The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia

By Simon Finger

By the time William Penn was planning the colony that would come to be called Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia at its heart, Europeans on both sides of the ocean had long experience with the hazards of city life, disease the most terrifying among them. Drawing from those experiences, colonists hoped to create new urban forms that combined the commercial advantages of a seaport with the health benefits of the country. The Contagious City details how early Americans struggled to preserve their collective health against both the strange new perils of the colonial environment and the familiar dangers of the traditional city, through a period of profound transformation in both politics and medicine.

Philadelphia was the paramount example of this reforming tendency. Tracing the city’s history from its founding on the banks of the Delaware River in 1682 to the yellow fever outbreak of 1793, Simon Finger emphasizes the importance of public health and population control in decisions made by the city’s planners and leaders. He also shows that key figures in the city’s history, including Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, brought their keen interest in science and medicine into the political sphere. Throughout his account, Finger makes clear that medicine and politics were inextricably linked, and that both undergirded the debates over such crucial concerns as the city’s location, its urban plan, its immigration policy, and its creation of institutions of public safety. In framing the history of Philadelphia through the imperatives of public health, The Contagious City offers a bold new vision of the urban history of colonial America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9780801464478

Book preview

The Contagious City

The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia

Simon Finger

Cornell University Press

ITHACA AND LONDON

For my parents

Hence the reader sees—and who can wonder, that medicine and politics were mixed together in a young, ardent and anxious brain, far distant from his suffering country!

—

Benjamin Waterhouse

, An Essay on Junius and His Letters, 1831

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Epidemic Constitutions

1. A Rude Place and an Unpolisht Man: William Penn and the Nature of Pennsylvania

2. An Infancy of Government: Population, Authority, and the Problem of Proprietorship

3. A Suitable Charity or an Effectual Security: Community, Contagion, and the Care of Strangers

4. A Body Corporate and Politick: Association, Interest, and Improvement in a Provincial City

5. Improvement in Every Part of the Healing Art: Transatlantic Cultures of Medical Improvement

6. A Fine Field for Professional Improvement: Sites and Sources of Medical Authority in the Revolutionary War

7. In a Yielding State: Nervous Nationalism in the New Republic

8. Those Friendly Reciprocities: Panic and Participation in the Age of Yellow Fever

9. A Matter of Police: Fever and Betrayal in the Federal Union

Conclusion: Looking West from Philadelphia

Notes

Preface

When I began the work that would become The Contagious City, I was trying to solve a problem of collective action: How do communities respond to shared dangers? I did not want to plow the well-furrowed ground of Indian-European conflict or imperial rivalry, and after some consideration I realized that disease presented a threat that easily rivaled tomahawk and musket ball. Although colonial planners and settlers shared a sense that disease was a common hazard and health a common goal, they differed dramatically in their understanding of how best to confront contagion and promote wellness. Few colonies illustrate that rift so vividly as Pennsylvania. The dream of protecting health on a collective level molded its capital at Philadelphia and the settler empire that took shape in North America. Colonial, provincial, and national societies all depended on the creation and mobilization of population to create a community and fuel an economy.

The battle over public health was a keystone to the politics of empire, but it has not always been understood as such.¹ Until the middle of the twentieth century, American medical historiography was largely dominated by an antiquarian bent and pointedly apolitical perspective that encompassed both general surveys and local case studies.² Even thereafter, many works continued to isolate medical development from wider social currents, although works by Whitfield Bell and Charles Rosenberg, among others, began to integrate American medicine with its social context.³ Meanwhile, W. B. Bynum, Roy Porter, and fellow British scholars recovered stories of the medical enlightenment that restored its political content. Adrian Wilson has referred to this scholarship as history of medicine with the politics put back in.⁴

Orthodox historians of American public health have focused almost exclusively on the development of formal institutions of sanitation and public relief. Although this literature has allowed for a modicum of institutional development in the colonial era, and even offered a political framework for its emergence, scholars have generally interpreted these measures as moments of exigent improvisation in response to particular crisis episodes.⁵ This has led many to downplay development before the mid-eighteenth century, and some go further still, effectively dismissing the existence of public health prior to Edwin Chadwick’s campaigns for sanitary reform in nineteenth-century England. Whatever their chronology, these accounts almost universally treat American public health as a creole response to colonial conditions: increasing density and urbanization in the colonies.⁶

To focus solely on crisis moments is to tell an incomplete story. Responses to disaster did not arise ex nihilo, but from a deep pool of preexisting ideology and experience, just as an army’s responses in wartime are shaped by its peacetime practices. Similarly, those responses did not just happen, but rather went through channels of established political practice, demanding that priorities be set, interests satisfied, and choices made. Medical thinkers and political leaders had a positive program to promote collective health, and they connected that program to larger political, social, and economic interests.⁷

Almost entirely separate from this work on institutional medical development, scholars of the body and the environment have offered a rich portrait of how American settlers understood the relationship between the two and how that understanding affected colonization. Transplanted Englishmen feared that they would undergo atavistic degeneration in their alien surroundings, even as they hoped that they could cultivate that landscape into a healthier state, more like their agrarian English homelands.⁸ Even after independence, Americans who transplanted beyond their cultural and political comfort zones displayed a similar anxiety that soil would win out over blood, unless blood could tame the soil.⁹ Creating a healthy population depended on reproducing familiar forms imported from home.

Adopting a Foucaultian perspective, subsequent scholars reinterpreted the development of public health infrastructure as an instantiation of hierarchy and the individual institutions as mechanisms for enforcing conformity to a rigid social vision organized around a disciplined capitalistic modernity.¹⁰ Along with revisionary works on the body, health, and hygiene, these efforts offered a sophisticated new vocabulary for explaining the relationship of health to race, gender, politics, environment, culture, and more. At times, however, political calculation almost seemed to crowd out health entirely, consigning philanthropic and medical reform to the status of mere pretext for more cynical designs for power and control.

In The Contagious City I situate the existing scholarship on public health in early America within the interpretive framework of population. Students of migration and social history have long acknowledged the importance of demography in producing culture and its significance to the colonial project.¹¹ As Christopher Tomlins has explained, building England’s empire entailed peopling and possessing its colonial claims, producing commodities within an Atlantic economy, and protecting its boundaries against enemies both potential and real. Accomplishing any of those aims depended upon a process of manning and maintaining a robust population to perform the labor of colonizing.¹² Although Tomlins follows this insight to track migration to the colonies and the emergence of legal cultures of labor, the same imperatives demanded that health be defended against disease and misfortune.

Population has its own history as a concept, one deeply entwined with the story of Pennsylvania specifically and Empire in general. It was not merely a count of people; it was what distinguished one group of people from another and made them a resource of state power. While William Penn was planning a healthy colony in 1681, William Petty was beginning to conceptualize the principles of his political arithmetic to explain that teeming multitudes buttressed rather than burdened the nation. While Pennsylvania was founding its landmark hospital in 1751, Benjamin Franklin was projecting that the prodigious growth of colonial population would eventually generate prosperity and power surpassing the mother country. And with the purchase of vast new holdings in Louisiana, Thomas Jefferson reasoned that the new territory would both provide an outlet for growing American numbers and demand their work to make the land itself American. At each turn, the concept of population can help reconcile these interpretive models and provide a more satisfying lens through which to understand public health as a fundamental part of creating a political and social community. It illuminates the continuities from the earliest anxieties about unfamiliar environments to the elaboration of provincial and national health infrastructure, while providing a rubric for understanding the changes. The ultimate aim of this work is not just to provide a medical history that doesn’t have the politics taken out, but rather to offer up a political and cultural history with the medicine put back in.

Acknowledgments

As The Contagious City first took shape, Peter Silver’s thoughtful criticism helped me focus my questions, rethink my assumptions, and finally finish my work. John Murrin, Barbara Oberg, and David Barnes can also each take credit for at least one error avoided, one argument clarified, and the entire project improved.

Philadelphia possesses fantastic archival resources, both in holdings and in the people who manage them. My thanks go out to Roy Goodman at the American Philosophical Society, Jim Green and Connie King at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the employees of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), the Philadelphia City Archives, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the archives of Pennsylvania Hospital, and the mid-Atlantic depository of the National Archives and Records Administration. Particular thanks are due to Nicole Joniec of the Library Company, who went above and beyond the call of duty in her contributions to the art program. In addition to research assets, I received valuable financial support from the Library Company and HSP, the American Philosophical Society, the David Library of the American Revolution, the Bartram Trail Association, and most especially the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

I undertook revisions of the manuscript at the McNeil Center, and no scholar could ask for a more welcoming and collegial community. I will probably spend the rest of my career profiting from the conversations, debates, and friendships I was privileged to have there. As director, Dan Richter merits special praise for creating an environment in which inquiry can flourish so richly, and I thank him for all his help. I profoundly appreciate the input I received from others in the McNeil community, especially Zara Anshanslin, Katherine Arner, Wayne Bodle, Sarah Brandt, Adam Jortner, Matt Karp, Susan Klepp, Michelle McDonald, Roderick McDonald, Brian Murphy, Joe Rezek, Jessica Roney, Lisa Rosner, Andy Shankman, Pat Spero, Laura Keenan Spero, and Megan Walsh.

I have been fortunate to find support and guidance from scholars and educators whose examples continue to inspire me. Thank you to Gareth Jenkins, who taught me to love footnotes, and to David Hackett Fischer and Jane Kamensky, whose cumulative contribution to my undergraduate career probably guaranteed that I would end up in graduate school.

Part of this work was previously published in Pennsylvania History, and I am grateful for permission to republish that material here. Several friends and colleagues also graciously agreed to read various versions of the manuscript in part or whole, and their feedback has contributed tremendously to the final product. Many thanks to George Boudreau, Kathleen Brown, Andrew Lipman, Phil Mead, Michael Meranze, LiLy Milroy, Gary Nash, Paul Douglas Newman, Bill Pencak, and Geoffrey Plank. I am likewise grateful to my editor Michael McGandy, art coordinator Sarah Grossman, and everyone else at Cornell University Press, both for their faith in The Contagious City and for all their help in transforming it into a book.

Finally, this work would not have been possible without the unfailing support of my family and my dear and wonderful Ashley, who has been a constant source of love, comfort, and inspiration.

Introduction

EPIDEMIC CONSTITUTIONS

In 1777, Pierre Nicole was a captain of the guards in the British army, stationed in occupied Philadelphia. The clever Swiss-born officer was well-acquainted with the Country and with the people, which made him an effective liaison between the army and the area’s covert loyalist population.¹ It also made him the capable cartographer and draftsman who, under the engineer John Montresor, produced an astonishing portrait of the revolutionary city. As the prominent earthworks and fortresses demonstrate, this was a city at war, indeed under occupation, when Nicole drafted the map. The civilian population was subject to the whims of a military authority that did not always hold the city’s health and well-being as a significant priority. Yet even today, the chart’s vivid colors and painterly elegance seem too opulent for its Spartan purpose.

On closer examination of the chart, not only Philadelphia’s physical attributes but also its social character and political culture come into focus. Nicole’s survey reminds us of how small Philadelphia was, the pink smear of the city engulfed by the vast green fields and broad blue river that surround it. It is easy to see farms of that rich hinterland and the commerce of the waterfront as opposites, but from the beginning, Philadelphia’s agricultural base and its commercial channel worked in concert to shape the city. Vestiges of William Penn’s original gridiron plan endure in the square lots and the broad streets that he hoped would make the city an airy country town free of the fires and diseases that plagued urban life in Europe. But in most respects, the Philadelphia captured in Nicole’s survey was one that departed dramatically from its founder’s vision. The city blocks, intended to provide space for freestanding houses on salutary lawns, were instead carved up by landlords into ever-smaller dwellings for laborers and artisans. Crisscrossing those warrens were dozens of filthy alleyways. And cutting through the middle of town was Dock Creek, the polluted waterway that Philadelphia’s butchers, tanners, chandlers, and soap-boilers used as a receptacle for their witches’ brew of industrial by-products, over the frequent protests of sickened neighbors.

A survey of the city of Philadelphia and its environs shewing the several works constructed by His Majesty’s troops, under the command of Sir William Howe, since their possession of that city 26th September 1777, comprehending likewise the attacks against Fort Mifflin on Mud Island, and until its reduction, 16th November 1777. Surveyed & drawn by P. Nicole. (Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division)

Unlike Thomas Holme’s better-known 1682 plan of the city, depicting an orderly grid spanning from the Delaware River all the way to the Schuylkill River, Nicole’s 1777 survey reveals a messy city crowded next to the shore, running more than a mile and half along the Delaware.² Despite Penn’s disdain for commercial life, Philadelphia’s long, snaking riverfront, studded with wharves, proved that it was a trading city, attended by all the benefits and hazards that came with commerce. Early Pennsylvanians avidly pursued the prosperity that came with economic development, but they also wondered if it was worth the inescapable pollution of the commercial district or the always looming threat that one of those ships would disgorge an exotic disease along with its declared cargo.

If the map suggests all of the ways that Philadelphia courted disease and ruin, it also illustrates some of the measures the city adopted to protect itself and promote the common welfare. City life exposed residents to injury and illness, but a speck just outside the urban core, marked Hospital, testifies to the power of a civic philosophy that built institutions to treat the wounds and diseases of those who could not support themselves. The ships at dock may have carried contagion, but the lazaretto stood downriver on Province Island to inspect ships for signs of infection, to detain vessels that contained suspect goods or persons, and to house and treat the sickly during their convalescence. In so doing, Philadelphians were, in their own fashion, protecting the common health and defining their community.

A year before Nicole produced his survey, Philadelphia’s artisan radicals celebrated the state’s new constitution, probably the most radically democratic government established in that crowded season of state making. Ten years after the draftsman’s work, delegates gathered in Philadelphia to remake a nation suffering from what Alexander Hamilton called the disease of democracy. And between these two very different Philadelphia constitutions, Pierre Nicole, though unintentionally, gave us an ideal map for exploring the epidemic constitutions that equally shaped the city’s past, present, and future.³

Health and American Constitutions

In the American colonies and the broader Anglo-Atlantic world, constitution encompassed many distinct, but related meanings. An individual’s or animal’s constitution referred to the balance of humors in its body. The great English physician Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689) used the term epidemic constitution to describe the mixture of atmospheres that determined what diseases could be expected in a particular territory. In matters of state, the constitution—whether codified in a single document as in the United States or accumulated in precedent and practice as in Britain—was the framework under which government structured the lives of individuals and the control of territories. This ambiguously overlapping language suggests how thoroughly ideas about health infused concurrent political developments. The relationship between medicine and politics went deeper than metaphor: it rested on the idea that humans, their environment, and their society operated on analogous principles that were therefore subject to the same kinds of defects and remedies, an understanding that provided a powerful vocabulary for articulating shared goals.

In Philadelphia, the most significant of those collaborations was the establishment of the city’s public health infrastructure. Generations of Philadelphians participated in a positive program to promote collective wellness that was connected to broader political goals of polity, security, and economy. In this book I explore how such a program developed, how Philadelphians thought they could achieve it, how their epidemiological aims interacted with competing political imperatives, and how all of those processes changed over time.

It can be tempting to condescend to the past, and modern observers routinely insist that premodern medicine was so primitive or so misguided that it does not merit the name of public health. It is certainly easy enough to flatter ourselves by dismissing the efforts of those who labored without germ theory, antibiotics, or gene therapy. But historians have good reason to understand these efforts as public health because the medical thinkers and political leaders who pursued them understood themselves to be practicing public health. They examined local features to identify the healthiest locations to build, and they tried to make those places healthier through extensive environmental engineering. They screened incoming traffic for possible infections. They recognized that crowding strained sanitary resources and exposed individuals to noxious nuisances, which they attempted both to prevent from appearing and to ameliorate when they did appear. They established institutions to provide care for the populace when those preventatives failed and tried to instill healthy habits that would fortify individuals against injury and illness. In short, they recognized that disease and debility were shared problems, and in recognizing that the problem was collective, they embraced a public responsibility to preserve and promote the common welfare, which they tried to fulfill to the best of their abilities.

I explore this intersection of medical knowledge and political culture through an era that saw both medicine and politics riven by controversy and turmoil. Reconstructing what the scholar John Pickstone called the political ecology of medical development not only illuminates the relationship of health and the state but also enriches our understanding of the other upheavals of the eighteenth century: the growth of an Atlantic economy and the changes it wrought, the development of the British empire and the conflicts within it that culminated in the American Revolution, the articulation of the rights and duties of citizenship, the transformation of labor, the creation of a transatlantic intellectual culture, the imposition of racial and sexual hierarchies, and the revision of the human relationship with the natural world. Lurking behind each of those transformations is a common theme: the formation of shared identities through the processes of inclusion, exclusion, and regulation.⁴

Philadelphians used the rhetoric and technology of social medicine to assert a collective identity and to demarcate their place in a larger world. Health was not just a subject of politics; it was a distinctive political register. Decisions made under the banner of medicine articulated social values and reified social categories. Arguments about what kinds of spaces were healthy directly shaped the physical form of early Philadelphia and periodically resurfaced as attitudes toward urban life shifted during the eighteenth century. Quarantines imposed on sickly ships screened what people and things would be admitted to the city and reflected how much power the port had to set the terms of its participation in the maritime economy. Debates over public relief forced Philadelphians to think hard about who was entitled to such charity and, in a sense, who actually counted as full members of the community. Regulations on hazardous and unhealthy practices reflected the expected responsibilities of those members. I trace some of these tangled roots of constitutions, and show how political efforts to promote health on a collective basis—the health not of a person, but of a city—shaped the political culture of that city and of the province and the nation around it.

Healing Cultures and Cultures of Healing

The framework of constitutional correspondence was not a codex of ironclad laws, but rather a set of versatile tools that reformers on both sides of the Atlantic used to remake their societies. Beginning with the Puritan revolutionaries who came to regard a medical restoration as a corollary of their spiritual regeneration, when medical thought and political power combined, the potential of social medicine expanded dramatically from a simple charge of relieving the poor to a more expansive notion of transforming the world.⁵

Medical policy was an especially potent vehicle for enacting social visions, in part, because the body is so central to ordering human understanding. The immediacy of corporeal experience makes it a point of first reference in metaphor and cognition, rendering the constituted body a powerful means of asserting a particular kind of shared identity. The Hobbesian image of the body politic is only the most familiar example of using physiognomy to define polity.⁶ Furthermore, both popular and elite wisdom taught that the outward body could be read for clues to essential moral character. Such associations are at least as ancient as Adam and Eve forfeiting immortality through sin and durable enough to survive into the twenty-first-century conceptions of disease as divine or karmic retribution. What made the medical ideas explored here useful enough to retain and refine was not only that they informed notions of English identity but also that the system provided tools within itself to adjust that identity, or even to create a new Anglo-Colonial identity. The political rhetoric of health was strong medicine, and it could be adapted and reformulated to serve new needs.⁷

In a nontrivial sense, to be constituted is to be simultaneously plural and singular. Multiple elemental substances combine to form an individual person. Airs and waters commingled to generate the disease environment of a particular location. The accumulation of precedents, customs, and laws created the unwritten constitution that colonists relied on to guarantee their liberties. These two factors—the enduring association of embodied and abstract characteristics and the simultaneously plural and singular nature of those characteristics—made the rhetoric of political medicine a versatile tool for implementing policy and for articulating a shared identity through that idea. The discovery of social health made it possible to exploit the rich rhetoric of health and disease on a broad new level to define the characteristics not only of the individual body but also of the polity as a whole.

Ideas about people, politics, and space influenced the way colonists, rebels, and republicans conceived their polity over the course of a century. Philadelphians thought about wellness and disease because they were vital aspects of their lives. The rhetoric of health was apocalyptic because the danger of contagion was potentially cataclysmic. But creating the conditions of health required politics as well as ideas. And those politics emerged in the train of official policies, popular practices, and partisan disputes rooted in the premise that public health was a shared goal and a collective obligation. Illness ceased to be a private matter. And by making wellness public, public health helped make Philadelphians, Pennsylvanians, Britons, and Americans.

1

A Rude Place and an Unpolisht Man

WILLIAM PENN AND THE NATURE OF PENNSYLVANIA

When Pennsylvania was in its planning stages, William Petty was one of the many figures to offer William Penn advice on establishing his new colony. Petty was in the process of developing a mode of inquiry he called political arithmetick, which explained national power in demographic terms. In keeping with that premise, he suggested that Penn plant the future Philadelphia on a peece of land…chosen for it’s situation, healthfulness, and fertility. Both men, like their contemporaries, understood that a healthy location was a critical factor in the success or failure of their ventures. When Penn invited Thomas Holme to survey the newly granted land and lay out plots of land for purchase, he therefore ordered him to lay the city out where it was most navigable, high, dry and healthy.¹

Penn further directed that land be set aside for a large Towne or Citty in the most convenient place upon the River for health and Navigation, again stressing the importance of both commercial and physiological concerns. The meaning of healthy land, however, was tied to a complex bundle of ideas about nature, medicine, geography, climate, agriculture, and human difference. Penn’s understanding of how to identify and create such spaces guided his approach to settling the province and to governing it, setting the stage for conflict with settlers and constituents who did not share his assessments of the local conditions or his priorities for the city’s development. It was far from clear that any city could provide both wealth and well-being; most of the era’s major cities were filthy, pestilential places. Penn’s own sentiments were haunted by the living memory of London beset by plague and conflagration. At stake was more than just the proprietor’s power, but broader anxieties about whether English life would survive the journey to America, whether people made their environments or were made by them, and whether commerce and a healthy constitution could coexist.²

William Penn and the Problem of the City

Penn delighted in the rough-hewn charm of his new holdings, for a rude place & an unpolisht man cant but agree together, and understanding his dream for Philadelphia begins with the dreamer who saw himself reflected in the land.³ As the historian Mary Dunn has observed, Penn’s complexity too often remains hidden beneath the broad-brimmed hat. He was a tireless champion of religious freedom, and he maintained a sincere belief in the possibility of government built on persuasion rather than coercion. He idealized rural virtue and plain living. And yet, in the words of another scholar, he was also essentially a man of action, restless and enterprising, at times a courtier and a politician, who loved handsome dress, lived well and lavishly. He was an aristocrat-proprietor with feudal pretensions to manorial privilege, who embraced rusticity more in theory than in practice.⁴

Penn’s father, Admiral William Penn, had supported the Stuart bid to reclaim the English throne, and in payment of that debt, Charles II granted the younger William an enormous 45,000 square mile tract, carved from the even vaster lands seized from the Dutch and administered by the Duke of York. Penn had managed his family’s plantations in Ireland and invested in the West Jersey colony. But the domains named for his father, and granted for his father’s actions, came with far more expansive territory and far more expansive powers to shape its society according to Penn’s vision. That vision did not include cities. Penn counted himself among the rural gentry, and he shared their characteristic distrust of urban life. Of Citys and towns of concourse beware, he warned his wife, for they were dangerous to body and soul.⁵

By the seventeenth century, it was obvious that cities generated health risks unknown in rural communities, hazards growing impossible to ignore. Chests tightened at the sulfurous smoke pouring from the coal-burning furnaces of protoindustrial workshops. Stomachs turned at the stench of butcher stalls. Eyes watered from the acrid by-products of noxious trades like soap-making, candle manufacture, and leather tanning. Confronted by such hazards, improvers and medical men searched in earnest for explanations and solutions. The naturalist John Evelyn (1620–1706) greeted the 1660 coronation of Charles II with his Fumifugium, an essay on the dire condition of London’s atmosphere and what could be done to correct it. Such vapors were only the most obvious signs of the evils, both physical and moral, that he attributed to urban life. Marshaling both classical sources and the latest London mortality statistics from fellow-improver John Graunt, Evelyn pilloried the Interregnum Puritans for inundating the city’s atmosphere with unhealthy miasmas and deforesting the area around London, thereby destroying the greenery whose perfumes could allay the situation. The smog was an allegory for Interregnum political corruption, blanketing the city like a layer of soot. But Evelyn’s Fumifugium was foremost a literal document, laying out a specific program for improving municipal public health. His Sylva of 1664 resumed the theme, arguing that putrid cities could achieve melioration of the Airs by the plantation of proper trees.⁶

Any ambivalence Penn felt about cities evaporated following London’s Devil’s Year, the cascading catastrophes of 1665–1666: war, plague, starvation, and a killing frost, capped by a devastating fire. Though most people had long acknowledged that cities were sicklier than countryside, and urban outbreaks more severe than rural, the plague of 1665–1666 still shocked even the most jaded Londoner. Scores fled in search of sanctuary. Some took the scourge as divine judgment on a corrupted civilization, particularly as it raged into the eschatologically ominous year of 1666. The plague’s tyranny over the city ended only with another calamity, the great fire that burned out the remaining repositories of infection. Indeed, Penn’s first colonial experience, as administrator of his family estates in Ireland, resulted from Admiral Penn’s desire to remove his sensitive young son from London during the plague year.⁷

Penn’s inclination ran against the era’s imperial grain: political and economic factors demanded that he establish a city overseas. The restoration of royal authority in England had transformed the empire, resulting in more urbanized and less autonomous colonies, with more concentrated populations under more thorough English control. The chief architect of this grand modell was Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621–1683), the Earl of Shaftesbury and a principal proprietor of the Carolina colony, who argued that there was nothing more important for the security and thriving of our Settlement than…planting in Townes. Cities would promote trade and stimulate economic development, provide more effective defense against indigenous and European enemies, and deter smuggling by filtering colonial produce through designated seaports. Despite his sentiments, Penn knew that Pennsylvania would need a port to be economically viable and to attract investors and settlers. He worried about competing with the more convenient New York, and he fought hard against Maryland’s territorial claims so that he could keep the Delaware River within his colony, thereby ensuring direct access to the ocean.⁸

Such a Situation Is Scarce to be Paralleled

Like Penn, Thomas Holme had experience managing an Irish estate, but he had earned his four thousand acres by serving in Cromwell’s army to topple the Stuart monarchs who later reclaimed the throne and who repaid their debts to Admiral Penn by granting American lands to his son. Religious bonds helped Penn and Holme escape the burden of their tangled political commitments. Having retired from soldiering, Holme adopted his future employer’s faith. Penn encountered Holme in England’s Quaker circles and saw in his fellow Friend an ideal candidate to replace original surveyor William Crispin, who had perished on