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57 4 “A Body Corporate and Politick” Association, Interest, and Improvement in a Provincial City Philadelphia never had been a “green country towne,” and by the middle of the eighteenth century, a variety of factors placed Pennsylvania “upon the growing hand, more than any of the provinces of America.” As hub of the regional economy and heart of the colonial print culture, the Quaker city fostered the intellectual and social ferment that made it the continental seat of culture and commerce. The British solider, Lord Adam Gordon, pronounced that the spectacular progress of its population and commerce made Philadelphia “one of the wonders of the world.” Moreover, it was not just economic development, but built environment—“the regularity of its streets,” orderly grid plan, and “spacious publick and private buildings”— that made the city not only “the first of America,” but “one that bids fair to rival almost any in Europe.” Another traveler, Andrew Burnaby, marveled that such an achievement, “if we consider that not eighty years ago the place where it now stands was a wild and uncultivated desert, inhabited by nothing but ravenous beasts, and a savage people, must certainly be the object of every one’s wonder and admiration.”1 Growth aggravated all the problems that plagued the early modern city, from fire and filth to crime and contagion. Some Philadelphians claimed that these pains and perils vindicated the founder’s skeptical view of city living and demonstrated the need to renounce urban luxury and subordinate private desires to the public good. Others believed that harnessing personal appetites, rather than denying them, offered not only a better solution to urban problems but also the possibility of elevating the colonies and inducting them into a shared culture of improvement with their metropolitan cousins.2 The ongoing clash and conversation between these civic visions 58 “A Body Corporate and Politick” shaped the effort to promote the public health of the commercial community that Philadelphia was, rather than the rural idyll Penn had envisioned. Both public and private actors operated within a new world of collective action, organized around the power of association to change individual lives and solve shared problems.3 Philadelphia’s improvers developed their projects within the imperial economy and the broader international conversation about social reform as a still-developing ideology of population linked international economic competition with the state’s capacity to promote popular welfare.4 The merchant networks that ferried Palatines to America also carried recordsetting quantities of agricultural produce to the West Indies and manufactured goods from England, as well as news from home, dispatches from London’s learned societies, and all other manner of British publications.5 On both sides of the Atlantic, consumers were opening a cultural space for what they called refinement. Departing from traditional praise for abstemious rural virtue, medical theorists such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot focused their attention on social bonds, holding that “Men are created for each other; their mutual association is productive of advantages not to be given up without suffering for it; and it has been very properly observ’d, that solitude brings on a consumption. Nothing can contribute more to health that cheerfulness, which is animated by society and damped by retirement .” Association was the order of the day, buoyed by a faith in mutual improvement.6 Perhaps the greatest exemplar of this new mode of life was the paramount representative of colonial Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin. The runaway servant from Boston was the consummate self-salesman and civic associator . He established insurance companies and hospitals, militias and scientific debating clubs. He committed himself to an ideal of self-improvement and a program of social reform that matched or exceeded any other figure in colonial America.7 The enlightenment program of civic improvement, however , did not completely efface competing visions of social change. If Franklin , with his famous autobiography, embodied liberal self-creation in early Philadelphia, then his shadow across the river in Burlington, New Jersey, personified a very different path to identity. Abolitionist John Woolman lived the life of a Quaker ascetic, dreaming of a polity based on the “pure wisdom” of obedience to God. He was an evangelist of personal transformation, but a transformation that was fundamentally ascetic, religious, and communal rather than associational, commercial , and competitive. As a young man, Woolman found employment as a clerk, but he soon discovered that “The increase of business became my burden; for though my natural inclination was toward merchandise, yet I believed truth required me...

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