First City. Gary B. Nash
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life, and community life are much thinner. Still, the study of urban women that has been undertaken in the past several decades—drawing on constable’s lists of householders, tax lists, probate records, newspaper advertisements, account books, diaries, correspondence, and ephemera—is now bringing Philadelphia’s female world into view.
Over the years, the Historical Society, Library Company, and Philosophical Society did acquire the writings—letters, diaries, memoirs, accounts, and other materials—of a few eighteenth-century women, and now this has become a collecting priority everywhere. One of the most valuable is the diary of Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker (1734-1807). Married to Henry Drinker, a member of the Philadelphia Quaker elite, Elizabeth began her diary when she was twenty-four and kept it faithfully until she was near death, at age seventy-three. She was an astute observer of the world around her, and from the thirty-three manuscript volumes of the diary, acquired in 1955, can be garnered an abundance of information on family life, women’s education and intellectual life, medical practices, household management and employer relations with servants, and the changing character of the city’s neighborhoods.26
The Philadelphia Enlightenment
Few affluent Philadelphians doubted that hard work, sobriety, and moderation were the keys to social progress and personal advancement. To them, society was like a machine, the parts of which had to be improved and kept in good working order. As their city grew, many prosperous Philadelphians devoted some of their time and wealth to cultural activities and civic improvements. This benefited the city while fostering an identity among the wealthy as a distinct class with special claims to social authority. Most of the founders and early members of the Library Company, the Philosophical Society, and the Historical Society were descended from this group, which ushered in the American Enlightenment.
Philadelphia became an American center of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement based on the notion of human progress through rational thought and civic concern. From the city’s merchants, lawyers, and prospering craftsmen came the Library Company (1731), which was America’s first lending library, the College of Philadelphia (1751), the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Sick Poor (1752), the American Philosophical Society (1769), and numerous other organizations dedicated to promoting culture and perfecting the human condition.
Benjamin Franklin personified the Enlightenment’s commitment to the acquisition of knowledge for bettering humankind. From helping to found America’s first circulating library to designing a more efficient wood stove for heating rooms to installing the first streetlights in Philadelphia, Franklin was the civic improver par excellence.27
Franklin’s fascination with electricity gained him international recognition. In 1746, already a successful printer and earnest civic organizer, he began his experiments. In that year, a Dutchman, Pieter van Musschenbroek, had learned how to condense electricity in a glass bottle (called a Leyden jar) and to produce electrical sparks by attaching a conductor to the two sides of the bottle. Throughout Europe, amateur scientists began to play with this device, but nobody really understood the source or the nature of the mysterious electrical “fluid.”
By 1748, Franklin had constructed a number of experiments in his house on Market Street for producing brilliant sparks from Leyden jars. His Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America was published in London three years later, putting his name on the lips of scientists all over Europe. Far more important than his household experiments, however, was his development of the technical means to test what many already believed—that lightning produced by thunderstorms was a form of electricity. His famous kite experiment constituted a breakthrough of one of the most formidable barriers of the unknown and opened up an entirely new field of controlled study and human advancement (Figure 30).
Franklin’s Philadelphia experiments with electricity represented Enlightenment thinking at its practical best because it used ideas, or what we call scientific theory, to harness nature. Once he had learned the properties of electricity and had established that lightning was a form of it, he found it relatively easy to contrive a metal rod, coated to prevent rusting, that would “throw off” the electricity and render it harmless. By 1753, convinced that he had mastered the theory of electricity and lightning, Franklin published a practical essay, “How to Secure Houses &c. from Lightning,” in his best-selling Poor Richard's Almanack. Here he explained a natural phenomenon that had always terrified people, providing the world with a relatively simple and inexpensive device to protect lives and property. Soon lightning rods appeared on houses and barns all over the American colonies, then before long in Europe and other parts of the world. Farmers, homeowners, mariners, and church wardens could rest easier, knowing that their dwellings, stables, houses, ships, and churches were safe. What had seemed to be the wrathful work of an angry God now became a force within the power of human beings to control. If the power of lightning could be harnessed by the son of a Boston candlemaker far from the centers of learning in Europe, what other forces of nature might be understood and brought under rein? “Franklin’s reputation was more universal than that of Leibniz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire,” John Adams later wrote. “There was scarcely a peasant or a citizen … who did not consider him a friend to human kind.”28
FIGURE 30. Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, c.1805, PMA. Franklin’s house was about to be demolished and Benjamin West was nearing the end of his life when he painted this heroic portrait. Of course, when Franklin conducted his famous kite experiment in 1752 he was not surrounded by cherubs (one in an Indian headdress); only his son William was at his side. However, the thunderstorm and the key tied to a metal kite string were real. West conveniently has cherubs playing with Franklin’s electrical apparatus. Paintings of Philadelphia’s most famous son were as migratory as the man himself. West’s descendants in England kept this painting until 1898; then it was sold several times at auction in London, Paris, and New York before returning to the Philadelphia area in 1927.
In 1789, when Franklin was near death, the Philosophical Society commissioned Charles Willson Peale to paint a half-length portrait of the internationally recognized scientist. The ailing Franklin could pose for only fifteen minutes a day and died on April 17, 1790. Peale finished the work from memory, aided by his Franklin portrait of 1785. Peale depicted Franklin holding the manuscript for his famous book, Experiments and Observations on Electricity. The American Philosophical Society rejected the painting, perhaps because they did not consider it to be a life portrait. That act redounded to the Historical Society’s good fortune, because more than half a century later James J. Barclay, a Philadelphia lawyer and an officer of the Historical Society, donated the portrait to the society.
Statesman as well as scientist, Franklin spent fifteen years in London between 1757 and 1775 as a colonial agent for the legislatures of Pennsylvania and several other colonies. These were the years when the American Enlightenment in Philadelphia began to influence the lives of several thousand Africans toiling in the city, all but a few of them as slaves. The origins of Philadelphia’s reputation as an international capital of humanitarian reform now began with a tiny number who spoke out against slavery. The first whites to protest, four recently arrived German immigrants in Germantown, uttered their detestation of slavery in 1688. They were appalled that the Quaker colony, established for liberty of conscience, should deny men and women “liberty of the body,” and they pointed to the inconsistency between professing pacifism and engaging in slavery, which was inherently violent. But for many years thereafter the only souls to decry slavery were regarded as misfits and disturbers of the peace. Such a man was Benjamin Lay. A former Barbadian slave owner, Lay joined the Society of Friends and moved to Philadelphia in 1731. He used personal example and dramatic acts to portray the evil of slavery. Lay made his own clothes to avoid materials grown with slave labor and publicly smashed his wife’s teacups to discourage use of slave-produced sugar. His fiery condemnation of slavery, All Slave-keepers, That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates (1737) led to his repudiation by the Society of Friends. Not until he was near death in 1758, when the engraving in Figure