Historic Philadelphia

“some kept mistresses”) took female parts,
and plays ranged from lightweight fare to
Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. At the snowy
Valley Forge encampment, American officers
performed plays, too.
General Howe was due to leave for
England in the spring, and twenty-two of his
officers chipped in 140 pounds each for a
lavish farewell party. They called the event the
Meschianza, which they claimed meant a
mixture or medley. The men commandeered,
for the site, the late Joseph Wharton’s
mansion at about what is now Fifth Street and
Washington Avenue, with lawns sweeping
down to the river. At 3:30 p.m. on May 18,
1778, guests gathered on Knight’s wharf at the
foot of what is now Green Street. A flotilla of
barges, decorated with flags and bunting,
carried the revelers past the waterfront, where
the docks and buildings were festooned,
cannons saluted and crowds cheered. Bands
on ships played God Save the King. The officers
and their ladies landed on Wharton’s lawn to
walk under huge decorative arches. The
women wore specially designed medieval
costumes. Men and horses dressed King
Arthur style jousted on the lawn. There was a
huge buffet, dancing in a mirrored hall,
twenty different fireworks displays at 10
o’clock, a midnight supper with twelve
hundred dishes, and, in all, the most
ostentatious party thrown in Philadelphia up
to that time, and maybe since.
On June 18, British occupation troops
pulled out of Philadelphia, and American
soldiers moved in cautiously. They found
many houses all but demolished, with doors,
windows, and roofs gone for firewood.
Buildings that had been converted to barracks
were filthy and smelled of urine. Trash and
debris littered the streets. Flies were
everywhere. Valuables from homes and
buildings had been carried off, including
furniture, paintings, Bibles, clothing, the
pews from several churches, and even one of
Ben Franklin’s printing presses. Where part of
the State House had been used as a hospital, a
great pit had been dug, and into it were tossed
dead men, dead horses, and assorted filth.
The fine house at Sixth and Market Streets
just vacated by General Howe was next
occupied by General Benedict Arnold,
recovering from a wound suffered in battle at
Saratoga, New York, the previous October.
Congress appointed Arnold military governor
of the city. He lived pretentiously, and there
were accusations that he was using his position
to enrich himself. He was court-martialed, but
the most serious charge that stuck was use of
government wagons for private purposes.
Arnold, thirty-seven, was courting Peggy
Shippen, nineteen, daughter of Judge Edward
Shippen, with the same love letters he had
used unsuccessfully on another girl in Boston
only six months before. Arnold bought Mount
Pleasant, the Macpherson mansion on the
Schuylkill, on March 22, 1779, and married
Peggy on April 8. Before the honeymoon was
over, Arnold was exchanging coded messages
✧
Foreign military men, mostly French, were
showing up in Philadelphia and asking to
help with the revolution. A nineteen-yearold
red-haired Frenchman named Gilbert
Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, arrived in
1777 and said he would like to be a general.
It wasn’t as silly as it sounded; he came
from a line of French military leaders that
stretched back three hundred years, he had
already been a soldier six years, he
had been married three years with one child
and another due soon, and was not your
average teenager. Congress made him a
major general.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER II
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