At the outset of U.S. involvement in the First World War, the major branches of U.S. Quakerism created AFSC to coordinate alternative service for young Quaker men who conscientiously refused to serve in the military after being drafted under the Selective Service Act. The alternative consisted mostly of over six hundred Quaker and other pacifist volunteers reconstructing modular housing for displaced persons along the Western Front in France under the auspices of the American Red Cross. It was a version of what William James (1842-1910) had called the “moral equivalent of war,” and AFSC saw it as a chance for Quakers and other pacifists to make a positive contribution to peace instead of taking a merely negative stance against war. After the war, between 1920 and 1924, AFSC organized and directed the feeding of over five million children in Germany.

During the organization’s early years, the Philadelphia Quaker elite (professionals, educators, and business executives), with the occasional midwestern Friend, largely constituted the executive board and administrative leadership and so largely determined its mission and programs. A large contingent of early AFSC workers attended Germantown Friends Meeting. This concentration positioned AFSC on one side of theological differences between the more liberal Quakers of Philadelphia, New England, and the Mid-Atlantic and the more conservative Friends of the South, Midwest, and West. Differences rapidly grew into division, especially over AFSC’s abjuration of evangelism as an obstacle to delivering material aid and social services. As early as the mid-1920s more conservative Friends were disowning AFSC as in any way representative of American Quakerism as a whole.

Philadelphia Quaker Elite

The Philadelphia Quaker elite between the world wars was solidly middle and upper-middle-class and counted many industrial and financial executives among its ranks. These well-off Quakers generally subscribed to the middle-class Social Gospel, a liberal movement for political and economic reform whose influence on Protestantism at large had just passed its peak. Yet Philadelphia Quakers, unlike most other Friends in the country, never officially joined the major institutional expression of the Social Gospel in the United States, the Federal Council of Churches (FCC, founded in 1908). AFSC effectively fulfilled the role of the FCC for Philadelphia Quakerism; indeed, in the 1920s and 1930s AFSC often worked with the FCC on domestic projects, most notably among coal-mining families in southern Appalachia.

During World War II, AFSC (somewhat controversially) worked with representatives of the other “historic peace churches,” the Mennonites and Brethren, to administer the federally established Civilian Public Service (CPS) system of work camps for conscientious objectors. AFSC helped resettle European refugees in the United States, and by establishing a regional office (one of the first of several) in San Francisco, also protested Japanese-American internment and helped relocate over four thousand Japanese-American college students from the internment camps. In 1947, after another round of postwar feeding and service in Germany and on the strength also of its administration of prewar relief programs in Russia and Spain during those countries’ respective civil wars, AFSC (together with its British counterpart, the Friends Service Council) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Quakers worldwide.

After World War II, AFSC resolved a long-standing internal debate over what it should prioritize in its hiring: Quakerism or practical expertise. It became increasingly professionalized and soon employed a majority non-Quaker staff, moving the debate over AFSC’s Quaker identity outside the organization to liberal Quaker circles, where it raged into the twenty-first century. Also, AFSC began to focus less and less on material aid and more and more on ending military conflict and poverty in the Global South and on improving race relations and civil rights at home. AFSC started delivering aid to refugees in Gaza in 1948 at the request of the United Nations and during its ensuing decades-long presence in the Middle East distinguished itself as one of the first organizations in the United States to call for Palestinian rights. In 1958, AFSC started working in Africa as well, aiding refugees from the Algerian War. After also administering medical aid in China and food aid in India and Bengal, AFSC entered Vietnam in 1965 and (again, somewhat controversially) aided civilians on both sides of the Vietnam War. It also provided draft counseling for thousands of young men in the United States.

“Speak Truth to Power”

AFSC became perhaps most famous for coining the phrase “speak truth to power,” the title of a pamphlet it issued in 1955 advocating nonviolent resolution of international conflicts. Although the lead authors of Speak Truth to Power attributed the phrase to an eighteenth-century Friend, it originated with Bayard Rustin (1912-87), one of the pamphlet’s co-authors. Rustin was an African American Quaker civil rights leader from West Chester, Pennsylvania, and the chief organizer of the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. AFSC itself sponsored Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-68) and Coretta Scott King (1927-2006) on a visit to India in 1959 to help strengthen the nonviolent African American civil rights movement’s ties to its Gandhian roots. AFSC also first published Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as a stand-alone pamphlet.

In the 1970s and 1980s, AFSC protested apartheid in South Africa as well as the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the United States and around the world. In the 1990s, AFSC established a major health clinic in Haiti and, in the midst of a famine in North Korea, advised farmers in that country on how to increase food production sustainably. In 2004, AFSC continued its practice of protesting U.S. wars by curating a travelling exhibit, “Eyes Wide Open,” which displayed a pair of boots for every American soldier killed in Iraq along with shoes representing the hundreds of thousands of civilians who also died in the most recent war. In the 2010s, AFSC focused on criminal-justice and immigration reform, opposing solitary confinement (in particular) and providing legal services for immigrants.

While AFSC became a majority non-Quaker organization with offices around the United States and on four continents, Philadelphia remained the organization’s headquarters. In the twenty-first century, the Quaker values of peace, integrity, and equality continued to animate AFSC programs.

Guy Aiken holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies (American Religions) from the University of Virginia and is a postdoctoral fellow at Villanova University. He has published several articles, including “The American Friends Service Committee’s Mission to the Gestapo” in Peace & Change, and “Educating Tocqueville: Jared Sparks, the Boston Whigs, and Democracy in America” in the Tocqueville Review. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Anglican Church came to Philadelphia under the terms of the 1681 Pennsylvania charter, which welcomed all who “acknowledge one almighty God.” In 1695, thirty-nine Anglicans formed Philadelphia’s Christ Church, the first Anglican congregation in Pennsylvania, and requested a minister from the bishop of London, who oversaw the Church of England in the colonies. Members of Christ Church, Philadelphia, joined several Swedish Lutheran churches as the only non-Quaker places of worship in the colony. Facing the dominant Quaker power and the region’s ethnic and religious heterogeneity, Anglicans embraced religious pluralism and a diversity of theological views by their ministers. Anglicans, especially in Philadelphia, vigorously participated in colonial society and commerce, as well as the political debates surrounding the American Revolution (1775-1783). While Anglicans faced unique challenges during this conflict, persons who shifted allegiance to the new state played a pivotal role in the formation of an American Episcopal Church independent from Great Britain.

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglican Church was characterized by its status as a state church, its episcopal governance, and its adherence to the Book of Common Prayer, which contained vital theology and forms of worship that distinguished Anglicans from those outside the church, termed “dissenters.” Early Anglicans optimistically dreamed of recreating the Church of England in the colonies, but only the prayer book existed in Pennsylvania, and colonists looked to the distant bishop of London for guidance and oversight.

Through the 1690s Anglicans in the region complained about Quaker principles and doctrines, including pacifism, refusal to swear oaths, and resistance to most forms of entertainment, and saw Quaker control of the Pennsylvania colony as a threat to orderly society. Their leaders petitioned to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony and for the appointment of a bishop, and worked to bring “heathen” Quakers back into the true church. By 1695 members of Christ Church Philadelphia erected a small brick church at Second Street and High Street and soon secured a salary from the Privy Council for a minister and schoolmaster. The London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), founded in 1701, also provided material and financial support to colonial ministers and churches across the colonies. Unlike in colonies where the Anglican Church was established as the state church and local churches were supported by parish taxes, Pennsylvania’s Anglican churches relied on the generosity their members.

Within ten years of Christ Church’s establishment, Anglicans formed congregations in the Pennsylvania settlements of Oxford, Perkiomen, Great Valley, Radnor, Whitemarsh, Marcus Hook, Concord, and Chester. Church officers, vestrymen, and annually elected wardens oversaw church finances and outreach, especially the distribution of moneys to the poor. While eastern New Jersey proved more receptive to Anglicanism, congregations formed in nearby Burlington, Hopewell, and Salem. Churches in New Castle and other communities in Pennsylvania’s lower three counties along the Delaware also operated within the orbit of the region’s oldest Anglican church. Despite these successes, Anglicans failed to convert many Quakers or undermine the Quaker proprietors, and by 1715, Anglicans were forced to acknowledge the legitimacy of other denominations. This enabled them to compete and occasionally cooperate with other religious denominations and sects without the animus that characterized Anglican-dissenter relations elsewhere in the American colonies.

Outnumbered Anglicans

Ethnic and religious diversity often posed a challenge to Anglican outreach; across the region, Anglicans remained outnumbered by dissenters. A lack of missionaries fluent in the language left predominantly Welsh-speaking Anglicans at Trinity Church in Oxford and St. David’s in Radnor with no regular minister until the 1730s. One missionary expressed fear that a Welsh Presbyterian minister would draw congregants from these churches. Anglican cooperation with Swedish Lutherans, whom they viewed as fellow representatives of the “true” apostolic church, was a notable exception. Ministers supplied each other’s pulpits, and several Swedes received Anglican orders or stipends from the SPG to preach in Pennsylvania. However, as a rule, churches remained understaffed and faced near-constant financial uncertainty because of their reliance on donations from individual congregants. By the 1770s seven SPG missionaries served some 1,500 Anglicans in nineteen congregations across Pennsylvania outside of Philadelphia, visiting congregations at least once a month. In their absence, lay members led services from the prayer book.

In contrast to rural churches, Philadelphia’s Anglican community grew in pace with the city. Beginning in 1727, members of Christ Church began construction on an ornate new structure modeled on famed English architect Christopher Wren’s Georgian designs, with a brick exterior, the first Palladian window in the colonies, and a steeple, completed in 1753, which contrasted with the modesty of other religious buildings in the Quaker city. Still requiring more space, Anglicans sponsored the construction of a second church, St. Peter’s, which opened on Third Street and Pine in 1761 on land donated by Thomas Penn (1702-1774) and Richard Penn (1706-1771), who had inherited the Pennsylvania proprietorship from their father William Penn (1644-1718) and publicly converted from Quakerism to Anglicanism. To prevent competition between congregations, Christ Church and St. Peter’s remained organizationally united and served by the same ministers until 1832. Architecture, material culture, and music all distinguished Anglicanism from other denominations. Organists at The United Churches, James Bremner (?-1780) and Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791), were the region’s preeminent musicians. Both churches have retained many eighteenth-century features, including box pews, organ cases, and communion silver and a walnut baptismal font, purportedly used by William Penn before his conversion to Quakerism.

Through the mid-eighteenth century Anglican churches struggled with the growing influence of evangelical theology. Lack of oversight also allowed for internal conflicts between clergy and members of the laity, which were mediated by the bishop of London. After the bishop sided with Philadelphia clergymen who opposed the elevation of evangelical SPG missionary William McClenachan (c. 1710-1766) to the United Churches, over a hundred individuals broke away to form St. Paul’s Church, which used the “liturgy, rites, ceremonies, doctrines, and true principles of the Church of England” but allowed the selection of ministers by the congregation without input from the bishop of London. This schism between St. Paul’s and the United Churches ended in 1773 when St. Paul’s asked the bishop to ordain their minister so they could rejoin their sister churches. By the 1770s Anglicans comprised 18 percent of the population of Philadelphia, or approximately 2,500 persons, divided between three congregations. While Pennsylvania Anglicans never gained a resident bishop, their experiences with religious pluralism and diverse theology prompted them to adopt compromises and share power within local churches and the church hierarchy in England.

Elites and Members of Moderate Means

Philadelphia Anglicans represented a cross-section of the city. Leading churchmen participated in voluntary associations, such as the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company, and the Freemasons. Four-fifths of the trustees of the Charity School and Academy, which became the College (and later University) of Pennsylvania, were Anglican, including Richard Peters (1704-1776), who served in numerous posts in the colonial government until 1762, when he retired to become rector of Christ Church. Alongside colonial elites and persons of moderate means, who purchased pews and served as elected leaders, close to a third of congregants numbered among the city’s poorest, and Christ Church routinely provided poor relief to needy persons, especially widows. In 1772, Dr. John Kearsley (1684-1772) founded the Christ Church Hospital (later renamed the Kearsley House), an almshouse that provided for widows and spinsters in their old age.

The church also made limited efforts to convert persons of color. In 1746, the SPG provided a stipend for an assistant minister to catechize free and enslaved African Americans. Ten years later, the London-based Bray Associates helped open a school in Philadelphia dedicated to providing religious and practical education to enslaved children. More than 250 free and enslaved African Americans were baptized and over forty couples married at Christ Church and St. Peter’s before 1776. Absalom Jones (1747-1818), who married a fellow slave at Christ Church in 1770, played a major role in the city’s growing free Black community and in 1792 helped found the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, where he was eventually ordained as the first African-American priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church.

Although lay Anglicans were involved in the political and economic debates of the 1760s and early 1770s, clergymen stayed largely apart from events until September 7, 1774, when Samuel Adams of Massachusetts solicited Christ Church’s Reverend Jacob Duché (1737/8-1798) to open the First Continental Congress in prayer and serve as its chaplain. Adams’s choice of Duché was a deliberate attempt to court the favor of Anglican delegates from influential southern colonies. When war broke out the following April, Philadelphia’s Anglican clergymen remained supportive of the patriot cause. In a June 1775 letter to the bishop of London, they justified their efforts to effect a peaceful and mutually advantageous outcome and remain in good standing with their congregations.

Congress’s Declaration of Independence forced Anglican clergymen to choose whether to disregard their former oaths of loyalty to the crown or close their churches. At a July 4, 1776, meeting, Duché and the vestry decided it “necessary for the peace and well being of the churches” to replace prayers in the liturgy for the king with prayers for Congress. Duché was arrested by the British when they entered the city in October 1777. Accused of treason, he recanted and tried to convince George Washington to sidestep the Congress and sue for peace before fleeing to England. With the exception of the United Church’s assistant minister, William White (1748-1836), who shifted his allegiance to the new country, Philadelphia’s other clergymen similarly fled as loyalists.

Outside of Philadelphia, Anglican clergymen had difficulty maintaining public worship. In September 1776, the Reverend Daniel Batwell of York insisted on reading prayers for the king and was arrested and eventually exiled. The Reverend Thomas Barton (1730-1780) of Lancaster similarly refused to omit prayers and ministered privately to congregants until 1779, when Pennsylvania authorities accused him of “being very instrumental in the poisoning the minds of his parishioners.” Deported to British lines, Barton died before he could depart for England. William Currie (1709-1793) and George Craig (?-1783) who together served five rural congregations, made out better than most. Shuttering their churches, they avoided comparable harassment.

Divided Loyalties

While the majority of Anglican ministers chose exile rather than conforming to revolutionary demands, Anglican laity were divided into loyalists, neutrals, moderate revolutionaries, patriots in favor of radical changes, and persons who underwent changes of heart over the course of the conflict. In Philadelphia, the removal of neutral and loyalist church members who accompanied the British to New York in late 1778 left ardent revolutionaries in control of the United Churches vestry, which remained the lone functioning congregation in Pennsylvania.

As the war continued, William White led efforts to revive neglected congregations, which after 1784 were organized within the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. In 1785, the diocese included Philadelphia’s three churches and six rural churches. That year, White helped found the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia. Originally an all-boys school, it prepared students for the ministry and admission to Pennsylvania College, providing free education for persons with limited means.

The 1783 peace settlement between the United States and Great Britain prompted renewed debate over the formation of an American Protestant Episcopal Church. In an August 1782 pamphlet titled The Case of the Episcopal Churches in the United States Considered, White proposed modifications to the Book of Common Prayer and altering the episcopal structure of governance to reflect both lay and ecclesiastical representation. Over the next years, deputies to the Pennsylvania Diocese routinely gathered to discuss joining with other Episcopalians, and White helped chart a middle path between the low-church South, which wanted lay control and no bishops, and vocal New England clergy, who catered to ex-loyalists and wanted clerical control and strong bishops. In 1787, White and James Provoost (1742-1815) of New York traveled to England, where they were consecrated as bishops. Finally, in 1789, clerical and lay representatives from nine state dioceses met in Philadelphia and, agreeing on liturgy and governance, created the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Because the region’s religious diversity had forced Anglicans to compromise with competitors and operate without state support and limited oversight, Pennsylvania Anglicans were uniquely equipped to operate independent of Great Britain and lead efforts to sever ties with the Church of England.

Ross A. Newton received a Ph.D in History from Northeastern University. His current book manuscript explores Anglicans in colonial and revolutionary Boston, Massachusetts, and their connections within the larger British Atlantic World. (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).

A cathedral is the bishop’s church, where he presides, teaches, and conducts worship for the Christian community of his area of ecclesial jurisdiction. Basilicas, according to the 1989 Vatican document Domus Ecclesiae, “stand out as a center of active and pastoral liturgy.” They indicate a special bond of communion with the pope, his concern for the faithful of all nations, and the strengthening of ties between the local and the universal Church.

Philadelphia’s new cathedral acquired its site on Logan Square when Marc Anthony Frenaye (1783-1873), the diocese’s financier and a refugee from the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), purchased the plot from the Farmers’ Life and Trust Co. of New York. Frenaye also purchased the four-story house that originally stood on the site, which subsequently became the cathedral rectory. Philadelphia architect Napoleon LeBrun (1821-1901), whose major work included St. Patrick’s on Rittenhouse Square (1839) and later the Academy of Music (1857), executed initial designs for the Roman-Baroque style church modeled on Rome’s San Carlo al Corso. Scottish-born Philadelphia architect John Notman (1810-65), who later built St. Clement’s (1856-59), contributed its Italian Renaissance Palladian façade.

Cornerstone Laid in 1846

Construction on the imposing sandstone structure was slow, given the challenges of meeting the spiritual, pastoral, and social needs of Philadelphia’s expanding Catholic population and organizing the Philadelphia diocese. During the era of increasing Irish-Catholic immigration and diocesan expansion in the mid to late 1840s, Kenrick juggled lack of funds, debt, and initial opposition from priests and laypeople to the idea of building a new cathedral. Already suffering a shortage of priests and churches, they were concerned about maintaining their own parishes and the cost of rebuilding churches destroyed during the nativist riots that took place in Philadelphia in 1844. Leading up to 1845, some objected that Catholicism’s growth in Philadelphia did not yet warrant building a church exceeding any other church in the city in both cost and physical proportion. Some also considered the proposed site to be too far west from the city center and the bishop’s then-cathedral, St. John the Evangelist on South Thirteenth Street. Nonetheless, eight thousand people witnessed Kenrick lay the cornerstone on September 6, 1846. Laying the cornerstone for a new Catholic church is an elaborate ritual, in which the bishop explains its ecclesial and theological significance while also soliciting the faithful’s financial support. Catholics organized a system of block collections by parish to raise the requisite funds.

After Kenrick became Archbishop of Baltimore in 1851, construction of the church continued under Bishop John Neumann (1811-60) and Archbishop James Frederick Wood (1813-83). It proceeded through most of the Civil War, even while Philadelphia’s industrial importance in the conflict and continuing financial difficulty meant that church officials struggled to retain workers. The interior remained largely unembellished while details filled in slowly. Italian-born “artist of the United States Capitol,” Constantino Brumidi (1805-80), known for his mural The Apotheosis of George Washington (1865), executed five oil paintings for the ceiling dome in 1863: The Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven, and four of the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were in place for the Cathedral’s dedication—and opening for services—on November 20, 1864. Philadelphian Edwin F. Durang (1829-1911) designed a marble high altar, placed in 1883-84 before the church’s consecration in 1890. By the mid-twentieth century, it boasted interior and exterior renovation work by Philadelphia’s Henry Dandurand Dagit (1865-1929), and the firms of Daprato (Chicago) and Eggers and Higgins (New York), among others.

During the building’s construction, the Friends of the Cathedral society saw its potential for evangelization in the surrounding neighborhood, which was becoming both Protestant and wealthy. The cathedral became the base of operations for several Catholic civic organizations, such as the Total Abstinence Society, the Ladies’ Society, and Cadet Societies for boys and girls. During the early twentieth century, construction of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway placed the Cathedral amid a developing museum district. The building merited placement on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 on the basis of the architectural significance of the work by LeBrun, Notman, and Brumidi and the religious/philosophical significance of its roles as “the center of Catholic life of Philadelphia” and longtime church of St. John Neumann—the first canonized U.S. bishop, whose cause for canonization was underway at the time.

The cathedral has continued to play an active role in the lives of Philadelphia’s Catholics. In the summer of 1976, Philadelphia’s celebration of the American Revolution’s bicentennial coincided with the Forty-First International Eucharistic Congress (August 1-8) held in the city. Following the congress, at the request of then-archbishop John Cardinal Krol (1910-96), Pope Paul VI (1897-1978) designated the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul a basilica, solidifying its role as the meeting ground between the Philadelphia archdiocese and the universal Church that Bishop Kenrick had originally intended: during a papal visit in 1979, Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) prayed in the cathedral and celebrated Mass in Logan Circle; in 2015, Pope Francis (b. 1936) publicly celebrated Mass at the cathedral and on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway during the World Meeting of Families. The Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul has remained an architectural focal point for Philadelphia and a major site of worship, devotion, and Catholic identity.

Wendy Wong Schirmer, a historian of Early America and U.S. foreign relations, received her Ph.D. from Temple University. She is working on a book project that examines the relationship between print culture, neutrality in the Early Republic, and the politics of slavery. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In the earliest Christian communities, some women devoted their lives to emulating Jesus Christ. Most of these women were virgins who saw themselves as “brides of Christ,” and they wore veils as a symbol of that marriage. As they assembled in communities with their common cause, the “sisters” formed “convents,” from the Latin conventus, meaning gathering or coming together. Although convents have generally been associated with Roman Catholicism, Episcopal and orthodox communities also established convents in America. In the Philadelphia area, however, Roman Catholic convents predominated.

English settlement in the New World yielded a predominantly Protestant East Coast. The Quakers, who predominated under William Penn’s (1644-1718) initial settlement, allowed Catholics to worship privately without government interference, but the further influx of Catholic immigrants coupled with Protestant revivalism in the early nineteenth century generated a violent anti-Catholicism. Catholic immigrants needed Catholic leadership, education, and help in all forms. The Diocese of Philadelphia, founded in 1808, developed a number of Catholic schools by midcentury, but lay people staffed most of them. Within twenty-five years, religious communities of women formed to meet the educational and social needs of the growing Catholic population. These included the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Sisters of St. Joseph, the Glen Riddle Sisters of St. Francis, and the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Due to ethnic and religious discrimination of the Irish in Philadelphia, five Irish women established the first convent in Philadelphia in 1833. A Philadelphia priest met Mary Frances Clarke (1803-87) and her four companions in Dublin and convinced them to join him in Philadelphia to set up a school. Two months after arriving in the city, the women founded the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM Sisters) with the blessings of the Catholic Church. The sisters began to teach young children in a “free school” and took in sewing to supplement their income. As time passed, some of the Philadelphia sisters moved west to help teach Native Americans in Iowa. In May 1844, during a series of riots (Philadelphia Nativist Riots, also known as Philadelphia Prayer Riots, Bible Riots, and Native American Riots) resulting from anti-Catholic sentiment due to growing Irish Catholic population, anti-Catholic Nativists burned down the Philadelphia convent—Sacred Heart Academy (occupied by three sisters)— and St. Michael’s Church. Most of the BVM sisters had already left Philadelphia to minister to other regions.

Needing help in meeting the many and growing social and educational needs of Catholics in the diocese, Bishop Francis Kenrick (1797-1863) convinced a contingent of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a religious order founded in LePuy, France, in 1650, to move to Philadelphia in the mid-1840s. The sisters began by administering St. John’s Orphanage for Boys in Philadelphia. In 1858, they purchased an established estate in Chestnut Hill, which became their administrative center and the first site of Mount Saint Joseph Academy. The sisters helped immigrants with educational needs, cared for orphans and widows, and worked as nurses during the American Civil War and the influenza epidemic of 1918.

The Diocese of Philadelphia was responsible for southern New Jersey (Archdiocese of New York held northern New Jersey) until 1853, when Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) established the Diocese of Newark, which initially covered all of New Jersey. Pius also established the Diocese of Wilmington in 1868. Up until this time, Philadelphia Catholic leaders treated New Jersey and Delaware as mission areas. The Sisters of St. Joseph administered two parochial schools in Delaware, but with the establishment of the new diocese, Bishop James Frederick Bryan Wood (1813-83) recalled them to Philadelphia.

In the mid-nineteenth century, following the death of her husband, Anna (Ana Maria Boll) Bachmann (1824-63) told her parish priest her desire to enter religious life. During his visit to Rome in 1854, Philadelphia’s Bishop John Neumann (1811-1860) informed Pope Pius IX about the need for sisters in his diocese. He also told the pope about Bachmann, her sister Barbara Boll, and a friend, Anna Dorn, all from Bavaria, and their desire to establish a religious community in Philadelphia. Bachmann (Sr. Mary Francis), Boll (Sr. Mary Margaret), and Dorn (Sr. Mary Bernardine) took their vows in May 1856 in Bishop Neumann’s private chapel. Two years later, “Mother” Francis officially founded the Institute of the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis. In 1871, the Philadelphia sisters took the opportunity to purchase the “Little Seminary” in Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, from Bishop Wood for $12,000. On the twenty-eight acres of land twenty-five miles southwest of Philadelphia, they made their home in old seminary buildings and founded a novitiate. The Motherhouse followed in 1896—Convent of Our Lady of Angels. In 1958, one hundred years after its founding, there were more than 1,600 Glen Riddle sisters working in grade schools and high schools, hospitals and centers of nursing, catechetical centers, and a seminary. By 2015, the congregation’s numbers had dropped to about 450 Catholic women Religious.

In 1858, the Sisters of St. Francis traveled to Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, to welcome the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters to eastern Pennsylvania. The IHM sisters opened a mission in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1859 with a select school for girls and a parish school for boys and girls. Reading became the motherhouse for the IHM sisters in eastern Pennsylvania from 1864-1871. From there the sisters also established schools in Philadelphia. In 1872, Bishop Wood provided a new motherhouse and novitiate in West Chester. In October of that year, the Convent of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in West Chester held its first reception of seven novices. At the same time, the sisters opened a school in St. Agnes Parish (established 1793), West Chester.

Episcopal female communities established themselves in America as early as the Roman Catholic convents did, but there were considerably fewer of them. Although none developed directly in the Philadelphia area, the Community of St. John the Baptist Episcopal Sisters came to America in 1874 (founded in England 1852) and built a convent in New York three years later. Since 1900, they have continued an active ministry in Mendham, New Jersey. Orthodox women’s communities developed much later. The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, centered in Englewood, New Jersey, founded its first Monastery for Nuns, the Convent of St. Thekla, in Glenville, Pennsylvania, where nuns have prayed for the salvation of the world and led a life of repentance. The convents varied in purpose and function—from active ministry to contemplative life—but the vocation of the women was to serve God.

Although most Roman Catholic convents in the Philadelphia area were active within the community, other sisters lived a cloistered life. In 1915, Mother Mary Michael (1862-1934) founded the Convent of Divine Love in Philadelphia. Archbishop Edmund Francis Prendergast (1843-1918) desired to have an adoration convent in his archdiocese. The “Pink Sisters” wore rose-colored garbs with a white veil. In addition to kneeling night and day (in shifts perpetually since 1915) before the Most Blessed Sacrament, sisters made altar bread and worked as clerks and seamstresses.

Although financial deficits moved the Catholic leadership to auction off three former convents in 2013, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, as of 2015, listed over fifty religious congregations of women (particularly along the Main Line), which included many missionary sisters and international congregations. Still, the aging population of Catholic women Religious caused concern for the Catholic Church. As of 2014, a study showed that there were more Catholic sisters in the United States over age 90 than under age 60. The history of Catholic sisters in the Philadelphia area proved significant, however, as early Catholic education led by sisters through the past two centuries helped the region to maintain a strong Catholic identity even into the twenty-first century. Through the decades, they continued their vocations in education, social services, parish ministry, aid to the poor, marginal, and oppressed, and missionary work and, and they remained on the front lines for the Catholic Church.

Brenda Gaydosh is an Assistant Professor of History at West Chester University. Her research focuses on varied aspects of the Catholic Church—from a biography about Nazi-era German Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg to how the Catholic Church has dealt with genocide. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Protestant Episcopal Church emerged out of the aftermath of the American Revolution, when it became clear that maintaining ties with the Church of England was both impractical and repugnant: The Church of England was a national church headed by the British monarch, and it required prayers at services for the monarchy. Its clergy, at the time of their ordination, had to swear an oath of loyalty to the Crown. Neither requirement was acceptable to citizens of the new American republic, and those concerns led to the establishment of an American church, independent in its organization while remaining somewhat loosely part of the larger Anglican Communion.

William White (1748-1836), the rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia, while still an official part of the Church of England and then first bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania (established in 1784), used his genius for compromise to preside over the birth of a separate American church that retained much of the form and many of the traditions of the Church of England. Delegates met at Christ Church to establish an American church during the summer of 1789, at the same time that the newly minted government under the United States Constitution was taking effect. The delegates drafted an American Book of Common Prayer, developed a governance structure of elected bishops, and created a bicameral policy-making body made up of a House of Bishops and a House of Deputies, whose lay representatives were also elected. White served as presiding bishop of the national church from 1795 until his death in 1836.

Regional Dioceses Established

Initially, the Diocese of Pennsylvania comprised the entire commonwealth, but between 1865 and 1910, it was divided into five regional dioceses, with Philadelphia and its surrounding counties retaining the original name of the Diocese of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, separate dioceses formed in Delaware and New Jersey. The Episcopal Diocese of Delaware, which was originally the Anglican Diocese of Delaware (later changed to the Episcopal Church of Delaware), traced its founding to 1786, when delegates to a state convention decided to form a separate diocese from Pennsylvania, with its cathedral church in Wilmington. The Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey, founded in 1785 as the Anglican Diocese of New Jersey, originally included all of the state, but in 1874 divided into the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, which covered the northern part of the state, and the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey, with its cathedral church in Trenton, which encompassed South Jersey.

Philadelphia-area Episcopalians and others in the nation have often juggled dual impulses. They have seen their denomination as being both Catholic and Protestant—a “reformed” church with bishops regarded as successors to Christ’s apostles but nevertheless providing a generous degree of decentralization and lay governance. Even though the Protestant Episcopal Church has remained part of the wider “Anglican Communion,” Episcopalians, both locally and nationally, have often claimed, in seeming contradiction, to be the most American of the Christian denominations in the United States. Another duality of the church has been its emphasis on tradition, while in the best of times willing to accommodate change. For example, most Episcopalians have rejected a literal reading of the Bible, a position that some Episcopalians liken to a “four-legged stool” in which scripture should be understood in light of reason, tradition, and experience.

Episcopalians also have tended to embrace a “latitudinarian” approach to faith and worship derived from the time of England’s Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603). The major facet of this stance, known as the Elizabethan compromise, has required Episcopalians to use the words of the Book of Common Prayer but has permitted worship practices to vary, so that individual parishes run the gamut from “high church” (including what is called Anglo-Catholic practice) to “low church” (including but not exclusively evangelical parishes). This “middle way,” as the compromise has sometimes been known, has proved both a strength and a weakness, since it allows for variety but also has invited controversy. This lack of a strict, doctrinaire attitude may also help to explain why the Episcopal Church has long been a denomination of converts. In the early twenty-first century, only one-third of its members, locally and as well as nationwide, could call themselves “cradle Episcopalians”—that is, born into Episcopalian households.

Overcoming an Upper-Class Label

In the early decades of the diocese and the national church, Episcopalians struggled to compete with other denominations in Philadelphia and the surrounding region, in large part because of the church’s reputation as an upper-class denomination and its associations with England. By the industrial era of the second half of the nineteenth century, a time of increasing wealth and social aspiration, the number of parishes increased from 113 to 138 at the same time that the number of clergy climbed from 176 to nearly 300. This growth was due in part to many newly wealthy Philadelphians becoming Episcopalians as a way of associating themselves with families of “old money” or social respectability. In looking for social and cultural models, many looked to England, becoming Anglophiles in attitudes and tastes. Contributing to this Anglophilia was the Oxford Movement, a complex phenomenon that began at Oxford University in England and that, among other things, emphasized the medieval Catholic roots of the Church of England.

For Episcopalians, the Oxford Movement strengthened high church attitudes and stimulated the Gothic Revival in church architecture and decoration. Among the earliest of the Gothic-style edifices was St. James the Less (completed in 1850), at Clearfeld Street and Hunting Park Avenue in the East Falls section, then outside the city limits but later consolidated into Philadelphia. Designed by Robert Ralston (1795-1858) and John Carver (1803-59) and inspired by thirteenth-century English country churches, St. James the Less became a model for other Gothic Revival churches in the United States. Another impressive example of this style was St. Mark’s Church at 1625 Locust Street, designed by the celebrated Scottish-born, Philadelphia architect John Notman (1810-65) and completed in 1851. Dozens of other Gothic-style Episcopal churches went up in Philadelphia and environs, including St. Timothy’s, Roxborough (1862); the Church of the Redeemer, Bryn Mawr (1881); St. Thomas, Whitemarsh (1881); St. Martin-in-the Fields, Chestnut Hill (1889); the Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont (1894); and St. Paul’s, Chestnut Hill (1929). In Wilmington, Delaware, the Cathedral Church of St. John (1858), built of Brandywine blue rock, exemplified the Gothic style and cruciform design that was intended not only to inspire faith but also to encourage surrounding development. The crowning achievement of Gothic construction in the Philadelphia region was supposed to be the diocesan cathedral in Upper Roxborough (officially known as the Cathedral Church of Christ), undertaken by Bishop Philip Mercer Rinelander (1869-1939) after the diocese purchased a one-hundred-acre site to build a cathedral complex in 1927. Due to a lack of funds, the grand cathedral was never completed, and in 1992, the diocese dedicated the large and impressive Church of the Saviour in West Philadelphia as its cathedral.

Philadelphia-area Episcopalians combined their interest in grandiose physical structures with concerns for social and economic reform. In the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century, amid problems created by rapid industrialization and urbanization, Philadelphia-area Episcopalians became involved in the Social Gospel movement, which called on Christians to practice the social teaching of Jesus as a way of addressing poverty and injustice. In pursuit of such interest, the Philadelphia diocese founded such institutions as the Lincoln Institute for Orphaned Boys, the Sheltering Arms Association for abandoned children and unwed mothers, All Souls Church for the Deaf, Episcopal Hospital, the Church Dispensary, St. John’s Settlement, the Church Farm School in Chester County, and the City Mission, which later became Episcopal Community Services.

Perhaps the most impressive parish efforts toward fulfilling the Social Gospel came out of historic Christ Church, Philadelphia, at Second and Market Streets. In 1915, the parish established Christ Church Neighborhood House to serve what was then a low-income population in surrounding neighborhoods. Occupying a handsome, two-story brick building beside the church that included a large gymnasium on the second floor, the Neighborhood House operated a soup kitchen, a shelter for stranded travelers, a childcare center, boys and girls clubs, a low-cost luncheon service for workers in the area, and a performance venue. Social outreach in the diocese included work with African Americans in the city. In 1910, for example, the diocese established the League for Work Among Colored People. In addition to a sincere dedication to carrying out the Gospel message as a testimony of faith, many wealthy Episcopalians acted from a sense of noblesse oblige—an obligation on the part of the well-off to assist those who were not so fortunate.

Early Ambivalence Toward Racism

Most white Episcopalians held ambivalent attitudes toward Black people, including members of their own church. White Episcopalians generally accepted prevailing views about race, and the diocese did not become significantly active in addressing racial prejudice and injustice until the mid-1960s era of the nationwide civil rights movement.

Before slavery was abolished in Pennsylvania, wealthy Anglicans frequently had their enslaved people baptized at church, and some sought to educate free Black people in special schools. After Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition law in 1780, some free Black individuals continued to attend the newly formed Episcopal Church. White congregants saw exposure to religion as a way of tamping down what they considered to be the undisciplined habits of some African Americans, but they had no intention of admitting them to an equal status in the church. Accordingly, Black Episcopalians established the segregated African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in 1794, with Absalom Jones (1746-1818) as its leader. Within a year, the parish counted some five hundred members, becoming the mother church of Black Episcopalians. Nevertheless, Bishop White designated Jones as a deacon and did not promote him to the priesthood for another decade, and Jones was never invited to attend the annual conventions of the diocese. (St. Thomas was not permitted to send delegates to the convention until 1864.) This slight persisted even though the social profiles of Black Episcopalians in many ways reflected those of white members of the denomination: They tended to be economically prosperous and generally well-educated individuals who could claim some measure of professional or commercial success, who were drawn to the sober and formal types of worship associated with the Episcopal Church. Additional African American Episcopal parishes were founded in the diocese over the decades, and from the 1960s on many formerly white parishes became largely Black or all Black as neighborhoods changed demographically.

With some exceptions, Episcopalians in the diocese, like the majority of Philadelphians, did not take an active role in opposing slavery during the years leading to the Civil War. Philadelphia merchants had long done a brisk business with the southern states, transporting their goods up and down the Atlantic Coast and to Europe, while other Philadelphians sold them banking and insurance services. Significant intermarriage also occurred between wealthy Philadelphia Episcopalian families and those in the South, especially from Charleston, South Carolina, all of which led to considerable sympathy with the South. To the extent that Episcopalians and other well-to-do Philadelphians supported the subsequent Civil War, they did so more to preserve the Union than to put an end to slavery. Yet the war did cause churches to assess their ministry and their civic obligations—none more visibly than Christ Church, where the congregation divided over such issues as slavery and emancipation. The church emerged from the war as a more “northern” church with a decidedly Republican character.

Individual Episcopalians supported Reconstruction and educational efforts for Black people in the South, but the church took no official position. Episcopalians along with most whites in the Philadelphia region did not question the doctrine of “separate but equal” regarding legal racial segregation or invest much in improving conditions for Black residents of Philadelphia, Wilmington, Camden, or elsewhere.

The Pennsylvania diocese did little about racial disparities until the election of Robert L. DeWitt (1916-2003) as bishop in 1964. He insisted that all Christians were duty-bound to live out the principle of the equality of all humans. DeWitt supported the integration of Philadelphia’s Girard College, which had been limited to “white, orphaned boys.” He joined other Episcopal clergy and laity, along with individuals from other faith communities and the general public, to picket the institution, which was successfully integrated in 1969 after a fourteen-year effort. DeWitt also embraced the so-called Black Manifesto, which various Black clergy and other civil rights activists drew up in Detroit in the summer of 1969, demanding that white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues pay a half-billion dollars in restitution for harm done to Black people during and after slavery. Agreeing with the justice of these demands, DeWitt established a Task Force for Reconciliation, which set up a fund of $500,000 (later augmented to $675,000) to be administered by Black communities for their own benefit.  More than a few Episcopalians withheld financial contributions from the diocese in protest against their bishop’s activism on behalf of racial justice. Still, from the mid-1960s into the early twenty-first century, the diocese, individual parishes in the region, and various committees and organizations associated with the church sponsored a variety of efforts to encourage racial understanding and to heal the wounds of the past.

Role of Women Progresses

The diocese also advanced the role of women. From a very early period, women engaged in a variety of fundraising activities such as organizing church fairs and bazaars to provide funds for special projects. During the 1830s Episcopal women were managing the Magdalen Society Asylum, founded by Bishop White to rescue prostitutes who were “desirous of returning to a life of rectitude.” Two decades later, women from Christ Church established the Dorcas Society, which provided free clothing for the poor. The most widespread women’s activity was support for the church’s missions. In 1872, the national church established the Women’s Auxiliary of the Board of Missions, with branches in almost every parish in the Philadelphia region. Although these organizations were later criticized for consigning women to subordinate roles in the church, they gave women opportunities to develop organizational techniques and to take up leadership roles. The women also learned much about fundraising, as, for example, in their important roles in supporting missionary work overseas. And Episcopalian women missionaries in the field frequently worked to provide educational opportunities and improved working conditions for women.

However, when it came to governance in the church, women had no official role for more than a century and a half after the founding of the diocese. By the early 1950s, several parishes finally permitted women to serve on vestries (a type of lay parish council), and in 1956 the annual diocesan convention voted to allow women to serve as delegates. Nearly two decades later, Bishop DeWitt led the call for the full inclusion of women in the Episcopal Church when he arranged to ordain the first women as priests. In 1973, the triennial convention of the national church had narrowly voted down a proposal for the ordination of women. Then in February 1974, soon after he had stepped down as Bishop of Pennsylvania, DeWitt, joined by three other bishops, ordained eleven women to the priesthood at Philadelphia’s Church of the Advocate. Two years later the general convention finally approved women’s ordination.

Questions of sexuality stirred far more controversy and opposition within the church. In the 1980s, the national church passed several resolutions condemning discrimination against the gay community and those suffering from AIDS. In 1989, Bishop Allen Bartlett Jr. (b. 1929) appointed a fourteen-member commission on human sexuality. Four years later Bartlett ordained as a deacon a gay man who had been in a committed same-sex relationship of twenty years. This action led several conservative parishes and their members to form a group called Concerned Episcopalians that opposed gay ordination on doctrinal and biblical grounds. In 1999, the vestry of St. James the Less, an Anglo-Catholic parish in the East Falls section of Philadelphia, voted to disaffiliate itself from the diocese and claimed ownership of the property. Two years later the diocese filed suit, and in 2006 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the property remained in the ownership of the diocese. In 2002, the diocese deposed the rector of Good Shepherd, Rosemont, another Anglo-Catholic parish, when he and his vestry refused to allow the bishop to make visitations because of the position of the local diocese and the national church position on the question of gay ordination.

As Elsewhere, Membership Declines

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, membership in the local diocese had declined from a high of 84,000 in 1962 to 41,000 in 2017. The church’s controversial stands on race, gender, and sexuality likely contributed to falling numbers, but the Episcopal Church was not unlike other historic, “main line” Protestant denominations in their declining membership—beset as they were by low birthrates, the growing secularization of American society, widespread anti-institutionalism, and strong competition from more evangelical denominations. The number of parishes in the diocese declined during the same period from approximately 170 to 155. The fall-off in parishes reflected socioeconomic changes in urban neighborhoods and the movement of Philadelphians to the surrounding suburbs. Similar declines and migration occurred in the Delaware and New Jersey Episcopal dioceses.

Indicative of the changes underway was the closing of historic Gothic-style St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, at Tenth and Ludlow Streets, to worship in 2017 and its repurposing as a social service community center in 2019. At the same time, the Pennsylvania diocese moved its headquarters to the Gothic-style St. John’s Episcopal Church, in Norristown, Montgomery County. Similarly, the Diocese of Delaware closed its Cathedral Church of St. John in Wilmington in 2014, after serving the diocese for 150 years, because it could not afford maintenance costs and the church was not attracting enough worshipers to sustain it. Even some suburban churches consolidated or moved to share clergy, due to a lack of ordained ministers and declining membership, as, for example, did Christ Church Ithan and St. Martin’s Church in Radnor in 2020.

Despite these changes, the Episcopal Church remained a significant presence in the Philadelphia region, with its many handsome surviving church buildings, social programs, and continued prominence among the region’s social and economic elite.

David R. Contosta is professor of history at Chestnut Hill College and the author of numerous books on a variety of subjects, many devoted to aspects of Philadelphia history. These include A Philadelphia Family: The Houstons and Woodwards of Chestnut Hill; Suburb in the City: Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia; A Venture in Faith: The Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields; and co-author of Metropolitan Paradise: Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Valley. He is also editor and co-author of This Far by Faith, a history of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Before the professionalization of mortuary practices, women known as layers-out of the dead, or shrouders, prepared the body. Layers honored the dead by washing, dressing, and grooming the body. Layers closed the deceased’s eyes and mouth, removed internal organs, blocked orifices, applied alcohol, and filled body cavities with charcoal to retard putrefaction. Their work allowed family members and friends to view their beloved with minimal revulsion. Female relatives and neighbors as well as women who offered their services for pay worked as layers-out of the dead.

Religious and ethnic traditions affected the arrangement of the corpse and the symbolic objects placed in the coffin and burial site. Christian burial tradition dictated that the body be positioned with the head to the west and with the hands resting on the thighs. Simplicity characterized Quaker practices: they used plain coffins, which were sometimes stacked on top of others, and, although proscribed, they marked graves with nondescript headstones. Anabaptists also valued plainness and modesty in their burial customs. Other Protestant denominations provided their adherents with more options. A person might choose to be laid to rest in the church graveyard, in a church vault, or, most prestigiously, in the church itself. Archaeological excavations in the yard of St. Paul’s on Third Street near Walnut Street uncovered burial vaults, evidence of the desire of the deceased, or their relatives, to highlight their socioeconomic standing. In the first half of the nineteenth century, African Americans adorned the bodies buried in the First African Baptist Church cemetery located on Vine Street between Eighth and Ninth Streets in Philadelphia with African ritual items and laid shoes—footwear for the journey to the African homeland—on several coffins. When the deceased lacked financial resources, social connections, or spiritual associations, they were buried without ceremony or coffins in mass graves in areas designated as “Strangers Grounds.” The most important of these was Southeast (later Washington) Square.

By the mid-nineteenth century, formally trained and licensed professionals, including undertakers and embalmers, increasingly assumed the task of caring for the dead. Undertakers orchestrated funerals and embalmers prepared bodies. Philadelphia city directories reveal that men who worked as undertakers and embalmers greatly outnumbered hired female shrouders. In 1867, Philadelphia had 125 male undertakers, one female undertaker, and only four female layers-out of the dead. Undertaking frequently was a family business.

The Civil War, industrial accidents, medical professionalization and specialization, and increasing dependence on hospitals and homes for the incurable contributed to these changes. The massive death toll of the Civil War was a boon to undertakers and embalmers, and the viewing of Abraham Lincoln’s embalmed body by thousands of Americans popularized the technique. Industrial accidents resulting in disfiguring deaths gave rise to new embalming specialties, specifically restorative art. With the growth of hospitals, fewer people died at home; subsequently, their corpses were no longer prepared or viewed there. In the second half of the nineteenth century, undertakers, now most often referred to as “funeral directors,” learned embalming or partnered with embalmers to establish a new profession. Some funeral directors dedicated their practices to specific ethnic and religious communities. Families who desired to show their love and respect for their deceased did so by patronizing these professionals.

Not only did the people who cared for the dead change, so did the vessels in which bodies were buried. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, coffins were often plain, hexagonal, pinch-toed boxes decorated with simple iron handles. Germantown was home to one of the nation’s oldest coffin producers, the workshop of Jacob Knorr. By the end of the nineteenth century, the casket replaced the coffin. Larger, more ornate, rectangular in shape, adorned with elaborate handles, and sometimes topped by a window through which the living viewed the dead, the “casket” was a receptacle that housed a precious treasure. The casket designated the deceased as a unique being, and its extravagance signified the dead’s real or desired class status.

Cremation also gained acceptance in the late nineteenth century. Fears about the spread of disease through improper burials convinced some Pennsylvanians to adopt cremation as a more sanitary option. The country’s first crematory, established in the western Pennsylvania town of Washington, led to the construction of other furnaces, including the state’s second crematory in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Reformers organized societies that promoted cremation instead of burial in both Philadelphia and Lancaster. The Philadelphia Cremation Society, established in 1886, built the city’s first crematorium, and the city Board of Health soon erected a second adjacent to the municipal hospital. New Jersey constructed its first crematoriums in the early twentieth century.

Demographic changes also affected the burial and funeral practices in the Greater Philadelphia region. Diverse ethnic groups brought varied customs. The Irish celebrated the wake, a vigil initially designed to ensure that the deceased was indeed dead. Characterized sometimes by rowdy fellowship, including drinking and joke telling, the wake ended with the sharing of a large meal with family and friends after the funeral mass. Jewish migrants to the region, like the Quakers, favored plain, wooden coffins without nails and introduced their seven-day mourning ritual of Shiva, observed when a loved one passed or married outside the faith. Many African Americans, who journeyed to Philadelphia during the Great Migration, chose to be buried in the South; their remains made their final journeys aboard trains. Arriving home, the bodies were picked up by southern Black funeral directors who prepared them for viewing. Italians who settled in South Philadelphia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries adapted funeral rituals from Italy to their urban neighborhoods. They melded Italian folk beliefs and practices intended to prevent the return of the deceased among the living with a desire for social status, spending lavish amounts on funerals, buying opulent caskets, large flower sprays, and impressive gravestones decorated with photographs of the deceased. To keep the dead from visiting those who remained, they tucked treats, such as cigarettes, into caskets. Family picnics and walks at cemeteries served to keep the deceased happy and provided the living the chance to experience a peaceful, natural setting, away from the hard streets of their South Philadelphia neighborhoods.

Among the most elaborate funerals were those for fallen police officers and firefighters, which broadened the definition of family to embrace fellow service members as well as biological kin. Hundreds of police officers or firefighters participated in these funerals honoring their comrades and highlighting the dangerous but essential work these men and women performed. The wearing of dress uniforms, the placing of mourning bands across badges and on vehicles for prescribed mourning periods, and the erection of end-of-watch memorials both honored the dead and brought comfort to the living.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, digital technology and the environmental movement were changing the region’s funeral practices. Family and friends, spread across the nation and around the globe, paid their respects to lost loved ones through online memorials that allowed viewers to see photographs of the deceased, offer condolences, and share memories. Those who sought greener burial and funeral options turned to home viewings, natural cemeteries such as Green Meadow Natural Burial Ground in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, and the enclosure of their remains in concrete balls deposited in the Atlantic Ocean and used to create coral reefs.

Professional, material, and social factors have influenced the development of funeral and burial practices in the Philadelphia region for centuries. Female layers gave way to male undertakers, coffins gave way to caskets, and cremation often replaced burial. And throughout, religious, economic, and ethnic diversity impacted the choices residents made about their final farewells and resting places.

Karol Kovalovich Weaver is the author of Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (University of Illinois Press) and Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1880–2000 (Penn State Press). Her third book project is titled Powerful Grief: American Women and the Politics of Death. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The path to a German Reformed Church in the Philadelphia area began in Europe in 1517, when Augustinian monk Martin Luther (1483-1546) composed his 95 Theses, initiating the “Reformation.” Within six years of Luther’s Theses, Huldrych (or Ulrich) Zwingli (1484-1531) published the charter for the Zurich (Swiss) Reformation. These doctrines developed further as Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575) and John Calvin (1509-1564) carried them into the western Holy Roman Empire. In that area, at a time of disputes regarding interpretation of the Lord’s Supper, Frederick III of Simmern (1515-76), Elector of the German Palatinate (a region of southwest Germany), sought unity by commissioning the 1563 Heidelberg Catechism. Several Dutch synods also began to follow this style of religious instruction. The Heidelberg Catechism continued as a teaching and preaching tool as well as a guide for the faith of the German Reformed Church (ultimately United Church of Christ) into the twenty-first century.

German and German-Swiss farmers, laborers, artisans, and redemptioners (indentured servants) brought their religious practices to Pennsylvania and the mid-Atlantic region as they migrated to find economic opportunity, peace, and freedom of worship. By the late seventeenth century, German immigrants had settled near Philadelphia in a town they named “Germantown” (incorporated into Philadelphia in the nineteenth century) and began farming in Montgomery and Bucks Counties. With their personal faith, but without pastors, they worshiped in their homes. These German religious folk identified as Lutherans, Amish, Mennonites, Moravians, and Dunkards. By the early eighteenth century, the first official German Reformed congregations were emerging in America. The Reformation had set a path of continued “reform,” thus a “Reformed” German faith, not to be confused with any other German faith. In 1710, Sam Guldin (1664-1745), Pennsylvania’s first Reformed minister, preached in Germantown, but he did not attempt to organize a formal congregation.

1720s: Twelve Congregations

In the 1720s, John Philip Boehm (1683-1749), a schoolmaster, organized twelve Reformed German congregations in Pennsylvania, including the congregations at Falkner Swamp, Skippack, White Marsh, and Philadelphia.  In 1727, George Michael Weiss (1697-1762) and four hundred of his congregants arrived in Philadelphia from the Palatinate. Weiss began to minister to the Philadelphia “church” founded by Boehm. In 1730, Weiss returned to Europe to raise funds for the fledgling church, but he returned the following year with empty hands. He moved to New York and ministered there for the next fifteen years. Following Indian attacks, he returned to Pennsylvania and tended to congregations in Montgomery County until his death. Although Weiss did not remain in Philadelphia, his early congregants considered him the first pastor of the German Reformed Church they continued to cultivate.

Before building the German Reformed Church (“Old Reformed”), congregants worshiped in members’ homes and then in a small frame house on Arch Street that they shared with a Lutheran congregation. In 1741, the German Reformed congregation purchased a lot on the southeast corner of Fourth and Sassafras (later Race) Streets. In 1747, they completed their hexagonal church building, one of the earliest German Reformed churches in America. As time passed, the congregation used a portion of the land later known as Franklin Square as a church burial ground.

German settlements continued to spread through Pennsylvania into Berks, Lehigh, Lebanon, and Lancaster Counties. In 1742, Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf (1700-60), bishop of the Moravian Church, arrived in Pennsylvania. He attempted to unite German faiths—Lutherans, Reformed, Moravians—into one church. These faiths each had unique spiritual confessions, and John Philip Boehm resisted the unification efforts.  Still actively serving German Reformed Christians in central and eastern Pennsylvania, Boehm called on the Dutch Reformed Church in New York to send him more Reformed ministers. The Church answered his call with the second pastor of Philadelphia’s “Old Reformed Church”—Michael Schlatter (1716-90).

When Schlatter arrived in America, he found congregations of German settlers scattered throughout New York and Pennsylvania. Within one year, as directed by his superiors, he organized the Reformed ministers and congregations into a coetus (synod). Given the diversity of German religious sects competing for the devotion of German immigrants, Reformed leaders welcomed this new organization. The second coetus, in 1748, adopted the Heidelberg Catechism. Schlatter continued his work in Philadelphia and traveled through the regional colonies on mission trips. The German Reformed congregation in Philadelphia grew in numbers and in prosperity. In 1774, it replaced the hexagonal church with a larger building, one that could seat three thousand people.

Americanization and Assimilation

In the surge of postwar nationalism that followed the American Revolution and the War of 1812, leaders of Reformed congregations faced issues of Americanization and cultural assimilation. Throughout the eighteenth century, German Reformed churches had conducted services in German. As early at the latter eighteenth century, Lutheran leaders in America discussed the need for their ministers to preach in German and English. During the nineteenth century, congregations began adopting English-language practices both in oral and written forms, a process that took much of the nineteenth century to complete. Fewer in number, Danish Reformed churches moved to English most quickly. Given their German roots, German Reformed congregations maintained close connections with Lutherans, with whom they shared a heritage and common concerns about holding on to German as essential to their identity. The pace and extent of language and cultural adaptation varied depending on the concentration of German speakers in the congregations and the commitment of ministers to encourage at least bilingual worship and instruction.

Beginning in the 1820s, as outdoor Christian revivals and charismatic frontier leaders called Americans toward a democratization of Christianity, “Free Synod” congregations emerged. Their desire to hold on to their strong German identity and not give in to English ways began a long and energetic debate, which ultimately led to a schism in the Reformed Church—Free Synod versus Eastern Synod. In 1821, some German Reformed members (Eastern Synod) proposed an “American-style” theological seminary, which they opened in 1825 on the campus of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  Although they perceived their denomination as “a proper American institution,” their seminary continued using the German language lest it “die out in silence.” The seminary moved in 1829 to York, Pennsylvania; in 1837 to Mercersburg, Pennsylvania; and finally to Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1871, where it became Lancaster Theological Seminary.

Through the nineteenth century, Old Reformed in Philadelphia and other Reformed churches provided basic education to local children, including those too poor to pay tuition. Since Pennsylvania had no public education law until 1834, it was common for both German Reformed and Lutheran churches to offer parochial schools. Both denominations provided their members with secular education before and after the development of public schools. Especially in the early years, German constituted the language of instruction.

The “High Church” and the “Low Church”

In the late 1860s, the German Reformed Church consisted of two factions. The “high church” faction wanted to make worship more formal. This group ultimately established Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  John Henry Augustus Bomberger (1817-90), a German Reformed pastor from Philadelphia, supported the traditional “low church” style of a plain and simple worship. “Under his leadership, the church founded a college in the “village” of Freeland (later established as Collegeville.) The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania granted the college its charter on Feb. 5, 1869, naming the school for Zacharias Ursinus, a sixteenth-century academic and theologian from Heidelberg, Germany.

As Pennsylvania’s population tripled between 1860 and 1920 and its urban population more than doubled, the German Reformed Church maintained a significant presence. A religious survey done by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1926 found the Lutheran Church to be the largest Protestant body in Pennsylvania with 551,000 members. The Reformed Church retained 216,000 members, ranking fifth behind Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists. In 1934, the German Reformed Church merged with the Evangelical Synod of North America, and in 1957, this combined group joined the General Council of the Congregational Christian Churches to organize the United Church of Christ.

The main German Reformed Church in Philadelphia, Old Reformed, also experienced transitions. In 1837, because of traffic noise on Race Street and the inadequacies of its second structure, the church expanded with a third building. Following the Civil War, as the area around the church became enveloped by industry and business, many people moved. The congregation followed the migration of its members and built a new church in 1882 at Tenth and Wallace Streets. In 1925, the congregation similarly followed its people to Fiftieth and Locust Streets. In 1967, however, the Old First Reformed Church returned to its original location at Fourth and Race Streets as part of efforts to revitalize Center City Philadelphia. Engaging more directly with the community, the church began presenting a live crèche at Christmas in the 1970s (changed to a refugee nativity in 2018), opened an overnight shelter for the homeless in 1984, and in the early twenty-first century began hosting a jazz workshop. Through mergers in the twentieth century “Old Reformed” formally became Old First Reformed United Church of Christ. As of 2019, it was one of a dozen Reformed churches in the immediate Philadelphia area and scores of Reformed churches in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Brenda Gaydosh is an Associate Professor of History at West Chester University.  Her research focuses on varied aspects of the Catholic Church—from a biography about Nazi-era German Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg to current research on the Christian bishops in the DDR. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Gospel music emerged from urban African American churches in the early twentieth century, growing out of longstanding sacred Black music traditions. In colonial Philadelphia, African Americans sang sacred songs from their African homelands as well as European-derived psalms and hymns that they infused with African elements. The music became more formalized in the city’s first Black churches in the 1790s, particularly Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1794 by Richard Allen (1760-1831). In 1801 Allen published a hymnal for his congregation titled A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected From Various Authors by Richard Allen, African Minister, the first American hymnal compiled for a Black congregation. Allen later issued expanded editions of the hymnal, which included primarily traditional Protestant hymns along with some he wrote himself.C

While gospel music first developed in urban Black churches in the North, its roots lay in the rural South. Prior to the Civil War, the harsh conditions of slavery in the South produced two major African American vocal traditions: the blues and the Negro spiritual—the former secular, the latter sacred. Spirituals, the great body of African American religious folk songs, served as the foundation for gospel.

Following the Civil War, African Americans migrating from the South brought their musical traditions to northern cities, where the urban environment gave rise to a new kind of worship music, the gospel song. In contrast to spirituals, which were improvisatory folk songs passed down orally, gospel songs were composed, formally structured tunes that incorporated elements of popular music and blues. Their lyrics reflected the new realities of urban Black life.

Charles Albert Tindley

One of the creators of the gospel style, Charles Albert Tindley, moved to Philadelphia during the increasing wave of African American migration from the South at the turn of the twentieth century. Born into a slave family in Maryland and largely self-taught, Tindley became pastor of Bainbridge Street Methodist Episcopal Church (later renamed Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church) in South Philadelphia in 1902. Under his leadership, the congregation expanded significantly and in 1906 moved to its longtime location at Broad and Fitzwater Streets (where it was later renamed Tindley Temple). Tindley wrote gospel hymns, which he began publishing in 1901, the first such songs in the new style to be published. He later issued several gospel hymn collections, published by companies he helped to establish. Through preaching and singing, songwriting, publishing, and radio broadcasts, Tindley became an important figure in gospel music in Philadelphia and beyond. Several of his hymns became gospel standards, including “I’ll Overcome Someday,” which served as the inspiration for the well-known civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” Six of his hymns appeared in Gospel Pearls, a collection published in 1921 that was the first hymnal geared toward African American congregations to use the word gospel in the title.

Tindley sometimes has been called the “Father of Gospel Music,” but most historians give this title to Thomas Dorsey (1899-1993), the Chicago-based pianist and songwriter who originally worked in blues before turning to gospel in the early 1930s. Following in Tindley’s footsteps, Dorsey became a prolific gospel songwriter and promoter. An astute businessman as well as musician, he successfully marketed his songs, founded gospel choirs and conventions, and promoted the career of Mahalia Jackson (1911-72), the most famous gospel singer of the twentieth century. Dorsey and other gospel songwriters of the period, most of whom acknowledged Tindley’s influence, helped to usher in the “golden age” of gospel in the 1940s and 1950s, a time when Black congregations across the nation sang gospel music in their worship services and gospel recording artists and performers enjoyed great popularity.

Several distinct musical styles developed within Black gospel. More-traditional Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal congregations generally took a reserved approach. Their performances, while spirited, retained traditional song forms and harmonies and they rendered the songs in a dignified manner. Conversely, in Pentecostal or “holiness” churches, the music was highly charged and improvisatory, with exuberant shouting, hand clapping, and dancing. The Church of God in Christ, a denomination founded in the 1890s, became the chief home of the Pentecostal style. The repertoire of these churches varied, from centuries-old Protestant hymns, to Negro spirituals, to the gospel songs of Tindley, Dorsey, and others. The use of instruments also varied. Some congregations and performers sang a cappella, eschewing instruments as too secular. Others employed instrumental accompaniment, from just a guitar or tambourine to a full band.

One of Philadelphia’s preeminent churches in the Pentecostal style emerged under the leadership of Ozro Thurston Jones (1891-1972), who moved from Arkansas to Philadelphia in 1925 to assume the pastorship of Holy Temple, a small Church of God in Christ congregation located in West Philadelphia. Holy Temple was originally located at Fifty-Seventh and Vine Streets before moving to Sixtieth and Callowhill Streets in 1935. For a time, the congregation included Elizabeth Dabney (c.1890-1967), a Virginia native who became a leading figure in the Church of God in Christ. She later helped her husband, a singing preacher, establish another prominent Church of God in Christ congregation, Garden of Prayer, in North Philadelphia. Gertrude Ward (1901-81), who moved to Philadelphia from her native South Carolina around 1920, attended the lively services at both Holy Temple and Garden of Prayer regularly, bringing her daughters Clara (1924-73) and Willarene (Willa, 1920-2012). The three later formed the nucleus of the Ward Singers—also known at various times as the Famous Ward Singers and Clara Ward and the Ward Singers—one of the most popular gospel groups of all time.

Singers Drawn to Philadelphia

By the mid-twentieth century, gospel emanated from the numerous churches in the growing Black neighborhoods of South, North, and West Philadelphia, as well as other cities in the region with significant African American populations. Some of the biggest names in gospel music moved to Philadelphia from the South in this period, including the nationally popular male quartets the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Sensational Nightingales. Soon after settling in the city in 1942, the Dixie Hummingbirds secured a daily program on radio station WCAU, laying the groundwork for a long, successful career. In the mid-1940s, Hummingbirds singer Ira Tucker (1925-2008) began staging gospel shows at the Metropolitan Opera House at Broad and Poplar Streets in North Philadelphia. Featuring his own group and other local and national gospel acts, these very successful shows made “the Met” an important gospel venue.

Philadelphia became known especially for its female gospel groups, including the Ward Singers, Davis Sisters, Stars of Faith, and Angelic Gospel Singers. Of these, the Ward Singers achieved greatest success. Performing in elaborate gowns and hairstyles, they took gospel into nightclubs and jazz festivals, which enhanced their popularity but alienated more-conservative gospel adherents. Marion Williams (1927-94) moved to Philadelphia from Florida in 1947 to join the Ward Singers and sang with them for eleven years before breaking away to form the Stars of Faith and later embarking on a solo career. Considered one of the greatest gospel singers of all time, Williams was honored by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1993. Mary Johnson Davis (1899-1982), an influential singer and group leader who moved in the 1950s from her native Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, maintained an active performing career and, with her friend Gertrude Ward, nurtured gospel talent in the area.

Singer/guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-73), perhaps the most successful—and unusual—female gospel artist of the period, moved to Philadelphia in 1957 after years of touring and living in other cities. Major gospel artists routinely received tempting offers to cross over to the more lucrative secular world of jazz, rhythm and blues, and popular music. While a number of prominent gospel singers refused to abandon sacred music, many did make the transition, to the consternation of their more traditional audiences. Uniquely, Tharpe moved back and forth between secular and sacred music several times in the course of her career, enjoying great success in both realms. Tharpe also developed a distinctive virtuoso guitar style, earning her the title “Godmother of Rock and Roll.”

Changes in society, musical tastes, and the music business in the 1960s signaled an end to the golden age of gospel, as well as other Black music styles. While traditional gospel remained popular, a new “contemporary” gospel style began to emerge, incorporating elements of modern popular music and often featuring elaborate musical arrangements and sophisticated recording techniques. Gospel music, both contemporary and traditional, remained an active, thriving tradition into the early twenty-first century in the Philadelphia area. It formed an integral part of the services of Black churches throughout the region and gospel artists continued to enjoy the support of loyal audiences who listened to local gospel radio stations and attended concerts at churches and major venues such as the Robin Hood Dell and Temple University’s Liacouras Center.

Jack McCarthy is an archivist and historian who specializes in three areas of Philadelphia history: music, business and industry, and Northeast Philadelphia. He regularly writes, lectures, and gives tours on these subjects. His book In the Cradle of Industry and Liberty: A History of Manufacturing in Philadelphia was published in 2016 and he curated the 2017–18 exhibit “Risk & Reward: Entrepreneurship and the Making of Philadelphia” for the Abraham Lincoln Foundation of the Union League of Philadelphia. He serves as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Orchestra and Mann Music Center and directs a project for Jazz Bridge entitled Documenting & Interpreting the Philly Jazz Legacy, funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The “First Great Awakening”

Because of its high level of religious and linguistic diversity, the Philadelphia region experienced a wide variety of forms that Protestant revival could take in the first “Great Awakening” of the 1730s and 1740s. When English-speaking evangelical preachers came through Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, their advocacy of “heartfelt” religion merged neatly with the Pietist emphases that many German, Swedish, and Dutch settlers had brought from Europe after their struggles with Lutheran and Reformed church leadership there. Both evangelical and Pietist believers emphasized that individuals can experience the joy of “true conversion” by humbly yielding to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. By featuring many personal testimonies to the transformative grace of God, the itinerant preachers’ meetings tended to cut through denominational, class, and gender lines and lay bare the common condition of all people. Throughout the mid-eighteenth century, most Philadelphia-area churches grappled intensely with the populist implications of this evangelical preaching. When theological precision mattered less than a man’s heartfelt account of his cleansing from sin, clerical authority based on education-based distinctions came under threat.

Early challenges to religious norms in the mid-Atlantic colonies arrived with the immigration of Theodorus Frelinghuysen (c. 1691-1747), a Dutch Reformed missionary, to New Jersey and William Tennent (1673-1746), an Edinburgh-educated Presbyterian clergyman, to Pennsylvania.  While Frelinghuysen cultivated a Pietist devotional life among the settlers of the Raritan Valley, Tennent set up an academy near Warminster around 1735—the first college in the colony. Dubbed the “Log College” after its humble meetinghouse, it produced a number of revivalist preachers prepared to criticize religious complacency among the Presbyterian churches. Most notable among them were Tennent’s own sons, Gilbert (1703-64) and William Jr. (1705-77), who later became founding trustees of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). Gilbert Tennent’s 1740 tract, The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry, issued an opening shot against a Presbyterian clergy more concerned with the prerogatives of their offices, in the Tennents’ view, than experiencing a personal encounter with the grace of God. Presbyterian supporters of the Tennents’ emphasis on conversion became known as the “New Side” in Pennsylvania—akin to the “New Lights” among the Congregationalists in New England who supported Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) and the revivalist preaching of itinerants there. The Presbyterian Synod of Philadelphia, holding up the “Old Side,” pushed the New Side ministers into the revivalist-leaning Synod of New York. The schism illustrated that the awakening could unify as well as fragment churches, depending on members’ emphasis on expressive individual piety or dependable order for authority and worship.

The Tennents and Frelinghuysen found a great boost to their cause when the English evangelist George Whitefield (1714-70) arrived in Pennsylvania in fall 1739 on his second tour up the Atlantic Seaboard. New Side Philadelphians joined “low church” Protestants in thronging to his sermons. Philadelphians did not tire of Whitefield’s preaching during the visits he made over the next twenty years. After Whitefield’s first stay, they raised funds to build a meeting hall at Fourth and Arch Streets to host his sermons—the largest edifice in the city at the time.

The awakening also became a publishing phenomenon for Philadelphia’s printing houses, as the population became eager readers of theological and devotional texts. When Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) published collections of Whitefield’s sermons and journals, demand well outpaced his printing. Germantown printer Christoph Sauer (1695-1758) soon followed with German translations of the evangelist’s sermons. Philadelphia’s newspapermen were happy to print the animated commentaries that Whitefield’s dramatic preaching style provoked. The controversy made good business, pointing to religion’s status as a matter of general public concern.

The awakenings extended to the region’s Native Americans. Among the various German Pietist sectarians who had settled north and west of the city, Moravians usually led cross-confessional worship meetings and they became the most successful of European religious groups in forging trustful relationships with the Native tribes. Their unique forms of affective piety, with prominent feminine metaphors for divinity, were reflected in Natives’ own appropriations of Christianity. Until the Seven Years’ War, Mahican, Lenape, and Shawnee converts lived side-by-side with Moravians in a settlement in the Lehigh Valley. Through the efforts of Presbyterian missionary David Brainerd (1718-47), Lenape converts also set up a “praying town” in Cranberry, New Jersey, where their leaders replicated revivalist themes of prophetic preaching, personal confession, and the power of the Holy Spirit.

The “Second Great Awakening”

The Second Great Awakening is typically associated with “camp meeting” revivals in the 1820s and 1830s on the Appalachian frontier and the “Burned-Over District” of upstate New York. But a new era of religious renewal and organizational realignment had already begun in the Philadelphia region in the 1780s and 1790s. Circuit-riding Methodist preachers made significant inroads among the population during this time. The ministry of Francis Asbury (1745-1816) in the Delmarva Peninsula made it the most concentrated area of American Methodism in British North America and launched him into a position of spiritual authority that he used to organize pastoral care throughout the new nation. The Second Great Awakening emanated from a surge of young men who devoted themselves to pastoral ministry and evangelism, regardless of academic training.

Many free Black residents of Philadelphia, as well as enslaved Black people in Delaware and New Jersey, were attracted to Methodist spirituality. Among them was Richard Allen (1760-1831), who was able to purchase his freedom after his owner experienced a religious conversion and became morally “convicted” that slaveholding was wrong. Allen became a compelling Methodist preacher, traveling throughout the Mid-Atlantic states. He also began preaching frequently at St. George’s Methodist Church and evangelizing Black people in Philadelphia. But as fluid revivals solidified into church routine, racial segregation also became routine in the church. Allen responded by organizing a new Methodist church named Bethel, and his associate, Absalom Jones (1746-1818), formed the St. Thomas African Episcopal Church. Almost thirty years later, in 1816, Allen led seventeen congregations to form the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. The church and its auxiliary societies were among the few national organizations in which Black men and women had the opportunity to exercise leadership, empowering them with a sense of ownership, independence, and participation in church life.

Philadelphia’s role as a center for social reform in the antebellum era made it the setting for the rise of important interdenominational mission and education societies. The Sunday School movement, begun in England in the 1780s, found its prime American model when a group of Philadelphia pastors and merchants founded the First Day Society in 1791. The society paid local schoolmasters to teach boys and girls, as well as illiterate men and women, to read and write while using the Bible as the textbook. In 1817, a new generation of Philadelphia businessmen founded the Sunday and Adult School Union, this time organizing a cadre of volunteer teachers to spread out through the poorer parts of the city with their literacy skills and evangelical mission. Within one year, the union had opened forty-three Sunday schools in the city and was instructing 5,970 pupils. By 1824, the society had expanded nationally, hiring missionaries who started Sunday schools in both urban and rural areas, as well as Native American reservations. Changing its name to the American Sunday School Union, it acted as a major publisher of Sunday school and Vacation Bible School materials throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its missionaries became active advocates for African Americans’ and Native people’s voting and educational rights.

The Awakening took on more immediate political significance through its implications for slavery. Philadelphia’s evangelicals, taking their cues from the successful campaign of William Wilberforce (1759-1833) to end the slave trade in Britain, joined with Quakers to try to purge the sin of slavery. Many itinerant preachers, who stressed the equality of all men before God, sought to persuade white people that their faith entailed emancipating their slaves and supporting emancipation elsewhere. In 1833, abolitionists gathered in Philadelphia to organize the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) and the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society (PFASS), calling for immediate, rather than gradual, abolition. While William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79), an evangelical Baptist at the time, led the AASS, the leaders of the PFASS, such as Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), came largely from the Hicksite Quaker movement. The Hicksites, formed in the 1820s, emphasized that Quaker business and consumer relationships should not be contaminated with associations to enslaved labor. Such heightened interests in antislavery work, however, sometimes encountered resistance from Philadelphia-area religious leaders concerned about politicizing the church to the detriment of other evangelical work.

The “Third Great Awakening”

Philadelphia-area religious leaders pioneered the mass-marketed prayer meetings and tent revivals that characterized the “Third Great Awakening” of the late 1850s, providing a model for successful evangelistic services that continued to influence American religious life into the twentieth century. This third revival began against the backdrop of the Bank of Pennsylvania’s collapse on September 25, 1857. The bank’s failure, amid rapidly declining valuations of railroad companies, reverberated on Wall Street, where the stock market crashed fifteen days later. Over the prior year, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) had been sponsoring a noontime prayer meeting at a church in New York’s financial district. In the unsteady autumn days of 1857, it became a place where unchurched businessmen began to throng.

Through the YMCA network, the idea to hold noonday prayer meetings traveled quickly to Philadelphia, where the fledgling local chapter was led by prominent businessman George Hay Stuart (1816-90) and a young retail clerk named John Wanamaker (1838-1922). In November 1857, they first held prayers in the Methodist meetinghouse originally built for Whitefield, and in 1858 they moved to Jayne’s Hall in the heart of the financial district. Wanamaker also organized a Sunday school in a volunteer firemen’s hall and boosted interest in both meetings by taking out advertisements in the city newspapers under the banner: “Jesus is Coming!”  By March the papers were reporting on a “Religious Awakening,” and Wanamaker needed to organize more sites for noonday prayer meetings around the city’s commercial center and wharves. Even the telegraph companies lent their support by offering to send “revival messages” and prayer requests free of charge during the noon hour. Civic leaders were particularly pleased about reports of spiritual and moral reform among the city’s fire companies, which were previously known to be a source of drunkenness and street fighting.

Likely the most consequential of the Philadelphia prayer meeting converts was Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911). Describing herself as a Quaker-born skeptic of Christianity in her autobiography, Smith initially viewed the noonday prayer meetings as “only another effort of a dying-out superstition to bolster up its cause.” But while grieving the death of her young daughter, she attended a prayer meeting. There, she recalled, “somehow an inner eye seemed to be opened in my soul, and I seemed to see that after all God was a fact—the bottom fact of all facts. … God was making Himself manifest as an actual existence, and my soul leaped up in an irresistible cry to know Him.” Smith went on become a leader within the Holiness movement, which generated many of the religious revivals and controversies of the late nineteenth century. She traveled throughout North America and Europe, emphasizing the possibility of “entire sanctification” and the “higher life,” and wrote the best-selling book The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (1875).

The Methodist-leaning branch of the Holiness movement had an anchor in Philadelphia after the success of two camp revivals in the region in the 1860s. In 1867, an estimated ten thousand people gathered for a camp meeting in Vineland, New Jersey, where participants founded the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness. The second meeting, in 1868, attracted twenty-five thousand people to a farm outside Manheim, Pennsylvania. The Camp Meeting Association chose Philadelphia as its headquarters, establishing an influential missionary board and a publishing house for its many tracts while planning camp meetings around the nation well into the twentieth century.

Leaders of Philadelphia’s 1858 prayer meetings also pioneered the “tent revival,” which became a mainstay of American religious life for more than a century, into the era of evangelist Billy Graham (1918-2018). In spring 1858, Wanamaker approved the purchase of a circus tent capable of seating two thousand people. Dubbing it, appropriately, “The Union Tabernacle” or the “Moveable Tent-Church,” the YMCA moved it from neighborhood to neighborhood, holding services day and night for several weeks at a time. The idea for the tent came from Edwin McKean Long (1827-94), a Presbyterian missionary based in Norristown who had been evangelizing the rural German-speaking population in southeastern Pennsylvania. The casual, festival-like atmosphere of the tent proved attractive to working-class and immigrant residents who might have otherwise viewed themselves as too poorly dressed to attend formal church services or the prayer meetings in the business district. By the time the tent was decommissioned in 1861, the YMCA estimated that between 150,000 and 170,000 people had attended services inside the tent. Fifteen years later Stuart and Wanamaker—by then the owner of the city’s best-known department store—used their marketing acumen to make the revival meetings of Dwight L. Moody (1837-99) a major regional event. Over the course of nine weeks in the winter of 1875-76 more than one million people attended services inside the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Grand Freight Depot, many traveling from rural towns now linked to the center city by regional rail lines.

The large camp and tent meetings proved to be models for evangelism throughout the United States in the industrial era. Most notable among them was the Billy Sunday (1862-1935) campaign in Philadelphia in 1915, an event that received such admiring coverage from the local press that Sunday once quipped that he would point towards Philadelphia when God called him to account for his life: “I gave them your message, Lord, I gave it to them the best way I could and as I understood it. You go get the files of the Philadelphia papers.” It was a comment that Whitefield could have also made 175 years earlier.

Since individuals and single congregations in a large city like Philadelphia experience religious conversion and revival every day, there is an element of artificiality involved in designating specific time periods as “great awakenings.” Still, the designation can be useful to focus attention on moments when increased collaborations among ministers and laypeople across denominational lines create public forums for mass preaching and prayer outside of congregational services; build new organizations for instructing the unchurched; and challenge established authorities whom they perceive to be impeding spiritual and moral reform. The Philadelphia region experienced each of these dynamics during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and many organizations that Philadelphians created during these moments of awakening proved to have national significance.

Hans Leaman (Ph.D. Yale University; J.D. Yale Law School) is Academic Dean and Associate Professor of History at Sattler College in Boston, Massachusetts. He is originally from Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County. (Author information current at time of publication.)