First City. Gary B. Nash
battle shown in this nineteenth-century recreation. After the war Chew returned to Cliveden and won back his prominence in Philadelphia political and social circles. His descendants lived in the house until 1972, when they presented it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Philadelphia played a central role in the dramatic events leading to war. As the meeting place of the First and Second Continental Congresses, it drew together insurgent leaders from all the colonies; in the prolonged debates over independence in early 1776, Pennsylvania became the “keystone” colony whose willingness to commit for independence proved decisive. During the war, the city was a strategic port and a military staging and production center as well as the center of state and national government.2
The founders of the Library Company, the Philosophical Society, and the Historical Society were all keenly interested in collecting material relating to the American Revolution. After all, the city was the nation’s birthplace, where the Declaration of Independence was written and signed and where the Continental Congress sat while directing the war. Moreover, Philadelphia was the home of some of the most famous men of ’76: Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, Thomas Paine, James Wilson, Benjamin Rush, and many others. This initial collecting interest never waned, and down to the present the city’s collecting institutions have nourished a special interest in acquiring anything related to the nation’s founding. Yet looking back on the Revolution was not a neutral activity, and hence for many years collecting institutions privileged some materials while downgrading others.
Quaker prominence in Philadelphia’s cultural institutions has been the source of some confusion and tension in assembling, preserving, and presenting documents and artifacts of the revolutionary era. To put the matter bluntly, the American Revolution was nearly as painful in Quaker remembrance as was the revolutionary experience at the time. For Philadelphia Quakers, the Revolution was a frightful ordeal, the most traumatic chapter in their history. As principled pacifists, they refused to fight or even pay taxes for the war, and many of them were suspected of collaborating or at least sympathizing with the British because of close mercantile ties to overseas partners. On both counts they were reviled, ostracized, and in some cases exiled. All were disenfranchised, and only slowly in the postrevolutionary period did Pennsylvanians put aside their wartime disgust with the Quakers.3
The Quakers’ patriot opponents were almost as interested as the Quakers themselves in allowing historical amnesia concerning this chapter of the Revolution to blot out remembrance. An internecine struggle hardly fit with the desire to show the revolutionary generation in untarnished, heroic terms, which, in the nineteenth century, was the dominant impulse among historians and historical societies. Nor has it been easy for non-Quaker historians to deal with Quaker pacifism and outright Toryism because of their general admiration of postrevolutionary Quaker efforts on behalf of woman’s suffrage, abolition, Indian rights, world peace, and other liberal causes.
For all the pain associated with the Revolution, many of the Library Company’s early Quaker councillors, librarians, and patrons knew that historical materials germane to the war for independence were of utmost value. And some had joined the Free Quakers, the splinter group that put aside pacifist principles and fully supported the American cause in word and deed. When the chance arose to acquire a bundle of revolutionary ephemeral materials, just one year after the war ended, the Library Company sprang into action. One of its members, the Swiss immigrant Pierre-Eugène Du Simitière, had assiduously gathered materials that few at the time thought to collect—newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, cartoons, and prints—in order to write a history of the Revolution. But death claimed Du Simitière in 1784. The Library Company, positioning itself as a national library, promptly purchased his cache at auction, thus becoming a repository of special importance for materials bearing on the American Revolution. This set an unspoken precedent for collecting materials that, while distasteful to many of its leaders and members, could help establish the claim of being a civic public library as distinct from the sectarian libraries at the new nation’s small number of colleges.
Nearly half a century later, the Historical Society’s early Quaker leaders, remembering vividly the anguish of their parents and grandparents, probably recalled the Revolution as something more than simply “the glorious cause.” But they also remembered that time had healed the wartime wounds and Quakers had been reincorporated into Philadelphia society. Materials connected to the Revolution, especially related to the war against England, became priceless items, for the American Revolution had become their heritage too, even if their fathers and grandfathers had opposed it at the time. If Quaker beliefs stressed pacifism, they did not prohibit the preservation of valuable documents from turbulent times.
It can be imagined that the American Philosophical Society’s interest in the American Revolution must have been unequivocal, since Franklin, the society’s founder, was a central revolutionary figure. Moreover, one year after Franklin’s death in 1790, Thomas Jefferson became the institution’s president. For many years, however, the Philosophical Society showed only casual interest in acquiring documents concerning the American Revolution. In 1803, when Benjamin Franklin’s daughter put her father’s library up for sale, the Philosophical Society purchased some books and manuscripts of its patron saint. But not until Du Ponceau proposed the acquisition of historical documents in 1811, a proposal that took another four years to implement when the society created a new historical and literary committee, was any priority given to revolutionary materials. The first fruit of this initiative came in 1815, when the Philosophical Society received a scrapbook of newspaper clippings accumulated by an Irish foot soldier who fought with the British during the Revolution and later became a steward in the household of one of Washington’s leading generals—Nathanael Greene. Five years later came the papers of Greene himself, from Robert de Silver, a wealthy Philadelphia stationer and bookseller. In 1825, Richard Henry Lee, a Virginia delegate to and later president of the Continental Congress, presented some of his correspondence.
Not until 1840, when the Philosophical Society’s interest in historical materials had waned, did its library acquire one of the crown jewels of revolutionary material—a voluminous collection of Benjamin Franklin’s papers. This acquisition is an example of the circuitous disposition of what later generations would regard as priceless treasures. The Franklin papers, including his library of more than four thousand volumes, came indirectly from Benjamin’s grandson, William Temple Franklin, who had little use for Philadelphia at all. The illegitimate son of William Franklin (himself an illegitimate offspring of Benjamin), Temple Franklin, as he was known, was raised by a London governess after his birth in 1760 and brought to Philadelphia by his famous grandfather in 1774. When Franklin became the Continental Congress’s emissary to France in 1776, he took young Temple with him to Paris as his secretary. Temple returned to Philadelphia after the war but disliked the city. Shortly after his grandfather died in 1790, he returned to London, placing the immense trove of Franklin papers and books in the hands of George Fox, a Philadelphia doctor. Thirty-three years later, on his deathbed, Temple Franklin bequeathed them to Fox, along with his own papers. There they rested until Fox died, leaving the papers in 1840 to his son and daughter, who promptly presented them to the American Philosophical Society. Meanwhile, Franklin’s collection had been broken up and sold at various times.4
Despite the Quaker leanings of its early councillors, the Historical Society began collecting materials on the violent Revolution just a year after its founding. John Fanning Watson was especially influential. In reply to a circular from the first president, William Rawle, for historical materials, Watson urged in 1825 that the Historical Society make a special effort “to rescue from oblivion, the facts of personal prowess, achievements, or sufferings by officers & soldiers of the Revolutionary War.”5 A pioneer of oral history, he argued that “the recitals of many brave men now going down to the tomb—of what they saw, or heard, or sustained, in that momentous struggle which set us free would form a fund of anecdotes and of individual history well deserving of our preservation.” President Rawle’s circular calling for materials had included a request for biographical notices of “eminent persons or of any persons in respect to whom remarkable events may have happened,” and John Jay Smith, soon to become the librarian of the Library Company, circulated a list of questions regarding the Revolution. Watson added a populist twist, calling for attention to “many privates ‘unknown to fame’