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PHILADELPHIA

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Struggling to avoid being eclipsed by the economic upstart New York, Philadelphians entered the second quarter of nineteenth century with a self-conscious appreciation of their own sophistication mixed with anxiety over losing their supremacy. Since the mid-eighteenth-century, Philadelphia—measured by the breadth and value of its international markets, its infrastructure and cosmopolitan population, and the number and variety of its civic institutions—ranked just behind London as the second most dynamic city in the powerful British Empire. Those who experienced Philadelphia between 1820 and 1870 witnessed an acceleration of that dynamic.

But sophistication and acceleration proved insufficient. New York soon overtook Philadelphia in population and wealth. However, Philadelphia retained some unique attributes that earned it a distinctive niche in American economy and culture.

THE MODERNIZING CITY

In 1845, when William Henry Fry (1813–1864) unveiled his grand opera Leonora, Philadelphia was reminded that though it might no longer be the biggest and the richest, it was often still a city of innovation. Fry's opera—the first created by an American composer—was performed, with a sixty-piece orchestra, at the Chestnut Street Theatre. More than a decade later the work was translated into Italian and performed in New York.

Philadelphia was already sensitive to its own history. The Germantown bank cashier John Fanning Watson, a self-styled historian, had published in 1830 his Annals of Philadelphia. In this volume Watson was a trailblazer in using first-person interviews to capture how eighteenth-century Philadelphians viewed their world and their story. Watson had much to celebrate: the 1820s had brought the refurbishing of the Philadelphia State House, where the Declaration of Independence was signed. Now enshrined in a spiffedup park, the statehouse reminded Philadelphians that they were part of the founding of the great experiment that was America. That same decade had seen the establishment of two other institutions devoted to promoting the city's image: the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Franklin Institute—the former for "elucidating the natural, civil and literary" history of Pennsylvania and the latter to "promote the mechanick" arts by sponsoring scientific education for those involved in manufacturing. Over the succeeding decades dozens of such organizations sprang up, aimed at celebrating, educating, protecting, or reforming the citizenry or to encourage Philadelphia's economic innovation. The city was poised to dazzle residents and tourists alike.

Philadelphians were justly proud of their social and economic innovation. In the 1830s a parade of foreign observers stopped in to view Eastern State Penitentiary, the new prison system housed in the stately building designed by the distinguished architect John Haviland (1792–1852). Haviland, who had earned his reputation by creating the Philadelphia Arcade, another shrine—this one to the city's burgeoning businesses—had also designed the city's innovative Pennsylvania Institute for the Deaf and Dumb. Eastern State provided state-of-the-art housing for local criminals; the arcade was the city's most modern conglomeration of shops and stores; and the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb reflected the growing sense of public responsibility for needy citizens.

Tourists were well-rewarded for their visits. The Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville's Observations on the Penitentiary System in the United States, and Its Application in France were published by Philadelphia's Carey, Lea, and Blanchard in 1833. Two years later the same firm published the diary of the British actress Fanny Kemble, who found Philadelphia equally fascinating. (The publisher Henry Carey was the successor to his father's firm, Matthew Carey and Company, which dominated the U.S. publishing industry of the 1820s. Another Carey son, Edward, partnered with Abraham Hart in 1829 to form Carey and Hart, which also joined the ranks of the best-known publishing houses in the United States.) Transformed by the 1830s from a seaport city to a seat of urban industry, Philadelphia had an up-and-coming middle class, newly moneyed and anxious to take its place among the ranks of consumerism. Weathering two economic downturns in 1837 and 1843, it could still dream, and its dreams could still draw praise.

Having been the nation's innovator in developing a public water delivery system—designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe in 1800—the city leaders took the bold step of buying up private riverside property in the 1840s in order to protect the purity of the water supply. So began Fairmount Park, which remains one of the world's largest contiguous city parks. Indoor plumbing, domestic gas service, and public street lighting followed close behind. With advances in lithography (pioneered in the 1820s by Cephas G. Childs, then later expanded by the partnership of George Lehman and Peter S. Duval), this urban development was well-documented in pictures as well as words. And one of America's first daguerrotypes immortalized the early years of Central High School, an institution that has retained its reputation as one of the nation's premier public schools.

By 1854, when the city and the surrounding county were consolidated into one municipality, the region encompassed a population that had almost doubled over the previous decade. Not only bigger—grown from one square mile to more than one hundred square miles—the city was also increasingly cosmopolitan, embracing (if sometimes contentiously) multiple nationalities, religions, and races. Elizabeth M. Geffen records that in 1850 the visiting Hungarian countess Theresa Pulszky saw "the stamp of wealth and commerce wherever we cast our glance on the buildings and inhabitants," while a British visitor of the same time found "something more than usually wonderful in the growth of Philadelphia" (p. 314).

Much of Philadelphia had been born out of Benjamin Franklin's (1706–1790) boundless energy and initiative, and his legacy stretched far beyond his death. So while New York outstripped it in size, Philadelphians more than kept pace in imagination.

THE WORLD OF MODERN PUBLISHING

Part of Philadelphia's "something wonderful" was a vigorous publishing industry. In fact Philadelphia entrepreneurs were leaders in the new profession of "publisher"—a career developing in the early nineteenth century from the marriage of what the historian Rosalind Remer calls "printers and men of capital." The 1830s modern publisher was, in many cases, a printer who had developed new strategies for enhancing his income. The first step was often for a skilled printer to team up with a savvy businessman who had access to ready funds. Hence many a mid-nineteenth-century publishing firm had two or more names—the craftsman plus the backers who had the ear of Philadelphia's powerful banking and insurance industry. In the early national period the First Bank of the United States and the Bank of Pennsylvania had dominated the American economy. Then the Second Bank of the United States, occupying the impressive Greek revival structure built for it by William Strickland in the 1820s, meant that Philadelphia was the seat of a deep well of capital from which to draw. The city also was home to an extensive community of wealthy individuals, whose informal investment network kept much of Philadelphia's business afloat.

Sometimes book producers sought to raise the visibility of their wares by relocating from the periphery to the commercial centers of the city. Other schemes for expansion were more aggressive. The bookseller William Woodward hired ministers to carry religious books to sell as they fanned out into the hinterland. After 1834, when Philadelphia instituted public education administered by local school boards, school-books became another valuable staple. The textbook firm of McCarty and Davis introduced both traveling salesmen and the branch store to expand their publishing empire as far afield as Tennessee, Louisiana, and Missouri. McCarty and Davis next secured their market by producing inexpensive almanacs, do-it-yourself legal works, and novels. Their mission was assisted by the tumbling costs of production and materials beginning in the 1820s, culminating in the transition from rag paper to wood-pulp sheets by the end of the 1850s.

Philadelphia still holds the distinction of having the oldest continuously operating lending library in the English-speaking world: the Library Company of Philadelphia. An important aspect of Benjamin Franklin's legacy, the library helped to sustain the stream of publishing by encouraging a reading public and building rich and international collections for its upper-class members. But Library Company members were only one element of the reading public. School texts, such as The Arithmetical Expositor, authored by Enoch Lewis in 1824 and reissued several times in succeeding decades, produced steady profits for the publisher Kimber and Sharpless. Lindley Murray's English Grammar, which first appeared in 1800, brought more than six decades of profits for Philadelphia book trade. And Jacob Snider's 1833 edition of the Bible, printed in embossed letters for students at the new Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind, reinforced the city's sense of nurturing innovation.

Popular periodicals also enlivened readers' days. Zachariah Poulson took over John Dunlap and David C. Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser in 1800, publishing it until 1839, when it was overshadowed by the more aggressive Public Ledger, founded in 1836. Philadelphia's first "penny paper"—a modern news sheet that took full advantage of inexpensive production techniques—the Ledger initiated the policy of hiring teams of reporters and home delivery boys to ensure that their customers got the hottest news—and they got it right at their own front doors. The Ledger soon had the largest circulation in Pennsylvania.

Godey's Lady's Book outpaced the Ledger, garnering a readership that stretched across the North and the South and by the 1850s claimed some 150,000 subscriptions for its monthly offerings. In a career that began in 1830 and ran for more than six decades (to 1898), Godey's Lady's Book both created and responded to the new woman who eagerly awaited its features of fashion, fiction, and music. Lavishly illustrated and richly focused on romantic images of domesticity and motherhood, Godey's was perhaps the supreme symbol of modern publishing possibilities and the sophisticated urban audience.

The city's publishing enterprise also spawned some surprising offspring. Mathias Baldwin (1795–1866), who began as a manufacturer of bookbinders' tools in Philadelphia in the 1820s, had turned his metalworking know-how to more ambitious directions by the 1830s: he began producing steam-driven locomotives. By the time of his death in 1866, his factory at Broad and Spring Garden Streets had employed hundreds of immigrant workers to build more than one thousand of these machines, which he sold all over the world. In turn his factory had given rise to Midvale Steel, which turned out metal parts to supply the Baldwin Locomotive Works, beginning in 1867.

THE CITY OF REFORM

Partly resulting from the enduring influence of its Quaker founders, antebellum Philadelphia was host to two unique realities: a vigorous energy for social reform and a large and flourishing African American population. Often these two realities fed off each other. Since the eighteenth century, a number of Philadelphia Quakers had been active in antislavery agitation. As abolitionist ferment increased during the 1830s—sometimes intertwining with the women's rights movement—Philadelphians, especially Philadelphia Quakers, joined forces with African Americans in other cities like Boston and New York in pursuit of racial justice. Their various activities have left much evidence in the form of paper and ink. In 1838, for example, the five-year-old Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS, an interracial organization) built its own meeting place—Pennsylvania Hall—only to have it destroyed by a white mob that resented their cross-racial socializing. J. T. Bowen's lithograph immortalized the event.

Not all abolitionists were as wedded to racial equality as was the PFASS, but the debate about how to end slavery and the fate of freed people helped enliven Quaker periodicals such as the Friend, which began publishing in 1827. The Friends Intelligencer, by William Moore, joined the conversation in 1844, as the voice of the schismatic Hicksite Quakers tended to embrace a more radical antislavery strategy than did their more conservative Orthodox rivals. And the mathematics text writer Enoch Lewis took advantage of his captive school audience to insert short notes promoting racial justice and antimilitarism.

Travelers—black and white—found Philadelphia to be a crucial stop on any American tour, and inevitably they reported on the city's race relations and black enterprises. Tocqueville remarked upon the psychological freedom of the city's black population and upon the anxiety it caused many white residents. The Philadelphia experience figured prominently in the narrative of fugitive slaves, such as Ellen and William Craft, who fled to the city from Georgia in 1848 and documented their story in the memoir Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860). Henry "Box" Brown's daring escape from Richmond, Virginia, by means of having himself nailed into a 2-foot-by-2-foot crate and shipped as "dry goods," ended with his being uncrated in Philadelphia and being immortalized in an image created by Peter Kramer and then lithographed by Louis Napoleon Rosenthal. The black historian William Wells Brown complained of Philadelphia's "colorphobia" (Weigley, p. 363), but when Martin Delany, the era's premier black political commentator, recounted his Philadelphia experience in his 1859 novel Blake; or, The Huts of Africa, he praised the array of organizations resulting from black enterprise. Little wonder that when Frank J. Webb wrote The Garies and Their Friends, America's second novel by a black author (published in New York in 1857), he set the story in Philadelphia's upper-class black community.

Philadelphia's black leaders early enjoined the city's literary discourse with their own set of concerns. As early as the 1790s yellow fever epidemic, black spokesmen developed a protest voice that swelled over the decades to include the wealthy sailmaker James Forten's Series of Letters by a Man of Color, published in pamphlet form in 1813, then republished in the nation's first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, in 1827. Forten's son-in-law, Robert Purvis, took up the cause in 1837, authoring an "Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania," which also appeared in a black newssheet, the Colored American. Such abolitionist literature, which poured forth from black Philadelphians, was often published by sympathetic local Quaker printers, culminating in the 1872 publication of The Underground Rail Road, penned by the black Underground Railroad organizer William Still and published by the abolitionist Quaker firm of Porter and Coates. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of black Philadelphia, however, is the Christian Recorder, founded in 1852 by the city's Mother Bethel AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church. The only African American news sheet to publish continuously through the Civil War, the Christian Recorder stood, for many decades, as an authoritative voice of black Philadelphia and indeed of black America.

The Philadelphia that lost its supremacy never regained its first-place status. Nevertheless, creating its own niche in publishing, reform, finance, and indus-try, it remained an important stop on the American tourist trail. With its cosmopolitan population, reform initiatives, and innovative manufacturing strategies, it remained a major port and manufacturing center in the decades following the Civil War.

See also Abolitionist Writing; Banking, Finance, Panics, and Depressions; Blacks; Foreigners; Literary Marketplace; New York; Publishers; Quakers; Slave Narratives; Tourism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Work

Watson, John F. Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania: In the Olden Time; Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants, and of the Earliest Settlements of the Inland Part of Pennsylvania. 1830. Philadelphia: The Author, 1844.

Secondary Works

Geffen, Elizabeth M. "Industrial Development and Social Crisis, 1841–1854." In Philadelphia: A Three-Hundred-Year History, edited by Russell Weigley, pp. 307–362. New York: Norton, 1982.

Hamm, Thomas D. The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Lapsansky, Emma J. "Building Democratic Communities, 1800–1850." In Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth, edited by Randall M. Miller and William Pencak, pp. 153–202. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.

Lapsansky, Phillip. "Graphic Discord: Abolitionist and Anti-abolitionist Images." In The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, pp. 201–230. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Lehuu, Isabelle. Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Remer, Rosalind. Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Wainwright, Nicholas B. "The Age of Nicholas Biddle, 1825–1841." In Philadelphia: A Three-Hundred-Year History, edited by Russell Weigley, pp. 258–306. New York: Norton, 1982.

Wainwright, Nicholas B. Philadelphia in the Romantic Age of Lithography. Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1958.

Weigley, Russell. "The Border City in Civil War, 1854–1865." In Philadelphia: A Three-Hundred-Year History, edited by Russell Weigley, pp. 363–416. New York: Norton, 1982.

Wolf, Edwin, and Marie Elena Korey. Quarter of a Millennium: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1731–1981; A Selection of Books, Manuscripts, Maps, Prints, Drawings, and Paintings. Philadelphia: Library Company, 1981.

Zboray, Ronald J. A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner