Contemporary maps show that Philadelphia occupied the two-mile stretch of land, east to west, between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, and extended about a mile, north to south. Laid out in an orderly grid by William Penn 110 years earlier, the city was to have been a “greene Country Towne, which,” Penn resolved, remembering the great fire of London in 1666, would never burn. He designed a city bisected by two stately thoroughfares (the intersecting Broad and High streets were wider than any seventeenth-century road in London), with four large squares to serve the city’s residents as parks, an even larger square in the city center to house its main public buildings, and tidy lots to accommodate homes and businesses. East-west streets were named after trees; north-south were numbered, beginning at the Delaware River and progressing west. It was a plan that allowed Philadelphia to grow and thrive.
By the time Maria arrived, the city had not yet overspread the land between the two rivers, but what had been a wooded area to the west was now cleared—the result of the British occupation during the war—and ready for expansion. With a population of forty-four thousand, Philadelphia was the second-largest English-speaking city in the world, far outstripping its nearest American competitor, New York, with its thirty-three thousand. It had become the temporary national capital in 1790, the result of a deal Jefferson had brokered with treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton and Virginia representative James Madison, trading congressional passage of Hamilton’s debt plan for the permanent location of the capital city on the Potomac River. In exchange for their votes to seal the deal, Pennsylvania delegates had won Philadelphia as the temporary capital until Washington City would be ready for occupancy.
A booming commercial center throughout the colonial period, now vested with new importance, Philadelphia embarked on a program of building worthy of the nascent republic, in hopes that it could claim that honor permanently. Homes that had been ravaged by war now shone with new windows and coats of paint; public buildings used as hospitals and stables were thoroughly cleaned of stench. In 1787, the city flanked the State House (now known as Independence Hall) with a new county courthouse to the west and, in 1791, City Hall to the east. These new structures would conveniently house Congress and the Supreme Court, as Philadelphians readily improvised to make a capital city out of a commercial and cultural center. The new First Presbyterian Church on Market Street between Second and Third had yet to be built (1793), but it would be the first public building in the city to be faced with a classical temple façade and columns. Following suit two years later, the massive First Bank of the United States would proclaim both the stability and the republican ethos of the new nation.
Arriving in 1794, English artist William Birch recorded the building of the world’s first republican capital since Ancient Rome in a series of remarkable paintings. They enable us to see the rows of neat red-brick buildings, trees, and brick-paved walkways that lined the city’s streets. Pedestrians strolled unconcerned by the hum of activity in the streets, protected by the regularly spaced posts that kept wagons and horses from spilling over onto the sidewalks. By 1800, the city’s development had crept as far west as Twelfth Street, although most of its population remained concentrated east of Seventh, where High Street’s paving stopped—an improvement from 1776, when Seventh Street marked the outskirts of the city and Jefferson resided there for its quiet location. Birch’s images show a prosperous though—in good republican fashion—not ostentatious city, a civilized and productive citizenry, and an already successful nation on the rise.
With the shift of the capital from New York to Philadelphia, Jefferson enlisted the aid of William Temple Franklin, Benjamin’s grandson, to find a rental property that would accommodate both office and domestic space. None of Franklin’s recommendations suited, however, even with the alterations Jefferson intended to make, adding a book room here or moving a wall there. In the end, budget constraints prevented Jefferson from renting the two adjoining houses that Franklin, understanding Jefferson’s sensibilities, suggested would “constitute what the french call un Appartement complet,” so he settled for just one of them instead.
In one of many scenes of Philadelphia captured by William Birch, this shows the magnificent home built in 1789 for Anne Willing Bingham by her husband, William. In their richly furnished home, the Binghams hosted the political and social elite of the new nation on the model of the French salons they had admired in Paris. Both in the salons where men and women discussed politics, and in the neat, orderly streets of the capital where citizens could freely mingle, we see Americans’ aspirations for what their republic could be.
Located on High Street (it was not renamed Market until 1853) between Eighth and Ninth, just two blocks west of the president’s residence, Jefferson’s new home was typical of Philadelphia row houses, with twenty-five feet fronting on the street and a back extension of forty-four feet. A narrow passage ran the length of the house on the ground floor, opening to the public rooms (parlor and dining room) and then extending back to the kitchen in the rear. A large drawing room overlooked the street on the second floor, which also had two additional chambers, one of which Jefferson used for sleeping. Wanting to have a quiet space at the rear of the house to work away from street noise, Jefferson also successfully negotiated for an extension of the second floor to add a book room. His landlord arranged a second rental, across the street, for office space. For all of these modifications for his comfort and convenience, however, nothing suggested that Jefferson was thinking of lodging his daughter with him as he planned his living arrangements in the new capital.
Maria stayed with him only briefly on her arrival, when the relieved father reported to her sister Martha that she was busy making new friends. Nelly Custis, Martha Washington’s granddaughter, was a particular favorite. Jefferson noted that Maria remained “particularly attended to by Mrs. Washington,” who continued her maternal kindness to the motherless girl in spite of her duties as First Lady.
A round of visits from leading ladies of the republic ensued; by mid-November, Jefferson told Martha, Maria had “been honored with the visits of Mrs. Adams, Mrs. Randolph, Mrs. Rittenhouse, Sergeant, Waters, Davies &c. so that she is quite familiar with Philadelphia.” The reunion between Abigail Adams and Maria must have been particularly joyful, since Maria had never been able to make the visit she had promised during their tearful farewell in London four years earlier. Mrs. Randolph’s husband, Edmund, was serving as Washington’s attorney general. Hidden behind their married names were Hannah Rittenhouse and her stepdaughters, Elizabeth and Esther (Mrs. Sergeant and Waters, respectively), who had rescued eleven-year-old Martha from the venerable Mary Hopkinson during her stay in Philadelphia in 1783. These were the girls who had made bearable Martha’s drawing lessons with the imperious Simitiere and with whom Martha had danced away a New Year’s Eve to the merry tunes played by Francis Hopkinson. Now, eight years later, they descended upon Martha’s beautiful young sister to embrace her as well. They squired Maria about the city so that Jefferson could reassure himself within two weeks of her arrival that she was comfortable in her new surroundings.
Whether the press of his affairs of state precluded Jefferson from giving her a tour of his Philadelphia, we shall never know. Only one of the letters Maria wrote to her sister from this period survives, and but a handful to her brother-in-law. But we can certainly imagine that Jefferson would have pointed out to her the house he had rented during the momentous summer of 1776; it was just a block away, after all, on the southwest corner of High and Seventh. It was now the home of James Wilson, a Pennsylvanian who had also served in the Continental Congress that year and signed the declaration Jefferson had drafted “right in that front room,” father may have told daughter, pointing to the second floor. Jefferson may have taken her to the State House, where the Pennsylvania Assembly now met, to show her where he had helped declare a revolution. He may have taken her to the home of artist Charles Willson Peale, whose passion for natural science rivaled Jefferson�
��s. Stuffed to capacity with his enormous collection of animal specimens, Peale’s home proved insufficient to display them all; by 1794, he had established a museum in Philosophical Hall. One can only hope that Jefferson would not have delegated these outings to Adrien Petit, his French butler who had migrated to Philadelphia to supervise Jefferson’s domestic staff there. Maria’s reunion with Petit may have been tinged by the memory of their first unhappy meeting in London. Bringing his training in the art of French cookery, James Hemings, another alumnus of Paris, rounded out Jefferson’s Philadelphia household.
Whatever her introduction to Philadelphia, on November 1—no more than a week at most after her arrival—Maria and Jefferson stepped out onto High Street, turned left at the corner onto Eighth Street, and, crossing the street to the east side, entered the lovely courtyard that fronted Mrs. Pine’s boarding school. Mary Pine was the widow of Robert Edge Pine, an English portrait painter who had died three years earlier. In 1785, the artist had come to the attention of George Washington through his old friend George William Fairfax. Because Pine had been a staunch friend to the American cause, Fairfax told Washington, he had lost his business and friends in his own country and had migrated with his wife and six daughters to America. Moved by the story, Washington was persuaded and sat for what may have been the truest—although most forgotten—portrait of the general, worn out from the fatigues of war. The likeness did not suit the public’s craving for a hero, but it did prompt its subject to invite Pine to Mount Vernon to paint his family members there. This mark of Washington’s favor opened many doors to Pine. He maintained a studio in the Assembly Room of the State House in the late 1780s and built the spacious home on Eighth Street to house his works. It was America’s first art museum.
But when Pine died in November 1788, his widow struggled to stay afloat. She had apparently been operating a drawing academy in their home before her husband’s death. In the spring of 1789, trading on the reputation of her late husband, she expanded her curricular offerings and advertised a new and improved school. By 1790, Mrs. Pine appeared to have given up the fight, for she put the magnificent home up for sale. Yet on this fall day in 1791, as Maria walked up the front path to be enrolled, Mrs. Pine had persevered and the school was still in operation. Word of mouth, from one elite government official to another, had been sufficient to garner the number of scholars necessary to keep her school open. Through his secretary, Tobias Lear, George Washington had made discreet inquiries about the program and fees for his step-granddaughter Nelly Custis; Deborah Bache, granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, was a pupil there. Elizabeth and James Monroe also considered sending their daughter there if they did not return to Virginia.
Mary Pine’s splendid home certainly did not hint at her financial distress. It sat on a lot fully four times the breadth of Jefferson’s rental property and more than triple its depth. Unlike most Philadelphia row homes, which practically spilled out onto the street, Mrs. Pine’s home enjoyed the luxury of a twenty-foot setback, protected from prying eyes and street noise by an enclosed courtyard. Jefferson had surely toured the school before he decided to board his daughter there. He would have approved of the six first-floor rooms, each heated with a fireplace, that Mrs. Pine’s advertisement had proudly described; he had been incredulous when the workman hired to build a book room in his own lodgings failed to include a fireplace. (“It is possible that I may not have particularly spoken of the chimney,” Jefferson complained to his landlord, but that was because he had taken a fireplace for granted.) Mrs. Pine’s heated rooms served the students as a residence space, as they had for the Pine family when her husband was alive. Jefferson certainly would have appreciated the beauty and proportions of the second-floor ballroom, which Mrs. Pine had described as “being the whole front of the house in length and about thirty-three feet in breadth, with a very lofty ceiling, and lighted from above in an elegant stile.” Jefferson had fallen in love with skylights in Paris. He had hoped to have one installed in his new second-floor book room, where he could enjoy both light and privacy, but the workmen had completely misunderstood his instructions. Instead, when he returned from his summer holiday in Virginia in 1792, he found to his disgust that the workers put the windows in the doors rather than in the ceiling, utterly thwarting his design. (He ended up using it as a storeroom.) But the large, light-filled room in Mrs. Pine’s home must have made a wonderful schoolroom.
Jefferson gave Mary Pine a bank note for $33.33 that day to pay for Maria’s tuition and board. If she remained that night, Maria’s leave-taking of her father would not have been marked by the tears Martha had shed on her first day at Panthemont. Living just around the corner from her father’s home and office, Maria could visit him every day. In fact, the proximity of Mrs. Pine’s school to his home had influenced his choice. Another Philadelphia teacher, Ann Brodeau, ran a better school in Jefferson’s opinion; but since it was much farther from his own rental, it would have precluded Maria’s daily visits. Without her elder sister to smooth the transition, Maria was on her own to form new friendships and find her way in her new school. Jefferson may have been satisfied that she had “made young friends enough to keep herself in a bustle with them” two weeks after her enrollment, but Maria’s report to Tom, after almost a month, that she had “been to Mrs Pines but I am not well acquainted with her or the young ladies there yet,” seems more likely, given her habitual reticence.
Much as Jefferson scholars have tucked Martha away in Panthemont without comment, so too have they done with Maria in Philadelphia. A footnote here in the edited edition of Jefferson’s family letters, or an editor’s comment there in the print edition of Jefferson’s voluminous memorandum books, and that is all the attention Maria gets. The sparse documentary record of Maria’s tenure in Philadelphia helps to explain this. Yet in many respects, we should consider that Philadelphia was for Maria what Paris had been for Martha. As Martha had in her first month at Panthemont, Maria could see her father daily, without having to vie with a sister for his attention; she attended an elite female academy; she hobnobbed with a privileged group of girls and women and likely attended plays, assemblies, and other amusements around the city. Here she may have even felt the first stirrings of love.
Mary Pine’s school for young women was small and exclusive: The 1790 census showed only ten females (including Mary Pine and her four daughters) in residence. However small her school, the English-born Mrs. Pine had a clear sense of educating her students for the elevated status they occupied. Young Deborah Bache, Franklin’s granddaughter, was delighted when Mrs. Pine seated her at the head of the table with Nelly Custis, the president’s step-granddaughter, and Maria Morris, the daughter of the wealthy financier who underwrote so much of the war. Social patterns of deference had not disappeared just because there had been a political revolution. This was particularly true for women, the struggling widow was well aware, as she tried to woo the custom of the nation’s elite in the new capital. After her two years of ranked seating arrangements at meals at Panthemont with aristocratic English and French girls, Maria likely had a different sensibility about such things than did Deborah Bache’s mother, who tartly told her daughter to inform Mrs. Pine that “there is no rank in this country but rank mutton.”
In fact, Mrs. Pine offered her students exactly the curriculum Jefferson and other fathers of his standing thought proper for young women, both useful and ornamental. Under her tutelage, her students studied grammar, reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography, subjects reflecting the increasingly popular view through the eighteenth century of the rational capacities of girls and women. Still, in this transitional post-Revolutionary era, ornamental accomplishments were still considered crucial to polish young women for their presentation on the marriage market, so Mrs. Pine also advertised needlework, French, drawing, music, and dancing under her particular “care and instruction.” With his firm belief in the importance of needlework to alleviate the tedium of plantation life, and his perpetual interes
t in his daughters’ progress in drawing and music, Jefferson could rest assured that his requirements for Maria met an exact match in Mrs. Pine’s offerings.
Robert Pine’s art museum offered the perfect setting and inspiration for his widow’s drawing lessons. The huge room on the second floor, so well lit by skylights, housed much of Pine’s work. As a boy, Rembrandt Peale had accompanied his artist father, Charles Willson Peale, to see the new museum. After paying the twenty-five cents admission fee, they climbed the stairs to the second floor. “Accustomed only to my father’s small gallery of paintings,” Peale recalled, “when I entered Mr. Pine’s spacious salon, I was astonished at its magnitude and the richness of the paintings which covered its walls.” When Pine emerged from his workroom, the young Rembrandt was surprised to see such “a very small and slender man as the author of the great works I had just left.”
But Pine did not work alone. His wife was a portrait painter in her own right, and she was assisted by at least two of her four daughters. They often finished the portraits their father had begun on his southern tours. Pine painted the subjects’ heads, and his daughters finished the pieces, adding bodies, clothing, and backgrounds, allowing their father to move on more rapidly to his next paying customer. Jefferson was not as easily impressed as the young Rembrandt had been (he bought a portrait of James Madison that he thought “indifferent”), but Mrs. Pine’s expertise would have been entirely suitable for training a thirteen-year-old girl in that female accomplishment. And her young assistants would have been far less intimidating teachers for shyer students like Maria. If Maria ever kept any of her drawings, however, they have not survived.
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