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33 3 “A Suitable Charity or an Effectual Security” Community, Contagion, and the Care of Strangers The earliest Pennsylvania settlers worried about whether they would transform the environment before it transformed them, and by the early eighteenth century, most were confident that they had.1 But as Philadelphia expanded, its established population faced a new question: Would they be able to remain Pennsylvanian in the face of shifting demographics, or would the influx of newcomers change what it meant to be Pennsylvanian? The increasingly varied origins of the migrants forced a community that began as a self-consciously English and Quaker colony to develop a corporate identity that could encompass accelerating mobility and increasing linguistic, religious , and cultural diversity. New migration destabilized provincial politics, as competing factions alternately targeted non-English settlers as potentially dangerous and courted their growing numbers as potentially useful. The expansion of the “migrant trade” also revived all the old terrors of the sea, contagion above all others. Just as they knew the city to be a repository of disease, seventeenth-century Englishmen knew the sea to be a bodywracking chaos. It was to be traversed, and survived with luck, but its briny air and heaving waves made it unfit for human life. Compounding those natural hazards were the dangers of the ship, which, as Dr. Samuel Johnson notoriously quipped, had all the charms of “prison with the additional risk of drowning.” The crowds packed in together, sharing the same close and scanty rations of rotting food, made every voyage a possible incubator of deadly infection. To care for the sea-sickened and to prevent a possible outbreak in Philadelphia, the provincial governor proposed a lazaretto, or marine hospital. But the fight over an institution designed to prevent the spread of physical contamination unleashed latent tensions about cultural 34 “A Suitable Charity or an Effectual Security” contamination, the place of the newcomers in Pennsylvania, the place of Pennsylvania in the empire, and what it meant, finally, to be a Pennsylvanian. The Politics of Palatine Immigration Toleration under the aegis of shared religious identity shaped immigration politics in England itself, especially after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, effectively outlawing Protestantism in France and supplementing economic rationales with popular pressure born of antipapist solidarity.2 The new empire was explicitly Protestant, a confessional commitment that linked England to a broader “Protestant interest.” Continental religious connections bridged ethnic and linguistic fissures, helping one foreign prince invade and subsequently placing the British crown on the heads of the German Hanover dynasty. In this way, Protestantism helped to form both national and transnational identities. In short, and in the words of the scholar David Armitage, the new empire was “Protestant, commercial, maritime and free.”3 In 1709, Queen Anne and her Whig ministry embarked on an ambitious plan to resettle in England some ten thousand immigrants from the Rhenish Palatinate. Through a combination of mismanagement, broken promises , and simple ill-fortune, the “poor Palatines” became a political disaster, trapped in squalid refugee camps characterized by disease and disorder, without willing employers or even landlords. In the end, few of the migrants remained in England. Many returned home, but others found their way to British colonial outposts in Ireland, the Caribbean, and the American colonies, where both provincial and metropolitan leaders were beginning to articulate the principles and the population policy of a British Empire constituted of non-English subjects.4 In the evocative words of one scholar, British officials viewed foreign Protestants as a “precision-guided weapon” that could be launched into any strategic landscape threatened by demographic imbalance. One such campaign sent a group of three thousand Palatines, many of them remnants of Queen Anne’s fiasco, to harvest naval stores and provide a buffer population on the New York frontier. The 1740 Plantation Act subsequently eased naturalization for foreign Protestants who agreed to help develop Britain’s overseas possessions.5 Even before the act, Philadelphia was a leading destination for these voyagers, who contributed to its sevenfold increase in municipal population from 1690 to 1740 and the growth of Pennsylvania in general, where population expanded from 35,000 to 50,000 in the decade following 1720. By the 1730s, pluralism was not just policy, but the lived reality of Pennsylvania. The peripatetic Dr. Alexander Hamilton recounted a tavern dinner he shared with “a very mixed company of different nations and religions,” which included “Scots, English, Dutch, Germans, and Irish . . . [18.222.67.251] Project MUSE...

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