the Philadelphia/Pennsylvania Story: a Module Series
John and Sam Adams with Thomas Paine Make Pennsylvania a Radical Republic (1)
Philadelphia, one might keep in mind, was the Thirteen States most populated urban center (about 40,000)–and it would remain so until sometime in the 1820’s. Pennsylvania was the second most populated state (about 327,000 in 1780), after Virginia which exceeded a half-million. Given that Boston’s Fenway Park, the smallest stadium in professional baseball, could house all of Philadelphia’s residents, one is tempted to downplay that whatever urbanism really is–and does–Philadelphia was urbanism personified in North America.
Because Philadelphia/Pennsylvania fashioned as the “Revolution’s” capitol, its elite and population could literally watch the Continental Congress goings on. Other states/cities received reports on a much more limited basis. Take this proximity one step further, and one might suggest that whatever was going on in Philadelphia may well have consequences on the deliberations/voting in the Second Continental Congress. Indeed, the Pennsylvania state legislature was meeting on the second floor, of what is today Independence Hall, while the Second Continental Congress met on the first.
the Philadelphia/Pennsylvania colonial policy system transitions to a democratic republic
It would be a mistake to assume the nature and composition of the revolutionary opposition to the Crown was identical across each of the major port cities. That is especially accurate if one includes opposition in the hinterland. Boston certainly had a troubled history with the British, and its Puritan elite held their own distinct cultural views on authority, religion, and the role of the colonial/state policy (despite their common structure) did vary, with Massachusetts and Virginia among the most aggressive and centralized. Pennsylvania’s colonial legislature was regarded as among the most loyal to the British crown, and conservative in its willingness to press hard for independence (and war), preferring exhaustive negotiation.
Pennsylvania’s original Quaker gentry had long since withdrawn to agricultural manor-style farming in the hinterland. German immigrants (Mennonites for example) were also tended to pacifism as did the Quakers, but post-1700 German-Lutheran immigrants , climaxing in 1749-54 came from Rhineland, to Swiss borders, came in families, and like the Yankee Puritans included a considerable number of “artisans”, most were probably agriculturalists, in debt up to their ears or indentured workers. As early as 1727, the Pennsylvania Provincial Council required them an oath of loyalty. Over time, they diffused to create small homestead farms, often closely tied to a village center, into Pennsylvania’s eastern counties, and then to western Pennsylvania. Naturally, they contested the same lands as inhabited by the Native Americans, and the Germans, unlike Quakers were willing to seize land by chicanery, purchase or by fighting for it–a huge contrast with the style and reputation amassed by Quaker immigrants. By 1775, an estimated 75,000 Germans lived in Pennsylvania., the largest North American German population at that time. https://www.google.com/search?q=pennsylvania+early+german+immigrants&oq=pennsylvania+early+german+immigrants&aqs=chrome..69i57j0.9238j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8; http://lynnheidelberg.org/beginnewlife.html; Farley Grubb, German Immigration into Pennsylvania, 1709-1820 (Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xx: 3, Winter, 1990, pp 417-36; [66] They equaled, maybe slightly exceeded, the Scots-Irish that arrived after the French and Indian War.
Pennsylvania’s elite were a blend of landed-Quaker
Ron W. Coan 