First City. Gary B. Nash
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 or Philadelphia’s lesser known Dr. John Kearsley, who designed Christ Church, 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