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.
Chapter 2
RECALLING A COMMERCIAL SEAPORT
Between the time William Penn left his colony in 1701 after his second visit and the outbreak of disputes with Great Britain in 1764 that would lead to the American Revolution, Philadelphia became the largest commercial center in English-speaking America. Penn’s liberal immigration policy encouraged rapid development of the region, and along with natural increase this drove Pennsylvania’s population upward from a mere 18,000 in 1700 to about 220,000 in 1765. The urbanized Philadelphia region grew from about 2,200 in 1700 to 19,000 in 1760, and then to about 30,000 as the Revolution erupted in 1775. Around 1720, a little-known painter named Peter Cooper caught the bucolic nature of the sleepy riverfront town of the early eighteenth century (Figure 17), carved out of forests, with its two rude Quaker meetinghouses, a few primitive wharves, and streets extending only several blocks from the Delaware River.
When William Penn’s son Thomas Penn commissioned George Heap to draw a panoramic view of Philadelphia thirty years later, artisans, merchants, mariners, and ordinary laborers—many of the latter indentured or enslaved—transformed Philadelphia into one of the English empire’s prize overseas capitals (Figure 18). Although Heap’s panorama is not strictly accurate—it exaggerates the height of public buildings and presents the curved waterfront as a straight line—it does not overstate the importance of maritime commerce to Philadelphia’s economy. Approximately seventy wharves and twelve shipyards dotted the area shown, graphic evidence that Philadelphia had grown mightily by becoming the entrepôt that imported manufactured goods for a thriving region and exported foodstuffs, wood products, furs, and other commodities throughout the Atlantic basin. Many Philadelphians would have agreed with Lord Adam Gordon, a British colonel who fought in the Seven Years’ War. Visiting Philadelphia in 1765, he called it “a great and noble city” and “one of the wonders of the world.”
To the leaders of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions, looking back from the nineteenth century, the prerevolutionary city was a marvelous success. Some modern planners, developers, and city dwellers have tried to recreate the imagined charm of Philadelphia in the mid-eighteenth century. Visitors to Cliveden in Germantown, the stately home of the Chew family, the restored Powel House on Third Street, the recreation of the Georgian drawing rooms of wealthy Philadelphia merchants at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum outside Wilmington, Delaware, are appropriately dazzled by the restrained gentility of early Philadelphia aristocrats. But they are not seeing prerevolutionary Philadelphia, only the Georgian grandeur of a very small fraction of even the upper class.1
FIGURE 17. Peter Cooper, The South East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia, c. 1720, LCP. Cooper’s Southeast Prospect is thought to be the oldest surviving painting of a North American city. Cooper took liberties. The Quaker meeting houses, identified by key numbers, had no pinnacles, which would have offended Quaker values. Nor did the Court House, identified as #18, have a tower as depicted by the artist. Cooper’s eight-foot-long painting on canvas was sent to London in 1744. In a fine example of the vagaries of collecting, it was discovered 113 years later in a London curiosity shop. The member of Parliament who found it took it to the American minister to the Court of St. James, Philadelphia-born George Mifflin Dallas, who gave it to the Library Company.
FIGURE 18. Scull and Heap, An East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia, engraving, 1756, LCP. William Penn’s son Thomas commissioned an engraved view of Philadelphia to boast about the city’s rapid growth and to stimulate further immigration and investment. The four plates constituting the view (only one is shown here) were engraved in London because of Philadelphia’s chronic lack of engravers before the 1790s. The scene encompassed almost a mile and a half of the city’s waterfront. The Delaware River here fairly boils with merchantmen riding on stylized waves.
Today’s historians view the bustling city through several lenses. In one light, it was a thriving shipping center where some merchants and officials built gracious houses and some artisans, like Benjamin Franklin, followed the way to wealth through industriousness, sobriety, and excellent craftsmanship. But another city can also be seen: one whose economic growth, spurred by population explosion and war contracting, made it a city of economic instability, of exploited indentured and slave labor, of a growing gap between the top and bottom of society that led to the emergence of an impoverished class. This underside of commercial development is not well documented in the city’s early historical collections because the leaders of cultural agencies in the nineteenth century were not interested in the lives of the lower classes. However, historians have explored this side of the city’s history through later acquisitions of the Historical Society, the Library Company, and more recently founded institutions such as the Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia History and the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies. But most important has been the Archives of the City of Philadelphia, which by mandate systematically preserved such invaluable sources as vagrancy dockets, almshouse admission books and minutes, tax lists, deed and mortgage books, and probate records with inventories of personal possessions upon the death of the rich, the poor, and those in between (Figure 19).
Wheels of Commerce
Philadelphia’s merchants and shopkeepers, whose records are abundant in the Historical Society’s collections, became legendary. Dozens of colonial merchants were memorialized in street names—Shippen, Willing, Pemberton, Norris, Powel, and many more. These were the merchants who reached inland to tap the Indian fur trade and to gather the produce of the fertile rolling farmlands watered by the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. They dispatched their ships to Africa, Europe, the West Indies, and—by 1785—to China. The wharves jutting into the Delaware River and the dense settlement for several miles along the river clearly displayed Philadelphia’s “vigorous spirit of enterprise,” as one merchant called it.2
Philadelphia’s merchants established their fortunes by transporting the agricultural products of the hinterland—beef, pork, wheat, corn, and lumber—to wood-and food-hungry parts of the flourishing British empire. In the early decades of settlement, many business transactions took the form of barter, the direct exchange of goods and services. More complicated transactions became common in the 1700s, involving letters of credit, bills of exchange, and specie, or money in coin. An innovation was paper money, first issued in Pennsylvania in 1723 to help ease the city’s earliest severe recession.
Not every merchant made a fortune, and taken together merchants did not form a cohesive group. A study in the 1980s shows that the city had about 320 merchants in the early 1770s, and that fully 85 percent of them were not part of the city’s social elite, itself sharply split between Quakers and Anglicans. Only half owned a horse, and most
