First City. Gary B. Nash
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records of wealthy white Philadelphians. After all, these residents were the slave traders and slave owners and often, in the aftermath of emancipation, the patrons of free black churches and organizations. Evidence that 150 Africans were brought to the city in 1684 is buried in a letter in the Penn Papers acquired in 1870; there a merchant describes to Penn, now back in England, how most of the hard money brought by the settlers of 1682-83 went down the Delaware River in the Isabella, having been exchanged for Africans. Similarly, when the Historical Society acquired by gift and purchase a huge trove of Chew family papers, it knew it could open windows on one of early Pennsylvania’s most powerful families. But the Chew papers also included important information on how Chew sold Richard Allen’s family to Stokely Sturgis, a farmer living near the Chew’s Kent County, Delaware plantation, thus establishing the place where Allen came of age, obtained his freedom through self-purchase, and became a founding father in his own right—of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Only fragments of evidence of how slavery functioned in early Philadelphia can be found in the city’s collecting institutions. But the head harness made of iron and copper (Figure 15) tells a story that is fleetingly documented in printed sources, that African slaves were shackled to prevent their escape and were harnessed with a bell that would proclaim any attempt at escape. If Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell is our national icon for celebrating freedom, this rare item reminds us that other bells were cast to prevent freedom in a city where the slave population had reached nearly 1,500 by the 1760s and where the proportion of families that owned slaves was not much different from that in Maryland or Virginia.
FIGURE 15. Slave head harness and weathervane, HSP. Philadelphia blacksmiths and other metalworkers are noted for fashioning artistic weathervanes of the type shown here, bearing the initials of William Penn and two of his business partners, Caleb Pusey and Samuel Carpenter, at a Chester County grain mill. The same artisan often turned his hand to the production of slave harnesses, chains, and shackles, but these items were rarely thought of as collectibles until recent years. The weathervane was given to the Historical Society in 1863.
Although not collected because they would shed light on the African American experience, newspapers have become vital veins of ore much exploited by today’s historians of black America. Because they regularly carried advertisements for the sale of slaves, both by slave traders with recently imported men and women for auction and by individual slave owners who were weary of a truculent slave or strapped for money, newspapers provide fascinating detail on slaves’ physical appearance, linguistic ability, dress, temperament, and much else. The runaway slave ads—thousands of them—spanning nearly a century, from the first publication of the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729, are a running if highly fragmentary story of the black campaign to destroy slavery by stealing themselves away.30
FIGURE 16. Slave advertisement, Pennsylvania Gazette, August 26, 1762, HSP. Of all the sources on early slavery the slave advertisements are the richest for showing individual Africans acting of and for themselves—negotiating the terrain during freedom flights, inventing new identities as a way of disguising their slave status, seeking out spouses, children, parents, and friends.
Some runaway slave ads provide examples of the opportunities to derive multiple meanings buried in pieces of the past collected by the Historical Society, the Philosophical Society, and the Library Company. The advertisement for a slave named Joe, by his master Thomas Bartholomew, in the Pennsylvania Gazette on August 26, 1762, is a case in point (Figure 16). At first glance, the ad seems to indicate simply Bartholomew’s desire to reclaim his human property as well as Joe’s resistance to bondage: “Run away from the Subscriber Yesterday, a Mulattoe Man Slave, named Joe, alias Joseph Boudron, a brisk lively Fellow.” But careful attention to the ad’s language tells us more. Joe was not satisfied with a shortened forename—the usual slave owner’s assignment of a half-name signifying the slave’s demeaned status. The “brisk lively Fellow” presumed to call himself Joseph Boudron, not Joe, probably choosing a surname derived from a previous experience with a French master or a European parent in Guadeloupe, the place of his birth according to the ad. The advertisement also reveals the mulatto slave’s linguistic abilities: “speaks good English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese,” indicating that this twenty-three-year-old man was among the city’s most accomplished linguists. The ad also tells us about the slave’s cosmopolitanism and knowledge of geography, having lived in the French West Indies, New York, and Charleston, a “good Cook,” and “much used to the Seas.”
Holding enslaved Africans in a society committed to peaceful relations was only one of the difficulties and tensions inherent in the business of founding colonies. For the visionary Penn, much frustration and disappointment attended his attempts to manage his colony from England. Yet the diversity encouraged by his peace testimony and policy of toleration, though it spawned strain and bitter words, allowed Pennsylvanians to think of community in a new way, as a collection of people whose welfare depended on ignoring their differences or, at least, tolerating them rather than fighting over them. In Philadelphia, Jewish merchants, German innkeepers, English craftsmen, French Huguenot shopkeepers, Scots-Irish sea captains and sailors, and enslaved Africans all mingled closely. Though certain groups such as the Germans, Scots-Irish, and Africans preserved some of their distinctive folkways rather than adopt wholesale the ways of the English majority, most Philadelphians embraced the idea of religious toleration and ethnic diversity, helping to make the colony a model for people in other areas. For Africans, Philadelphia was no city of brotherly love, but at least it was a city where, almost from the beginning, there were some who pricked the conscience of those who dealt in human flesh.
Chapter 2
RECALLING A COMMERCIAL SEAPORT
Between the time William Penn left his colony in 1701 after his second visit and the outbreak of disputes with Great Britain in 1764 that would lead to the American Revolution, Philadelphia became the largest commercial center in English-speaking America. Penn’s liberal immigration policy encouraged rapid development of the region, and along with natural increase this drove Pennsylvania’s population upward from a mere 18,000 in 1700 to about 220,000 in 1765. The urbanized Philadelphia region grew from about 2,200 in 1700 to 19,000 in 1760, and then to about 30,000 as the Revolution erupted in 1775. Around 1720, a little-known painter named Peter Cooper caught the bucolic nature of the sleepy riverfront town of the early eighteenth century (Figure 17), carved out of forests, with its two rude Quaker meetinghouses, a few primitive wharves, and streets extending only several blocks from the Delaware River.
When William Penn’s son Thomas Penn commissioned George Heap to draw a panoramic view of Philadelphia thirty years later, artisans, merchants, mariners, and ordinary laborers—many of the latter indentured or enslaved—transformed Philadelphia into one of the English empire’s prize overseas capitals (Figure 18). Although Heap’s panorama is not strictly accurate—it exaggerates the height of public buildings and presents the curved waterfront as a straight line—it does not overstate the importance of maritime commerce to Philadelphia’s economy. Approximately seventy wharves and twelve shipyards dotted the area shown, graphic evidence that Philadelphia had grown mightily by becoming the entrepôt that imported manufactured goods for a thriving region and exported foodstuffs, wood products, furs, and other commodities throughout the Atlantic basin. Many Philadelphians would have agreed with Lord Adam Gordon, a British colonel who fought in the Seven Years’ War. Visiting Philadelphia in 1765, he called it “a great and noble city” and “one of the wonders of the world.”
To the leaders of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions, looking back from the nineteenth century, the prerevolutionary city was a marvelous success. Some modern planners,