built in 1727. But the subscription list for the 1775 Philadelphia edition of The British Architect tells a different story. The original 181 “encouragers” of the first architectural publication in North America included only two gentlemen and two merchants but 62 master builders, 111 house carpenters, two painters, and two plasterers. Such information about the history of early building has become the absorbing interest of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Founded in 1814 as a subscription library, it has now become the nation’s most important repository of early American architectural history with extensive holdings of architectural drawings and books as well as material on fine furniture and the decorative arts.
All but forgotten to public memory about the humming commercial city on the Delaware in the colonial era are the enslaved Africans and free blacks. These two groups were indubitably important to the workings of commerce and the city’s rapid expansion in the decades preceding the American Revolution. Close to fifteen hundred slaves lived with masters in the city in 1767, when nearly one of every six households contained at least one slave. Some of them moved ships, often going to sea with the sea captain who owned them; more moved goods, at dockside as stevedores or through the streets as wagon drivers. Others toiled in ropewalks, saw pits, shipyards, and tanneries, all connected to the fitting out of ships. Still others worked alongside masters in the shops of blacksmiths, blockmakers, and coopers. In every such instance they contributed to the turning of the wheels of commerce. Those who were domestic servants, including most of the enslaved women, contributed indirectly to the commercial success of white city dwellers by making life more comfortable for their masters and mistresses in kitchens, nurseries, stables, and taverns.9
The post-World War II restoration of Philadelphia’s old commercial center of the eighteenth century has whisked slave history aside as cleanly as did the creation of Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s, when the Rockefeller fantasy of eighteenth-century Virginia life took form. Anyone visiting Franklin Court today, ambling through the courtyard where the print shop, post office, and Venturi steel outline of the Franklin home recall the heyday of Printer Ben’s fame, will see no evidence that Franklin acquired four slaves in the 1750s—Peter, Jemima, King, and Othello. Not a trace of John Cadwalader’s seven slaves can be found in Nicholas Wainwright’s Colonial Grandeur in Philadelphia: The House and Furniture of General John Cadwalader (1964). Careful attention by the author to the building and lavish furnishing of the house on Second Street makes this book the finest account of the mid-century Georgian efflorescence in colonial Philadelphia, yet it shrouds the details of how the Cadwalader mansion was partially built by enslaved labor and carefully cared for by his retinue of slaves. Visitors to Cliveden, now a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, will learn a lot about its builder, Benjamin Chew, attorney general and provincial councillor of Pennsylvania. But they will learn little about the dozens of slaves employed by Chew at Cliveden and on his Kent County, Delaware plantation, including the family of Richard Allen, who would found the African Methodist Episcopal Church. John Dickinson is etched in public memory as the “Pen man of the Revolution” for his famous protest pamphlet Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1768), but he is forgotten as the owner of about fifty-five slaves on the eve of the Revolution. Yet none of these famous white men could have ascended so high within the city’s rising commercial sector of the mid-eighteenth century without the advantage provided by unpaid laborers—the silent, shadowy figures of the seaport’s history.
Artisans and Artisanry
While planning his colony in London, Penn realized the importance of attracting skilled craftsmen to Pennsylvania, and in this he succeeded. By 1690, about 120 craftsmen were practicing their trades in the city. Eighty years later, on the eve of the Revolution, about half of Philadelphia’s households were headed by craftsmen—or “leather-apron men,” as they called themselves. The craftsmen took pride in their skills, knowing them to be indispensable to the community. They believed in the dignity of laboring with one’s hands and regarded their skills, to be passed on to apprentices and journeymen, as a form of property. “The humblest workman thinks nobly of his trade” went the French saying in the eighteenth century, and it applied equally in Philadelphia.10
The dignity conferred by craft labor had its basis not only in the Protestant concept of calling, which held that in God’s eyes the mason was as worthy as the merchant, but also in the awareness that no community could exist without the products of its dexterous artisans. Craft skill represented indispensable knowledge, and upon that knowledge rested a claim to a certain authority in the community. Moreover, craft skill was a form of capital, nonmaterial to be sure but at least as important as cash or real estate. Artisans invested their skill in products, and these handcrafted objects, to the craftsman’s way of thinking, always bore his personal stamp and therefore, in an indirect way, were his possessions.
Conditions in North America fostered a corollary attitude that intensified this belief in the dignity of labor. In the seaboard cities, the incentives for industriousness went beyond a search for “a decent competency,” as the phrase went in this era, because the availability of land and the persistent shortage of labor produced a more fluid social structure than in Europe. Penn’s open-door policy and the liberal terms for purchasing land brought a rich array of skilled artisans to the Delaware, and in the early decades many forged ahead. The Bristol Factor that landed at Chester in October 1681, a year before Penn arrived and even before Philadelphia was laid out, brought Cesar Ghiselin, an eighteen-year-old silversmith who prospered; Thomas Wharton, a tailor whose sons would become important merchants; Nehemiah Allen, a cooper whose business thrived; Josiah Carpenter, a brewer who became a large landowner; Thomas Paschall, a pewterer who made a small fortune; and Abraham Hooper, a cabinetmaker who could hardly keep up with the demand for his furniture. In this single ship arrived the core of the artisan and commercial enterprises of the early decade. Each established a family that prospered.
Such generally favorable conditions encouraged unremitting labor as men found they could rise from journeyman to master more swiftly than in the German Palatinate, Ulster, or East Anglia. One result of the new attitude toward industriousness was the abandonment in Philadelphia and other cities of “St. Monday,” the English artisan’s habit of taking Monday as well as Sunday off from work. If more work meant only lower daily wages, as was often the case in England, where a surplus of labor existed, then a shorter workweek made perfect sense. But in the seaboard towns of colonial America, where labor was often in short supply, St. Monday fell victim to the conviction that laboring people, by the steady application of their skills, could raise themselves above the ruck.11
Working in their small shops, Philadelphia’s diversified artisans created fine silver hollowware, exquisitely carved furniture, and much more. Seen from one perspective, these artifacts are a tribute to the good taste of the wealthy families who commissioned them. But seen from another, they become a lasting reminder of the imagination and skill of the craftsmen who created them.
FIGURE 21. Iron stoveplate with German inscription, 1741, PMA. Pennsylvania’s rich reserves of iron ore made possible a flourishing iron industry that demonstrated craft traditions, cultural preferences, and American ingenuity. This stove plate, forged at Durham Furnace in Bucks County, displays an inscription in German that translates as “Cain killed his brother Abel.” Many other stove plates told moral stories. One with a war and peace motif shows two grenadiers with guns facing off while two short bearded men with broad-brimmed hats shake hands. Another portrays a family quarrel inspired by the devil himself where husband and wife, encouraged by their children, trade blows. Benjamin Franklin fused two fireplace traditions—English and German. His “New Invented Pennsylvania Fireplace” of 1744 combined the German tradition of cast iron heating stoves and the English tradition of open fireplaces with iron firebacks to protect the masonry and throw heat into the room. Franklin’s fireplace—widely copied down to the present day—fitted an open-fronted stove into a fireplace opening.
Philadelphia’s many craftsmen produced articles on demand for urban
