First City. Gary B. Nash

a valuable source of information on the education and socializing of eighteenth-century women.

      The commercial wealth that propelled the city’s economy forward created a much more self-conscious elite. The number of men identifying themselves to tax collectors as “gentleman” or “esquire” tripled between 1756 and 1772, and these rank-conscious urbanites strove to assert or reinforce their social status in a number of ways. One was to commission oil-on-canvas portraits. Typically, the portrait showed the gentleman assuming erect posture—chin up, back straight, and shoulders back—in itself signaling high status. Likewise, the sitter’s dress announced his social authority. No merchant, lawyer, or clergyman would have dreamed to appear on canvas coatless or in an unbuttoned vest or open-throated shirt, sure signs of a tradesman. The protocol of both posture and costume, clearly displayed in portraits, drew lines demarcating the urban gentleman from the ordinary city dweller. Although the public rarely laid eyes on the oil portrait, secure inside an urban mansion, its owner could view it daily as a reassurance of his class authority.

FIGURE 26. Rebecca Jones sampler, 1751, Atwater Kent Museum. The young Rebecca worked birds, animals, and sprigs of flowers into her compartmented sampler, recorded the exact time of her birth, and stitched in a moral lesson. The Friends Historical Association donated it to the Atwater Kent Museum after World War II as part of a collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Quaker clothes, decorated fabrics, and dolls.

      The leaders of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions have attached great importance to acquiring portraits of such worthies as Thomas Lawrence, Thomas Mifflin and his wife, Robert Morris, and Charles Willing, Jr. because, like documents and artifacts, they forge links between the past and the present. But more particularly, the portraits of historically mighty figures reinforce the high social position of their institutional owners, many of them descended from the portrait sitters. The Historical Society’s portrait collection of Philadelphia worthies reached sixty-seven by 1872. In the following decades the collection mounted rapidly, rising to several hundred by the mid-twentieth century.

      Also important as emblems of cosmopolitanism and status were furniture designed for the upper classes. The comment of a New York merchant in 1757 applied as well to Philadelphia: “Our affluence, during the late war introduced a degree of luxury in tables, dress, and furniture with which we were before unacquainted.”²⁰ Stylish furniture, arranged in carefully planned architectural spaces within the home, permitted social performances, such as tea drinking, and formal receptions governed by carefully cultivated rules of etiquette. Investment in more ornate and more aesthetically developed furniture became a hallmark of the middle third of the eighteenth century, adopted cautiously by Quakers and embraced wholeheartedly by others.

      By the late nineteenth century, the Historical Society, the Athenaeum, and the Philosophical Society avidly collected furniture and house furnishings of the merchant and rentier elite because they attached a special value to the surviving artifacts of the colonial era that supported a romantic vision of a heroic American era. Indeed, as we will see in Chapter 8, a colonial revival was in full flood at this time. Today, historians see the rising desire for fashionable living, played out in acquisitiveness for material goods, as evidence of a “consumer revolution” that spread not only within the upper echelon but also among the middling ranks of American society. They also see the yen for display and the cultivation of refinement not only as a way for the affluent to separate themselves from the hoi polloi through conspicuous consumption but also as a commitment to living a more refined life according to what its participants thought was a superior moral code. “Brandishing possessions in the faces of the poor to demonstrate pecuniary superiority,” writes one historian, “only signified a difference in wealth,” but “creating parlors as a site for a refined life implied spiritual superiority.”²¹

      In fashionable Philadelphia, during its rise as a commercial center of great importance, one ate from as well as sat on crafted objects made of materials connoting class position. Wooden bowls and crude clay vessels sufficed for the poor and pewter and earthenware served the needs of the middle class, but the wealthy required silver and porcelain. As the American Revolution approached, silver tea-and coffee-ware, dining accessories, and personal articles became essential emblems of wealth and status. By the 1750s, about a dozen silversmiths worked in Philadelphia, producing increasingly specialized forms of silver tableware as well as ceremonial presentation pieces, silver peace medals, and gorgets produced for Indian chiefs to commemorate treaty signings and keep the Indian trade with Quaker merchants flowing.

      Such a piece as a coffeepot (Figure 27) crafted by Joseph Richardson, Jr., one of the city’s premier silversmiths before the Revolution, provides an example of how such an artifact can have multiple meanings. It can be viewed most directly as a handsome example of high-style eighteenth-century craftsmanship, as an intrinsically valuable work of decorative art. Through a second lens, the coffeepot can be seen as a crucial piece of evidence in tracing the new meaning of gentility in the eighteenth century. Amid rising consumerism, in both England and its colonies, genteel people developed a new sense of refinement, acted out in elegant manners, witty conversation, and graceful movements on occasions that depended on the importation of new beverages from exotic ports of call—in this case coffee beans from South America. Through a third lens, the Richardson coffeepot can be considered, although not actually seen, with regard to the organization of rhythms of work of the artisan who crafted the object. Behind the coffeepot lay several work processes involving African cultivation of the coffee beans, the sailors who shipped them to Philadelphia, and the small silversmith workshop production that linked together the labor of apprentices, journeymen, and master craftsmen. Finally, behind the coffeepot, absent from the view of the lovely pot itself, resided the role of the crafts worker in the political and social life of a port town such as Philadelphia.

FIGURE 27. Richardson coffeepot, PMA. Joseph Richardson’s grandfather Francis Richardson, a mariner, immigrated to Philadelphia in 1681. His son, Francis Richardson, Jr., prospered in Philadelphia as a gold-and silversmith and consolidated the family’s fortune by marrying Elizabeth Growden, daughter of a large landowner and provincial officer in nearby Bucks County. When Francis Richardson, Jr. died in 1729, he passed on to his sons, Francis and Joseph, his craftsman’s skills, his clientele, and his enviable place among Philadelphia Quakers. Both sons practiced silver-and goldsmithing. The elegant pieces made by Joseph, one of Philadelphia’s most notable silversmiths, found their way into almost every Philadelphia cultural institution and the homes of many private collectors.

      While creating domestic architectural spaces equipped with elegant furnishings, the colonial elite also developed new forms of gentility to display their status. It was not enough to dress well or live well; one had to walk with grace, appreciate music, dance and ride skillfully, and know classical literature and languages. One visitor to Philadelphia wrote that without refined manners “the best finished furniture or finest marble will lose half its luster, which, when added, decorates and greatly ornaments it.”²² The Library Company’s Benjamin Franklin, immensely ambitious and intensely aware of appearances, edited from an English original America’s first treatise on how to get on in business, including standards of decorum and propriety: The American Instructor, or Young Man's Best Companion.

      Below the genteel resided the vast majority of urban dwellers. If they could not aspire to gentility, many Pennsylvanians believed that theirs was “the best poor man’s country in the world,” where ordinary people could get ahead and where the gap between kingly riches and grinding poverty, so common in Europe, had narrowed. Philadelphia did contain scores of examples of those who had started at the bottom and risen high. The city to which Franklin came as a journeyman printer in 1723 was filled with ambitious young men, and many of them rose to prominence, if not so spectacularly as “Poor Richard.” No wonder, then, that Franklin became a hero of the city’s leather-apron men and that his little book, variously entitled Father Abraham's Speech