluence during the building boom of the 1760s and 1770s, and the wealthiest of them retreated from the heat, dirt, and yellow fever epidemics of Philadelphia summers by building country houses along the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers. Inside the urbane house, whether in or outside the city, fireplaces were an essential element for heating and a venue for the decorator’s touch. House carpenters assembled mantels and then added ornaments according to their client’s taste or their own.

If house size was a signifier of social status, so were the building materials of which the houses were made: brick and stone for the wealthier, wood for the humble. In the same way, inside the house the wood used in furniture signified a family’s wealth and values. Softwood pine served ordinary people, more expensive cherry and maple for middling families. But for the affluent, hardwoods such as oak, walnut, and mahogany—the latter far more expensive because it had to be imported from British Honduras and other distant places—were the materials of choice (though some conservative Quakers shied away from the more ostentatious mahogany). Fine upholstered side chairs, a drop-leaf dinner table, crystal wine glasses, and Chinese porcelain plates (Figure 25) were far beyond the means of common Philadelphians but comfortably within the budget of perhaps one hundred Philadelphia families.¹⁹

FIGURE 25. Dining room setting, mid-eighteenth century, PMA. Wealthy Philadelphians enamored of Georgian-era furnishings created a local version of English upper-class life. The table shown here is set with a silver salver (the small footed tray at the center holding a serving dish), Chinese porcelain plates, silverware, and crystal glasses. These fine material possessions have been collected so passionately and displayed so frequently in museums and historical societies that the public’s mental picture of colonial life in Philadelphia is based primarily on the household goods of the uppermost layer of urban society.

Samplers were a favorite form of female expression among the city’s well-to-do families. Needlework efficiently combined lessons in writing and cultivated discipline, patience, and quietude—or so mothers and fathers hoped. Rebecca Jones was twelve in 1751 when she worked her sampler (Figure 26), probably under the watchful eye of her mother, a schoolmistress, or Ann Marsh, a Quaker woman skilled in needlepoint. Originally treasured for its age and beauty, the sampler has more recently become thought of as a valuable source of information on the education and socializing of eighteenth-century women.

The commercial wealth that propelled the city’s economy forward created a much more self-conscious elite. The number of men identifying themselves to tax collectors as “gentleman” or “esquire” tripled between 1756 and 1772, and these rank-conscious urbanites strove to assert or reinforce their social status in a number of ways. One was to commission oil-on-canvas portraits. Typically, the portrait showed the gentleman assuming erect posture—chin up, back straight, and shoulders back—in itself signaling high status. Likewise, the sitter’s dress announced his social authority. No merchant, lawyer, or clergyman would have dreamed to appear on canvas coatless or in an unbuttoned vest or open-throated shirt, sure signs of a tradesman. The protocol of both posture and costume, clearly displayed in portraits, drew lines demarcating the urban gentleman from the ordinary city dweller. Although the public rarely laid eyes on the oil portrait, secure inside an urban mansion, its owner could view it daily as a reassurance of his class authority.

FIGURE 26. Rebecca Jones sampler, 1751, Atwater Kent Museum. The young Rebecca worked birds, animals, and sprigs of flowers into her compartmented sampler, recorded the exact time of her birth, and stitched in a moral lesson. The Friends Historical Association donated it to the Atwater Kent Museum after World War II as part of a collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Quaker clothes, decorated fabrics, and dolls.

The leaders of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions have attached great importance to acquiring portraits of such worthies as Thomas Lawrence, Thomas Mifflin and his wife, Robert Morris, and Charles Willing, Jr. because, like documents and artifacts, they forge links between the past and the present. But more particularly, the portraits of historically mighty figures reinforce the high social position of their institutional owners, many of them descended from the portrait sitters. The Historical Society’s portrait collection of Philadelphia worthies reached sixty-seven by 1872. In the following decades the collection mounted rapidly, rising to several hundred by the mid-twentieth century.

Also important as emblems of cosmopolitanism and status were furniture designed for the upper classes. The comment of a New York merchant in 1757 applied as well to Philadelphia: “Our affluence, during the late war introduced a degree of luxury in tables, dress, and furniture with which we were before unacquainted.”²⁰ Stylish furniture, arranged in carefully planned architectural spaces within the home, permitted social performances, such as tea drinking, and formal receptions governed by carefully cultivated rules of etiquette. Investment in more ornate and more aesthetically developed furniture became a hallmark of the middle third of the eighteenth century, adopted cautiously by Quakers and embraced wholeheartedly by others.

By the late nineteenth century, the Historical Society, the Athenaeum, and the Philosophical Society avidly collected furniture and house furnishings of the merchant and rentier elite because they attached a special value to the surviving artifacts of the colonial era that supported a romantic vision of a heroic American era. Indeed, as we will see in Chapter 8, a colonial revival was in full flood at this time. Today, historians see the rising desire for fashionable living, played out in acquisitiveness for material goods, as evidence of a “consumer revolution” that spread not only within the upper echelon but also among the middling ranks of American society. They also see the yen for display and the cultivation of refinement not only as a way for the affluent to separate themselves from the hoi polloi through conspicuous consumption but also as a commitment to living a more refined life according to what its participants thought was a superior moral code. “Brandishing possessions in the faces of the poor to demonstrate pecuniary superiority,” writes one historian, “only signified a difference in wealth,” but “creating parlors as a site for a refined life implied spiritual superiority.”²¹

In fashionable Philadelphia, during its rise as a commercial center of great importance, one ate from as well as sat on crafted objects made of materials connoting class position. Wooden bowls and crude clay vessels sufficed for the poor and pewter and earthenware served the needs of the middle class, but the wealthy required silver and porcelain. As the American Revolution approached, silver tea-and coffee-ware, dining accessories, and personal articles became essential emblems of wealth and status. By the 1750s, about a dozen silversmiths worked in Philadelphia, producing increasingly specialized forms of silver tableware as well as ceremonial presentation pieces, silver peace medals, and gorgets produced for Indian chiefs to commemorate treaty signings and keep the Indian trade with Quaker merchants flowing.

Such a piece as a coffeepot (Figure 27) crafted by Joseph Richardson, Jr., one of the city’s premier silversmiths before the Revolution, provides an example of how such an artifact can have multiple meanings. It can be viewed most directly as a handsome example of high-style eighteenth-century craftsmanship, as an intrinsically valuable work of decorative art. Through a second lens, the coffeepot can be seen as a crucial piece of evidence in tracing the new meaning of gentility in the eighteenth century. Amid rising consumerism, in both England and its colonies, genteel people developed a new sense of refinement, acted out in elegant manners, witty conversation, and graceful movements on occasions that depended on the importation of new beverages from exotic ports of call—in this case coffee beans from South America. Through a third lens, the Richardson coffeepot can be considered, although not actually seen, with regard to the organization of rhythms of work of the artisan who crafted the object. Behind the coffeepot lay several work processes involving African cultivation of the coffee beans, the sailors who shipped them to Philadelphia, and the small silversmith workshop production that linked together the labor of apprentices, journeymen, and master craftsmen. Finally, behind the coffeepot, absent from the view of the lovely pot itself, resided the role of the crafts worker in the political and social life of a port town such as Philadelphia.

FIGURE 27. Richardson coffeepot, PMA. Joseph Richardson’s grandfather Francis Richardson, a mariner, immigrated to Philadelphia in 1681. His son, Francis Richardson, Jr., prospered in Philadelphia as a gold-and silversmith and consolidated the family’s fortune by marrying Elizabeth Growden, daughter of a large landowner and provincial officer in nearby Bucks County. When Francis Richardson, Jr. died in 1729, he passed on to his sons, Francis and Joseph, his craftsman’s skills, his clientele, and his enviable place among Philadelphia Quakers. Both sons practiced silver-and goldsmithing. The elegant pieces made by Joseph, one of Philadelphia’s most notable silversmiths, found their way into almost every Philadelphia cultural institution and the homes of many private collectors.

While creating domestic architectural spaces equipped with elegant furnishings, the colonial elite also developed new forms of gentility to display their status. It was not enough to dress well or live well; one had to walk with grace, appreciate music, dance and ride skillfully, and know classical literature and languages. One visitor to Philadelphia wrote that without refined manners “the best finished furniture or finest marble will lose half its luster, which, when added, decorates and greatly ornaments it.”²² The Library Company’s Benjamin Franklin, immensely ambitious and intensely aware of appearances, edited from an English original America’s first treatise on how to get on in business, including standards of decorum and propriety: The American Instructor, or Young Man's Best Companion.

Below the genteel resided the vast majority of urban dwellers. If they could not aspire to gentility, many Pennsylvanians believed that theirs was “the best poor man’s country in the world,” where ordinary people could get ahead and where the gap between kingly riches and grinding poverty, so common in Europe, had narrowed. Philadelphia did contain scores of examples of those who had started at the bottom and risen high. The city to which Franklin came as a journeyman printer in 1723 was filled with ambitious young men, and many of them rose to prominence, if not so spectacularly as “Poor Richard.” No wonder, then, that Franklin became a hero of the city’s leather-apron men and that his little book, variously entitled Father Abraham's Speech and The Way to Wealth, became a best-seller.

Yet while many artisans, like Franklin, watched their wives replace the pewter spoon and earthen porringer at the breakfast table with a silver spoon and china bowl, many others by the mid-eighteenth century were finding the road forward strewn with obstacles. Economic fluctuations, inclement weather, and personal injuries kept many artisans, mariners, and laborers on the knife edge of insecurity, and everyone knew of a bankrupt merchant. The Seven Years’ War was particularly wrenching. It made many artisans flush with orders for boots, clothes, guns, and other military supplies, but it also left hundreds of war widows with children to support. Even at the beginning of that war the Quaker John Smith wrote in his diary, “It is remarkable what an increase of the number of Beggars there is about this town this winter.” Then, at war’s end, colonial cities experienced the greatest economic stagnation ever known.²³

Compounding the economic suffering brought by the Seven Years’ War and depression that set in when the fighting moved to the Caribbean theater in 1761 was the bitter winter of 1761-62, which left hundreds destitute. A wartime inflationary trend had driven up the price of firewood, always an item that, if needed in unusual amounts, could throw a poor laboring family into distress. “Many of the poor,” reported the Pennsylvania Gazette, “are reduced to great Extremity and Distress” because of “the high Price of Firewood.”²⁴ In this situation, Philadelphia leaders, with Quakers in the lead, formed a special “Committee to Alleviate the Miseries of the Poor.” The relief roll in Figure 28 is a partial list of the 329 “objects of Charity” who received blankets, stockings, and—that most precious commodity—firewood. One of the recipients of firewood, William Browne, lived across the street from Governor James Hamilton, poignant evidence of the class-mixed character of the city.

FIGURE 28. Manuscript relief roll from Committee to Alleviate the Miseries of the Poor, HSP. Both Richardson and Ghiselin, whose names appear on this list, were grandsons of men who had immigrated to America in 1681, Francis Richardson from England and Cesar Ghiselin, a Huguenot, from France. Both families prospered at first, but while the Richardsons continued to rise, the Ghiselins remained on a plateau and then, in the third generation, declined sharply. Cesar Ghiselin, named after his grandfather, became a barber and by 1756 was rated on the tax list at one third the assessment of Joseph Richardson. In the next few years Ghiselin’s world collapsed, leaving him indigent in the winter of 1761-62, when Richardson served as one of the leaders of the poor relief effort.

FIGURE 29. A View of the House of Employment, Alms-house, Pensylvania Hospital, & part of the City of Philadelphia, c.1767, LCP. The main part of the city, seen in the background to the right, emphasizes the bucolic setting of these buildings. Animals graze in the fields. Only the Bettering House and the first wing of the Pennsylvania Hospital, seen on the right, had been built by this time. As soon as its doors opened in October 1767 the Bettering House was filled with 284 persons. By the eve of the American Revolution it bulged with more than four hundred indigent men, women, and children. The name came from the growing feeling among the city’s leaders that the poor were responsible for their poverty and could better themselves through a strict almshouse regimen designed to inculcate an abstemious work ethic.

Philadelphia’s construction artisans were glad for contracts in 1766-67 to build an extensive new almshouse, the largest building in the American colonies, but some of them probably wondered if they would become inmates themselves as the city’s poor swelled in number. The new almshouse, or Bettering House as it was revealingly called, was built on Spruce Street, several blocks beyond the limits of residential development, on a site described by a visitor in 1774 as “a very bleak place” where “the North-Westers, which are very severe here, will have a full sweep at a body.” It became an institution of last resort for poor Philadelphians, a place to obtain food and warmth during the winter when employment was scarce, a maternity hospital, and a place to die with a semblance of dignity. Standing near it was the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Sick Poor, built in 1755-56 (Figure 29). The first institution of its kind in North America, the hospital admitted mostly those too poor to pay a doctor who would treat them at home.

Recovering the lives of ordinary Philadelphians, such as those who went to the Hospital for the Sick Poor or to the almshouse, is hampered severely from the disappearance of most material evidence that would show how they conducted their lives, at home and at the workplace, and what they knew, thought, or cared about. Ironically, the impoverished and desolate in the social basement of urban society are more visible than the ordinary people above them—the countless, anonymous people who inhabited the lower middle class. Nobody noticed the plodders as much as the desperate. While institutions rarely collected materials from the middle, they often gathered evidence, if inadvertently, from the bottom.

This has happened in two ways. First, because the poor were the objects of reformers’ zeal and the recipients of institutional assistance, their lives were recorded, very briefly to be sure, in the records of the criminal justice and poor relief systems. For example, the Pennsylvania Hospital’s admission and financial records, along with rough minutes of its managers and medical staff, have been maintained nearly intact for more than two centuries. They provide historians with fascinating windows into the lives and travails of the laboring poor. So do the admission records of the Bettering House, supplemented by managers’ records, which are housed at the Archives of the City of Philadelphia and are largely complete from the 1760s forward.

Second, because Philadelphia’s wealthy merchants, lawyers, and land speculators were also the city’s philanthropists, social reformers, and government officials, the traces of lower-class life are buried in what collecting societies assiduously acquired: double-entry ledgers, commercial correspondence, and, lodged in these commercial papers, records of charitable contributions, scraps of court proceedings, and material related to managing churches. In an era before modern record-keeping and before civil service, fragments of municipal records—even tax assessors’ lists and quarter-session court records—surface in the private papers of civic leaders. For example, buried in the papers of Thomas Wharton, an important Philadelphia merchant in the late colonial era, is his proposal for building a new kind of poorhouse—the genesis of the so-called Bettering House. In this single document one finds evidence of changing attitudes toward the poor, as Quakers attempted to administer tough love to the down-and-out (an experiment that failed in a matter of years). Similarly, when the Historical Society leaders acquired the Wharton-Willing Papers by gift in 1973, adding to their hefty materials on two of the city’s great eighteenth-century merchant families, they unexpectedly found buried in this rich collection the records of the Committee to Alleviate the Miseries of the Poor, an ad hoc group that distributed wood, blankets, and stockings in the bitter winter of 1761-62 and inscribed the name of each recipient—comprising, in effect, a group portrait of laboring families carried downward. Here, in capsule, was the story of the deranging effects of the Seven Years’ War, the re-sorting of social classes in an era of commercial growth, and the evidence that in Franklin’s Philadelphia not every leather-aproned artisan could cash in on Ben’s penny aphorisms contained in “The Art of Making Money Plenty in Every Man’s Pocket.” One era’s tastes and priorities in collecting have fortuitously provided materials for historians of another era with new questions to ask about the past. Much old wine has been decanted into new bottles.

If Pennsylvania was the “best poor man’s country in the world,” at least in good times and for many men, was it also the best poor woman’s country in the world? The study of women’s roles and contributions to the making of urban society is relatively new, but it is becoming a thriving subject of inquiry.²⁵ The founders and later directors of the Historical Society and other collecting institutions were little interested in this topic—and indeed historians, most of them males, were only occasionally drawn to the subject for generations after the Society’s founding. Moreover, most of the Historical Society’s holdings that bear on female lives tell us about women married to wealthy and publicly prominent men. The sources that would allow an investigation of how ordinary women helped shape church life, work life, and community life are much thinner. Still, the study of urban women that has been undertaken in the past several decades—drawing on constable’s lists of householders, tax lists, probate records, newspaper advertisements, account books, diaries, correspondence, and ephemera—is now bringing Philadelphia’s female world into view.

Over the years, the Historical Society, Library Company, and Philosophical Society did acquire the writings—letters, diaries, memoirs, accounts, and other materials—of a few eighteenth-century women, and now this has become a collecting priority everywhere. One of the most valuable is the diary of Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker (1734-1807). Married to Henry Drinker, a member of the Philadelphia Quaker elite, Elizabeth began her diary when she was twenty-four and kept it faithfully until she was near death, at age seventy-three. She was an astute observer of the world around her, and from the thirty-three manuscript volumes of the diary, acquired in 1955, can be garnered an abundance of information on family life, women’s education and intellectual life, medical practices, household management and employer relations with servants, and the changing character of the city’s neighborhoods.²⁶

The Philadelphia Enlightenment

Few affluent Philadelphians doubted that hard work, sobriety, and moderation were the keys to social progress and personal advancement. To them, society was like a machine, the parts of which had to be improved and kept in good working order. As their city grew, many prosperous Philadelphians devoted some of their time and wealth to cultural activities and civic improvements. This benefited the city while fostering an identity among the wealthy as a distinct class with special claims to social authority. Most of the founders and early members of the Library Company, the Philosophical Society, and the Historical Society were descended from this group, which ushered in the American Enlightenment.

Philadelphia became an American center of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement based on the notion of human progress through rational thought and civic concern. From the city’s merchants, lawyers, and prospering craftsmen came the Library Company (1731), which was America’s first lending library, the College of Philadelphia (1751), the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Sick Poor (1752), the American Philosophical Society (1769), and numerous other organizations dedicated to promoting culture and perfecting the human condition.

Benjamin Franklin personified the Enlightenment’s commitment to the acquisition of knowledge for bettering humankind. From helping to found America’s first circulating library to designing a more efficient wood stove for heating rooms to installing the first streetlights in Philadelphia, Franklin was the civic improver par excellence.²⁷

Franklin’s fascination with electricity gained him international recognition. In 1746, already a successful printer and earnest civic organizer, he began his experiments. In that year, a Dutchman, Pieter van Musschenbroek, had learned how to condense electricity in a glass bottle (called a Leyden jar) and to produce electrical sparks by attaching a conductor to the two sides of the bottle. Throughout Europe, amateur scientists began to play with this device, but nobody really understood the source or the nature of the mysterious electrical “fluid.”

By 1748, Franklin had constructed a number of experiments in his house on Market Street for producing brilliant sparks from Leyden jars. His Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America was published in London three years later, putting his name on the lips of scientists all over Europe. Far more important than his household experiments, however, was his development of the technical means to test what many already believed—that lightning produced by thunderstorms was a form of electricity. His famous kite experiment constituted a breakthrough of one of the most formidable barriers of the unknown and opened up an entirely new field of controlled study and human advancement (Figure 30).

Franklin’s Philadelphia experiments with electricity represented Enlightenment thinking at its practical best because it used ideas, or what we call scientific theory, to harness nature. Once he had learned the properties of electricity and had established that lightning was a form of it, he found it relatively easy to contrive a metal rod, coated to prevent rusting, that would “throw off” the electricity and render it harmless. By 1753, convinced that he had mastered the theory of electricity and lightning, Franklin published a practical essay, “How to Secure Houses &c. from Lightning,” in his best-selling Poor Richard's Almanack. Here he explained a natural phenomenon that had always terrified people, providing the world with a relatively simple and inexpensive device to protect lives and property. Soon lightning rods appeared on houses and barns all over the American colonies, then before long in Europe and other parts of the world. Farmers, homeowners, mariners, and church wardens could rest easier, knowing that their dwellings, stables, houses, ships, and churches were safe. What had seemed to be the wrathful work of an angry God now became a force within the power of human beings to control. If the power of lightning could be harnessed by the son of a Boston candlemaker far from the centers of learning in Europe, what other forces of nature might be understood and brought under rein? “Franklin’s reputation was more universal than that of Leibniz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire,” John Adams later wrote. “There was scarcely a peasant or a citizen … who did not consider him a friend to human kind.”²⁸

FIGURE 30. Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, c.1805, PMA. Franklin’s house was about to be demolished and Benjamin West was nearing the end of his life when he painted this heroic portrait. Of course, when Franklin conducted his famous kite experiment in 1752 he was not surrounded by cherubs (one in an Indian headdress); only his son William was at his side. However, the thunderstorm and the key tied to a metal kite string were real. West conveniently has cherubs playing with Franklin’s electrical apparatus. Paintings of Philadelphia’s most famous son were as migratory as the man himself. West’s descendants in England kept this painting until 1898; then it was sold several times at auction in London, Paris, and New York before returning to the Philadelphia area in 1927.

In 1789, when Franklin was near death, the Philosophical Society commissioned Charles Willson Peale to paint a half-length portrait of the internationally recognized scientist. The ailing Franklin could pose for only fifteen minutes a day and died on April 17, 1790. Peale finished the work from memory, aided by his Franklin portrait of 1785. Peale depicted Franklin holding the manuscript for his famous book, Experiments and Observations on Electricity. The American Philosophical Society rejected the painting, perhaps because they did not consider it to be a life portrait. That act redounded to the Historical Society’s good fortune, because more than half a century later James J. Barclay, a Philadelphia lawyer and an officer of the Historical Society, donated the portrait to the society.

Statesman as well as scientist, Franklin spent fifteen years in London between 1757 and 1775 as a colonial agent for the legislatures of Pennsylvania and several other colonies. These were the years when the American Enlightenment in Philadelphia began to influence the lives of several thousand Africans toiling in the city, all but a few of them as slaves. The origins of Philadelphia’s reputation as an international capital of humanitarian reform now began with a tiny number who spoke out against slavery. The first whites to protest, four recently arrived German immigrants in Germantown, uttered their detestation of slavery in 1688. They were appalled that the Quaker colony, established for liberty of conscience, should deny men and women “liberty of the body,” and they pointed to the inconsistency between professing pacifism and engaging in slavery, which was inherently violent. But for many years thereafter the only souls to decry slavery were regarded as misfits and disturbers of the peace. Such a man was Benjamin Lay. A former Barbadian slave owner, Lay joined the Society of Friends and moved to Philadelphia in 1731. He used personal example and dramatic acts to portray the evil of slavery. Lay made his own clothes to avoid materials grown with slave labor and publicly smashed his wife’s teacups to discourage use of slave-produced sugar. His fiery condemnation of slavery, All Slave-keepers, That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates (1737) led to his repudiation by the Society of Friends. Not until he was near death in 1758, when the engraving in Figure 31 was done by Henry Dawkins, was his cause adopted officially by the Society of Friends.

Lay was followed by other antislavery spokesmen, though they were few in number before the American Revolution. The most committed and best known were John Woolman and Anthony Benezet. Both were ascetic and totally committed, caring little for the comforts of life or about the opinions of their contemporaries. These were the two humble men—one a tailor, the other a teacher of small children—who finally moved the Society of Friends to take a series of official positions against slavery between 1754 and 1774. In the latter year, the Society prohibited slave owning, and thereafter all Quakers had to release their slaves or face disownment by the Society of Friends. Decades of antislavery labor lay ahead, but a beginning had been made.²⁹

Science and higher education were also part of Philadelphia’s leadership in the American Enlightenment. In 1751, under Franklin’s impetus, the Academy of Philadelphia, a nonsectarian school of higher education, held its first classes. It was granted college status four years later, but not until 1779 was it renamed the University of the State of Pennsylvania. The first board of trustees of the college included Anglicans and Presbyterians but only a few Quakers. The Society of Friends had traditionally rejected the more esoteric aspects of higher education in favor of practical learning. From its early period the college desultorily collected historical materials, but its connection with Franklin made it an important holder of Frankliniana.

FIGURE 31. Henry Dawkins, Benjamin Lay, engraving, 1758, Haverford College. The engraving includes a basket of fruit—Lay was a vegetarian—and Lay is seen outside a cave he used as a retreat for meditation on his farm in Abington. Lay holds a book inscribed “TRION ON HAPPINESS”—a reference to the work of an early English Quaker, Thomas Tryon, whose The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness (London, 1683) set forth a theory of temperance and moderation as the keys to a long and happy life. The painting from which the engraving was taken, by William Williams, who aroused Benjamin West’s interest in painting, is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

FIGURE 32. Astronomical clock built by David Rittenhouse, APS. Instrument maker Rittenhouse built this clock for his observatory at Norriton and used it for his famous observation of the transit of Venus in 1769. Many prized Rittenhouse materials have found their way, by gift or purchase, to the Athenaeum, Historical Society, Library Company, Philosophical Society, and Atwater Kent Museum. Hundreds of pages of his meteorological observations in the 1780s and 1790s were presented to the Philosophical Society in 1898. The Society acquired the clock in about 1810 from Rittenhouse’s executors. The centennial of Rittenhouse’s birth went unnoticed in 1832, but Philadelphia celebrated the bicentenary in the middle of the Great Depression with modest fanfare.

Like his friend Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse (1732-96) was a scientist, inventor, successful businessman, and Revolutionary leader. George Washington recognized his expertise as a mathematician and instrument maker by appointing him the first Superintendent of the United States Mint. Rittenhouse began his career as a clockmaker and gained fame in 1769 by observing the transit of Venus (Figure 32). His orrery, a moving mechanical model of the solar system based on precise mathematical calculations, also brought him fame. Both the Philosophical Society and the Library Company were venues of scientific experimentation, and Rittenhouse belonged to both, serving as the Philosophical Society’s president after Franklin died in 1790.

Cosmopolitan from the beginning because of Penn’s doctrine of religious tolerance and an open-door policy for immigrants, Philadelphia at the end of the colonial period stood on the threshold of receiving a new storm of strangers. As the largest North American town and situated midway between the two oldest areas of settlement and commercial development—New England and the Chesapeake—Penn’s “greene country towne” was about to become the center of the revolutionary government that for ten years, from 1774 to 1783, coordinated the bloody fight to gain American independence. Into the city came delegates from all thirteen colonies to the First and Second Continental Congresses, along with those whom the Congress designated to go abroad as the nation’s first emissaries. Through Philadelphia poured American and British armies. Into the city came French and Spanish diplomats, Indian chiefs, titled aristocrats eager to fight for the American cause, and streams of individuals displaced by the war. The commercial city was becoming the city of revolution.