First City. Gary B. Nash
was his cause adopted officially by the Society of Friends.
Lay was followed by other antislavery spokesmen, though they were few in number before the American Revolution. The most committed and best known were John Woolman and Anthony Benezet. Both were ascetic and totally committed, caring little for the comforts of life or about the opinions of their contemporaries. These were the two humble men—one a tailor, the other a teacher of small children—who finally moved the Society of Friends to take a series of official positions against slavery between 1754 and 1774. In the latter year, the Society prohibited slave owning, and thereafter all Quakers had to release their slaves or face disownment by the Society of Friends. Decades of antislavery labor lay ahead, but a beginning had been made.29
Science and higher education were also part of Philadelphia’s leadership in the American Enlightenment. In 1751, under Franklin’s impetus, the Academy of Philadelphia, a nonsectarian school of higher education, held its first classes. It was granted college status four years later, but not until 1779 was it renamed the University of the State of Pennsylvania. The first board of trustees of the college included Anglicans and Presbyterians but only a few Quakers. The Society of Friends had traditionally rejected the more esoteric aspects of higher education in favor of practical learning. From its early period the college desultorily collected historical materials, but its connection with Franklin made it an important holder of Frankliniana.
FIGURE 31. Henry Dawkins, Benjamin Lay, engraving, 1758, Haverford College. The engraving includes a basket of fruit—Lay was a vegetarian—and Lay is seen outside a cave he used as a retreat for meditation on his farm in Abington. Lay holds a book inscribed “TRION ON HAPPINESS”—a reference to the work of an early English Quaker, Thomas Tryon, whose The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness (London, 1683) set forth a theory of temperance and moderation as the keys to a long and happy life. The painting from which the engraving was taken, by William Williams, who aroused Benjamin West’s interest in painting, is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
FIGURE 32. Astronomical clock built by David Rittenhouse, APS. Instrument maker Rittenhouse built this clock for his observatory at Norriton and used it for his famous observation of the transit of Venus in 1769. Many prized Rittenhouse materials have found their way, by gift or purchase, to the Athenaeum, Historical Society, Library Company, Philosophical Society, and Atwater Kent Museum. Hundreds of pages of his meteorological observations in the 1780s and 1790s were presented to the Philosophical Society in 1898. The Society acquired the clock in about 1810 from Rittenhouse’s executors. The centennial of Rittenhouse’s birth went unnoticed in 1832, but Philadelphia celebrated the bicentenary in the middle of the Great Depression with modest fanfare.
Like his friend Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse (1732-96) was a scientist, inventor, successful businessman, and Revolutionary leader. George Washington recognized his expertise as a mathematician and instrument maker by appointing him the first Superintendent of the United States Mint. Rittenhouse began his career as a clockmaker and gained fame in 1769 by observing the transit of Venus (Figure 32). His orrery, a moving mechanical model of the solar system based on precise mathematical calculations, also brought him fame. Both the Philosophical Society and the Library Company were venues of scientific experimentation, and Rittenhouse belonged to both, serving as the Philosophical Society’s president after Franklin died in 1790.
Cosmopolitan from the beginning because of Penn’s doctrine of religious tolerance and an open-door policy for immigrants, Philadelphia at the end of the colonial period stood on the threshold of receiving a new storm of strangers. As the largest North American town and situated midway between the two oldest areas of settlement and commercial development—New England and the Chesapeake—Penn’s “greene country towne” was about to become the center of the revolutionary government that for ten years, from 1774 to 1783, coordinated the bloody fight to gain American independence. Into the city came delegates from all thirteen colonies to the First and Second Continental Congresses, along with those whom the Congress designated to go abroad as the nation’s first emissaries. Through Philadelphia poured American and British armies. Into the city came French and Spanish diplomats, Indian chiefs, titled aristocrats eager to fight for the American cause, and streams of individuals displaced by the war. The commercial city was becoming the city of revolution.
Chapter 3
THE REVOLUTION’S MANY FACES
The American Revolution was the central event in the lives of most of those who lived through it. It engaged the passions and interests of nearly everyone and promised to usher in a new age. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Philadelphia’s famous pamphleteer, Thomas Paine. “A situation similar to the present has not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”1
While the Revolution shaped the lives of most of its participants, it also became the touchstone of succeeding generations, especially those who were historically minded. In the fashioning of public memory in Philadelphia, the Revolution became a central event. However, this did not happen spontaneously or continually. The public had to be reminded and instructed again and again. But given the diverse and contrasting views its Philadelphia participants had held, stimulating, massaging, and managing public memory always ran into the problem of deciding just what the American Revolution meant. As later chapters will make clear, preserving a stable narrative of the Revolution was nearly as difficult as Washington’s attempt to hold together a stable Continental army.
The difficulties in sustaining a unified view of the Revolution could hardly have been otherwise because the war was a continuously shifting and painfully ambiguous affair for the diverse people of the Philadelphia region (Figure 33). At bottom, of course, it was a bloody struggle to secure independence from what most colonists regarded as a corrupt and tyrannical English government. But it was also a prolonged negotiation among people of different points of view about what kind of society they wished to create should good fortune allow them to win the war. This debate divided families, neighbors, churches, and occupational groups, not only between “loyalists” and “patriots” but also among rebels who varied from conservative to radical on vexed internal questions: the breadth of the franchise, the powers of the governor, tax burdens, the criminal code, emancipating slaves, and much more. Casting themselves into a state of nature after renouncing the English charter and law under which they had lived, Pennsylvanians had to decide just what kind of laws, political structures, and constitutionally protected liberties they wished to live under and by what means they should create these new governmental arrangements.
This task proved difficult and divisive. United in their desire to begin anew as an independent nation, Americans were at the same time frequently divided by region, class, religion, ethnicity, and gender. Nearly everyone carried into the fray an understanding of their own experiences in the colonial period, both in relation to the mother country and to each other. “Can America be happy?” asked Paine. “As happy as she wants, for she hath a clean slate to write upon.” That was the rub. With many eager to step forward with chalk to inscribe their hopes for the future upon the blank slate, it took the entire course of the war to sort out competing ideas and to frame solutions. Even then, unresolved questions carried over into the postwar period. If citizens argued strenuously at the time, it is little wonder that their descendants would quarrel heatedly about the “true” nature of the Revolution.
FIGURE 33. Edward Lamson Henry, Cliveden During the Battle of Germantown, Cliveden of the National Trust. On October 3, 1777, Washington’s ragged Continentals attacked the British encamped at Cliveden, the mansion of Benjamin Chew, wealthy Philadelphia Loyalist landowner and officeholder who was exiled to