First City. Gary B. Nash

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СКАЧАТЬ materials that few at the time thought to collect—newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, cartoons, and prints—in order to write a history of the Revolution. But death claimed Du Simitière in 1784. The Library Company, positioning itself as a national library, promptly purchased his cache at auction, thus becoming a repository of special importance for materials bearing on the American Revolution. This set an unspoken precedent for collecting materials that, while distasteful to many of its leaders and members, could help establish the claim of being a civic public library as distinct from the sectarian libraries at the new nation’s small number of colleges.

      Nearly half a century later, the Historical Society’s early Quaker leaders, remembering vividly the anguish of their parents and grandparents, probably recalled the Revolution as something more than simply “the glorious cause.” But they also remembered that time had healed the wartime wounds and Quakers had been reincorporated into Philadelphia society. Materials connected to the Revolution, especially related to the war against England, became priceless items, for the American Revolution had become their heritage too, even if their fathers and grandfathers had opposed it at the time. If Quaker beliefs stressed pacifism, they did not prohibit the preservation of valuable documents from turbulent times.

      It can be imagined that the American Philosophical Society’s interest in the American Revolution must have been unequivocal, since Franklin, the society’s founder, was a central revolutionary figure. Moreover, one year after Franklin’s death in 1790, Thomas Jefferson became the institution’s president. For many years, however, the Philosophical Society showed only casual interest in acquiring documents concerning the American Revolution. In 1803, when Benjamin Franklin’s daughter put her father’s library up for sale, the Philosophical Society purchased some books and manuscripts of its patron saint. But not until Du Ponceau proposed the acquisition of historical documents in 1811, a proposal that took another four years to implement when the society created a new historical and literary committee, was any priority given to revolutionary materials. The first fruit of this initiative came in 1815, when the Philosophical Society received a scrapbook of newspaper clippings accumulated by an Irish foot soldier who fought with the British during the Revolution and later became a steward in the household of one of Washington’s leading generals—Nathanael Greene. Five years later came the papers of Greene himself, from Robert de Silver, a wealthy Philadelphia stationer and bookseller. In 1825, Richard Henry Lee, a Virginia delegate to and later president of the Continental Congress, presented some of his correspondence.

      Not until 1840, when the Philosophical Society’s interest in historical materials had waned, did its library acquire one of the crown jewels of revolutionary material—a voluminous collection of Benjamin Franklin’s papers. This acquisition is an example of the circuitous disposition of what later generations would regard as priceless treasures. The Franklin papers, including his library of more than four thousand volumes, came indirectly from Benjamin’s grandson, William Temple Franklin, who had little use for Philadelphia at all. The illegitimate son of William Franklin (himself an illegitimate offspring of Benjamin), Temple Franklin, as he was known, was raised by a London governess after his birth in 1760 and brought to Philadelphia by his famous grandfather in 1774. When Franklin became the Continental Congress’s emissary to France in 1776, he took young Temple with him to Paris as his secretary. Temple returned to Philadelphia after the war but disliked the city. Shortly after his grandfather died in 1790, he returned to London, placing the immense trove of Franklin papers and books in the hands of George Fox, a Philadelphia doctor. Thirty-three years later, on his deathbed, Temple Franklin bequeathed them to Fox, along with his own papers. There they rested until Fox died, leaving the papers in 1840 to his son and daughter, who promptly presented them to the American Philosophical Society. Meanwhile, Franklin’s collection had been broken up and sold at various times.⁴

      Despite the Quaker leanings of its early councillors, the Historical Society began collecting materials on the violent Revolution just a year after its founding. John Fanning Watson was especially influential. In reply to a circular from the first president, William Rawle, for historical materials, Watson urged in 1825 that the Historical Society make a special effort “to rescue from oblivion, the facts of personal prowess, achievements, or sufferings by officers & soldiers of the Revolutionary War.”⁵ A pioneer of oral history, he argued that “the recitals of many brave men now going down to the tomb—of what they saw, or heard, or sustained, in that momentous struggle which set us free would form a fund of anecdotes and of individual history well deserving of our preservation.” President Rawle’s circular calling for materials had included a request for biographical notices of “eminent persons or of any persons in respect to whom remarkable events may have happened,” and John Jay Smith, soon to become the librarian of the Library Company, circulated a list of questions regarding the Revolution. Watson added a populist twist, calling for attention to “many privates ‘unknown to fame’ peculiarly distinguished by their actions” and mentioned, by way of example, Zenas Macumber, a private in Washington’s bodyguard who had served through the entire war and survived seventeen wounds.⁶ However, the recollections and memorabilia of the Zenas Macumbers of the Revolution did not flow in, as Watson hoped. As close as the Historical Society came was the acquisition of the manuscript diaries of Christopher Marshall, a disowned Quaker druggist who figured importantly in Philadelphia’s radical revolutionary circle. Covering the years from 1774 to 1785, the Marshall diaries were the one main source of information on the Revolution acquired in the early years of the Historical Society that told the story from the streets and coffeehouses rather than the counting houses and legislative chambers.

       Breaking Ties

      Contemplating independence was both exhilarating and frightening because the colonies were only loosely united and faced the world’s greatest military power. No wonder, then, that in 1774 John Adams found the idea of independence “a Hobgoblin of so frightful Mien, that it would throw a delicate Person into Fits to look it in the Face.”⁷ Philadelphians, like other colonists, shuddered and argued for a decade before finally taking the plunge. As hosts of both Continental Congresses, they were first-hand observers of the debate about independence. Their publishing preeminence already established, the city’s presses poured forth newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets, thus assuring an airing of all sides of the question.

      But Philadelphians had known political controversy since the early 1700s. The political campaigns of the mid-1760s were especially notable in mobilizing voters and using the press to raise the temperature of political debate. The election of 1764 brought forth a torrent of scurrilous pamphlets from both sides. “Stop your pamphleteers’ mouths & shut up your presses,” pleaded a shocked observer. “Such a torrent of low scurrility sure never came from any country as lately from Pennsylvania.”⁸ In mobilizing a record number of voters in Philadelphia, campaigns such as this helped prepare the ground for revolutionary involvement of ordinary people.

FIGURE 34. Magna Britania her Colonies Reduc’d, cartoon, 1765-66, LCP. Philadelphia’s printers frequently but selectively copied cartoons from London sources. This cartoon was re-engraved in Philadelphia and distributed in a larger form after the news reached the city of the Townshend duties passed by Parliament in 1767. Du Simitière saved this copy of the card Franklin distributed in London. It is the only surviving copy.

      The role of the man in the streets became evident the very next year when boycotts of English goods were organized to force Parliament to repeal the detested Stamp Act of 1764. Philadelphia merchants joined those in other cities to vow they would import no further British goods. But many merchants opposed the nonimportation agreement and joined only “to appease [the people] and indeed for their own safety,” as the revolutionary leader Charles Thomson observed.⁹ Women, as the main purchasers of imported goods, and ordinary people involved in maintaining boycotts, were coming to the fore.

      Political cartoons helped mobilize public opinion. Franklin believed they had greater effect than printed discourses. In СКАЧАТЬ