First City. Gary B. Nash
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 lived in cramped housing not much different from that of a successful furniture 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