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Life & Liberty
As Voltaire demonstrates, Pennsylvania has long gained attention througout the world for the idealistic sentiments expressed there, during the founding of Philadelphia as a city and the United States as a nation. Yet if we consider the human rights of all inhabitants, it is clear that this rhetoric was never fully realized, and that the story should be seen not in terms of a golden age, but rather as a series of struggles by various groups to complete the founders' unfinished revolutions. In this tour of human rights landmarks in Philadelphia, we will explore two "grand visions" for human rights by focusing on their challenges. The first vision is a utopian Protestant strain of the radical reformation in Europe, as embodied by William Penn and the Quakers. The second concerns the Enlightenment theories of political philosophy embodied in the Constitution of the United States. Both are uniquely Philadelphia stories, but they also draw on European traditions and are ultimately global in influence. Join us as we examine these grand visions in light of the crises that
tested them and three fundamental questions that underlie them: We also will consider the extent to which many of these movements (and their oppositions) are interrelated: Nativist mobs burned Irish Catholic churches, abolitionist institutions, and African-American orphanages indiscriminately. Many of the founders of the women's rights movement were ardent abolitionists. Early industrial labor organizers drew on the 18th century conception of "artisanal republicanism," and activists to this day cast their protests in terms of revolutionary-era rhetoric or Constitutional language. Another consistent theme is the interaction between human rights and market forces. Witness the brutality of the international slave trade, the tension between religious ideals and a booming mercantile port, the land claims of Native Americans versus the interests of commercial development, or the plight of working people in an industrial economy. All these issues played themselves out in historic Philadelphia, the nation's seat of liberty, in profound ways. Tour Times Tour Highlights |
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Tamanend Statue
(Front & Market) |
We will begin by considering Native Americans, who stood as a vexing case for European humanists and profiteers alike. The interactions between the Lenni Lenape, the indigenous people of the region, and the Pennsylvania colonists provide a unique and fascinating example of these themes. | |
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Slave Market Marker
(Front & Market Streets) |
The Atlantic slave trade, predicated on the bondage of Africans and some Native Americans, was a complex and brutal human institution. The contradictions of slavery in the "City of Brotherly Love" threatened to tear apart its religious and civic ideals. But those same strained ideals would by the end of the 18th century make Philadelphia a magnet for the nation's largest population of free African-Americans. | |
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Friends Meeting House
(4th & Arch Streets) |
This 1804 Meetinghouse is perhaps the best place on the tour to address the roots of women's rights in America. Implicit in the radical egalitarianism of early English Quakerism, which did not silence women the way Puritans or other Protestants did, were the seeds of a radical feminism. The themes of Quaker humanistic moralism can also be traced through the struggles of pacifism, especially during the Revolutionary War and the schism of the Free Quakers. Ultimately, Quaker fundamentals of abolition and pacifism came into sharpest conflict during the Civil War. | |
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Independence National
Historic Park |
Philadelphia in the late 18th century hosted one of the greatest ongoing debates around questions of political rights since antiquity. By the dawn of the 19th century it was rightly dubbed "the Athens of America." Despite tensions, two great documents of the American Enlightenment, the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the 1787 Constitution of the United States, still stand as one of the most important frameworks for freedom and human rights in the history of the world. | |
| St. Thomas African Episcopal Church Marker (5th Street, South of Walnut) |
The maintenance of slavery in the Constitution, including such elements as the 3/5 Compromise which denied citizenship or even recognition of humanity to African-Americans, remained the greatest shortcoming of America's new manifesto. The Declaration of Independence also attacked Native Americans as "merciless Indian Savages." The large free black population in Philadelphia fueled the growth of such institutions as the free African Society, the AME church, and the Underground Railroad, not to mention an eloquent, national, abolition movement. | |
| Old St. Joseph's and Old St. Mary's RC Churhes (4th & Locust Streets) |
Catholics enjoyed a unique level of religious liberty in Philadelphia's tolerant climate of the 18th century. But the arrival of Irish Catholics fleeing the potato famine of the 1840s provided one of the first serious challenges to Americans' self-conception as a white Protestant nation. This wave of immigrants combined with the growing Abolition movement to provoke a conservative backlash of xenophobia and nativism. The result: race riots and anti-Catholic mobs, which culminated in the burnings of Pennsylvania Hall, St. Augustine's RC Church, the Shelter for Colored Orphans, and others. | |
| Society Hill Synagogue (Spruce Street between 4th & 5th) |
The second great wave of immigration to the United States came near the turn of the 20th century. Philadelphia and other industrial cities attracted Jews fleeing the anti-Semitic pogroms in eastern Europe, as well as men and some families from the Mediterranean who sought economic opportunity. These new Americans would force a redefinition of the boundaries of the "beloved community." Many became engaged in struggles for workers' rights from the sweatshops they inhabited. Bigotry and nativism persisted, but the growing presence of diverse populations marked the undeniable arrival of a new era of multiculturalism. | |
| Seventh Ward (6th & Spruce) |
Since the 1790s, the African-Americans in Philadelphia had produced a dynamic secular and religious leadership that pursued civil rights. In W.E.B. Dubois's groundbreaking 1899 study of the Seventh Ward, The Philadelphia Negro, modern American social science was born. It is also the neighborhood where James Forten, Robert Purvis, William Still, and others fought the disfranchisement of Pennsylvania's black population in 1838, conducted the Underground Railroad, and organized the first national Negro Convention. In the mid-20th century, the Great Migrations of African-Americans from the rural south would infuse this neighborhood and its institutions with new arrivals. At the same time, the growing black population would spark intense racial fears among whites (including recent immigrants), who either fled to the suburbs or fought to prevent the integration of their neighborhoods. | |
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Atwater Kent Museum
(7th Street South of Market) |
This building, now a museum of Philadelphia history, was constructed in 1825 to house the Franklin Institute, founded to promote practical research and public education around manufacturing, engineering, architecture, and science. Such initiative and innovation ushered in an industrial revolution by the mid-19th century. The artisan became marginalized as factory production replaced individual craftsmanship. In 1827, industrial laborers and artisans alike began to call for basic rights of workers. Thus, the American labor movement had its beginnings in Philadelphia. | |
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Balch Museum of
Ethnic Studies (7th & Market) |
The Balch Institute collections and exhibits tell the stories of Philadelphia's successive waves of immigrants-from the Native Americans, to Europeans, to the more recent groups from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Philadelphia has become a city of neighborhoods and institutions that reflect the diversity and tensions these demographic processes engender. | |
| Liberty Bell Pavilion | Over four centuries, many of the crises and causes that played themselves out on the streets of Philadelphia have led to dramatic advances in human rights. Slavery was abolished; trade unions were legalized and work conditions regulated; women gained political equality (at least in the ballot). Those struggles continued in the 20th century as America's minorities have continued to push for what they see as basic rights: access to education, jobs, and minimum economic sufficiency, as well as deeper questions of human dignity and respect of culture. | |
| Other groups have continued the Quaker themes of pacifism in the face of war or opposition to the death penalty. When such groups are petitioning for such human rights in Philadelphia, they frequently use the Liberty Bell as a symbolic staging ground for their grievances. Of course, the Liberty Bell has always been a symbol: It was cast to commemorate the 50th jubilee year of the Charter of Privileges with which William Penn granted political rights to the citizens of Philadelphia in 1701. Imported by Jewish merchants from the congregation Mikveh Israel, it bore an Old Testament inscription to "proclaim liberty thro' all the land and the inhabitants thereof" (Leviticus 25:10). | ||