First City. Gary B. Nash
of renewal. The Welsh and the French Huguenots made substantial contributions to the city’s life. So did non-Quaker English immigrants and many others who had first arrived at way stations in the West Indies or other parts of British North America. Church records have partly illuminated the lives of some of these people of the colonial period. Occasionally, these records were lost to fire through church arson or accident, but some found their way into the Historical Society or Philosophical Society collections because a famous Philadelphian, whose descendants left his papers to one of these institutions, was a treasurer or other officer of a particular church. As early as 1870, the Historical Society purchased a 1740 deed from Thomas Penn to Nathan Levy, the first Jew known to have settled in Pennsylvania, for land on which to establish a sanctified Jewish cemetery, which still survives. From one of Philadelphia’s oldest Jewish families, the Gratzes, came Simon Gratz, one of the country’s most avid collectors of Americana. Serving as a councillor and vice president of the Historical Society in the early twentieth century, he began giving most of his huge collection of nearly 60,000 manuscript letters and prints, rich in Jewish materials, to the Historical Society during World War I.
FIGURE 13. Mortality bill, 1793, LCP. Mortality bills not only are an important source for studying the growth of churches in Philadelphia, but they have allowed demographic historians to chart the fertility and mortality rates in the city. For an era when municipal recording of vital statistics was unknown, the mortality bills have become a key source for reconstructing the dynamics of population growth in colonial Philadelphia.
Of all the artifacts that have reached across the generations to speak of Philadelphia’s polyglot nature, the simplest and yet most revealing are the mortality bills (Figure 13), first issued by the city’s Anglican churches in the 1740s. Published annually, they detailed the births and deaths recorded in each of the city’s congregations. Such mortality bills were common in England in the eighteenth century, but their Philadelphia counterparts may have been inspired by the Anglicans’ desire to show how their congregations were growing more rapidly than those of other churches. If so, they would have lost their purpose by the late eighteenth century, when the one in Figure 13 was published, because by then the Methodist and Baptist churches were the fastest growing in the city.
Another group joining the human mosaic in early Philadelphia was the Africans, and they came, of course, not as immigrants but as involuntary laborers carried across the Atlantic under appalling conditions. Though small in number, they contributed much to the physical and cultural development of the seaport town and colonial capital.
Africans were in Philadelphia almost from the beginning. The Dutch had brought slaves with them to the Delaware Valley long before Penn and the Quakers arrived. But their number was vastly augmented in November 1684, when the Isabella, out of Bristol, England, sailed up the Delaware River with 150 Africans in chains. It does not comport well with the usual picture of the early pacifist settlers that they assembled on the newly built wharves and bid avidly to purchase these arrivals. At the outset of their “Holy Experiment,” the pacifist Quakers had ensnared themselves in a troublesome institution. In an infant community with about 1,000 persons, these Africans immediately became central to the labor force that did the work of clearing trees and brush and erecting crude houses. This marked the beginning of the extensive intermingling of white and black Philadelphians that has continued ever since.27
Though the interest in Penn and his compatriots was a logical priority for Library Company or Historical Society leaders, Quakers’ early involvement in slavery—as slave traders and slave owners—was decidedly not. The Library Company directors of the early nineteenth century and Historical Society founders were interested in African Americans as objects of white reformers’ zeal because many of these leaders were part of the Quaker-led antislavery movement. This explains the society’s subscription from the beginning to the African Observer, an abolitionist journal edited by the Quaker Enoch Lewis. But Africans in Philadelphia were not themselves seen as fit subjects for commemorating the past or even as a valuable part of urban society. Their first newspapers, including the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Christian Recorder, published in Philadelphia, were never collected. John Fanning Watson, the city’s leading annalist, was fearful of the large free black community. A devout Methodist, he hated the way black Methodists were, as he saw it, “corrupting” Sunday services through exuberant music, dancing, and noisy exhortation; he hated even more, as he explained in his book Methodist Error (1819), that white Methodists were adopting black Methodist churchly enthusiasm. Independent black churches, which were sprinkled throughout the city and became focal points of the black community, were a big mistake, in Watson’s view. “Their aspirings and little vanities,” he sneered in his 1830s Annals of Philadelphia, “have been rapidly growing since they got those separate churches.” In his youth, he explained, “they were much humbler, more esteemed in their places, and more useful to themselves and others.”28
FIGURE 14. Portrait of 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