Colonial Philadelphia Research Articles

David Rittenhouse: Philosopher-Mechanick of Colonial Philadelphia and His Famous Clocks by Donald L. Fennimore and Frank L. Hohmann III (review)

David Rittenhouse: Philosopher-Mechanick of Colonial Philadelphia and His Famous Clocks by Donald L. Fennimore and Frank L. Hohmann III (review)

A Moderate Proposal: Jonathan Dickinson and Benjamin Franklin Debate Freedom, Conscience, and Consensus

In matters of twenty-first century public policy, age-old questions surrounding freedom of conscience and both personal and civic liberties remain in perennial tension with the necessary demands for civic conformity, custom, and consensus. These questions were also of critical importance in early eighteenth-century colonial America. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a hotbed of religious, intellectual, and cultural diversity was fomenting considerable conflict in Philadelphia, setting the stage for a vital debate over the nature and parameters of religious liberty and freedom of conscience in the colonies. Within this context of the eighteenth-century religious and cultural landscape of colonial Philadelphia, this article will examine a debate between Jonathan Dickinson and Benjamin Franklin whereby two distinctly different interpretations of religious liberty and freedom of conscience were established. Left to themselves, these two interpretations lead to sharply divergent trajectories. Nonetheless, by considering these two viewpoints in dialogue with one another, the Franklin–Dickinson pamphlet debate can serve as a useful tool for conceptualizing twenty-first century public policy issues related to freedom of conscience: policies that preserve the essential aspects of what constitutes each person’s humanity while simultaneously respecting the broader exigencies for public order and responsible policy in the aggregate.

Sailing Souls: Colonial Philadelphia's German Merchants and the Development of the Transatlantic Passenger Trade

Sailing Souls: Colonial Philadelphia's German Merchants and the Development of the Transatlantic Passenger Trade

Law and Gospel Order: resolving commercial disputes in colonial Philadelphia

AbstractTrade in the early modern Atlantic grew a great deal. While acknowledging that this growth had important economic, social and cultural consequences, scholars have yet to fully explain its causes. This paper argues that formal religious institutions were key. Based on records from colonial Philadelphia, it shows how the Quaker meeting created a legal forum to resolve commercial disputes. The meeting enforced its verdicts by gathering and disseminating information about disputes locally and across the Atlantic world through the Society of Friends’ formal organisation of meetings. Thereby, it re-enforced reputation mechanisms, facilitating the expansion of Philadelphia's trade.

Jessica C. Roney , Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, $59.95). Pp. 272. isbn 978 1 4214 1527 7.

Jessica C. Roney , Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, $59.95). Pp. 272. <scp>isbn</scp> 978 1 4214 1527 7.

Jessica Choppin Roney.Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia.

Jessica Choppin Roney.<i>Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia</i>.

Jessica Choppin Roney. Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv+252. $59.95.

Jessica Choppin Roney. <i>Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia</i>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv+252. $59.95.

Articles and Publications

Articles and Publications Christopher Densmore and Barbara Addison Mysticism and Reform, 1400–1750, edited by Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015) includes a chapter by Genelle C. Gertz, “Quaker Mysticism as the Return of the Medieval Repressed: English Women Prophets Before and After the Reformation.” Kristianna Polder, Matrimony in the True Church: the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Marriage Approbation Discipline (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015) examines marriage among English Friends, with particular attention to the marriage of George Fox and Margaret Fell. Elizabeth Bouldin, Women Prophets and Radical Protestantism in the British Atlantic World, 1640–1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) includes a chapter, “Female Prophecy, Election, and the Transatlantic Quaker Community” and other references to Quakers. Other studies of Quaker religious thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries include: Jonathan Warren, “‘Out of Whose Hive the Quakers Swarm’d’: Polemics and the Justification of Infant Baptism in the Early Restoration,” Perichoresis, 13:1 (June 2015) 97–113; Carol Dale Spencer, “James Nayler and Jacob Boehme’s The Way to Christ,” Quaker Religious Thought, No. 125 (Oct. 2015), 43–56; Jon R. Kershner, “Mysticism and Revelation in John Woolman’s Theology,” Quaker Religious Thought, No. 125 (Oct. 2015), 34–42; and Judith Roads, The Distinctiveness of Quaker Prose, 1650–1699: a Corpus-Based Enquiry (Thesis (Ph.D.), University of Birmingham, 2015). Works on early Quakerism with an American context include: Natalie Spar, “The Politics of the Pure Language in Seventeenth-Century Quakerism: Speech, Silence, and the Founding of Pennsylvania,” Early American Studies 13.3 (Summer 2015), 692–713; Andrew R. Murphy, “The Emergence of William Penn, 1668–1671,” Journal of Church & State, 57:2 (Spring 2015), 333–359; and Heather E. Barry, “Naked Quakers Who Were Not So Naked: Seventeenth-Century Quaker Women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 43.2 (Summer 2015) 116–135. Two recent studies examine the meaning of travel among seventeenth and eighteenth century Friends. Hillary Hinds, “Going Nowhere: the Stranger and the Pilgrim in the Journal of George Fox,” Quaker Studies 20:1 (Sept. 2015), 84–102, looks at the place of the journey, the rhetoric of movement and the figure of the stranger in the writings and behavior of early Friends. Jon R. Kershner, “‘A More Lively Feeling’: the Correspondence and Integration of Mystical and [End Page 70] Spatial Dynamics in John Woolman’s Travels,” Quaker Studies 20:1 (Sept. 2015), 103–116, examines the impact of his travels on his social and religious convictions. Tony Seaton, “Travel and Touring in England by Elite Quaker, Industrial Families in The Long Nineteenth Century: the Journeys of Mary-Anne Schimmelpenninck (née Galton) of Birmingham (1778–1856),” Quaker Studies 20:1 (Sept. 2015), 117–144, considers the role of tourism in promoting connections among British Quakers in the nineteenth century. A related work is by Jordan Landes, London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World: the Creation of an Early Modern Community (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [UK]: New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Two studies examine material culture among American Quakers: Michael Lawrence Young, The Style of Quaker Consumption in British Colonial New Jersey: the Link Between Religious Beliefs and Values and the Archaeological Record of the Society of Friends (Thesis (Ph.D.), School of Archaeology and Ancient History, 2015); and Neil Larson, “The Architecture of Quaker Meeting Houses in Dutchess County,” Hudson River Valley Review 31.2 (Spring 2015), 62–87. Quakers and Their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause, 1754–1808, edited with an introduction by Maurice Jackson and Susan Kozel (Abingdon, Oxon. [UK]; New York: Routledge, 2015) contains a wealth of chapters by leading scholars: Gary B. Nash, “Warner Mifflin (1745–98): The Remarkable Life of an Unflinching Abolitionist”; Geoffrey Plank, “Sarah Woolman and the Anti-Slavery Family”; Julie Winch, “Friends, Family and Freedom in Colonial Philadelphia: A Black Slave-Owner Settles Her Accounts”; Maurice Jackson, ‘What Shall Be Done with the Negroes?’: Anthony Benezet’s Legacy: Then and Now”; Richard C. Allen, “Samuel Meredith (1741–1817): American Patriot and Welsh Philanthropist”; Jon R. Kershner, “‘Come Out of Babylon, My People’: John Wool-man’s (1720–72) Anti-Slavery Theology and the Transatlantic Economy”; Julie L...

Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society by Arwen Mohun (review)

Reviewed by: Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society by Arwen Mohun Scott Knowles (bio) Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society. By Arwen Mohun. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. 344. $55. It’s not often that a reader encounters Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Florence Kelley, and Huey Newton in one volume—but such is the range of personalities one finds in Arwen Mohun’s creative and highly readable Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society. Mohun develops a series of risk cases spanning American history, linking them together in a chain that runs from fires in colonial Philadelphia to consumer product safety debates in the late twentieth century. The book is divided into three sections. First, Mohun considers risk in the pre- to partially industrialized nation, including cases of urban fire, lightning, smallpox, and horse-related injuries. These “risks from nature,” she argues, were understood and managed according to the mentality of a “vernacular risk culture”—“a set of rules, customs, and beliefs … generated in the course of everyday activities … passed informally from person to person, reinforced through the authority of experience and social status” (p. 1). The second section outlines the emergence of risk analysis and regulation as a professional act, spurred by the dangers of industrial transportation (railroads) and factory employment. By the 1930s “safety professionals gradually expanded the scope of their efforts from factories to streetcars to schoolrooms … [allying] themselves in these efforts with businessmen, bureaucrats, and other members of a burgeoning middle class” (p. 159). The book’s concluding section focuses on the debates surrounding the attempts over the twentieth century to create a risk-regulation state. Illustrated through the evolution of automobile safety, insurance, and licensing, and in an ingenious chapter on early gun-control legislation, this section comes to the grim conclusion that by the 1980s the “dreams of a powerful regulatory state that put safety first had been sacrificed to a declining, deindustrializing American economy and a new political ideology that suggested that safety at any cost might be a luxury American society could not afford” (p. 254). Mohun’s analysis is strongest when she is walking us through dramatic [End Page 245] culture clashes over risk: a grenade flies through Cotton Mather’s window in the midst of a raging public debate over smallpox inoculation in 1721 (he was in favor of inoculation). The relative safety or danger of lightning rods set off a war of words in Franklin’s day. Handgun control in Progressive-Era New York City spawned an argument over federal gun control that enlivened the NRA and landed in the committees of the New Deal Congress. Whereas Risk functions very well in this sort of historical anthropology—cultures of risk in conflict mode—it functions less well in advancing our thinking about why exactly American society tolerates some risks—automobile crash deaths and failing levee systems, for example—and not others, like airline crashes and terrorist attacks. Mohun’s central explanatory dynamic is one of constant dispute, that is to say this is a history of knowledge claims and counterclaims in a rough-and tumble-democracy. The vaccine and the lightning rod, the driver’s license and the gun license—each resolves a crisis of risk in its time and place, and yet each case also opens up longstanding American conflicts along lines of class, race, regional identity, and ideology. Could there also be something to say here about more structural historical features of the American political economy—the longstanding urban versus rural divide, or perhaps the ongoing battle of individual freedom versus the protection of the commons? The shift from a less to a more environmentally destructive form of capitalism over the past 300 years, and the rise of the military-industrial complex, with its accompanying national toleration of near-constant war and nuclear threat, also deserve close attention in any comprehensive study of American risk history. These criticisms aside, the book is a welcome addition to the growing field of risk and disaster studies, primarily because Mohun takes on a long stretch of historical time, rather than (as is too often the case among historians) focusing narrowly on one type of risk, or one singular disaster...

Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia

During the colonial era, ordinary Philadelphians played an unusually active role in political life. Because the city lacked a strong central government, private individuals working in civic associations of their own making shouldered broad responsibility for education, poverty relief, church governance, fire protection, and even taxation and military defense. These organizations dramatically expanded the opportunities for white men-rich and poor alike - to shape policies that immediately affected their communities and their own lives. In Governed by a Spirit of Opposition, Jessica Choppin Roney explains how allowing people from all walks of life to participate in political activities amplified citizen access and democratic governance. Merchants, shopkeepers, carpenters, brewers, shoemakers, and silversmiths served as churchwardens, street commissioners, constables, and Overseers of the Poor. They volunteered to fight fires, organized relief for the needy, contributed money toward the care of the sick, took up arms in defense of the community, raised capital for local lending, and even interjected themselves in Indian diplomacy. Ultimately, Roney suggests, popular participation in charity, schools, the militia, and informal banks empowered people in this critically important colonial city to overthrow the existing government in 1776 and re-envision the parameters of democratic participation. Governed by a Spirit of Opposition argues that the American Revolution did not occasion the birth of commonplace political activity or of an American culture of voluntary association. Rather, the Revolution built upon a long history of civic engagement and a complicated relationship between the practice of majority-rule and exclusionary policy-making on the part of appointed and self-selected constituencies.

Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia by Jessica Choppin Roney (review)

Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia by Jessica Choppin Roney (review)

Credit and Ethnicity in the Urban Atlantic World: Scottish Associational Culture in Colonial Philadelphia

The emergence of an associational world is often regarded as fundamental to the development of civil society, urban cultural life, and political consciousness in early America. The financial roles of voluntary associations, however, remain less well explored. This article draws on a case study of the St Andrews Society of Philadelphia to examine the credit functions of a voluntary association and to consider the relationship between ethnicity and economic practice in the urban Atlantic world. Through focus on the Society’s charitable, social and money-lending activities, it argues that associations had a crucial function in colonial communities as providers of credit in its entangled economic and social forms. In placing the Society within the context of both early American associational culture and the history of the Scottish Diaspora, the article considers why ‘Scottishness’ functioned as a basis for trust. Through its various activities, the Society manufactured and enforced a sense of Scottishness based upon the notion of good credit. Ethnicity was a flexible and fluid concept that incorporated the components of credit and individual worth based on social, occupational, and gender identities, providing a framework for interaction within Philadelphia’s particular public sphere and a wider Atlantic economy.

Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia. By Jessica Choppin Roney. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 252. $59.95, cloth; $59.95, ebook.

Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia. By Jessica Choppin Roney. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 252. $59.95, cloth; $59.95, ebook.

Modern Time as Historical Artifact

Modern Time as Historical Artifact David E. Nye (bio) Alexis McCrossen. Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 255pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $45.00. Molly McCarthy. The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 302pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $90.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper). These two excellent books explore different aspects of how Americans have understood and used time since the late eighteenth century. Alexis McCrossen charts the rise and decline of public clocks, installed on churches, town halls, office buildings, railroad stations, or other prominent sites. She sees these clocks as “markers of modernity.” First at a local level and then with the standardization of time at the national level, bells, clocks, and falling balls not only divided time into shared units of experience but also encouraged Americans to internalize mechanical rhythms, replacing a sense of time based on natural observation. At the apex of public-clock installation between 1871 and 1911, 15,000 were added to the thousands that had been put up in previous decades (p. 189). If increasing numbers of people owned watches, they nevertheless checked and adjusted them against public timekeepers. Molly McCarthy tackles the related subject of daily planners. At roughly the same historical moment that public clocks became prominent, planners emerged from the back pages of almanacs to become a profitable publication in their own right, and even in the digital present they continue to be sold to millions of Americans. While a daily planner ostensibly helps keep track of future appointments and present expenses, in practice their owners often have used them to record retrospectively the events of each day. These volumes are fascinating in themselves, but both also can be viewed as studies of the historical transition that has led to the present 24/7 world, where timekeeping is built into a myriad of devices that record and, to some degree, direct our actions. Well before these two studies, the cultural history of time was explored by anthropologists interested in the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that each language structures a sense of space/time relations1 and by [End Page 54] labor historians following the groundbreaking works of E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman.2 Much important work has been done since, seemingly all of it referenced in the books under review. A short list of important studies published since 2000 includes books by David Landes, Anthony Aveni, Carlene Stephens, and Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift.3 In addition, Michael O’Malley’s Keeping Watch, a fine overview focused on the United States, appears to have been a touchstone for both McCarthy and McCrossen.4 Neither author provides a bibliography, an omission presumably dictated by the publisher. McCrossen argues that modernity had been achieved “when time and space ceased to pose meaningful barriers to circulation of news, ideas, goods, and people” (p. 18). Establishment of public time was crucial to breaking down these barriers, making it possible, for example, for railroad timetables to be harmonized or for stock-market trading to be synchronized through the telegraph system. She begins with the story of a magnificent six-ton Elgin clock erected in 1928 on the exterior of the new Jeweler’s Building in Chicago. It was meant to symbolize both the professional skill of jewelers, who had long sold and repaired clocks and watches, and the success of the Elgin National Watch Company that had its headquarters on several floors of the building. Forty years later, however, the jewelers had vacated the building and Elgin had gone out of business. Its rivals had either moved to Switzerland (Hamilton, Waltham, Gruen) or had disappeared (E. Howard and Seth Thomas). The era of large American public clocks had ended, and a Chinese company owned the Elgin name. These transformations of the clock and watch industry after 1930 are not McCrossen’s concern, however. She has written not a business history but a cultural history, and accordingly the following chapter turns the clock back to the introduction of bells in colonial Philadelphia and to the nation’s first public clocks, followed by...

The maximum intelligible range of the unamplified human voice

The Anglican preacher George Whitefield preached to some of the largest reported crowds in recent history during the Methodist revivals in 18th century London. Benjamin Franklin later performed an auditory experiment in Philadelphia from which he estimated Whitefield could be heard by 30,000 listeners at once. Using the data from Franklin’s experiment and acoustic model of colonial Philadelphia, Whitefield’s on-axis averaged sound pressure level at one meter has been calculated to be about 90 dBA, consistent with the loudest values measured from trained vocalists today. Using period maps and topological data, acoustic models have been constructed of the sites of Whitefield’s largest crowds in London, using a human voice source with the projected SPL for Whitefield’s preaching voice. Based on the total audience area whose speech transmission index value is greater than that at Franklin’s position in the Philadelphia experiment, the total intelligible audience area can be calculated. Using Franklin’s own crowd density calculations, this method allows estimates of the maximum amount of listeners that could hear Whitefield’s voice under different environmental conditions and provides a better maximum estimate for the free-field intelligible range of the unamplified human voice.

Front Parlor from the Powel House, Philadelphia, 1769–70

In the mid-1920s, the Philadelphia Museum of Art installed the colonial-period rococo parlor from the second floor of Samuel and Elizabeth Powel’s Third Street house. The interior architectural elements display colonial Philadelphia’s interpretation of the rococo and provide an ideal setting for the display of furniture, paintings, and decorative arts of the period. This article examines the history of the Powel House and the installation of the parlor at the museum, elucidates conjectures that were made about elements of the room’s design, and concludes with suggestions about minor improvements that could be made to the room.

Articles and Publications

Articles and Publications Christopher Densmore and Barbara Addison An annotated bibliography of the titles listed below is available at the Friends Historical Association website: www.haverford.edu/library/fha Quaker Writings, an Anthology, 1650–1920, edited with an introduction by Thomas D. Hamm (Penguin Classics 2010) contains Quaker writings documenting the thought and experiences of Friends from George Fox in the 1640s to 1920. Quakers first arose in a period of religious and political turmoil. Though not specifically about Quakers, David R. Adams, "The Secret Printing and Publishing Career of Richard Overton the Leveller, 1644–46," The Library, 11.1 (March 2010), 3-88, and Ariel Hessayon, "Early Modern Communism: The Diggers and Community of Goods," Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 3.2 (2010), 1-49, provide insight into the era immediately preceding the rise of Quakerism. S.L.T. Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) contains extensive references to seventeenth-century Quaker women including Joan Whitrowe, Anne Docwra and Elizabeth Bathurst. Betty Hagglund, "Changes in Roles and Relationships: Multiauthored Epistles from the Aberdeen Quaker Women's Meeting," in Woman to Woman : Female Negotiations During the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Carolyn D. Williams, Angela Escott, and Louise Duckling (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010) examines epistles written between 1675 and 1700. Amanda E. Herbert, "Companions in Preaching and Suffering: Itinerant Female Quakers in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World," Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9.1 (2011), 73-113, explores the writings and tribulations of traveling women Friends, and concludes that "traveling Quaker women refigured seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constructions of the female body, femininity, and female sociability." Two recent articles examine Quakers and slavery in Barbados and the West Indies in the seventeenth century: Kristen Block, "Cultivating Inner and Outer Plantations: Property, Industry, and Slavery in Early Quaker Migration to the New World," in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 8.3 (2010), 515-548, and Katharine Gerbner, "The Ultimate Sin: Christianising Slaves in Barbados in the Seventeenth Century," in Slavery & Abolition, 31.1 (2010), 57-73. Three articles examine the publishing and reading of Friends: David J. Hall, "What Should Eighteenth Century Quakers Have Read?" in The Journal of the [End Page 70] Friends Historical Society 62.2 (2010), 103-110; Richard S. Harrison, "Quaker Publishing in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Ireland," in The Journal of the Friends Historical Society 62.2 (2010), 111-130, and David J. Hall, "Spreading Friends Books for Truths Service: The Distribution of Quaker Printed Literature in the Eighteenth Century," in The Journal of the Friends Historical Society 62.1 (2010), 3-24. Clive D. Field, "Zion's People: Who Were the English Nonconformists?," Local Historian, 40.3 (2010), 208-223, compares the occupational structures of Quaker, Baptist and Congregational Nonconformists and includes data and analysis of Quaker occupations from 1650 to 1901. Local studies of English Quakers include Peter Collins, Quakers and Quakerism in Bolton, Lancashire 1650–1995: The History of a Religious Community, with a preface by Ben Pink Dandelion (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010) and Richard C. Allen, "Nantucket Quakers and the Milford Haven Whaling Industry, c. 1791–1821," in Quaker Studies, 15.1 (Sept. 2010), 6-31. Andrew R. Murphy, "Persecuting Quakers?: Liberty and Toleration in Early Pennsylvania," in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, edited by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) looks at Pennsylvania's actions during the Keithian schism. Pennsylvania's actions towards and conflicts with its Native American population in the mid eighteenth century are considered in Steven C. Harper, "Making History: Documenting the 1737 Walking Purchase," Pennsylvania History, 77.2 (Spring 2010), 217-233; in Jessica Choppin Roney, "'Ready to Act in Defiance of Government': Colonial Philadelphia Voluntary Culture and the Defense Association of 1747–1748," Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 8.2 (2010), 358-385; and John H. Brubaker, Massacre of the Conestogas: On the Trail of the Paxton Boys in Lancaster County (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2010). The Roney and Brubaker studies include extensive references to Quakers. Joseph S. Tiedemann, "A Tumultuous People: The...

"Ready to act in defiance of Government": Colonial Philadelphia Voluntary Culture and the Defense Association of 1747–1748

This article examines the Defense Association formed in Philadelphia in 1747–48, an extralegal militia that for a short time usurped governmental powers when the city feared attack during King George's War. It argues that the Defense Association was no aberration, that it must be understood as the fruition and extension of patterns of voluntary organization that had been developing in Philadelphia for twenty years. The Association, in turn, expanded the scope of what was politically possible through voluntary organization and carved out space for future extralegal organizing up to and including the Revolutionary groups of the 1770s.

The Reality of the Self-Made Man

24 Historically Speaking · May/June 2007 The Reality of the Self-Made Man Wyatt WeUs In the popular mind, the rise of "self-made" men from modest beginnings to wealth and prominence proves that the United States is indeed a land of opportunity. Critics point out that, historically, the United States has denied opportunities to African-Americans and other groups, and that parents' wealth and status have always affected children's success more than anything else. Nevertheless, the American experience abounds with successful men from modest beginnings, and every community has at least a few. The self-made man is not typical, but neither is he particular rare. Yet this raises another question: does the ascent of these men simply reflect talent and luck, or is a more subtle, systematic process at work? Americans define the self-made man subjectively. As Booker T Washington put it, "Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome." The career path defines the self-made man, not a specific level of achievement. As with any ideal type, however, the self-made man is best understood through exemplars . Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, John D. Rockefeller , Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, E.H. Harriman, Henry Ford, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton , and Washington himself all qualify as outstanding examples of the self-made man, rising from modest beginnings to spectacular heights. These twelve enjoyed varied careers in business, politics, and other areas, and their biographies contain common threads that suggest broader conclusions about the type. At first glance, their origins seem diverse. Washington, born a slave a few years before emancipation , endured grinding poverty as a boy. Andrew Carnegie started work in a textile mill at twelve to help support his family. In contrast, Harriman and Frick came from impecunious branches of well-to-do families. Although none of these men inherited riches, only a few grew up in poverty. Yet they all shared insecurity. Harriman and Frick avoided poverty largely because of relatives' generosity ; Jackson was an orphan; and Hamilton, Rockefeller, Reagan, and Clinton grew up in families desperately clinging to the middle class. None could be sure of their social or economic position. In every case, these men had difficult or nonexistent relationships with their fathers. Jackson's and Clinton's fathers died before they were born, and Washington knew nothing of his father, a white man. Reagan's father and Clinton's stepfather were alcoholics who had trouble holding jobs. Hamilton 's, Carnegie's, Harriman's, and Frick's fathers Booker T. Washington speaking in Lakeland, Florida, ca. 1890. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-1 20526]. were all failures at their chosen professions (merchant , craftsman, clergyman, and farmer, respectively ). Rockefeller's father was a bigamist and a con man who apparentiy regarded everyone as a mark, even his own children. The cases of Franklin, Lincoln , and Ford are particularly instructive. Their fathers were moderately successful, Franklin's as a craftsman and Lincoln's and Ford's as farmers. Yet all three rejected their fathers. Franklin ran away from home at the age of seventeen, rebelling as much against the older brother to whom he was apprenticed as his father, and both Lincoln and Ford despised rural life and abandoned it as soon as they could. Lincoln seems to have genuinely loathed his father, refusing even to visit his deathbed. Fathers usually introduce their sons to the world of affairs, and, as a rule, boys take their social positions and, often, their professions from their fathers. For various reasons, however, these self-made men all separated from their fathers at an early age. Lacking or rejecting paternal guidance, they found new places in society by cultivating powerful patrons and establishing ties with other ambitious young men. Benjamin Franklin relendessly pursued the favor of colonial Philadelphia's small elite and made himself the leader of the city's upwardly mobile youth. Hamilton relied on a series of patrons, most notably George Washington. Jackson's early prosperity depended heavily on his alliances with the Blounts, Tennessee's leading politicians, and...

Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-€“1830 (review)

Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830. By Clare A. Lyons. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. 420. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $55.00; Paper, $22.50.)Reviewed by Kate HaulmanIt may be unseemly to describe a book about the history of sexuality, gender, and race as masterful, but Clare A. Lyons's Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1750-1830 is just that. Part of an emerging body of scholarship explaining how early American societies shifted among social, political, and cultural systems through exploring the relationship between ideas and practices, Lyons's book locates culture at the heart of power struggles in revolutionary-era Philadelphia. She chooses her city wisely, for by the middle of the eighteenth century Philadelphia proved a far more free-wheeling town, sexually speaking, than its British American counterparts due to its diversity, cosmopolitanism, and absence of longstanding regulation. Such features made it a battleground for a host of competing ideas and practices and ultimately a crucible for the creation of new ideas about sexuality, Lyons argues. The regulation of culture had far-reaching and long-lived implications for social, racial, gender, and political hierarchy in the early American republic.The book is structured in three parts, giving its narrative a tidy beforeduring-and-after trajectory that is nonetheless richly complex. Part One maps the sexual terrain of colonial Philadelphia, by the mid-eighteenth century, a town rife with self-divorcing couples, out-of-wedlock offspring, and erotica, none of which bore the stigma of deviance. Lyons's sources are impressively broad, ranging from newspaper notices and court and other public records to literature, and her interpretation of those materials deep. Studying advertisements disowning runaway wives, Lyons demonstrates that women could exercise free will through flight, yet they also used the public prints to contest claims of desertion. Social understandings of a wife's economic role, combined with notions of her dependence, meant that women enjoyed legal protection and financial support from husbands who attempted to shirk their duties through desertion or publicly proclaimed dissolution.Marriage was undoubtedly a site of gender conflict, but Philadelphians had a sense of humor about it, as well as about the common phenomenon of illegitimate births, which reflected the city's demography. Using bastardy cases adjudicated by the Overseers of the Poor beginning in 1767, Lyons shows that the public held men economically responsible for their out-of-wedlock offspring and that mothers could expect monetary support, whether from fathers or through public relief, without suffering punishment for the offense. The environment tolerated not only illegitimacy but also the practices that often produced it, such as prostitution. All was part of an overall pleasure culture, as Lyons terms it, created through behavior and discursively produced in print.Following the American Revolution, the period covered in Part Two, sexual expression in the city blossomed, yet ran squarely up against the discourse of virtue touted by social and political architects of the new republic (188). Authorities continued to prove lax in their prosecution of offenses, the legislature passed a divorce law in 1785, and Philadelphians tolerated cross-racial intimacies no longer legally proscribed after gradual emancipation. …