First City. Gary B. Nash

FIGURE 36. Edward Savage, The Congress Voting Independence, oil, HSP. Savage’s painting is thought to have been partly based on an earlier unfinished portrayal of the Declaration’s signing by Robert Edge Pine, an English immigrant who was attracted to the American Revolutionary cause and started a series of large historical paintings in the United States between 1784 and 1788. It may have been acquired by Savage, who completed his own painting about 1801. A definitive identification of all the figures in the painting is not possible. Some, like Franklin, are obvious, scholars disagree about others, and some are too indistinct to guess at. The identification of some figures, like that of Francis Hopkinson (leaning on the table near the center of the painting), are based on single portraits by Pine.

      When the Historical Society had an opportunity to purchase this painting in 1904, its leaders hastened to do so because such a painting fit perfectly into their view of the society as a temple for studying and contemplating the nation’s origins and for inculcating national pride. Charles Henry Hart, one of the first historians of early American painting, had found the canvas languishing in a dark corner of the Boston Public Museum and sold it to the Historical Society for $600.

      Of much less interest to the city’s collecting institutions was an independence movement of a different kind—the breaking of ties between enslaved Philadelphians and their masters. Before and during the Revolution, the rhetoric of liberty and natural rights spilled over to areas not intended by the first protesters of British colonial policy in the 1760s. Enslaved Africans petitioned in other towns for their freedom. While no such petitions from Philadelphia slaves have surfaced, it can be imagined that they were moved toward action when, just five days before the minutemen took their stand at Concord and Lexington, ten white Philadelphians met to establish the first antislavery society in the world. Their immediate concern was the enslavement of an Indian woman, Dinah Nevill, and her three children, but the larger issue was the entrenched system of racial slavery that held one out of five inhabitants of the colonies in lifelong bondage. Almost a century after the founding of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1775, the Historical Society began receiving its voluminous records, a source almost unexcelled for studying both abolitionism and African American life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

       Loyal Subjects and Subjected Loyalists

      Textbooks have usually taught us that the loyalists who remained faithful to the English crown were too selfish or timid to join the revolutionaries. In truth, the loyalists were a mixed group with widely varying motives. Some, like Benjamin Franklin’s friend Joseph Galloway, had been early protesters against English policy but grew alarmed when ordinary Philadelphians began to take matters into their own hands and call for internal reforms as well as independence. Men like Galloway wanted independence but not a social revolution. Franklin’s only son, William, remained loyal because he had served proudly as the royal governor of New Jersey and had acquired thoroughly English tastes when growing up with his father in London.

      Anglican clergymen in America formed another group torn between loyalty to their English-directed church and their affection for their native ground. For example, the Reverend Jacob Duché, rector of the united parishes of Christ Church and St. Peter’s, initially favored American independence. But many in his congregations were wealthy Philadelphians lukewarm or opposed to independence. Duché began to have misgivings after the Declaration of Independence, changed allegiances again when General Sir William Howe jailed him during the British occupation of 1777-78, and finally made a decision, in December 1777, to immigrate to London. A few months, later his wife and children followed him. There his son Thomas studied with Benjamin West, who, as the king’s painter, was in no position to favor the American cause openly. As happened to many loyalists, Duché’s American property was confiscated by order of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and he was not permitted to return until 1792.¹⁵

      Philadelphia’s collecting institutions therefore have little to show that would restore memory about the city’s loyalists, except some materials relating to members of the Society of Friends. Many loyalists, such as William Franklin, Galloway, and Duché, voluntarily left for England or Nova Scotia or were driven out, taking their papers with them. The descendants of other loyalists who eventually returned had little reason in the nineteenth century to preserve the papers of parents and grandparents who refused to support the American cause. Nor were Philadelphia’s collectors much interested in ferreting out archival materials or spending money on them to preserve a record documenting those who chose the losing side in the American Revolution. The collectors’ passion was mainly directed at rekindling what they imagined were the spirit-stirring times of “the glorious cause.” Diaries of Grace Growden Galloway; the wife of Philadelphia’s most unpopular Tory, did survive because Mrs. Galloway was intent on saving the family’s vast properties and was unwilling to follow her husband to England. Copies of letters and diaries of loyalist Rebecca Shoemaker and her daughters also made their way into the Historical Society’s collections, but this was not until 1945, when the stigma of loyalism had passed after two world wars in which the Americans and the British were allies.