First City. Gary B. Nash

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of early Pennsylvania craftsmanship and aesthetic taste.

      Although cultural persistence was a hallmark of Pennsylvania’s German communities—and has led to the production of hugely marketable ironware, pottery, and fabrics along the tourist routes in Lancaster, York, and Berks Counties today—it was from the beginning mixed with cultural adaptation. This was evident in some German newspapers that circulated in Philadelphia and the surrounding counties; the two-column, two-language format accommodated settlers of differing degrees of acculturation and provided an early form of bilingual education. No complete runs of these newspapers exist, which speaks to the limited eighteenth-and nineteenth-century vision of collecting institutions. As late as 1869, when James Rush left today’s equivalent of $20 million to the Library Company of Philadelphia, he wagged his finger, so to speak, in his bequest, directing that the library not collect to amuse the public and therefore shun “mind-tainting reviews, controversial politics, scribblings of poetry and prose, biographies of unknown names, nor for those teachers of disjointed thinking, the daily newspapers, except, perhaps for reference to support … the authentic date of an event.”²⁶ Widely shared among cultural leaders, Rush’s vision of what was valuable and therefore collectible facilitated the obliteration of parts of the past that historians now strain to recapture.

      Like the Germans, the Scots-Irish found in Pennsylvania a place of refuge, especially from economic privation. Also, like the Germans, most were unable to pay the fare across the Atlantic, and so they came as indentured servants. The term of service was four to seven years, during which time the servant surrendered his or her labor and the fruits of it entirely to the master. The indentured servant’s rights, more liberal in Pennsylvania than in many colonies, were spelled out in written contracts that have filtered into the collections of many institutions. Often the servant was to receive a few pounds and, if lucky, two suits of clothes, one of them new, and perhaps a few tools. Such a grubstake was for many the beginning of the slow climb toward economic security.

      The Scots-Irish left behind no body of vernacular furniture, such as in the case of the Germans, and until recently the leaders of collecting institutions were little concerned with collecting evidence of ordinary immigrants’ lives. Not until the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies was founded in 1971 did Philadelphia have an institution focused on immigration history and ethnic heritage, and the materials it has gathered largely pertain to the immigrant experience since the mid-nineteenth century. Hence, the early history of the Scots-Irish, one of Philadelphia’s largest immigrant groups, is poorly documented. Only from the fragmentary records and artifacts of immigrant societies can partial stories be recovered. The medal of the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, a mutual aid organization founded in 1771 for men of direct Irish descent, is one such rare item.

      Besides the Germans and Scots-Irish, many other groups came to Philadelphia seeking a place of renewal. The Welsh and the French Huguenots made substantial contributions to the city’s life. So did non-Quaker English immigrants and many others who had first arrived at way stations in the West Indies or other parts of British North America. Church records have partly illuminated the lives of some of these people of the colonial period. Occasionally, these records were lost to fire through church arson or accident, but some found their way into the Historical Society or Philosophical Society collections because a famous Philadelphian, whose descendants left his papers to one of these institutions, was a treasurer or other officer of a particular church. As early as 1870, the Historical Society purchased a 1740 deed from Thomas Penn to Nathan Levy, the first Jew known to have settled in Pennsylvania, for land on which to establish a sanctified Jewish cemetery, which still survives. From one of Philadelphia’s oldest Jewish families, the Gratzes, came Simon Gratz, one of the country’s most avid collectors of Americana. Serving as a councillor and vice president of the Historical Society in the early twentieth century, he began giving most of his huge collection of nearly 60,000 manuscript letters and prints, rich in Jewish materials, to the Historical Society during World War I.

FIGURE 13. Mortality bill, 1793, LCP. Mortality bills not only are an important source for studying the growth of churches in Philadelphia, but they have allowed demographic historians to chart the fertility and mortality rates in the city. For an era when municipal recording of vital statistics was unknown, the mortality bills have become a key source for reconstructing the dynamics of population growth in colonial Philadelphia.

      Of all the artifacts that have reached across the generations to speak of Philadelphia’s polyglot nature, the simplest and yet most revealing are the mortality bills (Figure 13), first issued by the city’s Anglican churches in the 1740s. Published annually, they detailed the births and deaths recorded in each of the city’s congregations. Such mortality bills were common in England in the eighteenth century, but their Philadelphia counterparts may have been inspired by the Anglicans’ desire to show how their congregations were growing more rapidly than those of other churches. If so, they would have lost their purpose by the late eighteenth century, when the one in Figure 13 was published, because by then the Methodist and Baptist churches were the fastest growing in the city.

      Another group joining the human mosaic in early Philadelphia was the Africans, and they came, of course, not as immigrants but as involuntary laborers carried across the Atlantic under appalling conditions. Though small in number, they contributed much to the physical and cultural development of the seaport town and colonial capital.

      Africans were in Philadelphia almost from the beginning. The Dutch had brought slaves with them to the Delaware Valley long before Penn and the Quakers arrived. But their number was vastly augmented in November 1684, when the Isabella, out of Bristol, England, sailed up the Delaware River with 150 Africans in chains. It does not comport well with the usual picture of the early pacifist settlers that they assembled on the newly built wharves and bid avidly to purchase these arrivals. At the outset of their “Holy Experiment,” the pacifist Quakers had ensnared themselves in a troublesome institution. In an infant community with about 1,000 persons, these Africans immediately became central to the labor force that did the work of clearing trees and brush and erecting crude houses. This marked the beginning of the extensive intermingling of white and black Philadelphians that has continued ever since.²⁷

      Though the interest in Penn and his compatriots was a logical priority for Library Company or Historical Society leaders, Quakers’ early involvement in slavery—as slave traders and slave owners—was decidedly not. The Library Company directors of the early nineteenth century and Historical Society founders were interested in African Americans as objects of white reformers’ zeal because many of these leaders were part of the Quaker-led antislavery movement. This explains the society’s subscription from the beginning to the African Observer, an abolitionist journal edited by the Quaker Enoch Lewis. But Africans in Philadelphia were not themselves seen as fit subjects for commemorating the past or even as a valuable part of urban society. Their first newspapers, including the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Christian Recorder, published in Philadelphia, were never collected. John Fanning Watson, the city’s leading annalist, was fearful of the large free black community. A devout Methodist, he hated the way black Methodists were, as he saw it, “corrupting” Sunday services through exuberant music, dancing, and noisy exhortation; he hated even more, as he explained in his book Methodist Error (1819), that white Methodists were adopting black Methodist churchly enthusiasm. Independent black churches, which were sprinkled throughout the city and became focal points of the black community, were a big mistake, in Watson’s view. “Their aspirings and little vanities,” he sneered in his 1830s Annals of Philadelphia, “have been rapidly growing since they got those separate churches.” In his youth, he explained, “they were much humbler, more esteemed in their places, and more useful to themselves and others.”²⁸

СКАЧАТЬ