They had not come to Philadelphia to wage a revolution. Their first, indeed their only, task was to find a path toward reconciliation. As they arrived in Philadelphia in late August and early September of 1774, many of them must have wondered how things had reached such a state of crisis. How had a relationship that had been so harmonious, so mutually beneficial to both Crown and colonies, deteriorated so badly, and so quickly?
The Delegates Explore Philadelphia
Like anyone arriving in a great city for the first time, the delegates set out to explore Philadelphia. The founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, had laid out a plan for Philadelphia that had the city’s streets arranged in a perfect grid, stretching from the Delaware to the Schuylkill rivers. In fact though, in 1774, nearly a century after its founding, Philadelphia’s population was crammed into a space occupying only about a quarter of that area. The main part of the city was roughly the size of a small New England town but with ten times the population, and so perhaps the first thing that caught their attention was the sheer concentration of humanity within that relatively small space. The city occupied the area from Front Street bordering the Delaware River in the east, westward to Sixth Street in the West, and running north and south from Arch Street to South Street, and within those confines lived most of the city’s residents.
Because Philadelphia’s population was growing more rapidly than any town in America at that point, more and more of the city’s residents crammed themselves into small houses and shacks in makeshift alleys that ran between the more carefully laid-out main streets. In that sense Philadelphia provided the visiting delegates with a glimpse of America’s future—a city in which the contrasts between prosperity and poverty were impossible to ignore.16
Arriving delegates must also have been struck by Philadelphia’s ethnic and religious diversity. Boston was overwhelmingly English in its makeup. New York was growing more diverse, with its mixture of English, Dutch, increasing numbers of other European immigrants and a growing African slave population. But Philadelphia, within its roughly forty blocks, had brought together rich and poor, slave and free, English, Irish, German and African, Quaker, Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic and Jew. The city’s richest and most powerful residents lived in imposing townhouses on the main streets, but they could easily see and hear the dynamic commotion of the great mass of Philadelphia’s other inhabitants, of all religions and ethnicities, clustered tightly in makeshift shacks located in the alleys immediately behind those houses. And, modern-day plumbing being something that lay in the distant future, the smell emanating from the improvised outhouses, not to mention from the open sewer on Dock Street running through the heart of the town, was not something anyone used to living in the expansive environment of the countryside would be likely to miss.
Philadelphia in 1774 was not only a city whose population was expanding more rapidly than that of any other in America, but also which was enjoying a prosperity greater than any other city. In 1774 Philadelphia’s residents, about a thousand of whom were African slaves and another thousand free blacks, lived in some 6,000 houses, with more than 500 new houses added each year. In 1774 alone, Philadelphians built more houses than Bostonians were able to construct in an entire decade. A few of those houses were genuinely impressive structures. Located on the south side of Market Street between 5th and 6th Streets, the mansion owned by Richard Penn, grandson of the colony’s founder, William Penn, was as lavish as any home in any city in America.17
In the days immediately following his arrival, John Adams would frequently evince his awe at the city’s opulence and sophistication. He was particularly impressed by the Pennsylvania Hospital, located at Eighth and Pine Streets. Medical practice anywhere in America was in a pretty primitive state, with most ordinary illnesses being treated either by purgatives, sweating or bleeding, and typical surgical procedures occurring with little or no anesthesia, and amputation being the norm rather than the exception. But primitive as it may have seemed to a twenty-first century patient, it was improving. And Pennsylvania Hospital, co-founded by Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond, was leading the way. It was probably America’s first teaching hospital, in which doctors received carefully planned clinical training rather than serving a haphazard apprenticeship. And it pioneered in treating the mentally, as well as the physically, ill. Recording his impressions in his diary after a tour of the hospital, John Adams went on and on about the range of activities occurring within the hospital, showing a particular fascination for the “lower Rooms under Ground,” in which “the Cells of the Lunaticks, a Number of them, some furious, some merry, some Melancholly” were to be found. Although Adams’s description may sound Dickensian to a twenty-first century reader, the very fact that the mentally ill were being treated in a hospital rather than simply being confined to the basements of their homes was a step forward in American medical practice. Apart from the hospital, Philadelphia may have had more trained doctors than any city in America, and many of the delegates to the Congress, mindful of periodic outbreaks of smallpox in the city and having access for the first time to doctors capable of treating them, ventured to try the still-untested method of inoculation while they were in the city.18
By far the most imposing building in the city was the State House. Designed by Andrew Hamilton and Edmund Woolley in 1732, it had taken more than two decades to complete. With its imposing bell tower and the bucolic park and gardens surrounding it, it may have been the most impressive public building in all of America. Some of that beauty and dignity was undermined a bit by the immense building standing directly in front of the State House. The Walnut Street Jail, still under construction in 1774, was a massive three-story structure that loomed over the State House, and the residents of the jail, taken to hanging out the windows and raining insults on passersby, made the overall scene in that neighborhood a bit less inviting.19
The delegates may have been most impressed by the number of cultural and intellectual institutions in the city. Three of the most prominent of those had all been created by the city’s leading citizen, Benjamin Franklin. The Library Company of Philadelphia, America’s first public library, had its headquarters on the second floor of Carpenters’ Hall, the building in which the delegates would meet during the next three months. The College of Philadelphia, later to be known as the University of Pennsylvania, was founded by Franklin as his city’s answer to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Unlike its counterparts to the north, and consistent with Franklin’s own intellectual and philosophical beliefs, the college was intended to be America’s first secular institution of higher learning, with a curriculum aimed at combining a knowledge of ancient languages and ancient history with the “useful knowledge” to be gained by the study of subjects such as mathematics, natural science and the history of commerce and manufacturing. And, standing right next to the State House, was the American Philosophical Society, intended by its founder to be the American equivalent of the Royal Society of London, of which he was a proud member. The cultural and intellectual institutions of Philadelphia could hardly compete in scale or prestige with those of London, but they were nevertheless indicative of a combination of economic vitality and cosmopolitan, cultural ambition unmatched in any other city in America.20
On a far different level, most of the delegates, with the possible exceptions of a few of the New Englanders, must also have been pleased to see that there was no shortage of places in which they could find opportunities for the convivial consumption of alcohol. Philadelphians, like most Americans, had a marked fondness for drink. Starting their day with a glass of beer and continuing on through the afternoon and evening with cider, wine, port and rum, Philadelphians consumed an amount of alcohol that is simply astonishing by today’s standards. Consequently, the one, truly ubiquitous commercial institution in the city was the tavern, of which there were no fewer than 110 in 1774. Taverns were spread throughout the city—indeed, it would have been impossible to walk even a block without encountering one—bu
t they were particularly concentrated around the public market, for that was the area in which an enterprising tavern keeper was most likely to attract a clientele. In general, taverns were of three types. The largest and most genteel—taverns like Smith’s City Tavern, the Indian King, the Indian Queen and the London Coffee House—served as dining places and watering holes for the city’s elite, as well as providing lodging for travelers who expected a bit more than a bare room and bed. Overwhelmingly, the delegates to the Congress lodged during their time in Philadelphia either in these genteel taverns or in some of the city’s more respectable boardinghouses. The boardinghouses may have served breakfast but in general did not serve dinner, so most of the delegates either took their main meals in the city’s finest taverns or, as was often the case, by invitation in the homes of some of the city’s most prominent citizens. A level below the genteel taverns were those like the Black Horse or the Anvil and Double Cross Keys, which also provided food, drink and lodging, but were not as finely furnished. We know that many of the delegates from the South brought one or more slaves with them, and though we have little record of where those slaves were lodged, it is likely that they either stayed in this second level of tavern or in some of the smaller, less commodious boardinghouses that dotted the city’s streets and alleys.21
Like every city and town of any size in America, Philadelphia boasted a public market, but it was surely the largest, and perhaps the most boisterous, in all of America. It was a covered market, with walls and roofs, and stretched along Market Street (or High Street as it was sometimes called) all the way from Second Street to Fifth Street. The stalls from Second through Fourth Streets were devoted mainly to the selling of meat and fish. The butchers often slaughtered their animals on the spot, and the patrons were frequently forced to stand in the pools of blood while they made their purchases. On a hot day—and it was very hot during those early days in September—it was not unusual to see animals’ carcasses completely covered with flies. When the butchers wanted to get rid of the carcasses, they would throw them in the creek (we would call it an open sewer) at nearby Dock Street. Dock Street Creek was a notoriously filthy, smelly, unhealthy part of the city, the recipient not only of animal carcasses, but also the waste products of neighborhood brewing establishments and soap boilers, not to mention the constant flow of excrement that made its way into the creek from the neighboring privies scattered all over the city.22
Silas Deane, a delegate who hailed from the small town of Wethersfield, Connecticut, south of Hartford, was no doubt one of those unaccustomed to such sights and smells, and, clearly, he didn’t like them. He displayed some of the provincial pride common among the New Englanders, and his first impressions of Philadelphia were unrelentingly negative. He complained about the quality of the roads leading into it and the unimpressive vista as he was approaching the city. Writing to his wife, he complained that there was more “grass and verdant Meadows” in the immediate vicinity of Hartford, Connecticut, than there was on the sixty miles of road leading into Philadelphia. Nor did Deane think much of the High Street Market. He visited it on September 2, a particularly warm day, and the New Englander complained bitterly about not only the heat, but about the quality of the fruit, vegetables, fish, fowl and beef to be purchased there. Apparently Deane was not reticent about sharing with the city’s residents his low opinion about virtually everything he saw in Philadelphia, an impulse that hardly won him any friends among those attending the market that day. Deane’s opinion of the city would improve over time, but his initial comments were symptomatic of an obstacle the delegates to the Congress would have to overcome: a reflexive provincialism that militated against efforts to work together to find a common solution to the imperial crisis which they were confronting.23
Forty-five of the fifty-six delegates to the First Continental Congress had arrived in Philadelphia by September 5, the day it commenced. It was a remarkable feat since many colonies had not even elected their delegates until late July or early August—a relatively short time between the decision to hold a general congress in the first place and the distances that many had to travel to attend it.
In addition to the delegates from Massachusetts, Virginia and South Carolina, whose travels and initial impressions of the city we have already observed, the other delegates present that opening day were John Sullivan and Nathaniel Folsom from New Hampshire; Stephen Hopkins and Samuel Ward from Rhode Island; Eliphalet Dyer, Silas Deane and Roger Sherman from Connecticut; James Duane, John Jay, Philip Livingston, Isaac Low and William Floyd of New York; James Kinsey, William Livingston, John Dehart, Stephen Crane and Richard Smith of New Jersey; Caesar Rodney, Thomas McKean and George Read from Delaware; and, the Congress’s hosts, the delegates from Pennsylvania—Joseph Galloway, Samuel Rhoads, Thomas Mifflin, Charles Humphreys, John Morton and Edward Biddle.24
The Delegates to the First Congress: A Collective Profile
Although most of the delegates to the Congress had entered into the city as strangers, nevertheless, as a group they had much in common. Pennsylvania’s deputy governor, John Penn, described them as “the ablest & wealthiest men in America” and believed they would express the views “not . . . of a Mob but of the first & best people in all the Colonies.” Penn was right. Nearly all of the delegates were wealthy, and nearly every delegation could count among its members an individual—Thomas Cushing of Massachusetts, Samuel Ward of Rhode Island, John Jay and Philip Livingston of New York, Governor William Livingston of New Jersey, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, Richard Bland and Benjamin Harrison of Virginia, the Rutledges and Henry Middleton of South Carolina—who were among the wealthiest residents in his colony.
Reflecting an occupational bias that would persist in American politics up to the present day, thirty-two of the fifty-six delegates who would eventually take part in the sessions of the First Continental Congress were lawyers. That number is somewhat misleading, for only about half of them earned their living by practicing law; the rest were planters or merchants or simply subsisted on inherited wealth as “gentlemen.” Then, as now, ambitious men pursued legal training not only as a vocation but as a useful path toward financial and political success. Not surprisingly, the majority of the delegates from the South were planters, although, again, among that group of twenty-three, at least ten could claim training in the law.25
The one delegate whose occupation is most difficult to describe was also the one with most modest economic attainment—Sam Adams. Although he had from time to time made a meager living as a highly unsuccessful tax collector, perhaps the best occupational label for Boston’s most visible resident was “professional politician,” or, in the eyes of the British, “professional agitator.”
At a time when a college education was a rarity, even among the wealthy, fifteen of the delegates had attended college and five had studied law at the Inns of Court in London. Among the New Englanders, all four of the Massachusetts delegates had attended Harvard, and two of the three Connecticut delegates—Eliphalet Dyer and Silas Deane—had attended Yale; the third Connecticut delegate, Roger Sherman, who began his career as a shoemaker, had no formal education beyond a few years in grammar school. Among the New York delegates, John Jay attended King’s College (soon to become Columbia), and Philip Livingston attended Yale. New Jersey’s William Livingston, the son of Philip Livingston, followed in his father’s footsteps and also attended Yale. Among the Pennsylvania delegates, only Thomas Mifflin could boast of a college degree, having attended the College of Philadelphia. When John Dickinson joined the Pennsylvania delegation in mid-October, he would bring to six the total number of congressional delegates with legal training at the Inns of Court. Among the Marylanders, Robert Goldsborough attended the College of Philadelphia and then went to England where he acquired his legal training at the Inns of Court; his fellow Maryland delegate William Paca received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the College of Philadelphia. Three of the Virginians—Richard
Bland, Benjamin Harrison and Peyton Randolph—attended the College of William and Mary (although Harrison never received his degree) and Peyton Randolph went on to study law at the Inns of Court. Although Richard Henry Lee did not have a college degree, beginning at the age of sixteen he spent two years at the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, England, probably the equivalent of an education at any of America’s colleges at the time. William Hooper, one of the delegates from North Carolina who would join the Congress in the coming week, had grown up in Boston and was the lone delegate outside of Massachusetts to boast a Harvard degree. Finally, three of the South Carolinians, as we have seen, pursued their legal training at the Middle Temple in the Inns of Court in London, and two of them, Edward Rutledge and Thomas Lynch, could lay claim to being the only members of the Congress to have spent some of their undergraduate years studying at Oxford and Cambridge respectively.26
There were a few whose principal means of education came in the “school of life.” Patrick Henry’s formal education stopped when he was ten. New Hampshire’s John Sullivan was the son of a poor Irish immigrant, but by the time he traveled to Philadelphia he had built a substantial fortune from a successful legal practice. Roger Sherman of Connecticut, though he had by 1774 become a surveyor and public officeholder of moderate means, had started his life in relative poverty and probably attended only a few years of common school, and John Morton was a self-educated, middle-class farmer living just outside of Philadelphia.
Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor Page 8