During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Philadelphia and other cities lacked permanent armories. Militia units such as the First Troop, Philadelphia City Cavalry, the Second Troop of Light Horse, and the State Fencibles met in hotel rooms and taverns and drilled in public parks and squares, riding schools, and circuses. For drill, these units often rented floors in multistory commercial buildings, including the Union Building at Eighth and Chestnut Streets, the cast-iron Swain Building at 503-7 Chestnut Street, and a restaurant in the Northern Liberties neighborhood known as Military Hall. However, these facilities were not structurally strong enough to support drills by large units or secure enough to protect arms and equipment from theft.

In 1857, Philadelphia became one of the first cities to possess a permanent armory when the Infantry Corps, National Guards, purchased ground opposite Independence Hall and built the three-story National Guards Hall. In addition to quarters, storage, and meeting rooms, the building contained a drill hall on the second floor that could support an entire regiment.

The First Troop constructed its first armory, a two-story structure, in 1863. In 1874, the troop commissioned the architectural firm Furness & Hewitt to design a new armory, to be built at Twenty-First and Ash Streets with funds bequeathed by wealthy members. Frank Furness (1839-1912) designed a compact three-story structure with a drill hall annex in the style of a medieval castle. According to historian Robert Fogelson, the building was one of the nation’s first castellated armories, which were distinctive for their thick walls topped with battlements, narrow windows, and bartizans. Industrialists and National Guard officials favored this style because it provided greater security for personnel and equipment in times of labor unrest. Architects embraced it because it unified form and function.

Armories Privately Funded

In an era of labor unrest, fundraising for armory construction in Philadelphia accelerated as wealthy private donors increasingly came to view the Pennsylvania National Guard as a strikebreaking force. In the wake of the nationwide Great Railroad Strike of 1877, Philadelphia gained new armories for the First Regiment, Second Regiment, and First Troop. James H. Windrim (1840-1919) designed the First Regiment Armory (built in 1884), located at Broad and Cherry Streets until it was demolished in 1979. The Second Regiment Armory (1895-97), designed by the firm Rankin & Kellogg, stood at Broad Street and Susquehanna Avenue. The First Troop’s third armory (1901), at Twenty-Third and Chestnut Streets, replaced the Furness armory, which suffered a collapsed roof in 1899 following a snowstorm. The local firm Newman, Woodman, & Harris designed the new armory, which continued to be used by the First Troop into the twenty-first century. All three castellated armories limited access to the interior with raised windows and single entranceways. As a cavalry armory, the First Troop Armory’s interior contained a spacious central hall with a dirt floor to serve as a riding ring (later paved to accommodate motor vehicles). These buildings received funding almost entirely from private donors. For example, the patrons of the First Regiment Armory included the Pennsylvania Railroad Corporation, merchant John Wanamaker (1838-1922), and Edwin Benson (1804-1909), an ex-National Guard officer and future president of the Union League.

By the end of the century, Philadelphia boasted six permanent armories. In New Jersey, meanwhile, officers of New Jersey’s Sixth Regiment successfully lobbied the state legislature to approve construction of a new armory in Camden to replace the old one at Bridge and West Streets (which remained standing until destroyed by fire in 1906). A Philadelphia contractor completed the new armory in 1897, and it remained in use as an armory, and after 1953 as a convention center, until its demolition in 1977 to create a site for a Veterans Administration hospital. For state officials and guardsmen, protecting the men and stores from attack by a mob was the primary purpose of the armory. Toward that end, architect Charles A. Gifford (1861-1937) designed the Camden Armory on Haddon Avenue to look like a fortress and a line of railroad track was laid alongside the structure to allow for the safe transport of troops out of the city. Gifford’s design for the Second Regiment Armory (1905), in Trenton, likewise retained many of the features of the castellated style. In the early twentieth century, Camden gained an additional armory on Wright Avenue to serve as the headquarters of a field artillery unit.

Unlike Pennsylvania, New Jersey built its armories mostly from public funds. The state legislature passed armory bills—five in the span of a decade—that authorized appropriations and established a state armory board that supervised the construction of new facilities. Pennsylvania followed suit when that state’s legislature created its armory board in 1905. The influx of this new source of funding led to a surge in construction in the Philadelphia suburbs, with armories sprouting in Media (1908), West Chester (1916), Reading City (1919), and Norristown (1928). Delaware also shifted from private to public funding of its armories. Troop B, First Delaware Cavalry, was able to raise money from private sources to build its home at the Wilmington Armory, located on Twelfth and Orange Streets. From 1890 to 1925, this “State Arsenal” served as quarters for all of the city’s National Guard units. When guardsmen complained that the space was too cramped, the Delaware legislature authorized a State Armory Commission to build a new armory and appropriated $250,000 for that purpose.

Military Use Gives Way to Civilian Use

As the perceived threat of a revolution by labor subsided and the federal Militia Act of 1903 transformed state militias from industrial police forces to reserve forces for the regular Army, the purpose and form of armories underwent a marked change. With armories no longer considered targets of attack, federal, state, and city governments hired architects to design new armories with civilian functions in mind and adapted existing armories for public use. Armories in a diversity of architectural styles superseded the fortresses of the late nineteenth century. In Philadelphia, Windrim designed the Third Regiment Armory (1898), Broad and Wharton Streets, in the Romanesque style typical of the day but also included the features of a medieval castle, such as crenellations. The armory became the site for circuses, prizefights, and fraternal club meetings, and was converted into loft apartments in 2003. Philip H. Johnson (1868-1933) designed two armories in the Classical Revival style: a three-story cavalry armory (1916) resembling a railroad station at Thirty-Second and Lancaster, later adapted into a gymnasium by Drexel University, and the two-story General Thomas J. Stewart Memorial Armory (1928) in Norristown. Delaware architect Edward Canby May (1889-?) chose an Egyptian Revival style for his design of the Wilmington Armory (1928), located on Tenth and DuPont Streets. During the 1930s, the armory construction program of the Works Progress Administration and Public Works Administration continued this process toward civilian-oriented armory functions and design. To save taxpayer money, economy of design became the watchword, in stark contrast to the monumental privately-funded armories of the nineteenth century. Armories typically followed standardized designs with T-shaped or I-shaped plans in Art Deco or Art Moderne style. The New Deal dramatically increased the amount of federal funds disbursed by the states for armory construction. As a result, armories proliferated across the region, especially in towns and suburbs. Examples include the Hamburg Armory (1937) in Berks County and the Special Troops Armory in the Ogontz neighborhood (1938-39) of Philadelphia and company-sized armories in Milford (c. 1938) and New Castle (c. 1934-35?), Delaware.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a few of these suburban and small town armories were turned over to local communities to use as they saw fit. For example, the Borough of Media donated the Media Armory to the Pennsylvania Veterans Museum and the West Chester Armory was converted into a theater for the performing arts.

National Guard armories in the region developed in tandem with architectural fashion, the mission of the citizen-soldier, and the role of government in the social life of the nation. The ornate castellated armories of Philadelphia, Camden, and Wilmington provide physical evidence of domestic turmoil and close links between the National Guard and their wealthy patrons during the post-Civil War era. Guardsmen’s reliance on private funding for armory construction not only helped turn state militias into a police force for industry, but also enabled local architects to develop a distinctive style for a building type that had never had one. The shift to public funding in the twentieth century armories meant that armories were often the product of pork barrel legislation or took the form of government make-work projects. States responded to the public desire for more civic spaces by expanding construction to small towns and suburban neighborhoods. Architects, in turn, embraced contemporary styles and the armories lost much of their aesthetic distinctiveness.

Jean-Pierre Beugoms is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Temple University. He is working on a dissertation about the logistics of the U.S. Army during the War of 1812. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Schuylkill Arsenal, established by Act of Congress on April 2, 1794, occupied an eight-acre site between the east bank of the Schuylkill River and Gray’s Ferry Road. Constructed between 1802 and 1806, in its early years the arsenal operated as a storage depot for gunpowder, arms, and other supplies. (In 1803, the arsenal issued clothing, blankets, tents and equipment to the Lewis and Clark Expedition.) The functions of the arsenal changed after the War of 1812 and the opening of a new arsenal in Frankford in 1816. While Frankford superseded the Schuylkill Arsenal as an ordnance depot, the older site evolved into a clothing arsenal because of its proximity to textile mills. It ceased storing arms in the 1830s, and in 1842, after the Quartermaster Department acquired the site from a defunct supply agency, the Schuylkill Arsenal became a center for manufacturing, procuring, and distributing clothing, footwear, and camp equipage.

The Schuylkill Arsenal provided the Army with supplies either by contracting out requisitions to private firms or, when the contract system proved deficient, by manufacturing goods onsite. The arsenal’s bootee- (an ankle-length boot) and tent-making establishments, in particular, produced items superior to those acquired by contract. The arsenal also employed a large female workforce, which varied from 400 to 10,000 depending on military demand. While the men worked as packers, cutters, tailors, and laborers, women found jobs as seamstresses. Working from home, the seamstresses who obtained work directly from the arsenal sewed cut textiles provided to them, returned with finished uniforms, and received wages on a per-piece basis. Seamstresses hired by contractors, on the other hand, often worked in crowded sweatshops and received a fraction of what the public employees earned.

The low wages of seamstresses in Philadelphia and other cities drew criticism in 1833 from Philadelphia economist and publisher Mathew Carey (1760-1839), who argued in a series of essays that the women made too little to support themselves or their children. Seamstresses also began forming trade unions, organizing strikes, and writing petitions to improve their lot. In 1835, seamstresses and women employed in other trades organized the Female Improvement Society to protest inadequate wages. During the Civil War, arsenal seamstresses petitioned the War Department to set a minimum wage for both public and private sector workers and called for an end to the Army’s use of contractors. Although the petitioners met with President Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) and government workers received a pay raise, the practice of subcontracting continued.

By the time of the First World War, the Schuylkill Arsenal’s site had become too small to meet the demands of outfitting the American Expeditionary Forces. The arsenal, renamed the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot, moved in 1918 to a new location on Twenty-First Street and Oregon Avenue. From 1921 to 1941, the depot housed a quartermaster training school for commissioned officers, officer candidates, and enlisted personnel. It lost this function, however, when rapidly increasing enrollment during World War II resulted in the school’s removal to Fort Lee, Virginia. The arsenal served as a storage site until its closing in 1958.

Philadelphia’s second arsenal, in Frankford, served different purposes. Established by the Ordnance Department on May 27, 1816, the arsenal occupied twenty-two acres on the north bank of the Frankford Creek, near its confluence with the Delaware River. Equipped with a wharf, the site provided waterborne access to the Worrell gunpowder mills. Initially, the arsenal included four stone buildings arranged around a parade ground, and open land in the surrounding area offered the possibility of future expansion.

During the antebellum era, the Frankford Arsenal functioned as a depot for storing, repairing, and cleaning military equipment and weapons. On a small scale, the arsenal also manufactured ordnance, including paper cartridges, percussion caps, and musket balls. Arsenal commanders also awarded contracts to private firms such as the DuPont Company, whose gunpowder they inspected before shipping it to other posts.

In the 1830s, the site began to develop from a small post used mainly for storage and procurement into a bustling industrial and scientific complex. In 1835, the Secretary of War made the arsenal the Ordnance Department’s only proving ground for gunpowder, and the site nearly doubled in size with the purchase of adjacent land in 1836 and 1850. Previously manned by about twenty-five soldiers plus a temporary civilian workforce, the arsenal expanded to employ hundreds of civilian workers.

During the Philadelphia nativist riots of 1844, the Frankford Arsenal faced the only threat to its security in its 161-year history. On May 8 in neighboring Kensington, mobs destroyed the Roman Catholic churches of St. Augustine and St. Michael’s and several homes belonging to Irish immigrants. The arsenal’s  commander sent arms and ammunition to Philadelphia County Sheriff Morton McMichael (1807-79). Rumors of an impending attack on the arsenal and a nearby church prompted the War Department to deploy reinforcements from a unit based in Fort Columbus, New York. Nothing came of the rumors, however.

In the ensuing years, commanders expanded the arsenal with a rolling mill, a laboratory for conducting experiments in ballistics and explosives, and a factory that produced more than one million percussion caps a month by 1853. Steam-powered machinery, introduced in 1852, hastened the transition from hand craftsmanship to industrial production. By 1864, the arsenal had become a manufacturing center that employed 1,226 civilian laborers and artisans, many of them from the neighboring community of Bridesburg.

Given the Frankford Arsenal’s role as a scientific testing ground, fires and explosions were common. In 1861, an explosion at one of the laboratories resulted in two fatalities and, in 1862, another destroyed part of the percussion cap factory. Arsenal commander Major Theodore T. S. Laidley (1822-86) responded to events such as these by constructing new buildings with wrought-iron frames, an innovation that allowed the beams and columns to withstand explosions even if the roofs collapsed and the walls blew out.

Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Ordnance Department purchased more land and added an array of new buildings, including an optical shop for developing instruments and munitions. Engineers and scientists contributed to the arsenal’s already substantial catalogue of innovations by developing the Gatling gun, smokeless powder, 75mm and 105mm recoilless rifles, the rocket-powered pilot ejection seat, and laser rangefinder, to name a few. Production of munitions increased dramatically during the Spanish-American War, the two world wars, and the Korean War. At its peak, in 1942, the arsenal employed 22,000 workers and produced nearly all of the nation’s wartime supply of small-arms ammunition for that year.

In November 1974, the Department of Defense announced that the Frankford Arsenal would be closed. The move, part of a nationwide base reduction and consolidation process that began under Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara (1916-2009), drew criticism from residents and local politicians and became a bone of contention during the 1976 presidential election campaign. On Election Day eve, vice-presidential candidate Walter Mondale (b. 1928) visited the arsenal and promised to keep it open if the voters elected Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) president. The site had grown to more than 200 buildings on 110 acres of land and maintained a workforce of 2,000 people. The arsenal closed in the fall of 1977, but it later reopened as a business park.

The Schuylkill Arsenal and Frankford Arsenal played critical roles in U.S. military supply system during times of war and peace. They also contributed to Philadelphia’s status as one of the nation’s principal manufacturing and commercial cities.

Jean-Pierre Beugoms is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Temple University. He is working on a dissertation about the logistics of the U.S. Army during the War of 1812. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia’s connections with the Atlantic predated William Penn’s founding of the city in 1682. Imperial rivalries among European powers in the seventeenth century made the Delaware Valley a site of colonization, conflict, and diplomatic wrangling. In 1638, the powerful Swedish monarchy established the colony of New Sweden in the area that later became portions of Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. The colony survived until 1655, at which point the Dutch Republic conquered it and incorporated New Sweden into New Netherland. Less than ten years later, in 1664, the English took over New Netherland (renaming New Amsterdam as New York in the process), although the Dutch recaptured the colony during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74). The Treaty of Westminster (1674) relinquished New Netherland to the English. Such contests among European monarchies and republics gave the Delaware Valley a cosmopolitan hue. Before Penn arrived, Lenape people lived alongside Swedes, Dutch, Finns, and Germans; enslaved African people have been documented around the Delaware region from 1639.

Within a few decades of the city’s founding, Philadelphia had become a bustling port city and a center of transoceanic trade. Commercial networks bound Philadelphia to the Atlantic World. By the 1750s, Philadelphia had outgrown Boston to become the busiest port in British America. Its shipping carried flaxseed exports to Ireland and sugar grown by enslaved people in the Caribbean for refining along the Delaware waterfront. Philadelphia, in other words, quickly became integrated into the dense web of connections stretching across the Atlantic and beyond. From the beginning, pirates took advantage of these connections as they preyed on vessels. William Penn discovered to his dismay in a 1699 visit to his city that pirates thrived in Philadelphia, where they received significant support from some of the city’s well-to-do residents and royal officials, and from whence they ventured to target Muslim pilgrims in the Indian Ocean.

Religious Freedom, Economic Opportunity

Transatlantic migration peopled early Philadelphia and its surroundings. Irish, English, Welsh, and German Quakers accompanied Penn across the ocean, drawn—like other dissenting groups—by Penn’s promise of the religious freedom denied to them in the Old World. Other newcomers in the eighteenth century, frequently from the British Isles and Germany, flocked to the rich agricultural land to the west of the city. Their small farms offered better economic opportunities than could be found in Europe, giving the region a reputation as “the best poor man’s country.”

But that land belonged to other people and, consequently, European immigration to the Delaware Valley assumed a settler colonial character marked by diplomacy and conflict. Negotiations between Lenape people and Europeans in Greater Philadelphia became an important, if much mythologized, part of the early history of the region. Some Native Americans appear to have preferred dealing with pacific Quakers and established productive relationships with them. At least in the beginning, Penn and Quakers seemed to negotiate in good faith. However, as time passed, more and more Europeans arrived in the region, eyed Native American lands covetously, and plotted to appropriate further territory for themselves. By the mid-eighteenth century, Scots Irish settler colonials to the west of Philadelphia blamed the colony’s Quakers for checking further conquest. In 1763, a marauding band known as the Paxton Boys massacred the residents of a Susquehannock settlement in Lancaster County that had been on good terms with the colony. Such instances reveal how voluntary European migration across the Atlantic led to the violent expropriation of the region’s Native peoples.

Not all passages across the ocean, though, were voluntary. Indentured servitude and African enslavement—the first a temporary form of unfree labor, the second a permanent one—also crossed the Atlantic. Some European immigrants could pay their fare, but those who could not traded up to seven years of their future labor for passage to the Americas. Conditions indentured servants experienced varied wildly across different times and places, but most did not have easy lives. The German schoolmaster Gottlieb Mittelberger sought to discourage such emigration from his homeland. His Journey to Pennsylvania (1756), based on his voyage from Rotterdam to Philadelphia and his subsequent sojourn in Lancaster County, did not pull any punches about the misery and exploitation that indentured servants and other immigrants often faced.

Trafficked African people, assigned by their captors with the inheritable status of enslavement, also arrived in Philadelphia, sometimes on ships outfitted in the city. In the early years of the colony most came from the Caribbean. However, when that supply became more fraught, as it did during Seven Years’ War, Philadelphian traffickers turned to direct importation from Africa. At the beginning of the American Revolution, Philadelphia contained roughly seven hundred enslaved people, who brought with them elements of African and Caribbean culture like pepper pot soup. Philadelphia and its hinterland—where enslavers held over two thousand more people as property—never developed the export-oriented plantation economy that flourished in Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. That said, enslaved people served in households, craft industries, and aboard ships. Furthermore, Philadelphians who did not enslave people themselves often purchased the products of enslaved labor, invested in slaving voyages, and facilitated the buying and selling of their fellow human beings.

Clashes Abroad Reverberate in Philadelphia

A region scarred by Black enslavement became a cradle of white liberty over the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As the foremost port in British North America, Philadelphia played a critical role during the Seven Years’ War, the Imperial Crisis, and the American Revolution. Each of these upheavals had Atlantic origins and ramifications. The struggle between Great Britain and France in Europe reverberated in the Americas. Similarly, events that occurred in the Americas, like George Washington’s military encounter with Joseph Coulon de Jumonville in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, rippled across the Atlantic as well. For Philadelphians, the backdrop of conflict among great powers intensified existing transatlantic connections and created opportunities for new ones. Benjamin Franklin spent considerable time in Great Britain in the 1760s and 1770s trying to prevent war between Great Britain and the thirteen colonies, as well as securing jobs for his friends and associates. Franklin had long been an Atlantic celebrity and his growing disillusionment with Great Britain represented the fraying political and intellectual links between Parliament and its American possessions.

Over these years Philadelphia and its surrounding region became a key battleground in the age of Atlantic Revolutions. Between 1770 and 1833, violent upheavals transformed France, Haiti, and vast colonized regions of North and South America into republics. In 1776 the Second Continental Congress, composed of delegates who were often born and educated in Europe, met in Philadelphia to sign the foundational document of the new United States. The Declaration of Independence reverberated across the ocean and reflected the influence of transatlantic thought. Its authors presented facts to the candid world and addressed a much broader audience than the residents of the thirteen colonies. The draft of Thomas Jefferson also revealed the western drift of Enlightenment ideas. He adapted, for instance, the claim of the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke that men had the right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property.” But the declaration, and the new republic it announced, were also shaped by Atlantic World slavery. As scholars have demonstrated, ideas about white freedom and liberty developed in tandem with racialized ideas about Black enslavement and submissiveness. Jefferson’s initial draft of the declaration placed the onus for slavery solely on Great Britain. From London, it prompted the lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson to wonder why the loudest cries for liberty emanated from the mouths of enslavers.

The Imperial Crisis and the American Revolution severed links to Britain. For some in the Delaware Valley the divorce proved hard to imagine. By no means did all residents in the region flock to the Patriot cause, and “Loyalists” who wanted to maintain relations with the mother country could be found among both the economic elite and ordinary people. The Delaware Valley’s Atlantic merchants confronted a difficult dilemma. Ties to the British Empire granted local merchants access to imperial markets, not least in the Caribbean, where food grown in Philadelphia’s fertile hinterland had been exchanged for sugar and cash crops. War cut off such long-established trading routes and led to the questioning of loyalties. Quaker merchants like Henry Drinker often had deep ties to Great Britain. Drinker and his wife Elizabeth faced the challenge of trying to thread the needle between making concessions to revolutionaries while maintaining their Atlantic connections. Revolutionaries eventually arrested him for treason, imprisoning him in Virginia, while Elizabeth navigated life in British-occupied Philadelphia during 1777-78. After regaining control of the city, Patriots held 638 “Tory” collaborators as suspected traitors. The Drinkers, embedded in Atlantic World networks, suffered as they attempted to navigate the complex politics of the Revolutionary era. Other Philadelphian merchants turned their gaze to the west, looking for new markets in China and the Pacific.

Ripples of the American Revolution

The Revolutionary War, like the Seven Years’ War before it, recalibrated Atlantic relations in other ways, too. At Valley Forge in 1777-78 the Prussian officer Baron von Steuben helped to drill George Washington’s army. The British evacuated Philadelphia in June 1778 and retreated to New York. Around three thousand Philadelphian loyalists left the city with the British military forces, joining a wider exodus of Tories and their allies (including enslaved Black Americans who had been promised freedom in exchange for military service) to Canada and Britain. Von Steuben’s work at Valley Forge helped Washington fight the British to a draw at Monmouth. A few months before Patriots retook Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, having been dispatched to Paris, steered the rebel colonies into a crucial alliance with France that helped to determine the outcome of the war. The decision to use Franklin as a diplomat proved a sound one. He fascinated the French, who saw him as the premier example of American genius, and he played his role with aplomb.

In the decades following the American Revolution, Philadelphia remained closely connected to the political currents of the Atlantic World. The ideas of the American Revolution were carried east and south. Revolutions erupted elsewhere—in France, in other parts of Europe, in Haiti, and in Spanish America. The career of Thomas Paine indicates their entangled paths. Paine, who was born in Norfolk, England, had been convinced by Franklin to go to the Americas. Arriving in Philadelphia in late 1774, his influential pamphlet Common Sense made the case for revolution in plain language that appealed to a wide readership. In the doldrums of 1776, Paine’s The American Crisis helped buoy Patriot morale. After the American Revolution ended, Paine traveled to France and served as a member of the National Convention, where he narrowly avoided the guillotine after falling out of favor with leading Jacobins. Paine’s career as an Atlantic revolutionary, with Philadelphia at its center, demonstrates how ideas easily crossed oceans.

As a major port city and an Atlantic World hub, Philadelphia often welcomed revolutionaries like Paine, while selectively supporting revolutions elsewhere. French Minister Edmond-Charles Genêt, also called Citizen Genêt, arrived in Philadelphia to a rapturous welcome in 1793. Genêt angered George Washington by attempting to subvert Washington’s proclamation of U.S. neutrality in the brewing conflict between Great Britain and France. Another figure to become embroiled in partisan battles of the early republic was the Polish nobleman Tadeusz Kościuszko. Having fought with the colonials during the American Revolution and then for Poland against Russia and Prussia, in 1797 he returned as a political exile to the United States, where he lived briefly in Philadelphia until leaving for Europe in 1798. Kościuszko wrote a will that named Thomas Jefferson as the executor, dedicating his estate to purchasing the freedom of enslaved people and providing them with an education.

Exiles Find a Home

Whether as a place of refuge from revolution and reaction or as a source of support for insurgents, the Delaware Valley became enmeshed with tumultuous upheavals across the Atlantic. When revolution erupted in Haiti in 1791, French masters fled the island, forcing many of the people they enslaved to join them. The exiles who arrived in Philadelphia brought firsthand accounts of the hemisphere’s first Black-led revolution, which energized both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist politics. Another Francophone uprooted by revolutionary wars was Joseph Bonaparte, who fled to the United States after his brother Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Following a short sojourn in Philadelphia he moved out to an estate in nearby Bordentown, New Jersey, where he spent most of his remaining years. Supporters of the Greeks in the Greek War for Independence from the Ottoman Empire raised money for the cause and even tried to persuade the United States to intervene. And in 1848, citizens gathered on Independence Square to welcome the proclamation of a new French Republic. People did not always like the direction foreign revolutions took, but Philadelphians, both Black and white, recognized their city’s place in a revolutionary Atlantic World.

Black Philadelphians insisted that those Atlantic revolutions had to reckon with enslavement—the cry of liberty rang hollow if new republics were built on the back of forced labor. Finding allies, however, did not prove easy; abolitionism was never more than a minority sentiment among white people in the eighteenth century. That said, some of the region’s Quakers, African Americans, and other friends of liberty raised their voices in favor of ending enslavement and emancipating enslaved people. Connections to the Caribbean and Europe shaped antislavery activism in the Delaware Valley. An extraordinary individual named Benjamin Lay, a Quaker immigrant, became one of the region’s earliest abolitionists. Born in England the same year as Philadelphia’s founding, Lay spent years traversing the Atlantic as a sailor, left for Barbados, and from there migrated to Philadelphia. Lay’s abolitionism sprang from his ardent Quaker faith, as well as his experiences in Barbados, where he witnessed enslavement’s brutality firsthand. While in Barbados, Lay and his wife Sarah held meetings at their house and served meals to enslaved people, which infuriated white slaveholders. After he and Sarah relocated to Philadelphia, Lay tried to convince fellow Quakers in the region to emancipate enslaved people. While some Friends had rejected enslavement before Lay’s arrival, his activism led to his disownment, and he retreated to a cave he converted into a cottage in Abington, Pennsylvania. From there Lay continued to urge the region’s Friends to acknowledge Atlantic enslavement as apostasy. By the end of his life more Quaker voices in the region had begun to proclaim the abolitionism gospel, including the New Jersey merchant John Woolman, a member of the Chesterfield Friends Meeting, who died in Britain on an antislavery mission, and the French-born religious refugee Anthony Benezet, who played an important role in founding the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in 1775. The first abolition society in the Americas, it was later reorganized as the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage (usually referred to as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society) in 1789.

The AME Church Goes Global

In the decades that followed, Black abolitionists in Philadelphia built institutions and cultivated connections that reached across the Atlantic. By doing so they recognized that the struggle against enslavement in the United States was part of a wider battle for rights that extended to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. Richard Allen, building on his efforts in establishing Philadelphia’s Free African Society in 1787 and Mother Bethel Church in 1794, founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 and became the church’s first bishop. AME churches subsequently sprang up all over the globe. By the end of the nineteenth century they had reached Bermuda, West Africa, and South Africa. An African American institution that began in Philadelphia therefore shaped the global spread of Black Christianity. Bishop Allen supported abolition, as did James Forten, a self-made sailmaker who after an initial flirtation with the idea of “colonizing” formerly enslaved Americans in Africa or Haiti became a fierce opponent of such schemes and an ardent advocate of an immediate end to enslavement. But the Atlantic connections of Philadelphia’s Black abolitionists are perhaps most evident in the career of Robert Purvis. Born free in Charleston, South Carolina, to parents of British, Moroccan, and Jewish roots, Purvis migrated to Philadelphia, where he helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society. Like many of his fellow abolitionists, Purvis sought to rally support in the United Kingdom, which had put enslavement on the path to extinction in its own colonies, and he traveled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean on fundraising missions while corresponding with prominent British figures in the antislavery movement. When, on August 1, 1842, Black abolitionists marched through the southern wards of the city to mark the eighth anniversary of abolition across the British empire, a rampaging white mob threatened to burn down Purvis’s house.

The Lombard Street Riot of 1842, as it became known, proved just one of a series of riots that pitted rival immigrant and racial groups against one another in the “turbulent era” of the 1830s and 1840s. Tensions over religion, enslavement, and politics that reached across the Atlantic Ocean played out on the streets of Philadelphia. Immigration from Europe continued in the decades after the Revolution, with British, Germans, and Irish (especially after the beginning of the Potato Famine in the 1840s) the most heavily represented. Old World experiences shaped their politics. British Chartists, veterans of the struggle for the vote in the United Kingdom, welcomed the political rights denied to them in their country of origin. Irish Catholics gravitated toward the Democratic Party, in part due to the hostility of prominent Democrats like Andrew Jackson toward Britain. Indeed, the frequency with which Irish Catholics participated in anti-abolitionist violence owed something to their equation of abolitionism with support for the British crown. Germans, on the other hand, often backed the new antislavery Republican Party in the 1850s, and many of them saw the fight against enslavement as a continuation of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe. Catholic immigration in particular met a nativist backlash. The Philadelphia Nativist Riots of 1844, which saw the county placed under martial law, sprang from rumors that Irish newcomers wanted to replace the Protestant King James Bible in the city’s public schools. Philadelphia became a battleground in a conflict that stretched back to the English colonization of Ireland and break with Rome.

Movement across the ocean brought epidemics as well as people. Diseases rarely remained within the borders of one country; they spread rapidly across an increasingly connected world. Philadelphia’s status as an Atlantic port increased its vulnerability. A yellow fever epidemic in 1793, possibly carried on ships transporting French enslavers fleeing the Haitian Revolution, killed at least five thousand Philadelphians and sent tens of thousands fleeing from the city. Yellow fever recurred on a less destructive scale for decades. After the epidemic in 1793, the city decided to build new waterworks and engaged British-born architect Benjamin Latrobe to design them. Latrobe built the waterworks in a neoclassical style that evoked Athens. Cholera too crossed the Atlantic and caused epidemics in 1832, 1849, and 1866. By the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s sanitarians were learning from the hygiene measures that had begun to control such diseases in Europe.

The Arts and Sciences Flourish

Such exchange of knowledge had long been a feature of the region. The arts and sciences flourished in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram’s establishment of the American Philosophical Society in 1743 marked the first of many efforts for Philadelphians to demonstrate leadership in the arts and sciences. Philadelphia was the first city to lay claim to the mantle of the “Athens of America,” although some people later argued that Boston also deserved the title. The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was founded in 1812, in part to impel the creation and diffusion of knowledge about the sciences and in part to place science in the United States on a par with its status in Europe. While Atlantic World rivalries proved important, the flourishing of the arts and sciences in Philadelphia also sprang from cultural exchange and connection, with leaders in fields as diverse as medicine (Benjamin Rush), botany (John Bartram), and history (Henry Charles Lea) all maintaining close links through either education or correspondence to their European counterparts. The French, in particular, had a powerful influence on the city, not least through the career of the merchant Stephen Girard, an immigrant who became one of the richest men in the United States and left most of his estate to his adopted city. Such figures cultivated and affirmed Atlantic World relationships.

If Philadelphia’s intellectual connections to the Atlantic remained a constant across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the region’s significance to the transoceanic economy eventually started to wane in the 1800s. In contrast to Washington, D.C., which foreign observers and even many people in the U.S. derided as a miasmic swamp or a sleepy, provincial village, Philadelphia remained an Atlantic financial hub well into the 1830s. The Second Bank of the United States, based on Chestnut Street and boasting a federal charter from its foundation in 1816 to 1836, maintained transatlantic financial ties between the U.S. and Europe, particularly Great Britain. Its demise at the hands of President Jackson strained those relations, which suffered further when Pennsylvania defaulted on its debt payments to European creditors in 1842, prompting the English Lake poet (and out of pocket “surly creditor”) William Wordsworth to rail against the commonwealth’s “degenerate Men.” Furthermore, Philadelphia lost ground to New York City as an Atlantic port, as the Erie Canal (among other factors) fueled Manhattan’s ascent as the financial capital of the United States. The source of Greater Philadelphia’s wealth shifted from commerce to manufacturing, as the Athens of America transformed into the workshop of the world, which increased local support for high protective tariffs to protect home industry. These higher tariffs, however, made it harder for the city to cultivate European markets. Some Philadelphians nevertheless found overseas clients. Joseph Harrison Jr., for example, built locomotives for Russia and Czar Nicholas I awarded him a gold medal for completing the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. After his return to Philadelphia, Harrison amassed an impressive art collection, which he displayed at his mansion off Rittenhouse Square. Harrison, like some of his contemporaries, remained connected to the Atlantic World and prioritized connections and cultural exchange.

Philadelphia’s reputation as an Atlantic center of politics, finance, and commerce may have declined over the course of the nineteenth century but its links to its nearest ocean persisted in other respects. Immigration, which had slowed during the Civil War, accelerated again in the decades that followed. These arrivals increasingly came from eastern and southern Europe— especially Italy—rather than the western and northern reaches of the continent. Their children and grandchildren then often made the Atlantic crossing in reverse to fight in that continent’s wars. U.S. intervention in European conflict left a marked impact on the region’s economy and society. World War I and World War II stimulated ship production along the Delaware. During the latter, the Philadelphia Navy Yard employed over fifty thousand workers, whose labor made Philadelphia a vital part of the “Arsenal of Democracy.” Europe and Africa continued to exert an influence in art, design, and politics, too. Jacques-Henri-Auguste Gréber, a French landscape architect, designed and built the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and a proponent of Pan-Africanism, had a following in Philadelphia. Garvey is not the only example of Philadelphia’s connections to Africa. After the loosening of federal restrictions on immigration in the 1960s, Ethiopians, Ghanaians, Liberians, and Nigerians were prominently represented in the new African diaspora of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to Philadelphia.

Bonds of Culture Persist

Philadelphia’s Atlantic connections remained evident in spaces and civic life of the twenty-first century region. The Irish Memorial near Penn’s Landing, dedicated in 2003, sought to remind visitors about the migrants who built the city. The Mummers Parade could trace its roots back to older immigrant traditions from England, Germany, and Sweden. Annual Columbus Day celebrations testified to both the strength of Italian-American pride and the contested legacy of European colonization. Founders of the ODUNDE Festival, held the second Sunday in June, sought to celebrate the history and heritage of African peoples around the globe and created one of the longest-running and largest African American street festivals in the United States. Philadelphia’s historical connections to the Atlantic—forged in cultural exchange, revolutionary conflict, and the movement of peoples and revolutionary ideas—helped make the twenty-first century city a mecca for tourists. Yet such connections have sometimes underpinned a resurgent nativist politics that echoed an earlier era, as some residents used the region’s European cultural heritage to question the place of new immigrants from the Americas and Asia in the city. Philadelphia connections by the twenty-first century were global rather than primarily Atlantic. But the ocean the Delaware River empties into made the city a political and economic hub and the links it enabled remained lodged in civic memory.

Evan C. Rothera is Assistant Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. He is author of Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022) and coeditor, with Brian Matthew Jordan, of The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020). (Author information current at time of publication).

The occupation of Philadelphia deviated from a British plan to conquer New England in 1777, after two years of inconclusive war. To conquer New England, the British intended to send two armies into New York state. The first, headed by General John Burgoyne (1722-92), proceeded south from Canada. At the same time, forces led by General William Howe (1729-1814) would have headed north from New York City along the Hudson River. These two armies would have divided New England from the other colonies, allowing the British to invade and conquer.

Howe, to the surprise of his superiors, did not follow through on this plan. Whether from personal dislike of Burgoyne, fear of allowing General George Washington (1732-99) time to rebuild his army, or doubts about his own ability to prosecute the Hudson River campaign, he rejected the plan. Instead, with a force of about fifteen thousand English and German soldiers, he sailed south along the coast and then headed up the Chesapeake Bay toward Philadelphia. In August 1777, he landed at Head of Elk, some fifty miles from the city.

Howe set his sights on Philadelphia for a number of reasons. Philadelphia, of course, was the American capital and the meeting place of the Continental Congress. Howe also apparently hoped to draw Washington into a battle that might destroy the Continental Army once and for all. Furthermore, prominent Loyalists, including Joseph Galloway (1731-1803), had claimed that more than 75 percent of Americans in Philadelphia and the surrounding region were loyal to the crown and would welcome and aid the British.

Battle of Brandywine Creek

Washington, watching Howe’s movements carefully, attempted unsuccessfully to stop the British advance at the Battle of Brandywine Creek (September 1777). It was a costly loss–Washington suffered some nine hundred casualties (of eleven thousand soldiers), while Howe lost only 550. As the British army approached Philadelphia, thousands of patriot citizens fled, including the delegates to the Continental Congress. Sarah Logan Fisher (1751-96), the wife of a prominent Philadelphia merchant, described “wagons rattling, horses galloping, women running, children crying, delegates flying, & altogether the greatest consternation, fright & terror that can be imagined.” One estimate suggests that more than 10 percent of Philadelphia’s homes were abandoned by their owners before the British arrived, and reports of looting and theft grew. When Howe entered Philadelphia on September 26, 1777, Loyalists lined the streets to welcome the return of British authority. On October 5, Washington tried to dislodge the British at the Battle of Germantown, but this effort also failed.

Once in control of Philadelphia, Howe faced serious problems. Even though thousands of Americans had fled, the civilian population still numbered some fifteen thousand. Howe’s forces added another fifteen thousand. But Howe’s supply lines were inadequate. Having marched overland to Philadelphia, he needed to control the Delaware River to ensure an adequate supply of provisions. The Delaware, however, was guarded by two American forts, Fort Mifflin on Mud Island and Fort Mercer on the New Jersey side of the river. The Americans successfully defended both forts for almost seven weeks. Suffering followed in Philadelphia, as food and other provisions were in short supply. British officers quartered with local citizens, churches became hospitals for sick and wounded soldiers, and Philadelphians described British and German soldiers stealing horses, cattle, wood, food, and clothing. The suffering of American prisoners in the Walnut Street Jail was especially severe, as prisoners endured hunger, cold, and abuse from their jailers. In October 1777, the Quaker diarist Elizabeth Drinker (1735-1807) described the suffering of the city, writing “if things dont change ‘eer long, we shall be in poor plight, everything scarce and dear, and nothing suffer’d to be brought in to us.” The forts fell in November, relieving the blockade, but prices in the city remained high and citizens continued to complain of theft and other crimes committed by soldiers. Howe tried, without much success, to deter such behavior. He offered monetary rewards for information about crimes, and frequent courts-martial sentenced men to up to a thousand lashes for plundering and other crimes.

During the long fall and winter months, the British built up the city’s defenses, kept an eye on the American army at Valley Forge, and sent foragers into the countryside to search for wood and hay. But such tasks could not occupy the thousands of men in the army, and the British also turned to a wide variety of leisure activities. Some occupied themselves by playing cards, drinking, gambling, and visiting prostitutes. Others sought more elaborate entertainments, arranging dinner parties and taking part in amateur dramatics. British officers put on plays at the Southwark Theatre on Monday nights from January to May, performing at least fourteen different plays.

Howe’s Resignation

When Howe resigned in April 1778, his officers planned a grand celebration to honor him before his departure. This “Meschianza” (in Italian, “medley”) began with elaborately decorated flatboats and galleys carrying officers and hundreds of guests down the river. This procession was followed by a tournament in which British officers dressed as medieval knights jousted in honor of the “Ladies of the Blended Rose” and the “Ladies of the Burning Mountain.” The tournament was followed by a feast, fireworks, and dancing. Participants judged the event a stunning success, but not all Philadelphia citizens agreed. The Meschianza cost more than three thousand guineas, a stunning amount of money in an occupied city where citizens complained regularly of shortages and high prices. The diarist Drinker criticized the officers’ extravagance, writing, “How insensible do these people appear, while our Land is so greatly desolated, and Death and sore destruction has overtaken and impends over so many.”

While Howe and his army spent the winter in Philadelphia, the fortunes of war were turning. On October 17, 1777, Burgoyne (lacking support from Howe) surrendered at Saratoga. This American victory encouraged the French to make an alliance with the Americans. With British plans in America threatened by the French fleet, the British could no longer afford to occupy Philadelphia, especially as they had gained nothing from being there. General Henry Clinton (1730?-95) was ordered to abandon Philadelphia and retreat to New York. The British army left Philadelphia in June 1778, accompanied by some three thousand loyalists.

The British occupation and abandonment of Philadelphia also led to difficult choices for Black residents of the city, both free and enslaved. In 1777 and 1778, it was not clear whether an American or a British victory would be more likely to lead to freedom and greater rights. On the one hand, Quaker and abolitionist sentiment in Philadelphia had been growing in the decade before the war. As masters freed their slaves, the free Black population of the city grew. Slaves in Philadelphia might have hoped that an American victory would lead to yet more manumissions, or even the outlawing of slavery. During the war, thirty-five Black men served in the Second Pennsylvania Brigade of the Continental Army, and others served on American privateers. On the other hand, Black men and women in Philadelphia quickly learned of Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation (November 7, 1775) offering freedom to patriots’ slaves who joined the British forces. Although Dunmore was the royal governor of Virginia, news of his proclamation reached Philadelphia within a week. During the occupation, many Africans and African Americans seem to have decided that the British offered better prospects than the Americans, and served among them as soldiers, guides, and laborers. When the British evacuated, dozens of slaves fled with them.

The occupation of Philadelphia did little for the British war effort. The American government survived, as the Continental Congress fled the city. Washington’s army survived the harsh winter at Valley Forge. Relations between the British and Loyalists in Pennsylvania worsened. Worse, Howe had lost a vital opportunity. By failing to meet Burgoyne in New York, he had thrown away the best chance the British would have to conquer New England.

Martha K. Robinson is an Associate Professor of History at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include “New Worlds, New Medicines: Indian Remedies and English Medicine in Early America,” Early American Studies 3 (Spring 2005): 94-110. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In the earliest days of European settlement in the Delaware Valley, colonists formed militias of able-bodied men to guard their settlements against other imperial powers, Native Americans, and pirates. However, by the time of Pennsylvania’s colonial charter in 1681, militia practices ran counter to the pacifist tenets of the region’s Quaker leadership, and militias mostly disbanded. Neighboring New Jersey and the Lower Counties of Delaware, however, continued to maintain permanent volunteer militias to be at the ready in times of crisis. By the middle of the eighteenth century, noting Pennsylvania’s inability to protect itself, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) was instrumental in mobilizing Philadelphians to join “associated companies,” local voluntary defense groups. When the Revolutionary War broke out, Philadelphia’s associated companies and the Delaware Valley’s regional militias proved difficult to integrate into the Continental Army. In the first years of the war, state legislatures—including that of the formerly pacifist-minded Pennsylvania—passed legislation making militia service compulsory for all white men of fighting age, thereby streamlining military organization.

Like other states and cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Philadelphia region relied on local militias to preserve public safety during both peace and war. Often, the urgency of emergencies blurred the distinction between militia volunteers, police forces, and those enlisted or drafted into the armed services. As such, civil defense and active defense—or military defense—were often one in the same. In addition to participating in the Revolutionary War, Philadelphia-area militias played an integral role in smaller conflicts in the Early Republic, including the Whiskey Rebellion (1791-94), Fries’ Rebellion (1799-1800), the War of 1812, and the Nativist Riots in the Kensington and Southwark sections of Philadelphia (1844). However, in the relative peace of the antebellum years, militias also were important civic and social organizations, with individual companies frequently composed of men belonging to a particular trade, ethnicity, religion, or political party. Muster days—events held for roll-call and training—often included parades, games, and patriotic celebrations.

During the Civil War, Philadelphia became central to the Union’s production effort, but invasion threatened the city only briefly when the Confederate Army led by Robert E. Lee (1807-70) entered Pennsylvania in June 1863. Fearful that Lee would march to Philadelphia, volunteer groups rushed to construct physical barriers to defend the city. However, the works projects did not last long; the Union’s victory at Gettysburg ended the immediate threat to Philadelphia. Still, throughout the war, Philadelphian civic organizations such as the Union League called for participation in home guards and home defense groups as part of Philadelphians’ patriotic duty. Generally, these all-male brigades and regiments assumed similar functions to past militias. Women and families contributed to the war effort through charitable efforts, such as Philadelphia’s 1864 Sanitary Fair, or women’s auxiliaries.

Twentieth-Century Civilian Defense

The United States’ early twentieth-century conflicts placed the Delaware Valley in an integral position in war industry and national transportation networks. As the Philadelphia home front became deeply involved in both World Wars I and II, the changing nature of war made new demands on Philadelphia’s civilian defense. New military technologies from both wars, including airplanes, submarines, and missiles, expanded the reach of a potential enemy attack to include the American mainland, beyond the geographic boundaries that once offered Philadelphia protection during ground or naval war. As modern war increasingly threatened the homeland, many Philadelphians grew concerned that the region could be a target.

During World War I, some Philadelphian civilians joined anti-sabotage programs designed to maintain a watchful eye on suspicious activity, especially in military industrial plants. But civilian defense during the Great War was primarily a mobilization effort to support the military, including bond drives for Liberty Loans and draft rallies. Echoing Civil War home guards, citizens enlisted in organizations such as the Philadelphia Home Defense Reserve to assist local officials in the event of a home-front crisis. But the United States’ brief involvement in the war cut short the tenure of civilian defense activities, and most programs were dismantled shortly after the war concluded.

After the United States entered World War II, however, the region revived and strengthened many of its earlier civilian defense programs. While residents of the Delaware Valley once again participated in bond rallies, food rationing, and anti-sabotage campaigns, the preparations for an attack took on a more militarized focus. The Philadelphia city government, newspapers, and civic organizations printed millions of informational pamphlets that included air raid information, instructions for building shelters, and basic first aid techniques. Periodic blackout drills required residents to turn off outdoor lighting, cover building windows with dark curtains, and dim automobile lights in order to disguise the city from potential attacking aircraft. Citizens across the region learned to identify enemy planes, and along the region’s rivers and coastlines, residents volunteered to take shifts as submarine spotters.

Cold War Civil Defense

After the end of World War II, the region’s civilian defense underwent another transformation. Nuclear weapons, used by the United States against Japan at the end of the war and soon after acquired by the Soviet Union, presented a new threat to public safety. The power of nuclear weapons exceeded the destructive capabilities of earlier weapons of war by several orders of magnitude, endangering more civilians than ever before. Because of the Philadelphia area’s importance in industrial production, its critical transportation infrastructure, and its large metropolitan population, the region rushed to find ways to prepare and defend itself from attack. While postwar Americans looked to civilian defense methods from earlier eras, many saw activities such as victory gardens and bond rallies as anachronistic and ineffective for the Atomic Age. In Philadelphia and across the country, Cold War civilian defense became known as “civil defense” in part to distance new strategies from the legacy of outmoded programs.

As in many threatened American cities, Philadelphia’s leadership took an early active role in local civil defense planning. In 1951, Mayor Bernard Samuel (1880-1954) established the Philadelphia County Civil Defense Council, responsible for hosting educational programs and organizing a military-style chain of command to connect city residents with block wardens, neighborhood coordinators, city offices, and civil defense officials. Throughout the 1950s, the council ran citywide drills designed to give civilians an idea of the kind of destruction they could expect, and the actions they would need to take should a real attack occur. Notably, during 1954’s Operation SCRAM (Survival of our Citizens depends on Cooperation, Alertness, and Mobility), more than twenty-five thousand Philadelphians evacuated the blocks closest to City Hall to a muster point on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. With the assistance of federal civil defense funds, cities, counties, and states built a system of fallout shelters—identified by ubiquitous yellow and black signage—in many buildings, including Philadelphia’s City Hall and public schools.

One of the most challenging aspects of the Philadelphia area’s Cold War civil defense efforts, however, was the relationship between its cities and surrounding towns and counties. Should an attack occur, the entire Delaware Valley region would need to mobilize to deliver supplies and transport millions of evacuees. Successful civil defense plans thus relied on coordination between the cities of Philadelphia; Trenton and Camden, New Jersey; and Wilmington, Delaware, as well as hundreds of towns and several counties. Because every municipality had different civil defense needs, and every state had its own civil defense legislation, regional and interstate coordination was a logistical problem that officials never fully resolved.

In the end, Philadelphia’s Cold War-era civil defense fell victim to the changing city politics of the postwar period. The Civil Defense Council had difficulty defending its budget and usefulness to reform Democrats, especially as nuclear weapons technology advanced well beyond the capacity of civil defense strategies. Moreover, civil defense was a hard sell to Philadelphians, who balked at rehearsing for such catastrophic war in a time of peace. By the late 1960s, facing significant public apathy and ridicule from critics, the region’s civil defense activities had declined drastically and emergency planning energy was redirected toward preparation for peacetime crises. In 1972, Philadelphia’s Civil Defense Council merged with the Fire Department to become the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP). The OEP relied on regional volunteers and local relief organizations during extreme weather, industrial accidents, and other disasters to assist in preparation and recovery efforts.

Throughout its history, Greater Philadelphia has relied upon its citizens to help keep the region safe. Whether compulsory or voluntary, popular or unpopular, civil defense has shaped the region’s politics and culture. Although the nature of crises and war has changed significantly since the seventeenth century, civil defense has remained a consistent part of civic life in the Philadelphia area.

Sarah Robey is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Temple University, where she studies American nuclear culture. She has been a fellow at the Philadelphia History Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the National Air and Space Museum. (Author information current at time of publication.)

During the 1850s, expansion of slavery into western territories polarized the North and South, and southerners’ demands for the return of fugitive slaves and silencing of antislavery critics became increasingly intolerable in the North. Philadelphia and regional newspapers amply reported and stirred public comment and conflict about events such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the ensuing conflict over slavery in Kansas, which led to bloodshed as pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces fought a preview of the war that lay ahead. Further controversies arose over the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857, the fracturing of the Democratic Party over the slavery issues, and the failed but far-reaching attempt by John Brown (1800-59) to foment an uprising of enslaved people in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859.

Pro-southern sentiment ran strong in Philadelphia and the surrounding region. Economic ties with the South ran deep, especially in the textile, lumber, and coal industries, but also in education, banking, and marketing services. Some prominent families in the region owned plantations and many enslaved people, especially in Atlantic Seaboard states. Anti-Black and anti-abolitionist feelings also ran high. As a result, the increasingly pro-southern Democratic Party dominated not only Philadelphia but also New Jersey and Delaware. Although the newly emerging antislavery Republican Party (known in Pennsylvania as the People’s Party) gained supporters by the late 1850s, in the region it emphasized higher tariffs and a moderate position of opposing further extension of slavery into the western territories. Local Republicans played down any ties to abolitionists who insisted on the immediate, universal, and uncompensated end to slavery and the embrace of Black people as citizens.

A Magnet for Freedom Seekers

The John Brown raid and his execution by Virginia authorities, which northern abolitionists and others likened to martyrdom, inflamed tensions in Philadelphia. Editorials in Democratic, pro-southern newspapers lashed out at abolitionists as revolutionaries bent on racial violence, lawlessness, and even disunion. They equated abolition with the Republican Party, asserting that it aimed to promote equality between white and Black people. Philadelphia’s growing African American population and proximity to slave states made it a magnet for enslaved persons fleeing bondage. The increasingly effective work of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, vigilance committees, and the Underground Railroad network brought many freedom seekers into the city, further heightening tensions between abolitionists, African Americans, and Republicans on one side, and pro-southern supporters and Democrats on the other.

The sectional crisis came to a head in the election of 1860. “Fire-eating” southerners threatened to leave the Union if the Republicans won the presidency. But the Democratic Party had split into southern and northern wings, each nominating its own candidate for the presidency. Most northern Democrats threw their support behind Stephen A. Douglas (1813-61), and southern Democrats, along with many Philadelphians, supported Vice President John C. Breckinridge (1821-75). Complicating this already muddled field was the emergence of the Constitutional Union Party, a new third party committed to avoiding the slavery issue, which drew away votes from Democratic candidates. The Republicans offered a seemingly moderate ticket with Abraham Lincoln (1809-65)—the “rail splitter” from Illinois—at its head. To win the 1860 presidential election, Republicans needed only to hold onto the northern states they had won in 1856 and win Pennsylvania and either Illinois or Indiana. With fierce electioneering, the Republicans carried Pennsylvania. Douglas fared poorly, although he did win electors in New Jersey.

Following the Republican victory, seven southern states seceded, and efforts to bring them back during the “secession winter” from December 1860 to February 1861 failed, despite persistent efforts by prominent Philadelphia newspapers to rally support for compromise. As the Confederacy formed in the South, on February 21, 1861, president-elect Lincoln came to Philadelphia enroute to his inauguration and gave a powerful speech outside Independence Hall on the necessity of Union. His speech anticipated his inaugural address in Washington as he promised a firm hand to save the Union but an open hand to southerners that his administration would not disturb lawful existing institutions (meaning slavery). 

After Fort Sumter, Pro-Union Stance Solidifies

The new Confederacy’s attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12-13, 1861, immediately changed the attitude of people in the Philadelphia region from conciliation to defense of the Union. It also led four more southern states to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy. On April 15, Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers for ninety days to put down the rebellion.

In Philadelphia those who had voiced support for the South now kept a low profile. Most pro-southern newspapers fell silent. Those that did not, such as the Palmetto Flag, came under threat of attack by enraged citizens. Philadelphia Mayor Alexander Henry (1823-83) readied police to oppose violence against persons or property. Throughout the war, he sought to maintain order through police presence whenever rumors of trouble loomed.

Philadelphia woefully lacked military preparedness when the war began. The initial rush of local volunteers, however, amply filled the quotas established by the federal government. Enlistees came from a variety of ethnic and social backgrounds. Most units, including thousand-man regiments, were formed by prominent citizens who recruited from their neighborhoods and towns or appealed to common ethnic ties. During the war nearly fifty infantry and cavalry regiments were recruited in the Philadelphia area, forty in New Jersey, and eleven in Delaware.

Many of the Philadelphia-area regiments—infantry, cavalry, and artillery—distinguished themselves during the war, and successful officers parlayed their military exploits and reputations into political careers. Philadelphia and its surrounding counties provided more than 100,000 men for the Union army: the city of Philadelphia (93,300), Bucks County (3,300), Montgomery County (3,900), Chester County (4,800), and Delaware County (1,900). New Jersey sent close to 80,000 men, and Delaware sent more than 12,000, most recruited from New Castle County.

Philadelphia played a major role in mobilizing for the war and providing relief for soldiers and their families. Drawing on their experience in social reform and charitable efforts, faith-based and other private organizations offered aid and comfort to soldiers and widows and orphans of soldiers. Among them, the nationally organized United States Sanitary Commission and the United States Christian Commission were the most prominent. Many northern cities organized fairs to fund these organizations by selling products, art, memorabilia, and other objects and charging admission. The largest such fair, held in Philadelphia’s Logan Square, June 7-28, 1864, was supported by the governors of the three contiguous states. Contributions by businesses, industries, and private citizens raised over $1 million in support of the Sanitary Commission.

Early Hopes for a Short Conflict Fade

In the wake of the Battle of First Bull Run (First Manassas) in July 1861, Philadelphians and their neighbors began to understand that the conflict would be long and potentially devastating. This realization, coupled with a series of morale-sapping setbacks in the eastern theater of military operations and mounting Union casualties, spurred open opposition to the war by southern sympathizers. Democratic newspapers pointed to the Lincoln administration’s inability to defeat the Confederate armies and condemned wartime measures such as the suspension of habeas corpus in many northern cites as examples of “tyranny.” The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation issued by Lincoln in September 1862 stirred further opposition to the war by peace Democrats in the region. Cries of Black-over-white and tyranny heightened with Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and the call for African Americans to be recruited into the army. These reactions did not drown out jubilation by the Black population and other abolitionists, but anti-Lincoln sentiment deepened with the Enrollment Act of March 1863, which called for all able-bodied men, aged twenty to forty-five,  to register for the draft. Many men in the region sought to evade conscription by paying a commutation fee of $300 or hiring substitutes. Conscription led to protests, defiance, and even violence in parts of Pennsylvania, especially in the anthracite coal region, but it helped to fill the ranks. Philadelphia escaped the protests and violent resistance that marked opposition to the draft elsewhere due to the presence of federal troops and the firm hand of the mayor enforcing law and order.

Needing manpower, the Lincoln administration sought to enlist Black troops. The president had been authorized to recruit African Americans as early as 1862, but he held off doing so for political reasons. Many white Americans believed recruiting Black soldiers was long overdue, for reasons of justice but especially to fill the ranks. Others held that Black men would make poor soldiers and would run away at the first shots of battle. Then, too, arming African Americans had the potential of making them equal to white men. When Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware initially balked at accepting Black recruits, many Black men from the region joined the few state-level Black regiments in service such as the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry (commanded, as was every other Black outfit, by white officers). Despite the army’s efforts to limit their role in combat and often to confine them to fatigue or guard duty, Black soldiers from the Philadelphia area performed admirably during the war, and from that service called for the rights and respect due them as citizens. In Philadelphia, for example, Black soldiers and local Black women, angry over the inconvenience and disrespect of segregated public transportation there, pushed to end discrimination on the rails. After the war Black churches, veterans’ organizations, and social clubs played major roles in setting up and staffing schools for the “freedpeople” in the South, attacking racial discrimination in public services, and lobbying for the vote.

The reemergence of resistance to the Lincoln administration appalled Republicans in Philadelphia, most of whom viewed opposition to the war and calls for a negotiated peace as treason. To meet the threat of the “Copperheads,” as Republicans labeled northern opponents of the war, a group of prominent Philadelphians in November 1862 established the Union League to counter the Peace Democrats and reenergize support for the war. As one of its first acts, the league created a military committee to help recruit, organize, and equip regiments for the Union Army, including United States Colored Troops. The league also published tracts, posters, broadsides, and other printed materials and raised money to support the war effort, the Lincoln administration, and Republican policies during and after the war. The league’s example encouraged hundreds of such organizations to form across the North.

Philadelphia and the surrounding region supported the Union war effort in a variety of ways. The Frankford Arsenal supplied munitions; the Navy Yard built and repaired warships; and the DuPont Company in Delaware produced up to 40 percent of the black powder used by the Union army. The government also set up several military training camps in and around Philadelphia; the largest of which was Camp Cadwalader. And Philadelphia served as the northern station for receiving ships and contraband cargo seized in the blockade of the Confederacy. As the major railroad hub in the Mid-Atlantic region, Philadelphia maintained and supplied rail transport for soldiers and materiel; indeed, most Union soldiers from northern states east of the Appalachians who served in the eastern theater of the war passed through Philadelphia. This made the Philadelphia area a prime location also for wartime hospitals and refreshment stations.

New Efforts to Fund the War

Philadelphia also figured prominently in funding the war. Desperate to raise funds through bond sales, the Lincoln administration engaged Philadelphia financier Jay Cooke (1821-1905) to organize a major bond drive, which succeeded by pitching the purchase of the bonds not only to businesses but also to citizens as an investment in the nation. The mobilization of Philadelphia resources fostered a growing sense of national pride, purpose, and Philadelphia’s importance to the nation, which Republicans used to move the city firmly into its camp.

Wartime mobilization created jobs for men and women in the area’s many war-related industries. Men found jobs in manufacturing and services. Women often took over businesses and farms when their men went off to war, or they worked for pay as seamstresses making uniforms, clerks in government offices, and doing various tasks in munitions factories. Because of wartime inflation, workers’ pay did not keep up with the price of consumer goods, which led to workers protesting for more pay and better working conditions, although with mixed results.

The war came to Pennsylvania in June 1863 when Robert E. Lee’s (1807-70) Army of Northern Virginia launched its northern campaign in hopes of defeating the Union Army on northern soil and dispiriting support for the Union. In Philadelphia fears of Lee’s army marching into the city led to panicky calls for militia and the digging of defenses. The anxiety subsided when the Army of the Potomac, commanded by native Philadelphian Major General George Gordon Meade (1815-72), defeated Lee’s army at Gettysburg (July 1-3). This victory, coupled with Major General Ulysses S. Grant’s (1822-85) capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi (July 4), led many to believe the war would end soon, but the worst of the fighting came the following year. In spring of 1864 Grant assumed command of all the Union armies, and Union armies hammered relentlessly at the Confederates on multiple fronts. General William T. Sherman’s (1820-91) army march through Georgia in late 1864 and the Carolinas in early 1865 helped secure Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 and raised Republican fortunes in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. The following year, Grant’s armies forced Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, and on April 26 Sherman received the surrender of General Joseph E. Johnston’s (1807-91) Army of Tennessee, effectively ending the military war in the East. In the western theater the last Confederate army surrendered in late May 1865.

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, cut short the victory celebrations. Philadelphia and the surrounding region, like the entire the North, entered a period of mourning for the president, whose death soon became likened to martyrdom. The funeral train bearing the president’s body arrived in Philadelphia on April 22 enroute to its final resting-place in Springfield, Illinois. While Lincoln lay in state at Independence Hall, an estimated three hundred thousand mourners, who formed a line three miles long, waited up to five hours to pay their respects.

Adjusting to the War’s End

Although combat ceased with Union victory in 1865, the emotions it engendered continued as returning soldiers and their families and communities adjusted to resettling their lives, caring for the wounded, and remembering their service. The war also led to major efforts to define civil rights, not only for the newly freed people in the South but also for Black people in the North.  Such efforts renewed political and social conflict in Philadelphia and its environs. An influx of Black migrants into the area heightened racial tensions, while competition for jobs and controversy over the Radical Republican program of Reconstruction led to violence.

After the war, Republicans tried to consolidate their wartime gains by continuing to promote business, financial reforms, tariffs, and other economic measures, and especially by seeking to secure basic civil rights for “freedmen” in the South and an orderly return of the former Confederate states to the Union. Trading on the memory of the martyred Lincoln, the Union victory, and the supposed “betrayal” of Democrats in their lack of full support for the war effort, and pointing to their economic policies, Republicans emerged as the dominant party in the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania and remained so well into the twentieth century. Democrats fared better in South Jersey and Delaware, where opposition to Reconstruction, especially resisting expansion of civil rights to Black people, played well in public and at the polls.

Remembering the war became an important part of adjusting to the postwar world. (Thousands of area soldiers died during the war, from disease to battlefield wounds, but no official count of casualties by county exists to know the exact numbers from the Greater Philadelphia area.)  Cemeteries filled with Union soldiers marking their service. The national dedication of the Union cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November 1863, during which Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address, was part of a sustained national effort to memorialize the service of the soldiers. Local governments, church groups, ethnic associations, and other organizations put up statues, monuments, and memorials across the region. Philadelphia, for example, exalted its military leaders with statues of Pennsylvania native sons George B. McClellan (1826-85) and John Reynolds (1820-63) mounted on horses dominating the public square around City Hall and George Gordon Meade at the entrance to Laurel Hill Cemetery, where many Civil War veterans were buried. By some accounts, the Philadelphia region built more Civil War monuments and memorials than anywhere else in the North.

Tributes and Veterans Organizations Grow

Veterans also organized to lobby for pensions as well as public recognition. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), established in 1866, became the nation’s most powerful veterans’ organization, wielding a political influence through the end of the century. At one time the GAR had fifty-six posts in the Philadelphia area and twenty-eight in South Jersey and twenty-nine in Delaware. Members had to have been honorably discharged from the U.S. Army, Navy, or Marine Corps; all were considered equal in the post hall, whether general officer or private soldier, including African American veterans. The organization advocated voting rights for Black veterans as well as patriotic education for schools. It helped found Decoration Day (later, Memorial Day), gained generous pensions for veterans, and staunchly supported the Republican Party. The first local Memorial Day ceremonies were held on May 30, 1868, in Doylestown, Bucks County, and at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, hosted by General George G. Meade Post #1 of the GAR. By 1890, the GAR’s national membership exceeded four hundred thousand. Although its last surviving member died in 1956, the organization’s mission continued into the twenty-first century through the efforts of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. Its museum and library in Philadelphia collected wartime memorabilia, printed material, military gear and uniforms, and more.

The Philadelphia region played a major role in mobilizing men and resources that brought Union victory in the Civil War and raised questions about the meaning of emancipation and freedom after it. Working in relief organizations encouraged women to push for political rights and larger roles in civic affairs. Some industries that scaled up demand to meet wartime needs continued to prosper, and improvements in chemistry, medicine, and engineering developed in Philadelphia during the war yielded postwar benefits. Philadelphia-area ties to the South continued after the war, with many women serving in freedmen’s schools set up by churches and philanthropic organizations and with renewed commercial connections, but Philadelphia was no longer a southern city. Its schools no longer enrolled many, or sometimes any, southerners, and its first families no longer enslaved people in southern places. The war consolidated Republican Party dominance in the region, and in Pennsylvania generally, though it did not weaken the Democrats altogether as their successes in local elections in the 1870s and after attested. The wartime generation also refused to forget the war or let those after them forget, as evinced in the monuments they constructed, the cemeteries they established, and the annual public invocations of soldierly valor and memory they celebrated.

Theodore Zeman, who earned his Ph.D. in history studying under Russell Weigley at Temple University, is Adjunct Professor of History at Saint Joseph’s University and at Penn State University Abington and the author of various studies of the Civil War era. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The creation of a Civil War museum in Philadelphia originated with the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS), a fraternal association for veteran officers of the Civil War founded in 1865 at the Union League in Philadelphia. The group formed in the wake of the assassination of Lincoln amid fear of a continuation of the Civil War, but when that fear subsided, commemoration became central to the association’s mission. The chartering of the War Library and Museum in 1888 reflected new efforts at remembrance that occurred in part because veterans were aging, but also because in the wake of Reconstruction, the Civil War seemed resolved and so it began to fade from current events into history.

Members of MOLLUS, including John Page Nicholson (1842-1922), who had taken control and revived the organization a decade earlier, chartered the War Library and Museum to collect, preserve, and maintain books and artifacts—“implements, relics, and muniments of war”—pertaining to the “War of the Rebellion.” The library and museum reflected a larger interest in documenting the memories of aging US Army and Navy veterans so as to capture history before it was lost. The urge to collect artifacts from veterans and to write and publish their recollections was also part of a contest over who would get to write the history of the Civil War.

Donations From Veterans

Collections grew throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, primarily from the donations of veterans and MOLLUS members, but the early history of the War Library and Museum revolved mostly around finding a home for itself. The State of Pennsylvania offered $50,000 for construction of a building if MOLLUS could raise $100,000 more. Throughout the 1890s, the group wrote appeals, pursued various locations, and drew up designs for a grand structure that would house offices, banquet halls, and the library and museum. The veterans envisioned a repository of history and material objects, but also a space where they could socialize and reminisce.

At different times, MOLLUS pursued homes in council chambers at Independence Hall, in properties near City Hall, and in a building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, but none of these proved feasible. In 1907, the organization rented rooms in the Flanders Building at Fifteenth and Walnut Streets, and in 1922 it made a permanent home in a townhouse at 1805 Pine Street. The selection of a more modest home was a disappointment, but it enabled building funds to sustain the institution as an endowment for much of the twentieth century.

At the Flanders Building, for the first time, exhibits showcased the collections publicly. The displays included the Tiffany sword and scabbard that General Ulysses S. Grant received after the battle at Vicksburg, a uniform worn by General George Meade (1815-72) at Gettysburg, and casts of Lincoln’s face and hands made by sculptor Leonard Wells Volk (1828-95) just before the war broke out. Visitors could also see the cane Lincoln carried into Ford’s Theater, a tree trunk hit by a cannon ball at Gettysburg, a recruitment drum played outside enlistment headquarters in Philadelphia in 1861, and the paisley smoking jacket worn by Jefferson Davis when he was captured by Union soldiers in 1865.

Ephemeral items and other personal relics donated by Union veterans contrasted strikingly with other Civil War commemorations in Philadelphia at the time, including the equestrian statues of Meade and General John Reynolds (1820-63) and the Smith Memorial Arch in Fairmount Park. While Nicholson and MOLLUS wanted the library and museum to be similarly monumental, the museum’s collection was a mixture of official military history documented by the uniforms and firearms of commanding officers and a more subtle memory of the Civil War driven by everyday artifacts donated by individuals (albeit mostly officers) that revealed alternative, more personal histories. General Lewis Merrill (1834-96), a member of the museum’s Board of Governors, explained that an institution like theirs “will be a more lasting monument than any one that is built of stone or metal, and will be more influential in telling the truth of history and doing justice to its defender.”

From Private to Public

Debates arose in the 1920s over whether the collection needed to be better interpreted now that veterans (who could recall their own experiences) were dying and MOLLUS membership was passing to descendants, but a catalog to guide visits never emerged. In the members-only museum, the artifacts were largely left to speak for themselves and the library and archives, while available for use, were only partially cataloged or cared for.

MOLLUS remained involved with the museum until the 1970s, when the organization and the museum separated so that each could dedicate more resources to its narrower mission. In 1976, coinciding with the Bicentennial, the museum opened to the public on a day-to-day basis, and in the 1980s special exhibits began to interpret more diverse histories—including those of women or African Americans or even the rebel states—in  addition to the other long-standing displays of the collections.

By the early 2000s, a dwindling endowment and declining visitation threatened the sustainability of the museum. Legal proceedings against former curator Russell Pritchard Jr. (b. 1940) and his son for fraud and theft from a variety of Civil War institutions, including the Civil War Museum of Philadelphia, provided further evidence of the museum’s longtime mismanagement. One proposed solution to address the state of the museum would have loaned part of the collection to a planned Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. The backlash in Philadelphia against that idea resulted in a proposal to create a Center for Civil War Studies based at the Union League that would have included partners like the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, and the Philadelphia Historical and Museum Commission. The desire, beyond creating an exceptional network of research collections, was to make Philadelphia a destination not just for Revolutionary War tourism, but also for tourism around nineteenth-century history and the Civil War. Plans for such a consortium never came to fruition, nor did another plan for the museum to occupy Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park. Continuing the disappointments, in 2002 the State of Pennsylvania pledged $15 million toward a new facility but retracted the funds in 2009 during the recession.

A Dual Emphasis Emerges

While the quest for a new home signaled a desire for a more professional, authoritative institution, appreciation also remained for the small, quirky museum on Pine Street that displayed, among other things, the preserved head of Old Baldy, General Meade’s horse. However, rather than develop either of these identities, in 2003 the institution reemerged as the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum with a new dual emphasis that reflected trends toward more inclusive histories of the Civil War era. With a limited collection of African American materials, the museum turned to living history with actors portraying historical figures including Harriet Tubman (c. 1822-1913) and Absalom Jones (1746-1818). New outreach resulted in a 2006 program called “Faith and Freedom,” co-produced with Black churches. One program featured an actor portraying Jones giving his “Thanksgiving Sermon” at the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas.

In 2004, a grant from the William Penn Foundation enabled the first complete inventory of the collection, which revealed objects previously unknown to the museum or the nation. In addition to the already celebrated items from well-known figures, the inventory uncovered items like a pocket watch belonging to Brevet Capt. John O. Foering (1843-1933) that was dented by a bullet; a jar of peaches from an orchard on the battlefield of Winchester, Virginia; the tombstone of John Butcher (1845-99), a veteran of the United States Colored Troops; and an 1872 first edition of The Underground Railroad by William Still (1821-1902).

However, none of these developments could save the museum, which closed in 2008. An effort to work with the National Park Service to renovate the Second Bank in Old City to yield a usable space also failed, and ultimately in 2016 the artifact collections transferred to the Gettysburg Foundation—the private, nonprofit partner of Gettysburg National Military Park—with the promise that the National Constitution Center would still display some of the artifacts in Philadelphia. The museum retained the two-dimensional materials, including paintings, lithographs, and books that went on loan to the Union League and remained available to researchers there. Other artifacts—including the head of Old Baldy, which had been on loan from the Grand Army of the Republic Museum in Frankford—returned to the GAR Museum, which sustained Civil War memory in Philadelphia, although on a smaller scale.

In 2019, the National Constitution Center opened the exhibit “Civil War and Reconstruction: The Battle for Freedom and Equality,” which used Civil War Museum artifacts in an expansive history that explored the context, causes, and consequences of the Civil War. Extending to histories of injustice and violence, the exhibit encompassed causes like slavery and racism and consequences like the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution and their simultaneous importance and impotence in the face of Jim Crow segregation. At the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum, meanwhile, artifacts from the Philadelphia museum illustrated the story of the Civil War from the perspectives of both the United States and the states that seceded. While the objects added authenticity in service of each institution’s interpretive goals, the new installations also demonstrated the contrast between the polished Civil War tourism of the twenty-first century and the earlier museum’s role as a nineteenth-century reliquary and evocative home for family legacies.

Ultimately, the Civil War Museum faced several hurdles that it could not overcome. By the late twentieth century, Philadelphia museums—especially small, lesser-known museums—were suffering financially. The Civil War Museum’s location was also challenging because Philadelphia never successfully cultivated a Civil War identity or Civil War tourism despite deep connections to that history. However, if, as a fundraising appeal from 1891 argued, the museum was meant to commemorate those “who gave their lives to the war which restored the Union and maintained the Constitution,” then the collections found a fitting final resting place at the National Constitution Center in an exhibit about the simultaneous successes and failures of that document and a more critical memory of the Civil War for a new generation.

Mabel Rosenheck is a writer, lecturer, and historian in Philadelphia. She works in the museum of the Wagner Free Institute of Science and teaches at Temple University in addition to freelance writing and research. She received her Ph.D. in Media and Cultural Studies from Northwestern University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Cold War emerged after World War II when the United States and the Soviet Union—wartime allies against Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy—reverted to their prewar ideological rivalry between U.S. promotion of capitalism and Soviet support for Communist revolutions. As early as 1946, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) described the postwar divide in Europe as an Iron Curtain. In 1961 the East German government constructed the Berlin Wall, physically dividing the city and symbolic of Cold War tension. While the Soviet Union and the United States avoided direct military conflict, each became involved in proxy wars around the world, most notably in Korea (1950-53), Vietnam (1950-75), and Afghanistan (1979-89). Each nation worked to expand its international influence in a conflict carried out through propaganda, espionage, domestic surveillance, soft power (economic and cultural), the space race, and the threat of atomic weaponry. While Cold War tensions eased during the 1970s, a period characterized by détente (thawing), they resumed following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

Into the Postwar World

At the end of World War II, Philadelphia stood as America’s third largest city. Optimism ran high amid military demobilization and the lapsing of wartime rationing and restrictions. A building boom took place, and rows of small houses and garden apartments appeared in the city’s sections of East Germantown, West Oak Lane, and the Northeast. Philadelphia’s colleges and universities grew markedly in enrollment due to the educational opportunities made possible for veterans under the G.I. Bill.

At the same time, however, apprehension grew over the detrimental impact of the sudden peace on local defense operations and industry. These fears quickly became realized at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, where fifty-eight ships were deactivated by the middle of 1946. The Navy Yard laid off thousands of civilian workers and cut naval personnel from 345 officers and 639 WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in 1945 to 82 officers and 172 WAVES in 1949. To assist laid-off workers in finding employment, the Navy Yard established a Reduction-in-Force Unit in its Industrial Relations Division.

Postwar cuts generated constant fear of base and shipyard closure. In 1949, the Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) presidential administration laid off more than four thousand government employees at the Frankford Arsenal, Marine Corps Supply Depot, Naval Home, Quartermaster General Depot, and Signal Corps Stock Control Office, reducing the federal payroll in Philadelphia by $13 million. It further closed the Atlantic City Naval Air Station at Pomona, New Jersey, and announced plans to reduce the authorized number of personnel at the Navy Yard from nine thousand to seven thousand.

In addition to the military cutbacks, the spectre of communism provoked anxiety as political leaders, the media, and others warned of domestic threats. The Communist Party already had a strong presence in the region. Its membership of nearly one hundred thousand individuals by the late 1940s owed to both the economic toll of the Great Depression and the U.S.-Soviet alliance during World War II. During the postwar period, Communists built on existing racial tensions to recruit African Americans. The party’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, regularly reported instances of police brutality and frame-ups directed against African Americans in Philadelphia. Thomas Nabried (1900-65), the party’s city chair (1942-45) and then district chair for eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware, worked to organize fellow African Americans in the city and throughout Bucks County. By the 1950s, African Americans came to constitute more than one-sixth of the party’s membership. The party’s strength, however, proved short lived, as it failed to withstand the anti-communist mood of the 1950s and ceased to operate as an effective political force.

Veterans organizations emerged early as forceful proponents of anticommunism. The Catholic War Veterans, for example, organized mass demonstrations in Philadelphia in December 1946 to protest the repression of the Catholic Church in communist Eastern Europe. The Pennsylvania American Legion expressed support for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the McCarran Act, a 1950 federal law that called for the registration of “subversives.” Veterans groups sponsored patriotic celebrations such as Loyalty Day, designated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) in 1958 and held annually on or near May 1.

Patriotic activities to celebrate the United States, including the role Philadelphia played in its founding, accompanied anticommunist initiatives throughout the Cold War. Religious leaders played an important role. Vito Mazzone (1903-85), pastor of St. Mary Magdalene de Pazzi at 712 Montrose Street in South Philadelphia, encouraged active patriotism among his parishioners. “Christian patriotism” was the message of evangelist Billy Graham (b. 1918), who attracted a crowd of nearly seven hundred thousand to his Philadelphia crusade in 1961. Philadelphia served as the point of departure for the Freedom Train, which carried an exhibit of the nation’s founding documents around the country between 1947 and 1949. The era’s heightened patriotism also brought increasing numbers of tourists to see Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, which became the centerpieces of Independence National Historical Park, authorized by Congress in 1948.

Military Revitalization and Nuclear Threats

The Cold War suddenly turned hot in June 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea. This followed the Soviet Union’s first explosion of an atomic bomb and the creation of the Communist Peoples Republic of China. The Philadelphia region felt the impact as jobs returned to the Naval Yard. At the height of the American-led United Nations “police action” in Korea at the end of 1951, 14,750 went to work for the Navy in the shipyard. A new Radiological Decontamination Training Facility opened in Building 681 and distributed manuals for ship decontamination in the event of an air burst of atomic bombs.

The fear of nuclear attack remained paramount. In 1952, Pennsylvania’s Civil Air Patrol dropped leaflets in Bucks and Chester Counties that warned of potential bombs. By the 1950s, the Philadelphia District of the Corps of Engineers supervised construction of twelve NIKE/AJAX surface-to-air missile sites averaging twenty-five miles from Center City. Regular Army and Pennsylvania National Guard manned the batteries with command and control functions located at a facility in Pedricktown, Salem County, New Jersey. Missile sites in New Jersey protected the New York area in the north and the Philadelphia area in the south.

As nuclear espionage dominated national news, in May 1950 authorities arrested a South Philadelphia man, Harry Gold (1910-72), on espionage charges. A South Philadelphia High School graduate, Gold had studied chemical engineering at Drexel Institute and by the 1930s had begun to provide the Soviets with documents about industrial solvents and manufacturing processes from the Pennsylvania Sugar Company, the Fishtown refinery where he worked. At that time one of the largest sugar refineries in the world, Pennsylvania Sugar had subsidiaries that produced everything from Quaker brand antifreeze to solvents, lacquers, and rum.

Following his arrest, Gold confessed to acting as a courier to pass information for the Soviets about the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb, to atomic spy Klaus Fuchs (1911-88). This led to the arrest of David Greenglass (1922-2014), a Manhattan Project machinist whose testimony resulted in the espionage arrest, trial and execution of Greenglass’s sister Ethel Rosenberg (1915-53) and her husband, Julius (1918-53). Gold served fifteen years of the thirty-year sentence he received before his parole from the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in May 1966.

Reflecting continuing anxiety about Communist activity within the United States, organizers of Pennsylvania Week activities in 1951 chose “Defense” as their theme. Philadelphia’s Civil Defense Council, citing a shipment of purported sabotage manuals allegedly unloaded from a ship at the Philadelphia docks, warned of the need to detect subversive threats. The region’s desire to expose potential communist subversives manifested in the adoption of statewide loyalty oaths in Pennsylvania (1951) and New Jersey (1949). Delaware remained one of only seven states to resist adopting such legislation. Locally, meanwhile, in 1955 the Philadelphia School District dismissed twenty-six teachers for refusing to answer questions about Communist affiliations on the basis of their rights under the Fifth Amendment. In the suburbs, the Bucks County Bar rejected an applicant based on his association with a Marxist fellow student at the Pennsylvania State University. An appeal eventually overturned the decision.

The Cold War elevated the importance of universities to national security. As centers of scientific production, the federal government provided campuses with unprecedented funding. Philadelphia’s campuses benefited from the Section 112 program, a 1959 revision to the Housing Act that responded to the Soviet Union’s launch of its satellite Sputnik two years before. This enabled urban universities in selected cities, including Philadelphia, to undertake massive expansion projects at little or no cost to the universities.

Because of their perceived importance and the federal dollars they received, universities came under the scrutiny of authorities early and often. Barrows Dunham (1905-95), professor of philosophy and department head at Temple University, attracted interest from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) because of his former membership in the Communist Party. Subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. House Un-American Affairs Committee in October 1952, Dunham ultimately sought protection under the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions. Cited for standing in contempt of Congress in May 1954, Dunham secured an acquittal a year later. Temple officials dismissed Dunham and continued to cooperate with the FBI. In July 1981 Temple’s trustees acknowledged Dunham’s dismissal as an error and reinstated him as professor emeritus entitled to a lifetime pension.

The Cold War further revitalized the Philadelphia Naval Yard during the Vietnam War, when the facility entered its most active period of operations and highest level of employment since World War II. Its annual payroll reached nearly $90 million. Activity diminished after Vietnam, but the Naval Base remained vital to national defense throughout the Cold War. Most notably, the Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) presidential administration awarded Philadelphia $500 million to fulfill the first Carrier Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) contract for the 60,000-ton attack carrier Saratoga. Continued SLEP contracts employed thousands of Delaware Valley residents and brought hundreds of millions of dollars to the region over the next twenty years.

The Cold War’s costs included the men and women overseas to serve in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Draftees and volunteers from across the northeastern United States reported to Fort Dix in New Jersey for basic training. Many did not return. The Korean War exacted a human toll of over six hundred dead from Philadelphia and its surrounding counties. Forty-three from Delaware died in Korea while nearly eight hundred from New Jersey lost their lives. The war in Vietnam proved even more costly, as 646 Philadelphians, 122 service people from Delaware, and 1,500 from New Jersey never returned from Vietnam.

These costs rendered the Vietnam War increasingly divisive at home. The conflict shattered the Cold War consensus as supporters and protestors demonstrated on college campuses and sought claim to Philadelphia’s symbols of America’s democracy, including the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. Following two years of acrimony on its campus, the University of Pennsylvania terminated its chemical and biological warfare contracts with the Pentagon.

Crossing the Divide

The accelerated globalization that accompanied the Cold War brought issues of national security to doorsteps across the nation. For those in the Philadelphia region, as for others across the United States, this rendered a renewed focus on home and family life that increasingly transpired in the suburbs. At the same time, Philadelphia became more connected to the world. In 1945, the United States Air Force returned Philadelphia Municipal Airport to civil control after using it as an airfield during World War II. It became Philadelphia International Airport later that year when American Overseas Airlines began direct flights to Europe. This coincided with the city proposing that Philadelphia become the permanent home for the newly established United Nations, offering a ten-square-mile site on Belmont Plateau but losing the bid to New York.

While often engulfed in Cold War tensions, Philadelphians also sought ways to alleviate them. In 1958, the Philadelphia Orchestra departed for its first tour of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1973, the orchestra embarked on another first, a trip to the Peoples Republic of China that preceded the existence of an American embassy in Beijing. This type of exchange also extended to sport. In July 1959, Philadelphia hosted the first in a series of track meets between American and Soviet athletes at the University of Pennsylvania’s Franklin Field. While Soviet athletes largely prevailed over their American counterparts, almost twenty years later the defending Stanley Cup champion Philadelphia Flyers scored a convincing 4-1 victory over Moscow’s Central Hockey Club at the Spectrum on January 11, 1976.

The region also offered the site for the 1967 summit meeting between President Johnson and Soviet Premier Kosygin. The two met June 23-24 at Hollybush Mansion, the residence of Glassboro State College (Rowan University) President Thomas E. Robinson (1905-92). The choice of site, with only two day’s notice, derived from a disagreement about whether the meeting should take place in Washington or in New York, where Kosygin was attending an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting to discuss the recently concluded Six Day War.

Both sides agreed on Glassboro, located exactly at the midpoint between New York and Washington. Johnson considered the site ideal for its relatively rural location, removed from the growing protests on Philadelphia’s campuses against the Vietnam War. The summit failed to produce any agreements, notably on the limitation of anti-ballistic missile systems. Limited headway made by the two leaders on the terms of a nonproliferation treaty failed to result in the issuing of any communique, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 delayed further serious discussion between American and Soviet officials until 1972. However, the Glassboro meeting’s spontaneity and its spirit of cooperation resonated widely at the time. This helped pave the way for a period of thawed relations between the Cold War adversaries referred to as détente.

Philadelphia continued to serve as an important site for the nation’s expression of patriotism. As the Cold War varied in intensity, the city hosted America’s Bicentennial celebration in 1976 and the bicentennial anniversary of the Constitution in 1987. It also rewarded the pursuit of freedom globally, awarding the inaugural Liberty Medal in 1989 to Lech Walesa (b. 1943) of Poland, the leader of Solidarity, the Soviet bloc’s first independent trade union.

The Cold War concluded in 1991 with the internal collapse of the Soviet Union. The tensions of the era served to revitalize the military establishment in Greater Philadelphia, injecting the economy with money and jobs. The cost, however, included an anticommunist hysteria that occurred throughout the nation. Thousands of area residents lost their lives in Cold War-era military conflicts. While the region contributed markedly to the nation’s defense, through its missile defense initiative and operations at the Philadelphia Naval Yard, its sacrifices proved more substantial.

Robert J. Kodosky is an Associate Professor of History at West Chester University. He is the author of Psychological Operations American Style: The Joint United States Public Affairs Office, Vietnam and Beyond.

The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 created two factions, Constitutionalists and Republicans. The Constitutionalists favored the Constitution of 1776, which established a unicameral legislature, a weak executive branch, and a broadened suffrage to include any free male of 21 or older who paid even the smallest tax. The Republicans favored a two-house legislature, a suffrage restricted to adult male property owners, and a strong executive branch with legislative veto power. Wilson, a Republican, shared the view of his party’s disapproval of the radically democratic Constitution of 1776.

In January 1779, increasing prices of flour, wood, and grain renewed the demands by the Constitutionalists and working-class Philadelphians to impose price controls to stem inflation. But Wilson, Robert Morris (1734-1806), and the merchant class of Philadelphia benefitted financially from free trade and inflationary prices on such necessities. Throughout the spring and summer of 1779, the working-class and militia families who bore the financial and military burdens of the war looked on the merchant class with disdain for their lack of service and control of the economy. The rising tension between the classes led the working-class men in the Pennsylvania Assembly to favor price controls. The Philadelphia Committee of Privates, an organization of representatives from local militias and the working class created in 1775, re-emerged to secure price regulations and remedy other perceived acts of injustice by profiteers and Tories.

Militia Detains Merchants

On Monday, October 4, 1779, a large number of militiamen gather at Burns Tavern on Tenth Street between Race and Vine Streets to take action against any man associated with profiteering and sympathetic to the British. Headed by Captain Ephraim Faulkner, the militia called on Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) to lead their march through the city to arrest and detain their enemies. As some cried out, “Get Wilson,” Peale tried but failed to persuade the militia to abandon the plan. The militia captured four prominent merchants and forcefully marched them through the streets of Philadelphia in a display of public humiliation.

To avoid being captured by the militia, Wilson and other members of the Republican Society barricaded themselves inside Wilson’s house. The militia stopped near Wilson’s house when Captain Robert Campbell (1753-79), who was inside, opened a window and either shouted to them to continue marching or shouted and fired his pistol at the militia. Storming the doors, the militiamen set fire to the first floor and killed Campbell before being turned away by the men inside. The arrival of Joseph Reed (1741-85), President of the Pennsylvania Supreme Executive Council, and the City Troop of Light Horse ended the attack on Fort Wilson. Four militiamen, one free Black youth (who joined the militia’s march), and Captain Campbell were killed, and fourteen militia and three men from inside the house were wounded.

The arrest of several militiamen increased the tension throughout the city and surrounding areas. Wilson fled the city to Morris’s country estate until October 19, 1779, when he returned to the city at night. The Pennsylvania Assembly acted quickly to quell the tension between the classes through legislation that provided flour to the families of the militia and re-emphasized the enforcement of the laws pertaining to military service.  In March 1780 the Executive Council passed an act pardoning all involved in the attack on Fort Wilson.

David Reader teaches history at Camden Catholic High School and was the recipient of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship in 2007. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Constructed from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century, defensive fortifications along the lower Delaware River and bay guarded the region during times of international and sectional upheaval. As important structures with such long histories, forts help to explain the political, economic, and social history of the Greater Philadelphia region.

The earliest fortifications in the lower Delaware region resulted from the intense economic colonial rivalries and wars of the early seventeenth century, as Dutch, Swedish, and English Protestant capitalist states battled Spanish, Portuguese, and French Catholic kingdoms for control of the North American and West Indian trade and settlement. Their rivalry led to construction of Fort Nassau, built in 1626 by the Dutch West India Company on the east bank of the Delaware (the future site of Gloucester City, New Jersey), and Fort Christina, built in 1638 by the New Sweden Company at the confluence of the Christina River and Brandywine Creek (the future site of Wilmington, Delaware). Both fortifications served as centers for fur trading, and Fort Christina also developed as an agricultural settlement. The New Sweden Company dispatched more than a dozen expeditions over the next decade bringing Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and German settlers to the Delaware, then known as the South River. When Lieutenant Colonel Johan Bjornson Printz (1592-1663), a veteran of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), became governor of New Sweden in 1643 he further fortified the colony with Fort Nya Elfsborg (Elsinboro, Salem County, New Jersey) and Fort New Gothenburg (Tinicum Island, Pennsylvania) upriver on the west bank a mile south of Fort Nassau.

The Dutch West India Company naturally responded to New Sweden’s threat to New Netherland’s commercial monopoly on the South River by strengthening Fort Nassau, building a number of small, fortified trading posts across the river, and erecting Fort Casimir where the river met the Delaware Bay (later the site of New Castle, Delaware). The new fort stood well below the Swedish forts and promised to stop Swedish ships entering the bay and river. New Sweden soon seized Fort Casimir, but had neither the resources nor manpower to construct and hold such a fort as aggressive New Netherland Director-General Peter Stuyvesant (1612-72) sent a thousand-man expedition up the Delaware in 1655 to retake the defensive works and bring an end to New Sweden.

Britain Prevails Over the Dutch

The regained Dutch influence on the Delaware River was short-lived. In 1664, after the Dutch surrendered New Netherland to the British, they quietly abandoned their forts on the Delaware. Without major threats to control over the region and naval supremacy in the bay and nearby Atlantic coast, the British decided not to garrison fortifications on the Delaware. Spending money on forts or defense also did not interest the Quaker provincial government of Pennsylvania, created by land grant to William Penn in 1681. By the mid-eighteenth century, though, the need for fortifications in the Delaware Valley increased as Britain became locked in a century of colonial warfare with France and Spain.

Greater defenses became an issue by the 1740s as French soldiers and their Native American allies came south from Canada into western and central Pennsylvania to block English westward settlement, while French and Spanish naval forces—particularly privateers from the West Indies—came up the coast and plundered several Delaware Bay and river settlements.  Local residents constructed a fortified redoubt in 1748 near Wilmington, but the Quaker assembly in Philadelphia refused to raise money for the city’s fortification. When the French and Spanish threatened Philadelphia’s trade and business, more-militant Quaker merchants joined with a non-Quaker political faction that included Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) to fund defensive measures. During King George’s War (1740-48), Franklin used the sale of lottery tickets to fund the construction in 1747-48 of the Grand (Association) Battery, a great twenty-seven-gun stone wall along the south Philadelphia (Southwark) riverfront, and a smaller Society Hill Battery just upriver. Fortifying the lower Delaware and Philadelphia became more urgent during the French and Indian War, 1754-63, particularly after the British were driven from Fort Duquesne in western Pennsylvania and moved eastward toward Philadelphia. In response, Franklin oversaw construction of a number of fortifications in the Lehigh Valley, where he personally directed the building of Fort Allen (Weissport, Carbon County) in 1755.

The British government, overtaxed by continual warfare against the French in Europe, the Caribbean, Atlantic Ocean, and North America, expected the Pennsylvania Assembly to bear the burden of arming the Delaware Valley, particularly fortifying the Delaware River approaches to Philadelphia. To this end the British army dispatched military engineer Captain John Montresor (1736-99) to fortify Mud Island (also called Fort Island) on the Delaware riverfront near the mouth of the Schuylkill River. Montresor designed a small stone fort and began construction of a southern and eastern wall of the Mud Fort (later Fort Mifflin). Worsening relations between England and her North American colonies interrupted construction until 1775, as the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and increasingly protested British taxation and trade policies.

1776: Need for Forts Gains Urgency

Months of debate over whether Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, or the Continental Congress, should select sites and pay for defensive works along the river reached a critical stage after the American Declaration of Independence. On July 5, 1776, the Continental Congress purchased a site for a fort in Billingsport (Paulsboro), New Jersey. General George Washington (1732-99) asked Col. Thaddeus Kosciuszko (1746-1817), a highly skilled French-trained Polish/Lithuanian military engineer to design the fort, and the Continental Congress hired French military engineer Philippe DuCoudray (1738-77) to build it as an anchor for a chain of frames of large iron-tipped logs known as chevaux-de-frise to be spread across the river channels to prevent British warships coming upriver to attack Philadelphia. Congress also authorized construction of Fort Mercer on a high bluff known as Red Bank, Gloucester County, New Jersey.

The British attack on Philadelphia in late summer and fall of 1777 forced completion and garrisoning of the three Delaware River forts. Fort Billings, defended by local militia, was the first to fall to the British Army, then British naval vessels breached the chevaux-de-frise and slowly moved upriver toward the Mud Island (Fort Mifflin) and Red Bank (Fort Mercer) fortifications.  British naval bombardment of Fort Island, reportedly the heaviest cannon fire of the Revolutionary War, reduced the Mud Fort (Fort Mifflin) to rubble. Forts Mercer and Mifflin were abandoned on November 15, and the British Army occupied Philadelphia.

The Revolutionary War marked the last time that forts in the Philadelphia region defended against an enemy force. Nevertheless, fortifications became important while Philadelphia served from 1790 until 1800 as the national capital. President Washington and his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), pressed for rebuilding Fort Mifflin and constructing river defenses, particularly with the growing threat of French and British naval incursions in the Delaware during the wars of the French Revolution. The federal government hired civil engineer Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825) to redesign Fort Mifflin and military engineer Anne-Louis de Tousard (1749-1817) to build the bastion. Tousard used government funds to buy material from Philadelphia merchants and hire local German, Irish, and English carpenters and bricklayers. African American slaves, many owned by Tousard, supplied the necessary labor. The fort was named Fort Mifflin in 1795 after Washington’s wartime adjutant general, Thomas Mifflin (1744-1800) of Philadelphia.

The Influence of Naval Arms

Work ceased on Fort Mifflin when the national capital left Philadelphia in 1800 for the Potomac River. Some construction resumed during the War of 1812, but Jeffersonian Republicans preferred to spend money on several temporary batteries of twenty-four-pounder cannon on islands in the Delaware River and use small gunboats to protect the city. Moreover, it seemed that the region should be defended with a fort farther downriver because Fort Mifflin stood too close to Philadelphia to provide adequate defense against increasingly long-range naval armament. The U.S. government began to look at sites near New Castle, Delaware, and Pea Patch Island, a large island in the middle of the Delaware River channel where the river met the bay.  Work began on a Pea Patch Island fort soon after the War of 1812.  Fire destroyed the partially built fort in 1831, but construction resumed in 1833 on a large stone fortification called Fort Delaware.

Defense of the region became necessary once again with the advent of the Civil War. After the Confederate capture of Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor in 1861, the U.S. and Pennsylvania governments demanded the arming of Fort Delaware. They worried that a nearby secessionist movement in the state of Delaware and southern counties of New Jersey threatened the security of the cities of Philadelphia, Chester, and Wilmington, which were rapidly emerging as centers of munitions manufacturing, gun casting, and ironclad shipbuilding. The railroad system carrying troops and material south to meet the rebel forces also passed through these cities. Rumored construction of a huge Confederate Navy ironclad warship particularly disturbed the region, and Fort Delaware needed to mount heavy smoothbore guns and floating mines to stop enemy ironclads from attacking Philadelphia. The federal government began to build a great ten-gun battery on the Delaware City riverfront (Fort DuPont) to protect Pea Patch Island. Fort Delaware and to a lesser extent Fort Mifflin served as prisoner-of-war camps throughout the Civil War. Fort Delaware held more than 30,000 Confederate prisoners and local Southern sympathizers in the extremely unhealthy, disease-ridden Pea Patch Island facility.

The last decades of the nineteenth century became the golden age of American coastal fort building as the United States entered into imperial rivalries with Germany, Russia, England, France, Japan, and particularly Spain, which seemed a threat to American interests in Cuba and the Philippine Islands.  As the federal government moved to modernize and strengthen American seacoast defenses, the Philadelphia region gained additional fortification in 1896 with construction of a battery on Finn’s Point, Pennsville, Salem County, New Jersey.  Named Fort Mott after New Jersey Civil War and National Guard commander Brigadier General Gershom Mott (1882-84), the new fort created a defensive triangle with Forts Delaware and DuPont to stop any enemy fleet before it could reach the great manufacturing centers upriver at Wilmington, Chester, and Philadelphia.

World Wars Bring Heavier Artillery

Delaware Valley forts played no fighting role during the Spanish-American War, but U.S. entry into the First World War in 1917 brought the prospect of a greater need for defending the region as it continued to be a center for naval and merchant shipbuilding, munitions making, and other war goods. Moreover, the region became a mobilization nexus for troops to be shipped to the European fronts. Forts Mott and DuPont were garrisoned by artillery units. Fort DuPont built more barracks, a hospital, and warehouses to train and equip draftees and house troops and material destined to fight in the Great War. However, the region faced no real threat from enemy forces other than sabotage of defense industries by German agents in New Jersey.

The threat to the region was greater by the time of the Second World War, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 raised the possibility of long-distance aerial attack. Older, obsolete forts gained new purposes as sites for anti-aircraft batteries, including Fort Mifflin, manned by the first African American Coast Artillery unit. It soon became apparent, though, that the greatest threat to the region during the Second World War came from powerful German U-boats that torpedoed merchant ships and oil tankers off the Jersey and Delaware coasts and lurked just off the Delaware Bay and capes to intercept ships coming out of the Delaware Bay.  In response, the United States moved all Delaware River and bay defenses to the seacoast, erecting Fort Miles on Cape Henlopen, near Lewes, Delaware. Fort Miles featured giant, long-range sixteen-inch guns and 90mm anti-aircraft batteries. Round concrete observation and fire-control towers were constructed along the Jersey coast as far north as Sandy Hook and down the Delaware coast to Ocean City, Maryland.

Locating coastal defenses ever farther away from Philadelphia and the Delaware River during the Second World War attested to the increasing spatial dimensions of modern warfare and long-range capabilities of new weapons. It suggested as well the increasing obsolescence of the Greater Philadelphia region’s historic forts. All Delaware River forts were declared war surplus after the Second World War and remaining guns or other military material were removed. Forts Mott, DuPont, and Delaware were given to New Jersey and Delaware and became parts of historic districts and state park systems. Fort DuPont retained a National Guard armory. Fort Mifflin was eventually obtained by the city of Philadelphia and supported by a private Fort Mifflin Society to preserve one of the most historic forts in American history. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers retained a presence on site. None of the early seventeenth-century forts remained, but plaques and monuments marked the original sites of Forts Elfsborg, Billings, Mercer, Casimir, and Christina. The surviving structures and monuments and plaques served as reminders of the central role forts played in the earliest history of the Greater Philadelphia area.

Jeffery M. Dorwart, Professor Emeritus of History, Rutgers University, is the author of histories of the Philadelphia Navy Yard; Fort Mifflin of Philadelphia; Naval Air Station Wildwood; Camden and Cape May Counties, New Jersey; Office of Naval Intelligence; Ferdinand Eberstadt and James Forrestal.  He also is the co-author of Elizabeth Haddon Estaugh: Building of the Quaker Community of Haddonfield, New Jersey, 1701-1762  (Historical Society of Haddonfield, 2013). (Author information current at time of publication.)