Philadelphia Experiments

Rum Punch & Revolution: Taverngoing & Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia. By Peter Thompson. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999

These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia. By Susan Branson. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001

The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic. By Laura Rigal. Princeton University Press, 1998

First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory. By Gary B. Nash. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002

The Elite of Our People: Joseph Willson's Sketches of Black Upper-Class Life in Antebellum Philadelphia. Edited by Julie Winch. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000

In Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, when the narrator is describing the first stop in her trip northward—Philadelphia in 1842—there is a small but striking moment. In Philadelphia, Jacobs's protagonist Linda meets the Rev. Jeremiah Durham and his wife, and she is assisted by an African-American antislavery organization. In Philadelphia, she sees something new: "One day [Mrs. Durham] took me to an artist's room, and showed me the portraits of some of her children. I had never seen any paintings of colored people before, and they seemed to me beautiful" (162).

Linda sees a kind of self-presentation that she has not seen before. Commissioned by those with means, preserving their visages, such portraits convey a status, a permanence, and a visual authority. In some ways, this is a self-reflexive passage describing Jacobs's own artistic effort: her book, which she hopes will grant her a durable presence. These desires are nicely evoked by Jacobs's modern editor, Jean Fagan Yellin, and Harvard University Press, who have placed a deceptively benign portrait of Jacobs on the cover and spine of the paperback edition. Whether the volume is lying on the desk or displayed on the bookshelf, Jacobs is watching. ¹

Philadelphia is also the place where Jacobs's Linda is struck by unequal access to the resources of society and by the persistence of prejudice, when she travels in the segregated railroad car to New York City. The car in which she is forced to ride contains a loud, uncouth mixture of people:

We were stowed away in a large, rough car, with windows on each side, too high for us to look out without standing up. It was crowded with people, apparently of all nations. There were plenty of beds and cradles, containing screaming and kicking babies. Every other man had a cigar or pipe in his mouth, and jugs of whiskey were handed round freely. The fumes of the whiskey and the dense tobacco smoke were sickening to my senses, and my mind was equally nauseated by the coarse jokes and ribald songs around me. It was a very disagreeable ride. (163)

Linda likes the clarity, authority, and beauty of the portraits; she resists the roughness, heterogeneity, and lower-classness of the segregated train car. Her trip through the North is marked by such distinctions. It is no accident that Jacobs describes Philadelphia as the place of both portraits and prejudice. She is extraordinarily careful in detailing the different states of freedom she experiences in different Northern cities: Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and London. In Philadelphia, Jacobs describes being attracted to a community and to its cultural productions, and she resists a confinement associated with the vulgar and the foreign. She articulates the complicated, delicately navigated freedom that is one of the book's rhetorical achievements.

It seems odd in 1861 for Jacobs to describe Philadelphia in 1842 as a place where Mrs. Durham "was surrounded by her husband and children, in a home made sacred by protecting laws" (160), given the precarious state of African American Philadelphia and, in particular, the spectacular riot that erupted on 1 August 1842, less than two months after her stay in the city. Her overstatement and elision may result from an effort to emphasize her initial sense of comparative security in the North or from a desire to...