First City - Gary B. Nash Early American Studies

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many artisans, like Franklin, watched their wives replace the pewter spoon and earthen porringer at the breakfast table with a silver spoon and china bowl, many others by the mid-eighteenth century were finding the road forward strewn with obstacles. Economic fluctuations, inclement weather, and personal injuries kept many artisans, mariners, and laborers on the knife edge of insecurity, and everyone knew of a bankrupt merchant. The Seven Years’ War was particularly wrenching. It made many artisans flush with orders for boots, clothes, guns, and other military supplies, but it also left hundreds of war widows with children to support. Even at the beginning of that war the Quaker John Smith wrote in his diary, “It is remarkable what an increase of the number of Beggars there is about this town this winter.” Then, at war’s end, colonial cities experienced the greatest economic stagnation ever known.23

      Compounding the economic suffering brought by the Seven Years’ War and depression that set in when the fighting moved to the Caribbean theater in 1761 was the bitter winter of 1761-62, which left hundreds destitute. A wartime inflationary trend had driven up the price of firewood, always an item that, if needed in unusual amounts, could throw a poor laboring family into distress. “Many of the poor,” reported the Pennsylvania Gazette, “are reduced to great Extremity and Distress” because of “the high Price of Firewood.”24 In this situation, Philadelphia leaders, with Quakers in the lead, formed a special “Committee to Alleviate the Miseries of the Poor.” The relief roll in Figure 28 is a partial list of the 329 “objects of Charity” who received blankets, stockings, and—that most precious commodity—firewood. One of the recipients of firewood, William Browne, lived across the street from Governor James Hamilton, poignant evidence of the class-mixed character of the city.

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      Philadelphia’s construction artisans were glad for contracts in 1766-67 to build an extensive new almshouse, the largest building in the American colonies, but some of them probably wondered if they would become inmates themselves as the city’s poor swelled in number. The new almshouse, or Bettering House as it was revealingly called, was built on Spruce Street, several blocks beyond the limits of residential development, on a site described by a visitor in 1774 as “a very bleak place” where “the North-Westers, which are very severe here, will have a full sweep at a body.” It became an institution of last resort for poor Philadelphians, a place to obtain food and warmth during the winter when employment was scarce, a maternity hospital, and a place to die with a semblance of dignity. Standing near it was the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Sick Poor, built in 1755-56 (Figure 29). The first institution of its kind in North America, the hospital admitted mostly those too poor to pay a doctor who would treat them at home.

      Recovering the lives of ordinary Philadelphians, such as those who went to the Hospital for the Sick Poor or to the almshouse, is hampered severely from the disappearance of most material evidence that would show how they conducted their lives, at home and at the workplace, and what they knew, thought, or cared about. Ironically, the impoverished and desolate in the social basement of urban society are more visible than the ordinary people above them—the countless, anonymous people who inhabited the lower middle class. Nobody noticed the plodders as much as the desperate. While institutions rarely collected materials from the middle, they often gathered evidence, if inadvertently, from the bottom.

      This has happened in two ways. First, because the poor were the objects of reformers’ zeal and the recipients of institutional assistance, their lives were recorded, very briefly to be sure, in the records of the criminal justice and poor relief systems. For example, the Pennsylvania Hospital’s admission and financial records, along with rough minutes of its managers and medical staff, have been maintained nearly intact for more than two centuries. They provide historians with fascinating windows into the lives and travails of the laboring poor. So do the admission records of the Bettering House, supplemented by managers’ records, which are housed at the Archives of the City of Philadelphia and are largely complete from the 1760s forward.

      Second, because Philadelphia’s wealthy merchants, lawyers, and land speculators were also the city’s philanthropists, social reformers, and government officials, the traces of lower-class life are buried in what collecting societies assiduously acquired: double-entry ledgers, commercial correspondence, and, lodged in these commercial papers, records of charitable contributions, scraps of court proceedings, and material related to managing churches. In an era before modern record-keeping and before civil service, fragments of municipal records—even tax assessors’ lists and quarter-session court records—surface in the private papers of civic leaders. For example, buried in the papers of Thomas Wharton, an important Philadelphia merchant in the late colonial era, is his proposal for building a new kind of poorhouse—the genesis of the so-called Bettering House. In this single document one finds evidence of changing attitudes toward the poor, as Quakers attempted to administer tough love to the down-and-out (an experiment that failed in a matter of years). Similarly, when the Historical Society leaders acquired the Wharton-Willing Papers by gift in 1973, adding to their hefty materials on two of the city’s great eighteenth-century merchant families, they unexpectedly found buried in this rich collection the records of the Committee to Alleviate the Miseries of the Poor, an ad hoc group that distributed wood, blankets, and stockings in the bitter winter of 1761-62 and inscribed the name of each recipient—comprising, in effect, a group portrait of laboring families carried downward. Here, in capsule, was the story of the deranging effects of the Seven Years’ War, the re-sorting of social classes in an era of commercial growth, and the evidence that in Franklin’s Philadelphia not every leather-aproned artisan could cash in on Ben’s penny aphorisms contained in “The Art of Making Money Plenty in Every Man’s Pocket.” One era’s tastes and priorities in collecting have fortuitously provided materials for historians of another era with new questions to ask about the past. Much old wine has been decanted into new bottles.

      If Pennsylvania was the “best poor man’s country in the world,” at least in good times and for many men, was it also the best poor woman’s country in the world? The study of women’s roles and contributions to the making of urban society is relatively new, but it is becoming a thriving subject of inquiry.25 The founders and later directors of the Historical Society and other collecting institutions were little interested in this topic—and indeed historians, most of them males, were only occasionally drawn to the subject for generations after the Society’s founding. Moreover, most of the Historical Society’s holdings that bear on female lives tell us about women married to wealthy and publicly prominent men. The sources that would allow

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