Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA. Located about one hundred miles up the Delaware from the Atlantic, Philadelphia was established in 1682 by William Penn as a Quaker colony. Its name means "City of Brotherly Love." The site was first occupied by the Delaware or Leni Lenape people, and the Swedes established a settlement there not later than 1643. Often considered the first truly American city in layout because of its grid pattern, it had parallel streets that were numbered and cross streets that were named after trees. As early as 1751, the city had illuminated its streets and organized a body of paid constables to replace the traditional nightwatch. In 1768, when London and Paris still contended with medieval filth, Philadelphia contracted for garbage collection and street cleaning. After a lusty growth in the decade preceding the Revolution, by 1775 Philadelphia's population of an estimated thirty-eight thousand was third in the British realm behind only London and Edinburgh. London had 750,000 people, followed by Edinburgh with just over 40,000. Philadelphia was the center of manufacturing in America. The first Continental Congress met at Philadelphia in 1774, and Congress sat there during most of the war.

When the British occupied this capital on 26 September 1777, nearly six hundred houses were unoccupied, over two hundred shops were closed, and fewer than fifty-five hundred males of military age (from eighteen to sixty years) were in town. Most of the latter were Quakers and Loyalists. Most scholars agree that the British occupation of Philadelphia served no real strategic purpose. Congress moved to York, carrying on its business there, and Philadelphia proved a poor base for the British. The American public saw more evidence of British decadence as stories of their wild parties and luxurious living leaked out. As Benson Bobrick has written, "the apparent moral contrast betweeen the self-indulgent Howe in Philadelphia and the spartan Washington at Valley Forge—Vice and Virtue—could not have been more pronounced" (Angel in the Whirlwind, p. 311). On 18 June 1778 the British army evacuated the city. Within hours, General Benedict Arnold led American forces back into their capital, which he commanded as military governor until March 1779.

SEE ALSO Manufacturing in America; Monmouth, New Jersey.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bobrick, Benson. Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Taaffe, Stephen R. The Philadelphia Campaign, 1777–1778. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.

                              revised by Michael Bellesiles