First City. Gary B. Nash
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early as 1802, Pennsylvania’s General Assembly had considered selling the State House, the Liberty Bell included, while dividing into building lots the parklike expanse familiarly called the State House Yard. The city of Philadelphia itself had secured state permission in 1812 for demolishing the piazzas and wing buildings that gave Independence Hall, still called the Pennsylvania State House, its distinctive character. The city promptly erected office space that “created a Chestnut Street facade in the character of a Philadelphia rowhouse development.”2
Obliterating old buildings was for many Americans a way of freeing themselves from the tyranny of forerunners—what Thoreau would call a “purifying destruction.”3 The home of Philadelphia’s most famous figure, Benjamin Franklin, was treated as anything but hallowed space. In 1802, twelve years after Printer Ben died, Franklin’s daughter and her husband converted the home where so many national and international figures had met during the Revolutionary era into a boardinghouse. Then they demolished the house entirely in 1812 to prepare the site for division into small urban building lots. Philadelphians’ memory of Franklin had waned so rapidly by this time that lagging sales of an earthenware figurine of America’s “universal man” convinced the manufacturer to pep up the trade by relabeling Franklin’s image “George Washington.”4
Unexpectedly, the close call with plans to obliterate Independence Hall kindled reverence for places associated with the American Revolution. William Duane, publisher of the newspaper founded by Benjamin Franklin Bache, Franklin’s grandson, campaigned in 1816 that “in Pennsylvania, under the Gothic mist of ignorance and vice, by which it is now governed—everything is to be pulled down.” The building where the Declaration of Independence “was deliberated and determined,” he thundered, should be venerated “as a monument of that splendid event; but this is not the spirit of the rulers of Pennsylvania now—the state house must be sold— for every thing now in political affairs is barter and sale!”5 Duane’s outcry led the state to sell the building to the city of Philadelphia for $70,000 before it fell under the gavel. However, even as the negotiation proceeded, the city removed much of the original pine paneling of the Assembly Room where the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. Eager to modernize the building for office use, the city sold pieces of the paneling as souvenirs (Figure 1). Well in advance of the public, one candidate for county commissioner made this sale an election issue, vowing to stop the defacement.
FIGURE 1. John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776, oil, 1818, Yale University Trumbull’s painting, which gained him fame, shows the pine paneling removed in 1816. He deplored “the spirit of innovation [that] laid unhallowed hands upon [Independence Hall] and violated its venerable walls by ‘modern improvement,’ as it is called.”
By June 1818, when Philadelphia finally took possession of Independence Hall from the state, its citizens awakened to the importance of saving historic buildings as treasured symbols of American history. In the same month, an old friend—indeed the Quaker city’s founder—introduced them to another use of the past. Readers of the Philadelphia Union found advice from William Penn, dead for almost a century, on one of the burning issues of the day. In a series of articles, Penn had returned, at least in spirit, to comment benevolently on the proposal to transport free African Americans back to Africa. The recently formed American Colonization Society had turned this proposal into a national debate, and here in the pages of the Union (actually, in heaven) was Penn discussing the matter with two lately deceased black leaders: Absalom Jones, minister of Philadelphia’s St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church for nearly a quarter century, and Paul Cuffe, merchant and ship captain in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and one of the nation’s few black Quakers.
In their “dialogues on the African colony,” Penn, Jones, and Cuffe debated the matter warmly. The man putting words into their mouths was Robert Finley, president of Princeton Theological Seminary and publicist of the American Colonization Society. Finley’s design was to sway black opinion in Philadelphia. He knew, as did everyone in the city, that African Americans had thronged Richard Allen’s Mother Bethel Church on Sixth Street near Pine just a year before to discuss repatriation to Africa. Before a packed house, several black leaders had supported voluntary immigration to Africa. They agreed with the reasoning of white patrons of the free black community that congealed white racism would never allow free blacks to succeed in the United States, that repatriated black Christians would have a chance to convert millions of heathen Africans to the true religion, and that several million repatriated blacks might create a new outlet for American goods. But ordinary black Philadelphians, knowing that the American Colonization Society had enlisted prominent southern slaveholders and politicians who called free blacks “a dangerous and useless part of the community,” nearly brought down the walls of Mother Bethel with shouts of “No!” when the question was put about who favored repatriation.
FIGURE 2. Raphaelle Peale, Portrait of Absalom Jones, oil, 1810, Delaware Art Museum. Raphaelle Peale, the son of Charles Willson Peale, painted sixty-four-year-old Absalom Jones in 1810. Jones’s master brought him to Philadelphia as a slave at age sixteen, and the dutiful servant was able to purchase his wife’s freedom shortly after marrying her in 1770. But his master would not permit Jones’s own self-purchase until 1784. Eight years later he founded Philadelphia’s first independent black church.
In their celestial discussion, Absalom Jones firmly rejected repatriation as a deportation scheme designed to squelch efforts to abolish slavery (Figure 2). Paul Cuffe dissented. Reminding Penn and Jones that he had taken a boatload of free blacks to Sierra Leone only a few years before he died, Cuffe explained that the plan was “one of the most beneficent that human genius could have devised.” Jones remained unconvinced. Penn, father of religious and ethnic toleration, promised to consult George Washington, also in heaven since his death nineteen years before. Reporting back, Penn vouchsafed that the Pater Patriae warmly endorsed colonization of free blacks for their own good. Cuffe chimed in that the racial prejudice of white Americans was intractable, leaving Africa as the only viable choice. Jones still doubted that whites wished to do a great good for a people they hated. But Penn and Cuffe persisted. Finally, swallowing his doubts that whatever pleased slavemasters could benefit free blacks, Jones acceded: “My objections have been refuted; my scruples vanquished. And all my doubts satisfied. Heaven speed the undertaking!”6
What Philadelphia’s black community made of Reverend Finley’s enlistment of Philadelphia’s long-deceased founder to convince them to pack their bags, leave the city, and head home to Africa cannot be recovered from extant documents. But in both deed and word, black Philadelphians certainly regarded Finley’s imaginary dialogues as the work of a pillager of the past who put deceased heroes, black and white, on the side of the American Colonization Society. After the Union ran Finley’s “Dialogues on African Colonization,” they remonstrated in 1818 and 1819 against the Colonization Society. They spoke more compellingly with their feet when the society sent the first two ships to establish the colony of Liberia in 1819 and 1820. Of about 10,000 free blacks in Philadelphia, only twenty-two embarked. New recruitment campaigns in 1823 and 1824 for Liberia-bound ships failed miserably, netting only another handful of black Philadelphians.
In 1824, only six years after the crumbling State House began its metamorphosis to the Independence Hall shrine and black Philadelphians rejected Finley’s manipulation of William Penn’s and Absalom Jones’s views on colonization, the city entered a new era of historical consciousness in which restoring collective memory of the past came to be seen as an urgent matter. The arrival on September 28, 1824 of the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution and surrogate son of the childless George Washington, became a galvanizing moment. Invited by Congress to return to the United States, the aging Lafayette toured every corner of the country, inspiring grand receptions, massive parades, civic celebrations, and monument raising for thirteen