First City. Gary B. Nash
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Primarily, it was an early-day think tank whose members read papers and invited people from near and far to expand the common knowledge. Only in 1797 did the Philosophical Society evince much interest in history, by creating a committee on “the antiquities of North America.” With Thomas Jefferson serving as its president, the society began soliciting material: natural history specimens, including mammoth skeletons; sketches and reports on the remains of ancient Indian fortifications and earthworks; and data on the languages, customs, and character of American Indians. In 1801-3 the society spent money for the first time, to purchase books and manuscripts from the sale of Benjamin Franklin’s library, broken up by his daughter and her husband. This was the foundation of what would become a mighty Franklin collection. Eight years later, in 1811, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, who had come from France in 1777 to fight with the Americans against the British and became America’s most eminent lawyer on international law, proposed the systematic acquisition of historical documents. Philadelphia’s involvement in the War of 1812 probably delayed action on this initiative, but in 1815 the society created a Committee on History, Moral Science, and General Literature, charged with forming “a collection of original documents, such as official and private letters, Indian treaties, ancient records, ancient maps” that would “throw light on the History of the United States, but more particularly of this state … for the public benefit.”3
At first glance, it is surprising that the American Philosophical Society was so interested in Native Americans; its members were more interested in Indians than in William Penn, the Quakers, or even the American Revolution. Much of this interest stemmed from Jefferson’s fascination with Indian languages and customs and the enthusiasm of Philadelphia doctors such as Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Smith Barton, who believed Indian languages held the key to solving the mysteries of Indian origins and Indian natural remedies. The astounding linguistic prowess of Du Ponceau also sharpened interest in Native Americans. Steadily, the American Philosophical Society gathered historical materials: a memoir of Chief Ouachita contributed by Jefferson in 1803; observations of the Choctaw, Cherokee, and Chickasaw nations in the same year; and Lenape grammars, notes, and essays contributed by two Moravian missionaries, John Gottlieb Heckewelder and David Zeisberger, both of whom lived with the Indians for years. Also, between 1820 and 1825, though nobody proposed acquiring materials relating to the American Revolution, came important papers from two stalwarts of “the spirit of ’76”: Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee and Rhode Island’s Nathanael Greene, one of Washington’s most trusted generals.
Though the Philosophical Society had begun gathering historical materials by fits and starts, it lost its mainspring, Peter Du Ponceau, to his law practice and linguistic research by about 1820. But four years later Lafayette’s triumphant arrival in Philadelphia inspired the forming of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Its leaders did not intend to compete with or eclipse the Philosophical Society, but this is what gradually happened. The Philosophical Society lost the momentum Du Ponceau had created and would not regain it for the rest of the nineteenth century. Especially a casualty was the Committee on History. Although the Philosophical Society received a large collection of Benjamin Franklin papers in 1840, the history committee was never very successful in acquiring historical materials and abandoned its interest in local, regional, or even national history. But filling that vacuum was the Library Company—under the energetic leadership of John Jay Smith, the great-grandson of Penn’s trusted agent James Logan—and the budding Historical Society.
To some extent, the leaders of the Philosophical Society, the Library Company, and the Historical Society in the first third of the nineteenth century were part of an interlocking, history-minded club. The powerful lawyer William Rawle and Joseph Parker Norris, for many years the president of the Bank of Pennsylvania, were involved in all three institutions; others, such as Du Ponceau, Zachariah Poulson, William Meredith, and Caspar Wistar, were involved in two of the “big three.” Notwithstanding these interconnections, the three institutions acquired different characters. After its reorganization in 1769, the Philosophical Society’s self-selected membership was primarily composed of weighty intellectuals—men of science, literature, linguistics, medicine, law, and philosophy—who were selected nationally and internationally. They presented carefully wrought learned papers to the society and desultorily passed along what others put in their hands. Physical and mathematical sciences, along with American Indian linguistics, had been their greatest strengths, with history “but a graft upon an uncongenial trunk.”4 The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, from the beginning, was very different. It was composed almost entirely of local residents, many of whom were related and traced their families back to early settlers; it grew by internal nomination of new members, ensuring that it would be a gentleman’s club; it made the collection of historical materials its singular priority; it was policy driven rather than intellectually thirsty; it created an aloofness that kept the unwashed away; and it was self-conscious about cultivating a reverence for particular aspects of the past in order to counteract the acids its members saw eating at their community.
Somewhat similarly, Library Company leaders shared a reverence for the past and a consummate love of family connections. No one exemplified this more than its librarian from 1829 to 1851, John Jay Smith, whose many-branched family counted scores of relatives descended from William Penn’s cadre of Quaker “first purchasers.” But the Library Company was a subscription institution that by 1774, according to one account, attracted “twenty tradesmen” for each “person of distinction and fortune.”5 Its doors were open to all, with a rule, followed to the present day, that “any civil person” could use the books unless the person had “to be awakened twice” or showed “any evidence of ‘pulex irritans’ [fleas].”6 For this reason its collections needed to be broad and latitudinarian. Thus, long before the Historical Society was founded, the Library Company had established its openness to all religious groups, political parties, and social classes, knowing that if it meant to be a civic institution it could not afford to shut out any part of its constituency.
William Penn: Man, Family, Community
The founders of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania were far more focused on William Penn and the early Quakers than on the Native Americans whom the Philosophical Society had found so fascinating. At the dinner meeting that led to the founding of the Historical Society, Du Ponceau memorialized “a great man—the purest and noblest law giver that the annals of history can produce. His administration was the only golden age which did not belong to fable.”7 Of course Du Ponceau was operating in the realm of fable or legend with these words, but it is understandable that his encomium to Penn resonated with the small gathered group, since five of the seven Historical Society founders were descended from old Philadelphia Quaker families. Also, in the 1820s, as these well-to-do urbanites looked about them, they trembled at the character of their rapidly changing city. Rowdy gangs—Death-fetchers, Bloodtubs, and Hyenas—spilled through Philadelphia’s streets. Workers and servants no longer deferred to their betters as the Historical Society founders imagined had happened in the colonial period. Penn’s “greene country towne,” the town of their grandparents and great-grandparents, had become a sprawling, turbulent, heterogeneous city in the early stages of industrialization. The founders hoped that by selecting and collecting the right historical materials—books, manuscripts, and artifacts—they could restore a collective memory that might nurture unity and order as people reflected on a less trammeled, more virtuous, and less materialistic past.
To this end, the Historical Society founders proposed to form an “ample library” of books and historical documents and a “cabinet” (or small room) for the preservation and display of historical artifacts. Working behind the scenes was John Fanning Watson, a banker, amateur historian, and one of the earliest collectors of American material culture. For several years, Watson had been gathering materials for the first history of Philadelphia, which he would publish in 1830, and his most important confidant in this was John Jay Smith, who would shortly become the Library Company’s librarian. Both Pennsylvania Brahmins, Watson and Smith loathed the forces unleashed by immigration, industrialization, and democratization. In Watson’s nostalgic conception, a historical society might spread the values of genteel culture and impart a shared sense of identity among Philadelphians who, in the boisterous 1820s, seemed to be pulling in every direction while forgetting their precious heritage.