First City. Gary B. Nash

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FIGURE 27. Richardson coffeepot, PMA. Joseph Richardson’s grandfather Francis Richardson, a mariner, immigrated to Philadelphia in 1681. His son, Francis Richardson, Jr., prospered in Philadelphia as a gold-and silversmith and consolidated the family’s fortune by marrying Elizabeth Growden, daughter of a large landowner and provincial officer in nearby Bucks County. When Francis Richardson, Jr. died in 1729, he passed on to his sons, Francis and Joseph, his craftsman’s skills, his clientele, and his enviable place among Philadelphia Quakers. Both sons practiced silver-and goldsmithing. The elegant pieces made by Joseph, one of Philadelphia’s most notable silversmiths, found their way into almost every Philadelphia cultural institution and the homes of many private collectors.

      While creating domestic architectural spaces equipped with elegant furnishings, the colonial elite also developed new forms of gentility to display their status. It was not enough to dress well or live well; one had to walk with grace, appreciate music, dance and ride skillfully, and know classical literature and languages. One visitor to Philadelphia wrote that without refined manners “the best finished furniture or finest marble will lose half its luster, which, when added, decorates and greatly ornaments it.”²² The Library Company’s Benjamin Franklin, immensely ambitious and intensely aware of appearances, edited from an English original America’s first treatise on how to get on in business, including standards of decorum and propriety: The American Instructor, or Young Man's Best Companion.

      Below the genteel resided the vast majority of urban dwellers. If they could not aspire to gentility, many Pennsylvanians believed that theirs was “the best poor man’s country in the world,” where ordinary people could get ahead and where the gap between kingly riches and grinding poverty, so common in Europe, had narrowed. Philadelphia did contain scores of examples of those who had started at the bottom and risen high. The city to which Franklin came as a journeyman printer in 1723 was filled with ambitious young men, and many of them rose to prominence, if not so spectacularly as “Poor Richard.” No wonder, then, that Franklin became a hero of the city’s leather-apron men and that his little book, variously entitled Father Abraham's Speech and The Way to Wealth, became a best-seller.

      Yet while many artisans, like Franklin, watched their wives replace the pewter spoon and earthen porringer at the breakfast table with a silver spoon and china bowl, many others by the mid-eighteenth century were finding the road forward strewn with obstacles. Economic fluctuations, inclement weather, and personal injuries kept many artisans, mariners, and laborers on the knife edge of insecurity, and everyone knew of a bankrupt merchant. The Seven Years’ War was particularly wrenching. It made many artisans flush with orders for boots, clothes, guns, and other military supplies, but it also left hundreds of war widows with children to support. Even at the beginning of that war the Quaker John Smith wrote in his diary, “It is remarkable what an increase of the number of Beggars there is about this town this winter.” Then, at war’s end, colonial cities experienced the greatest economic stagnation ever known.²³

      Compounding the economic suffering brought by the Seven Years’ War and depression that set in when the fighting moved to the Caribbean theater in 1761 was the bitter winter of 1761-62, which left hundreds destitute. A wartime inflationary trend had driven up the price of firewood, always an item that, if needed in unusual amounts, could throw a poor laboring family into distress. “Many of the poor,” reported the Pennsylvania Gazette, “are reduced to great Extremity and Distress” because of “the high Price of Firewood.”²⁴ In this situation, Philadelphia leaders, with Quakers in the lead, formed a special “Committee to Alleviate the Miseries of the Poor.” The relief roll in Figure 28 is a partial list of the 329 “objects of Charity” who received blankets, stockings, and—that most precious commodity—firewood. One of the recipients of firewood, William Browne, lived across the street from Governor James Hamilton, poignant evidence of the class-mixed character of the city.

FIGURE 28. Manuscript relief roll from Committee to Alleviate the Miseries of the Poor, HSP. Both Richardson and Ghiselin, whose names appear on this list, were grandsons of men who had immigrated to America in 1681, Francis Richardson from England and Cesar Ghiselin, a Huguenot, from France. Both families prospered at first, but while the Richardsons continued to rise, the Ghiselins remained on a plateau and then, in the third generation, declined sharply. Cesar Ghiselin, named after his grandfather, became a barber and by 1756 was rated on the tax list at one third the assessment of Joseph Richardson. In the next few years Ghiselin’s world collapsed, leaving him indigent in the winter of 1761-62, when Richardson served as one of the leaders of the poor relief effort.

FIGURE 29. A View of the House of Employment, Alms-house, Pensylvania Hospital, & part of the City of Philadelphia, c.1767, LCP. The main part of the city, seen in the background to the right, emphasizes the bucolic setting of these buildings. Animals graze in the fields. Only the Bettering House and the first wing of the Pennsylvania Hospital, seen on the right, had been built by this time. As soon as its doors opened in October 1767 the Bettering House was filled with 284 persons. By the eve of the American Revolution it bulged with more than four hundred indigent men, women, and children. The name came from the growing feeling among the city’s leaders that the poor were responsible for their poverty and could better themselves through a strict almshouse regimen designed to inculcate an abstemious work ethic.

      Philadelphia’s construction artisans were glad for contracts in 1766-67 to build an extensive new almshouse, the largest building in the American colonies, but some of them probably wondered if they would become inmates themselves as the city’s poor swelled in number. The new almshouse, or Bettering House as it was revealingly called, was built on Spruce Street, several blocks beyond the limits of residential development, on a site described by a visitor in 1774 as “a very bleak place” where “the North-Westers, which are very severe СКАЧАТЬ