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
