Historic Philadelphia

✧
The Walnut Street Prison, at Sixth and
Walnut across from the State House, was
designed by ubiquitous architect Robert
Smith. It was opened in January 1776, in
an unfortunate sense of the word: six
prisoners escaped the first night. It was
demolished in 1835.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
36
his diplomatic activities of the past eleven
years, which he sent to his illegitimate
son, William, royal governor of New Jersey, by
way of William’s illegitimate son, Temple, who
had arrived with his grandfather. Franklin
had known since February that his wife,
Deborah, was dead. He saw his new house for
the first time.
The Continental Congress reconvened
on May 10, 1775, this time not in the neutral
Carpenters’ Hall, but in the Provincial State
House itself, essentially a British government
building.
Some two thousand troops were drilling
mornings and evenings in the commons near
the Bettering House at Eleventh and Spruce
Streets. Congress started organizing a
Continental Army in June, and commissioned
George Washington as a general to take command
of the troops opposing the British at
Boston. Washington rode out of Philadelphia
in heavy rain on June 23, escorted by the City
Troop of Light Horse.
A dozen small gunboats were under construction
on the Delaware, and six hundred
crewmen were recruited. A merchant ship was
converted into a twenty-gun warship for river
defense. Citizens of the city and immediate suburbs
met at the State House and agreed to elect
a sixty-man committee to oversee the interests of
those sympathetic to the doings of the Congress.
It would effectively replace the city council.
Congress had put a damper on
entertainment, but there was nothing to stop
serious lectures, and Dr. Abraham Chovet’s
“anatomical and physiological lectures” were
drawing nice crowds at his Anatomical Museum
in Vidal’s Alley off Second Street. Respectable
citizens including Governor Richard Penn and
even some of the clergy attended the lectures,
“in which the several parts of the human body
will be demonstrated,” Dr. Chovet’s advertising
promised, “with their mechanisms and actions.”
The Continental Congress adjourned
August 1. The delegates returned in September
to find gunpowder and weapons stored in the
State House and a new gaol being erected
across Walnut Street. A thirteenth colony,
Georgia, sent representatives.
Nearly every Philadelphia carpenter and
their employees turned out on October 9 to
install obstructions in the Delaware River ship
channel opposite the unfinished fortifications
on Mud Island below the city. They sunk huge
wooden boxes, weighted with stones,
bristling with logs whose iron tips protruded
just above the water’s surface to snag
incoming ships.
THE
DECLARATION
In wartime Philadelphia, Quakers who
refused to accept money issued by the
Continental Congress or who did anything
construed as not supporting the war saw their
businesses shut down and their stores
boarded up by the zealous patriot Committee.
Anyone accused of making statements
“inimical to the cause of liberty” (such as
William Walton, who drank a toast of
“Damnation to the Congress,” title of a
popular Tory song) was bullied into issuing a
statement to the press that he was sorry for his
wrong-headedness.
Prices were rising. Lamp oil was up fifty
percent. The Committee set fixed prices on
rum, molasses, coffee, cocoa, chocolate,
pepper, sugar, and salt to prevent profiteering.
If any merchants were caught overcharging,
the Committee threatened to “expose such
persons by name as sordid vultures.”
Word arrived on March 26, 1776, that a
British warship, the forty-four-gun H.M.S.