Philadelphia Reflections

What Happened in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776?

Spirit of 76'

The American colonies were growing too big, too fast, and the British Empire had too many international distractions, to have smooth relationships across three thousand miles of ocean, using uncertain communications available in the late Eighteenth century. Friction and misunderstanding were inevitable without far more statesmanship than either side thought was necessary. So, when the Continental Congress dispatched George Washington to Boston with troops to defend rebellious Massachusetts at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, it was hard for the British to believe the colonists were merely helping out one of their distressed neighbors. It seemed in London that the thirteen colonies had united, formed not only an army but a government, and gone to war. In December 1775 England passed the Prohibitory Act, essentially declaring war, and organized a huge invasion fleet to put down the rebellion. It now seems hard to understand the first notice the Americans had of this huge over-reaction was a private letter to Robert Morris from one of his agents in March 1776; no warnings, no negotiations, no attempt to investigate problems and correct them. The British just sent a fleet to settle this problem, whatever it was. It's all very well to say the Americans should have known they were playing with fire. They didn't see it that way; they were being self-reliant, responding to attack. In June 1776 British patrol frigates were skirmishing in the Delaware River; late in the month, British troops landed on Staten Island. The American reaction to all this was a muddle of confusion. A few were delighted, most of the rest were amazed or appalled.

Although the deeper strategic origins of the American Revolution are subtle, complex, and controversial, there is far less muddle about what happened on July 2, 1776, publicly proclaimed two days later. Adopting a resolution written by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, the Thirteen Colonies stated they had now clarified their goals in the controversy with the British monarchy. For a year before that, the Continental Congress had been corresponding with each other and meeting in Carpenters Hall with the goal of achieving representation in the British parliament -- "No taxation without representation". The model for most of them was based on the Whig agitation for Ireland -- for a local parliament within a larger commonwealth. But the passing of the British Navy in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then the actual appearance of seven hundred British warships in American waters showed that not only was Parliamentary representation out of the question, but King George III was going to play rough with upstarts. The new goal was no longer just representation, it was independence. If we were going to resist a military occupation at the risk of being hanged as traitors, we might as well do it for something substantial. The meeting had a number of Scotch-Irish Princeton graduates, whose basic loyalty to England had long been divided. Pacifist Pennsylvania, chief among the wavering hold-outs, was mostly won over by its own Benjamin Franklin, who was optimistic the French would help us. Even so, both Robert Morris and John Dickinson refused to sign the Declaration; Franklin persuaded both to abstain by absence, which created a majority of the Pennsylvania delegation in favor. That's a pretty slim majority for a crucial decision. Franklin was soon dispatched back to Paris to make an alliance; Washington was dispatched to hold off that British army in the meantime. Jefferson was designated to write a proclamation, which even after editing is still pretty unreadable beyond the first couple of sentences. Meeting adjourned. This brief account may not qualify as a serious examination of the causes of the American Revolution, but it comes close to the way it seemed to the colonist in the street.

Colonist's Complaint

The rebels then spent eight years convincing the British they were serious and have been independent ever since. But, just a minute, here. Reflect on the fact that fighting had been going on for a year in Massachusetts, and that Lord Howe's fleet had set sail a month before the Declaration, actually landing on Staten Island at just about the same time as the Fourth of July. Add the fact that only John Hancock actually signed the document on July 4th, and some of the signers even waited until September. You can sort of see why John Adams never got over the idea that Thomas Jefferson had a big nerve implying the whole Revolution was his idea. What's more, there's a viewpoint that New England subsequently had to endure a President from Virginia for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of the new nation because loud talk from New England still made the rest of the country nervous. Philadelphia may have been the cradle of Independence, but that was not because it was a colony hot for war, dragging others along with it. Rather, it was the largest city in the colonies, centrally located. It had a strong pacifist tradition, and it had the most to lose from a pillaging enemy war machine. When Independence was finally declared the goal, many of Philadelphia's leading citizens moved to Canada.

New England had started hostilities and was about to be subdued by overwhelming force. The Canadians were not going to come to their aid, because they were French, and Catholic, and enough said. What New England and the Scotch-Irish needed were WASP allies, stretching for two thousand miles to the South. By far the largest colony was Virginia, which included what is now Kentucky and West Virginia; it even had some legal claims for vastly larger territory. Virginia was incensed about its powerlessness against British mercantilism, especially the tobacco trade. The rest of the English colonies had plenty of assorted grievances against George III, and almost all of them could see that America was rapidly outgrowing dependency on the British homeland, without a sign that Parliament was ever going to surrender home rule to them. It was perhaps unfortunate New Englanders were so impulsive, but it looked as though a military confrontation with the Crown was inevitably coming. Without support, New England was likely to be torched, as Rome once subdued Carthage.

And the last hope for an alternative of flattery and diplomacy, for guile and subtlety, had stepped off the boat a year earlier. Benjamin Franklin, our fabulous man in London, arrived with the news he had finally had it "up to here" with the British ministry. He was a man who quietly made things happen, carefully selecting his arguments from amongst many he had in mind. In retrospect, we can see that he held the idea of Anglo-Saxon world domination as far back as the Albany Conference of 1745, and could even look forward to America outgrowing England in the 19th Century. His behavior at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 strongly suggests he never completely gave up that long-term dream. Just as Edmund Burke never gave up the idea of Reconciliation with the Colonies, Benjamin Franklin never quite gave up the idea of Reconciliation with England. While John Dickinson and Robert Morris resisted the idea of Independence down to the last moment, Franklin took a much longer view. For the time being, it was necessary to defeat the British, and for that, we needed the help of the French. In 1750, America joined with the British to toss out the French. And then in 1776, we joined the French to toss out the British. Franklin didn't always get his way. But Franklin was always steering the ship.

The Heirs of William Penn

William Penn

Freedom of religion includes the right to join some other religion than the one your father founded; William Penn's descendants had every right to become members of the Anglican church. It may even have been a wise move for them, in view of their need to maintain good relations with the British Monarch. But religious conversion cost the Penn family the automatic political allegiance of the Quakers dominating their colony. Not much has come down to us showing the Pennsylvania Quakers bitterly resenting their desertion, but it would be remarkable if at least some ardent Quakers did not feel that way. It certainly confuses history students, when they read that the Quakers of Pennsylvania were often rebellious about the rule of the Penn family.

Delaware

Such resentments probably accelerated but do not completely explain the growing restlessness between the tenants and the landlords. The terms of the Charter gave the Penns ownership of the land from the Delaware River to five degrees west of the river -- providing they could maintain order there. King Charles was happy to be freed of the expense of policing this wilderness, and to be paid for it, to be freed of obligation to Admiral Penn who greatly assisted his return to the throne, and to have a place to be rid of a large number of English Dissenters. The Penns were, in effect, vassal kings of a subkingdom larger than England itself. However, they behaved in what would now be considered an entirely businesslike arrangement. They bought their land, fair and square, purchased it a second or even third time from the local Indians, and refused to permit settlement until the Indians were satisfied. They skillfully negotiated border disputes with their neighbors without resorting to armed force, while employing great skill in the English Court on behalf of the settlers on their land. They provided benign oversight of the influx of huge numbers of settlers from various regions and nations, wisely and shrewdly managing a host of petty problems with the demonstration that peace led to prosperity, and that reasonableness could cope with ignorance and violence. When revolution changed the government and all the rules, they coped with the difficulties as well as anyone in history had done, and better than most. In retrospect, most of the violent criticism they engendered at the time, seems pretty unfair.

John Penn

They wanted to sell off their land as fast as they could at a fair price. They did not seek power, and in fact surrendered the right to govern the colony to the purchasers of the first five million acres, in return for being allowed to become private citizens selling off the remaining twenty-five million. Ultimately in 1789, they were forced to accept the sacrifice price of fifteen cents an acre. Aside from a few serious mistakes at the Council of Albany by a rather young John Penn, they treated the settlers honorably and did not deserve the treatment or the epithets they received in return. The main accusation made against them was that they were only interested in selling their land. Their main defense was they were only interested in selling their land.

As time has passed, their reputation has repaired itself, and they bask in the universal gratitude which is directed to their grandfather and father, William Penn. Statues and nameplates abound. Nobody who attacked them at the time appears to have been really serious about it, except one. Except for Benjamin Franklin, who turned from being their close friend to being their bitter enemy. Franklin tried to destroy the Penns, traveled to England to do it, and after twenty years seemed just as bitter as ever. Something really bad happened between them in 1754, and neither the Penns nor Franklin has been open about what it was.

Revising, Amending, and Skirting The Constitution

Tiananmen Square

In some foreign countries, people who dislike the government about some issue wait for a clear day and go in the streets to riot. Some of our own younger people who spent a little too much time abroad have likewise occasionally called their friends on a cell phone and agreed to pour out into our town squares to protest. When you try that in Tienanmen Square (1989) or similar places, machine guns can suddenly end the meeting (2,500 dead). We had the Boston Massacre of 1770 (5 people killed) and Kent State of 1970 (4 people killed), where newsmedia somewhat over-dramatized the risk involved. In general, most Americans feel public demonstrations are neither very dangerous nor very useful.

Chief Justice, John Marshall,

One measure of Constitutional effectiveness can be found in just this public attitude. The citizenry has been told and generally believe that methods for addressing grievances have been provided in the legislative, judicial and executive branches, ultimately leading to the Constitution itself as the last point of appeal. The 1787 framers in Philadelphia probably had this design in mind, but it was not until the third Chief Justice, John Marshall, made it his life's work that the elegance of the system became widely appreciated. The Constitution is the capstone of our system; every citizen's grievance can be appealed within it. If things are sufficiently dire, even the Constitution can be changed.

second Constitutional Convention

A second Constitutional Convention could be called, but most lawyers shudder at what chaos might emerge from making multiple changes without waiting to see how a few worked out. For practical purposes, therefore, amending the Constitution is the last recourse when the government goes astray. Amendments don't easily succeed; hundreds were proposed in two hundred years but only two dozen were adopted. In totalitarian countries, millions of amendments might be envisioned, but either nothing significant would be adopted, or nothing significant would be enforced. In our country, it is sufficiently difficult to succeed that frivolous or ill-advised proposals are discarded or modified into less extreme forms by "due process". But enough amendments do succeed to keep the populace out of street protests. Amendments can succeed, if you and the proposal are really serious. So far the only real appeal beyond an amendment has been another amendment.

Judge Benjamin Cardozo

The step provided before an amendment is to appeal to the Supreme Court. That happens about a hundred times a year, with the generally satisfying outcome. Perhaps the only serious criticism of the Supreme Court is the difficulty of "gaining cert.", which is the process of petitioning the Court to take the case, by granting a writ of certiorari. Only about 2% of petitions are allowed to present their arguments, and the Court has protected itself from overwhelming volume by limiting its caseload to instances of conflicts between circuits, and cases involving sovereignty of some sort. For such a selective process to remain acceptable, implicitly the rulings of the various Circuit Courts of Appeal would also have to enjoy general approval. That such is the case is evidenced by the fame and distinction reached by certain Judges of Appeals Courts, like Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, and Richard Posner. In Cardozo's case, he was finally appointed to the Supreme Court, but at such an advanced age and short tenure that his Supreme Court reputation is rather modest; he achieved his reputation as an Appellate Judge. The failure of Robert Bork and several others to achieve Senate ratification illustrates a somewhat different version of the same issue: that the higher courts, not just the Supreme Court, are generally held to do as good a job as human systems allow; supremely gifted judges are not exclusively in the Supreme Court. As you go lower in the court system, more dissatisfaction can be heard, ultimately reaching slander accompanied by knowing grins, such as "You show me a hundred thousand dollars, and I'll show you a Philadelphia judge." Whenever criminals meet justice, such mutterings can be expected. But the point to emphasize is that there are no muttered challenges to the contention that the higher you go in the Judiciary, the more distinguished the judge is likely to be.

That's the federal judiciary, of course. State judiciaries are held in less esteem, although they have the power to put people in jail forever, award multimillion-dollar verdicts and modify the climate of business. Somehow, the prestige of these judicial systems has eroded to the point where a joke can be heard that being a state supreme court justice is a pretty good way to start a law practice. It's hard to know whether prestige has disappeared because of performance, or the reverse. Whether the steady erosion of state legislative power by Congress has resulted in a parallel loss of status in the judiciary is a serious question. In that case, of course, there is very little the judiciary itself can do about it.

Dred Scott

In two hundred years, hundreds of amendments have been submitted to overturn Supreme Court rulings which displeased someone. Only three have succeeded. The first was the overturning of Chisholm v. Georgia by the Eleventh Amendment, reflecting a largely unspoken wish to employ state sovereignty to continue the anti-British animosities of the Revolutionary War. While understandable enough, this approach is most unfortunate. The second is the overturning of the Dred Scott decision on the legitimacy of the Fugitive Slave Law by the Thirteenth Amendment. While the outcome meets general approval, here is another court position which could only be changed by winning a war. And finally, the legitimacy of the graduated income tax as an allowable private taking was established by the Sixteenth Amendment, overturning an entirely legitimate decision in Pollack v. Farmers Loan and Trust that the original Constitution prohibited it. In each case, the desired remedy only existed in changing the Constitution. Dissenters are free under the First Amendment to describe such a Court decision as asinine, but it is going to continue to stand. Some will be tempted to circumvent the whole process in order to achieve their goal, and two examples come to mind. In the court-packing episode of 1937, most impartial observers would agree that the Supreme Court was forced to reverse its decision under threat of coercion by President Franklin Roosevelt. Amendment of the Constitution was a choice open to him, but he chose another way. The Commerce Clause of Article I, Section 8 now continues to read:

The Congress shall have power to .........Regulate Commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes

just exactly as it did when for 150 years everyone referred to it as the Interstate Commerce Clause. What has changed is the declaration that Congress may regulate all commerce of any sort, without fear of challenge in the court system. Whatever chances Roosevelt might have had to amend the Interstate Commerce Clause before this uproar, it is clear he could never have achieved its amendment afterward.

The second instance of circumvention is related to the same episode. The insurance industry was highly displeased to find itself regulated by federal agencies, and within six weeks successfully lobbied the McCarran Ferguson Act into law. Congress could not overturn or make an exception to a Supreme Court ruling, but it accomplished the same result by prohibiting federal agencies from taking action in the business of insurance. To maintain regulation for insurance, all of the various states then passed laws establishing insurance regulatory mechanisms, and insurance regulation migrated back to the states. It is now difficult to know whether the same exception could have been created by then re-amending the Constitution. But since the advent of wide-spread current dissatisfaction with health insurance, it pretty clear that an amendment imitating McCarran Ferguson would never pass, today.

John Jay the Chief Justice

Finally, the Eleventh Amendment may not have been such a good idea, either. The dispute in 1793 (although it avoided saying so) was about compelling Americans to pay just debts regardless of the person they owed them to. And that included paying debts to former Loyalists. John Jay the Chief Justice was sent to England to negotiate a treaty to settle this matter, but after both nations ratified the treaty, state laws were passed to supersede it. From this evolved the issue of whether a treaty takes precedence over American laws, and the ensuing battle firmly established the preemption of Congress by treaties. Two hundred years later, when the British are our allies and Revolutionary debts fade in significance, many people are uneasy about such clear-cut deference to treaties. Our unwillingness to join the League of Nations, and sign the Kyoto Agreement, or enter into many other international cooperative ventures are related to uneasiness about the unintended expansive power inherent in the Constitutional location of a foreign treaty, enacted at a time of limited communication. We are doomed by demography to perpetual minority status in world forums but forced by economic success to exert leadership or become a target. There is no immediate emergency, but the prescribed generalities of enacting or enforcing treaties need sober reflection in the era of instant communication.

Newspapers

Times Generation X, Y, or Z

Amidst the 2009 depression, newspapers got more expensive but thinner, thus tempting readership into a downward spiral. We hear the generation under thirty scarcely notices newspapers, except for comic pages and sports sections. Kids never were much interested in news, as I discovered at age 15. Time Magazine sponsored prizes for the best score on current events to test at that time; I won it in my school by being the only student who bothered to take the test. Later, I even had to do a lot of arguing to compete with boys clustered around the radio, listening to such timeless music as Amapola , just to find out what had happened at Pearl Harbor. Within two years, several of those boys had been killed in the war that began for us that December day. Whether the news is covered by TV, the blogosphere, magazines or newspapers, kids are not now and have never been much interested in news. Those polls and surveys bemoaning the condition of Generation X, Y or Z don't prove very much. In fact, if you want my opinion, all age groups of the American culture have always been astonishingly oblivious to news. When Franklin Roosevelt won landslide election victories in spite of almost universal opposition by newspaper editorials, it astonished the newspaper columnists but didn't surprise me at all. Americans don't pay much attention to the news, never have.

Newspapers are central to the life of retirement.

Toting a hundred morning newspapers in the dark hours before school began, it was painfully obvious to my adolescent muscles that newspapers were thick (and heavy) on Fridays, pathetically thin on Saturdays, and although the weekly cycle persisted, grew unbelievably heavy between Thanksgiving and Christmas, thin and anemic after New Year's. What seems to excite reader interest is an advertisement, opening a chest of dreams for the hopeful, plus maybe suggestions to those who are desperate for gift ideas. The generation of my parents read Sears, Roebuck catalogs, my own generation grown adult read the ads back among the brassiere ads. The coming generations get their dream fulfillment -- from electronic gadgets rather than the printed page, but their interest in news is no less, it couldn't be. A major feature in the decline of newspaper revenue was the almost instantaneous transfer of want-ads to the Internet. The shocked newsrooms are discovering that advertisements not only subsidized the news, but they also generated much of the readership.

For the people in retirement, however, newspapers do provide the news. Retirees read the papers, think about the editorials, begin their conversations with allusions to today's big news stories. Television tells you what is news, but the newspapers make you current events conversationalist. Every retired person wants to engage in brief banter about some movie star who died, but the retirees -- mostly male -- who want to express opinions about the affairs of the world, are accustomed to shaping those opinions by reading the papers. You can't maintain your self-image as a local leader when you don't have a clue. And since retirees have time to read but commuters mostly don't, interpreting the news is a function which maintains generational authority.

Newspapers

Because big papers can afford bigger newsrooms, urban retirees typically maintain dominance over country cousins. People who live in the big city know what's what, while retirees who wander around small towns have to rely on their wits, small-time. The steady disappearance of urban newspaper competition led to the complaint that the press was biased. But the disappearance of newspapers entirely is too threatening to social relationships to be tolerated without searches for substitutes.

You would think the newspapers would mount better self-defense than they have; right now, only 16% of retired males are comfortable using a computer. The rising generation is something else, of course, so there might be a ten-year window for the newspapers to regroup and respond. However, it looks as though they waited too long. The New York Times was worth $10 billion six or seven years ago, now is only worth one billion. The Sulzberger family doesn't own it all but have surely lost 90% of their investment, and must be looking to their family security rather than gamble their pittance on saving the paper. The Bancroft family took their billion and ran, leaving it to Mr. Murdoch to worry about new frontiers for the Wall Street Journal. Just about every other family-dominated newspaper has passed into the hands of absentee generations. If a feisty young newspaper heir is going to become Sir Galahad, he better get started soon. The retiree grandparents, out on the golf course, demand no less.

Lazaretto

David Barnes

DAVID Barnes, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, kindly visited the Right Angle Club with an interesting talk about the Lazaretto, the oldest quarantine station in the Western hemisphere, and the sixth oldest in the world. It was built in 1800 responding to the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793, followed by those of 1797, 1798, 1799, 1820, 1853, and 1870. If an incoming ship had a case of Yellow Fever on board, the patient was institutionalized at the Lazaretto and the ship captain had to pay for the care until the patient recovered, or until he didn't. Since we now know that Yellow Fever is transmitted by mosquito bites, it probably didn't do much good, and by locating the Lazaretto in a swamp, it may actually have promoted the spread of the disease. It thus fits into the story of Dr. Benjamin Rush hastening the death of his Yellow Fever patients by bleeding them of several pints of blood, as well as the construction of the Philadelphia Water Works to purify the drinking water, which we can now she had nothing to do with the disease, either. However, the waterworks were a marvel of engineering and must have saved many lives from Typhoid Fever. As recently as 1970, I can remember cases of anthrax being brought to the port on Pakistani ships, so quarantining and quarantine stations are useful ideas, some of the time.

Philadelphia Lazaretto

The first Lazaretto was built on the Aegean Sea at Venice, around 1450. There is some dispute about the name, which is said to come from the patron saint of lepers, St. Lazarus. The followers of St. Nazareth maintain the present name is a corruption of Nazaretto however, since St. Lazarus was the name of the church on the island where it stands. It seems most likely that the original Venetian quarantine hospital was responding to the plague, which would have benefitted greatly from isolation, although the rats and mice probably quickly found a way around their problem. Benjamin Rush thought that Yellow Fever was transmitted by the overpowering stench of rotting coffee beans, which is quite wrong as Walter Reed later showed, but at least it would lead to the idea that quarantine might be useful. Historically, the rumors and suppositions about this matter were useful to the Virginia delegates to the Constitutional Convention, who used it to promote their campaign to move the national capital to Washington, D.C.

The Schuylkill empties into the Delaware River at a sharp bend in Delaware, which slows the river and causes silt to be dumped there. William Penn had earlier decided to locate his new colony at Chester, just below the bend. However, he soon saw that it was more defensible to locate Philadelphia on the upstream side of the mud flats, as it proved to be in the Revolutionary War. Fort Mifflin was located just above the mud flats and could be kept supplied by flatboats coming down the Schuylkill from Valley Forge and Reading, the arsenal city of the Revolution. On Benjamin Franklin's suggestion, the channels between the mud flats were blocked by the chevaux de fries, underwater spiked contraptions which were much like the blockages to the entrance of parking lots. On the Jersey side of Delaware was Ft. Mercer at what is now called National Park. It was a formidable defense which almost ended the War by starving the British troops who had occupied Philadelphia from the rear via Germantown but were long unable to get past Fort Mifflin with their fleet, coming upriver. Most of South Philadelphia was a swamp, and there are many reports of flocks of swans paddling around the entrance of the Schuylkill. Hog Island became a shipyard, then a Naval Base. And then the airport was built on the mudflats, pretty much-obliterating everything else. There is the talk of making this area into the main intermodal transportation hub of the east coast, since ocean shipping, air transport, interstate highways, and railroad are all crowded together, quite close to the urban centers.

Benjamin Rush

Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was still active at the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1800. It was still the only general hospital in America and the model for much of subsequent American medicine. One striking memento of that connection at the Lazaretto is the cupola on the center building, which is very similar to the cupulas on the roof of the building at 8th and Spruce Streets. The brickwork is also Flemish bond. The ten-acre site of the Lazaretto is very accessible, except perhaps for the suspicious Tinicum Township police. However, it has long been a tradition to have a banquet and picnic at the Lazaretto at the beginning and end of the quarantine season, roughly June 1, and October 1. Yellow Fever shots are not required.