Raising Philadelphia: The Making of America’s First Great City, 1750–1775

Justin McHenry has written a very readable and revealing book about colonial Philadelphia’s “golden age” when it emerged as the largest, most prosperous, and predominant city in British North America in terms of science, education, medicine, invention, finance, commerce, the arts, and more. Relying almost wholly on secondary works, McHenry interweaves biographical treatments of prominent persons—mostly men and two women—to show a vibrant city that prospered in an environment informed by the Enlightenment, religious toleration, intellectual and scientific curiosity, and business savvy. He also sets Philadelphia’s story in the context of a contested Pennsylvania at mid-century, when some leaders sought to end proprietary rule, backcountry settlers challenged the authority of Quaker politics and Philadelphia’s control over markets and Indigenous policy, and personality disputes chafed away comity and common interest regarding government, education, and public policies.It’s a varied lot McHenry brings into focus. We learn, of course, about printer and polymath Benjamin Franklin and his many experiments and enterprises, and his political feuds with the proprietors and others. But also, to cite several examples, we learn about clockmaker David Rittenhouse and his mathematical and practical work making possible observing the Transit of Venus in 1769, botanist John Bartram and his collections of plants from across eastern North America, Dr. William Shippen and his anatomical dissections and lectures, college president William Smith and his educational reforms, poet Elizabeth Graeme and her intellectual salons, musician Francis Hopkinson and his musical compositions and performances, and John Dickinson, Charles Thompson, Joseph Galloway, and others writing pamphlets, etching cartoons, and drafting resolutions in the turbulent politics of the colony and the first rumblings of what became the American Revolution. And others. Despite rivalries and jealousies, such people formed an intelligentsia of sorts that distinguished Philadelphia and even gained it notice and respect in Great Britain and on the European continent. They also supported and sustained institutions to build and advance knowledge, good for science, business, and social and self-improvement. With the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the College of Physicians, Philadelphia became a clearinghouse for information from across the colonies and the empire and the leading incubator for scientific, medical, and social reform, and educational experiments in British North America. McHenry tracks such developments with skill, especially a telling detail that speaks to a bigger story.In his canvas of Philadelphia people making the city rise, McHenry does not forget the many persons at the bottom of the social pyramid—the enslaved, free Blacks, indentured servants, and workers who made and moved the goods and provided the daily services that kept raising Philadelphia to its economic prominence and enabling the “elites” to have time and resources to be scientists, inventors, writers, and all. Lacking personal accounts from such persons, especially the enslaved, McHenry ably combs the appropriate secondary works describing their lives and their place in the city. In the case of the enslaved, he also turns to Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography as the lens through which to discover a personal experience of Black life in Philadelphia, though, admittedly, Equiano only briefly visited the city during his lifetime and did not say much about it in his memoir. Still, in drawing on Equiano’s work, McHenry shows an adroitness in finding a usable source to reveal a too often hidden story.Unfortunately, McHenry ends his book abruptly. He provides two concluding chapters on the year 1775 that give month-by-month descriptions of the thinking, comings and goings, and doings of many of the principals in his story during that year when the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, but he offers no assessment of what a raised Philadelphia meant to an emerging United States. How the rise of Philadelphia informed the character, direction, and dynamics of the American Revolution McHenry does not say. One can fairly wonder if the ways Philadelphia intellectuals, scientists, printers, educators, and politicians, among others who commingled to create the vibrant center of the British North American empire affected the confidence of those there and elsewhere to challenge British authority and risk independence and perhaps even to imagine themselves as “Americans.” To give an example of just one tack McHenry might at least have speculated on: some years ago historian Jack Greene made the very astute observation that as colonial leaders, through their legislatures in British North America, assumed more authority and responsibility in running their colonies, pursuing their own interests, and developing their own organizations and practices in government, society, and economy, they became skilled and self-assured in their ability to manage their own affairs, which in turn made them less dependent on the British authorities and even somewhat disdainful of them.1 Was this true of the Philadelphia men and women McHenry so ably describes as self-directing? McHenry would do well to continue his work into the Revolutionary era, and beyond. In doing that, he also should include an index in such a book. Lacking one in Raising Philadelphia makes it less possible for readers to move back and forth through his book to realize more fully the myriad cross pollinations of ideas and interests and the many connections between and among his subjects.McHenry makes no new historiographical forays in his book, preferring instead to draw on established works for information and direction. One can read echoes of historians from Carl and Jessica Bridenbaugh to Gary Nash, among others, in his descriptions of city life and Philadelphia happenings.2 Knowledgeable readers will not be surprised by the overall portrait McHenry paints of a vital Philadelphia as the leading intellectual, scientific, and economic center in British North America, nor will they find new details discovered in new sources or new readings of old ones. But all readers will profit from McHenry’s gifts in synthesizing a large literature on Philadelphia and his example of parsing out a particular period to look closely at the people and the means by which a colonial city matured into a provincial capital.