ANTIQUES - quakers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1999 by Wendell Garrett

It is now time to return to the City of Brotherly-Love (for so much the Greek Word or Name Philadelphia imports) which though at present so obscure, that neither the Map-Makers, nor Geographers have taken the least notice of her; ...yet in a very short space of time she will, in all probability, make a fine Figure in the World, and be a most Celebrated Emporeum.

Gabriel Thomas, An Historical and Geographical Account of the Province and County of Pensilvania, 1698

Gabriel Thomas's promotional pamphlet reflects the hopes that drew immigrants from Britain and the Continent to the wilderness across the Atlantic Ocean. He emphasized the abundance and fertility of the land available in Pennsylvania, the purity of its streams, profusion of its fish and game, and its pleasant climate. He found that there was "seldom any young Married Woman but hath a Child in her Belly or one upon her Lap." And he related that he had never known a child born in Pennsylvania with "the least blemish on any part of its Body." He noted that in general these children were "observ'd to be better Natur'd, Milder, and more tender Hearted than those born in England."

Others painted a somewhat less rosy picture. Dr. Alexander Hamilton, a Scottish-born physician visiting from Annapolis in 1744, compared Philadelphia to a country market town in England with dirty, unpaved streets and low buildings. Nonetheless, he forecast that "a few years hence, [Philadelphia] will be a great and flourishing place and the chief city in America." He found that the city's inhabitants "have that accomplishment peculiar to all our American colonys, viz, subtilty and craft in their dealings."

From the beginning there was an unstable tension between the meetinghouse and the countinghouse among the rich Quaker merchants, who professed simplicity but lived splendidly in keeping with their elevated station. The formidable careers of the Quaker grandees should remind us that eighteenth-century Philadelphia, while a melting pot of immigrants from England, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Wales, was hardly an egalitarian society. Those at the top simply assumed their superior worth and set themselves apart with growing ostentation and wealth.

The Swedish traveler Peter Kalm wrote of the Philadelphia Quakers: "They cling together very close now, and the more well-to-do employ only Quaker artisans if they can be found." Such insularity was not without its merits, for in some measure we may owe to the religious instincts of the Quaker merchants and artisans the unfailing soundness of worksmanship and sureness of line that characterize the best Philadelphia craftsmanship of the mid-eighteenth century.

Dr. Hamilton was prescient. Colonial Philadelphia flowered in the middle years of the eighteenth century. It experienced not only phenomenal material growth but also striking intellectual attainments. Already the cultural center of the country, it soon became the political center as well.