First City. Gary B. Nash
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Название: First City
Автор: Gary B. Nash
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
Серия: Early American Studies
isbn: 9780812202885
isbn:
Cosmopolitan from the beginning because of Penn’s doctrine of religious tolerance and an open-door policy for immigrants, Philadelphia at the end of the colonial period stood on the threshold of receiving a new storm of strangers. As the largest North American town and situated midway between the two oldest areas of settlement and commercial development—New England and the Chesapeake—Penn’s “greene country towne” was about to become the center of the revolutionary government that for ten years, from 1774 to 1783, coordinated the bloody fight to gain American independence. Into the city came delegates from all thirteen colonies to the First and Second Continental Congresses, along with those whom the Congress designated to go abroad as the nation’s first emissaries. Through Philadelphia poured American and British armies. Into the city came French and Spanish diplomats, Indian chiefs, titled aristocrats eager to fight for the American cause, and streams of individuals displaced by the war. The commercial city was becoming the city of revolution.
Chapter 3
THE REVOLUTION’S MANY FACES
The American Revolution was the central event in the lives of most of those who lived through it. It engaged the passions and interests of nearly everyone and promised to usher in a new age. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Philadelphia’s famous pamphleteer, Thomas Paine. “A situation similar to the present has not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”1
While the Revolution shaped the lives of most of its participants, it also became the touchstone of succeeding generations, especially those who were historically minded. In the fashioning of public memory in Philadelphia, the Revolution became a central event. However, this did not happen spontaneously or continually. The public had to be reminded and instructed again and again. But given the diverse and contrasting views its Philadelphia participants had held, stimulating, massaging, and managing public memory always ran into the problem of deciding just what the American Revolution meant. As later chapters will make clear, preserving a stable narrative of the Revolution was nearly as difficult as Washington’s attempt to hold together a stable Continental army.
The difficulties in sustaining a unified view of the Revolution could hardly have been otherwise because the war was a continuously shifting and painfully ambiguous affair for the diverse people of the Philadelphia region (Figure 33). At bottom, of course, it was a bloody struggle to secure independence from what most colonists regarded as a corrupt and tyrannical English government. But it was also a prolonged negotiation among people of different points of view about what kind of society they wished to create should good fortune allow them to win the war. This debate divided families, neighbors, churches, and occupational groups, not only between “loyalists” and “patriots” but also among rebels who varied from conservative to radical on vexed internal questions: the breadth of the franchise, the powers of the governor, tax burdens, the criminal code, emancipating slaves, and much more. Casting themselves into a state of nature after renouncing the English charter and law under which they had lived, Pennsylvanians had to decide just what kind of laws, political structures, and constitutionally protected liberties they wished to live under and by what means they should create these new governmental arrangements.
This task proved difficult and divisive. United in their desire to begin anew as an independent nation, Americans were at the same time frequently divided by region, class, religion, ethnicity, and gender. Nearly everyone carried into the fray an understanding of their own experiences in the colonial period, both in relation to the mother country and to each other. “Can America be happy?” asked Paine. “As happy as she wants, for she hath a clean slate to write upon.” That was the rub. With many eager to step forward with chalk to inscribe their hopes for the future upon the blank slate, it took the entire course of the war to sort out competing ideas and to frame solutions. Even then, unresolved questions carried over into the postwar period. If citizens argued strenuously at the time, it is little wonder that their descendants would quarrel heatedly about the “true” nature of the Revolution.
FIGURE 33. Edward Lamson Henry, Cliveden During the Battle of Germantown, Cliveden of the National Trust. On October 3, 1777, Washington’s ragged Continentals attacked the British encamped at Cliveden, the mansion of Benjamin Chew, wealthy Philadelphia Loyalist landowner and officeholder who was exiled to New Jersey. Broken communications and fog contributed to the Americans’ defeat in the battle shown in this nineteenth-century recreation. After the war Chew returned to Cliveden and won back his prominence in Philadelphia political and social circles. His descendants lived in the house until 1972, when they presented it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Philadelphia played a central role in the dramatic events leading to war. As the meeting place of the First and Second Continental Congresses, it drew together insurgent leaders from all the colonies; in the prolonged debates over independence in early 1776, Pennsylvania became the “keystone” colony whose willingness to commit for independence proved decisive. During the war, the city was a strategic port and a military staging and production center as well as the center of state and national government.2
The founders of the Library Company, the Philosophical Society, and the Historical Society were all keenly interested in collecting material relating to the American Revolution. After all, the city was the nation’s birthplace, where the Declaration of Independence was written and signed and where the Continental Congress sat while directing the war. Moreover, Philadelphia was the home of some of the most famous men of ’76: Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, Thomas Paine, James Wilson, Benjamin Rush, and many others. This initial collecting interest never waned, and down to the present the city’s collecting institutions have nourished a special interest in acquiring anything related to the nation’s founding. Yet looking back on the Revolution was not a neutral activity, and hence for many years collecting institutions privileged some materials while downgrading others.
Quaker prominence in Philadelphia’s cultural institutions has been the source of some confusion and tension in assembling, preserving, and presenting documents and artifacts of the revolutionary era. To put the matter bluntly, the American Revolution was nearly as painful in Quaker remembrance as was the revolutionary experience at the time. For Philadelphia Quakers, the Revolution was a frightful ordeal, the most traumatic chapter in their history. As principled pacifists, they refused to fight or even pay taxes for the war, and many of them were suspected of collaborating or at least sympathizing with the British because of close mercantile ties to overseas partners. On both counts they were reviled, ostracized, and in some cases exiled. All were disenfranchised, and only slowly in the postrevolutionary period did Pennsylvanians put aside their wartime disgust with the Quakers.3
The Quakers’ patriot opponents were almost as interested as the Quakers themselves in allowing historical amnesia concerning this chapter of the Revolution to blot out remembrance. An internecine struggle hardly fit with the desire to show the revolutionary generation in untarnished, heroic terms, which, in the nineteenth century, was the dominant impulse among historians and historical societies. Nor has it been easy for non-Quaker historians to deal with Quaker pacifism and outright Toryism because of their general admiration of postrevolutionary Quaker efforts on behalf of woman’s suffrage, abolition, Indian rights, world peace, and other liberal causes.
For all the pain associated with the Revolution, many of the Library Company’s early Quaker councillors, librarians, and patrons knew that historical materials germane to the war for independence were of utmost value. And some had joined the Free Quakers, the splinter group that put aside pacifist principles and fully supported the American cause in word and deed. When the chance arose to acquire a bundle of revolutionary ephemeral materials, just one year after the war ended, the Library Company sprang into action. СКАЧАТЬ