First City. Gary B. Nash
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place to study the contest over historical memory because the city was so closely associated with the nation’s founding, revolution, and nation building, all rich subjects for historical memory. In addition, memory-making in Philadelphia is unusually fascinating because it has been complicated by the city’s rich variety of ethnic, racial, and religious groups, often mutually antagonistic, often remembering the past differently. Fitting the pacifist and influential Quakers, the largest and most important free black population in post-revolutionary America, and the nineteenth-century waves of Irish Catholics and eastern European Jews into a unified and unifying history has been an exquisite challenge for myth-makers at the city’s elite institutions.
While Philadelphia has its own narrative and its own fascinating cast of storytellers, remembering history is not unique to Philadelphia. It is shared by every community that produces, consumes, and markets history.18 Therefore, this book presumes to provide a model for examining the process of memory-making: how particular people with vested power reconstructed the past through collecting, narrating, and interpreting; how that history was presented to the public; and how individuals and groups outside the circle of cultural arbiters tried to gain a claim on the past by resisting “official” truth and telling different stories. As in most other cities, deep inequalities in how Philadelphia society functioned were paralleled by inequalities in the official historical narratives. But in the Quaker city, as in other communities, the mantle of legitimacy could not prevent subordinate storytellers from trying to break through layers of silence. Not all the world is Philadelphia, but in every site of human habitation the process of constructing memory has proceeded in ways this study hopes to make clear.19
In the pages that follow, the reader will find an abundance of images. I have chosen them with three purposes in mind. Some of the images are chosen because they evoke a sense of the character and rhythm of urban life in different eras in ways that often elude textual materials. Others convey how Philadelphia imprinted itself on the minds of artists, lithographers, and photographers, who turned their impressions into collectible views of the city, whimsical or sardonic scenes meant to entertain, or frankly propagandistic vehicles commissioned by those exercising one kind of power or another. Finally, still other images depict a variety of sources, drawn from material culture as well as paper-based archives, that have helped historians in recent years to uncover chapters of Philadelphia’s hidden past. Taken together, the range of images is also meant to carry forward the message of what it means to collect the documentary, artifactual, and artistic records of the past. I have paid more than casual attention to the captions accompanying the images, because it is here that I tell much of the story about how and when a particular piece of the past found its way to a collecting institution. Part of that account is about the vagaries as well as the priorities that explain just what the scholar or curious citizen, in search of a piece of the past, can find today when entering the doors of the Library Company, the Athenaeum, the Historical Society, the Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia History, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a host of other institutions. Every institution has collecting priorities and policies, which have changed over time, but assembling historical materials has depended at least as much on what appears on one’s doorstep as on what one chooses to collect.
Just as people have seen their history through different lenses—depending on who they are, their reasons for consulting historical accounts, and what experiences, ideas, and values they bring to the act of looking backward—every article of material culture and every scrap of written language is susceptible to variant interpretations. The meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the intention of its authors are argued as strenuously today as two hundred years ago. Chairs, dolls, samplers, trade cards, paintings, lithographs—even photographs—all speak to us in a variety of ways, and their meaning and value to the collector or curator change with time, sometimes dramatically. Some of the artifacts portrayed in the following pages, such as the image of Washington on a pitcher or a Civil War battle scene, were created at particular historic moments to influence the way people thought about the past. Others—a tall-case clock or a decorated fireman’s parade helmet—were not created for pedagogic or political use but have enabled historians and curators in our own times to recapture parts of the past otherwise undisclosed in textual materials. With this in mind, the meaty caption accompanying each illustration is meant to lean on the ingenuity of Philadelphia’s quintessential eighteenth-century citizen, Benjamin Franklin. Printer Ben invented bifocal glasses for people who needed their vision adjusted so they could see the world clearly in both short and long perspectives. In this book, I am engaged in something similar—asking readers to gaze bifocally sometimes trifocally in order to see the past as it was experienced differently by Philadelphians of various stations in life; to see how our understanding of bygone eras depends partly on what historical materials were collected, preserved, and exhibited; to look at artifacts, documents, and paintings from different angles of vision. The text of what follows ought to make some sense without the illustrations, and the illustrations, without text, should give new perspectives on the past. But word and image, like pie and ice cream, are meant to be savored together.
Chapter 1
PIECES OF THE COLONIAL PAST
Pennsylvania was the product of Quaker beliefs and aspirations, and Philadelphia became its pulsebeat on the banks of the Delaware River. “I have obtained [Pennsylvania] that an example may be set up to the nations,” wrote William Penn, its founder, in 1681.1 Penn hoped that his colony of diverse settlers would show a strife-ridden world a new formula for living. Adept promoter as well as revered defender of persecuted Quakers, he attracted settlers from England, Ireland, Wales, and continental Europe with policies of religious toleration, pacifism, and fair treatment for all.
But the fertile Delaware River valley where Penn was to plant his “seed of a nation” already had inhabitants. For at least 12,000 years before Penn and the Quakers arrived, the area had been inhabited by distant ancestors of the Lenape (later to be called Delaware). Europeans had encountered the Lenape at least as early as 1609, when the Dutch sailed into Delaware Bay, and more intensely after 1624, when a small group of Dutch settlers occupied Burlington Island in the Delaware River. Over the next half century the Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, and English settlers traded and mingled with the Lenape. Thus, Penn built his colony amid small settlements of both native and intruding peoples. Penn may never have realized that his open-door policy toward a variety of immigrants would undermine the peaceful Indian relations he vowed to put into effect (see Figure 4).
Every society must fabricate and sustain creation stories, and nearly everyone craves knowledge about his or her beginnings—those who came first, those who blazed the trails, those who did great deeds. No sooner was the colony well established than it began, like most successful enterprises, to remember itself in selective ways. From the first, the urge in Philadelphia to collect historical materials, documents, and objects relating to William Penn, the early Quakers, and the original inhabitants assumed a special, almost holy importance. Philadelphia’s first collecting institutions, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Philosophical Society, were initially dedicated to gathering “useful knowledge,” the term used in the formal title of each, rather than historical materials. But these two endeavors soon merged.
“Constructive buying and generous giving” marked the Library Company’s collecting from its founding at the hand of Benjamin Franklin in 1731, when the colony had existed for fifty years and the recently arrived printer was only twenty-five years old. Within nine years, the library’s growth prompted a move to the west wing of the State House. Already it had more than 600 volumes. The germ of the library’s historical holdings came in 1755, when its purchasing agent in London shipped as a present a group of rare early accounts of the colony’s founding. By 1769, the collection moved to more spacious quarters on the second floor of nearby Carpenters’ Hall. In 1784, just after the American Revolution, the Library Company became the first Philadelphia institution to acquire by purchase primary source materials relating to American history.2
From its founding in 1743 until the very end of the eighteenth century, the Philosophical Society, also a creature of the relentlessly ingenious Franklin, was less aggressive in collecting.