absence of great wealth or dire poverty in Philadelphia’s early decades, what some called “a pleasing mediocrity,” was yielding to a new social order by the eve of the American Revolution. The range of social conditions had widened, and the distance between top and bottom had grown. Mixing together on the streets and wharves were merchant moguls, middling shopkeepers and artisans, and struggling—sometimes impecunious—mariners, laborers, and less successful artisans.
The collections of the city’s cultural institutions have been repeatedly replenished with objects reflecting the comfort of the merchant-rentier class in the colonial city, so much so that it sometimes seems that everybody in the city prospered. But beneath the surface of genteel Philadelphia resided other layers of society that historians have disclosed only recently. Most of the physical evidence that would document the lives of ordinary Philadelphians has been used up, torn down, or thrown away. But historians are beginning to discover the lives of the laboring classes in tax lists, poor relief rolls, pay records, newspaper notices of runaway servants and slaves, vagrancy dockets, almshouse admission ledgers, and other records. Especially important are the inventories of household goods taken when a person died. But a full picture of life in the growing colonial city remains half-visible.
As today’s builders of outsized mansions can appreciate, the house was the greatest symbol of wealth and social status in eighteenth-century America. Many of Philadelphia’s successful merchants and gentlemen living on investments and inherited wealth built houses befitting their affluence during the building boom of the 1760s and 1770s, and the wealthiest of them retreated from the heat, dirt, and yellow fever epidemics of Philadelphia summers by building country houses along the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers. Inside the urbane house, whether in or outside the city, fireplaces were an essential element for heating and a venue for the decorator’s touch. House carpenters assembled mantels and then added ornaments according to their client’s taste or their own.
If house size was a signifier of social status, so were the building materials of which the houses were made: brick and stone for the wealthier, wood for the humble. In the same way, inside the house the wood used in furniture signified a family’s wealth and values. Softwood pine served ordinary people, more expensive cherry and maple for middling families. But for the affluent, hardwoods such as oak, walnut, and mahogany—the latter far more expensive because it had to be imported from British Honduras and other distant places—were the materials of choice (though some conservative Quakers shied away from the more ostentatious mahogany). Fine upholstered side chairs, a drop-leaf dinner table, crystal wine glasses, and Chinese porcelain plates (Figure 25) were far beyond the means of common Philadelphians but comfortably within the budget of perhaps one hundred Philadelphia families.19
FIGURE 25. Dining room setting, mid-eighteenth century, PMA. Wealthy Philadelphians enamored of Georgian-era furnishings created a local version of English upper-class life. The table shown here is set with a silver salver (the small footed tray at the center holding a serving dish), Chinese porcelain plates, silverware, and crystal glasses. These fine material possessions have been collected so passionately and displayed so frequently in museums and historical societies that the public’s mental picture of colonial life in Philadelphia is based primarily on the household goods of the uppermost layer of urban society.
Samplers were a favorite form of female expression among the city’s well-to-do families. Needlework efficiently combined lessons in writing and cultivated discipline, patience, and quietude—or so mothers and fathers hoped. Rebecca Jones was twelve in 1751 when she worked her sampler (Figure 26), probably under the watchful eye of her mother, a schoolmistress, or Ann Marsh, a Quaker woman skilled in needlepoint. Originally treasured for its age and beauty, the sampler has more recently become thought of as a valuable source of information on the education and socializing of eighteenth-century women.
The commercial wealth that propelled the city’s economy forward created a much more self-conscious elite. The number of men identifying themselves to tax collectors as “gentleman” or “esquire” tripled between 1756 and 1772, and these rank-conscious urbanites strove to assert or reinforce their social status in a number of ways. One was to commission oil-on-canvas portraits. Typically, the portrait showed the gentleman assuming erect posture—chin up, back straight, and shoulders back—in itself signaling high status. Likewise, the sitter’s dress announced his social authority. No merchant, lawyer, or clergyman would have dreamed to appear on canvas coatless or in an unbuttoned vest or open-throated shirt, sure signs of a tradesman. The protocol of both posture and costume, clearly displayed in portraits, drew lines demarcating the urban gentleman from the ordinary city dweller. Although the public rarely laid eyes on the oil portrait, secure inside an urban mansion, its owner could view it daily as a reassurance of his class authority.
FIGURE 26. Rebecca Jones sampler, 1751, Atwater Kent Museum. The young Rebecca worked birds, animals, and sprigs of flowers into her compartmented sampler, recorded the exact time of her birth, and stitched in a moral lesson. The Friends Historical Association donated it to the Atwater Kent Museum after World War II as part of a collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Quaker clothes, decorated fabrics, and dolls.
The leaders of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions have attached great importance to acquiring portraits of such worthies as Thomas Lawrence, Thomas Mifflin and his wife, Robert Morris, and Charles Willing, Jr. because, like documents and artifacts, they forge links between the past and the present. But more particularly, the portraits of historically mighty figures reinforce the high social position of their institutional owners, many of them descended from the portrait sitters. The Historical Society’s portrait collection of Philadelphia worthies reached sixty-seven by 1872. In the following decades the collection mounted rapidly, rising to several hundred by the mid-twentieth century.
Also important as emblems of cosmopolitanism and status were furniture designed for the upper classes. The comment of a New York merchant in 1757 applied as well to Philadelphia: “Our affluence, during the late war introduced a degree of luxury in tables, dress, and furniture with which we were before unacquainted.”20 Stylish furniture, arranged in carefully planned architectural spaces within the home, permitted social performances, such as tea drinking, and formal receptions governed by carefully cultivated rules of etiquette. Investment in more ornate and more aesthetically developed furniture became a hallmark of the middle third of the eighteenth century, adopted cautiously by Quakers and embraced wholeheartedly by others.
By the late nineteenth century, the Historical Society, the Athenaeum, and the Philosophical Society avidly collected furniture and house furnishings of the merchant and rentier elite because they attached a special value to the surviving artifacts of the colonial era that supported a romantic vision of a heroic American era. Indeed, as we will see in Chapter 8, a colonial revival was in full flood at this time. Today, historians see the rising desire for fashionable living, played out in acquisitiveness for material goods, as evidence of a “consumer revolution” that spread not only within the upper echelon but also among the middling ranks of American society. They also see the yen for display and the cultivation of refinement not only as a way for the affluent to separate themselves from the hoi polloi through conspicuous consumption but also as a commitment to living a more refined life according to what its participants thought was a superior moral code. “Brandishing possessions in the faces of the poor to demonstrate pecuniary superiority,” writes one historian, “only signified a difference in wealth,” but “creating parlors as a site for a refined life implied spiritual superiority.”21
In fashionable Philadelphia, during its rise as a commercial center of great importance,
