maker or silversmith.3 All were part of an intensely competitive milieu, and all faced uncertain markets, unpredictable storms at sea, and frequent periods of war when they could speculate in disrupted overseas markets to their advantage or plummet into bankruptcy. No merchant could sit in his countinghouse and count on anything.
FIGURE 19. Pages of 1772 Philadelphia tax list, HSP. Until social historians in the 1970s began to use tax lists such as this one, the extent of slavery in colonial Philadelphia was discussed only impressionistically, if at all. The left page of the list shown here gives Benjamin Franklin’s assessment for one slave but not for three others he took with him to London. The right page includes many of Franklin’s neighbors who owned slaves, listed along with horses and cows as chattel property. Merchant Daniel Williams and gentlemen John Ross and John Lawrence owned three slaves each, along with much Philadelphia property rented out. Innkeeper Henry Funk owned one. Probate records for several thousand prerevolutionary Philadelphians confirm that slavery was extensively practiced in the City of Brotherly Love.
FIGURE 20. W. L. Breton, The London Coffee House, Watson, Annals (1830), LCP. Merchants bringing slaves to Philadelphia usually auctioned them at the London Coffee House at Front and High (Market) Streets. When Thomas Paine arrived in 1774, he boarded in a building looking down on the slave auctions. Offended by what he saw, he wrote one of his first essays, attacking the slave trade and the use of slaves.
Between the merchant importer and the consumer stood the shopkeeper. Philadelphia had hundreds of them, and female entrepreneurs were numerous, especially as retailers of imported luxury wares. Catering to a thirst for British goods, part of the surging consumer demand throughout the world rimming the Atlantic Ocean, women shopkeepers became leading arbiters of taste. We are so accustomed to thinking of eighteenth-century women as guardians of domestic life, largely restricting themselves to the private realm, that it takes an adjustment of our angle of vision to appreciate that entrepreneurship flourished among single women and widows, especially after about 1750. As purveyors of British wares, women shopkeepers were drawn into the political sphere after 1764, when new British policies led to heated campaigns for nonimportation.4
The ships dispatched from the city wharves laden with wheat, wood, and meat often returned with human cargo: Irish and German indentured servants and Africans enslaved in places such as Senegambia, Angola, and Dahomey. The slave trade was especially active during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), when the flow of white indentured servants from Ireland and Germany stopped. Many account books of eighteenth-century merchants acquired over the years by the Historical Society show the sale of a shipload of newly arrived Africans, sometimes with entries showing the expenses incurred in “going after Negroes” or “taking up Negroes”—clues to how desperate Africans bolted into the wilderness after a torturous long voyage across the Atlantic, into Delaware Bay, and up the Delaware River (Figure 20). Neither the Historical Society nor any other institution collected materials that would interpret the experience from the viewpoint of the enslaved Africans, and indeed accounts of this kind were set down only rarely. But newspapers bristled with advertisements for slave sales and runaway slaves and servants, an important source of revenue for newspaper publishers such as Benjamin Franklin. In the absence of much material in the papers of Philadelphia’s slaveimporting merchants, the newspaper slave ads have been nearly the most valuable source of information on the experience of slaves and indentured servants.5
Beyond quickening the slave trade, the Seven Years’ War, like most colonial wars, provided a special opportunity for war contractors, merchants prominent among them. The privateer was another such agent. Licensed by the government to prey on enemy shipping, an intrepid ship captain could leapfrog to the top of society if luck came his way. Such a man was Philadelphia’s John Macpherson, who snared eighteen French vessels on a single voyage in 1758. So vast was Macpherson’s haul that five years later he could afford to pour £14,000 sterling into building Mount Pleasant, his 160-acre estate outside the city (now Fairmount Park) to which this son of a Scottish immigrant soon retired in Georgian splendor. When John Adams saw Macpherson’s Mount Pleasant, he called it “the most elegant country seat in the Northern colonies.”6
In the 1760s, those profiting the most from the Seven Years’ War initiated the first era of the construction of country seats within a day’s journey from the city. The country house or mansion afforded the opportunity to retreat from urban disease, heat, and hubbub; it was also a place to display wealth and status. About fifteen years after Macpherson built Mount Pleasant, a visitor to Philadelphia observed that “the country round Philadelphia is … finely interspersed with genteel country seats, fields, and orchards, for several miles around, and along both the rivers for a good many miles.”7 Still, only about forty merchants owned a country seat by 1770, and many of the residences were hardly more than what today would serve as a summer cottage.
A Philadelphia merchant was no better than the ships he sent to sea and the sailors who manned them. Indeed, many merchants were ship captains as well or trained their sons as ship captains plying the Atlantic trade routes. Indispensable to Philadelphia’s commercial economy, mariners and dockside laborers composed about 10 percent of all working males. The crews of many blue-water vessels included African Americans and occasionally Native Americans. Historians have often classified mariners as unskilled laborers, but no ship captain or vessel owner would have entrusted his seagoing property to “unskilled” hands. The lives of deep-sea sailors (and other Philadelphians at the bottom of the social scale) are sadly elusive, but historians have traced them in recent years in tax lists, deeds, poorhouse records, church marriage and baptism entries, and probate records, where inventories of the goods left at death have survived for some. Best recorded in printed materials are the lives and adventures of the pirates, some of whom lived in Philadelphia in the city’s early years.
A romanticized picture of blue-water sailors clouds our picture of maritime reality. For example, the Seven Years’ War seemingly brought flush times for mariners because the privateering boom put a premium on the seaman’s labor. As early as 1756, one merchant was writing about the “Scarsity of seamen as Most of them are gone privateering.”8 Yet few of the fortune seekers realized their dreams. Privateering crews distributed their booty according to rank, and usually half the shares went to the ship’s financial backers. The rest was distributed according to position, with the lowly cabin boys getting one-half to three-quarters of one share. Many privateersmen came home empty-handed, and many went to a watery grave because the already hazardous life at sea became even more hazardous. The main rewards went to the owner-investors, the officers, and the maritime artisans ashore. As a result of the rush to scoop up enemy riches from an English-dominated sea, it was they who received unparalleled wages while enjoying safe billets.
Mercantile wealth created colonial Philadelphia, although personal fortunes were as often made in real estate and the social elite probably had more gentlemen of inherited wealth than active merchants. The merchants’ and shopkeepers’ wealth also made the trades hum because much of the money earned by importers, exporters, and retailers was money spent on house construction or home furnishings. The building boom during and after the Seven Years’ War nearly doubled the number of houses in the city between 1760 and 1777—from 2,969 to 5,470. This required the labor and skills of an army of house carpenters, glaziers, painters, stonecutters, masons, sawyers, and ordinary laborers. That several dozen city merchants were contracting for elegant new houses in and outside the city explains the need for a Philadelphia edition of The British Architect, or The Builder’s Treasury of Staircases.
We often associate the design of colonial America’s more elaborate buildings with cultivated amateur architects such as Thomas Jefferson
