Читать книгу First City - Gary B. Nash - Страница 9

Chapter 1

PIECES OF THE COLONIAL PAST

Pennsylvania was the product of Quaker beliefs and aspirations, and Philadelphia became its pulsebeat on the banks of the Delaware River. “I have obtained [Pennsylvania] that an example may be set up to the nations,” wrote William Penn, its founder, in 1681.¹ Penn hoped that his colony of diverse settlers would show a strife-ridden world a new formula for living. Adept promoter as well as revered defender of persecuted Quakers, he attracted settlers from England, Ireland, Wales, and continental Europe with policies of religious toleration, pacifism, and fair treatment for all.

But the fertile Delaware River valley where Penn was to plant his “seed of a nation” already had inhabitants. For at least 12,000 years before Penn and the Quakers arrived, the area had been inhabited by distant ancestors of the Lenape (later to be called Delaware). Europeans had encountered the Lenape at least as early as 1609, when the Dutch sailed into Delaware Bay, and more intensely after 1624, when a small group of Dutch settlers occupied Burlington Island in the Delaware River. Over the next half century the Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, and English settlers traded and mingled with the Lenape. Thus, Penn built his colony amid small settlements of both native and intruding peoples. Penn may never have realized that his open-door policy toward a variety of immigrants would undermine the peaceful Indian relations he vowed to put into effect (see Figure 4).

Every society must fabricate and sustain creation stories, and nearly everyone craves knowledge about his or her beginnings—those who came first, those who blazed the trails, those who did great deeds. No sooner was the colony well established than it began, like most successful enterprises, to remember itself in selective ways. From the first, the urge in Philadelphia to collect historical materials, documents, and objects relating to William Penn, the early Quakers, and the original inhabitants assumed a special, almost holy importance. Philadelphia’s first collecting institutions, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Philosophical Society, were initially dedicated to gathering “useful knowledge,” the term used in the formal title of each, rather than historical materials. But these two endeavors soon merged.

“Constructive buying and generous giving” marked the Library Company’s collecting from its founding at the hand of Benjamin Franklin in 1731, when the colony had existed for fifty years and the recently arrived printer was only twenty-five years old. Within nine years, the library’s growth prompted a move to the west wing of the State House. Already it had more than 600 volumes. The germ of the library’s historical holdings came in 1755, when its purchasing agent in London shipped as a present a group of rare early accounts of the colony’s founding. By 1769, the collection moved to more spacious quarters on the second floor of nearby Carpenters’ Hall. In 1784, just after the American Revolution, the Library Company became the first Philadelphia institution to acquire by purchase primary source materials relating to American history.²

From its founding in 1743 until the very end of the eighteenth century, the Philosophical Society, also a creature of the relentlessly ingenious Franklin, was less aggressive in collecting. It passively received books, artifacts, and learned papers but had no active policy of acquiring or purchasing anything. Primarily, it was an early-day think tank whose members read papers and invited people from near and far to expand the common knowledge. Only in 1797 did the Philosophical Society evince much interest in history, by creating a committee on “the antiquities of North America.” With Thomas Jefferson serving as its president, the society began soliciting material: natural history specimens, including mammoth skeletons; sketches and reports on the remains of ancient Indian fortifications and earthworks; and data on the languages, customs, and character of American Indians. In 1801-3 the society spent money for the first time, to purchase books and manuscripts from the sale of Benjamin Franklin’s library, broken up by his daughter and her husband. This was the foundation of what would become a mighty Franklin collection. Eight years later, in 1811, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, who had come from France in 1777 to fight with the Americans against the British and became America’s most eminent lawyer on international law, proposed the systematic acquisition of historical documents. Philadelphia’s involvement in the War of 1812 probably delayed action on this initiative, but in 1815 the society created a Committee on History, Moral Science, and General Literature, charged with forming “a collection of original documents, such as official and private letters, Indian treaties, ancient records, ancient maps” that would “throw light on the History of the United States, but more particularly of this state … for the public benefit.”³

At first glance, it is surprising that the American Philosophical Society was so interested in Native Americans; its members were more interested in Indians than in William Penn, the Quakers, or even the American Revolution. Much of this interest stemmed from Jefferson’s fascination with Indian languages and customs and the enthusiasm of Philadelphia doctors such as Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Smith Barton, who believed Indian languages held the key to solving the mysteries of Indian origins and Indian natural remedies. The astounding linguistic prowess of Du Ponceau also sharpened interest in Native Americans. Steadily, the American Philosophical Society gathered historical materials: a memoir of Chief Ouachita contributed by Jefferson in 1803; observations of the Choctaw, Cherokee, and Chickasaw nations in the same year; and Lenape grammars, notes, and essays contributed by two Moravian missionaries, John Gottlieb Heckewelder and David Zeisberger, both of whom lived with the Indians for years. Also, between 1820 and 1825, though nobody proposed acquiring materials relating to the American Revolution, came important papers from two stalwarts of “the spirit of ’76”: Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee and Rhode Island’s Nathanael Greene, one of Washington’s most trusted generals.

Though the Philosophical Society had begun gathering historical materials by fits and starts, it lost its mainspring, Peter Du Ponceau, to his law practice and linguistic research by about 1820. But four years later Lafayette’s triumphant arrival in Philadelphia inspired the forming of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Its leaders did not intend to compete with or eclipse the Philosophical Society, but this is what gradually happened. The Philosophical Society lost the momentum Du Ponceau had created and would not regain it for the rest of the nineteenth century. Especially a casualty was the Committee on History. Although the Philosophical Society received a large collection of Benjamin Franklin papers in 1840, the history committee was never very successful in acquiring historical materials and abandoned its interest in local, regional, or even national history. But filling that vacuum was the Library Company—under the energetic leadership of John Jay Smith, the great-grandson of Penn’s trusted agent James Logan—and the budding Historical Society.

To some extent, the leaders of the Philosophical Society, the Library Company, and the Historical Society in the first third of the nineteenth century were part of an interlocking, history-minded club. The powerful lawyer William Rawle and Joseph Parker Norris, for many years the president of the Bank of Pennsylvania, were involved in all three institutions; others, such as Du Ponceau, Zachariah Poulson, William Meredith, and Caspar Wistar, were involved in two of the “big three.” Notwithstanding these interconnections, the three institutions acquired different characters. After its reorganization in 1769, the Philosophical Society’s self-selected membership was primarily composed of weighty intellectuals—men of science, literature, linguistics, medicine, law, and philosophy—who were selected nationally and internationally. They presented carefully wrought learned papers to the society and desultorily passed along what others put in their hands. Physical and mathematical sciences, along with American Indian linguistics, had been their greatest strengths, with history “but a graft upon an uncongenial trunk.”⁴ The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, from the beginning, was very different. It was composed almost entirely of local residents, many of whom were related and traced their families back to early settlers; it grew by internal nomination of new members, ensuring that it would be a gentleman’s club; it made the collection of historical materials its singular priority; it was policy driven rather than intellectually thirsty; it created an aloofness that kept the unwashed away; and it was self-conscious about cultivating a reverence for particular aspects of the past in order to counteract the acids its members saw eating at their community.

Somewhat similarly, Library Company leaders shared a reverence for the past and a consummate love of family connections. No one exemplified this more than its librarian from 1829 to 1851, John Jay Smith, whose many-branched family counted scores of relatives descended from William Penn’s cadre of Quaker “first purchasers.” But the Library Company was a subscription institution that by 1774, according to one account, attracted “twenty tradesmen” for each “person of distinction and fortune.”⁵ Its doors were open to all, with a rule, followed to the present day, that “any civil person” could use the books unless the person had “to be awakened twice” or showed “any evidence of ‘pulex irritans’ [fleas].”⁶ For this reason its collections needed to be broad and latitudinarian. Thus, long before the Historical Society was founded, the Library Company had established its openness to all religious groups, political parties, and social classes, knowing that if it meant to be a civic institution it could not afford to shut out any part of its constituency.

William Penn: Man, Family, Community

The founders of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania were far more focused on William Penn and the early Quakers than on the Native Americans whom the Philosophical Society had found so fascinating. At the dinner meeting that led to the founding of the Historical Society, Du Ponceau memorialized “a great man—the purest and noblest law giver that the annals of history can produce. His administration was the only golden age which did not belong to fable.”⁷ Of course Du Ponceau was operating in the realm of fable or legend with these words, but it is understandable that his encomium to Penn resonated with the small gathered group, since five of the seven Historical Society founders were descended from old Philadelphia Quaker families. Also, in the 1820s, as these well-to-do urbanites looked about them, they trembled at the character of their rapidly changing city. Rowdy gangs—Death-fetchers, Bloodtubs, and Hyenas—spilled through Philadelphia’s streets. Workers and servants no longer deferred to their betters as the Historical Society founders imagined had happened in the colonial period. Penn’s “greene country towne,” the town of their grandparents and great-grandparents, had become a sprawling, turbulent, heterogeneous city in the early stages of industrialization. The founders hoped that by selecting and collecting the right historical materials—books, manuscripts, and artifacts—they could restore a collective memory that might nurture unity and order as people reflected on a less trammeled, more virtuous, and less materialistic past.

To this end, the Historical Society founders proposed to form an “ample library” of books and historical documents and a “cabinet” (or small room) for the preservation and display of historical artifacts. Working behind the scenes was John Fanning Watson, a banker, amateur historian, and one of the earliest collectors of American material culture. For several years, Watson had been gathering materials for the first history of Philadelphia, which he would publish in 1830, and his most important confidant in this was John Jay Smith, who would shortly become the Library Company’s librarian. Both Pennsylvania Brahmins, Watson and Smith loathed the forces unleashed by immigration, industrialization, and democratization. In Watson’s nostalgic conception, a historical society might spread the values of genteel culture and impart a shared sense of identity among Philadelphians who, in the boisterous 1820s, seemed to be pulling in every direction while forgetting their precious heritage.

FIGURE 4. Francis Place, side by side chalk drawings of Hannah Callowhill Penn and William Penn, HSP. Place, a London limner, captured the couple at about the time of their marriage in 1696, when Hannah was twenty-five and William fifty-one. Seven children came from this marriage. No other portraits of Penn or his wife are known to have been executed. By the mid-eighteenth century, some wealthy Quakers had given up the idea of portraits as signs of vanity and commissioned oil paintings. The Historical Society acquired the crayon portraits in 1957 at a London auction.

Objects, paintings, manuscripts, and pamphlets relating to William Penn and the early Quaker immigrants—what Watson liked to call “the dust of perished matter”—became the most important type of material that the Historical Society’s founders collected. Thus, from its inception, the Historical Society was not simply a neutral gathering place for valuable historical materials but an institution for carrying out certain political and ideological responsibilities, as its founders understood them. In this way, they made a heroic figure of Penn, ignoring many episodes of the founder’s often troubled life and the contentiousness in early Philadelphia that stretched the patience of both Penn and the governors he appointed after he returned to England. Veneration for Penn and early leaders such as James Logan and Isaac Norris flowed naturally from their reading of the past, because they wished to cultivate the memory of a society in which each person knew his or her rank and deferred to those above. The society of their dreams was also one in which change occurred because of the wisdom and work of great leaders. Great men made history; ordinary people followed their lead.⁸

Many of the first objects collected by the Historical Society were treasured because of their connection—real or purported—to Penn and the early Quakers. The very first acquisition, in 1825, was a medal, based on an original ivory relief portrait carved by a London friend of Penn in 1720. The medal, which was struck for the important Barclay family of Quakers in London about 1731, is inscribed: “By Deeds of Peace / Pennsylvania / Settled / 1681.” This inscription was meant to remind all of the founding vision of a pacifist utopia. In 1827, Thomas I. Wharton, one of the society’s founders and a descendant of an early prominent Quaker family, donated a pewter shaving basin, revered because it was supposed to have been used by Penn. Much later, the Penn family cradle, Penn’s silver and tortoise shell razor and case, and Penn’s Bible found their way to the society’s collections. Everything connected to Penn took on an aura of virtue, and the Historical Society became the unofficial attic of Penn relics. Only a few choice Penn items went elsewhere, such as the founder’s William and Mary secretary desk, which wandered from owner to owner after the American Revolution, when it was sold from Pennsbury Manor, Penn’s country seat, on the upper Delaware River. Finally, it fell into the hands of the Library Company’s mid-nineteenth-century librarian, John Jay Smith, who gave it to the company in 1873.

In cultivating collective memory, paintings have an unusual power to evoke the past, especially portraits of heroic figures or paintings of battlefield scenes. But the Quaker leaders of the Historical Society were hoist on their own petard because the Society of Friends was morally opposed to extravagance and hence regarded portraits as self-indulgent and ostentatious. Battlefield scenes were not simply tainted but repugnant to their pacifist principles. In contrast with Puritan Boston, where scores of merchants and ministers had their portraits painted, Quaker Philadelphia in its presumed golden age left a scant visual record of its iconic figures. Hence, the Historical Society’s first painting, acquired in 1833, was of the young William Penn sumptuously attired in armor. Painted in oil about 1770 after an original executed in 1666, when Penn was twenty-two years old, the portrait displayed the founder clad in the trappings of the English ruling class. One year later, the rebellious young Penn shed his armor and joined the Society of Friends, its members widely regarded in England at this time as dangerously radical for their refusal to serve in the militia, their liberality toward women in religious affairs, and their rejection of hierarchy in churchly and worldly affairs. For more than a century, the Historical Society could display only the armored Penn of his pre-Quaker years. A more peace-loving rendition of Penn, a chalk drawing by Francis Place rendered about 1696 (Figure 4) that shows the founder in middle age, was not acquired until 1957.

The provenance of artifacts often establishes their value in the eyes of collecting institutions. But institutions often get more or less than they anticipated. Sometimes research conducted long after the acquisition of a particular artifact proves its provenance to have been wrongly assigned; and changing notions of what is important frequently reestablish the value of what has been determined to be a fraud. All of this is true in the case of the “Laetitia Penn” doll. A gift to the Historical Society in 1960, the gessoed and painted wood-body doll with glass eyes, fiber hair, and dress of various fabrics over paper was thought to have been carried to America by Laetitia Penn, the founder’s hoydenish twenty-one-year-old daughter, who accompanied him to Philadelphia when he returned to the colony in 1699. A letter written in 1865 makes just this claim. For some time the Historical Society had no reason to question the doll’s authenticity and prized it as a genuine Penn family artifact. However, recent analysis of the style of dress and the construction and painting of the body places the manufacture of the doll more likely in the middle third of the eighteenth century. Seventeenth-century wooden dolls tend to have larger heads in relation to the body than the “Laetitia Penn” doll has, and earlier dolls rarely have the painted lower eyelines of the Penn doll. The Penn doll is very similar to the well-documented “Mary Jenkins” doll, brought from England to New York in 1745. Although it is disappointing that the doll now appears to be unconnected to William and Laetitia Penn, it has taken on new value as a fine example of a rare plaything and as a record of styles in the early Georgian period.

FIGURE 5. William Penn gateleg table, PMA. This drop-leaf table, probably brought from England along with much other furniture to furnish Penn’s manor house at Pennsbury, was a marker of high status in England in the late 1600s. Private collectors own much of the furniture brought across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, and individual pieces associated with early settlers, especially the famous, have acquired special symbolic significance. New techniques for analyzing furniture have unmasked previously treasured pieces, showing them to have been wrongly identified or so altered that they do not reflect the craftsmanship and aesthetics of the period.

Many of the early Penn objects collected by the Historical Society reflect the tension between Penn the aristocrat, proprietor, and country gentleman and Penn the Quaker visionary and civil libertarian. Penn’s Quakerism did not keep him from building a magnificent estate at Pennsbury, Philadelphia’s first country seat, or staffing it with servants and slaves, some of whom rowed him down the Delaware River for meetings in Philadelphia. Penn owned a number of slaves and freed several during his lifetime. It was probably indicative of the deep financial difficulties he was in at the end of his life, when he had to mortgage his colony to pay his debts, that he amended an earlier will freeing his slaves and instead bequeathed them to his heirs. Along with indentured servants, these slaves provided the workforce at Pennsbury and at Penn’s townhouse in Philadelphia.

If owning slaves speaks of conflicting tendencies in Penn, so do the accouterments of life he assembled for his brief periods in Philadelphia. Penn’s large, fashionable gateleg table (Figure 5), along with much other high-end furniture, jars with his repeated counsel in published essays for simplicity in dress and household possessions. He insisted to his second wife that “lowness as well as plainness” were important parts of his character. Yet, as the son of a wealthy English admiral and courtier and as a man who inhabited a world of privilege and power, he was accustomed to the strident display of costly caned chairs, four-wheeled coaches, silver settings, and other signifiers of a gentleman’s life.⁹

The Penn family was also of great interest to the early collectors of the Library Company and the Historical Society, because family itself was at the heart of the world they wished to remember and perpetuate. Though not acquired until much later, Penn’s letters to his three children from his first marriage, written as he was departing London for Philadelphia in 1682, were a treasure to the Society, for they revealed Penn as a devout Christian, an advocate of education, and a loving father. Such interest in the Penn family remains unabated, but of some 2,600 Penn documents that have survived, only 75 are private family letters. The vast collection of Penn Papers acquired by the Historical Society in 1870 at a London auction had been sadly pillaged, and it is possible that family papers, as Mary Maples Dunn has suggested, “were the special target of wanton destruction,” possibly by “a disgruntled, illegitimate, and disinherited member of the family.”¹⁰

With the meteoric rise of women’s history in the last generation, the women connected to Penn have attracted much interest recently. Penn’s second wife, Hannah Callowhill Penn, is of special significance. Hannah married William in 1696, accompanied him to Philadelphia on his second trip in 1699, and bore seven children. After Penn’s debilitating stroke in 1712, Hannah and her advisors managed the founder’s tangled legal and business affairs until his death six years later. As acting proprietor of Pennsylvania, Hannah Penn wielded more political power than any other colonial woman. One governor, William Keith, expressed his resentment at receiving “instructions from a woman” shortly before Hannah dismissed him.

Launching a Colony

By the time Penn and his fellow Quakers reached Pennsylvania in the early 1680s, more than a dozen English colonies existed in North America and the West Indies. But Penn and his followers were determined to establish a unique colony free of the violence, corruption, and intolerance that were widespread on both sides of the Atlantic.

When Penn received his grant for Pennsylvania, the Society of Friends had begun to leave behind the radical beginnings that had made them objects of scorn and brutal treatment by the English authorities and had brought from such a Puritan stalwart as Cotton Mather the charge that the Quakers were “the chokeweed of Christianity.” The greater autonomy allowed women in religious affairs made Quakers suspect in the eyes of most of their Christian contemporaries. Especially troubling to those who defended gender hierarchy was how female Quaker “ministering Friends” or “Publishers of the Truth” fanned out across the Atlantic world, traveling unattended by husbands, fathers, or brothers. A seventeenth-century painting mocked Quakers for their radical ways, depicting a woman preaching to a gathering of urinating dogs and grotesque Quakers groping lewdly.¹¹

Pennsylvania never entirely lived up to its visionary founding principles, but nowhere else in the hemisphere where Europeans were colonizing did there exist such substantial toleration for religious and ethnic differences and such relatively peaceful relations with Native American groups. Most European visitors were astounded at what had been achieved. Peter Kalm, a Swedish visitor, wrote in 1750: “Everyone who acknowledges God to be the Creator … and teaches or undertakes nothing against the state or against the common peace, is at liberty to settle, stay, and carry on his trade here, be his religious principles ever so strange.” This would have pleased Penn, who had written: “I deplore two principles in religion: obedience upon authority without conviction and destroying them that differ with me for Christ’s sake.”¹²

Much of Penn’s life from 1680 to 1686 revolved around attracting settlers and working out the framework of government for his colony. King Charles II had granted Penn extensive powers to govern the province in 1681, but the proprietor had to win the consent of his settlers in order to achieve a peaceful and just society. Building a colony was also a business proposition, one that could not succeed without vigorous promotion. Launching a colony was hugely expensive. Penn later calculated that he spent almost £12,000 (about $2.5 million today) in the first two years alone to obtain his patent from the king and promote his colony. He was not ashamed to say that he wanted some return on his investment. “Though I desire to extend religious freedom,” he wrote in 1681, “yet I want some recompense for my trouble.”¹³

Penn’s attempts to create a utopia in the wilderness had all the elements of mythmaking, and it is no surprise that his efforts attracted the attention of collecting institutions. Although the Library Company had less than a burning interest in collecting Penn material for more than a century after its founding, partly because Penn’s separately published essays were out of print for a long time and biographies of Penn did not appear until the early nineteenth century, the Historical Society from the outset was an avid collector of anything related to the launching of Pennsylvania. That interest has never abated. In its first year, the Historical Society asked the Philosophical Society to make a donation of its manuscript papers on the early history of Pennsylvania. Especially important were the rough minutes of the Provincial Council covering the period from 1693 to 1717. But the Philosophical Society brusquely denied the request, although it allowed the Historical Society’s curator, Samuel Hazard, to publish the minutes a few years later.

Of special interest have been materials that documented the early promotion of Pennsylvania and the drafting of early laws and frames of government. From the late 1820s, the Historical Society negotiated with the descendants of James Logan, whose extensive correspondence with William Penn and his widow, Hannah Penn, provides the richest source of material on the early affairs of Pennsylvania. Negotiations with the Logan family went on through most of the nineteenth century, and this mother lode of manuscripts gradually reached the society. Descendants of other proprietary officials who had Penn correspondence, records, and documents also made gifts to the society, and some of its members began copying letters between Penn and the English government deposited in the Public Record Office in London.

But the biggest breakthrough came when a massive collection of Penn papers became available in 1870. The papers had been bought a year before for wastepaper from the house of Granville Penn, a grandson of William Penn who had been made an honorary member of the Historical Society in 1833. In one of those hairbreadth escapes from dispersion or destruction that has crippled historical reconstructions, a book dealer, recognizing their value, bought the papers, catalogued them, and offered them for sale. For about £555, an agent of the Historical Society purchased the largest part of the papers, which represent the heart of the society’s holdings of the Penn Papers. Totaling more than twenty thousand documents, they include Penn’s cash books, journals, letter books, receipt books, and commonplace books as well as hundreds of documents concerning Indian relations, the long boundary dispute with the proprietor of Maryland, Lord Baltimore, and many other aspects of colonial Pennsylvania history. Rich additions to the Penn material have been made in the early twentieth century by gift, and a huge addition—the correspondence between Penn and two of his most trusted officials in Pennsylvania in the years immediately after he left the colony in 1684—would come in the 1980s from the descendants of Benjamin Chew, another of the most important colonial officials of Pennsylvania. The five-volume edition of the most important papers and essays of William Penn prepared in the 1980s is built on these various collections (although the editors located hundreds of other items scattered throughout the world).

In promoting his colony Penn relied on two kinds of documents: vivid descriptions of the land and of the terms of settlement, and maps of the region. Penn wasted no time on the former, issuing Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania in America in London in 1681. In this suitably optimistic account, he described what he had never seen: a land on the same latitude as Naples, Italy or Montpelier, France with fertile soil, fish-filled rivers, and wildlife in abundance. Here was a place for industrious farmers and urban artisans—all those who were “clogged and oppress’d about a Livelyhood,” all the “younger Brothers of small Inheritances”—and for servants, who were promised fifty acres of good land after their term of servitude was over.

FIGURE 6. Thomas Holme, A Mapp of the Improved Part of Pensilvania in America, Divided into Countyes, Townships and Lotts, 1687, LCP. Nothing could serve Penn better than a map showing the rapid settlement of his “sylvan woods.” He requested such a work in 1684 from his surveyor-general, Thomas Holme, and finally received it three years later. Its London engravers, using six copper plates, pleased Penn, the real estate promoter, greatly. Penn’s manor land, at the bend of the Delaware River, shows in the lower right corner, and that of his daughter, Laetitia Penn, near the middle on the east bank of the Schuylkill River in the lower center.

Many promotional tracts would flow from Penn’s hand over the next few years, but a map of Pennsylvania proved harder to obtain. The proprietor sent his friend Thomas Holme to survey eastern Pennsylvania, and along with him went John Ladd, whose surveying instruments ended up in the Chicago Historical Society, which donated them to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania just 300 years after Ladd arrived on the Delaware. Holme and Ladd worked for five years surveying the site of Philadelphia and the original counties of Philadelphia, Bucks, and Chester. After Penn returned to London, he called again and again for the map. “All cry out, where is your map, what no map of your Settlements?” he wrote in September 1686 to Holme.¹⁴ Finally it came the following year—a monumental map (Figure 6) showing the land granted to 670 early settlers, with some tracts of land left unlabeled because of disputed land titles. It was quickly engraved on six plates and sold by Quaker booksellers in London.

Penn’s attempts to draft a frame of government were no less difficult. How did one devise a system of government that guaranteed a more just, peaceful, and equal society? Penn could do nothing by decree, and even the extensive powers granted him in his charter from the king were only as good as his settlers’ willingness to accept them. Like all utopia builders, Penn had to consult, cajole, and compromise in constructing his “frame of government.” Many interested parties advised and lobbied Penn in organizing the civil system under which colonists would live. Penn published an early version in London in 1681, one of twenty drafts of the Frame of Government finally hammered out the next year. But to his dismay, a ratifying convention, meeting at Chester in December 1682, shortly after Penn arrived in his colony, rejected the document because it gave too much power to the governor and council and too little to the elected assembly. It was hardly the golden age that the founders of the Historical Society remembered and wanted fellow Philadelphians to recall.

Pacifism and Indian Relations

“… the king of the Countrey where I live, hath given unto me a great Province therein, but I desire to enjoy it with your Love and Consent, that we may always live together as Neighbours and friends.”¹⁵ In this single sentence, written to Lenape chiefs of the Delaware Valley, Penn dissociated himself from nearly two hundred years of violent European colonization in the Americas. He imagined colonization without conquest in the sylvan woods granted by his king, though no precedent for this existed.

The Historical Society did not have the scholarly interest in the Indian languages, customs, and human traits held by American Philosophical Society members. However, Historical Society leaders were deeply invested in preserving the writings and artifacts related to Indian-white relations. Just treatment of the Indians and the covenant of friendship Penn established with them gave Quakers historical legitimacy earned by no other aspect of their lives. Also, Penn’s amity with the Indians stood in sharp contrast to the forcible sending of the Five Civilized Nations west along the “trail of tears” in the 1830s and the blood-drenched Indian wars west of the Mississippi River a generation later. Cultivating the memory of the founder’s uniqueness in Indian relations also gave the Society of Friends missionary work among western Indian nations throughout the nineteenth century a special resonance. The Philosophical Society publicized its ethnological and philological studies of Indians, while the Historical Society capitalized on the Quaker treatment of Indians. The lesson was not lost on President Ulysses S. Grant, who in 1869, seeking to reform the government’s treatment of western Native Americans, appointed Friends to direct the effort. Among those sent to the Great Plains were Samuel M. Janney, biographer of William Penn and author of other histories of the Quakers.

Within its first decade, the Historical Society acquired important Indian materials, including some of the writings of John Heckewelder, the Moravian missionary who had translated three Indian languages into English. Penn’s 1681 manuscript letter, “To the Kings of the Indians,” was a more poignant and usable piece. In it, Penn assured the Lenape of his good intentions and promised that the colony would have no walled forts, the symbols of interracial conflict to the north and south. “… the great God … hath made us not to devoure and destroy one an other but live Soberly and kindly together in the world … I have great love and regard towards you, and I desire to Winn and gain your love & friendship by a kind, just and peaceable life.”¹⁶ Penn also intended that such assurances would instill confidence in prospective settlers, who knew from reports published in England that up and down the Atlantic seaboard, from Maine to South Carolina, a devastating series of Indian wars had been fought just a few years before. Published in London in 1681, the manuscript letter would not be donated to the Historical Society until 1891, a year after the Wounded Knee Massacre ended the Great Plains Indian wars.

Other treasured acquisitions could solidify remembrance of the Quakers’ attempt to show that, by disavowing violence and practicing fair dealing, people of different cultures could live together. The deed from the Lenape for approximately one hundred square miles of present-day Bucks County, negotiated by Penn’s deputy William Markham in the summer of 1682, was not acquired until 1867, but it was frequently displayed to refresh the public’s memory of Quaker benevolence and fair play. Signed with marks by twelve Indian leaders, it is the first known written agreement in Pennsylvania between native people and Penn’s agents. There is more than a little irony in the fact that among the trade goods Markham agreed to exchange for the vast tract of land were guns and liquor. Markham was unaware that four of the Lenape chiefs had earlier sold a portion of this same tract to New York’s governor, Edmund Andros. Like other American Indian leaders, the Lenape chiefs did not view a deed as a complete surrender of land but rather as permission for white newcomers to use the land and live there with indigenous people.

Historians and anthropologists have pointed out that the peaceful relations between the Quakers and Lenape lasting throughout Penn’s lifetime were not simply the triumph of pacifist ideology. Much to the advantage of Quaker farmers seeking fertile land, the Delaware River valley may have been the least dense region of indigenous settlement along the Atlantic coastal plain. In addition, the semi-nomadic Lenape population had been sharply reduced by diseases brought by Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and English settlers who preceded the Quakers. By the time the Quakers arrived, the Lenape population had been halved by three smallpox epidemics that struck the tribe between 1620 and 1670. Also favoring the Quaker peace policy was the unusually unwarlike ways of the Lenape themselves. Yet historians have not been able to refute the reverent Lenape view of Penn, carefully recorded at the end of the founder’s life. In 1720, Indians reminded William Keith, Pennsylvania’s governor appointed by Penn’s widow, of their great love for Penn, who had promised at the first meeting with Indian chiefs “so much love and friendship, that he would not call them brothers, because brothers might differ; nor children, because they might offend and require correction; but he would reckon them as one body, one blood, one heart, and one head.”¹⁷

FIGURE 7. Great Belt of Wampum, HSP. The famous belt, fashioned from quahog shell beads and leather, shows a European with a broad hat, typical of Quaker garb, clasping hands with a Native American. At Philadelphia’s 1864 Great Central Fair to raise money for wounded Civil War soldiers, the Wampum Belt was conspicuously displayed in the creation of a “William Penn Parlor” along with a cup said to have been presented to Penn by a Lenape chief at the Shackamaxon treaty gathering.

These words were recalled at a meeting of the Historical Society in 1859, when John Granville Penn, the great-grandson of the founder, presented a handsome belt of wampum to the Society. Just as for Europeans a deed finalized a land exchange, the wampum belt for Indians signified a sealed agreement. Indians and Europeans also used simple shell beads or wampum (literally, “white string”) as a medium of exchange. The wampum belt (Figure 7) is the Historical Society’s most famous and asked-about possession because it reverberates hauntingly in the public consciousness as a reminder of what might have been in the tragic history of European exploitation of native peoples. Today, when peace studies programs have replaced military history, most school textbooks include an illustration of this famous wampum belt.

Acquiring the wampum belt occasioned unusual excitement at the Historical Society. Regarded as “one of the jewels in our cabinet of curios,” as a later society president expressed it, its value “historically and sentimentally” was nearly unsurpassed. When John Granville Penn came from London to Philadelphia to contribute what would become a nearly holy relic and explain at length its authenticity, Historical Society leaders spared no ceremony to sanctify the icon, even though an earlier inquiry cast doubt that Penn ever met with Lenape chiefs to conclude a treaty of peace. Even an ex-president, Martin Van Buren, was enlisted to send a letter, and his words could not have been better chosen to evoke the spirit of an earlier day. The gift of the wampum belt, wrote Van Buren, “secures to Pennsylvania an historical monument of peculiar value” and vouches for Penn’s “own noble resolution, taken at the outset, and never departed from, to found his Commonwealth ‘on deeds of peace.’” The founder’s great-grandson then gave what seemed an unassailable account of how the Penn family had acquired the belt and how it had remained in the family for nearly two hundred years. His great-grandfather, he related, had pressed a roll of parchment pledging a treaty of friendship into the hands of the chief sachem and implored him and other attending chiefs to “preserve it carefully for three generations, that their children might know what had passed between them, just as if he [Penn] had remained to repeat it.” Solemnly, the Indians reciprocated, “according to their national custom,” by giving Penn the wampum belt “with the record of a treaty of peace and friendship woven in its centre.”¹⁸

Though modern scholars have searched hard, no proof has been found that the peace treaty meeting took place. It is even possible that the Belt of Wampum was made after William Penn’s death in 1717. The belt depicts a portly European (presumably Penn) clasping hands with an American Indian, but in 1682 Penn was not portly at all; he was athletic enough to run races with some of the young Lenape men. Yet this modern-day sleuthing, while inconvenient for continuing to tell a story nearly as venerable as that of the landing at Plymouth Rock, has not tarnished the belt’s iconic status. People create legends to preserve essential truths as they understand them, and nothing has served Quaker values better (now widely shared in the post-Cold War era in the case of their peace testimony) than the touching gift of the wampum belt to Penn. Penn did carry through on his extraordinary promise in his letter to the Indian kings in 1681 by creating a mechanism for resolving any disputes between the settlers and the Lenape. “[I]f in any thing any shall offend you or your People,” he promised, “you shall have a full and Speedy Satisfaction for the same by an equall number of honest men on both sides.”¹⁹ Such intercultural arbitration, also implemented in the West Jersey colony across the Delaware River, though only briefly, was unprecedented.

If the Lenape did not string shells into a ceremonial wampum belt in 1682, the impulse to do so may not have been far from their intentions. Whatever the case, the early Historical Society councillors—and a great many non-Quakers since—have drawn tremendous sustenance from the wampum belt fable. Granville Penn certainly believed that a treaty of friendship was drawn up at Shackamaxon (present-day Kensington) just after Penn’s arrival in the fall of 1682 and that it had been sealed by the great Belt of Wampum. He cited as authority Thomas Clarkson’s 1813 Memoirs of the Private and Public Life of William Penn and many documents mentioning the “old first treaties of friendship.” If the treaty of friendship meeting never occurred and the wampum belt was made many years later, we can appreciate how history is manipulated to fit the sensibilities of those living many years after a supposed event. Historians of public memory have mostly castigated the management of remembrance because the preservationist movement of the last century foisted many fables on an unsuspecting public. But the origins of the wampum belt legend, while doubtless reflecting the desire of nineteenth-century leaders to glorify as benign a previous Philadelphia elite from which they were descended, were buried deep in the hope of perpetuating the Quakers’ pacifist principles that had led to intercultural cooperation in a world of intercultural conflict.

FIGURE 8. Benjamin West, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, oil, 1771, PAFA. West’s painting, commissioned by Thomas Penn, son of Pennsylvania’s founder, almost immediately attracted attention: in 1773 a London publisher of engravings announced a 19-by-24-inch copy for 15 shillings. The painting was copied by engravers in Italy, Germany France, and Mexico as well as England, Scotland, and Ireland. The emotional appeal of the painting was noted a generation later by leading Quaker abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, who claimed that an engraved copy was the only piece of art found in the houses of most Quakers.

Benjamin West, one of Pennsylvania’s most famous painters and the first American-born painter to gain international fame, did his part to seal the memory of the Shackamaxon treaty of friendship meeting, even if it never took place. Just four years before the outbreak of the American Revolution, West painted what was to become one of the most widely reproduced paintings of a scene from American history (Figure 8). Europeans loved it because it showed them what Indians looked like, how they carried their babies, and how they dressed. But for Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic, West’s painting depicting Penn’s meeting with the Lenape became a symbol of the Quaker influence in American history and a reminder of the Quaker yearning for a peaceful world. In the early 1890s, plans were afoot among Quaker peace activists to place a copy in every Pennsylvania schoolhouse.

Living in England, West did not record history; he created it—or relied on an oral tradition of a “league of friendship,” if not a specific peace treaty. Relying on descriptions of Penn as an old man, West made him look older than thirty-eight, his age in 1682. He depicted Indian and Quaker clothing of the late 1700s, rather than the 1680s, and the buildings he depicted in Shackamaxon had not yet been built in 1682. Indians would not have carried weapons to a treaty meeting. A twentieth-century Quaker family legend alleges that the Indian mother with cradle-board baby is a likeness of West’s wife. The stately elm tree at Shackamaxon Creek, however, was real and when it fell many years later, in 1810, pieces of it were considered as good as gold.²⁰

FIGURE 9. Jigsaw puzzle of Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, LCP. Jigsaw puzzles were a favorite card table game in nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class homes, so children probably gained more cognizance of the Penn treaty legend this way than from their school books. The Library Company dates the puzzle to about 1850 but has no record of how it was acquired.

Whatever its limitations as an accurate portrayal of Indian and early settler life near Philadelphia in 1682, West’s treaty painting probably influenced public memory more than any other artistic work except portraits of George Washington. It had to swim against the tide of westward migration as the idea of Manifest Destiny suffused popular feeling and made a virtue of fighting Indians. But by the 1850s manufacturers of household goods were using it on dishes, bed and window curtains, whiskey glasses, bed quilts, hand-painted trays, lamp shades, and jigsaw puzzles (Figure 9). American lithographers pumped a steady stream of copies into the market throughout the nineteenth century, including early copies by Currier and Ives, sometimes giving the treaty date in 1661. A Philadelphia member of the Historical Society purchased West’s famous painting in 1851 and allowed it to be exhibited at the city’s Great Central Fair in 1864. Millions viewed it at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago, where it was part of the Quaker-led Universal Peace Union exhibit.

The promise of a new era of intercultural comity lasted through Penn’s lifetime, but by the 1730s Penn’s open-door immigration policy had filled Pennsylvania with Scots-Irish and German immigrants who did not subscribe to Quaker pacifism and who hungered for land to the west of the largely Quaker settlements, lands still in the possession of native peoples.

Ironically, James Logan, Penn’s most trusted official from 1699 to the founder’s death in 1717, became a central figure in a new era of abrasive relations with the Lenape and other tribes. In 1735, when he was the colony’s largest land speculator, Logan produced what he alleged was a copy of an old deed signed in 1686 that ceded a huge area between the Lehigh and Delaware rivers to Penn. Although the Lenape chiefs challenged the validity of the document, allegedly copied from an original that Logan could not produce, the Indian leaders succumbed to the combined pressure of the Pennsylvanians and their Iroquois allies who held sway over the Lenape. Two years after the chiefs signed a confirmation of the alleged 1686 deed, Logan arranged to “walk off” the bounds of the Indian deed, which granted Penn’s heirs all the land from a specified point in Bucks County westward as far as a man could walk in a day and a half. Tishcohan (Figure 10) was one of the Lenape chiefs who learned to his dismay of the colonists’ trickery: two of Penn’s sons sent scouting parties through the woods to blaze a trail so that three specially trained woodsmen could average nearly four miles an hour in order to extend the Penns’ claim almost sixty miles into Delaware territory, or twice as far as anticipated by the Indian chiefs. This became known as the “Walking Purchase.” The voluminous papers of James Logan began reaching the Historical Society by 1840 and continued to arrive as late as 1984. Logan was so long lived and his interests so diverse—he was Pennsylvania’s first polymath—that his paper trail can be followed not only in the trove of his papers at the Historical Society but also in the collections of the Library Company, the Pennsylvania State Archives, the Philadelphia City Archives, and the American Philosophical Society.

By the mid-eighteenth century, Penn’s peaceful Indian policy was in tatters. The Seven Years’ War all but shattered it as the French and their Indian allies attacked Pennsylvania’s western settlements and set the frontier aflame. Philadelphia Quaker leaders quickly formed the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures in order to maintain the support of the Delaware (the term subsequently used for the Lenape)—an effort based not only on the hope of avoiding violence but also on the desire to maintain the Quakers’ lucrative trade with the Indians. To this end, Quaker leaders refreshed Indian memory by distributing to Indian sachems silver peace medals harking back to the William Penn era. From Quaker silversmith shops came large medals with King George II gracing one side and a Quaker and an Indian the other. The Quaker—William Penn—is shown extending a winged peace pipe across a campfire to an Indian who accepts the offer. Struck in 1757, the peace medal was the first of its kind made in the English colonies. In this cagy use of history Quaker silversmiths soon produced other silver symbols of peace: brooches, arm bracelets, pendants, and crosses.

FIGURE 10. Gustavus Hesselius, Tishcohan, oil, 1735, HSP. Tishcohan was one of the signators to the Walking Purchase deed. Hesselius (1682-1755) was a Swedish immigrant and Philadelphia’s only painter of note during the colonial period. Even the lack of competition did not give him full employment because most Quakers were still averse to displaying vanity through commissioning portraits and not enough affluent non-Quakers were available. Hesselius dressed Tishcohan with a trade blanket, a chipmunk-skin tobacco pouch with a leather thong, and a clay pipe of European manufacture.

By the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Quakers were under heavy attack in their own colony for their Indian peace policy, which, frontiersmen charged, drenched their farms with blood. In late 1763, Scots-Irish farmers from Paxton Creek, to become known as “the Paxton Boys,” massacred friendly and defenseless Conestoga Indians at Lancaster (where Penn had visited with Lenape leaders in 1700) and then marched to Philadelphia to demand that the legislative assembly protect the frontier (Figure 11). Franklin wrote a strongly worded pamphlet condemning the “white savages” for their unconscionable behavior, turning the election of 1764 into a scurrilous war of words. One part of the Quakers’ “Holy Experiment” was coming to an end.²¹

FIGURE 11. The Paxton Expedition, Inscribed to the Author of the Farce, LCP. This cartoon, distributed in 1764, is the first internal view of Philadelphia. The Court House at the center, built in 1707 on High (Market) Street, was the scene of annual voting for assemblymen. Voters mounted the stairs to cast their ballots in the central doorway The scene shows Philadelphians, with cannons and shouldered muskets, preparing to repel the advancing Paxton Boys. At the left is the Greater Meeting House, erected in 1754.

From the Lancaster Massacre and the Paxton Boys’ march on Philadelphia came America’s first political cartoons. Along with a barrage of election pamphlets, these cartoons helped politicize eligible voters. In the colony’s most heated election, Franklin lost his assembly seat—the only time he was to lose a political contest.

This deep fissure in late colonial society attracted the attention of the Library Company, which began collecting political pamphlets related to the Paxton Boys’ expedition and also a barrage of pamphlets leading up to the ferocious Philadelphia election of 1764. When the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 ignited intense argument over new British regulations, the Library Company gathered pamphlets sparked by the debate. Proud of this collecting policy, Franklin wrote in 1771 that libraries such as the one he founded “made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defence of their privileges.”²² Over the waning years of the colonial era, the Library Company acquired a run of Philadelphia’s first newspaper, the American Weekly Mercury, many new scientific treatises and works of political thought, and museum objects such as fauna preserved in spirits, antique coins, fossils, Eskimo parkas, tanned buffalo skins, and a woman’s hand taken from an Egyptian mummy. But the Library Company’s special importance was in collecting printed materials related to every aspect of English and American life.

A Mixed Multitude

From the beginning, Penn’s colony attracted settlers from many parts of Europe, including many who had already sojourned in other West Indian or North American colonies. Speaking many languages and practicing many religions, they represented part of a tremendous worldwide redistribution of British, European, and African peoples, and their arrival gave early Pennsylvania a mélange of tongues, complexions, and religious beliefs. Penn tried to build a bedrock of tolerance to support this diverse population. He never entirely succeeded, but while prejudice and tensions sometimes flared into name-calling and near violence, Pennsylvania was spared the seething ethnic and religious hostilities that wracked Europe and many North American colonies in the seventeenth century.²³

The collections of the Historical Society, Library Company, and Philosophical Society came to include rich evidence of Pennsylvania’s patchwork of cultures. Though most of these institutions’ leaders were alarmed by the late nineteenth-century wave of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, they still paid some attention to the region’s colonial ethnic past. Swedes were the first Europeans to live in what was to become Pennsylvania. Some fifty of them came to the Delaware Valley in 1638, and from that first experience came journals and drawings that provided a basis for Tomas Campanius Holm to write in Swedish what would later be translated as A Short Description of New Sweden. Published in Stockholm in 1702, Holm’s Short Description includes the earliest known pictures of the Lenape—in family groups, trading with Swedish settlers, battling other Indians, and burying their dead.

The Swedes’ arrival gave the Lenape their first experience with European intruders, and the contacts were bittersweet. The Indians welcomed trade, and the Swedes symbolized their peaceful intentions by translating Martin Luther’s writings into a volume in the Lenape language or in a trade pidgin. Philadelphia’s American Swedish Historical Museum, founded in 1926, and built with funding from wealthy Swedish-American industrialists, holds a copy of the book. But as in so many other cases of European-Indian contact, trade was often accompanied by mistrust and violence. It was also almost always accompanied by the exchange of culture. One vivid example of this is an infantry helmet, probably made in Sweden in the early seventeenth century, that became a prized possession of an Indian who was found buried with it near the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County. How it found its way to the Historical Society is unknown, a phantom gift that came “over the transom,” in the parlance of curators.

The Swedish influence in Pennsylvania waned after the arrival of the English. The descendants of the initial Swedish settlers were not numerous, and Philadelphia’s cultural arbiters wanted the master narrative to begin with the English. But Gloria Dei, the “Old Swedes Church” in Philadelphia, became a revered sanctuary for people of many national origins. Its minister, Andreas Hesselius, was the brother of the colony’s premier colonial painter.

Far more numerous than the Swedes—in fact, the most numerous of all immigrant groups to early Pennsylvania—were the Germans. Some 80,000 poured into Pennsylvania during the colonial era, most of them fleeing “God’s three arrows”—famine, war, and pestilence—in their homelands along the Rhine. Although most of them moved through Philadelphia to take up farming, hundreds stayed in Pennsylvania’s commercial center, taking up positions as artisans, innkeepers, printers, merchants, and clergymen.²⁴

To Pennsylvania came Germans of many types, and they were among the earliest immigrants recruited by Penn, who had traveled through the Netherlands and the Rhineland and published his promotional tracts in German as well as English. Some of the earliest German settlers, like Johannes Kelpius, were pietists, seeking in Pennsylvania a refuge where they could put themselves beyond the scorn and abuse of their neighbors. In 1694, Kelpius led a settlement of some forty German pietists who purchased land in Germantown and became industrious members of that community. Christopher Witt’s ink drawing of the mystic Kelpius, done about 1705 and purchased by the Historical Society 177 years later, may be the first portrait rendered in Pennsylvania.

Following the Peace of Utrecht in 1714, ending a series of Anglo-French wars that hampered immigration, German sojourners to Pennsylvania poured ashore. More numerous than the pietists were the Moravians, whose main settlement was in Bethlehem. Like the Quakers, the Moravians dressed conservatively, garbing themselves in grays and browns and avoiding ruffles or other evidences of vanity. Unlike the Quakers, who wished for peace with native peoples but had no desire to convert them to Quakerism, the Moravians were among the most fervent missionaries to the Indians.

Though Pennsylvania became dotted with pietistic German communities, the most numerous of the German immigrants were the industrious farmers and artisans of the more worldly Lutheran and German Reformed churches. Settling in the western parts of Bucks and Chester Counties and more thickly in Lancaster, York, and Berks Counties, they left behind a tradition of folk craftsmanship and art that is immensely popular today. The painted furniture German artisans produced shows how the culture of the homeland could persist when transplanted to an environment that did not despise or attack cultural diversity. The painted chest (Figure 12) was often the most important storage item found in rural southeastern Pennsylvania households well into the nineteenth century. Holding clothing, linens, bedding, and even tools and food, it was frequently used as well for seating or as a table surface. The chests, to be found in every German household, were highly individualized with carving, inlay, and painting. They played a key role in each family’s migration. Many were inscribed with the name of the owner, thus marking a chest as the personal property of the immigrant and signifying how humble peasants began to see themselves as individuals. Many owners pasted their taufschein (baptismal certificate) inside the lid of the chest.²⁵

The Historical Society, Philosophical Society, and Library Company had few members of German descent in the early years, partly because most German Americans lived in the counties west of Philadelphia and also because Philadelphia’s Germans had a thriving historical and literary society of their own, founded in 1763. Therefore, the collecting of material relating to Pennsylvania Germans did not figure prominently in the minds of the city’s collecting institutions at first. The Historical Society in 1882 received a rich collection of manuscripts, illustrated hymn books, German language pamphlets, and records of the Ephrata Cloister collected by Abraham H. Cassel, a descendant of Pennsylvania’s most famous German printer of the colonial era—Christopher Sauer. In 1904, the Library Company acquired a collection of about one thousand German imprints, including some 150 from the press of Sauer, including the first Bible printed in German in North America. Already, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, founded in 1877, had been gathering a few examples of German American pottery and then, by the early twentieth century, systematically began acquiring pieces from regional dealers who purchased them from rural homesteads. The public’s interest in German American folkways had been whetted in the 1864 Great Central Fair where a recreated Pennsylvania-German kitchen, with a huge banner reading “Grant’s Up To Schnitz,” captivated visitors. Philadelphia’s German-Americans built on this interest two decades later with a massive bicentennial celebration of the first arrival of German immigrants in 1683. But not until 1926, when DuPont beneficence allowed the Museum of Art to install a kitchen and bedroom from a German American miller’s house, did the public have regular access to the aesthetic taste and craftsmanship of the state’s largest ethnic group.

FIGURE 12. Pennsylvania German painted chest over drawers, 1775, Mercer Museum. This chest was inscribed with its owner’s name, Christina Hegern, and the date of its making, 1775. Public memory of the past is shaped—and skewed—by the kinds of objects that have survived. Common utilitarian household objects were seldom prized (often they simply wore out), and their owners or descendants usually discarded them. Now that interest in common folk has greatly increased, chests of this kind are precious, and entire museum exhibitions have been dedicated to this material culture, such as a 1999 exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that brought together an array of decorative as well as fine arts that gave the public the fullest picture yet of early Pennsylvania craftsmanship and aesthetic taste.

Although cultural persistence was a hallmark of Pennsylvania’s German communities—and has led to the production of hugely marketable ironware, pottery, and fabrics along the tourist routes in Lancaster, York, and Berks Counties today—it was from the beginning mixed with cultural adaptation. This was evident in some German newspapers that circulated in Philadelphia and the surrounding counties; the two-column, two-language format accommodated settlers of differing degrees of acculturation and provided an early form of bilingual education. No complete runs of these newspapers exist, which speaks to the limited eighteenth-and nineteenth-century vision of collecting institutions. As late as 1869, when James Rush left today’s equivalent of $20 million to the Library Company of Philadelphia, he wagged his finger, so to speak, in his bequest, directing that the library not collect to amuse the public and therefore shun “mind-tainting reviews, controversial politics, scribblings of poetry and prose, biographies of unknown names, nor for those teachers of disjointed thinking, the daily newspapers, except, perhaps for reference to support … the authentic date of an event.”²⁶ Widely shared among cultural leaders, Rush’s vision of what was valuable and therefore collectible facilitated the obliteration of parts of the past that historians now strain to recapture.

Like the Germans, the Scots-Irish found in Pennsylvania a place of refuge, especially from economic privation. Also, like the Germans, most were unable to pay the fare across the Atlantic, and so they came as indentured servants. The term of service was four to seven years, during which time the servant surrendered his or her labor and the fruits of it entirely to the master. The indentured servant’s rights, more liberal in Pennsylvania than in many colonies, were spelled out in written contracts that have filtered into the collections of many institutions. Often the servant was to receive a few pounds and, if lucky, two suits of clothes, one of them new, and perhaps a few tools. Such a grubstake was for many the beginning of the slow climb toward economic security.

The Scots-Irish left behind no body of vernacular furniture, such as in the case of the Germans, and until recently the leaders of collecting institutions were little concerned with collecting evidence of ordinary immigrants’ lives. Not until the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies was founded in 1971 did Philadelphia have an institution focused on immigration history and ethnic heritage, and the materials it has gathered largely pertain to the immigrant experience since the mid-nineteenth century. Hence, the early history of the Scots-Irish, one of Philadelphia’s largest immigrant groups, is poorly documented. Only from the fragmentary records and artifacts of immigrant societies can partial stories be recovered. The medal of the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, a mutual aid organization founded in 1771 for men of direct Irish descent, is one such rare item.

Besides the Germans and Scots-Irish, many other groups came to Philadelphia seeking a place of renewal. The Welsh and the French Huguenots made substantial contributions to the city’s life. So did non-Quaker English immigrants and many others who had first arrived at way stations in the West Indies or other parts of British North America. Church records have partly illuminated the lives of some of these people of the colonial period. Occasionally, these records were lost to fire through church arson or accident, but some found their way into the Historical Society or Philosophical Society collections because a famous Philadelphian, whose descendants left his papers to one of these institutions, was a treasurer or other officer of a particular church. As early as 1870, the Historical Society purchased a 1740 deed from Thomas Penn to Nathan Levy, the first Jew known to have settled in Pennsylvania, for land on which to establish a sanctified Jewish cemetery, which still survives. From one of Philadelphia’s oldest Jewish families, the Gratzes, came Simon Gratz, one of the country’s most avid collectors of Americana. Serving as a councillor and vice president of the Historical Society in the early twentieth century, he began giving most of his huge collection of nearly 60,000 manuscript letters and prints, rich in Jewish materials, to the Historical Society during World War I.

FIGURE 13. Mortality bill, 1793, LCP. Mortality bills not only are an important source for studying the growth of churches in Philadelphia, but they have allowed demographic historians to chart the fertility and mortality rates in the city. For an era when municipal recording of vital statistics was unknown, the mortality bills have become a key source for reconstructing the dynamics of population growth in colonial Philadelphia.

Of all the artifacts that have reached across the generations to speak of Philadelphia’s polyglot nature, the simplest and yet most revealing are the mortality bills (Figure 13), first issued by the city’s Anglican churches in the 1740s. Published annually, they detailed the births and deaths recorded in each of the city’s congregations. Such mortality bills were common in England in the eighteenth century, but their Philadelphia counterparts may have been inspired by the Anglicans’ desire to show how their congregations were growing more rapidly than those of other churches. If so, they would have lost their purpose by the late eighteenth century, when the one in Figure 13 was published, because by then the Methodist and Baptist churches were the fastest growing in the city.

Another group joining the human mosaic in early Philadelphia was the Africans, and they came, of course, not as immigrants but as involuntary laborers carried across the Atlantic under appalling conditions. Though small in number, they contributed much to the physical and cultural development of the seaport town and colonial capital.

Africans were in Philadelphia almost from the beginning. The Dutch had brought slaves with them to the Delaware Valley long before Penn and the Quakers arrived. But their number was vastly augmented in November 1684, when the Isabella, out of Bristol, England, sailed up the Delaware River with 150 Africans in chains. It does not comport well with the usual picture of the early pacifist settlers that they assembled on the newly built wharves and bid avidly to purchase these arrivals. At the outset of their “Holy Experiment,” the pacifist Quakers had ensnared themselves in a troublesome institution. In an infant community with about 1,000 persons, these Africans immediately became central to the labor force that did the work of clearing trees and brush and erecting crude houses. This marked the beginning of the extensive intermingling of white and black Philadelphians that has continued ever since.²⁷

Though the interest in Penn and his compatriots was a logical priority for Library Company or Historical Society leaders, Quakers’ early involvement in slavery—as slave traders and slave owners—was decidedly not. The Library Company directors of the early nineteenth century and Historical Society founders were interested in African Americans as objects of white reformers’ zeal because many of these leaders were part of the Quaker-led antislavery movement. This explains the society’s subscription from the beginning to the African Observer, an abolitionist journal edited by the Quaker Enoch Lewis. But Africans in Philadelphia were not themselves seen as fit subjects for commemorating the past or even as a valuable part of urban society. Their first newspapers, including the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Christian Recorder, published in Philadelphia, were never collected. John Fanning Watson, the city’s leading annalist, was fearful of the large free black community. A devout Methodist, he hated the way black Methodists were, as he saw it, “corrupting” Sunday services through exuberant music, dancing, and noisy exhortation; he hated even more, as he explained in his book Methodist Error (1819), that white Methodists were adopting black Methodist churchly enthusiasm. Independent black churches, which were sprinkled throughout the city and became focal points of the black community, were a big mistake, in Watson’s view. “Their aspirings and little vanities,” he sneered in his 1830s Annals of Philadelphia, “have been rapidly growing since they got those separate churches.” In his youth, he explained, “they were much humbler, more esteemed in their places, and more useful to themselves and others.”²⁸

FIGURE 14. Portrait of Black Alice, engraving, 1803, frontispiece in Eccentric Biography; or Memoirs of Remarkable Female Characters, Ancient and Modern, LCP. Because the compiler of Eccentric Biography arranged the entries alphabetically, readers encountered Alice first, to be followed by Joan of Arc. The Library Company acquired a copy of Eccentric Biography in 1832 from the peculiar artist James Cox in one of the shrewdest moves ever made by one of its librarians. Living alone with his dog and macaw, Cox scraped money together for years to buy books, accumulating a six-thousand-volume library. John Jay Smith, the Library Company’s librarian, convinced Cox to sell his books for an annuity of $400. Cox died two years later, and the Library Company happily absorbed his fabulous collection.

Yet even if the topic of Philadelphia’s deep engagement in slavery and the history of its victims lay outside the historical imagination of Library Company and Historical Society patrons, sometimes sheer inquisitiveness got the better of them. For example, during years of collecting material for his history of Philadelphia, Watson conducted oral interviews that yielded nuggets treasured by present-day historians of African Americans. One ancient informant described how, before the American Revolution, slaves divided into “numerous little squads” on Sundays and holidays, “dancing after the manner of their several nations in Africa, and speaking and singing in their native dialects.” In these few words, we have the rarest of evidence of African cultural retention and continued ethnic identity among enslaved people cast up on the shores of the Delaware.

Though Watson had little respect for most black Philadelphians, he would have had great esteem for Black Alice, one of Philadelphia’s most respected oral historians (Figure 14). She was probably the daughter of two of the 150 Africans sold at dockside in Philadelphia in 1684. Reputedly born in 1686, she lived to 116 years of age. Like an African griot—a story teller—she became a repository of historical information and was sound of mind until the very end of her life in 1802. In her advanced years she recalled life as a young slave, when Philadelphia was a wilderness where Indians hunted for game. She remembered the original wood structure of Christ Church, where she worshiped, built in 1695 with a low ceiling that she could touch with raised hands. She also recounted meeting William Penn and lighting the pipe of the man who, like most Quakers in this period, did not find Quaker beliefs and slaveholding incompatible. For many years she tended Dunk’s Ferry, crossing the Delaware River north of the city, where she collected the tolls for her master. “Her conversation became peculiarly interesting, especially to the immediate descendants of the first settlers, of whose ancestors she often related acceptable anecdotes,” reported an account of her in 1804. “Many respectable persons called to see her, who were all pleased with her innocent cheerfulness, and that dignified deportment, for which (though a slave and uninstructed) she was ever remarkable.”²⁹

Hidden treasures relating to African American history are often to be found in the materials that early collectors coveted for entirely different reasons, particularly in the manuscripts and records of wealthy white Philadelphians. After all, these residents were the slave traders and slave owners and often, in the aftermath of emancipation, the patrons of free black churches and organizations. Evidence that 150 Africans were brought to the city in 1684 is buried in a letter in the Penn Papers acquired in 1870; there a merchant describes to Penn, now back in England, how most of the hard money brought by the settlers of 1682-83 went down the Delaware River in the Isabella, having been exchanged for Africans. Similarly, when the Historical Society acquired by gift and purchase a huge trove of Chew family papers, it knew it could open windows on one of early Pennsylvania’s most powerful families. But the Chew papers also included important information on how Chew sold Richard Allen’s family to Stokely Sturgis, a farmer living near the Chew’s Kent County, Delaware plantation, thus establishing the place where Allen came of age, obtained his freedom through self-purchase, and became a founding father in his own right—of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Only fragments of evidence of how slavery functioned in early Philadelphia can be found in the city’s collecting institutions. But the head harness made of iron and copper (Figure 15) tells a story that is fleetingly documented in printed sources, that African slaves were shackled to prevent their escape and were harnessed with a bell that would proclaim any attempt at escape. If Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell is our national icon for celebrating freedom, this rare item reminds us that other bells were cast to prevent freedom in a city where the slave population had reached nearly 1,500 by the 1760s and where the proportion of families that owned slaves was not much different from that in Maryland or Virginia.

FIGURE 15. Slave head harness and weathervane, HSP. Philadelphia blacksmiths and other metalworkers are noted for fashioning artistic weathervanes of the type shown here, bearing the initials of William Penn and two of his business partners, Caleb Pusey and Samuel Carpenter, at a Chester County grain mill. The same artisan often turned his hand to the production of slave harnesses, chains, and shackles, but these items were rarely thought of as collectibles until recent years. The weathervane was given to the Historical Society in 1863.

Although not collected because they would shed light on the African American experience, newspapers have become vital veins of ore much exploited by today’s historians of black America. Because they regularly carried advertisements for the sale of slaves, both by slave traders with recently imported men and women for auction and by individual slave owners who were weary of a truculent slave or strapped for money, newspapers provide fascinating detail on slaves’ physical appearance, linguistic ability, dress, temperament, and much else. The runaway slave ads—thousands of them—spanning nearly a century, from the first publication of the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729, are a running if highly fragmentary story of the black campaign to destroy slavery by stealing themselves away.³⁰

FIGURE 16. Slave advertisement, Pennsylvania Gazette, August 26, 1762, HSP. Of all the sources on early slavery the slave advertisements are the richest for showing individual Africans acting of and for themselves—negotiating the terrain during freedom flights, inventing new identities as a way of disguising their slave status, seeking out spouses, children, parents, and friends.

Some runaway slave ads provide examples of the opportunities to derive multiple meanings buried in pieces of the past collected by the Historical Society, the Philosophical Society, and the Library Company. The advertisement for a slave named Joe, by his master Thomas Bartholomew, in the Pennsylvania Gazette on August 26, 1762, is a case in point (Figure 16). At first glance, the ad seems to indicate simply Bartholomew’s desire to reclaim his human property as well as Joe’s resistance to bondage: “Run away from the Subscriber Yesterday, a Mulattoe Man Slave, named Joe, alias Joseph Boudron, a brisk lively Fellow.” But careful attention to the ad’s language tells us more. Joe was not satisfied with a shortened forename—the usual slave owner’s assignment of a half-name signifying the slave’s demeaned status. The “brisk lively Fellow” presumed to call himself Joseph Boudron, not Joe, probably choosing a surname derived from a previous experience with a French master or a European parent in Guadeloupe, the place of his birth according to the ad. The advertisement also reveals the mulatto slave’s linguistic abilities: “speaks good English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese,” indicating that this twenty-three-year-old man was among the city’s most accomplished linguists. The ad also tells us about the slave’s cosmopolitanism and knowledge of geography, having lived in the French West Indies, New York, and Charleston, a “good Cook,” and “much used to the Seas.”

Holding enslaved Africans in a society committed to peaceful relations was only one of the difficulties and tensions inherent in the business of founding colonies. For the visionary Penn, much frustration and disappointment attended his attempts to manage his colony from England. Yet the diversity encouraged by his peace testimony and policy of toleration, though it spawned strain and bitter words, allowed Pennsylvanians to think of community in a new way, as a collection of people whose welfare depended on ignoring their differences or, at least, tolerating them rather than fighting over them. In Philadelphia, Jewish merchants, German innkeepers, English craftsmen, French Huguenot shopkeepers, Scots-Irish sea captains and sailors, and enslaved Africans all mingled closely. Though certain groups such as the Germans, Scots-Irish, and Africans preserved some of their distinctive folkways rather than adopt wholesale the ways of the English majority, most Philadelphians embraced the idea of religious toleration and ethnic diversity, helping to make the colony a model for people in other areas. For Africans, Philadelphia was no city of brotherly love, but at least it was a city where, almost from the beginning, there were some who pricked the conscience of those who dealt in human flesh.