First City. Gary B. Nash

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СКАЧАТЬ in a desolate scene representing Britain’s “Colonies Reduced.” An olive branch falls from the hand of the severed Pennsylvania. “The moral is,” wrote Franklin to his sister, “that the Colonies may be ruined, but that Britain would thereby be maimed.”¹⁰ The motto, “Date Obolum Bellisario” (Give a Penny to Belisarius), asks members of Parliament, to whom Franklin had this cartoon-on-card delivered the day before the debate on repealing the Stamp Act, to remember that the Roman general Belisarius was blinded and left to beg for alms after accused of a conspiracy against Justinian. American protests forced the repeal of the hated Stamp Act, although Parliament continued to insist on its right to pass laws affecting the colonies without the assent of colonial representatives.

      By the time Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, the artisans, mariners, and shopkeepers in Philadelphia had found their political voice and were nominating men from their own ranks for local and provincial offices. Conservatives within the merchant elite looked askance at this, one of them in Philadelphia sputtering that “the Mechanics … have no Right to Speak or Think for themselves.”¹¹ But the artisans pushed on. They were prominent in the Committee for Tarring and Feathering, organized in October 1773. Six weeks later, the Committee published a strongly worded broadside (Figure 35) warning Delaware River pilots not to conduct British ships carrying tea into the port of Philadelphia. John Adams later told Benjamin Rush that these Philadelphians had inspired the Boston Tea Party. Similar broadsides encouraged women, who bought and served tea, to join the boycott.

      Some artisans not only served as committeemen and street marshals during demonstrations but also became fervent propagandists for the patriot cause. Silversmith John Leacock used art as well as artisanry. Although associated with Philadelphia’s Sons of Liberty, Leacock was never elected to one of the city’s radical committees. But he made his contribution in an action-packed play published as the Second Continental Congress took the final steps toward independence. Widely advertised in the Philadelphia newspapers, Leacock’s Fall of British Tyranny: or, American Liberty Triumphant had a diverse cast of characters who spoke sailor’s bawdry, Roman oratory, and black dialect in a series of satiric vignettes lambasting the British and celebrating the Americans who resisted their tyrannical designs.

      Like many well-to-do leaders, Philadelphia’s John Dickinson feared the rising political consciousness of those beneath him. In 1768, Dickinson had published one of the most important protest pieces of the period, “The Patriotic American Farmer” or “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” which appeared serially in the Pennsylvania Chronicle. But by 1776, by which time Philadelphia’s working people had become numerous on the committees that were assuming de facto powers of government, he had moderated his protests. A delegate to the second Continental Congress, he could not bring himself to sign the Declaration of Independence. At about the time the young Marylander Charles Willson Peale, who had recently arrived in Philadelphia, painted Dickinson’s portrait in 1770. John Adams described Dickinson as “a Shadow—tall, but slender as a Reed—pale as ashes. One would think at first Sight that he would not live a Month.”¹²

      One of the men who frightened lawyers like John Dickinson was Thomas Paine, the tousled immigrant stay maker who emerged from obscurity only a year before the Revolution to play a major role in the final break with England. The hardhitting, pungent language of Paine’s Common Sense contrasted sharply with the formal, legalistic rhetoric of most protest pamphlets written by lawyers and clergymen. This helped make it the most widely read and influential tract in the protests against England.¹³ But the Historical Society collected almost nothing related to Paine over the years—partly by happenstance, perhaps, but also indicative of the faint interest its councillors had in radicals such as Paine, who wanted not only independence but a thorough reformation of American society in the interest of greater equality. The Library Company had acquired Common Sense and also Paine’s American Crisis as part of the Du Simitière purchase. But not until 1895, with eminent historians on its council, did the Historical Society purchase a copy of Common Sense owned by Paine’s radical, warm-tempered compatriot, Timothy Matlack, a brewer who was disowned by the Quakers for chronic indebtedness and unruly behavior. The following year the society shelved “Eulogy of Thomas Paine,” deposited by a Philadelphia physician in 1896, and not until 1921 did members hear a lecture on “The Real Thomas Paine, Patriot and Publicist; A Philosopher Misunderstood.” Though the revolution’s greatest propagandist was a member of the Philosophical Society, only in 1971 did the society receive by gift a rich assemblage of Paine materials—editions of his many books, letters, accounts and receipts, verses, and commentary on the author of Common Sense, The American Crisis, Age of Reason, and Rights of Man. The collection had been gathered lovingly over many years by Richard Gimbel, who fought Philadelphia officials for years to restore Paine to public memory by placing a bust of Paine in the Independence Hall Museum.

FIGURE 35. To the Delaware Pilots, broadside, 1773, LCP. The wording in the broadside could hardly have been stronger: “Pennsylvanians are, to a Man, passionately fond of Freedom; the Birthright of Americans”; “no Power on the Face of the Earth has a Right to tax them without their Consent”; “What think you Captain, of a Halter around your Neck—ten Gallons of liquid Tar decanted on your Pate—with the Feathers of a dozen wild Geese laid over that to enliven your Appearance?” The Library Company purchased this broadside from Du Simitière’s collection, along with other ephemera from Philadelphia’s version of the more famous Boston Tea Party. The Historical Society acquired a copy 138 years later.

      In June 1776, when the Pennsylvania members of the Continental Congress held back on the issue of independence, artisans and shopkeepers virtually took over the provincial government and demanded that their representatives support the break with England. This was history-making from the bottom up, though the full story was not told by historians until the 1960s. In 1891, the Historical Society acquired a fragment of John Dunlap’s uncorrected printer’s proof of the Declaration of Independence, representing perhaps the earliest version of the document to appear in print as a broadside. When Philadelphians heard the Declaration read aloud from the State House steps on July 8, they shouted “Huzzah!” Then they tore the royal coat of arms from above the State House door and tossed that symbol of colonial dependency into a roaring bonfire in what amounted to a king-killing ritual, the flames representing the transfer of sovereign power from George III to the American people at large.

      One of the icons of American nationalism is the depiction of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The best-known rendering of that event is John Trumbull’s Signing of the Declaration of Independence (Figure 1). But the painting by Edward Savage (Figure 36) presents a truer picture than Trumbull’s and provides a powerful example of how a single picture of the past can inform the contemporary restorationist movement. When the National Park Service became custodian of Independence Hall after World War II, its desire to restore the interior rooms of Independence Hall to their original condition led to research proving that the paneling portrayed in the Savage painting was much more accurate than in the Trumbull version. Included in this restoration of the 1960s were the replacement of upholstered leather armchairs, lovingly collected and installed during the refurbishing of Independence Hall for the 1876 Centennial Exposition. The Savage painting showed un-upholstered Windsor chairs in the famed Assembly Room, and National Park Service research also confirmed this detail. Windsor chairs were acquired to replace the unauthentic ones, leaving the descendants of the donors of the upholstered chairs crestfallen at the demoted status of prized heirlooms.¹⁴

FIGURE 36. Edward Savage, The Congress Voting Independence, oil, HSP. Savage’s painting is thought to have been partly based on an earlier СКАЧАТЬ