One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

Phillips’s shop on Market Street, midway between Front and Second streets, with a view from its entrance of the Delaware River, was just four doors down from Dunlap’s print shop. It was well known by the end of July 1776 that the printer had stayed up all night inking two hundred copies of the freshly penned Declaration for distribution throughout the colonies. Unlike Dunlap, the man now composing a letter at his shop counter was no revolutionary—not yet, anyway. Phillips’s primary purpose in writing to his kinsman was to inquire about the welfare of his mother. Yet he had other business to attend to as well.

  Born in Germany, Phillips had also lived in Holland, England, and New York but was now among the refugees transforming Philadelphia. Comprised of about 200 families, the city’s Jewish community was small by European standards. Jews had begun to flee New York and Charles Town (as Charleston, South Carolina, was then known), port cities that seemed likely to fall under British control. Phillips traded in beaver pelts and fine fabrics and had worked as the shoykhet—the kosher butcher—for his synagogue. He was regarded as an important man, both ceremonially and financially, by all in his tight-knit community.

  When he arrived in the colonies in 1756 he had owned nothing—not even his own time. He had entered South Carolina as the indentured servant of an indigo merchant, a man by the name of Moses Lindo, who was one of the earliest Jewish success stories on the continent. Lindo had brought Phillips along with him from London, where he had built a prominent indigo trading firm on Wormwood Street in the city’s financial district, and had established a fortune that would make him well known during his lifetime on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Before his departure from England, Lindo had announced his intention to relocate his center of business operations by publishing his assessment of the product he hoped soon to ship throughout Europe. “I have examined the major Part of the Carolina Indico entered this year,” he wrote, in a letter published in the South Carolina Gazette in 1756, “and have the Pleasure to find a considerable Quantity equal to the BEST French.” In the letter, he went on to establish his bona fides in the trade by providing directions on how most effectively to treat “indico” to remove any impurities. Three months later, he had arrived in the colonies “with an Intent to purchase Indico of the Growth and Manufacture of this Province, and to remit the same to his Constituents in London, classed, sorted and packed in a Manner proper for the foreign market.” He was determined to corner the market, prepared to “employ the Sum of One Hundred and Twenty Thousand Pounds Currency” in order to set himself apart from all competition.

  Lindo and Phillips’s emigration came at a time when there were plentiful reasons for a Jew to abandon his own country for the unknown. For the better part of two decades before their departure, the place of Jews in England had been uncertain, seeming to improve with tolerant-seeming Acts of Parliament, only to be violently set back by latent anti-Jewish sentiment that flared up at the slightest provocation. The year Lindo and Phillips set sail, 1756, was ironically the centenary of Oliver Cromwell’s readmittance of Jews to the kingdom, the end of a three-hundred-year ban on their ability to openly live, do business, and practice their faith. Since then, native Jewish Britons had secured some rights—as Lindo’s success attests—but Jews not born in England still were not permitted to hold elected office or work in the government unless they were willing to convert, receive the sacraments, and swear a Christian oath. Originally envisioned as a defense against lingering Catholic elements in the kingdom, the so-called Sacrament Test required immigrants to receive the sacrament of communion in an Anglican Church in order to be naturalized, and thus caught Jews in its net as well.

  In 1740, a pathway toward Jewish naturalization was opened through the Plantation Act, which allowed Jews who were willing to live in the American colonies for seven years or more the opportunity to become full British subjects with equal rights. Given that the one precondition of their taking advantage of this act was that they leave England, it should come as no surprise that it was not passed in the spirit of toleration or civil rights. Rather, it was an economic decision on the part of the Parliament.

  England had until then watched jealously as the possessions of the Netherlands in the New World had prospered on a scale well beyond that of the British territories. One key to the success of these ventures, it was supposed, was the role of Dutch Jewish merchants, who enjoyed far greater freedoms of movement and property ownership than England’s Jews either at home or abroad. A particular example of this Dutch success was the tiny island of St. Eustatius, where Jews had been granted full equality in 1730 and which by then, in no small part thanks to the efforts of its non-Christian inhabitants, was among the busiest and most prosperous trading posts in the Americas.

  The success of St. Eustatius was something England wanted desperately to emulate, and even those who harbored anti-Semitic prejudices believed it would be for the good of the empire to seed British colonies with Jewish brokers, merchants, and other businessmen. Doing so, in the belief of the members of Parliament who had passed the Plantation Act, would allow England to benefit from established networks of Jewish commerce. As London’s Member of Parliament Sir John Barnard later argued during debates regarding the naturalization of Jews, it would be a good thing to exploit connections that would endure with or without official sanction, because the Jewish people “are dispersed over the whole world, and keep up correspondence with one another.”

  Much of the act’s support undoubtedly was based on anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jewish prowess with money, but some of the rhetoric—Jewish dispersal throughout the world; the persistence of Jewish alliances that endured despite the changing fates of the nations around them—was true. Down through the centuries of repressive laws in every kingdom in which they had lived, Jews had found a way to survive, and some had even managed to prosper. That they had done so undoubtedly had something to do with their tendency to “keep up correspondence with one another.”

  When the Plantation Act succeeded in convincing Jews to relocate in order to secure their rights, some in Parliament proposed that a similar path to naturalization might be opened to Jews who remained in England. The Law of Naturalization of 1753, which, like Maryland’s similar law of 1826, was popularly known as “the Jew Bill,” granted immigrant Jews the right to become full subjects of the Crown without renouncing their faith.

  A man like Moses Lindo, who never seems to have considered conversion for reasons either practical or spiritual, would likely have been pleased to see these religious tests end, and this was precisely the point. The law was passed in part to keep wealthy merchants and their money in the British territories. However, when the popular outcry against the new law brought a fresh wave of anti-Semitism to Britain’s shores—its passage was met, in the words of one historian, with “horror and execration”—the act was quickly repealed.

  It was in the wake of this failed attempt to expand the rights of Jewish immigrants to England that Lindo and Phillips left London. The British-born Lindo had rights in his native country, but, faced with such a high-profile aborted effort at increased toleration, he likely began to wonder if he might have more opportunity to build his business and his reputation abroad. From the moment of his arrival in Charles Town, Lindo established an empire of commerce that spanned the ocean, creating new contacts throughout the colonies while exploiting his existing relationships with the tightly knit Jewish merchant classes of England and Holland. The governor of South Carolina soon named him inspector general of all indigo trade in the province.

  For Jonas Phillips, the potential benefits of emigration were even greater. Because he had been born in Germany, in London he was sentenced essentially to statelessness. He lacked the rights to own property, establish a business, or participate in government. Thanks to the Plantation Act, however, he could secure rights equal to any British subject by accompanying Lindo to America and remaining for seven years. For a Jew in his position, even the ostensibly nonreligious choice to become an inde
ntured servant for the purposes of emigration had a spiritual dimension. Given English law at the time, he would have had more far more latitude if he had chosen to submit himself to the Sacrament Test. The very act of emigration, then, represented a religious choice—a choice to remain a Jew rather than embrace the beliefs of the majority.

  As soon as he earned his freedom from his indenture, Phillips followed in his former employer’s footsteps. Like Lindo, he made no secret of his religious affiliation or of his ambitions. He established himself first as a merchant in Albany, where he filled local papers with advertisements that drew attention to the international variety of his wares. He seems to have sold everything he could get his hands on: clothing and blankets, beads and ribbons, china cups and saucers, brass and copper kettles, shoes from England and wine from France and Spain, as well as oranges, coffee, and rum from the tropics. “All city and country gentlemen, storekeepers and others, that please to favor him with their custom,” he noted in one advertisement, “may depend on being well served, and on as easy terms as possible, for ready money only.” Perhaps coming to terms with life near the northern frontier, he gradually became less strict about his terms of payment, soon accepting “Beaver and Deerskins, Smal fur at New York Market price” in addition to cash and credit.

  After a brief setback following the French and Indian War, by the mid-1770s Phillips was again doing well enough that he was able to move south. Settling in New York City, he expanded his business and soon offered for sale real estate, Indian wampum, a horse and carriage, and, on at least one occasion, “a young negro wench of good character.” As his fortunes rose, he courted the daughter of a prominent family of Portuguese Jews. At the time, the Sephardim, the Jews of southern Europe, were considered a higher class than those from Ashkenaz, as Phillips was. Crossing this cultural line, he married up, as they say. Over the course of a long marriage, his wife gave birth to twenty-one children. If Phillips had come to America with thoughts of simply putting in his seven years and returning to England with full rights, he showed no desire to leave now.

  Nor did he forget where he had come from. He, too, made sure to “keep up correspondence” both with business associates from the old country and with family he had left behind. In May of 1775, for example, he had written to Gumpel Samson and asked him to deliver money to his mother. When he heard no reply, he waited long enough so that he would not seem ungrateful or impatient, and then he wrote again, choosing to write in Yiddish just in case his letter should fall before non-Jewish eyes. The letter later seized by the Royal Navy begins with the kind of overflowing sentiment that naturally precedes the asking of a favor.

  “Peace to my beloved master, my kinsman, the eminent and wealthy, wise and discerning God-fearing man, whose honored, glorious name is Mr. Gumpel,” Phillips wrote. “May his Rock and Redeemer protect him and all his family! Peace!”

  As this missive would be sent by means not before employed between them, Phillips then explained the letter’s delay and the roundabout route it took reaching its destination. “As it is not always possible to send a letter to England on account of the war in America, I must therefore write by way of St. Eustatius.”

  This would likely not have surprised Gumpel Samson. Like Philadelphia, St. Eustatius had by this time become an important coordinate in the Jewish geography of the New World. Despite its size, it was home to a Jewish community nearly equal to that of Philadelphia before the war, which crucially served as regular intermediaries between America and Europe now that the English colonies were hidden behind the sailcloth curtain of the British blockade. Phillips had become acquainted with the Dutch Jews of the West Indies—again through “keeping up correspondence”—after his congregation in New York had taken up the cause of supporting the St. Eustatius synagogue when it needed help rebuilding after a hurricane.

  Despite the formality of the letter’s greeting, Phillips and Samson seem to have enjoyed an easy way with each other, a familial willingness to speak honestly across the expanse of the sea.

  “I have not yet had any answer to a letter of May, 1775, when I sent my master a bill of exchange for ten pounds sterling for my mother,” Phillips wrote. “Should that letter not have arrived, then the enclosed third bill of exchange will obtain the money, and please send it to my mother, long life to her.”

  As he wrote, Phillips apparently considered the options open to him if the bank draft sent previously had already cleared with the money changers. It would be a waste of time and effort to ship these funds back across the ocean, especially in the roundabout way that he had been required to use. No, there was a more practical purpose to which this money might be put, though it was not without risk.

  “Should the funds have already been obtained,” he wrote, “you need not return the bill of exchange again.” Instead, he added, “a hint to the wise will suffice” and then proposed that those same funds might be used to buy merchandise with which the two of them might run the British blockade. “As no English goods can come over at all, and much money can be earned with Holland goods if one is willing to take a chance, should you have a friend who will this winter acquaint himself with the goods mentioned below, I can assure you that four hundred per cent is to be earned thereby.”

  “I could write my meaning better in English than Yiddish,” Phillips added, but his meaning was plain enough: There was always money to be made during a war—just as there was money to be lost. Despite the naval blockade that would soon find this letter confiscated, Phillips had no doubt who held the upper hand in the ongoing struggle. “The war will make all England bankrupt,” he wrote. “The Americans have an army of 100,000 and the English only 25,000 and some ships. The Americans have already made themselves like the States of Holland”—that is, a republic. “The enclosed is the Declaration of the whole country. How it will end, the blessed God knows. The war does me no damage, thank God!”

  The war was to Phillips, at the time, merely something to be endured. The Jewish people would persevere, as they always had, under whichever regime emerged victorious. This was not the statement of political indifference it might seem; rather, it was an acknowledgment, shared with one who would understand precisely what he meant, that he would be an outsider no matter who was in charge. The best they could do for now was attend to the needs of family.

  “I would like to send you a bill of exchange, but it is not possible for me to get it. If my master, long life to him, will disburse for me one hundred gulden to my mother, I can assure you that just as soon as a bill of exchange on St. Eustatia can be had, I will, with thanks, honestly pay you. I have it, thank God, in my power, and I know that my mother, long life to her, needs it very much; and I beg of my master, long life to him, to write me at once an answer, addressed as herein written.”

  With this business attended to, Phillips ended his note with the usual niceties. “There is no further news,” he wrote, “My wife and children, long life to her and them, together send you many greetings and wish you good health up to one hundred years.”

  When he finished his letter, he sent it to his contacts in St. Eustatius, where it was received by a young New Yorker named Samuel Curson, who forwarded the parcel containing the letter, bank draft, and the Declaration of Independence on toward its interception at sea.

  On the face of it, Phillips’s letter does not seem to have much to do with the success or failure of the war effort. Indeed, at the time he wrote it, he undoubtedly was more interested in his own enrichment than in the fortunes of the patriots. Yet shortly after sending this letter, Phillips seems to have had a change of heart. By 1778, he was serving in the 7th Company of the Philadelphia Militia as a middle-aged private under Captain John Linton and Colonel William Bradford. As such, he had joined the approximately one hundred Jews known to have fought in uniform against the British, as well as the vast majority of the two thousand Jews in the English colonies who supported the rebellion. For a period of two years after joining the ranks, his regular advertisement
s in the newspapers of Philadelphia fell away—an indication, perhaps, that he had matters other than commerce on his mind.

  Phillips’s letter, then, captures an intriguing moment in which a man harboring revolutionary sympathies—he had refused to stay in British-controlled New York, after all—had perhaps not yet fully committed to the cause. This temporary ambivalence aside, however, the network represented by this instance of a single Jewish merchant’s efforts to “keep up correspondence” was already essential to the fight for Independence at the time he mailed the Declaration to his Dutch kinsman. Moreover, the letter provides a key to understanding the most significant role played by Jews in the war. The letter itself might be considered as a map of sorts, plotting a triangle of coordinates that shared the distinction of being home to three Jewish communities, without which American Independence may not have been achieved. The place the letter was written (Philadelphia), the place it was sent (Amsterdam), and the intermediary between the two (St. Eustatius)—each had a unique role to play in the war effort, yet they were all bound together by precisely the kind of Jewish network of commerce, communication, and family ties that the British Parliament had earlier hoped to exploit for the benefit of the empire.

  Philadelphia at the time served as the center of operations to small-time Jewish businessmen like Phillips who attempted to circumvent British control, as well as to major brokers and sustainers of the war effort, who sought not merely to dodge the Crown’s reach but to dismantle it. Often referred to as the financier of the Revolution, the Polish Jew Haym Solomon had been in America less than a decade when war broke out, and yet he quickly became one of the most significant benefactors of the newborn nation and many of its founding fathers, who acknowledged that they could not have persevered without Solomon’s help. After he, like Phillips, had fled to Philadelphia during New York’s British occupation, Solomon kept an office on Front Street, just around the corner from Phillips’s shop. James Madison wrote abashedly of his frequent loans from Solomon: “The kindness of our little friend in Front Street, near the coffee house, is a fund that will preserve me from extremities; but I never resort to it without great mortification, as he obstinately rejects all recompense.” Solomon was so obstinate in this rejection, apparently, that he died penniless, owed as much as $600,000 by the nation he helped birth.