First City. Gary B. Nash

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СКАЧАТЬ craves knowledge about his or her beginnings—those who came first, those who blazed the trails, those who did great deeds. No sooner was the colony well established than it began, like most successful enterprises, to remember itself in selective ways. From the first, the urge in Philadelphia to collect historical materials, documents, and objects relating to William Penn, the early Quakers, and the original inhabitants assumed a special, almost holy importance. Philadelphia’s first collecting institutions, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Philosophical Society, were initially dedicated to gathering “useful knowledge,” the term used in the formal title of each, rather than historical materials. But these two endeavors soon merged.

      “Constructive buying and generous giving” marked the Library Company’s collecting from its founding at the hand of Benjamin Franklin in 1731, when the colony had existed for fifty years and the recently arrived printer was only twenty-five years old. Within nine years, the library’s growth prompted a move to the west wing of the State House. Already it had more than 600 volumes. The germ of the library’s historical holdings came in 1755, when its purchasing agent in London shipped as a present a group of rare early accounts of the colony’s founding. By 1769, the collection moved to more spacious quarters on the second floor of nearby Carpenters’ Hall. In 1784, just after the American Revolution, the Library Company became the first Philadelphia institution to acquire by purchase primary source materials relating to American history.²

      From its founding in 1743 until the very end of the eighteenth century, the Philosophical Society, also a creature of the relentlessly ingenious Franklin, was less aggressive in collecting. It passively received books, artifacts, and learned papers but had no active policy of acquiring or purchasing anything. Primarily, it was an early-day think tank whose members read papers and invited people from near and far to expand the common knowledge. Only in 1797 did the Philosophical Society evince much interest in history, by creating a committee on “the antiquities of North America.” With Thomas Jefferson serving as its president, the society began soliciting material: natural history specimens, including mammoth skeletons; sketches and reports on the remains of ancient Indian fortifications and earthworks; and data on the languages, customs, and character of American Indians. In 1801-3 the society spent money for the first time, to purchase books and manuscripts from the sale of Benjamin Franklin’s library, broken up by his daughter and her husband. This was the foundation of what would become a mighty Franklin collection. Eight years later, in 1811, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, who had come from France in 1777 to fight with the Americans against the British and became America’s most eminent lawyer on international law, proposed the systematic acquisition of historical documents. Philadelphia’s involvement in the War of 1812 probably delayed action on this initiative, but in 1815 the society created a Committee on History, Moral Science, and General Literature, charged with forming “a collection of original documents, such as official and private letters, Indian treaties, ancient records, ancient maps” that would “throw light on the History of the United States, but more particularly of this state … for the public benefit.”³

      At first glance, it is surprising that the American Philosophical Society was so interested in Native Americans; its members were more interested in Indians than in William Penn, the Quakers, or even the American Revolution. Much of this interest stemmed from Jefferson’s fascination with Indian languages and customs and the enthusiasm of Philadelphia doctors such as Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Smith Barton, who believed Indian languages held the key to solving the mysteries of Indian origins and Indian natural remedies. The astounding linguistic prowess of Du Ponceau also sharpened interest in Native Americans. Steadily, the American Philosophical Society gathered historical materials: a memoir of Chief Ouachita contributed by Jefferson in 1803; observations of the Choctaw, Cherokee, and Chickasaw nations in the same year; and Lenape grammars, notes, and essays contributed by two Moravian missionaries, John Gottlieb Heckewelder and David Zeisberger, both of whom lived with the Indians for years. Also, between 1820 and 1825, though nobody proposed acquiring materials relating to the American Revolution, came important papers from two stalwarts of “the spirit of ’76”: Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee and Rhode Island’s Nathanael Greene, one of Washington’s most trusted generals.

      Though the Philosophical Society had begun gathering historical materials by fits and starts, it lost its mainspring, Peter Du Ponceau, to his law practice and linguistic research by about 1820. But four years later Lafayette’s triumphant arrival in Philadelphia inspired the forming of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Its leaders did not intend to compete with or eclipse the Philosophical Society, but this is what gradually happened. The Philosophical Society lost the momentum Du Ponceau had created and would not regain it for the rest of the nineteenth century. Especially a casualty was the Committee on History. Although the Philosophical Society received a large collection of Benjamin Franklin papers in 1840, the history committee was never very successful in acquiring historical materials and abandoned its interest in local, regional, or even national history. But filling that vacuum was the Library Company—under the energetic leadership of John Jay Smith, the great-grandson of Penn’s trusted agent James Logan—and the budding Historical Society.

      To some extent, the leaders of the Philosophical Society, the Library Company, and the Historical Society in the first third of the nineteenth century were part of an interlocking, history-minded club. The powerful lawyer William Rawle and Joseph Parker Norris, for many years the president of the Bank of Pennsylvania, were involved in all three institutions; others, such as Du Ponceau, Zachariah Poulson, William Meredith, and Caspar Wistar, were involved in two of the “big three.” Notwithstanding these interconnections, the three institutions acquired different characters. After its reorganization in 1769, the Philosophical Society’s self-selected membership was primarily composed of weighty intellectuals—men of science, literature, linguistics, medicine, law, and philosophy—who were selected nationally and internationally. They presented carefully wrought learned papers to the society and desultorily passed along what others put in their hands. Physical and mathematical sciences, along with American Indian linguistics, had been their greatest strengths, with history “but a graft upon an uncongenial trunk.”⁴ The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, from the beginning, was very different. It was composed almost entirely of local residents, many of whom were related and traced their families back to early settlers; it grew by internal nomination of new members, ensuring that it would be a gentleman’s club; it made the collection of historical materials its singular priority; it was policy driven rather than intellectually thirsty; it created an aloofness that kept the unwashed away; and it was self-conscious about cultivating a reverence for particular aspects of the past in order to counteract the acids its members saw eating at their community.

      Somewhat similarly, Library Company leaders shared a reverence for the past and a consummate love of family connections. No one exemplified this more than its librarian from 1829 to 1851, John Jay Smith, whose many-branched family counted scores of relatives descended from William Penn’s cadre of Quaker “first purchasers.” But the Library Company was a subscription institution that by 1774, according to one account, attracted “twenty tradesmen” for each “person of distinction and fortune.”⁵ Its doors were open to all, with a rule, followed to the present day, that “any civil person” could use the books unless the person had “to be awakened twice” or showed “any evidence of ‘pulex irritans’ [fleas].”⁶ For this reason its collections needed to be broad and latitudinarian. Thus, long before the Historical Society was founded, the Library Company had established its openness to all religious groups, political parties, and social classes, knowing that if it meant to be a civic institution it could not afford to shut out any part of its constituency.

       William Penn: Man, Family, Community

      The founders of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania were far more focused on William Penn and the early Quakers than on the Native Americans whom the Philosophical Society had found so fascinating. At the dinner meeting that led to the founding of the Historical Society, Du Ponceau memorialized “a great man—the purest and noblest law giver that the annals of history can produce. His administration was the only golden age СКАЧАТЬ