First City. Gary B. Nash

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СКАЧАТЬ poor Philadelphians, a place to obtain food and warmth during the winter when employment was scarce, a maternity hospital, and a place to die with a semblance of dignity. Standing near it was the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Sick Poor, built in 1755-56 (Figure 29). The first institution of its kind in North America, the hospital admitted mostly those too poor to pay a doctor who would treat them at home.

      Recovering the lives of ordinary Philadelphians, such as those who went to the Hospital for the Sick Poor or to the almshouse, is hampered severely from the disappearance of most material evidence that would show how they conducted their lives, at home and at the workplace, and what they knew, thought, or cared about. Ironically, the impoverished and desolate in the social basement of urban society are more visible than the ordinary people above them—the countless, anonymous people who inhabited the lower middle class. Nobody noticed the plodders as much as the desperate. While institutions rarely collected materials from the middle, they often gathered evidence, if inadvertently, from the bottom.

      This has happened in two ways. First, because the poor were the objects of reformers’ zeal and the recipients of institutional assistance, their lives were recorded, very briefly to be sure, in the records of the criminal justice and poor relief systems. For example, the Pennsylvania Hospital’s admission and financial records, along with rough minutes of its managers and medical staff, have been maintained nearly intact for more than two centuries. They provide historians with fascinating windows into the lives and travails of the laboring poor. So do the admission records of the Bettering House, supplemented by managers’ records, which are housed at the Archives of the City of Philadelphia and are largely complete from the 1760s forward.

      Second, because Philadelphia’s wealthy merchants, lawyers, and land speculators were also the city’s philanthropists, social reformers, and government officials, the traces of lower-class life are buried in what collecting societies assiduously acquired: double-entry ledgers, commercial correspondence, and, lodged in these commercial papers, records of charitable contributions, scraps of court proceedings, and material related to managing churches. In an era before modern record-keeping and before civil service, fragments of municipal records—even tax assessors’ lists and quarter-session court records—surface in the private papers of civic leaders. For example, buried in the papers of Thomas Wharton, an important Philadelphia merchant in the late colonial era, is his proposal for building a new kind of poorhouse—the genesis of the so-called Bettering House. In this single document one finds evidence of changing attitudes toward the poor, as Quakers attempted to administer tough love to the down-and-out (an experiment that failed in a matter of years). Similarly, when the Historical Society leaders acquired the Wharton-Willing Papers by gift in 1973, adding to their hefty materials on two of the city’s great eighteenth-century merchant families, they unexpectedly found buried in this rich collection the records of the Committee to Alleviate the Miseries of the Poor, an ad hoc group that distributed wood, blankets, and stockings in the bitter winter of 1761-62 and inscribed the name of each recipient—comprising, in effect, a group portrait of laboring families carried downward. Here, in capsule, was the story of the deranging effects of the Seven Years’ War, the re-sorting of social classes in an era of commercial growth, and the evidence that in Franklin’s Philadelphia not every leather-aproned artisan could cash in on Ben’s penny aphorisms contained in “The Art of Making Money Plenty in Every Man’s Pocket.” One era’s tastes and priorities in collecting have fortuitously provided materials for historians of another era with new questions to ask about the past. Much old wine has been decanted into new bottles.

      If Pennsylvania was the “best poor man’s country in the world,” at least in good times and for many men, was it also the best poor woman’s country in the world? The study of women’s roles and contributions to the making of urban society is relatively new, but it is becoming a thriving subject of inquiry.²⁵ The founders and later directors of the Historical Society and other collecting institutions were little interested in this topic—and indeed historians, most of them males, were only occasionally drawn to the subject for generations after the Society’s founding. Moreover, most of the Historical Society’s holdings that bear on female lives tell us about women married to wealthy and publicly prominent men. The sources that would allow an investigation of how ordinary women helped shape church life, work life, and community life are much thinner. Still, the study of urban women that has been undertaken in the past several decades—drawing on constable’s lists of householders, tax lists, probate records, newspaper advertisements, account books, diaries, correspondence, and ephemera—is now bringing Philadelphia’s female world into view.

      Over the years, the Historical Society, Library Company, and Philosophical Society did acquire the writings—letters, diaries, memoirs, accounts, and other materials—of a few eighteenth-century women, and now this has become a collecting priority everywhere. One of the most valuable is the diary of Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker (1734-1807). Married to Henry Drinker, a member of the Philadelphia Quaker elite, Elizabeth began her diary when she was twenty-four and kept it faithfully until she was near death, at age seventy-three. She was an astute observer of the world around her, and from the thirty-three manuscript volumes of the diary, acquired in 1955, can be garnered an abundance of information on family life, women’s education and intellectual life, medical practices, household management and employer relations with servants, and the changing character of the city’s neighborhoods.²⁶

       The Philadelphia Enlightenment

      Few affluent Philadelphians doubted that hard work, sobriety, and moderation were the keys to social progress and personal advancement. To them, society was like a machine, the parts of which had to be improved and kept in good working order. As their city grew, many prosperous Philadelphians devoted some of their time and wealth to cultural activities and civic improvements. This benefited the city while fostering an identity among the wealthy as a distinct class with special claims to social authority. Most of the founders and early members of the Library Company, the Philosophical Society, and the Historical Society were descended from this group, which ushered in the American Enlightenment.

      Philadelphia became an American center of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement based on the notion of human progress through rational thought and civic concern. From the city’s merchants, lawyers, and prospering craftsmen came the Library Company (1731), which was America’s first lending library, the College of Philadelphia (1751), the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Sick Poor (1752), the American Philosophical Society (1769), and numerous other organizations dedicated to promoting culture and perfecting the human condition.

      Benjamin Franklin personified the Enlightenment’s commitment to the acquisition of knowledge for bettering humankind. From helping to found America’s first circulating library to designing a more efficient wood stove for heating rooms to installing the first streetlights in Philadelphia, Franklin was the civic improver par excellence.²⁷

      Franklin’s fascination with electricity gained him international recognition. In 1746, already a successful printer and earnest civic organizer, he began his experiments. In that year, a Dutchman, Pieter van Musschenbroek, had learned how to condense electricity in a glass bottle (called a Leyden jar) and to produce electrical sparks by attaching a conductor to the two sides of the bottle. Throughout Europe, amateur scientists began to play with this device, but nobody really understood the source or the nature of the mysterious electrical “fluid.”

      By 1748, Franklin had constructed a number of experiments in his house on Market Street for producing brilliant sparks from Leyden jars. His Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America was published in London three years later, putting his name on the lips of scientists all over Europe. Far more important than his household experiments, however, was his development of the technical means to test what many already believed—that lightning produced by thunderstorms was a form of electricity. His famous kite experiment constituted a breakthrough of one of the most formidable barriers of the unknown and opened up an entirely new СКАЧАТЬ