First City. Gary B. Nash

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FIGURE 3. General LaFayette’s arrival at Independence Hall Philad\a Sep\t 28th 1824, Winterthur Museum. The Germantown Print Works produced the most spectacular souvenirs of the Lafayette celebrations: printed linen handkerchiefs. The one shown here depicts architect William Strickland’s massive stageprop ceremonial arch, based on the Septimus Severus Arch in Rome. Workers erected it across the street from Independence Hall (missing its cupola, which had rotted badly and been torn down). A balloon begins its ascent as six white horses draw Lafayette through the arch in a decked-out barouche.

      Fervor in Philadelphia far outlasted Lafayette’s seven-day visit. Two weeks after his departure for points south, the Saturday Evening Post reported that “We wrap our bodies in La Fayette coats during the day, and repose between La Fayette blankets at night.… We have La Fayette bread, La Fayette butter, La Fayette beef, and La Fayette vegetables … Even the ladies distinguish their proper from common kisses, under the title ‘La Fayette smooches.’”⁸ Entrepreneurs scrambled to put Lafayette’s image on whatever appeared to have commercial potential—snuffboxes, cravats, brandy flasks, white kid gloves, pitchers, glasses, and gewgaws. The flesh-and-blood Lafayette might never return, but Philadelphians could cherish his memory through souvenirs of the week-long celebration. Suddenly, they began to see that while history is about the past, it is for the future.

      The anticipation of Lafayette’s visit brought renewed attention to Independence Hall as an icon associated with the American Revolution. “Through word and image,” historian Charlene Mires explains, “Lafayette’s visit redefined the State House as a significant bridge between past and present.”⁹ Choosing the east room of the State House as the proper place to receive Lafayette, Philadelphia officials commissioned the redecoration of the now shabby chamber. This produced a room more handsomely furnished than it had been when the delegates to the Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence. But enhancing the memory of the “glorious cause” seemed fitting at a time when Philadelphia’s leaders were worrying about a noble era slipping away in the memory of a new generation.¹⁰

      Lafayette brilliantly refocused attention on the virtue and heroism of the revolutionary generation in a way that kindled Philadelphians’ reverence for historic sites that could be transformed into sacred spaces. After the mayor of Philadelphia welcomed Lafayette to “this hallowed Hall” (the east room of the State House), Lafayette drove home the point: “Here within these sacred walls … was boldly declared the independence of these United States. Here, sir, was planned the formation of our virtuous, brave, revolutionary army and the providential inspiration received that gave the command of it to our beloved, matchless Washington.”¹¹ From this point on, the usage “State House” changed to “Independence Hall.” One of the last living links to the Revolution, Lafayette was instrumental in hurrying the old State House along its way to becoming a national shrine.

      The power of buildings and civic observances to connect the present with the past, becoming manifest during Lafayette’s visit, resurfaced two years later, in 1826, as city leaders prepared for the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Especially moved to action was a group of patrician Philadelphians who banded together for a dinner in the house that William Penn had occupied during his last sojourn in Philadelphia, from 1699 to 1701. By the 1820s, Penn’s house had been converted into Doyle’s Hotel, but this did not diminish the enthusiasm of an august group, many of them the great-great-grandchildren of Penn’s compatriots, from setting a new agenda for using the past for present purposes. “A new current of feeling seems to have set in,” one of the dinner participants wrote, and emotions were stoked by the dinner address of the aged Peter Du Ponceau, who had come to America with Lafayette to fight for liberty’s cause. At the time president of the American Philosophical Society, Du Ponceau gave an address “full of the fire of the patriot and the taste of the scholar.” He reminded his friends that “there is a love of country which has a hallowed cast, from commingling thankfulness for blessings with the memory of the mighty dead.… We are among those who believe there is inspiration in these things, and our creed is that a man who can tread over the ashes of the dead with indifference, and contemplate the deeds of other times without emotion, cannot be a patriot or hero.”¹²

      From this dinner, beginning with festiveness and ending with a sense of mission, came the founding of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Although it was not the first Philadelphia institution to collect manuscripts, books, and artifacts that could preserve memory of the past or use it to refurbish the present, the Historical Society would slowly emerge as the largest, most important, and most influential. Already the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia were in the business of preserving the past, but now the Historical Society began to assume a central place among institutions devoted to warding off historical amnesia.

      The four events between 1816 and 1826—saving Independence Hall, arguing over the Colonization Society’s plans to repatriate African Americans, celebrating Lafayette’s visit, and founding the Historical Society of Pennsylvania—focused the attention of many Philadelphians on history’s value and history’s power. After this formative decade, the process of constructing a web of memory never ceased. Engaging the passion of an increasing number of leaders and becoming the mission of a growing number of institutions, remembering Philadelphia would become in time a thriving enterprise. But, as we will see, this was far from an easy task, made all the more complicated by the fact that Philadelphians, in their growing diversity, came to understand that memory-making was neither a value-free and politically sanitized matter nor a mental activity promising everyone the same rewards. As soon as people began to see that the shaping of Philadelphia’s past was a partisan activity, involving a certain silencing of the city’s history, the process of remembering Philadelphia became a contested matter—and has remained so ever since.