American Experiment (22 page)

A vigorous and partisan press mirrored the cultural vitality of the city. During the late 1790s Philadelphia had more newspapers than any other city in the country. Typically consisting of about four medium-sized pages, they usually ran advertisements of merchandise and real estate on the front and back, along with news of departure and arrival of sailing vessels, notices of runaway slaves, stagecoach schedules, announcements of the publication of books and pamphlets. Some newspapers covered moral and
religious news, printed poems and book reviews, and reported on scientific and medical discoveries. The inside pages usually carried letters from abroad and reports on state and congressional activities, with comments by the editor and by readers.

News was not always abundant. When the federal government moved into Philadelphia the editor of the
Aurora
complained: “As to domestic politics, no party disputes to raise the printer’s drooping spirits; not a legislative sitting to furnish a few columns of debates, not even so much as a piece of private abuse to grace a paper—Zounds, people now have no spirit in them….Now not even an accident, not a duel, not a suicide, not a fire, not a murder.” The arrival of a President, a Cabinet, and a few dozen congressmen soon made up for some of these lacks.

On the surface, Philadelphia did indeed appear to be tranquil. In fact, the “City of Brotherly Love” was undergoing rapid change and experiencing severe tension and conflict, and these too would affect the nation’s as well as the city’s future.

The history of the city was shot through with contradictions. In founding the city as a “Holy Experiment” for persecuted Quakers, William Penn had made Philadelphia an open city for all believers and nonbelievers, because “no people can be truly happy, though under the greatest Enjoyment of Civil Liberties, if abridg’d of the freedom of their Consciences as to their Religious profession & Worship.” This benign open-door policy inevitably helped bring a flood of immigrants—Irish, French, Dutch, and Swedish, with their various religions and sects—to the point that the Quakers were vastly outnumbered, with the result that they protected themselves by maintaining control of the Pennsylvania Assembly, with the help of a sharply limited suffrage.

On the whole, immigrant groups got along together reasonably well, but this was in part because they were considerably segregated, with the Mulberry and upper Delaware areas heavily populated by Quakers and Germans, and the southern areas, especially along the docks, by the Irish. A powerful tradition of tolerance persisted, but in 1770 a mob, inflamed by rumors that Dr. William Shippen had stolen bodies from a local cemetery for medical research, attacked his home. In the same year that the constitutional convention met in Philadelphia, a woman suspected of being a witch was killed by a city crowd.

The fundamental conflict in Philadelphia, however disguised, was economic. The brotherly city was also a class-ridden one. On the top of the social and economic pyramid sat several hundred wealthy merchants, many of whom had made their fortunes in complex triangular trading—importing and selling sugar, rum, and molasses from the slave plantations of the
Caribbean, using the profits to buy manufactured goods from Britain and France, and reselling these in the city at another profit. Often these merchants maintained dockside houses that were as unimposing as their mansions in the country were elegant. Attached to this economic elite were ministers, scholars, lawyers, and other professional men. In the middle ranks of the class pyramid stood large numbers of artisans: carpenters, shipwrights, sailmakers, millers, carriage makers, blacksmiths, harness makers, tanners, tailors, boot makers, cordwainers, and others. This stratum had its own internal class structure comprising men of differently valued skills, such as those of master craftsman and ordinary artisan, of journeymen and apprentices, who often lodged in their master’s home and ate at the family table, and of women in a variety of trades and occupations. At the bottom of the pyramid were laborers, indentured servants, itinerant workers, recently arrived immigrants unable to speak English, carters, stable boys, sailors, servants, and—somewhere below but outside the pyramid—blacks.

The condition of the blacks in particular challenged fraternal shibboleths. Black people had been part of Philadelphia’s history from the very start; indeed, W. E. B. Du Bois noted in his monumental study
The Philadelphia Negro
that the Dutch “had already planted slavery on the Delaware when Penn and the Quakers arrived in 1682. One of Penn’s first acts was tacitly to recognize the serfdom of Negroes by a provision of the Free Society of Traders that they should serve fourteen years and then become serfs—a provision which he himself and all the others soon violated.” Long divided over the issue, the Quakers finally condemned slavery in 1758 and later, on the eve of the Revolution, excluded slaveholders from fellowship in the Society of Friends. During the century before, the Pennsylvania legislature had passed harsh laws directed at blacks; one, providing for execution, castration, and whipping as punishments, and barring the meeting together of more than four blacks, was disallowed by the Queen in Council. Emancipation was restricted on the ground that “free negroes are an idle and slothful people” and tended to become public burdens, but free blacks were hardly better off than slaves, since competition for jobs brought them into conflict with white laborers. It was not until 1780, amid the liberating impulses of the Revolutionary War, that an act for “the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” was passed. The initial result, Du Bois noted, was widespread poverty and idleness.

Inequality in Philadelphia was visible, palpable, inescapable. At one glance an observer could rate the social status of hired laborers wearing linen shirts and striped trousers, mechanics with their leather aprons, skilled craftsmen with their respectable, sober attire, and rich young men
decked out in the latest fashions from London. The distribution of wealth was not unlike that in other American cities: by the end of the century less than a quarter of the taxpayers owned more than three-quarters of the taxable property valued at over $50; but of a labor force of more than 10,000, over 3,000 were not taxable.

About half of Philadelphia’s working class lived at or just above subsistence levels. The results were, as usual, appalling: at least a third of Philadelphia was ill housed, ill clothed, and ill nourished. The city was divided, said a contemporary observer, into several classes of company: “the cream, the new milk, the skim milk, and the canaille.…” This loose class structure did not produce sharp class conflict, however, in part because the working poor lacked the leadership that might have aroused them to political consciousness.

The merchants of Philadelphia were not heartless exploiters. Compared to their ilk in other American and European cities, they were in many cases unusually benevolent. This very fact, however, helped involve them in a fundamental ambiguity. They were, first of all, entrepreneurs in a city bent on enterprise and profit-making. “Under the American tradition, the first purpose of the citizen,” Sam Bass Warner, Jr., said in introducing a study of Philadelphia, “is the private search for wealth; the goal of a city is to be a community of private money makers.” But many merchants were also public men. They had invested large amounts of money and time in humanitarian endeavors—founding a university and medical college, subsidizing education for the poor, blacks, and women, establishing libraries, promoting the arts, easing the plight of prison inmates, improving health and sanitation, devoting themselves to cultural and philosophical matters, serving in public office. Not only the elites but the middle classes were trying to advance themselves: laborers to get better pay, apprentices to become journeymen, artisans to become master craftsmen who could control their own work, time, and future. So a deep concern for the public welfare pervaded much of Philadelphia. But where did the private man leave off, the public man begin?

This question was part of a broader, more complex one. How could a community be organized to advance the general welfare while protecting individual rights—while making the pursuit of individual rights, indeed, part of the means of achieving the general welfare? As the federal men governed in Philadelphia during the 1790s, there seemed to be less time for these questions to be decided, before events would make the decision. For change was accelerating in Philadelphia. The city was experiencing the full impact of the altered economic patterns and social relations reshaped during the War of Independence. Profits were becoming bigger and more
tempting in the widening economic prosperity. The city was bursting at the seams as immigrants flooded in; the black population almost doubled in the last decade of the century.

The first question—public service versus private gain—would largely be left to the consciences of wealthy men. The second question—promoting liberty and the general welfare—occupied the best minds in Philadelphia for a century.

In April 1789 Benjamin Franklin, who had lived through eight-and-a-half decades of that century, lay mortally ill in the bedroom of his Market Street house. Although racked by fevers and his stone, only partly dulled by opiates, he was still philosophical; “what are the pains of a moment,” he said to a friend, “in comparison with the pleasures of eternity?” Until almost the end he pursued his political inquiries; the American Philosophical Society held its meetings in his home when he could no longer even be moved into his sedan chair. And he remained the empiricist, the inquirer, the experimenter, in matters political as well as scientific. “We are, I think, in the right road of improvement,” he had said the year before the constitutional convention met in his city, “for we are making experiments.”

Franklin and his fellow Philadelphians had conducted the most radical of political experiments ten years before, an experiment in sharp contrast with that of 1787. Inspired by the revolutionary acts against Britain in Massachusetts and angered by the conservatism of the Pennsylvania government, a group of Philadelphians early in 1776 had used their control of the militia, the committees of correspondence and public safety, and other extralegal revolutionary organizations to overthrow the authority of the Assembly. The radicals who had engineered this coup were a very different lot from the sound and substantial men who had dominated Philadelphia’s politics. Thirty-year-old Benjamin Rush led a multi-faceted life as a doctor, a professor of chemistry at the College of Philadelphia, and a sermonizer for temperance and exercise, and also as a political reformer, a millenarian who expected Christ’s Second Coming, and a revolutionary Christian Utopian who advocated the abolition of slavery. Forty-six-year-old Timothy Matlack was an apostate Quaker, a failed shopkeeper, a gambler, horse racer, fistfighter, bull baiter, and cockfighter whose prized bantams fought a famous match with cocks brought to Philadelphia by a New York blueblood. A habitué both of Philadelphia groggeries and of the Philosophical Society, Matlack had a remarkably wide acquaintanceship with men rich and poor, black and white. There were other notables: evangelical republicans like Christopher Marshall, artists like Charles W.
Peale, deists like Thomas Young, highly skilled artisans like Owen Biddle, and the self-taught scientist David Rittenhouse. But the political and intellectual luminary was Thomas Paine.

Born of a Quaker father and an Anglican mother in a market town seventy miles northeast of London, Tom Paine rose from apprentice to journeyman to master stay maker in only a few years, and then won a post as an excise taxer, only to be dismissed for agitating for higher pay for excisemen. Married and already separated at the age of thirty-seven, he struck out for America and a new start. Arriving in Philadelphia in 1774 with letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, he had intended to establish an academy for the education of young men, but was quickly swept up in the revolutionary euphoria of the city. Soon he wrote and published
Common Sense
, a sweeping attack on the Crown’s interference with American trade, and a bold call to American independence.
Common Sense
scored an immediate success, running through twenty-five editions and selling well over 150,000 copies, an astonishing number for those days. This tract—the most brilliant written during the American Revolution and one of the most brilliant ever written in the English language, in Bernard Bailyn’s judgment—had a quick and profound impact on public opinion.

The force of that impact was due not only to Paine’s clear and blunt language, his assault on the English monarchy, his clarion call for independence; other tracts had such qualities. The impact came from his repudiation of the established thinking of centuries on the question of liberty. For most Americans, and certainly for most Philadelphians—heirs to the fine Quaker tradition of liberality and tolerance—the great issue of the 1770s was the protection and nurturing of liberty. This was also the main principle and goal of most enlightened Englishmen. The question was how to achieve this goal without sacrificing other major values such as order, stability, and virtue.

Englishmen of Whiggish persuasion were convinced that, after decades and centuries of thought and travail, the British constitution had come to represent the best way to achieve that goal. Drawing heavily from Greek and Roman thinkers who had affirmed the need of mixed government in order to achieve balance and harmony among social classes, the English had achieved such a balance of social power among king, lords, and commons that a political balance of power would be counterpoised among these powerful estates. Social equilibrium in short would produce political equilibrium, which in turn would prevent the kind of immoderate government that might interfere in men’s liberties. This elaborate edifice was based on the theory that men, being naturally selfish, irrational, aggressive,
greedy, and lustful, had to be not only protected in their liberty
from
government but protected from one another
by
government. The “Interest of Freedom,” Marchamont Nedham had written in the mid-1650s, “is a Virgin that everyone seeks to deflower.”