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FIGURE 13. Mortality bill, 1793, LCP. Mortality bills not only are an important source for studying the growth of churches in Philadelphia, but they have allowed demographic historians to chart the fertility and mortality rates in the city. For an era when municipal recording of vital statistics was unknown, the mortality bills have become a key source for reconstructing the dynamics of population growth in colonial Philadelphia.

      Of all the artifacts that have reached across the generations to speak of Philadelphia’s polyglot nature, the simplest and yet most revealing are the mortality bills (Figure 13), first issued by the city’s Anglican churches in the 1740s. Published annually, they detailed the births and deaths recorded in each of the city’s congregations. Such mortality bills were common in England in the eighteenth century, but their Philadelphia counterparts may have been inspired by the Anglicans’ desire to show how their congregations were growing more rapidly than those of other churches. If so, they would have lost their purpose by the late eighteenth century, when the one in Figure 13 was published, because by then the Methodist and Baptist churches were the fastest growing in the city.

      Another group joining the human mosaic in early Philadelphia was the Africans, and they came, of course, not as immigrants but as involuntary laborers carried across the Atlantic under appalling conditions. Though small in number, they contributed much to the physical and cultural development of the seaport town and colonial capital.

      Africans were in Philadelphia almost from the beginning. The Dutch had brought slaves with them to the Delaware Valley long before Penn and the Quakers arrived. But their number was vastly augmented in November 1684, when the Isabella, out of Bristol, England, sailed up the Delaware River with 150 Africans in chains. It does not comport well with the usual picture of the early pacifist settlers that they assembled on the newly built wharves and bid avidly to purchase these arrivals. At the outset of their “Holy Experiment,” the pacifist Quakers had ensnared themselves in a troublesome institution. In an infant community with about 1,000 persons, these Africans immediately became central to the labor force that did the work of clearing trees and brush and erecting crude houses. This marked the beginning of the extensive intermingling of white and black Philadelphians that has continued ever since.²⁷

      Though the interest in Penn and his compatriots was a logical priority for Library Company or Historical Society leaders, Quakers’ early involvement in slavery—as slave traders and slave owners—was decidedly not. The Library Company directors of the early nineteenth century and Historical Society founders were interested in African Americans as objects of white reformers’ zeal because many of these leaders were part of the Quaker-led antislavery movement. This explains the society’s subscription from the beginning to the African Observer, an abolitionist journal edited by the Quaker Enoch Lewis. But Africans in Philadelphia were not themselves seen as fit subjects for commemorating the past or even as a valuable part of urban society. Their first newspapers, including the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Christian Recorder, published in Philadelphia, were never collected. John Fanning Watson, the city’s leading annalist, was fearful of the large free black community. A devout Methodist, he hated the way black Methodists were, as he saw it, “corrupting” Sunday services through exuberant music, dancing, and noisy exhortation; he hated even more, as he explained in his book Methodist Error (1819), that white Methodists were adopting black Methodist churchly enthusiasm. Independent black churches, which were sprinkled throughout the city and became focal points of the black community, were a big mistake, in Watson’s view. “Their aspirings and little vanities,” he sneered in his 1830s Annals of Philadelphia, “have been rapidly growing since they got those separate churches.” In his youth, he explained, “they were much humbler, more esteemed in their places, and more useful to themselves and others.”²⁸