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Chapter 3

THE REVOLUTION’S MANY FACES

The American Revolution was the central event in the lives of most of those who lived through it. It engaged the passions and interests of nearly everyone and promised to usher in a new age. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Philadelphia’s famous pamphleteer, Thomas Paine. “A situation similar to the present has not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”¹

While the Revolution shaped the lives of most of its participants, it also became the touchstone of succeeding generations, especially those who were historically minded. In the fashioning of public memory in Philadelphia, the Revolution became a central event. However, this did not happen spontaneously or continually. The public had to be reminded and instructed again and again. But given the diverse and contrasting views its Philadelphia participants had held, stimulating, massaging, and managing public memory always ran into the problem of deciding just what the American Revolution meant. As later chapters will make clear, preserving a stable narrative of the Revolution was nearly as difficult as Washington’s attempt to hold together a stable Continental army.

The difficulties in sustaining a unified view of the Revolution could hardly have been otherwise because the war was a continuously shifting and painfully ambiguous affair for the diverse people of the Philadelphia region (Figure 33). At bottom, of course, it was a bloody struggle to secure independence from what most colonists regarded as a corrupt and tyrannical English government. But it was also a prolonged negotiation among people of different points of view about what kind of society they wished to create should good fortune allow them to win the war. This debate divided families, neighbors, churches, and occupational groups, not only between “loyalists” and “patriots” but also among rebels who varied from conservative to radical on vexed internal questions: the breadth of the franchise, the powers of the governor, tax burdens, the criminal code, emancipating slaves, and much more. Casting themselves into a state of nature after renouncing the English charter and law under which they had lived, Pennsylvanians had to decide just what kind of laws, political structures, and constitutionally protected liberties they wished to live under and by what means they should create these new governmental arrangements.

This task proved difficult and divisive. United in their desire to begin anew as an independent nation, Americans were at the same time frequently divided by region, class, religion, ethnicity, and gender. Nearly everyone carried into the fray an understanding of their own experiences in the colonial period, both in relation to the mother country and to each other. “Can America be happy?” asked Paine. “As happy as she wants, for she hath a clean slate to write upon.” That was the rub. With many eager to step forward with chalk to inscribe their hopes for the future upon the blank slate, it took the entire course of the war to sort out competing ideas and to frame solutions. Even then, unresolved questions carried over into the postwar period. If citizens argued strenuously at the time, it is little wonder that their descendants would quarrel heatedly about the “true” nature of the Revolution.

FIGURE 33. Edward Lamson Henry, Cliveden During the Battle of Germantown, Cliveden of the National Trust. On October 3, 1777, Washington’s ragged Continentals attacked the British encamped at Cliveden, the mansion of Benjamin Chew, wealthy Philadelphia Loyalist landowner and officeholder who was exiled to New Jersey. Broken communications and fog contributed to the Americans’ defeat in the battle shown in this nineteenth-century recreation. After the war Chew returned to Cliveden and won back his prominence in Philadelphia political and social circles. His descendants lived in the house until 1972, when they presented it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Philadelphia played a central role in the dramatic events leading to war. As the meeting place of the First and Second Continental Congresses, it drew together insurgent leaders from all the colonies; in the prolonged debates over independence in early 1776, Pennsylvania became the “keystone” colony whose willingness to commit for independence proved decisive. During the war, the city was a strategic port and a military staging and production center as well as the center of state and national government.²

The founders of the Library Company, the Philosophical Society, and the Historical Society were all keenly interested in collecting material relating to the American Revolution. After all, the city was the nation’s birthplace, where the Declaration of Independence was written and signed and where the Continental Congress sat while directing the war. Moreover, Philadelphia was the home of some of the most famous men of ’76: Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, Thomas Paine, James Wilson, Benjamin Rush, and many others. This initial collecting interest never waned, and down to the present the city’s collecting institutions have nourished a special interest in acquiring anything related to the nation’s founding. Yet looking back on the Revolution was not a neutral activity, and hence for many years collecting institutions privileged some materials while downgrading others.

Quaker prominence in Philadelphia’s cultural institutions has been the source of some confusion and tension in assembling, preserving, and presenting documents and artifacts of the revolutionary era. To put the matter bluntly, the American Revolution was nearly as painful in Quaker remembrance as was the revolutionary experience at the time. For Philadelphia Quakers, the Revolution was a frightful ordeal, the most traumatic chapter in their history. As principled pacifists, they refused to fight or even pay taxes for the war, and many of them were suspected of collaborating or at least sympathizing with the British because of close mercantile ties to overseas partners. On both counts they were reviled, ostracized, and in some cases exiled. All were disenfranchised, and only slowly in the postrevolutionary period did Pennsylvanians put aside their wartime disgust with the Quakers.³

The Quakers’ patriot opponents were almost as interested as the Quakers themselves in allowing historical amnesia concerning this chapter of the Revolution to blot out remembrance. An internecine struggle hardly fit with the desire to show the revolutionary generation in untarnished, heroic terms, which, in the nineteenth century, was the dominant impulse among historians and historical societies. Nor has it been easy for non-Quaker historians to deal with Quaker pacifism and outright Toryism because of their general admiration of postrevolutionary Quaker efforts on behalf of woman’s suffrage, abolition, Indian rights, world peace, and other liberal causes.

For all the pain associated with the Revolution, many of the Library Company’s early Quaker councillors, librarians, and patrons knew that historical materials germane to the war for independence were of utmost value. And some had joined the Free Quakers, the splinter group that put aside pacifist principles and fully supported the American cause in word and deed. When the chance arose to acquire a bundle of revolutionary ephemeral materials, just one year after the war ended, the Library Company sprang into action. One of its members, the Swiss immigrant Pierre-Eugène Du Simitière, had assiduously gathered materials that few at the time thought to collect—newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, cartoons, and prints—in order to write a history of the Revolution. But death claimed Du Simitière in 1784. The Library Company, positioning itself as a national library, promptly purchased his cache at auction, thus becoming a repository of special importance for materials bearing on the American Revolution. This set an unspoken precedent for collecting materials that, while distasteful to many of its leaders and members, could help establish the claim of being a civic public library as distinct from the sectarian libraries at the new nation’s small number of colleges.

Nearly half a century later, the Historical Society’s early Quaker leaders, remembering vividly the anguish of their parents and grandparents, probably recalled the Revolution as something more than simply “the glorious cause.” But they also remembered that time had healed the wartime wounds and Quakers had been reincorporated into Philadelphia society. Materials connected to the Revolution, especially related to the war against England, became priceless items, for the American Revolution had become their heritage too, even if their fathers and grandfathers had opposed it at the time. If Quaker beliefs stressed pacifism, they did not prohibit the preservation of valuable documents from turbulent times.

It can be imagined that the American Philosophical Society’s interest in the American Revolution must have been unequivocal, since Franklin, the society’s founder, was a central revolutionary figure. Moreover, one year after Franklin’s death in 1790, Thomas Jefferson became the institution’s president. For many years, however, the Philosophical Society showed only casual interest in acquiring documents concerning the American Revolution. In 1803, when Benjamin Franklin’s daughter put her father’s library up for sale, the Philosophical Society purchased some books and manuscripts of its patron saint. But not until Du Ponceau proposed the acquisition of historical documents in 1811, a proposal that took another four years to implement when the society created a new historical and literary committee, was any priority given to revolutionary materials. The first fruit of this initiative came in 1815, when the Philosophical Society received a scrapbook of newspaper clippings accumulated by an Irish foot soldier who fought with the British during the Revolution and later became a steward in the household of one of Washington’s leading generals—Nathanael Greene. Five years later came the papers of Greene himself, from Robert de Silver, a wealthy Philadelphia stationer and bookseller. In 1825, Richard Henry Lee, a Virginia delegate to and later president of the Continental Congress, presented some of his correspondence.

Not until 1840, when the Philosophical Society’s interest in historical materials had waned, did its library acquire one of the crown jewels of revolutionary material—a voluminous collection of Benjamin Franklin’s papers. This acquisition is an example of the circuitous disposition of what later generations would regard as priceless treasures. The Franklin papers, including his library of more than four thousand volumes, came indirectly from Benjamin’s grandson, William Temple Franklin, who had little use for Philadelphia at all. The illegitimate son of William Franklin (himself an illegitimate offspring of Benjamin), Temple Franklin, as he was known, was raised by a London governess after his birth in 1760 and brought to Philadelphia by his famous grandfather in 1774. When Franklin became the Continental Congress’s emissary to France in 1776, he took young Temple with him to Paris as his secretary. Temple returned to Philadelphia after the war but disliked the city. Shortly after his grandfather died in 1790, he returned to London, placing the immense trove of Franklin papers and books in the hands of George Fox, a Philadelphia doctor. Thirty-three years later, on his deathbed, Temple Franklin bequeathed them to Fox, along with his own papers. There they rested until Fox died, leaving the papers in 1840 to his son and daughter, who promptly presented them to the American Philosophical Society. Meanwhile, Franklin’s collection had been broken up and sold at various times.⁴

Despite the Quaker leanings of its early councillors, the Historical Society began collecting materials on the violent Revolution just a year after its founding. John Fanning Watson was especially influential. In reply to a circular from the first president, William Rawle, for historical materials, Watson urged in 1825 that the Historical Society make a special effort “to rescue from oblivion, the facts of personal prowess, achievements, or sufferings by officers & soldiers of the Revolutionary War.”⁵ A pioneer of oral history, he argued that “the recitals of many brave men now going down to the tomb—of what they saw, or heard, or sustained, in that momentous struggle which set us free would form a fund of anecdotes and of individual history well deserving of our preservation.” President Rawle’s circular calling for materials had included a request for biographical notices of “eminent persons or of any persons in respect to whom remarkable events may have happened,” and John Jay Smith, soon to become the librarian of the Library Company, circulated a list of questions regarding the Revolution. Watson added a populist twist, calling for attention to “many privates ‘unknown to fame’ peculiarly distinguished by their actions” and mentioned, by way of example, Zenas Macumber, a private in Washington’s bodyguard who had served through the entire war and survived seventeen wounds.⁶ However, the recollections and memorabilia of the Zenas Macumbers of the Revolution did not flow in, as Watson hoped. As close as the Historical Society came was the acquisition of the manuscript diaries of Christopher Marshall, a disowned Quaker druggist who figured importantly in Philadelphia’s radical revolutionary circle. Covering the years from 1774 to 1785, the Marshall diaries were the one main source of information on the Revolution acquired in the early years of the Historical Society that told the story from the streets and coffeehouses rather than the counting houses and legislative chambers.

Breaking Ties

Contemplating independence was both exhilarating and frightening because the colonies were only loosely united and faced the world’s greatest military power. No wonder, then, that in 1774 John Adams found the idea of independence “a Hobgoblin of so frightful Mien, that it would throw a delicate Person into Fits to look it in the Face.”⁷ Philadelphians, like other colonists, shuddered and argued for a decade before finally taking the plunge. As hosts of both Continental Congresses, they were first-hand observers of the debate about independence. Their publishing preeminence already established, the city’s presses poured forth newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets, thus assuring an airing of all sides of the question.

But Philadelphians had known political controversy since the early 1700s. The political campaigns of the mid-1760s were especially notable in mobilizing voters and using the press to raise the temperature of political debate. The election of 1764 brought forth a torrent of scurrilous pamphlets from both sides. “Stop your pamphleteers’ mouths & shut up your presses,” pleaded a shocked observer. “Such a torrent of low scurrility sure never came from any country as lately from Pennsylvania.”⁸ In mobilizing a record number of voters in Philadelphia, campaigns such as this helped prepare the ground for revolutionary involvement of ordinary people.

FIGURE 34. Magna Britania her Colonies Reduc’d, cartoon, 1765-66, LCP. Philadelphia’s printers frequently but selectively copied cartoons from London sources. This cartoon was re-engraved in Philadelphia and distributed in a larger form after the news reached the city of the Townshend duties passed by Parliament in 1767. Du Simitière saved this copy of the card Franklin distributed in London. It is the only surviving copy.

The role of the man in the streets became evident the very next year when boycotts of English goods were organized to force Parliament to repeal the detested Stamp Act of 1764. Philadelphia merchants joined those in other cities to vow they would import no further British goods. But many merchants opposed the nonimportation agreement and joined only “to appease [the people] and indeed for their own safety,” as the revolutionary leader Charles Thomson observed.⁹ Women, as the main purchasers of imported goods, and ordinary people involved in maintaining boycotts, were coming to the fore.

Political cartoons helped mobilize public opinion. Franklin believed they had greater effect than printed discourses. In Figure 34, a butchered America sits in a desolate scene representing Britain’s “Colonies Reduced.” An olive branch falls from the hand of the severed Pennsylvania. “The moral is,” wrote Franklin to his sister, “that the Colonies may be ruined, but that Britain would thereby be maimed.”¹⁰ The motto, “Date Obolum Bellisario” (Give a Penny to Belisarius), asks members of Parliament, to whom Franklin had this cartoon-on-card delivered the day before the debate on repealing the Stamp Act, to remember that the Roman general Belisarius was blinded and left to beg for alms after accused of a conspiracy against Justinian. American protests forced the repeal of the hated Stamp Act, although Parliament continued to insist on its right to pass laws affecting the colonies without the assent of colonial representatives.

By the time Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, the artisans, mariners, and shopkeepers in Philadelphia had found their political voice and were nominating men from their own ranks for local and provincial offices. Conservatives within the merchant elite looked askance at this, one of them in Philadelphia sputtering that “the Mechanics … have no Right to Speak or Think for themselves.”¹¹ But the artisans pushed on. They were prominent in the Committee for Tarring and Feathering, organized in October 1773. Six weeks later, the Committee published a strongly worded broadside (Figure 35) warning Delaware River pilots not to conduct British ships carrying tea into the port of Philadelphia. John Adams later told Benjamin Rush that these Philadelphians had inspired the Boston Tea Party. Similar broadsides encouraged women, who bought and served tea, to join the boycott.

Some artisans not only served as committeemen and street marshals during demonstrations but also became fervent propagandists for the patriot cause. Silversmith John Leacock used art as well as artisanry. Although associated with Philadelphia’s Sons of Liberty, Leacock was never elected to one of the city’s radical committees. But he made his contribution in an action-packed play published as the Second Continental Congress took the final steps toward independence. Widely advertised in the Philadelphia newspapers, Leacock’s Fall of British Tyranny: or, American Liberty Triumphant had a diverse cast of characters who spoke sailor’s bawdry, Roman oratory, and black dialect in a series of satiric vignettes lambasting the British and celebrating the Americans who resisted their tyrannical designs.

Like many well-to-do leaders, Philadelphia’s John Dickinson feared the rising political consciousness of those beneath him. In 1768, Dickinson had published one of the most important protest pieces of the period, “The Patriotic American Farmer” or “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” which appeared serially in the Pennsylvania Chronicle. But by 1776, by which time Philadelphia’s working people had become numerous on the committees that were assuming de facto powers of government, he had moderated his protests. A delegate to the second Continental Congress, he could not bring himself to sign the Declaration of Independence. At about the time the young Marylander Charles Willson Peale, who had recently arrived in Philadelphia, painted Dickinson’s portrait in 1770. John Adams described Dickinson as “a Shadow—tall, but slender as a Reed—pale as ashes. One would think at first Sight that he would not live a Month.”¹²

One of the men who frightened lawyers like John Dickinson was Thomas Paine, the tousled immigrant stay maker who emerged from obscurity only a year before the Revolution to play a major role in the final break with England. The hardhitting, pungent language of Paine’s Common Sense contrasted sharply with the formal, legalistic rhetoric of most protest pamphlets written by lawyers and clergymen. This helped make it the most widely read and influential tract in the protests against England.¹³ But the Historical Society collected almost nothing related to Paine over the years—partly by happenstance, perhaps, but also indicative of the faint interest its councillors had in radicals such as Paine, who wanted not only independence but a thorough reformation of American society in the interest of greater equality. The Library Company had acquired Common Sense and also Paine’s American Crisis as part of the Du Simitière purchase. But not until 1895, with eminent historians on its council, did the Historical Society purchase a copy of Common Sense owned by Paine’s radical, warm-tempered compatriot, Timothy Matlack, a brewer who was disowned by the Quakers for chronic indebtedness and unruly behavior. The following year the society shelved “Eulogy of Thomas Paine,” deposited by a Philadelphia physician in 1896, and not until 1921 did members hear a lecture on “The Real Thomas Paine, Patriot and Publicist; A Philosopher Misunderstood.” Though the revolution’s greatest propagandist was a member of the Philosophical Society, only in 1971 did the society receive by gift a rich assemblage of Paine materials—editions of his many books, letters, accounts and receipts, verses, and commentary on the author of Common Sense, The American Crisis, Age of Reason, and Rights of Man. The collection had been gathered lovingly over many years by Richard Gimbel, who fought Philadelphia officials for years to restore Paine to public memory by placing a bust of Paine in the Independence Hall Museum.

FIGURE 35. To the Delaware Pilots, broadside, 1773, LCP. The wording in the broadside could hardly have been stronger: “Pennsylvanians are, to a Man, passionately fond of Freedom; the Birthright of Americans”; “no Power on the Face of the Earth has a Right to tax them without their Consent”; “What think you Captain, of a Halter around your Neck—ten Gallons of liquid Tar decanted on your Pate—with the Feathers of a dozen wild Geese laid over that to enliven your Appearance?” The Library Company purchased this broadside from Du Simitière’s collection, along with other ephemera from Philadelphia’s version of the more famous Boston Tea Party. The Historical Society acquired a copy 138 years later.

In June 1776, when the Pennsylvania members of the Continental Congress held back on the issue of independence, artisans and shopkeepers virtually took over the provincial government and demanded that their representatives support the break with England. This was history-making from the bottom up, though the full story was not told by historians until the 1960s. In 1891, the Historical Society acquired a fragment of John Dunlap’s uncorrected printer’s proof of the Declaration of Independence, representing perhaps the earliest version of the document to appear in print as a broadside. When Philadelphians heard the Declaration read aloud from the State House steps on July 8, they shouted “Huzzah!” Then they tore the royal coat of arms from above the State House door and tossed that symbol of colonial dependency into a roaring bonfire in what amounted to a king-killing ritual, the flames representing the transfer of sovereign power from George III to the American people at large.

One of the icons of American nationalism is the depiction of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The best-known rendering of that event is John Trumbull’s Signing of the Declaration of Independence (Figure 1). But the painting by Edward Savage (Figure 36) presents a truer picture than Trumbull’s and provides a powerful example of how a single picture of the past can inform the contemporary restorationist movement. When the National Park Service became custodian of Independence Hall after World War II, its desire to restore the interior rooms of Independence Hall to their original condition led to research proving that the paneling portrayed in the Savage painting was much more accurate than in the Trumbull version. Included in this restoration of the 1960s were the replacement of upholstered leather armchairs, lovingly collected and installed during the refurbishing of Independence Hall for the 1876 Centennial Exposition. The Savage painting showed un-upholstered Windsor chairs in the famed Assembly Room, and National Park Service research also confirmed this detail. Windsor chairs were acquired to replace the unauthentic ones, leaving the descendants of the donors of the upholstered chairs crestfallen at the demoted status of prized heirlooms.¹⁴

FIGURE 36. Edward Savage, The Congress Voting Independence, oil, HSP. Savage’s painting is thought to have been partly based on an earlier unfinished portrayal of the Declaration’s signing by Robert Edge Pine, an English immigrant who was attracted to the American Revolutionary cause and started a series of large historical paintings in the United States between 1784 and 1788. It may have been acquired by Savage, who completed his own painting about 1801. A definitive identification of all the figures in the painting is not possible. Some, like Franklin, are obvious, scholars disagree about others, and some are too indistinct to guess at. The identification of some figures, like that of Francis Hopkinson (leaning on the table near the center of the painting), are based on single portraits by Pine.

When the Historical Society had an opportunity to purchase this painting in 1904, its leaders hastened to do so because such a painting fit perfectly into their view of the society as a temple for studying and contemplating the nation’s origins and for inculcating national pride. Charles Henry Hart, one of the first historians of early American painting, had found the canvas languishing in a dark corner of the Boston Public Museum and sold it to the Historical Society for $600.

Of much less interest to the city’s collecting institutions was an independence movement of a different kind—the breaking of ties between enslaved Philadelphians and their masters. Before and during the Revolution, the rhetoric of liberty and natural rights spilled over to areas not intended by the first protesters of British colonial policy in the 1760s. Enslaved Africans petitioned in other towns for their freedom. While no such petitions from Philadelphia slaves have surfaced, it can be imagined that they were moved toward action when, just five days before the minutemen took their stand at Concord and Lexington, ten white Philadelphians met to establish the first antislavery society in the world. Their immediate concern was the enslavement of an Indian woman, Dinah Nevill, and her three children, but the larger issue was the entrenched system of racial slavery that held one out of five inhabitants of the colonies in lifelong bondage. Almost a century after the founding of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1775, the Historical Society began receiving its voluminous records, a source almost unexcelled for studying both abolitionism and African American life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Loyal Subjects and Subjected Loyalists

Textbooks have usually taught us that the loyalists who remained faithful to the English crown were too selfish or timid to join the revolutionaries. In truth, the loyalists were a mixed group with widely varying motives. Some, like Benjamin Franklin’s friend Joseph Galloway, had been early protesters against English policy but grew alarmed when ordinary Philadelphians began to take matters into their own hands and call for internal reforms as well as independence. Men like Galloway wanted independence but not a social revolution. Franklin’s only son, William, remained loyal because he had served proudly as the royal governor of New Jersey and had acquired thoroughly English tastes when growing up with his father in London.

Anglican clergymen in America formed another group torn between loyalty to their English-directed church and their affection for their native ground. For example, the Reverend Jacob Duché, rector of the united parishes of Christ Church and St. Peter’s, initially favored American independence. But many in his congregations were wealthy Philadelphians lukewarm or opposed to independence. Duché began to have misgivings after the Declaration of Independence, changed allegiances again when General Sir William Howe jailed him during the British occupation of 1777-78, and finally made a decision, in December 1777, to immigrate to London. A few months, later his wife and children followed him. There his son Thomas studied with Benjamin West, who, as the king’s painter, was in no position to favor the American cause openly. As happened to many loyalists, Duché’s American property was confiscated by order of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and he was not permitted to return until 1792.¹⁵

Philadelphia’s collecting institutions therefore have little to show that would restore memory about the city’s loyalists, except some materials relating to members of the Society of Friends. Many loyalists, such as William Franklin, Galloway, and Duché, voluntarily left for England or Nova Scotia or were driven out, taking their papers with them. The descendants of other loyalists who eventually returned had little reason in the nineteenth century to preserve the papers of parents and grandparents who refused to support the American cause. Nor were Philadelphia’s collectors much interested in ferreting out archival materials or spending money on them to preserve a record documenting those who chose the losing side in the American Revolution. The collectors’ passion was mainly directed at rekindling what they imagined were the spirit-stirring times of “the glorious cause.” Diaries of Grace Growden Galloway; the wife of Philadelphia’s most unpopular Tory, did survive because Mrs. Galloway was intent on saving the family’s vast properties and was unwilling to follow her husband to England. Copies of letters and diaries of loyalist Rebecca Shoemaker and her daughters also made their way into the Historical Society’s collections, but this was not until 1945, when the stigma of loyalism had passed after two world wars in which the Americans and the British were allies.

FIGURE 37. First Battalion of Pennsylvania Loyalists recruitment broadside, LCP. How many “intrepid able-bodied HEROES” signed up for two years service and the promise to retire on fifty acres, in any county of his choice, to “enjoy his Bottle and Lass”? In New Jersey and southern New York, the British had no difficulty recruiting thousands of men. But the First Battalion of Pennsylvania Loyalists never formed, and only about forty-five men enlisted in a troop of Philadelphia Light Dragoons recruited in November and December 1777. Many wavering Philadelphians, presumably knowing that the promise of land in this broadside presupposed American defeat, saw the signing bonus as an empty promise.

The appeal of loyalism operated among ordinary as well as wealthy Pennsylvanians. Some poor German immigrants, with particular grievances against Pennsylvania’s government, were drawn to the Loyalist side. And many Americans were simply “sunshine patriots,” as Paine called them. Looking to see where the wind blew, they changed sides when the revolutionary cause faltered. When the British captured Philadelphia in September 1777, they plastered the town with broadsides recruiting Philadelphians to the Queen’s Rangers and First Battalion of Pennsylvania Loyalists (Figure 37).¹⁶

For hundreds of enslaved Philadelphians, the prospect of gaining freedom by fighting with the British was irresistible. Wherever the British army went, they fled their masters and joined up, inspired by Lord Dunmore’s promise in 1775 of freedom to slaves and indentured servants. Many masters advertised for their runaway slaves in Philadelphia’s newspapers, especially when the British were occupying Philadelphia between September 1777 and June 1778. Hundreds of former slaves from the southern colonies had their first look at the City of Brotherly Love when they arrived as part of the Black Guides and Pioneers, a regiment wholly composed of escaped slaves who fought throughout the war under Scottish officers.¹⁷

The British recruited not only African Americans but also thousands of Hessians, transported across the Atlantic as mercenaries to fight against the rebellious colonists. Thirty German regiments—with an estimated 35,000 soldiers—fought against the Americans. They sustained 12,000 casualties; another 5,000 were lost through desertion, most of whom took up life in the United States; and 18,000 returned home. On several occasions the Hessians fought against other Pennsylvanians who were natives of Germany or the sons of German immigrants, and what has been collected about this fratricidal story and how the Hessian deserters disappeared into New York and Pennsylvania German communities is remarkable for its thinness. One rare and intriguing artifact that has survived is a Hessian regimental flag captured by the Americans at the Battle of Trenton on December 26, 1776. The Historical Society received the flag, seized from 900 Hessian prisoners who were paraded through Philadelphia before being marched off to prison in Lancaster, as a gift in 1882.

Besides Hessians, the Americans had to face most of the eastern Indian tribes, who chose to join the redcoats; these tribes regarded the British as their protectors, whereas the Americans threatened their land and political sovereignty. Lieutenant Colonel Adam Hubley commanded the Eleventh Pennsylvania Regiment, composed of Pennsylvanian Germans, against the Mohawks in the Wyoming Valley of western Pennsylvania during General John Sullivan’s grim campaign against the Iroquois tribes. In his journal, which the Historical Society acquired early in the twentieth century, Hubley sketched the plan of his encampment at Wyoming and copied the symbols the Indians painted on the forest trees. One of the Mohawk leaders that Hubley must have encountered was Thayendanegea, known to the Americans as Joseph Brant (Figure 38). Educated at what became Dartmouth College and a devoted Anglican, Thayendanegea had fought with the Americans during the Seven Years’ War as a young man. But by 1776, after a trip to England to parley with George III and his ministers, he was convinced that the Iroquois could maintain their independence only if the Americans did not gain theirs. Commissioned a captain in the British army, he led his people against the Americans in southern New York and northern Pennsylvania in some of the bloodiest fighting of the revolution. After the war, Thayendanegea pursued the Iroquois’ interest in negotiations with Great Britain and the United States. Peale painted Joseph Brant, probably in 1797 when Brant made his last visit to Philadelphia, adding the painting to his public portrait gallery. By then, the bitterness about the Iroquois alliance with the British had dissipated, and the public’s attention was focused on the diplomatic crisis with revolutionary France.¹⁸