Tasks Interweave Community Development in this decade. Alert the reader to other structural battles, the judiciary, and the prominence of an independent Dep Gov Keith and reappearance of Lloyd and Logan civil war. The peace that followed in 1714 brought adjustments to the economy and eventually a prosperous upturn which proved to be a period of transformative growth for the economic base, and the launch of a sustained half-century of immigration.
INTRO–By the 1720’s serious provincial and municipal policy-making was attempted as the system had matured sufficiently to stabilize and contain the effects of the political civil war. A pushback in public opinion, and more importantly within elites-Quaker opinion was willing to accept balanced government initiatives. The excesses of Lloyd’s rhetoric and legislation had resulted in a near-failed government in which stasis was an more optimistic assessment. You couldn’t get things done in Pennsylvania, and by the second decade of the 18th century that stood in the way of a second generation of Quakers, much removed from European religious discrimination and less anti-authoritarian in personality.
The economy/economic base had matured, and Philadelphia was on the threshold of competing with Boston and New York. A commercial elite had evolved and possessing some wealth and a strong business perspective chased opportunities that sometimes required a serious and thoughtful government perspective. Penn and his proprietary were viewed with a bit of respect, a sense of distance, and the imposition of a royal governor more a threat than an responsible alternative.
This elite was no longer Quaker. Anglicans occupied a significant position and they were more doctrinaire in their view of Penn and their proprietary. Their opposition reminded many Quakers as to the pitfalls of a more Whig-royal governor administration which flaunted Quaker values such as pacifism. Lloyd’s day had come and gone; the new Lloyd when he did return later in the decade could not inspire the frenzied policy area that had prevailed in the century’s first decade.
Philadelphia was transformed by Lloyd during its first decade into a weaponized anti-proprietary body, with the inevitable aggregation of piled up and unaddressed issues reaching near-crisis levels. In Philadelphia, service demands, several resulting from growth and increased density, others from the maturing of a self-sufficiency economic development strategy reduced the quality of life, endangered public safety and health, or simply frustrated individual initiatives and imperiled the growth machine Philadelphia had become.
… Pennsylvania had entered into a new stage of development. The most apparent changes were physical. Philadelphia was the fastest growing city in the British Empire. From approximately 5,000 inhabitants in 1700, the Quaker capital grew to 6,500 in 1710 and 10,000 in 1720, almost attaining the size of Boston. Population in the countryside showed equally significant increases. … Economic development paralleled population growth. Trade emerged from a decade-long slump in 1710, and enterprising Philadelphia merchants who worked to open new markets were soon challenging the merchants of Boston [99] Gary B. Nash, Quakers and Politics, pp. 319-20.
From these numbers we can appreciate that 17th century colonial America had not reached the levels of population that created the ingredients for modern urbanization. Massachusetts founded more than sixty years earlier, Boston fifty, than Philadelphia/Pennsylvania. By 1720, with the former reaching a hundred years of existence, and the later less than forty, Boston, colonial America’s largest urban presence was a mere 2,000 inhabitants larger than Philadelphia.
If urbanization had been muted before 1710-20, in the period of peace that followed Queen Anne’s War (ending 1714) the port cities of North America picked up the pace of urban growth. While England did become involved in a war in the 1730’s it did not significantly effect Pennsylvania until the early 1740’s–hence from 1714 to 1742, Pennsylvania was in a golden period of growth and prosperity–both of which will creating demands, did create a cushion that softened the disruption of the civil war, and permitted it to be channeled into what passed for “normal”, if noisy and ineffectual policy-making. In this period, then the five port cities of British North America experienced a shared evolution of urban services, an evolution, however, which displayed individual distinctions and some varying time frames.
While the tendency is to stress who was first (Boston was usually in that it reached a scale in the 1670’s and 1680’s that seems to have generated service delivery pressures caused by population and density), the other cities felt pressures also and we see a good deal of “copying”. Today we call it “spreading” (or diffusion [99] See, Karen Mossberger, the Politics of Ideas and the Spread of Enterprise Zones (Georgetown University Press, 2000)), but urban service innovation points out the phenomenon of a budding urban competitive hierarchy that freely stole from the other cities and often used them as a model to inspire their urban growth and development. The “horse race” that marks our contemporary urban competitive hierarchy can be see in this period quite clearly.
During this period, urban demands drove a steady increase in urban services. This was shared with other colonies in varying degrees and each on their own time frame. One might say, in colonial America this was the period that all port cities, certainly, and a few secondary cities as well, approached urban in a modern sense of the word. Up to this point, the scale of the colonial port cities had not reached the point they could be compared in function and services to modern cities. That is beginning to change in the 1714-1742 period.
What is very noticeable as one studies Pennsylvania-Philadelphia colonial history is the interaction of policy system outputs with the structure and processes of the policy systems. A policy system produces outputs which affect other sub-policy systems, and simultaneously foster change in the policy system itself. It is not simply that policy systems learn from their experience like artificial intelligence, but rather policy system outputs can rearrange the policy system itself, create new structures, and force the reconfiguration of old.
Policy systems evolve and early changes become embedded and over time embedded structures/processes/institutions accumulate almost unseen, are taken for granted, are frequently discounted. These embedded configurations can become more apparent when one compares a state’s policy system with other state policy systems. Time and embedded policy system changes are a major cause of state differentiation. We shall see this in Philadelphia, as the city deals with urban change and growth, it confronts its urban functions-policy areas and in so doing leaves a heritage that affects other urban functions as they are processed by a reconfigured policy system.
The Tax Act of 1712 was, for example, an output that greatly affected the manner in which Philadelphia evolved its urban policy areas, and these subsequent policy systems in turn accumulated and lent their own particular character to Philadelphia’s heritage. As we shall see contemporary Philadelphia will not be copies of Boston or New York–despite the obvious reality they share many similarities and time frames; the policy system “personality” or style will work its magic to ensure that the same structures will behave and perform differently than its colonial compatriots.
Philadelphia: 1712-1750’s: Backgound Context
These bodies expectedly developed relationships with the General Assembly, and periodically were drawn into larger debates and political issues of the day. The uncoordinated outputs of these special districts caused constant friction, and programmatic inefficiencies were well known and constant frustrations. Again what coherence could be managed was usually through private individuals, often members of the Corporation, who by private coalitions could find a path to resolve the need or settle the disruption. The way to get things done in Philadelphia was not by government action, but through the attentions and benevolence of private individuals, usually of wealth, status and access sufficient to the task. Private action, however, often found it needed public involvement, and that dynamic led to a sporadic but sustained entry of private individuals following private agendas entering into the public domain.
The plight of the Municipal Corporation of Philadelphia, its emasculation by the 1712 Tax Act, made it clear very early on that it was lacking the capacity to lead, maybe even to respond to the service demands and needs, physical or otherwise, of the city. That institution, the governance of the City–had essentially been bypassed. Since the Corporation’s assigned functions required sustained and increasing revenues over the years, the matter of annual budgets, fund required, tax rates and collection of taxes and fees (of the Corporation) was a bitter annual debacle with its six tax assessors.
Philadelphia got first crack at being the residence for poor, orphans, dysfunctional, and unskilled who could not find an indenture contract or was finally released from one. Sailors too old to sail or in between voyages formed a steady core of Philadelphia’s staple population. Widows and orphans gravitated to Philadelphia for safety and family contacts. Also Philadelphia was the market center for the adjacent, and not-so-adjacent hinterland:
“[on Market Days] the crowded city [became] ever more crowded as farmers within a radius of fifteen and more miles brought their sheep, cows, pigs, vegetables, cider and other products for direct sale to the townspeople … twice yearly fairs … provided a means of bringing handmade goods from outlying places … Not only did they cater to the governor and his [affluent] circle, but citizens from all over the colony came to the capital for sessions of the Assembly and Council and the meetings of the courts [99] Edwin B. Bronner, “Village into Town: 1701-1746” in Russell F. Weigley (ED.) Philadelphia: a 300-Year History (W. W. Norton & Co), p. 62.
Starting in the early 1720’s a steady parade of Scots Irish and Germans disembarked from ships, most eventually leaving for the hinterland, but a fair share stayed, at least for a period of time. These folk settled alongside the traditional Quaker families, many of whom were descendants of First Purchasers who were now established shopkeepers, merchants, artisans (Benjamin Franklin arrived in 1723) and commercial elite affluent families. The reader should make no mistake, After the recession that followed the Queen Anne’s War, with a few slack periods, Philadelphia became a growth machine. If in 1720, it threatened Boston’s leadership with a population of 12,000, by the time of the Revolution it housed 40,000 and was the largest urban center in the new nation.
If Philadelphia was the leader of North American cities, the period was “a period of expansion, when urban problems grew bigger, their solutions costlier, and the public mind, for the most part, more ready to accept its civic responsibilities. If there were no great innovations [North American cities usually first turned to English models], there was at the same time little backsliding. Socially too, the accumulation of wealth had its effect. It intensified the social and economic cleavage between rich and poor, and caused a growing stratification of society into the three groups of better, middling, and inferior sorts. Wealth tended increasingly to concentrate in the towns [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: Urban Life in America, 1625-1742 (Capricorn Books, 1964), p. 299.
This half-century of growth, commercial expansion, and sustained immigration prompts us to relax our focus on the economic development policy area, and broaden our attention to include other significant policy areas that developed during this period. Earlier at the colony’s founding we alluded to the nexus of mostly economic development strategies, initiatives and EDOs that constituted the first economic development paradigm in North America: the self-sufficiency paradigm.
Of necessity we argued economic development was the cornerstone policy area around which newly arrived American colonists/settlers carved, or hacked out a city or homestead in the wilderness, three thousand storm-filled miles from England and Europe. By the mid-decade of the 18th century, the larger American cities had more or less established their self-sufficiency from English mercantilism in spite of heavy and fairly consistent opposition from their colonial masters in London.
Not only were cities growing, and population/density scaling up from 17th century small town American coastline into the wilderness hinterland, but organic growth was producing new generations of native-born Americans whose memories of the mother country were largely second-hand, and whose actions and governance regarded as distant and not sensitives to the realities found in their colonies. Left unspoken was the offshoot of the self-sufficiency strategy mindset that prized self-reliance, individualism, and its economic by-product, entrepreneurism–and an need for autonomy that permitted its expression.
The stratification that developed in cities gave rise to distinct approaches to urban policy and policy-making. I heuristically collapse these approaches into elite or mass-based policy areas. The elite policy areas directly or indirectly referred back to economic development, if only through the wealth it produced and generated. “As routes of trade became established and products developed for exchange, surplus wealth piled up in the towns … administered by a few merchants for their own [think furniture, apparel or fine houses] or their community’s social or economic betterment” [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: Urban Life in America, 1625-1742 (Capricorn Books, 1964), p. 298. Elite-based social and economic betterment resulted in the emergence of community development strategies, education, and cultural thrust. These will be discussed in detail in future modules, and can be considered as the flip side of our economic development-focused history.
In Philadelphia/Pennsylvania Quakers still disproportionately set the standard for policy, and Quakers were very aggressive in attacking social and even economic problems through their religious bodies. Religious structures, congregations, and governing bodies (Annual Meeting) played a major role in community development, and not surprisingly, other religious faiths, usually associated with a particular ethnic group would spring up to serve the same ends. In any case policy-making leadership in this period both drifted almost naturally, and was literally assumed by the wealthier segments of Philadelphia/Pennsylvania. “If anything, with the development of the city came an increasingly emphatic social demarcation between an upper class of the wealthiest merchants and professional men and the lower orders of the population. [99] Edwin B. Bronner, “Village into Town: 1701-1746” in Russell F. Weigley (ED.) Philadelphia: a 300-Year History (W. W. Norton & Co), p. 63.
Policy areas sensitive to mass-based concern, however, pointed activists toward public and political institutions. The City Municipal Corporation drew the brunt of these complaints, but its combination of structural incapacity and insensitive, incompetent, guild-focused elites simply responded poorly–over this entire period. In fact the Corporation as we shall discover, became worse. Mass-based policy initiatives, when they rose from chronic and loud complaints to action were mostly spontaneous and anomic.
With sufficient momentum these almost uprising could permeate elections, and periodically could play important roles in the Pennsylvania political civil war. Combined with the rise of artisans and the lower middle class, we can see in this the seeds of an urban populism that will manifest itself in the drift to Independence. But in the shorter term, we see mass-based policy actions develop with taverns and newspapers playing an intermediate role, and in Philadelphia’s case, artisan activists–think Benjamin Franklin–could assume leadership in coalitions with their friends. In Philadelphia,
Franklin pioneered–(he was not the first)–an policy-making entity he called a “junto”. I treat it as the first manifestation of what will someday be called the non-profit sector. Franklin’s rise to political greatness and Founding Father, traces to his early roots and activism in junto-led policy areas such as the night watch, library, fire companies, insurance–and tapped into founding universities, hospitals, militias, policy think tanks, and even “paper money” advocacy. What is almost astonishing is his role in Philadelphia’s streets and environmental policies. He was joined by secular and traditional Quakers in several of these efforts. The latter also played a major role in philanthropy, abolitionism, and their role in pacifist Indian relations policy-making borders on the historic.
The activity of these types of people gave to Pennsylvania a particular Midlands style of community development, and use of non public EDOs, CDOs, quasi colonial non-profits, and special districts that persists to this day.
Mass-based approach to urban policy and policy-making in this period were closely linked to the physical expansion of the city, but to the density that necessarily followed from it. Much of it was housing and street-related, but public health concerns, and crime were in this period perceived on the rise, and resident-citizen demand for solutions were highly prioritized by lower middle, working classes, and the rising urban underclass, who, as expected, were the most vulnerable. In this module, we stress those mass-based policy areas that reflected the growth of the City and its economy and the quality of life for its residents. These policy areas addressed physical and social issues and needs especially. The political issues which drew in mass-based reaction will be discussed in modules devoted to these topics.
Of the policy areas most affected by mass-based pressure, we select police/crime, fire, streets in their broadest definition including public health (drainage, cleaning and wells), street lighting, and fire insurance. We have not isolated the “housing” policy area because that has been well covered in a number of other readings. In describing each we take liberty with this module’s time frame choosing to continue discussion into the 1760’s so to paint a fair picture on the evolution of each policy area. Also, after 1714 the era was on the whole at peace, with the obvious exception of the mid-1740’s and between 1754 to about 1759. War did impact the politics and economics of the period, of course, but it did not greatly impede the delivery of public services in Philadelphia.
The extended time frame will also be fairer to the Philadelphia Municipal Corporation, as it was able to acquire authorization to tax residents for selected and specific services in the 1750’s. It also allows us to compare Philadelphia with New York City, as the latter was granted a new charter in 1731 which set up a Municipal Corporation similar in background, but not in structure to Philadelphia’s. Charlestown in 1722 had also set up a Municipal Corporation, but so intense was the opposition from plantation elites and Charlestown merchants that the authorization was reversed by London a year later. Charlestown did not enjoy a municipal government until the American Revolution. New England, of course, used towns, and for all practical purposes Virginia relied on hinterland counties and a very few, very small cities.
Philadelphia’s Colonial Urban Development: the Evolution of Urban Functions-Policy Areas
In the sections that follow, I discuss major urban infrastructure initiatives (policing, libraries, street paving/cleaning), proto-zoning-environmental, and fire protection. For each topic analysis of how Philadelphia-Pennsylvania’s policy systems participated in the making/not making of decisions and program initiatives and the role of private actors (privatism) will be emphasized. What may be a surprise is the sustained and pivotal role Benjamin Franklin played in the evolution of Philadelphia’s urban development and its component policy systems. Part of the reason was Philadelphia’s slow start in the evolution of urban functions and services, due to the structural weakness of the Municipal Corporation, and the overwhelming and pervasive politicization of it because of the political civil war between Pennsylvania provincial branches of government and their strong-willed political leaders. Philadelphia’s service delivery only built momentum in the late 1720’s when Franklin was “one the make” and a printer who dashed around in a true Renaissance Man spirit.
One customarily thinks of Franklin as a Founding Father and a prominent player in the American Revolution. His role in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania’s politics and policy-making is usually understated, despite its more robust treatment by Pennsylvania/Philadelphia historians. Like George Washington’s oversized role in early American mainstream economic development, Franklin plans a major role in America’s early community and urban development. In no other colonial city does one individual play such a crucial role. Having said this, the reader is cautioned that while Franklin plays a major role, he does not always achieve success in his initiatives, and more important is his ability to involve others in his efforts.
Not only did he use his Free Mason contacts and Rolodex well, but his creation and employment of his “Junto” was path-breaking. His Junto, despites its seeming informality and behind-the-scenes power, bordered on being an EDO/CDO whose chief function was to spin off more permanent organizations that were central to the evolution of Philadelphia’s urban functions. This is, BTW, a backdoor way to observe that Franklin’s central role was oftentimes behind the scenes and that many other deserving individuals also played major roles in each urban function. For these reasons, we begin our discussion on the evolution of Philadelphia’s urban functions and services, with Franklin and his Junto
the Junto and the Lending Library Joined at the Hip
From his start, Franklin involved himself as a private businessman with they systematic recruitment of business allies through private associations in worthwhile community projects that necessarily brought him into more public and governmental initiatives. It is, in my opinion, not particularly helpful in these early efforts to label them as either CD or MED, as their true character was they were both. They did usually develop to the point they became a formal incorporated organization, and the great number of them today are non-profit (associations, libraries, university, think tank, and even fire companies and night watch volunteers. He even ventured into neighborhood organizing as he involved himself in street cleaning and paving). His environmental initiative would make ACORN proud, if it still existed.
Penn involved himself less in mobilizing masses (his Association (Militia) being a prominent exception), than mobilizing aspiring elites or elites on the rise. The elites he was drawn to were what today are called artisans, but they are a mixed bunch. In Franklin’s day they were better known as leather aprons, and Franklin prided himself in that label. He recruited heavily from that middling class, and from that perspective we see him as an agent of change, a business entrepreneur, and a community advocate who seldom lost sight that his primary client was always himself and his business.
A contemporary budding entrepreneur and innovator could do well just reading his biography and taking to heart his techniques, organizational principles, and his incredible leadership and marketing skills–after all he did own and edit his newspaper. It is not our purpose to provide such a biography; we cull out only what suits our purposes.
We start him out as printer, having just returned to Philadelphia from a multi-year stint in London (1726). He got his Junto start from his interest in books and reading, and his selection of close friends of a similar inclination who were willing to join his book club (lending library). They borrowed each other’s books, talked about them, socialized and drank together. From these rather pedestrian beginnings Franklin got the idea to take the group one step further in 1727 by (1) selecting out the very best: 12 initially, (2) committing them to his plan of action, and forming an entity that he called the Junto.
The Junto lasted thirty-eight years [99] “Junto Club” Benjamin Franklin Historical Society. From the Junto came nearly all of Franklin’s attributed initiatives. The process was first Franklin’s idea, followed by discussion in the Junto, then a Gazette or blog-like broadside, a public meeting, and then submission of a petition to a government or the formation of a coalition of private supporters. [Junto BTW in 1727 did not carry with it the negative implications we have today; it was not a political cabal that took over a government. Rather it was an association organized for a shared purpose.].
From the Junto, its founding initiative, came the Philadelphia “Lending Library”–a not-for-profit incorporation that set up Philadelphia’s lending library–which is a matter of a decade spread across the other provinces and inspired the creation of a library system in the major cities (and smaller as well) of the thirteen colonies. One of is later initiatives, the American Philosophical Society is still with us, lodged in Philadelphia (perhaps its most interesting early initiative was the 1803 Lewis and Clark Expedition).
As for the Lending Library, formally established in 1731–it was America’s first. It came together through the support of none other than James Logan, the Secretary of the Proprietor, at the time amongst Pennsylvania’s most powerful political leader and wealthiest Pennsylvanian. Logan himself later wrote of Franklin and the Lending Library “He it was who with some little assistance set of Philadelphia Library first on foot“, with fifty subscribers [and for which] a charter was secured in 1742 [99] Verner W. Crane, Benjamin Franklin and a Rising People, Oscar Handlin (Ed) (Little, Brown & Company, 1954), pp. 32-3.
Another initiative, “the Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America”, evolved into North America’s first national think tank, whose support greatly promoted the transportation revolution of the early 19th century (the canal movement and manufacturing especially). The Philadelphia Hospital System, Night Watch, Fire Department and fire insurance, and Streets/Sewer System also started out with the Junto, as did the University of Pennsylvania (originally Philadelphia).
He got the inspiration by simply amalgamating different examples of then-contemporary groups into one entity. The name “Junto”, he no doubt picked up in London (the Whig Junto), which was a political and very partisan entity). The social-occupational backdrop for the group appealed to artisans, businessmen of various ilk on the make with an intellectual and experimental bent that saw the group as a “place where everybody knows their name”–i.e. a refuge from the intellectual vacuum that surrounded them. That focus attracted established powerful men as James Logan and Mason Grand Master, William Allen, political/business leaders who also held an intellectual and experimental bent, and who made their libraries available.
Junto members also took a series of oaths to affirm their unequivocal respect for their colleagues, to declare their sincere love for humankind ‘of what profession or religion so ever’; to act doggedly and impartially in the search for truth, and to disavow the notion that anyone be harmed “in his body, name, or goods, for mere speculative opinions or his external way of worship” … they even had their own club song to be “hummed in Consort, by as many as can hum it” [99] Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge (Bloomsbury Press 2013) ,p. 47
To the younger member, the Junto was also a mutual self-improvement function that created a base of emotional and actual business support to those under various pressures of the moment. They also played a personal chamber-like function of promoting and defending its members in their personal and business lives [99] Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin & the Politics of Improvement (Yale University Press, 2008), p.51. The mutual benefit and self-help society that was the Junto was particularly valuable to its members as it was instrumental in supporting its members in presenting their best front to investors doing their due diligence in considering loans or investments.
Franklin added his own interests to the group–in his Autobiography he referred to the Junto as “the best school of philosophy, morals, and politics that then existed in the province “[99] Verner W. Crane, Benjamin Franklin and a Rising People, Oscar Handlin (Ed) (Little, Brown & Company, 1954), p. 22. Crane asserts through the Junto Franklin brought the Enlightenment in a leather apron to Philadelphia. But for Franklin ideas were linked to action.
The activist bent Franklin infused into the Junto could easily have originated from his interest, knowledge of, and relations with the noted Cotton Mather, who espoused and formed Boston-based ‘neighborhood benefit societies” as vehicles to transmit religious values and to link them with community goals and projects (a forerunner of a future CD not for profit). Mather and Franklin were alike in many ways, and Franklin had met and cultivated Mather as a protégé before he ever left Boston.
Finally, Franklin saw the Junto as a source of info, contacts, and current events useful to his newspaper/printing. Franklin got his venture capital from Junto investors–with it he bought a controlling interest in his first printing/newspaper (Pennsylvania Gazette). Franklin wrote “Rules” (there were 24) for the group. Each member was expected to attend each meeting (Friday evenings), and each member was expected to participate using one or another of these rules as a guide to their topic. Franklin, although I doubt it in practice, said he would fade into the darkness during these meetings.
Franklin was twenty-one when he founded the Junto.
As one can see the Junto was from its start a conglomerate of goals and purposes.
He printed his first currency in 1727 (New Jersey) , and when he started his business in 1729 he first printed Delaware’s. Later the reader shall suffer through our modules on the institutionalization of paper money/debt-lending/currency , but that was a major element of his printing business–one that by its nature involved him deeply into government at the highest levels. It would provide him his entry into Pennsylvania Assembly becoming eventually its Clerk in 1736. His political contacts and public visibility followed.
Free Masonry, becoming a protégé of a major Proprietary leader, William Allen (who later founded Allentown, of course), a Scots-Irish intellectually inclined businessman and politician. Allen was Grand Master at the time, and was probably very instrumental in admitting Franklin to St Johns Lodge in 1730.
Union Fire Company, Fire Insurance: Case Study in Pennsylvania-Style Privatism
When one reads the year by year activities of Franklin’s various civic initiatives, one comes away with the hook or crook, ups and downs, failures and realities of pre 1750 political change in colonial Philadelphia. Franklin came up with ideas, and he stuck to them bureaucratically i.e. he followed through. Lots of other folk were involved, recruited (Junto members will be involved in serving on the Union Fire Company–as were a surprising number of elected officials from the Corporation). He came up with the venture money but always found a way for the project to acquire a minimum level of financial self-sufficiency. His civic adventures seem more profound in the retelling than they were in living.
Franklin personally fought fires, and in its early years he was faithful to the meetings of the fire company (and later the Contributorship) that he started. As one would suspect, however, with each passing year Franklin got involved in other projects and affairs. He lost some interest, and moved on to other innovations; that is the reality that underscores a Renaissance activist. Still. Remarkable to me, the fire company initiative involved displayed at least two subsequent re-involvements (1743 and Fire Insurance).
Still once he had set up the Fire Company and it reached levels of sustainability, he moved on to other interests. While he was starting up the Contributationship, he set up incorporated entities, a string of new non profits in other initiatives (hospital, university, almshouse/poor, community policing, and streets-environmental cleanup). What is on display is Franklin’s personification of mid-eighteenth century Pennsylvania style privatism–in these instances within community development.
The point of all this being, Franklin was human, but of strong character and integrity, and resourcefulness, with no blush in asking others for their involvement. If this is community development–privatist activist, community organizing in colonial times, than let it be so.
Our initial question posed by our history is despite their obvious similarities and shared history and experiences, why are states and cities so different? In a time when privatism was so pervasive and impactful, it seems logical that the distinctions and differences in the form and expression of privatism, and how it fit into the provincial/urban policy systems had to be an important cause of this differentiation.
What we are seeing is a tradition and experience of public-private partnerships or whatever developing under the pressure of satisfying policy and service needs of a developing policy system and economy. In an age when colonial political cultures are also taking form, we can expect that the provincial policy systems will deal with this privatism in their distinctive ways. Fire protection service delivery provides an excellent opportunity to calculate privatism’s role in the urban service delivery system and policy process. Arguably the two provinces that pursued a somewhat aggressive response to the fire protection service were Boston/Massachusetts and Philadelphia/Pennsylvania. The former, hands-down, was the colonial leader, but Philadelphia after a very late start almost caught up. What follows is a simple fairly descriptive sequence of events and actors that played out first in Boston, and then in Philadelphia. From that comparison we can make some observations. First Boston:
Boston enjoys the best reputation for colonial fire protection. We will discuss two major fire protection strategies, chimney-based prevention, and fire-fighting.
According to Bridenbaugh [99] Vol 1, p. 207 Boston “enjoyed considerable success in coping with its chimney problem. Public chimney sweeps performed their duties satisfactorily” and in 1708 hired an inspector to ensure private individuals were conforming (13 convictions followed, including Cotton Mather). In 1711, the town hired a business to sweep chimneys on its behalf, in effecting giving it either a monopoly or , if it is one’s preference, contracting for a public service with a private entity. Standards were set and fines were approved.
The reader might take note of at least two observations relevant to our purposes: Boston was willing to spend taxpayer money on public services, very early in the 18th century; and, Boston was not adverse to public-private formal partnerships with businessmen. A third observation could have been that Boston was more willing to embrace a public role in urban service delivery, certainly when compared to other North American major cities.
This was not the case in Philadelphia. Seemingly active on the chimney front, the Assembly in 1696, had imposed serious fines on chimney abusers. This proved difficult to enforce, and the penalties were excessive, discouraging any attempt to convict. “At Philadelphia, largely, because the Corporation failed to enforce the cleaning laws, defective chimneys constituted a real menace. In 1713, the Corporation launched an intensive inspection, which by 1716 resulted in 29 convictions, but only 9 actually paid fines. In any event, defective chimneys still remained a serious problem, and that inspired a part-time tinkerer to “invent” a new stove in 1742–a business venture that yielded Benjamin Franklin a measure of celebrity status, and not a small fortune.
Interestingly, of those convicted, the list included an ex-Mayor, the respected and powerful Isaac Norris, the corporation recorder, our friend James Logan, and five members of the Common Council. This is how “brotherly love” was applied to Philadelphia urban service delivery. In 1720, the Corporation hired a full-time public chimney sweep. To what extent Boston, with a decade earlier, initiative inspired this action is not known–it well may be an early “diffusion of innovation”–and/or an example of municipal competition.
Fire fighting was not one of those urban functions/services that the Corporation could ignore. Its involvement in the service, however, was characteristically inconsistent, and performance was never awe-inspiring before it simply got lost in the shuffle. Early on the Corporation acquired fire pumps from London (1718), and purchased three more in 1730, along with 200 buckets, 20 ladders, and 25 hooks with axes [99] Jon C. Teaford, The Municipal Revolution in America, 1650-1825 (University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 53.; it left them out in the open, and they were handled by whoever showed up at a fire. By the time Franklin got involved in 1730 (his involvement did lead to the purchase of the three pumpers), one suspects it was questionable how much maintenance these pumpers had. In short, by 1730, the Philadelphia Corporation, nor the Provincial Assembly, had greatly distinguished themselves in fire protection–partly, unlike wood-reliant Boston, Philadelphia housing had a strong core built of stone and rock.
Boston, in any event, was the source of fire protection innovation. Boston, after a serious fire on its Dock in 1702 broke its city-owned pumper, ordered yet a new one. In 1711 the “Great Fire burnt down the Town House, killed at least four sailors, and left 110 families homeless. The City also reactivated (it had lapsed in 1686) a fire company that it had been first organized and publicly funded in 1679. At that time, it was managed by a chief (Thomas Atkins, hired twelve firemen, purchased a building and a fire pumper (imported from England), which served as a fire house In 1707, Boston purchased yet a third pumper, and organized a second fire company with twenty men. They were well-housed https://bostonfirehistory.org/boston-history-before-1859/.
The Massachusetts General Court (i.e. its provincial Assembly) in response to the fire passed legislation authorizing Boston to appoint ten fire wards, and by 1712 ten “commissioners” had been appointed by the Town, “with instructions to care for the public apparatus, and to give such ‘necessary orders as may best serve the said Town in Suppressing & Extinguishing Fire” [99] Bridenbaugh, Vol. 1, pp. 210-11
In 1715 inspired by Amsterdam’s fire protection model, the Boston Town Justices and the Massachusetts General Court further empowered fire wardens to manage the activities of the fire companies, and the crowds attracted to the fire to prevent stealing. “Even more significant was the fact that [the legislation] seems to have been the inspiration for a group of public spirited men who sought to remedy the deficiencies of the public fire service by private initiative when they founded the first colonial fire company a year later … The Boston ‘Fire’ Society of 1717, antedated by nineteen years the famous Union Fire Company of Philadelphia, and its rules furnished the model for Benjamin Franklin’s organization” 99] Bridenbaugh, Vol. 1, pp. 211-13; https://bostonfirehistory.org/boston-history-before-1859/ .
By 1720 the Town had formed an embryo public fire department of twenty capable men and six engines under the direction of ten fire wards [fire wards were entrusted with protection of property in properties on fire. To supplement the public fire company, a second fire company, privately managed and funded, had been founded to provide services to properties that paid an annual fee for their services–it was titled a “mutual fire company”.
Philadelphia on the other hand, relied on its night watch, and the purchase of a few fire pumpers. It had an advantage in climate compared to Boston: more temperate and less need for fires to keep warm. It also, despite access to wood, had built a solid core of its urban housing with brick and stone (the country side was dominated by the Finnish log cabin, at least until the Germans came in large numbers).
Boston had “great fires” to prod them into action; Philadelphia never had a great fire. Small-scale volunteer based fire fighting worked sufficiently well, but from time to time larger fires did occur and that exposed the city’s vulnerability to its spread and potential for widespread destruction and homelessness. Most housing numerically was wooden, and brick and stone residences were clearly owned by the more affluent.
Pilferage at the scene of a fire threatened all. When the wood-saturated waterfront area–and everyone in the city was not that far from a waterfront–caught fire the economy and jobs were devastated. It was a larger than usual fire at a waterfront-wharf (April, 1730) spread up the street destroying stone and wood housing along the way. The performance of the city-owned pumpers was perceived to have little effect, and stealing was fairly evident (several went to prison). So our friend Editor Benjamin Franklin, owner of one of the city’s two major newspapers wrote an editorial:
Before it could be mastered [the fire] consumed all the Stores, &c. on the wharf, damaged several houses on that Side the Street, and crossing the Way, seized the fine House of Mr. J. Dickinson, with two other Houses adjoining towards Walnut Street, which are all ruined. … It is thought that if the People had been provided with good Engines and other suitable Instruments, the fire might have easily been prevented spreading, as there was but little Wind. There is now a Subscription on Foot for supplying the Town with every Thing necessary … There was much Thieving at the Fire [99] J. A. Leo Lemay. the Life of Benjamin Franklin, Vol 2 Printer and Publisher, 1730-1747 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 358.
In no time at all, there hitherto uninspired City Corporation stepped to the fire protection plate. Two weeks after the fire they purchased three fire engines, 400 buckets, 20 ladders and 20 fire hooks. Later Franklin praised them–and probably himself as well.
But little had really changed. There was just a lot more equipment hanging around, uncared for, and still no organization responsible for providing leadership, direction, manpower and expertise at the fire–and no one responsible for crowd and thief management. But Franklin was a product of his environment and upbringing. The transplanted Boston Yankee knew quite well what was going on in Boston, and he liked what he saw and wanted to see it in Philadelphia. So in December 1733 he wrote a blog in his paper entitled “Brave Men at Fires”, and signed it Pennsilvanus. The editorial was so well written President Clinton quoted parts of it in a memorial remarks at a Worcester MA fire in 1999. In the blog he suggested a number of actions to be considered. Nothing happened of note.
In February, 1735, after discussing his ideas with the Junto, he picked up the theme yet again. He urged Philadelphians “act for preventing fires”, advocated stepping up the chimney inspection and better stoves. He urged the City to also hire chimney sweeps, or license them, and these sweeps ought to indemnify the city for any poor jobs they performed. Finally, he observed the lack of organization and expertise that accompanied volunteer fire fighting, and urged the City Council to pass a law creating a fire fighting company, appoint firewards (Boston’s Fire Wardens) to handle crowds and thieves, and direct-coordinate the effort. In his subsequent publicity, Franklin freely acknowledged Boston’s fine system; he also made know his willingness to look at a wide variety of building improvements that would make fire fighting safer and more effective.
Well, surprise, neither the City Corporation nor the Assembly responded with action. A serious fire occurred in 1736, with nothing having been done on Franklin’s call to action. So Franklin responded on his own.
In December of that year (1736) Franklin announced that he an nineteen neighbors-friends had officially formed the Union Fire Company, complete with “Articles of Agreement” which bound this fire company to rules of organization, fire procedure, and each member pledged to fight fires and supply their own equipment. A few men were tasked to protect the property at risk in the fire–and prevent looting. As his wont, Franklin through a system of fines to the members found ways to pay for the Fire Company fixed costs. Besides Boston, he also modeled his new company of New York’s Hand-in-hand Fire Company.
Four of the founding members were Franklin’s close friend. Three were Junto. Remarkably five were members of the Corporation’s City Council; one in the Provincial Assembly. The rest were an assortment of merchants, artisans and professionals–even a ship captain and physician. Many were to serve in future Franklin initiatives. Four new members were quickly added. (a year later, they were 30). After six months of organization and getting their act together, the Union Fire Company was ready for service in December 1736.
As to how many fires the Union Fire Company fought, records are skimpy. It is clear they lost a lot of buckets at each fire in which they were involved–and yes Franklin was very active in these efforts (he lost his buckets too). They had no engines until November 1742 (it had no wheels, but Franklin figured out how to get some attached). They did acquire a chain and rope in 1739, as well as 54 buckets in 1740, plus hooks for each member. All were at their own expense mostly. in 1743, the Union Fire Company adopted new articles–which tasked the Company to serve the entire city–making it more extensive (theoretically at least) than the mutual fire company in Boston. In 1750 they (and another Philadelphia fire company which had come to existence after the Union Fire Company) found the funds (bells were expensive)
Whatever the level of its fire fighting was, the Union Company kept active and sustained its existence for decades to follow. Franklin himself by 1740 lost some interest, but kept up involvement and financial support. He got back into action around 1742-, but with the Association (the militia movement) around 1745, he pretty much stopped coming. After 1750 he was in the Assembly, and then traveled a great deal as Postmaster after 1753–then came London. Still by 1747, Philadelphia had formed six fire companies–and the Union assumed some role in coordinating them. Eventually, the City Corporation would merge its equipment with the fire companies, and Philadelphia had a decent fire protection system–a half century after Boston.
Finally, with Franklin at the helm, the Union Fire Company at its August 1751 meeting voted to send two delegates to another meeting, held in early 1752. At that meeting Franklin founded the Philadelphia Contributionship. The idea, as always, had been shaped in the Junto. Jump-started in 1749, but couldn’t get off the ground. But with support of wealthy citizens such as the Pemberton’s commitment to provided startup funds to capitalize the insurance company “to raise a fund for an insurance office (for fires and property destroyed).
His model, Lemay believes, was the London Amicable Contributionship for Insuring Houses (a catchy name to be sure). What followed after its founding, was a slow incremental raising of sufficient capitalization to grow the company, as well as the formalization of its procedures and general finances. By 1752 it had fifty subscribers, but my sense is any fire would have likely bankrupted the company. The Governor is reputed to have been the first subscriber. Franklin was deeply involved with the Contributionship–despite his many activities and responsibilities.
In 1753, Franklin was elected its President. In the same year, a member had a fire, and the company was able to pay out its obligations with money remaining. Now it had a track record and people were willing to join and pay a subscription. By March 1754, the company had over 250 subscribers. Franklin left the Board of Directors in 1754. That proved not fatal to the Company because it is still in business as you read–America’s oldest fire insurance company . [99] J. A. Leo Lemay. the Life of Benjamin Franklin, Vol 3 Soldier, Scientist, and Politician 1748-1757 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 298-303.
Distinctive Styles-Paths of Provincial Privatism–The observations we derive from our simple chronological descriptions of Boston-Philadelphia experience in development/ implementation of fire protection services in their colonial period allow us to cull out the role played by private/ privatist actors. By the 1730’s the two provinces were each headed down their own distinctive path, driven by their own political cultures of the time, and following priorities that were approved by their provincial and city/town policy systems.
Both cities responded to needs for fire protection, but not in the same time period, nor was their development process identical. Boston created a mostly public-government fire department, supplemented by a private, pay for services mutual fire company. Boston’s chimney strategy relied strongly of public inspections, reasonably enforced, and eventually a contract with a business which was awarded a monopoly for the the conduct of such inspections and their certification. It fire-fighting initiatives were from the mid-17th century public in origin and implementation–which was allowed to lapse until revived by the experience of its Great Fire. That fire launched a series of fire-fighting initiatives that by 1720 set in place what turned out to be the most sophisticated and extensive fire-fighting system in the thirteen colonies. Those initiatives include the purchase and operation of fire halls, public and private fire companies, and an extensive array, relative to the times, of fire fighting pumpers and equipment. Training and active management of the fire was also an important element, as were crowd control and anti-looting.
Philadelphia on the other hand specified public standards for chimney’s which were erratically applied over nearly three decades by a mixture of government and private inspectors. Philadelphia simply evidenced little sustained interest in this policy area and its various initiatives lacked conviction and seemingly were marginally, if at all, effective. As to fighting fire strategy, the city purchased some pumpers early in the 18th century, but its maintenance and operation were indifferent, and no fire hall or even shed was ever provided for three decades. The equipment was used by volunteers from the citizenry who appeared at each fire. Little if any attempt were made to apply standards to the fire management, or to prevent looting, or provide safety to those who fought the fire, the occupants of the property, or the crowd that surrounded the site.
Then, through private action, a private citizen, Franklin, organized an effort which raised awareness of the need for fire protection, and when lacking public city/provincial response, he simply, on his own initiative and through private funds formed a private–non profit– fire company, with at best informal public support. That support copied the Boston (and other city’s) system as best it could, with the bare minimum of equipment. Its success or impact is still largely unknown as no systematic records exist, but it seems to have had some level of approval among the citizenry-residents.
Franklin, again of his own inspiration and activism, followed up with his establishment of a private mutual fire property insurance business, which over half a decade developed with private investors to a sufficient capacity that it achieved sustainability and continues to the present day. By the end of the colonial period, whatever equipment the city government had, was made available to the multiple private fire companies that formed after 1736.
The result was Boston developed a mostly public fire protection service delivery system, paid for by mostly public resources, with the private sector supplementing such service with a private pay-go subscription service. Philadelphia developed a mostly private system, loosely coordinated, and with limited funds private available to each private use. The activism behind the system was launched by one private actor, and each private company that followed were to some extent inspired by his success–but also launched by private actors. Philadelphia met its fire protection service needs through private actions and initiatives. Privatism dominated that service for the forty years remaining before the Revolution in 1776.
Why Philadelphia’s privatism? The legacy of Philadelphia’s experience in the evolution of its urban service delivery system, carried out during the political civil war between branches of government which was Pennsylvania’s lot through its colonial history combined with its evolution Midlands political culture that carried over into the Early Republic into the classic era of American history.
Functioning within these cultures, politics, and policy-making structures and institutions, each colony’s privatist engaged in public affairs differently, through a path that worked (or not) in their policy system. In time their experience and practice would harden into a legacy which would be embedded in the future policy system, its structures, and in its ever-changing political culture (if only as a strange anomaly, badly in need of reform). That heritage/legacy remains in Philadelphia today as it struggles to wend its way into the 21st Century.
Community Policing
— Constables and the Night Watch, a core feature of English municipal government, were hired by the Corporation in 1701 (but Night Watch had started in the 1690’s). Boston formally organized its Night Watch in 1638 but had commenced the activity earlier, and New York City in 1658 (although each during wartime suspended a civilian watch in favor of military patrols), but it too had a Nigh Watch three decades earlier. A police force, with a Night Watch, was a charter-responsibility that commenced immediately upon incorporation. It seems the function was also tasked with fire protection.
Night Watch were part-time, “drafted” (and fined if they did not serve) and poorly paid. Constables in Philadelphia Municipal Corporation were also not paid. In 1704 a watch house was constructed in the marketplace; in 1705 the Corporation passed legislation formalizing the watch function (twelve each night were “drafted”, and in 1712 made some attempt to improve their sporadic and inconsistent performance [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: Urban Life in America, 1625-1742 (Capricorn Books, 1964), pp. 215-7.
Philadelphia’s policing function was not well-respected it seems, as two constables in 1707 was beaten up for closing a tavern of ill-repute by a customer (Deputy Governor John Evans, who was accompanied by William Penn Jr., and the Sheriff)). The Governor later blocked any investigation of the affair by a Grand Jury.
“Crime, disorder and vice showed a marked increase in [each major colonial town] in the period before 1742”. Waterfronts and sailors were a shared problem; “Philadelphia experienced some increase in crime after 1700, and in 1720 was also suffering from a wave of robberies … The presence of pirates in all [major seaports], and ”’ authorities winked at their crimes” …. Citizens of Philadelphia seem to have been continually running afoul of drunken sailors and getting themselves beaten up” …
Part of the crime problem was a lack of jails to house offenders “and in 1707 the Grand Jury presented … the gaol as insufficient and in 1713 the [Corporation] Common Council denounced the whole building as ‘a public nuisance’ … it being too Notorious that Criminalls ffrequently [sic] Escape‘. They ordered the dilapidated structure torn down and a new prison built … But not until the [provincial] Assembly required the erection of this new prison by law was the building begun, and only by the close of 1721 was it open for use”. It took the intervention of the Provincial Council to force the Corporation to repair its town “stock” and its cage for storing drunks). Only in 1705 did the Corporation purchase a whipping post and pillory. [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 1625-42 (Vol 1) (Capricorn Books, 1964), pp. 220-227.
The Corporation in its 1705 legislation created an eight ward system (later expanded as the city grew), with a constable for each ward, The Constable recruited residents and drafted individuals into a community watch. It never worked well, and the Watch was in chronic reorganization, or should we say a failed innovation; it proved burdensome to the its drafted householders who over time dodged their responsibilities and in general the Watch was unable to cope effectively with street crime.
Private contributions from Corporation members and ward householders became more problematic the longer the Watch continued. The fine for avoiding the Watch duty became an important source of the Corporation’s funding, as it was cheerfully paid by all to avoid any actual work in the Watch. The Watch apparently was more effective in fire protection, but one can surmise, probably with much accuracy, that the Watch did not bring much credit upon the Corporation, and the maintenance of public order required the constant order and prodding of provincial level bodies.
Franklin became involved with the Watch while serving as clerk of the Assembly and the official printer of the province–hired in 1729 (the year he started Poor Richard) by the Assembly to print its sessions and committee reports (and currency). Inspired by discussions conducted by his “junto” (formed in 1727), he wrote several commentaries in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette and followed up by pressing for legislation in the Assembly.
Some current biographies credit him with more fundamental activities, including creating the Watch, but these are incorrect. Franklin in the spirt of “little improvements” [99] Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (Yale University Press,2008) got involved in all sorts of such issues, including street cleaning, and such. Franklin himself credited the lending library (Library Company) as his first “public” matter in his autobiography–although we will make much of his involvement in Pennsylvania’s “paper money” policy making as early as 1723. The take away is that the Corporation’s “policy function” continued under attack into the 1730’s and again the credibility of the Corporation in this vital function was still in the public eye.
After a report (1743) issued by a Grand Jury exposed the policing deficiencies, all too obvious to Philadelphia’s population as “expensive and unequal and Grevious to the poorer parts of Citizens“, and called for a paid, formally organized police department managed by the City Corporation. So in the same year, the Corporation City Council reacted, and finally determined a permanent police force was required.
The City Council/Corporation appropriately applied to the General Assembly for the power to tax and operate a police force/Night Watch. In 1743-4 the Assembly, apparently under the influence of Pemberton and Norris, did not take up the matter, but did order Franklin to produce a twelve page printed version of his bill–which he did. No action, however, was taken on the matter by the Assembly and the Assembly request became an annual ritual by the City Council in the following years–gathering some momentum to cause a 1749 political crisis of sorts.
It must be admitted the timing was terrible. Only a year after William Allen’s attempted “coup” of Assembly leadership, Pennsylvania was buffeted by the politics (pacifism, militia, paper money debt for military-related expenses, and a deterioration in relationships with the Indians and the threat of French-inspired raids on the Pennsylvania frontier. Pennsylvania public opinion was in turmoil, and policing was only one of several polarizing issues. The legislative civil war against the Proprietary had calmed after Allen’s electoral gambit, but relations between the warring parties were strained and fragile at best.
Bridenbaugh believes the reluctance of the Assembly (more precisely County resident Quakers in the Assembly) to act may have been caused by its “suspicions” the Night Watch and policy bill “was another of the city’s martial measures, for at this time Franklin and his cronies were forming the {Militia] ‘ Association’ to protect their homes against the enemy”. [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 1743-76 (Vol 2) (Capricorn Books, 1964), p. 109,
The identification of Franklin with the Night Watch issue was no paranoid manifestation; Franklin had been deeply involved with this issue since the late 1720’s. Since his first efforts in the late 1720’s, Franklin had never lost interest in the Watch and Philadelphia’s policing deficiencies. He waged (as Editor of the Gazette and Clerk of the Assembly) a serious campaign, complete with several pamphlets and broadsides detailing very specific criticisms of the constables, the misuse of the six shilling fine on those who refused the watch, and the inequities, failings, and abuses that characterized the watch In 1735
As early as the late 1720’s he wrote a broadside to his newly-formed Junto and mobilized a support from its members. It was he as Editor and activist, along with four members of his Junto who sat of the Corporation’s City Council, that prodded the Corporation to undertake the reform of 1742-3. Franklin, on the other hand, had deepened his civil involvement after the non-action on the Night Watch, and extended it in 1744-6, to the defense of Philadelphia by a private militia, the “Association”, autonomous of both the Assembly and the City Corporation. His activism, as will be discussed in other modules, also extended into several very public areas as well. In October 1748, Franklin, retired in the same year from his editor function, was elected to the Philadelphia Corporation City Council.
Franklin wasted little time in focusing the Council on reform of the Watch and policing. In early November 1749 the Council again debated Franklin’s bill for reform and approved it–sending once again its request for taxing power and authorization from the Assembly. The Assembly did not deal with the request and merely scheduled it for the next session of the Assembly in 1750.
The bill which the Assembly finally produced in 1750 session, however, was an improvement upon the 1749 City Corporation bill. Prodded by the members of the Junto, a street lighting committee had formed in 1749 to light the streets with gas lights lit by gas lighters hired by a proposed nearly four shilling tax. The Assembly committee had met with the private committee and had agreed to its inclusion in the bill. Measures calling for the inspection of public wells was also included.
As such one might suggest the 1749-50 legislation was an omnibus bill, triggered by the failures of the police/Night Watch, that was meant to resolve longstanding urban issues, The bill was passed in January 1751, and by September the city’s principal streets were lit–and the Night Watch and Corporation policy function/tax approved. Bridenbaugh happily describes the aftermath:
The Assembly acted, passing a bill creating wardens to supervise lighting the streets, public wells and a night watch. The Wardens were to hire as many watchmen as they needed, pay them, and remove and remove inefficient persons; the Corporation, on the other hand, drew up the watch regulations. Constables superintended the watchmen and inspected them nightly, while the guardians themselves received ample power to perform their duties properly. The Wardens and tax assessors together levied and collected the watch tax. So successfully did this extreme application of Montesquieu’s famous maxim [separation of powers] work out that the Philadelphia night watch became the colonial standard. [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 1743-76 (Vol 2) (Capricorn Books, 1964), p. 109
Wish it were all that simple. What he left out was the crisis of implementation that followed. First, the Assembly legislation got caught up in the civil war between Proprietary and Legislature. What followed was typical of the political struggle between the Proprietary Governor James Hamilton (a friend of Franklin at the time), and the Legislature. Hamilton vetoed the bill, but under pressure he relented and with amendments finally signed it. Among the amendments was the addition of the Wardens of the Night Watch as an independent agency from the Corporation [99] J. A. Lee Lemay, the Life of Benjamin Franklin (Vol 2: Printer and Publisher, 1730-1747) (Adobe Reader, November 9, 2005 ), pp. 404-8
Predictably, however the taxing power was shared by the independently-elected tax assessors and the budget process that had evolved from the 1712 Tax Act. The awkward separation of Philadelphia fiscal policy from the Corporation’s program management and implementation were now extended into policing, street lighting, public health and water supply inspections.
So by the end of 1751 the Assembly and Governor finally approved legislation which established its own “Wardens of the Watch”, a statutory body independent of the Corporation, with a head independently elected by the city’s eligible franchise The function was paid for by taxes included in an annual Corporation budget as determined by the process set in the 1712 Tax Assessor Act. The Corporation had lost control over the police function With taxing power the Warden Watch extended their responsibility to include street lighting, and in 1756 to protection of the city water supply pumps.
Other Functions
The Corporation also could not ignore the fire-fighting function either. Due to its lack of resources, these two policy areas were rudimentary and uneven in implementation–and generated a constant usually justified torrent of criticism. In 1718, for example, the Corporation bought its first fire engines to help with the bucket brigade. The resources to handle these functions initially were largely tossed off to the Corporation members, and the drafting of residents for service.
Penn’s Frames of Government assigned ” care of the poor” to the township/county, and by implication the city’s municipal corporation. In 1705, the Legislature formally assigned the function to the Corporation and empowered it to appoint “overseers of the poor”, an ominous title if you ask me, and allowed this “Corporation department to levy a penny per pound on all real estate and personal property of its residents. That tax became an element in the 1712 Act budget, but the tax remained lodged in the Corporation, which for the next forty-four years was not given permission to increase it.
In 1749, the same year as the Night Watch, the Assembly incorporated the Corporation almshouse department, made its head elected by popular vote, authorized the statutory authority to own and hold property (almshouse), and assigned it an expanded function above mere housing the poor to care of the poor. The Corporation, however, was required to continue its activities in this function, its membership was encouraged to contribute privately to the support of the new almshouse and the larger function, and periodically the Corporation had to borrow money to pay for its obligations. In 1766 the jurisdiction was extended to Philadelphia’s two urban neighboring towns, Southward and Northern Liberties. By that point the Corporation had reduced its role in this function considerably.
City Streets were also a Corporation function. This deviated from Pennsylvania’s normal and statutory practice of making them a county responsibility. Philadelphia was the only municipal level entity responsible for the function. Accordingly, the streets were planned, constructed and maintained by the Corporation, and supervised by a committee of its Common Council. The function was privatized in the sense householders were drafted for labor, and property owners were required to keep their own portion of the street clear and clean.
After 1712 Assessors Act some staff were hired and their salary became an annual battle in the city-assessor budget. . The first formal request to change this situation arose in the 1730’s when some citizens directly petitioned the General Assembly to establish a statutory authority to handle the function; that petition was opposed by the Corporation. The situation degenerated when no action was taken, and it was only in 1762 when the Assembly indulged its preference to create its own statutory authority, the Board of Streets Commissioners and that function was largely, but not completely taken over by the independent authority.
So in a brief assessment in 1701 the Proprietary set up the Philadelphia municipal corporation to serve as the city government. The Municipal Corporation, a closed corporation whose chief offices were appointed by the Proprietary who also appointed more than its fair share of its membership, was never embraced by the Proprietary’s main rival the General Assembly. Reluctant to empower a body over which the Proprietorship had heavy influence, the Assembly over the next fifty years instead created a rival Philadelphia sub-system with powers of taxing and authorization to create special districts to run key city functions. While the other Atlantic coast port cities enjoyed the incremental development of their city functions and resources,
Philadelphia used the city policy system as a battlefield to weaken the Penn oligarchic Proprietary, and in its place installed a democratic but fragmented sub-policy system beyond the control and influence of the municipal corporation. The battle between the two city sub-systems was further intensified by the rather specific processes of operation and administration set forth in the Assembly authorizing legislation.
Actual implementation of policy by each of the statutory special districts required a process in which the Philadelphia Corporation provided key support and required its “cooperation” in the administration of the key function. As would be expected, that cooperation was not forthcoming, and was converted instead to periodic pitch battles, a general inefficiency, and a time-consuming and frustrating warfare between two rivals who had little to gain by cooperating. Diamondstone collapses this organizational guerilla war in saying:
the extent to which their actions [the statutory agencies] were circumscribed by the need to consult, agree with, or get approval of some other body, frequently the Corporation … the possibilities were immense for delay, inaction, and political one-upmanship. For instance, the Streets Commission had the power to contract with someone to clean the streets, but they could only do so when ordered to by the mayor, recorder and the alderman [of the Corporation]. Money for the town watch was collected through a stultifying process of checks and balances … Over all these bodies there was no coordinating agency: each was independent of supervision. Failure to perform could go unchecked until public discontent reached a high level [99] Judith Diamondstone, “the Government of Eighteenth Century Philadelphia“, p. 253.
So why did the General Assembly refuse to empower the Philadelphia Corporation, choosing instead to create two rival Philadelphia sub-systems, interweave their goals-functions and processes, and seemed content to let them duke it out–even at the cost of inefficiency, public frustration, and even outright disruption.?
The root cause was simple: by 1701 Penn had polarized Pennsylvanians into two Quaker camps, his own Proprietary Group, and the what David-Hackett-Fischer calls the “country party” composed of farmers and artisans, but I would add non-First Purchaser merchants and south three county resident and elites. The Proprietary party, with Logan and initially David Lloyd as its chief honcho. By 1701 Lloyd was pretty much on the outs with Penn, and vice versa, but in 1701 the relationship still held by the slightest of threads.
After Penn’s second and final departure in 1701 that thread broke and from then on they were political, if not personal enemies. As we have discussed in an earlier module it was Penn’s personality, style of management, Quaker propensity toward dissidence, and the harsh decision-making realities of setting up a settlement in the American wilderness. I will never accuse Penn of being a natural politician or administrator, and will always insist he was equal parts businessmen and religious utopian as well. In any event, Penn’s proprietary land grant, as long as it was confirmed by the King, was there to stay–and it created a personal, less bureaucratic rule than would characterize governance through a royal governor. Penn was doomed to be sandwiched between King/Board of Trade/Parliament and Pennsylvania elites and masses.
Streets and Sewers: Philadelphia to the Revolution
It took a full half-century for Philadelphia to iron out its first permanent Night Watch/Policing System. Over that period considerable dysfunction, fiscal inequality, and a steady stream of incidents and abuses existed–with a widespread acknowledgement the system was ridden with inefficiency on a good day, and petty corruption on a bad. It would be an exaggeration, but not too much of one, to say a middling reform law pushed by Franklin over thirty years, and secured by his own vote in the Pennsylvania legislature (not the Corporation City Council) is what did the trick and set the City down the path as a model of urban police service delivery. But at least that story has a pleasing end. The next two do not.
Philadelphia’s Street & Sewer Infrastructure: Getting Somebody to Take Them Seriously–If there is one bottom-line infrastructure that transforms a city from a rural village, it is not unreasonable, I think, to say it is a paved street. What coexists under such a street is a water/sewer supply, and the street itself is paralleled with drainage system intended to inhibit flooding that causes structural damage, facilitates fire protection, can lead to public health concerns, and certainly impedes traffic both foot and carriage. Stink and waste can be addressed more readily with a paved street than with a mud street dependent on pigs, or full of snow and ice in winter, and mud and dust in the offseason and summer. Wearing hip boots to the market, or watching your dear, now dead, Fido, disintegrate in your front yard by your open window was a common urban pleasure in colonial 18th century Philadelphia.
Along the streets, which are usually bordered by sidewalks to facilitate human traffic, and service residential front doors, whale-oil lighting systems can be installed to inhibit crime and improve night life. In a growing city, streets have to be demarcated and the street system expanded to accommodate the new neighborhood. Hopefully, major streets connect the City to its hinterland highway system, and that facilitates trade, commerce, and in its way, western settlement.
Streets are rather mundane after three hundred years of having them, but even today they are centerpieces of urban life and discontent when they do not live up to expectations (think potholes and congestion). If there is one urban infrastructure the average urban resident sees and uses on a daily basis–and all must endure when it fares poorly–it is a street. Philadelphia’s newspapers, including the Franklin Gazette, ran stories on a regular basis detailing one or another unpleasant episode or citizen rant. In its way, a good street system is evidence of a functional urban governance.
By some accounts of prominent colonial historians, such as the tri-centennial masterpiece of Philadelphia history, Philadelphia streets and quality of urban life fared well during its 18th century colonial period. In the Philadelphia tri-centennial Theodore Thayer asserts that between 1750-1755 Philadelphia rose to be the epitome of colonial America’s promising magnificent future, of which his lead evidence for which is Philadelphia’s streets:
Such matters as street paving may seem comparatively mundane, but … by mid-century most of the streets had brick or flagstone sidewalks, often bordered with posts that protected pedestrians from vehicular traffic. some merchants now also took the initiative to have cobblestones or paving blocks laid in the streets in front of their places of business. Such private efforts continued until the city corporation itself in 1762 took on the responsibility which it funded by a general tax and lotteries; at the same time the city took the giant step of hiring street cleaners [99] Theodore Thayer, “Town into City, 1746-1765” in Russell F. Weigley, Philadelphia: a 300-Year History (W. W. Norton & Company), 1982), p.69.
Reading between the lines, however, the reader will recognize that before 1762–actually later–the streets of Philadelphia were minimally paved, nor did they employ street cleaners to remove whatever managed to accumulate on them. For the first eighty years or so Philadelphia had managed without them. Those poor street cleaners had their work cut out for them. Without paving, streets were dirt roads, and water that accumulated on them (or its lack), one way or another, were its main problem.
Bridenbaugh has the most to say on pre-1742 Philadelphia street paving:
Despite encouraging activity by private persons just prior to 1720, the Corporation of Philadelphia, like its New York counterpart, achieved little in the field of street-paving in this period. The Grand Jury in 1723 presented Chestnut, Arch, and Sassafras Streets as ‘common nuisances’, and George Warner found Market Street the only paved thoroughfare when he visited the town in 1726“. The next year the Corporation ordered property owners to provide sidewalks, and discouraged such walks from being used for inappropriate activities. “But these rules were poorly enforced, and not until 1737 did the Mayor and Common Council begin themselves to have streets paved, charging the costs to the delinquents“. The Grand Jury of 1739 reported Philadelphia streets were in the main unpaved and “impassable, for want of repair” [99] Bridenbaugh Vol. I, p. 317
That 1739 Grand Jury Report proved a catalyst for action–in the form of Franklin and citizen petitions to the ASSEMBLY. What was unleashed was actually an environmental, not street paving, initiative that concerned the infamous open river sewer, the Dock. That case study will be presented shortly. While concerns with the Dock would drag on for forty years, the Corporation did take some heed of citizen unrest and began a somewhat more intensive “graveling” (High Street), using public funds, but private citizens on Third Street, as a result of a 1741 Grand Jury report, were required to pave at their expense. The paving issue, then, until after 1750–with Franklin in the Assembly–did not gather meaningful momentum. Bridenbaugh observes that with some exception in Boston, the other colonial cities were only marginally better or worse than Philadelphia.
Wells, discharge of runoff, accumulation of water spawned disease, obstruction, smell, inconvenience, accidents and damage to property/animals, and loss of trade. On dirt streets sidewalks are critical, and regulation of water in wells and the imposition of drainage systems are critical. Without paved streets alleys proliferate, and sub-standard housing follows. These units lack their own water source and public wells must be expanded and regulated to accommodate these backdoor units. Illogically, the more a street is used, the worse its condition becomes.
Thayer partially redeems himself by picking up Philadelphia’s most important colonial reform legislation of 1756. Regulation previous to that date focused on private well inspections, and the expansion of public wells, particularly into new neighborhoods spawned by Philadelphia’s growth. In 1756 the City Corporation took over the responsibility for public wells, but the new legislation assigned the authority and responsibility for policy implementation to Wardens. We have discovered the Wardens in our description of the Night Watch and municipal policing. As they had been assigned authority the the Provincial Legislature for responsibility for the operating and the setting of taxes/rates for the annual budget–which was shared with another set of independently elected officials, the tax assessors (from the 1712 Tax Act) [99] Edmund J. James, The City Government of Philadelphia: a Study of Municipal Administration, Wharton School 1893, p. 111. This body is the forerunner of Philadelphia’s Bureau of Water.
As they had with street lighting, the separately elected Wardens took over public well inspections, and were assigned the task to sink new wells, and to buyup private wells–and then participating in the settling of tax rates for future expenditures. “The wardens, like the overseers of the poor, formed a committee elected by the free holders as provided by an act of the provincial Assembly. This was a means of circumventing the inactivity of a sluggish corporation on civic concerns [i.e. the City Corporation] [99] Theodore Thayer, “Town into City, 1746-1765” in Russell F. Weigley, Philadelphia: a 300-Year History (W. W. Norton & Company), 1982), p.69.
Dirt streets that led into market and commercial areas, not to mention the waterfront, disintegrated in quality and access with each passing year. The discharge of water in Philadelphia most often went to Dock Creek, known as “the Dock”. References in this story to the Dock do not refer to the waterfront precisely, but to Dock Creek–what served as Philadelphia’s principal colonial sewer. The Dock, then, became Philadelphia’s first environmental cesspool–the principal casualty of Philadelphia’s non-paving of streets.
Paving
Paving was the capstone strategy for streets. Boston’s streets were paved with coastal round and smooth “pebbles”, as found on today’s seashore, as early as 1663 [99] http://www.archipedianewengland.org/1600-1699/historic-paving-and-sidewalks-in-new-england/. Stone Street in New York City (more precisely New Amsterdam) was first paved with round stone in 1658. That street was repaved with real cobblestone in 1794 [99] Christopher Gray, “Under Hoof, Foot, and Tire” New York Times, April 18, 2014. After a 1657 petition by its residents, the (Breuers) street was paved at their expense the next year. Cobblestones we today associate with early streets, were a mostly a post-1800 development. Philadelphia did not start municipal paving until after1762. Why?
From Bridenbaugh in his classic series Cities in the Wilderness, however, presents a more complicated, if paradoxical view of Philadelphia’s streets. He is more generous with Philadelphia streets in his first volume and not at all generous in his second. What emerges is that by the time of his second volume (1743) Philadelphia non-paved streets had deteriorated to the point they turned into a major generator of resident complaint and demands for remediation. After 1720 reforms were imposed by provincial legislature or detailed to the City Corporation. In both instances it was clear reforms and legislation had not worked. What will be more clear in his quote from Vol 2, is that after 1743 nothing of substance changed until the 1750’s, and only in 1762 was paving legislation finally approved.
Philadelphia streets seem to have been kept reasonably clean. The Province Law of 1712 requiring residents to ‘sweep the streets clean before their respective houses’ seldom enforced before 1720, now apparently operated with considerable success for in none of caustic and searching reports of the Grand Juries were dirty streets singled out for mention …. rows of pots set up in 1720 along each side of the main thoroughfares separated street from sidewalk and so afforded some protection for pedestrians. To prevent accidents by carts and wagons new and stricter ordinances were enacted in 1722 against ‘Excessive Galloping, and Trotting and pacing of horses’. Yet accidents continued … Because of the dangers to shoppers during the heavy market day traffic, the Corporation in 1742 orders ‘proper Iron Chains be provided to Stop the passage … through the Market Place . [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 1725-42 (Vol 1) (Capricorn Books, 1964), pp. 323-4
Bridenbaugh’s first volume ends in 1742, but when he reviewed the same streets in his second volume beginning in 1743, he starts out with
The deplorable condition of the streets of Philadelphia resembled those of Westminster, Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester [presumably the foulest English municipal streets of the day] than those of New York or Boston in 1750. [Philadelphia] Mayor Thomas Lawrence blamed the populace for ‘heaping great Piles of Dirt and Filth near the Gutters so that the same is raised two and three Feet above them, thereby stopping the Water courses [drainage], and in consequence thereof, occasion an intolerable Stench at this Season, whereby Distempers will in all probability be Occasioned. His proclamation fruitlessly order every householder to clean before his door [as had been ordered in the 1720 legislation I remind the reader]. Six months later the Grand Jury turned its attention to “the extreme Dirtiness of the Streets for want of Paving. …. In 1754 another Grand Jury report … written in the hand of Printer [Benjamin] Franklin demanded PROVINCIAL [my capitalization] relief and some action on paving and keeping [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 1743-76 (Vol 2) (Capricorn Books, 1964), pp. 31-2
It appears that legislation in 1756 may have opened the doors for addressing the street-water nexus. Thayer asserts that “by mid-century the city was exercising some control over privately owned street pumps, and in 1756 it took over most of them. under new regulations the city made the city wardens responsible for inspecting the pumps, having new wells sunk when necessary, buying up private pumps, and assessing householders who used city water. The wardens, like the overseers of the poor, formed a committee elected by the freeholders as provided by an act of the provincial Assembly. This was a means of circumventing the inactivity of the sluggish corporation on civic concerns. [99] Theodore Thayer, “Town into City: 1746-1765 in Russell Weigley, Philadelphia: a 300-Year History (W. W. Norton & Company, 1982), p.69.
I am unable to find sufficient documentation to confirm this legislation, but it does seem reasonable to conclude the Assembly did pass legislation which affected the regulation of water pumps in Philadelphia in 1756. It also placed the administration of this legislation in the hands of “Wardens” who were elected by Philadelphia free holders. This could have been the assessors created by the 1712 Tax Act (who likely were involved in the raising of tax dollars necessary for the effective implementation of the legislation) or a new set of wardens could have been created specifically for water regulation and maybe other associated activities. That was the solution used in 1762 and following.
The most specific support for the latter is Bridenbaugh,[99] Vol II, p. 296 who asserts that in the 770’s on the eve of the Revolution “Philadelphia luxuriated in an ample and satisfactory supply of water. The Wardens sought to keep up with the expansion of the city, sinking new pumps every year, but there were those who objected to all citizens being taxed for this purpose when ‘not half receive any benefits’ …. A controversy arose in 1771 over the cost of the pumps set up by the Wardens, and the respective merits of public and private installations. From this rather heated exchange, it appears that on sixty-three ‘well-built on’ blocks north and south, forty-three east and west, and twenty-eight lands and alleys, there were three or four pumps to a block, or 498 in all, of which 120 were publicly owned. Many Philadelphians felt that about 378 new pumps ought to be erected, and the ASSEMBLY [my capitalization] responding to public opinion, ordered them and enabled the city to buy up private ones or to repairs such pumps at the charge of the owners“.
My reaction is that if such a deficiency existed in the early 1770’s, the implementation of the 1756 legislation was less than stellar–and lends credence to the historical consensus that by this time the Corporation ineffectively administered activities associated with urban functions and services, and the complicated and fraught with conflict Warden commissioner process did not work well– in this instance at the very least. As the reader will discover in the sections below, the simple approval and passage of legislation, little matter how significant and comprehensive it may appear, was no guarantee of effective and consistent implementation.
Sam Bass Warner essentially asserts the same as he starts his analysis of Philadelphia urban functions as of 1770 by asserting “Already in 1770, the crowding of the land exceeded the sanitary capacities of the town. The streets and alleys reeked of garbage, manure, and night soil, and some private and public wells must have been dangerously polluted. Every few years an epidemic swept through the town. In the 1790’s the city would pay a terrible price in deaths from recurring yellow fever. [99] Sam Bass Warner, the Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth (2nd ED) (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), p. 16.
The Standard Policy Process for Handling Urban Functions
If ever a city’s streets had gone from a near heaven to hell in handbasket in one year, Bridenbaugh’s Philadelphia streets were it. What follows below is a more detailed chronology of Philadelphia street-relevant infrastructure and the policy process, usually leading to non-decision, that produced the crisis that led to resolution in 1762-3. As usual, the fingerprints of Benjamin Franklin are all over that three decade time period.
As our cited sources confirm, dissatisfaction with streets and drainage periodically erupted to the point government had to respond. Normally in the early years, the Corporation was the first to be brought into the resolution, where it may or may not have taken some action on the matter–usually to no avail. Events escalated and the Provincial Legislature was dragged in, often prompted by a request from the Corporation for authorizing legislation and for appropriate powers and resources to carry our the initiatives, or assume responsibility for the activity/service.
The Legislature, often willing to meddle in Philadelphia issues usually lost interest when it became controversial, implied an expansion of the Corporation’s powers and role, and/or threaten to cost money or raise taxes. Malapportionment in favor of hinterland delegates carried with it an unwillingness, if not opposition, to seeing things from the urban perspective; and, the perception seems to have been the Corporation was more the stronghold of the Proprietary than the Quaker Party-Legislature, leaving the City distinctly out of political favor in the Legislature.
The structural problem at root was the Legislature seems to have denied or at least ignored the Charter provisions that regulated the city’s power–giving it rather broad, if unspecified authorities to govern the city, in favor of a narrow construction of the 1701 Charter to only those functions and activities specifically mentioned in the charter.
If not specifically mention, the default was the Legislature required the Corporation request of the Legislature the authorization for such powers, before any provision for resources could be made to implement them. That meant in practice that any attempt to resolve resident complaints or demand for enhanced services eventually had to wander into the Legislative domain-whether either side wanted it or not. This fundamental disagreement on the Charter’s delegation of municipal powers was never solved and continued to the Revolution
The Legislature’s agenda when in session (not all that often) was always crowded and over the decades of the 18th century it is reasonable to conclude non-municipal (Philadelphia) matters placed consistently higher on its agenda–deservedly so as the perpetual conflict between the Board of Trade/Privy Council, Proprietor and Legislature, and after 1740 the existence or threat of war/deterioration of Indian relationships were first rate crises, not easily resolved, and consuming of much time and debate. Not infrequently did the politics of one of these issue areas become the behind-the-scenes context for understanding what happened when Philadelphia matters intruded into the agenda.
As hindsight teaches us, the fundamental pattern of response to these periodic requests by the City to the Legislature was either to ignore them outright, take symbolic or rhetorical action, push them into another session in future years, or, when action seemed compelled, resort to the formulae introduced in the 1712 Tax Act which (1) stripped the Corporation of the right to tax on the activity, (2) compel the activity, service or function to become subject to the budgetary process in which an independently elected by city freeholders assessors, set rates, collected the taxes and jointly worked with Corporation officials to fabricate a city budget that allowed the transfer of tax funds to the Corporation for agreed upon services-expenditures.
That process simply never worked well, and in any case made independent organizations responsible for the implementation of city functions/services–not the Corporation. For whatever reasons there were, and several were apparent, Philadelphia matters ran afoul of these defaults. In the first four decades, urban matters did not reach crises levels, the Quaker Almshouse and issues associated with Overseers of the Poor excepted, the City was left to its own resources to cope with urban discontent, inefficiency, and demands for services.
By the end of the first decade of its existence, certainly the second, the Corporation seems to have tried in its way to deal with the impossible position it had been placed, but during the 1730, the problems were accumulating the growth necessitated some response by someone to the new situations it created. That is when we see some serious effort on street issues rising, and simultaneously, we see the deterioration in the response by the Corporation to address them.
It is my belief the missing ingredient in the rise of streets/drainage, and most other urban issues, was the lack of an elite-based constituency willing to assume leadership or responsibility for advocating policy and guiding it through the Corporation’s and Legislature’s policy-making thickets. Community demands were irregular, often tied to events/situations that lost the attention span of the community as solutions sailed off into the sunset.
A lack of community institutions, or more likely, an explosion in Philadelphia diversity/inequality meant considerable fragmentation among a host of religious-ethnic, city-suburb, and intra-neighborhood entities that lacked a will, past experience, or good sense to come together to press the issue. Bluntly, unless some elite member/group stepped up to the plate, most issues simply went nowhere, and were unable to get traction in Philadelphia’s convoluted policy-making process. Introducing an expression I will use endless in future modules, we needed a leader on a white horse who could save the situation from ruin. Enter the peripatetic, restless busybody genius who ran a newspaper.
To say it another way. The frustrations and inefficiencies of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia’s– failed policy systems, the perpetual political civil war between its branches of government, often required outside intervention from non-government individuals and entities to resolve the situation.
Every colonial American province included large doses of privatist action, but Pennsylvania’s backdoor interventionist privatism that first attempted to cope with governmental vacuums by ad hoc small-scale fixes; when that proved insufficient when a serious situation was encountered directly entered into the government’s policy process and led/mobilized a resolution/response to rectify the problem. Benjamin Franklin has come to personify this privatist style, but prominent Quakers, from James Logan, to the Norris family, William Allen, the Shippen Family, even Benjamin Rush and a score of others did so on consistently and persistently thru to and in the Revolutionary period. In and out of government, they were at home more in the private sector. Franklin was not typical of them in the sense he retired from the private sector in 1748 to enter into a pronounced public period that lasted to his death.
Franklin’s initial venture into streets/drainage is undated, found in his autobiography written in 1788. In the autobiography, written by Franklin in his eighties, events and issues become conflated, and details are not always supported by evidence which was lost, or is presently unknown. What is known with some precision is that Franklin during the 1730’s wrote a string of complaints on the condition of the streets/drainage (Lemay believed these comments applied to the late 1730’s, but Charles S. Olton asserts they occurred in the mid-1750’s, Olton, “Philadelphia’s First Environmental Crisis“, Philadelphia Magazine of History & Biography, Vol. 98, No. 1 (January, 1974), p. 93. By that time, however, Franklin was a North American Deputy Postmaster who traveled for long periods. The 1730’s were more congruent (Fire Department, the Dock environmental reform, and Night Watch) with Franklin’s urban focus):
In wet weather the Wheels of heavy Carriages ploughed through [the unpaved streets] into a Quagmire“. Making reference to his neighborhood near the Jersey Market, he saw “with Pain, the inhabitants wading in the Mud while purchasing their Provisions“. Later he wrote of that market area “Ground down the Middle of the Market was at length pav’d with Brick, so that being once in the Market, persons had “firm Footing, but were often over shoes in Dirt to get there [no street cleaning] [99] J. A. Leo Lemay, the Life of Benjamin Franklin, Vol 2: Printer and Publisher, 1730-1747 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 408.
Franklin was about to become a community development activist for the neighborhood in which he lived.
As his customary procedure, Franklin almost certainly brought the matter to the attention of his Junto. No doubt with their encouragement and support, and “by talking and writing on the Subject, I was at length instrumental in getting the Street pav’d with Stone between the Market and the brick’d Foot Pavement that was on each Side next the Houses … [but] the rest of the Street, not being pav’d whenever a Carriage came out of the Mud upon this Pavement it shook off and left its Dirt upon it, and it was soon covered with Mire which was not removed“. The obvious solution was a street cleaner, and Franklin thought that property owners should pay six pence a month to provide the service.
Apparently that fell on deaf ears, and so Franklin himself hired “‘a poor industrious Man‘ to clean the street twice a week, and ‘Carry off the Dirt from between all the Neighbor’s Doors‘. He followed that up with a newspaper blog-pamphlet-broadside presenting his case to the neighbors, pointing out to them the benefits received from the service. He sent these broadsides to each house, and went door-to-door himself “to see who would subscribe an Agreement to pay six pence a week to have the street cleaned. “It was unanimously sign’d and for a time well-executed“. Apparently Franklin felt the word got out to others and later he wrote “All the Inhabitants of the City were delighted with the Cleanliness of the Pavement that surrounded the Market, it being a Convenience to All‘ [99] J. A. Leo Lemay, the Life of Benjamin Franklin, Vol 2: Printer and Publisher, 1730-1747 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 408-9.
Franklin’s activism, however, did not lead to a sustained movement to pave the streets and clean up the associated problems that it caused. The streets were not by any means Franklin’s chief priority in his period of first public engagement after his entry to public life in 1748 (the time of the Hospital, the University, his electrification research, his American Philosophical/ Society of Useful Knowledge). It is possible that just previous to his first London venture (1757) he privately drafted some form of an ordinance for street paving and its financing (he thought he did and expressed it in his Autobiography), but no bills were ever filed in the Legislature or City Corporation.
In 1758, however, a citizen petition made its way to the Assembly (seemingly bypassing the Corporation). The petition stressed dust reduction and focused on street cleaning, but included was a request to start paving the streets. It is possible that the impact of a disruptive British Army presence during the desperate years (1754-59) of the French and Indian War, put stress on city streets that inspired both Franklin and Philadelphia’s citizens into action. It is equally likely that the accumulated neglect of nearly sixty years had finally reached the boiling point that engaged residents into action.
Franklin was in London, and it appeared that by the time he returned in late 1762, the streets issue had coalesced into a movement that had secured passage of an Assembly bill to pave streets in March 1762 (it formed a committee to prepare legislation in February1762, and five of the eight members were Junto or Franklin allies and associates [99] Lemay, Vol II, p. 409)). The Act provided for a tax and a lottery, issued requirements to landowners to clean their own sidewalks and doorsteps of rubbish and dirt, and “appointed commissioners to oversee the project and maintain newly paved streets [99] Charles Olcott, “Philadelphia’s First Environmental Crisis“, Philadelphia Magazine of History & Biography, Vol. 98, No. 1 (January, 1974), p. 93.
Interestingly, Franklin returned in November, 1762, and to the Legislature in January, 1763. Two weeks after his return to the Legislature (January 28), he was assigned to draft supplemental bill on the matter, a bill which passed three weeks later on February 22, 1763 (99), Lemay, Vol II, p. 409).The 1763 Act directed “regulating, pitching, paving, and cleansing, the streets, … regulating, making and amending the water courses [presumably the Dock], and common sewers, and for raising money to fund improvements” [99] Charles Olcott, “Philadelphia’s First Environmental Crisis“, Philadelphia Magazine of History & Biography, Vol. 98, No. 1 (January, 1974), p. 96. At a minum, the 1762-1763 legislation provided authorization to the City to perform and finance the streets function through a process specified in the legislation.
Lest it be lost in the details, once again the Assembly bypassed the City Corporation. In 1765, Assembly legislation directed the Corporation to involve itself in the street function, but the Assembly levied the tax, commenced the activities, and, in line with the default procedure since the 1712 Tax Act, devolved the street function to an independently elected set of commissioners who were responsible for implementation and future administration of the streets function. In the following years, regulation was frequently issued under the authority of “City of Philadelphia, by the Mayor … and the Commissioners for Paving and Cleaning the Streets“. Bluntly, it is apparent that Philadelphia urban service functions from their start meant a multi-party shared responsibility, authorized and commenced by provincial legislation, and implemented/ maintained/expanded by at least a three or four-party policy-making process (City Corporation-Mayor, independent commissioners, and Tax Act assessors).
Within a year of the passage of the monumental street reform, the Commissioners directly petitioned the Assembly (bring yet another party into the policy implementation process) to provide more funds for the function to extend it to all parts of the city–and broadening the geography of the tax to city-wide. The Commissioners further requested a law to “strictly enjoin the residents by requiring them to cart away “Heaps of Rubbish and Earth which have from Time to Time been thrown into the Public Cart-way … prohibiting heavy-laden wagons with narrow wheels which would damage new pavements, and finally request sterner enforcement to keep privately owned walkways paved, and enforcing provisions of the 1762-3 Acts prohibiting private structural obstructions into the streets . [99] Charles Olcott, “Philadelphia’s First Environmental Crisis“, Philadelphia Magazine of History & Biography, Vol. 98, No. 1 (January, 1974), p. 94
If this were not sufficient, in the same year citizen pressure focused on “the Dock” {Dock Creek, the waterway in the city that served as the city’s principal sewer since the City’s founding). Two citizen petitions were sent to the Assembly (again, not to the Corporation) “alleging that the Dock was not only commercial useless, but offensive and injurious to the people of the city:
The object was not to stop use of the Dock as a sewer, but to make it more effective by improving the channeling and cleaning it out … the petitioners also condemned the practice of leaving the carcasses of dead horses on the common, a custom ‘not only extremely offensive to the Passengers on the Road, but (which) also tends to infect the Air and produce Disease”.
Seeing where all this was leading, the Assembly responded by taking advantage of the expiration of the 1762 Street Act, to rewrite and enlarge upon its treatment of streets and paving to develop and approved a 1769 legislation that has since be called Philadelphia’s “first comprehensive environmental law” 99] Charles Olcott, “Philadelphia’s First Environmental Crisis“, Philadelphia Magazine of History & Biography, Vol. 98, No. 1 (January, 1974), p. 94.
To fully engage the reader in the substance and importance of this legislation, some background to “the Dock”, and the issue of public regulation of private activities (eminent domain, proto-zoning, and occupational-industry relevant regulation) as it applied to specific geographical areas of the city. Suffice it to say, street cleaning and paving, had not only opened the door to dealing with Philadelphia street functions, but had made it more necessary to start dealing with other and larger more complicated urban functions as well. The dam which had held back Philadelphia governance from dealing with its growth and the need for large-city urban governance/policy had been broken.
the Dock
On the 15th of May, 1739, “a great number of citizens’ petitioned the ASSEMBLY (my capitalization) asking ‘for the Convenience and Reputation of the City and the Health of the Inhabitants, the Erecting of new Slaughter-Houses, Tan-Yards, Skinner Lime-Pits &c, erect on the Public Dock and adjacent streets … be restrained, and those already made may be removed from such a Term of Years, as shall be judged reasonable”. There was never any doubt as who was the principal author of the petition, the Editor of the Philadelphia Gazette was already known to be concerned with the stink, and fearful of health concerns arising from the use of the Dock area for slaughter of animals, tanning facilities, and the use of lime and the disposal of the sad remains of the animals. The petition was signed by Franklin [99] Lemay, Vol II, p. 411.
On its face, the petition was asking for a number of related but quite broad set of requests. Public health was certainly a motivation, as was quality of life, and the use of a public waterway, as well as roadways-streets and residences along the course of the Dock. The request involved a litany of serious business regulations, including a cessation of new construction and uses, and the physical removal, substantial repair, or change in the processed employed at existing structures and presumably businesses from the area. The complaints associated with the Dock and the mixture of uses to which it had been put was long-standing–essentially since the founding of Philadelphia nearly a half-century previous.
In our contemporary context, I suspect many of us would think a similar petition as “environmental” in nature, and subscribe to the belief that government had the authority to regulate business for the public good. In these colonial times, the matter was frequently labeled as “the public domain”, and the right of government to interfere with the rights of private property, and the degree of regulation today subsumed in part under zoning and building codes had only the most rudimentary experience. The size of the area, the centrality of the businesses to economic life and growth, and their effect on the normal day-to-day of Philadelphia urban quality of life made the petition controversial from the start.
Franklin’s intentions may have been fairly clear, but his petition and the movement he personally led challenged some of the wealthiest business owners in the city/Pennsylvania. Many high wealth and high status business elites had some business or personal relationship with the families that owned these facilities, and Franklin’s no-holds-barred frontal assault was certain to rattle some well-upholstered cages. It is possible the petition went to the Assembly, because the owners of these businesses were not only well-connected–indeed members– to the City Corporation, but current officers and elected officials had included several, including a former Mayor, in its ranks.
Reflecting that the petition was so controversial, led by its Clerk of the Assembly and newspaper edition, and most likely enjoyed considerable support amid the city’s residential population, certainly those in the Dock’s borders, the Assembly heard the petition two days later and required in attendance representatives of the petitioners and the businesses affected. Franklin showed up as did several of the most prominent of the affected businesses. While the business spokesperson got off to a rough start, their counter to the petition and their request for more time to prepare a response, was not unreasonable and since a new session of the Assembly was about to commence, the owners were given until a new Assembly convened in August. So on the 8th of August, the case was heard.
The initial counter of the business owners was that their facility did not stink. They described the “Sweetness and Cleanliness of their Trade, and said he could smell no stink [from it]. … That what some People called a Stink from the pits, was a sweet Smell … [and] That the Tanners were as healthy as other men”. No doubt persuasive, other speakers did recognize the intensity of the issue and the latent opposition among citizens, and they offered various “reforms”, which in their aggregate certainly might have helped a bit–especially putting a roof on the worst uses and enclosing them, fencing them in, and “cleaning them” regularly. One reform was to release the refuse from these facilities only at High Tide’. Several of the most wealthy businesses owners guaranteed their compliance with these reforms. They even commended Franklin personally for being so “politically courageous” [99] Lemay, Vol II, pp. 410-1.
Having had sufficient time to think things over, the Assembly responded only two days after the Hearings had concluded (August 10). Because the facilities were entirely within the city of Philadelphia, the City Corporation had primary jurisdiction, and so the Assembly sent a missive to the City Council “to make such Provision for the Relief of the Petitioners against the Tanners, Skinners, Butchers &c, as they shall find to be necessary and consistent with the Powers of the Corporation”. If they needed any help the Corporation was to simply ask the Assembly.
When the Philadelphia City Council (the Corporation) met two days later, it simply received and filed the missive–and the matter was effectively dead-on-arrival.
That began a nasty, bitter, personal, multi-year rhetoric war between Franklin, competing newspapers and, of course the the myriad of influential business owners (Lemay takes eight full pages to describe it in detail). The last official “missive” was from Franklin’s Gazette eight years later (1747). Franklin’s core position throughout as he wrote early on (and repeated in his autobiography nearly fifty years later) was that “As the Tanners who own land on the Dock are very few, and the People whose interest is affected by their Remaining there, are a very great Number, the Damage they would suffer in removing, would be but a Trifle in Comparison to the Damage done to others, and to the the City, by their Continuing where they area” [99] Lemay, Vol II, p. 413. Summarized by Lemay, “it was a question of public domain and public rights versus the selfish interests of a few powerful persons.
Franklin himself suffered personally from his position. He lost his chairmanship of the Library, his own creation–one he had held for nearly a decade. If revenge is a meal best eaten cold, then Franklin’s final word on the subject of the Dock was eaten fifteen years later in 1762. Returning from London where he had been for five years as lobbyist for the Assembly, he rejoined the Assembly in person on 11 January 1763. On the 24th, the Assembly received a petition complaining about the Dock in terms reminiscent of the earlier struggle. The next day the Assembly received yet another petition.
On the 3rd of February, Franklin, as head of the Assembly committee creating the supplementary streets bill described earlier, was sent the petitions and tasked with forming a committee to conduct hearings on the Dock. On February 9th, the committee reported out its finding the Dock should be cleaned out, properly walled, and inserted into the supplementary streets bill language to the Wardens of the Streets to “purchase lots for public landing places … and [to] clean, repair, and make the Dock navigable. It further required the owners of land bordering the dock to wall with stone their portions of the dock’s banks at their own expense. It was approved by Assembly on March 4, 1763.
Franklin followed up with yet another piece of legislation two days later that essential forbade the dumping of dead animals or the remains of their carcass into the waters of the Dock. When the owners did not respond to these laws, and comply with their provisions, Franklin, as Speaker, two years later. 1765, passed yet another bill that ordered the critical areas of the Dock taken by the City and walled over as a public street. [99] Lemay, Vol II, pp. 418-9. Today Dock Street runs three blocks from Sansom Street to Spruce Street.
Philadelphia’s First Comprehensive Environmental Legislation
From hindsight, 1762-3 were the breakpoint in Philadelphia’s struggle to get the attention of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia decision-makers to deal with its needs created by growth and the demands from its residents. Arguably, the approval of the Night Watch and Policing legislation in 1751 had been a beginning, but after creating the Wardens of the Street, and the commencement of paving, the cat had been let out of the bag. Franklin was finally able to secure his environmental legislation over the Dock–and compel compliance to it with subsequent action. But as already mentioned above, the demands never stopped after 1762.
Truth be told, and I am always reluctant to acknowledge the existence of a truth, there was something going on that had nothing to do with Philadelphia’s urban agenda per se. In practically every single page I have written about Pennsylvania I have harped on its status as a near-failed state, its incredibly fragmented policy system, its political civil war between the legislative and executive branches–with London’s Board of Trade/Privy Council tossed in for good measure. I have argued it was hard enough to get the provincial level government to respond in times of the greatest of needs, and how the Philadelphia Municipal Corporation, bypassed by the Assembly as the legitimate governance of the city, had descended into lethargy, and functioned more as an elite country club for the city Quaker wealthiest than a city hall. Well after the end of the French and Indian War in 1763-4, it got worse.
It started with a heating up in the political civil war of government branches beginning in 1764–with Franklin taking the lead the Legislature was determined for once and for all to end the Proprietary and in 1765 former Speaker Franklin would head off to London to try once again for somebody’s consent to give Penn the boot. The timing could be worse because at the same time, Pontiac’s War on the western borders/hinterland created a genuine eastern versus western schism as western settlers, Scots Irish but also German marched on Philadelphia demanding someone listen to their complaints.
If this be not sufficient a disruption, peace had brought with it an increase in foreign immigration and a flood of Scots Irish hit Philadelphia’s streets, along with the first major rise of German ethnic groups whose direction was guided by religious and artisan-commercial Germans. For them this was a period of indenture reform and legislation for humanistic immigration/ naturalization. Germans, normally passive adherents of the Quakers, and firm anti-Proprietary allies split into western and eastern groupings, splitting a constituency vital to the Quaker Party.
The Proprietary, whose interest and strength always lay in its dominance in western settlement governance rode that surf. By 1765-1766 Franklin and his Quaker Party lost their control over the Legislature–and in the next year a third party, the Presbyterian Party arose out of the vacuum. If all this were not bad enough, let’s not forget our American history. The 1764 Sugar and 1765 Stamp Act infuriated nearly all residents of North America in some way and to some degree. In our terminology, the Drift to Independence and Revolution had started.
In short, Philadelphia and provincial politics was not simply in flux; it was in turmoil. In the collapse of the old non-order that characterized Pennsylvania a new order began to emerge. Today we might be tempted to call it class war, or at least populist insurgency, but the key was residents-voters were coming out of the woodworks, and deference-non participation, usually their default, got trampled on. In Philadelphia, artisans, the more wealthy of which owned sufficient property to be free holders, voted. While Philadelphia never experienced the frenzy of the Mob, aka Sons of Liberty, of Boston or New York, the entry of working and lower middle class was unsettling enough to the frail and weak Pennsylvania policy system.
They voted wherever an election was held–and in Philadelphia those bypassing special district-like Wardens and Tax Assessors caught their fair share of the turmoil and activists elected to office. With their direct access to the fractured and fragmented provincial Assembly, these Wardens and their followers were able to achieve some considerable success in affecting the provincial agenda–and forcing a better degree of compliance from the lackadaisical city council/board of aldermen aristocracy. Carl Bridenbaugh in his Vol II, Cities in Revolt, 1743-1776 dedicated a chapter “Twilight of the Aristocracy” to the decline of what had been North America’s principal core of governance.
So it was in this atmosphere that Philadelphia streets and environmental activism captured the attention of provincial legislators. Determined to seize upon their demands, legislators had a natural legislative vehicle to ride, the need to renew the 1762 streets legislation (whose term was expiring), turning it into Olton’s “first comprehensive environmental legislation” in 1767. The rhetoric alone that was found in its opening sections was a rather blunt hint as to what was to come in the detail-sections. The preamble itself was a near blanket condemnation of the pollution caused by Philadelphia businesses, particularly distillers, butchers, soap-boilers and tallow (candle) chandlers, all of which created some nuisance, stank and obnoxious discharges that found their way into the streets, gutters, alleys and sewers.
The definition of an offense was pretty open–anything that could “annoy or offend any neighbor”. Fines were stiff for any who left any dead animal on the street. The Dock area was singled out for even harsher treatment than Franklin had recently applied. The pace of new street paving was accelerated, and in the Dock area what had not been converted into a street was walled in. Supplementary legislation passed two years later applied regulations to specific occupations and business, wheel makers for instance, to ensure environmental degradation was minimized.
Despite the intensity of the legislation, the might ship of refuse and Dirt that was Philadelphia did not turn overnight–and to make matters worse, the city in another of its growth spasms and housing and new neighborhoods were spreading across any unbuilt area. So in 1769 The 1767 legislation was updated and its commitment to street paving enhanced. Added to that initiative was a more detailed focus on sewers, regulating water courses–and finding funds to pay for the improvements.
For once money was provided before it was needed. Property owners were tasked with compliance and fines were heavy, for matters such as filth disposal; businesses (who occupied their first floor of a family residence) were fined for occupational discharges into the public way. Moving carriages and wagons were made subject to parking regulations, and residential porches, and back door bulkheads had to be off the public way–as did a merchant’s advertising “shingle”.
But the street commissioners could not rest on their laurels. The newspapers regularly published complaints and the criticism that the more wealthy areas of the city were the first served were frequent, and seemingly impactful. Still, the politics became ever more turbulent as the years rolled on. Compliance, never the strong-suit of Pennsylvania population, was uneven, and the actual effect of the monumental series of environmental laws is open to some question.
The Dock area in particular proved to be beyond hope. In 1783, the year the Revolution ended and the British acknowledged defeat, a petition was sent to the Legislature repeating once more the litany of charges such as originally were leveled by Franklin in 1739. In 1784, the Legislature responded by building an archway over the Dock Creek, filling in the Creek, and building (of all things) a market area over the Creek. Whatever else it would become, the Dock was no longer an open sewer.
Ron W. Coan 