First City. Gary B. Nash

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, one ate from as well as sat on crafted objects made of materials connoting class position. Wooden bowls and crude clay vessels sufficed for the poor and pewter and earthenware served the needs of the middle class, but the wealthy required silver and porcelain. As the American Revolution approached, silver tea-and coffee-ware, dining accessories, and personal articles became essential emblems of wealth and status. By the 1750s, about a dozen silversmiths worked in Philadelphia, producing increasingly specialized forms of silver tableware as well as ceremonial presentation pieces, silver peace medals, and gorgets produced for Indian chiefs to commemorate treaty signings and keep the Indian trade with Quaker merchants flowing.

      Such a piece as a coffeepot (Figure 27) crafted by Joseph Richardson, Jr., one of the city’s premier silversmiths before the Revolution, provides an example of how such an artifact can have multiple meanings. It can be viewed most directly as a handsome example of high-style eighteenth-century craftsmanship, as an intrinsically valuable work of decorative art. Through a second lens, the coffeepot can be seen as a crucial piece of evidence in tracing the new meaning of gentility in the eighteenth century. Amid rising consumerism, in both England and its colonies, genteel people developed a new sense of refinement, acted out in elegant manners, witty conversation, and graceful movements on occasions that depended on the importation of new beverages from exotic ports of call—in this case coffee beans from South America. Through a third lens, the Richardson coffeepot can be considered, although not actually seen, with regard to the organization of rhythms of work of the artisan who crafted the object. Behind the coffeepot lay several work processes involving African cultivation of the coffee beans, the sailors who shipped them to Philadelphia, and the small silversmith workshop production that linked together the labor of apprentices, journeymen, and master craftsmen. Finally, behind the coffeepot, absent from the view of the lovely pot itself, resided the role of the crafts worker in the political and social life of a port town such as Philadelphia.