First City. Gary B. Nash
Washington’s bodyguard who had served through the entire war and survived seventeen wounds.6 However, the recollections and memorabilia of the Zenas Macumbers of the Revolution did not flow in, as Watson hoped. As close as the Historical Society came was the acquisition of the manuscript diaries of Christopher Marshall, a disowned Quaker druggist who figured importantly in Philadelphia’s radical revolutionary circle. Covering the years from 1774 to 1785, the Marshall diaries were the one main source of information on the Revolution acquired in the early years of the Historical Society that told the story from the streets and coffeehouses rather than the counting houses and legislative chambers.
Breaking Ties
Contemplating independence was both exhilarating and frightening because the colonies were only loosely united and faced the world’s greatest military power. No wonder, then, that in 1774 John Adams found the idea of independence “a Hobgoblin of so frightful Mien, that it would throw a delicate Person into Fits to look it in the Face.”7 Philadelphians, like other colonists, shuddered and argued for a decade before finally taking the plunge. As hosts of both Continental Congresses, they were first-hand observers of the debate about independence. Their publishing preeminence already established, the city’s presses poured forth newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets, thus assuring an airing of all sides of the question.
But Philadelphians had known political controversy since the early 1700s. The political campaigns of the mid-1760s were especially notable in mobilizing voters and using the press to raise the temperature of political debate. The election of 1764 brought forth a torrent of scurrilous pamphlets from both sides. “Stop your pamphleteers’ mouths & shut up your presses,” pleaded a shocked observer. “Such a torrent of low scurrility sure never came from any country as lately from Pennsylvania.”8 In mobilizing a record number of voters in Philadelphia, campaigns such as this helped prepare the ground for revolutionary involvement of ordinary people.
FIGURE 34. Magna Britania her Colonies Reduc’d, cartoon, 1765-66, LCP. Philadelphia’s printers frequently but selectively copied cartoons from London sources. This cartoon was re-engraved in Philadelphia and distributed in a larger form after the news reached the city of the Townshend duties passed by Parliament in 1767. Du Simitière saved this copy of the card Franklin distributed in London. It is the only surviving copy.
The role of the man in the streets became evident the very next year when boycotts of English goods were organized to force Parliament to repeal the detested Stamp Act of 1764. Philadelphia merchants joined those in other cities to vow they would import no further British goods. But many merchants opposed the nonimportation agreement and joined only “to appease [the people] and indeed for their own safety,” as the revolutionary leader Charles Thomson observed.9 Women, as the main purchasers of imported goods, and ordinary people involved in maintaining boycotts, were coming to the fore.
Political cartoons helped mobilize public opinion. Franklin believed they had greater effect than printed discourses. In Figure 34, a butchered America sits in a desolate scene representing Britain’s “Colonies Reduced.” An olive branch falls from the hand of the severed Pennsylvania. “The moral is,” wrote Franklin to his sister, “that the Colonies may be ruined, but that Britain would thereby be maimed.”10 The motto, “Date Obolum Bellisario” (Give a Penny to Belisarius), asks members of Parliament, to whom Franklin had this cartoon-on-card delivered the day before the debate on repealing the Stamp Act, to remember that the Roman general Belisarius was blinded and left to beg for alms after accused of a conspiracy against Justinian. American protests forced the repeal of the hated Stamp Act, although Parliament continued to insist on its right to pass laws affecting the colonies without the assent of colonial representatives.
By the time Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, the artisans, mariners, and shopkeepers in Philadelphia had found their political voice and were nominating men from their own ranks for local and provincial offices. Conservatives within the merchant elite looked askance at this, one of them in Philadelphia sputtering that “the Mechanics … have no Right to Speak or Think for themselves.”11 But the artisans pushed on. They were prominent in the Committee for Tarring and Feathering, organized in October 1773. Six weeks later, the Committee published a strongly worded broadside (Figure 35) warning Delaware River pilots not to conduct British ships carrying tea into the port of Philadelphia. John Adams later told Benjamin Rush that these Philadelphians had inspired the Boston Tea Party. Similar broadsides encouraged women, who bought and served tea, to join the boycott.
Some artisans not only served as committeemen and street marshals during demonstrations but also became fervent propagandists for the patriot cause. Silversmith John Leacock used art as well as artisanry. Although associated with Philadelphia’s Sons of Liberty, Leacock was never elected to one of the city’s radical committees. But he made his contribution in an action-packed play published as the Second Continental Congress took the final steps toward independence. Widely advertised in the Philadelphia newspapers, Leacock’s Fall of British Tyranny: or, American Liberty Triumphant had a diverse cast of characters who spoke sailor’s bawdry, Roman oratory, and black dialect in a series of satiric vignettes lambasting the British and celebrating the Americans who resisted their tyrannical designs.
Like many well-to-do leaders, Philadelphia’s John Dickinson feared the rising political consciousness of those beneath him. In 1768, Dickinson had published one of the most important protest pieces of the period, “The Patriotic American Farmer” or “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” which appeared serially in the Pennsylvania Chronicle. But by 1776, by which time Philadelphia’s working people had become numerous on the committees that were assuming de facto powers of government, he had moderated his protests. A delegate to the second Continental Congress, he could not bring himself to sign the Declaration of Independence. At about the time the young Marylander Charles Willson Peale, who had recently arrived in Philadelphia, painted Dickinson’s portrait in 1770. John Adams described Dickinson as “a Shadow—tall, but slender as a Reed—pale as ashes. One would think at first Sight that he would not live a Month.”12
One of the men who frightened lawyers like John Dickinson was Thomas Paine, the tousled immigrant stay maker who emerged from obscurity only a year before the Revolution to play a major role in the final break with England. The hardhitting, pungent language of Paine’s Common Sense contrasted sharply with the formal, legalistic rhetoric of most protest pamphlets written by lawyers and clergymen. This helped make it the most widely read and influential tract in the protests against England.13 But the Historical Society collected almost nothing related to Paine over the years—partly by happenstance, perhaps, but also indicative of the faint interest its councillors had in radicals such as Paine, who wanted not only independence but a thorough reformation of American society in the interest of greater equality. The Library Company had acquired Common Sense and also Paine’s American Crisis as part of the Du Simitière purchase. But not until 1895, with eminent historians on its council, did the Historical Society purchase a copy of Common Sense owned by Paine’s radical, warm-tempered compatriot, Timothy Matlack, a brewer who was disowned by the Quakers for chronic indebtedness and unruly behavior. The following year the society shelved “Eulogy of Thomas Paine,” deposited by a Philadelphia physician in 1896, and not until 1921 did members hear a lecture on “The Real Thomas Paine, Patriot and Publicist; A Philosopher Misunderstood.” Though the revolution’s greatest propagandist was a member of the Philosophical Society, only in 1971 did the society receive by gift a rich assemblage of Paine materials—editions of his many books, letters, accounts and receipts, verses, and commentary on the author of Common Sense, The American Crisis, Age of Reason, and Rights of Man. The collection had been gathered lovingly over many years by Richard Gimbel, who fought Philadelphia officials for years to restore Paine to public memory by placing a bust of Paine in the Independence Hall Museum.