Pennsylvania History: a Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Volume 88, Number 1, Winter 2021, Pp

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"Home Resources": Persistent Localism and Its Demise in the Delaware Valley's Quaker Townships, 1789–1830

Allen Carl Guelzo

Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Volume 88, Number 1, Winter 2021, pp. 1-29 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/779908

[ Access provided at 23 Jan 2021 22:31 GMT from Gettysburg College ] “home resources”

persistent localism and its demise in the delaware valley’s quaker townships, 1789–1830

Allen Carl Guelzo Princeton University

abstract: The case of Springfield and Upper Darby, two predominately Quaker townships in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, shows how transitions to capitalism in the nineteenth century were rarely uniform. The townships persisted in maintaining subsistence characteristics even as other parts of southeastern Pennsylvania were transitioning to capitalist accumulation and urbanization. The principal mediums for this resistance were geographical and religious. However, by the 1820s, the introduction of mill technology eroded geographical resistance and encouraged the outmigration of entrepreneurs to urban environments. Also, a religious schism within the Quakers and the lure of evangelical Protestant sects undermined the religious cohesion of the townships. Springfield and Upper Darby transformed themselves into commercial farm communities with significant industrial components that “tethered” them to distant markets, and in which Quakerism ceased to serve the dominant religious worldview.

keywords: localism, Quakers, Chester County, mentalité, mills

The year 1789 was a peculiar milestone in the life of Pennsylvania’s Chester County. On the one hand, the people of the county were witnesses from afar of the first federal presidential inauguration under the new federal constitu- tion, an event that presented them with new sources of national and central- ized authority and identity. On the other, the county itself moved in the opposite direction by voting to split and form a new county from its oldest settlements, to be known as Delaware County. Looked at from a distance, what the inauguration of George Washington said for national identities,

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the Delaware County division said even more emphatically for the stubborn power of localism. We may define localism in terms of small geographical units that are socially and culturally homogeneous, that thrive on the production and consumption of goods within the boundaries of those units, that share specific places of identity and value within those boundaries, and that exercise a large amount of practical self-governance. Put another way, localism is the physical incarnation of a civil society, or community. It was the contention of James Lemon a generation ago that Pennsylvania never developed localized systems, especially those that were featured in the studies of New England’s social historians of the 1960s: Kenneth Lockridge, Philip Greven and Michael Zuckerman. Lemon’s systems were typified from a very early point by conscious networks of market production and exchange, based on landholdings of 125 acres and more capable of producing for-market surpluses and characterized by religious and ethnic pluralism. They also produced towns (and the crime and violence that accompanied them) that served as central locations for exchange, a contention seconded by Lucy Simler’s studies of Chester County, and they served commercial interests as far removed as the West Indies. The material and consumption vortex of these communities was considerable, and they figure significantly in the account of the “consumer revolution” chronicled by Timothy H. Breen, Paul G. E. Clemens, Cary Carson, and others. As in William Fishbourn’s 1739 “Some Remarks on the Settlement of the Province of Pennsylvania,” the sugar islands were happy to bring “Quantitys of Coined Silver & Gold” to Pennsylvania pro- ducers, “besides ye Produce of those Islands, to purchase Provisions, by wch means Cash was plenty for ye Numbers of People” in Pennsylvania,

and thus Kind Providence Caused ye Country to Encrease in Wealth, Peace & Plenty from Year to Year; so that for ye first 40 years, it was ye Admiration of all People, who saw, or heard of its flourishing Condition, in Lands, Improvement in building houses & Shipping, Manufactures of many Kinds, Encrease in Plenty, Commerce & Trade, & great Numbers of Inhabitants.1

Much of the evidence Lemon, Clemens, and Simler relied upon grew out of the western borderlands of Chester and Lancaster counties. More recent interpreters of the Quaker experience in Pennsylvania have stressed how resistant that experience was to syncretization, economic or otherwise, in

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other places. The evidence of the Delaware County townships, at the older, eastern end of Penn’s settlements, indicates significant reserves of localism, with subsistence freeholds standing as the economic norm. The creation of Delaware County is an ironically symbolic display of the shrinkage, rather than the expansion, of economic and mental horizons. And within the county, two of these townships—Springfield and Upper Darby—show how pervasive and defiant the strength of localism could be in 1789. They also demonstrate how indifferent their material record indicates they could be to the onrush of goods and consumption in seaboard cities, even as relatively close as Philadelphia. Additionally, by 1830, localism was finally undermined by the introduction of new productive technology and the loosening of tra- ditional cultural bands, a process that was not nearly as “incremental” as has been suggested. We should, in this instance, not be looking for capitalist or precapitalism as the only answers in the experience of early Pennsylvania, so much as varieties of participation and withdrawal.2 William Penn’s original plan for his “holy experiment” in Quaker order- liness made a general provision for the laying-out of contiguous tiers of townships along the Delaware River in what Deborah Haines has called “an intentional expression of Quaker community” and the expectation that “its inhabitants should lead their lives therein in pure and simple brotherly love.” “We do settle by way of townships or Villages,” Penn declared, meaning by villages, dispersed family farms laid out on either side of a central road, and Quaker meetinghouses placed appropriately at the center of the townships to establish religious community.3 But this “planned localism” very quickly dissolved, just as Lemon and Simler surmised. Penn’s “First Purchasers” patented their lands not according to proximity to a meetinghouse but according to the exigencies of geography: the nearness of a stream, an enticing meadow, a stand of trees. Springfield’s “First Purchasers” had bought land willy-nilly from Penn’s land agents and the resulting deed map was a crazy- quilt of rectangles, triangles, and quadrilaterals that bear no connection to the location of the Springfield Preparative Meeting (which was located in the northernmost niche of the township anyway, rather than the center). Likewise, Upper Darby’s original seventeen purchases were laid out in long rectangular plots that ran east to west (from Upper Darby’s border with Philadelphia to its border with Springfield).4 Nor did the “First Purchaser” families seem to provide much in the way of local stability, since by 1789, few of the families who had settled in Penn’s time were left in either township. Springfield still had its first settler-family,

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the Lowneses, along with the large Maris clan and the Levises. Upper Darby had the Sellers, Marshalls, Kirks, Bonsalls, and still more Levises. But the overwhelming majority of original names from a century before were gone from the deed maps: Maddocks, Kennerlys, Powells, Leicesters, Foulks, and Yarnalls had disappeared from Springfield, while the Coppocks and Gleaveses were present only through new families like the Crozers, into which they had married. Overall, Springfield numbered only 324 persons (including eight “inmates” and, remarkably, four slaves).5 Additionally, by 1789 the farmsteads themselves had fragmented. In 1682 Henry Maddock and James Kennerly had jointly held 1,500 acres in Springfield, Robert Taylor another 400, George Simcock 490, George Maris 400, and Bartholomew Coppock 400. Upper Darby’s John Bourne held 500 acres by a 1688 patent, William Smith 450 acres, George Wood 650 acres, and Anthony Morgan 450 acres. By 1789 both the landholdings and the names of their owners were gone. According to the 1791 tax assessment, the average landholding in Springfield had shrunk to 87 acres, and in Upper Darby to 86. Only John Sellers (the Pennsylvania politician and the only Upper Darby Quaker with significant ties to the larger world of Pennsylvania) and Isaac Lobb held anything more than 300 acres in Upper Darby; only Samuel Levis did so in Springfield. The constant subdivisions through inheritance and, as the deeds indicate, fre- quent selling-off of portions remade the face of the Quaker townships.6 But there is little to indicate any of this movement was accompanied by the swift inrush of markets. Part of this shrinkage was owed to the limited agricultural success of the townships. A century after their founding, the townships still possessed all the traits of subsistence farming that had prevailed since the days of the first European settlements along the Delaware. Springfield was steeply gullied and hilled, with numerous creeks cutting deep ravines down to bedrock; even today, much of the landscape is still heavily wooded. None of the creeks were sufficient for water transport. Two major road links to markets—the State Road east to Philadelphia and the Amosland Road to the Delaware River—required market journeys of significant time and labor. County courts were originally responsible for appointing overseers of roads and highways, but enforcement was notoriously lax, guaranteeing that the roads would be in perpetually poor repair, and at some seasons of the year practically impassable. (When Nathan Sellers established his wire-mold and paper-making business after the Revolution, he had to maintain his offices in Philadelphia; there was no practical way to conduct matters from the family mill in Upper Darby.) The county appointed a township constable

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who was responsible for drawing up the tax assessment lists, supervising the roadways and overseeing poor relief. But in practice, the office rotated among the township residents. Above all, there were no stores or storekeepers listed in either the township tax lists or the 1790 federal census. Although Pennsylvania was home to over 1,500 mills of various types in the 1780s, the Springfield tax lists enumerated only one grist mill, one paper mill, and three sawmills, none of them valued at more than £100 and none of them housing company stores. Younger sons with any desire for a more aggressive commercial life would, as William Maris (a fifth-generation Springfielder, born in 1781) did, relocate to Philadelphia, set up as a cotton and woolen mill owner in New Hope, open a bank, venture abroad to the Madeira Islands, and die in Philadelphia in 1845.7 The corollary of this geographical isolation was the nonintensive use of the soil and the ownership and employment of only the most basic tools that sufficed for simple agriculture. Springfield and Upper Darby farmers appear happy to have grown a little of almost everything for home consumption. Joseph Maris described the use of his land in a title dispute over property in Marple Township in 1795: ownership of 300 acres, divided into three gardens, three orchards, plus acres of woodland, meadow, and pasture. John P. Crozer, who was raised in Springfield and made a fortune in textile manufacturing (and fame in Baptist philanthropy), remembered that his father owned 173 acres with “a large apple orchard, and choice summer and fall, as well as winter, apples. … In addition to the fruit, we kept a small dairy, with eight or nine cows, and my sisters often helped milk the cows and make the butter.”8 George Lownes’s probate inventory from 1793 lists hay (in stable, barn, and stack) worth 13 shillings, barley in sheaf worth 3 shillings, undressed flax worth £1, wheat in sheaf worth 17s.10d, rye and oats worth £6.7s.6d, indian corn worth £8.1s.3d, and “grain in the ground” worth £10.2s.6d.9 Joseph Gibbons, who also ran Springfield’s liveliest tavern along the Baltimore Pike, died in 1796 owning £19.10s worth of hay, £62 of wheat, £10 of rye £7.10s of oats, £18.15s of indian corn, in addition to buckwheat, potatoes and pump- kins “still in the ground.” The fact that commodities were so specifically rated suggests that food products could be precisely tallied for market exchange rather than barter, but it does not give any sense of whether market exchange was the object. Clothing, as Samuel Crozer would relate years later, “was made at home,” where “every well-organized house had its hand cards, its spinning wheel, and general its loom.” Anyone looking for a random example of localized subsistence

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farming would find it in Springfield Township, and only twelve miles from Philadelphia. “All,” Crozer said, “lived largely by their own home resources.”10 Moreover, hardly a farmer in the townships lacked for holdings in livestock, but the holdings were far from extensive. The tax records, which record only the presence of cattle, disguise the presence of sheep and pigs as well, but not in large quantities. Joseph Gibbons owned 22 sheep, 16 hogs, and 5 stocks of bees; George Lownes had 9 hogs, 7 cows, 3 heifers, 1 bull, 10 sheep, and 3 horses, all of which supplemented the trade he was being taxed for in the 1790s, that of blacksmith. John P. Crozer’s earliest memory of the family farm in Springfield was “walking out with my father—he having hold of my hand—and cousin John Moore, to look at some cattle grazing in a meadow near the house.” The marvel was that he only remembered that much: Crozer’s father also owned 2 horses, 21 sheep, and 7 hogs, above the 11 cows that young John recalled contentedly grazing in the meadow. No one, in other words, held livestock in any particular quantity sufficient to qualify as a grazer or dairy farmer.11 The tools these farmers used suited their tasks, and few township men owned anything more complicated than an axe or two, a wagon, shovels, forks, rakes, and a yoke and plow. Nathan Davis, at his death in Upper Darby in 1793, owned nothing more than three axes, a “sledg, spade, grubinghow, Mall & Wedges” worth $3.50, a “handsaw, Chisels, Augers, Drawing Knife” worth $3.00, a scythe and cradle, two harrows, “3 forks, 1 rake, shovel, dung fork,” and miscellaneous cow chains and harnesses, all for a farm of 200 acres worth a healthy £1155 in the eyes of the tax assessors. Despite his stature as a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, John Sellers died in 1804 owning only two plows, two harrows, “shovels, spades, hoes, forks, rakes” worth $16.50, and “sundry carpenters tools.” Even James Crozer, the grandfather of John P. Crozer, departed this life in 1798 having farmed 110 acres in Springfield with little more than 1 plow + irons £2.5s.0d 1 harrow £0.11s.3d mall, wedges, spade £0.10s.0d 1 cart + irons of another £3.10s.0d 12 When John P. Crozer badgered his father to “allow me to purchase lime or manure” to increase yield,” the father refused; “by clearing hedgerows and thickets, and putting up new fences, things appeared better, yet the lands were but little improved.” Household implements conformed to the same

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pattern. George Lownes’s estate noted “2 pewter dishes, 12 plates, 2 cans … 2 brass candlesticks, decanters … teapots, Cups … ½ Dozzen Chania plates + Bole … 1 table spoon, 6 tea spoons, … basket knife and forks,” all of which were tell-tale marks of the intrusion of consumer culture, but which were also valued at less than £3. John Sellers’s kitchen, for all his standing, contained articles worth only $31 at his death in 1804, when his estate was otherwise valued at $13,030. John Crozer’s “cherry breakfast table” and his “six yellow chairs” were worth only a little more than his “looking glass” to the assessors, and though he died in 1816 owning “plate” worth $129, the fact that he owned only 14 ounces of it did not make it a very serious capital accumulation.13 The “looking glass” was itself an evidence of consumer intrusion, but it appears surprisingly late in the tally.14 The spread of wealth within the townships reflected the patterns of “home resources.” The top 10 percent of the taxables in Springfield Township in 1791 controlled only approximately 33 percent of the townships’ wealth. It took only one man—the lawyer Thomas Levis—to form the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, it took eleven more to form the wealthiest 30 percent, and that in a township of only 62 taxables. In 1794 the amount of the township’s wealth in the hands of the top 10 percent actually decreased to 30 percent, and although Thomas Levis was still king of the mountain, it still required six men (out of fifty-six taxables) to comprise the wealthiest 30 percent of the township. There was, in other words, a fairly broad distribution of the available wealth across the township; neither was there in Springfield nor Upper Darby a class of consist- ently landless poor. Upper Darby had a slightly higher percentage of property-less freemen and “inmates” than did Springfield (which counted only eight “inmates” in 1783 and six in 1790) but there appears to have been no population crush, especially since most of the landless freemen in the townships seem to have been sons who were employed and housed on their fathers’ farms (Curtis Lownes and George B. Lownes appear as “freemen” in the 1790 federal census in Springfield, but were clearly members of the larger Lownes clan). Whatever may have prevailed as a pattern for large-scale use of landless, wage-dependent workers elsewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania, it does not appear to have been the case in Springfield and Upper Darby in 1789. Above all, none of the wealthiest 30 percent in Upper Darby owned more than 300 acres, and Isaac Lobb, the biggest landowner in Upper Darby, actually ranked behind Samuel Levis and John Sellers in overall wealth.15

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What this leaves us with in Springfield and Upper Darby in 1789 is a pair of marginal communities (Springfield, in 1783, was the third smallest of the forty- two townships that then comprised Chester County) of independent farmers, unsubdued by consumption, of the sort that might have made the heart of Thomas Jefferson rejoice. The temptation has long been to think of this condition as a point on a transition, from premodernity to modernity, or from precapitalism to capitalism. But localism can also be a status that exists along with or even beside other conditions. The “transition” can, as Jonathan Leitner has written about the Hudson River Valley, be “the gradual, often contested, and geographically uneven addition” of one layer of economic development in one community alongside an earlier and persistent “layer of self-sufficiency and basic material life” in another. Consumption may well have become a state- ment about social precedence in early American society, but most of the evidence for that is in the towns, and there is no evidence that this drove change in the lives of Springfield and Upper Darby before 1820. Moreover, localism is not merely a material condition. “There is no such thing as economic growth,” wrote E. P. Thompson long ago, “which is not, at the same time, growth or change of a culture,” just as historical geography can be understood as “the history of thought with a bearing on human activity on the land.” While this is not necessarily an argument in favor of a “moral economy” in early America, it does suggest that localism can represent a conscious preference, and that it can only be measured by determining whether the social and religious mentalité of the townships acted to make a virtue of what might otherwise simply be necessity.16 Nothing was more likely to feed the spirit of localism than the uneven relationship of responsibilities established in Pennsylvania between counties and townships. The commonwealth was notorious for its reluctance to create formal governmental structures to deal with poor relief, education, and even fire protection, leaving what Jessica Choppin Roney has called “a gaping hole” in the political infrastructure of the colony, which often had to be filled by voluntary associations. Functions in other colonies that were routinely performed at the county level were never attempted in Pennsylvania. The very office of county tax assessor was itself abolished in 1780, eliminating one of the counties’ principal reasons for being and shifting the responsi- bility for tax collection onto assessors within the townships. Only in 1791 were the counties directed by the state legislature to set up recordkeeping depositories.17

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The excision of Delaware County’s townships from Chester County only exacerbated the weakness of central control. The town of Chester had been the county seat of the original Chester County, but the county’s westernmost inhabitants had grown weary of the distances required for them to travel from the western townships to Chester and in 1786 obtained permission from the State Assembly to set themselves up as a new county with a county seat in Goshen Township in September of 1789. This left the town of Chester as a county seat, only now the seat of a new county—Delaware County— bereft of two-thirds of its area and comprising the lower tier of the original county’s townships, including Springfield and Upper Darby. This did nothing to promote the status of the town of Chester: although it had been founded as long ago as 1652 by Swedish colonists along the Delaware River, its population by 1800 only amounted to between 300 and 500, and Joseph Scott’s national gazetteer described it as a “hamlet” of only sixty houses. “The ancient borough of Chester had been shorn of its glory,” mourned the town’s nineteenth-century historian,

the staffs of office had fallen from the tip-staves’ clutch … the jangling bell ceased to announce that the justices had taken their places on the bench and the innkeepers would no longer mark with anxious long- ings the time for holding the quarterly courts, when the hospitalities should be taxed to the utmost, and money flow into their coffers.18

The new courts that had to be created for Delaware County might have been better able to pull people’s attention and interest out of the townships had it not been for several stumbles newly out-of-the-gate. The new county bench was staffed by appointments made by the Commonwealth’s Supreme Executive Council president, Thomas Mifflin, who rarely selected jurists from within the new county, or jurists at all for that matter. Benjamin Brannon, an Upper Darby man and one of the new judges native to the county, was a tavernkeeper and owner of property so modest that it failed to place him within Upper Darby’s top 10 percent; Springfield’s Thomas Levis was the only local- born justice of the peace commissioned by Thomas Mifflin in 1789. Moreover, the county was hardly a month old before the legality of all the justice of the peace commissions in the county was challenged in the state assembly and declared invalid. Henry Hale Graham, Mifflin’s appointee as President Judge of the new county court, was a lawyer of long experience in Chester County

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(he would eventually sit in the 1790 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention). He turned out not to have been previously commissioned as a justice of the peace; he was compelled to resign two days after his commissioning. He was then hurriedly appointed justice of the peace the next day, and the day after that reappointed President Judge all over again. Graham died only a year later, and was succeeded by John Pearson (1791), James Biddle (1792), and eventually, in 1805, by William Tilghman, a Marylander who would later go on to better things as one of John Adams’s “midnight judges.”19 The most significant indication of the difficulty in asserting the new county’s authority lay in the actual volume of cases referred to its jurisdiction. Cases already begun in the Chester County courts would be continued there in the November 1789 term. This left the new Delaware County court session that met in November 1789 only ten cases to consider; for four of them it handed down no opinion. The quarter sessions in February and May 1790 had more cases on their dockets—thirty-three in each session—but they were mostly “amicability suits,” minor boundary disputes that were left by the court to be settled by mutually agreeable arbitrators. In the case of Abraham Connors and William Brooks, in the May quarter session, “all controversy respecting a line between them is left to the final determination of Peter Hill, John Ogden + Wm Pinnock or any two of them.” The court made no attempt to flex any legal muscle, with the result that people like Jonathan and Peter Green, after settling their dispute out of court, agreed “each to pay his own lawyer,” but dallied for six months about paying court fees. Thereafter, court appearances declined throughout the 1790s; the July session in 1795 entertained only six cases, three of which obtained no judgment, and the October session heard only nine. Not until 1793 was a case deemed worthy of extended mention in the court docket; not until 1795 was a writ of entry put on the dockets and a case written up in its entirety.20 It was not the county seat, but the townships that served as the chief means of socialization in Springfield and Upper Darby. Springfield possessed two cross- roads hamlets in the 1790s: Heyville, where Garrett Road crossed Darby Creek into Springfield, and the intersection of the Amosland Road, Chester Road, and State Road. Both featured at least one tavern, which served as the head- quarters for local tax assessors in 1793, for various self-help associations, and for political meetings. Emor Eachus’s Three Tuns Tavern was the rendezvous point for Springfield’s company of conscripts in 1814 when they were marched to Marcus Hook to repel a rumored British invasion. The officers of the county’s militia regiment used Isaac Cochran’s Blue Ball Tavern “for upwards of Twenty

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years” as “the usual place of meeting to transact business.” None of these taverns was a great emporium. For example, Joseph Gibbons’s Lamb Tavern was valued at only £50 by the assessors in 1791 and 1794 and consisted of little more than a “bar Room” in his own residence which he had equipped with an old oval table, a breakfast table, six Windsor chairs, a cupboard, and an assortment of bowls, glasses, decanters, and “Sundries in the Closet.”21 Much more influential even than the taverns in the lives of the townships were the Quaker meetings, which simultaneously promoted a tolerant, come-outer remnant mentalité while creating a civic culture that protected Quaker authority and control. “Quaker discipline,” remarked Jack Marietta, “governed a Friend’s life from birth to death: the Society registered his birth, oversaw his religious and secular education, approved his choice of spouse, and buried him ‘decently, orderly, and publickly.’” From the beginning, the Quaker resistance to the taking of oaths already made recourse to secular judicial authority difficult. “Nothing but the nature of the case and our common station with our neighbors under the laws of the nation” ought to “bring any of us there.” Otherwise, disputes among Quakers should be settled by “a willingness and readiness to agree it peaceably between themselves, or to submit to a reference … either by arbitration or the meeting.”22 Quakers in Springfield and Upper Darby already had grounds for deal- ing reluctantly with civil authorities, based on the unhappy experience of Pennsylvania Quakers under the 1776 Pennsylvania state government. Springfielders even created their own “Book of Sufferings” to itemize the sheep, wheat, oats, plate, and clothing seized by the state in lieu of military service during the Revolution. But this only rendered them more determined to lay claim to the oversight of a variety of social practices. These, it could be argued, involved nothing more than the internal religious policing of moral practices expected within any viable religious body, but which, depending on the environment and the motivations, might readily grow to become a functional substitute for civil authority. Quakers, claimed Caleb Pusey, one of Penn’s early settlers, assume as their “principle” duty

taking care of the poor, the widows and orphans and about orderly and decent proceedings and consum[m]ating of marriages, to end differences among ourselves and not go to law one with another and as much as in us lays to reclaim disorderly walkers by faithful warn- ing such as are so, and to lay the danger of their state before them and in bowels of love to show such that its their interest as well as

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duty to walk in, as well as to profess to be led by the Spirit, and that their conversation may be as becomes the gospel, that no reproach may come upon our profession by any that profess with us or come among us. We do not find that ever did Lord did limit himself as that he would not so direct and act in or through his people for the law as was foretold was to go forth from Zion, which was Christ’s law to go forth through his people, and Zion is the Lord’s people, for says the Lord by the prophet, Say unto Zion, ye are my people.23

In the meetings, the elders sought to establish a monopoly on certain sub- sets of social decisions that would perpetuate the ideals of a Quaker society that would “come out from among them and be separate,” and inculcate that ideal into the minds of its members, yet do it in a quasi-judicial form. “In these spaces,” writes Barry Levy, “energetic men’s and women’s Quaker meetings supervised Quaker families and also visited outsiders. … Town meetings did not exist with the power and vigor of those in New England and thus economic regulation and local politics generally were comparably limited.” The Meetings in Springfield and Upper Darby—a preparative meeting in the former, a monthly meeting and a preparative meeting in the latter—not only set out sectarian norms of dress and manners but acted to enforce them. George Worrall was summarily disowned by the Springfield Meeting in 1792 because “he has given way to much to undue Liberty in Dress and Address &c. manifesting a general Deviation from our professed Plainness or Speech and Apparel.”24 Mary Brooks celebrated either too long or too loud in December of 1789, because at the next session of the Darby Meeting, “a Complaint” was registered against her for “keeping unprofitable company being from her fathers house at unseasonable Hours of the night & attending a dancing frolic.” The brand of disownment was every bit as serious as any court proceeding, as George Worrall learned, since he was forced to beg the Meeting’s forgiveness after four years of isolation. Nathan Sellers, who had been read out of the Darby Meeting for his participation in the Revolution, knew well the stigma he bore as he went courting, and had to warn his intended’s father of that fact:

I therefore must inform thee that I am declared not to be in Unity with friends for associating and taking up Arms—Under these circumstances I know not whether thee can grant me the Liberty of thy House on the Occasion and yet I sincerely wish it could be done without uneasiness to thyself or incurring the Censure of thy friends.

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“Not to be in Unity with friends”: that was the phrase that lay at the heart of the Meetings’ capacity to discipline its members. John P. Crozer remembered Springfield as a township “inhabited chiefly by Quakers” and where there “was no other place of worship for some miles and few residents of other religious persuasions.” He was not wrong: only one Baptist church existed in Delaware County before 1789; another was founded in Marcus Hook that year, but no others followed until a Baptist congregation was organized in Ridley Park in 1830 and another in Newtown in 1832. The Church of England placed one parish in Chester in 1702 and another in Radnor in 1715, but no other forays into Delaware County occurred until Calvary Church in Aston Township laid its cornerstone in 1836. One Presbyterian congregation was established in Delaware County in 1735, but no Presbyterians organized themselves within the Springfield or Upper Darby boundaries before 1850, nor were the Methodists able to sustain a Delaware County congregation until 1818. In the absence of any other religious authority, the discipline of the Meeting sometimes came close to rivaling civil authority. In 1790 every major Springfield landholder (owning more than 100 acres) was a member of the Springfield Preparative Meeting (including Seth Pancost, Hugh and George Lownes, William Fell, and Owen Rhoads) and at least one of the four inmates.25 With such an overlap between the body-politic and the body- religious, Quaker marriages were recorded by the Meetings, not by the county—not only recorded, but performed, investigated for right standing, and reported upon by representatives sent to observe the conduct of the marriage festivities. The Meetings policed members “for marrying by a magistrate to one not a member,” and those who dared to “marry out of unity” were promptly dealt with. When James Paiste and Elizabeth Dunn of Springfield were “joined in Marriage by the assistance of a Baptist Teacher,” a delegation of men and women Friends showed up on their doorstep, and in two months the couple was “now attending with a paper condemning their deviation.” Not even the Levises could protect Joseph Levis and his bride, Sarah, from the sting of the Springfield Meeting’s displeasure when they “accomplished their Marriage by the assistance of a Magistrate.” Another grim delegation appeared; in one month the Levises “now attend this Meeting with a paper acknowledging their Deviation which was Read + Received.” It certainly seemed to work: the Monthly Meeting reported only four such marriages “out of unity” in 1790, six in 1791, and seven in 1800 for the entire domain of the Chester Monthly Meeting. Those who did not submit to the communal

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rite of humiliation called “acknowledgement” were read out of the Meeting in terms that reminded them that their violation was a trespass against the God who inspired his people with consensual unity:

Whereas Susanna Tyson (formerly Jones) hath had her birthright + made some profession amongst us the People called Quakers but for want of taking heed to the Dictates of Truth, in her own heart, which would have preserved her from evil, has so far deviated from the good rules established amongst friends, as to keep Company, & accomplish her marriage with a man not in membership with us, by the assistance of a hireling teacher after being precautioned, therefore for the Clearing of our Society from the reproach of such disorderly conduct, we hereby declare her to be no member thereof, until She comes to a sight of her misconduct & condemns the same to the satisfaction of this meeting which that she may is our desire for her.

Even attendance at a non-Quaker wedding brought reprimands, as Jonah and Joshua Thompson learned. For them, yet another delegation was dis- patched “to convince them of the Inconsistency of such conduct with our religious Principles.”26 From the beginning, Quakers in Pennsylvania (and elsewhere) had strug- gled to nudge intrameeting litigants and offenders to resolve their differences within the meetings, and with uneven success.27 But this did not discourage the Springfield and Darby Meetings from persisting in the effort. Fornication, bastardy, and drunkenness became the care of the Meetings. Also the Meetings ran their own fund “for the relief of Friends in Necessitous Circumstances,” operated their own schools, and appointed a committee “to take under their Care the Subject … relating to the Oppressed Affricans & their offspring & labour [that] they may find a qualification for promoting their temporal and Spiritual welfare and Report of their service to a future meeting.” The Meetings also forbade their members from using bankruptcy laws. They strenuously discouraged lawsuits in secular courts and sometimes interfered with due process. Seth Evans discovered this in 1791 when he was “reported for intended fraudulent dealings with Philip Kirk who sued him for a bond given by Evans to James Arnold who assigned it to Kirk, the bond having been given in trade for land to be patented to Evans which was afterward done.” Even wills that bequeathed land to Quaker institutions were read in the Meetings, as in the case of Jacob Minshall, who had willed land for the establishment

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of a school. And when James Rhoades, the executor of Caleb Davis’s estate, died suddenly, it was the Springfield Meeting that stepped in and appointed Joseph Evans “to take charge in his stead.” Occasionally, the Meetings ran civil affairs, albeit in a de facto fashion: Springfield township’s two civil officers, the township commissioners, were elected annually, but in the 1790s all of them—John Lewis, William Paist, John Ogden, and Hugh Lownes—were prominent members of the Springfield Meeting. Otherwise, the Meetings inculcated an attitude of distance from civil administration “so that we might be Preserved in a Conduct Consistent with our High & Holy Profession.” The Darby Monthly Meeting wanted to be, on “that part relative to Government, the true followers of him who said his Kingdom was not of this world & that by denying ourselves the Honour of this World, & own Christ before men he may acknowledge is before our Father who is in Heaven.” Curiously, none of the disputes they were called upon to arbitrate concerned a disreputable list for consumer goods, and it can only be supposed that this was so because there was comparatively little in the demand for such goods to take the meetings’ attention. Although Breen reported on how probate records in Chesapeake showed “rapid and unprecedented growth” after 1730 in the consumption of British- manufactured household goods, little or none of that appears on the horizons of Springfield and Upper Darby until almost a century later.28

Thirty years and a generation later, the localized world of the Quaker townships had changed beyond recognition. The chief agency of this transformation was technology, not consumption: the introduction of British-style textile manufacturing, employing the waterpower offered by Delaware County’s streams and creeks, and part of the larger Delaware River water- shed. It happened quickly rather than gradually. “Opinions have prevailed in America that manufacturing employments are injurious to the best interests of the country,” observed Tench Coxe. He continued, “in a country thus circumstanced, producing the great raw materials for manufacture and pos- sessing unlimited power by water and resources of fuel,” for “manufactures” to be “arrested on the frontier of Pennsylvania … would be highly criminal.” With the coming of the textile mills, the localized worlds of the townships would dissolve, the demand for improved transportation would dispel isolation and open demand for commercial farming, and the moral command of the Meetings would crumble. The new Pennsylvania state government of the 1790s, strongly motivated by rivalry with New York and Maryland for the development of backcountry trade, sanctioned the use of chartered

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corporations to create turnpikes and canals. In 1810 state investment in turnpikes came to only $61,937; by 1820 it totaled over $1 million for turnpikes alone. Also, capital for individual economic development would emerge from both Alexander Hamilton’s new financial system and the forty state banks that the Pennsylvania state government chartered by 1814 (including, in that year, the Bank of Delaware County).29 Land once limited to subsistence farming now began to soar in market value and, at the same time, to be turned to commercial-farming uses. The 164 acres that tavernkeeper Joseph Gibbons owned in 1802 were valued then at $3,756. By 1808, that was up to $5,915, and in 1816 $13,825. Joseph Levis’s 160 acres were worth $4,065 in 1802 but fetched $12,965 in 1816; even the 60 acres of Matthew Ash of Upper Darby rose from $1,488 in 1802 to $4,175 in 1813. George B. Lownes began investing in new rakes, rollers, harrows, and plows, and began plowing up his marginal lands to grow wheat and hay for market sale. Jesse Beckerton of Springfield turned to growing hay only and began buy- ing his “pease” and barrels of fish from Philadelphia. By the time of his death in 1804, John Sellers’s father had already converted more than half his cultivation exclusively to corn. In return, Quaker households began sprouting more and more expensive and fashionable consumer goods, like Benjamin Brannon’s two mahogany desks, card tables, bookcases, and linens. Or, they turned specula- tors themselves: although Jesse Beckerton’s land in 1793 was assessed at £432, he began investing instead, and at his death held the notes of six different individuals totaling £547, leaving an overall estate of £1467/9s. George B. Lownes was even more aggressive: his taxable land was assessed at his death in 1816 at $14,520, but the bulk of his wealth turned out to be in financial instruments— bonds, mortgages, notes, and stock—worth $68,612.99. Nor did this capital investing stay localized. John Sellers died owning twelve shares of Bank of North America stock worth $6,720 (half his net wealth), two shares of Bank of Pennsylvania stock worth $1,008, in addition to the $395.25 he had on demand deposit in the Bank of North America. Even John Crozer, dying in 1816, was able to leave his wife and son, John P., $3,479.64 in bonds and mortgages.30 From the mid-1700s, many Quakers had eyed the growth of “luxuries” as a stain on the purity of Quaker life and producing what John Pemberton denounced as “heaviness, dryness and gloom.” Anthony Benezet demanded in 1758:

That a man should labour to be rich, and amass wealth, a state which our Saviour declares to be accompanied with snares and lusts, which

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tend to destroy the soul—and that this should be attained by the increase and importation of a commodity or commodities, which, from the quantity already imported, proves the ruin of so many thou- sands—is this keeping clear from defilement, and washing our hands in innocency? Now, that such a person shall esteem himself, and be esteemed, a religious man, and perhaps be the more regarded, even by religious people, because he is rich and great, is a mere paradox; yet is it too often the case.31

The ground, however, had been shifting under the feet of Benezet and Pemberton for decades by the time it caught up with Springfield and Upper Darby, and there was no real hope of stopping it. As the sources of wealth changed in the townships, so did its distribution. By 1808 Springfield had become a community where the upper 10 percent of the population controlled over half the wealth, and where propertyless freemen for the first time outnumbered the landed heads of households. In Upper Darby Township the balance was also shifting toward greater wealth in fewer hands. The 1802 and 1804 tax assessments indicate that the eighteen men who comprised the top 10 percent of Upper Darby’s land-based wealth also held 55 percent of the total land-based wealth in the township; at the other end of the spec- trum, propertyless freeman and inmates outnumbered the landed by 108 to 71. Moreover, few of the propertyless were any longer younger sons, living and working on farms they expected to inherit; only eleven of the freemen identified themselves as farmers. Even the pattern of landholding itself had changed, with fewer acres for the many and engrossed holdings of 200 acres or more becoming the dominant shape for the well-to-do.32 Many of the propertyless were now working in the new textile mills that sprouted across the surface of the townships and along their watercourses. These mills were one of the principal solvents of localism, and yet they were not a revolutionary appearance to be fiercely resisted under a Luddite banner of localism. If anything, the appearance of the textile mills was a short step, technologically, beyond the small-scale milling that the abundant waterways of Springfield and Upper Darby had long afforded. In 1789 Springfield had a grist mill, a paper mill, and three sawmills, although all of them small-scale operations (Thomas Levis had a sawmill but it was rated at only £100 in 1791; John Haycock’s sawmill was rated at only half that). But in 1816 Curtis Lownes took over his family’s small paper mill on Lownes Run and turned it into a three-story carding mill; George B. Lownes in turn rented the mill

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to the textile entrepreneur Samuel Riddle, and by 1835 it housed two carding engines, a drawing frame, 700 spindles, and two “mules” of 228 spindles. Joseph Gibbons Jr. left his father’s tavern to build a three-story cotton- spinning mill on Lownes Run, while Oborn Levis revamped the grist mill on Darby Creek into a double-vat paper mill that employed twenty-three hands. John Lewis Jr. built and operated another paper mill on Crum Creek in 1811, until his nephews John Rease Lewis and Mordecai Lewis converted it to cotton spinning. Upper Darby’s mills multiplied even more furiously, taking advantage of the deeper streams running through the township. Isaac Lobb sold the dam rights to Darby Creek, where he owned 300 acres, to Asher Lobb in 1812, and Lobb erected there a stone cotton-factory of four stories, with 30 carding engines, 32 looms, and 3056 spindles that could spin 3,300 pounds of cotton weekly. Thomas Garrett followed suit, building a three-story cotton factory along Darby Creek where he purchased dam rights from Samuel Levis in 1807 and filled his mill with seven carding engines, 120 spindles, 444 throstle spindles, 660 mule spindles, worked by 24 operatives. Moreover, few of these operatives had any sense of shared life with the other inhabitants of the townships. Springfield and Upper Darby had been immune to the waves of German and Scots Irish immigrants flowing west into the Pennsylvania interior through Philadelphia, but not after 1800. Thomas Garrett recruited immigrant operatives and housed them in their own tenements by the mill on Darby Creek, and the Lobb cotton factory employed so many Irish immigrants that a Catholic mission was established nearby. An entire settlement of Irish immigrant mill workers, established by immigrant entrepreneur Dennis Kelly and named Kellyville, had 500 residents and five mills operating on Darby Creek by 1847. If the mills represented capitalism, their appearance was an evolution, not an insurrection.33 No two individuals summed up these changes better than Nathan Sellers and John P. Crozer. Born in 1751, Sellers came from an “enterprising” family, in that his father, John Sellers, had already experimented with the erection of water-powered saw- and grist mills on the family farm along Cobbs Creek and as early as 1769 made wire-screens for cleaning wheat and flaxseed. Nathan Sellers expanded on his father’s penchant for invention by setting up a wire- drawing and mold-making shop in Upper Darby whose products became so well known that he was enlisted to make the wire paper-molds for the bank notes of the Continental Congress. He went on to serve banks throughout the new republic, from New England to the Bank of Pennsylvania, and when

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he retired, the chief laurel he could rest upon was that of “Pioneer paper- maker of America.” Except, of course, that he had no intention of resting: “The human family must live by labor, and therefore it seems a duty and cannot be dishonorable as many erroneously deem it, and I desire always to be thankful that I so think and that I have been able to work.” In a paper Sellers read to the American Philosophical Society in 1811, he declared that there was nothing that human ingenuity could not now do: “The persever- ing labours of the human mind, to effect useful purposes, seldom fail.” The mechanical restlessness of those unfailingly “useful purposes” was now to replace the complacency of the subsistence society in which Nathan Sellers had grown up. Sellers built the earliest cotton mill in Delaware county in 1798, and he was joined by the Bonsalls, Levises, Tysons, and Trumans in constructing thirteen other mills in Upper Darby in the 1790s. When Sellers took his old friend Mark Willcox to dine at Joseph Gibbons’s tavern in 1823, the chief landmarks Sellers was proud to point out were a paper mill and cotton factory.34 John P. Crozer’s principal contribution to the demise of localism began when he sold the family farm in Springfield after his father’s death in 1816. He sold it with reluctance. “I thought of grazing, dairying, vegetable farming—every plan which my reason or fancy could suggest … but all in vain.” The old ways of farming would never suffice. But the purchaser of the farm, George Leiper, hired Crozer to run a new sawmill he had built on Ridley Creek, three miles above Chester, and thus joining what became a new large-scale enterprise for turning the townships’ expansive wood lots into sawn capital. From there Crozer went steadily upward, as did many other “mechanics” of humble origin. He rented space in Leiper’s mill to install cotton-spinning spindles and in 1824 he purchased a new mill on Chester Creek, built a small house there, shifted from spinning yarn to cotton cloth, and bought new properties. In 1845 he built a spacious home outside Chester, where he began revolutionizing the town as a major manufacturing and shipbuilding center, complete with foundries, factories, and shops. Crozer turned his hand to town development, building up Chester’s new Third Ward in 1849, and the two grew apace.35 In 1827 the first steam-powered factory in Chester had “produced more sensation among the simple villagers than did the downfall of the French monarchy.” By 1870, Chester boasted twenty-eight steam-powered cotton and woolen mills, five shipyards, eight machine shops, and twenty other manufacturing establishments, along with two short rail-lines—the Chester Creek Railroad and the Media and Chester

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Narrow Gauge Railroad—to connect Chester with its Delaware County hinterlands.36 As Chester increased in economic stature, so did its administration and courts reassert new and more ambitious controls over the life of the townships. The once-dormant courts now sprang to attention, with the 1818 court sessions hearing over eighty cases each quarter; by October 1819 the courts were in virtually continuous session to handle 111 cases each quarter. The nature of the cases changed, too. Personal lawsuits of up to $12,000, divorce suits, massive debt hearings, and litigation initiated by the Bank of Delaware County were all part of a movement away from local oversight to the authority of the county. At the same time, the Meetings were losing more and more of their control over quasi-legal matters, as a shocked Darby Meeting discovered when Joseph Clement sued a Friend in Chester, despite “the matter in dispute between them” having been assigned by the Meeting “to Arbitrators, he giving his word to abide by their decision which he afterwards refused.” The Springfield Meeting made the same discovery when Joseph Levis refused “to abide by the award of arbitrators chosen to settle a difference between himself and a fellow member.” Chester, as the county seat, had triumphed, and by 1820 the independence of the townships was drawing to a close. With the opening of the first of the new common schools in Springfield in 1836, even the Meeting’s monopoly on education was at an end.37 If the demise of localism exhibited signs of conflict, they were best seen in the internal wounds inflicted in the post-1789 generation in the Quaker meetings, in the form of the Hicksite Schism. A New York Quaker, Elias Hicks had become a traveling Public Friend in 1778, and the message he preached was a call for a return to the pure antinomianism of seventeenth- century Quakerism. He rejected anything that looked like a creed, denounc- ing most of the Society of Friends as “dry and formal.” Hicks first visited Springfield and Upper Darby in May of 1813, and again in 1819, and the lines of opposition were rapidly and furiously drawn. The Chester Monthly Meeting split into Orthodox and Hicksite factions, followed by the Darby Meeting; Springfield Quakers remained officially Orthodox, but only by reading half-a-dozen Hicksites out of their fellowship. The War of 1812 created still more stress on the Meetings as Quakers in the townships came under particularly fierce pressure to yield to war fever. Samuel Bunting, Joshua and Reuben Bonsall, Isaac Brooks, and Charles Almore were read out of the Darby Meeting “for violating our peaceable principles by volunteering themselves in a military company,” and still more

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were suspended by the Chester Monthly Meeting, except that this time few showed any inclination to repent.38 The Meetings also now faced a rival religious challenge from the Second Great Awakening, as evangelical Protestants began to acquire converts within the townships. John P. Crozer was won to the Baptists when Dr. William Staughton, of Philadelphia’s First Baptist Church, came to Springfield to preach a funeral sermon at the Pennock farm. “Baptist preaching was had fre- quently at our neighbor Pennock’s,” Crozer recalled, and Staughton’s “preaching at this time and afterwards made an impression on the minds of a number.” When Crozer moved to Chester, he joined the original Marcus Hook Baptist congregation and then became the prime mover of the Upland Baptist congregation (only the fifth in Delaware County) in 1852. Methodists were also making inroads, and the Springfield Meeting began to make nervous references to those who “had join’d the Methodists.” George B. Lownes turned his back on the Quakers in favor of Protestant evangelicalism and in his will provided for the construction of the first non-Quaker religious building in Springfield to be devoted to

the doctrines of the Christian religion as set forth in the New Testament, and especially in the doctrine of the proper divinity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and in the efficacy of his atonement which he made for all mankind, by offering himself a propitiatory sacrifice for their sins, without the gates of Jerusalem.

Even the Swedenborgians challenged the Meetings, and in 1819 they founded a branch of the Church of the New Jerusalem in Upper Darby. Included in its membership were Charles and Samuel Sellers and Edward and Garrett Levis. Just how closely economic change and religious challenge could oper- ate together was underscored by the fact that these Swedenborgian novices first met in the picker room of Thomas Kent’s cotton mill, preached to by an English operative from the Clifton mills.39

With the removal of the Meetings as centers of communal organization, the transformation of Springfield and Upper Darby into commercial farm and industrial communities, dependent on outside markets, outside interac- tion and outside laws, neared completion The townships now became the homes of the people Stephen Innes described as “tethered to the market.”40 Except, of course, that this transformation was significantly delayed beyond

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the pattern laid out by James Lemon, Paul Clemens, and Lucy Simler, who located the “commercialization” of southeastern Pennsylvania long before 1789. (Indeed some farms in Springfield were still producing largely for in- township exchange as late as the 1920s.) The examples of Springfield and Upper Darby represent the flexibility of communities, even those in close physical proximity to each other, to travel different economic and cultural paths, and at different rates of time, rather than a stark, comprehensive binary. The principal price paid for commercial and secular success was the townships’ localism; in another hundred years, they were recreated again as suburban residential extensions, not of Chester, but of Philadelphia. There is a hint of economic determinism in tracing this transformation, but only a hint. Community qua community is a perception, not a statistic. In Springfield and Upper Darby, no sense of localism would have been con- ceivable without the mental universe and moral authority established by the Meetings. Community in the townships could only really be said to have changed when the world of the Meetings finally gave way to John Crozer’s, George Lownes’s, and Nathan Sellers’s new world of work and life.

allen carl guelzo is the Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University and director of the James Madison Program’s Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship.

NOTES

1. On localism, see Gregory T. Knouff, The Soldiers’ Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 1–5; Susan E. Clarke, “The New Localism: Local Politics in a Global Era,” in The New Localism: Comparative Urban Politics in a Global Era, ed. Clarke and Edward G. Goetz (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1993), 5; Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak, The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2017), 4–6. On the advent of a consumer revolution in the mid-eighteenth century, if not before, see Paul G. E. Clemens, “The Consumer Culture of the Mid-Atlantic, 1760–1820,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 (October 2005): 579; Timothy H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 49, 52, 63; Cary Carson, Face Value: The Consumer Revolution and the Colonization of America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 14, 113. See also Alan Tully, “One Quaker’s View: William Fishbourn’s

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Remarks on the Settlement of Pennsylvania,” Quaker History 66 (Spring 1977): 55; Matthew C. Ward, “The ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ Destroyed: The Seven Years’ War and the Transformation of the Pennsylvania Backcountry,” Pennsylvania History 74, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 255, 260–61. 2. James Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (New York: Norton, 1976), 28–29, 64–65; Lucy Simler, “Tenancy in Colonial Pennsylvania: The Case of Chester County, Pennsylvania,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (October 1986): 542–46; Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 4–5; John Smolenski, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 8–9; Clemens, “Consumer Culture,” 579. For those who have argued to the contrary— that money and credit did not factor significantly in some early American economies—the classic argument has long been Michael Merrill, “‘Cash Is Good to Eat’: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review 3 (Fall 1976): 42–71. 3. Deborah Haines, “William Penn’s Townships, the Cheshire Friends, and the Shape of Community in America,” Quaker History 101 (Fall 2012): 35, 38, 44; William Penn, “A Further Account of the province of Pennsylvania” (1685), in Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey and Delaware, 1630–1707, ed. A. C. Myers (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), 263. 4. Francis Daniel Pastorius, “Circumstantial Geographical description of Pennsylvania” (1700), in Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey and Delaware, 380; Thomas J. DiFilippo, The History and Development of Upper Darby Township, 2nd ed. (Upper Darby, PA: Upper Darby Historical Society, 1992), 12–13; James Lemon, “The Weakness of Place and Community in Early Pennsylvania,” in European Settlement and Development in North America, ed. James R. Gibson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 190–92; Lemon, Best Poor Man’s Country, 99. A “preparative” meeting was the most basic stage in the hierarchy of Quaker Meetings, and often functioned as a local prelude to the activities of a Monthly Meeting. 5. “Inmates” was a term applied to non–property owners, usually single males but often married or widowed females, who occupied rooms in a landholder’s house or a cottage on the landowner’s property, and who worked for the landholder for wages. See Simler, “Tenancy in Colonial Pennsylvania,” 547, and Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 292. 6. James T. Lemon and Gary B. Nash, “The Distribution of Wealth in Eighteenth Century America: A Century of Change in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1693–1802,” Journal of Social History 2 (1968): 1–24; Benjamin H. Smith, Atlas of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, Containing Nineteen Maps Exhibiting the Early Grants and Patents (Philadelphia, 1880); and Delaware County Tax Assessment

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Docket, 1791, Delaware County Courthouse, Media, Pennsylvania (hereafter DCCH). Sellers was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1768 and was a member of the local committee that observed the Transit of Venus a year later. William Barton nevertheless described him simply as “a sen- sible and ingenious country-gentleman, possessed of some skill in mathemati- cal and astronomical science.” Whitfield J. Bell, Patriot-Improvers: Biographical Sketches of Members of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997), 1:500–503; William Barton, Memoirs of the Life of David Rittenhouse (Philadelphia: Edward Parker, 1813), 162, 227. 7. S. K. Stevens and D. H. Kent, County Government and Archives in Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1947), 83; Stevenson W. Fletcher, Pennsylvania Agriculture and Country Life, 1640–1840 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1950), 249; Haines, “William Penn’s Townships,” 45–46; William McEnery Offutt, Of ‘good Laws’ and ‘good Men’: Law and Society in the Delaware Valley, 1680–1710 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 12–13; Delaware County Assessment Docket, Springfield, 1791, DCCH; William W. H. Davis, History of Bucks County, Pennsylvania: From the Discovery of the Delaware to the Present Time (New York: Lewis Publishing, 1905), 2:190. 8. Court Appearance Docket, November 1789–January 1806, DCCH; John P. Crozer, Biographical Sketch of John P. Crozer, written by himself (Philadelphia, 1860), 29–30; James Wheaton Smith, The Life of John P. Crozer (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1868), 36. 9. The “d” stands for “pence.” 10. John P. Crozer, “Early Manufactures and Manufacturers of Delaware County,” Proceedings of the Delaware County Historical Society 1 (September 1895–December 1901), 133; Michael V. Kennedy, “‘Cash for His Turnups’: Agricultural Production for Local Markets in Colonial Pennsylvania, 1725– 1783,” Agricultural History 74 (Summer 2000): 589. 11. George Lownes Inventory (hereafter Lownes Inventory), Will Book A, p. 119, no. 55, Register of Wills Office, DCCH (hereafter ROW–DCCH); Joseph Gibbons Inventory, Will Book A, p. 78, no. 100, ROW–DCCH (hereafter Gibbons Inventory); Crozer, Biographical Sketch, 14; Smith, Life of John P. Crozer, 36–37; John Crozer Inventory (hereafter Crozer Inventory), Will Book B, p. 349, no. 461, ROW–DCCH. 12. Nathan Davis Inventory, Administration Docket no. 1, p. 13, no. 51, ROW– DCCH; Delaware County Tax Assessment Docket, Upper Darby, 1794, DCCH; John Sellers Inventory, Will Book A, p. 434, no. 232 (hereafter Sellers Inventory); James Crozer Inventory, Will Book A, p. 252, no. 125, ROW–DCCH. 13. The inventory does not explain, but the general use of the term “plate” in probate inventories meant silver or gold plate. It was, so to speak, a way of investing cash when there were no banks. 14. Crozer, Biographical Sketch, 29; Lownes Inventory; Sellers Inventory; Crozer Inventory; Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement

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in the Delaware Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 237. On looking-glasses and candlesticks as evidence of consumer culture, see Clemens, “Consumer Culture,” 584. Daniel Defoe, The Compleat English Gentleman, 151. 15. Delaware County Tax Assessment Dockets, Springfield, 1791, 1794, DCCH; Duane E. Ball, “Dynamics of Population and Wealth in Eighteenth-Century Chester County, Pennsylvania,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1976): 638–39; Jack Marietta, “The Distribution of Wealth in Eighteenth-Century America: Nine Chester County Tax Lists, 1693–1799,” Pennsylvania History 62 (Fall 1995): 534; Paul G. E. Clemens and Lucy Simler, “Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 110, and “The ‘Best Poor Man’s Country’ in 1783: The Population Structure of Rural Society in Late-Eighteenth-Century Southeastern Pennsylvania,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133 (June 1989): 236, 247; Simler, “The Landless Worker: An Index of Economic and Social Change in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 114 (April 1990): 166; Delaware County Tax Assessment Dockets, Upper Darby, 1791, 1794, DCCH. 16. Jonathan Leitner, “Transitions in the Colonial Hudson Valley: Capitalist, Bulk Good, and Baudelian,” Journal of World-Systems Research 22 (2016): 214–16; E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 97; L. Guelke, “Historical Geography and Collingwood’s Theory of Historical Knowing,” in Period and Place: Research Methods in Historical Geography, ed. Alan Baker and Mark Billinge (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 193; Clemens and Simler, “The ‘Best Poor Man’s Country’ in 1783,” 249. For a critique of the “moral economy” interpretation, see Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast,” Journal of American History 90 (September 2003): 439. In much of the debate over whether early American economies were capitalist or precapitalist, a great deal of energy was expended in showing how one area appeared to be one thing, while another appeared to be another, with the discovery of each invalidating the other; less thought was devoted to how the two might exist side by side, depending on geography and social personality. Despite the emergence of consumption as a marker of social precedence in the towns, there is no evidence of such change in Springfield and Upper Darby (Carson, Face Value, 62). 17. Jessica Choppin Roney, Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 58. 18. Charles Palmer, A History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania (Harrisburg: National Historical Association, 1932), 1:77–78; Henry Graham Ashmead, History of Delaware County (Philadelphia, 1884), 80–81; Joseph Scott, United States Gazeteer (Philadelphia, 1795); Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country, 99.

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19. Ashmead, History of Delaware County, 84, 238–40; John W. Jordan, A History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and Its People, 2 vols. (New York, 1914), 1:255; Palmer, History of Delaware County, 1:209; Samuel T. Wiley, Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia of Delaware County, Pennsylvania (Richmond, IN: Gresham Publishing, 1894), 97, 404. 20. Court Appearance Docket, November 1789–January 1806, DCCH. On the long habits of town merchants in avoiding courts and settling disputes by arbitration, see Lamoureaux, “Rethinking the Transition,” 448. 21. Ashmead, History of Delaware County, 730; Gibbons Inventory; see notation in Delaware County Tax Assessment Docket, Springfield, 1793, DCCH 22. Ezra Michener, A Retrospect of Early Quakerism; Being Extracts from the Records of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the Meetings Composing It (Philadelphia: T. Ellwood Zell, 1860), 269–70; Smolenski, Friends and Strangers, 290; Marietta, Reformation of American Quakerism, 4, 30. 23. R. W. Tucker, Springfield Meeting: The First 300 Years, 1686–1986 (Springfield, PA: Springfield Monthly Meeting of Friends, 1986), 35; Henry J. Cadbury, “Caleb Pusey’s Account of Pennsylvania,” Quaker History 64 (Autumn 1975): 122. 24. Offutt, Of ‘good laws’ and ‘good Men,’ 146–48; Chester Monthly Meeting (CMM) minutes, September 21, 1792, Friends Historical Library (FHL), Swarthmore College. The Chester Monthly Meeting did not actually meet in Chester, but in Providence Township, at the center of the five local meetings that comprised the Delaware County Quaker meetinghouses, and was chiefly a business meeting. See Karen Guenther, “Social Control and Exeter Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, 1737–1789: A Research Note,” Pennsylvania History 57 (April 1990): 151; Barry Levy, “Levelers and Fugitives: Runaway Advertisements and the Contrasting Political Economies of Mid- Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts and Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 78 (Winter 2011): 9. 25. Joan M. Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 12; Wiley, Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia, 101–2; Jordan, History of Delaware County, 2:400, 404, 407; Simler, “The Landless Worker,” 181; John Pitts Launey and F. Edward Wright, eds., Early Church Records of Delaware County, Pennsylvania (Westminster, MD: Family Line Publications, 1997), 208–20. 26. Darby Monthly Meeting (DMM) minutes, August 28, 1788, and CMM minutes, February 23, March 3, May 29, June 29, 1789, and July 25, 1791, FHL); Wiley, Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia, 98; Launey and Wright, eds., Early Church Records of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, 208–11; Levy, Quakers and the American Family, 133–37. 27. George S. Odiorne, “Arbitration and Mediation Among the Early Quakers,” Arbitration Journal 9 (1954): 161–69; F. Peter Phillips, “Ancient and Comely

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Order: The Use and Disuse of Arbitration by New York Quakers,” Journal of Dispute Resolution 1 (2016): 88–91; Jerold S. Auerbach, Justice Without Law? Resolving Disputes Without Lawyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 28–31; as at least one example of success in imposing mediation outside the courts, see the case of Thomas Cope, a Philadelphia Quaker merchant who grudgingly agreed to a settlement imposed by “the referees” that he nevertheless felt was ‘an act of injustice to pay.” Cope (diary entry for March 5, 1804), in Philadelphia Merchant: The Diary of Thomas P. Cope, 1800–1851, ed. E. C. Harrison (South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions, 1978), 151. 28. Offutt, Of ‘good Laws’ and ‘good Men,’ 154; DMM minutes, January 1, 1789 and December 1, 1791, CMM minutes November 28, 1791, FHL; Springfield Preparative Meeting minutes, June 24, 1819, FHL; “Joseph Rhoads and Hannah (Evans) Rhoads,” in Quaker Biographies (Philadelphia: Religious Society of Friends, 1917), 2:12; George W. Belk, Springfield Township, 1686–1976 (Springfield: Springfield Bicentennial Commission, 1976); DiFilippo, History and Development of Upper Darby Township, 34; Tucker, Springfield Meeting, 21; Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 52. 29. Lamoureaux, “Rethinking the Transition,” 457; Tench Coxe, A View of the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1794), 52, 98; N. B. Wilkinson, “Brandywine Borrowings from European Technology,” Technology and Culture 4, no. 1 (1963): 1–13; D. J. Jeremy, “British Textile Technology Transmission to the United States: The Philadelphia Region Experience,” Business History Review 47 (1973), 24–52; Thomas C. Cochran, “Early Industrialization in the Delaware and Susquehanna River Areas: A Regional Analysis,” Social Science History 1, no. 3 (1977): 283–306; Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Domestic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 83–85, 94; C. W. Heathcote, History of Chester County, Pennsylvania (West Chester, PA, 1926), 92; Launey and Wright, eds., Early Church Records of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, 211. 30. George B. Lownes Inventory, Will Book C, p. 303, no. 836; Banjamin Brannon Inventory, Will Book C, p. 89, no. 645; Jesse Beckerton Inventory, Will Book A, p. 265, no. 133; Sellers Inventory; Crozer Inventory; Levy, Quakers and the American Family, 249. 31. “The Life and Travels of John Pemberton,” in The Friends Library: Comprising Journals, Doctrinal Treatises of Members of the Religious Society of Friends (Philadelphia: Joseph Rakestraw, 1842), 6:271; “To Samuel Fothergill” (November 27, 1758), in George S. Brookes, Friend Anthony Benezet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937), 231; Ross E. Martinie Eiler, “Luxury, Capitalism and the Quaker Reformation, 1737–1798,” Quaker History 97 (Spring 2008): 15, 18. 32. Delaware County Assessment Docket, Springfield, 1808–1810, and Upper Darby, 1802–1804, DCCH.

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33. Delaware County Assessment Docket, Springfield, 1791, 1813–1816; Ashmead, History of Delaware County, 538–47, 723–28; Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 40–41, 172; Dennis Clark, “Kellyville: An Immigrant Enterprise,” Pennsylvania History 39 (January 1972): 44–45. 34. Dard Hunter, Papermaking in Pioneer America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952), 137–38; Sellers to David Willcox, November 17, 1817, “Description of a Rolling Water-Gate” (April 19, 1811), and George Escol Sellers, “Personal Recollections of Nathan Sellers by His Grandson,” 1894, in Sellers Family Papers, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA; DiFilippo, History and Development of Upper Darby Township, 34; Bell, Patriot-Improvers, 1:501 35. Smith, Life of John P. Crozer, 37–38, 50, 54, 61, 68, 118; Donna J. Rilling, “Sylvan Enterprise and the Philadelphia Hinterland, 1790–1860,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 67, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 195, 197–200, 205. 36. John Hill Martin, Chester (and Its Vicinity,) Delaware County, in Pennsylvania: With Genealogical Sketches of Some Old Families (Philadelphia: William H. Pile, 1877), 315, 419, 454. 37. Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1978), 124; Court Continuance Docket B, no. 1, January 1816 (no. 111)–October 1819, DCCH; DMM minutes, August 1, 1820, and Springfield Preparative Meeting minutes, August 26, 1819, FHL; Jordan, History of Delaware County, 2:439. 38. Hicks to Phebe Wills, June 19, 1818, in Letters of Elias Hicks, ed. Isaac T. Hayes (New York, 1834), 25; Extracts from Two Letters by Elias Hicks to a Friend who had Joined an “Association for the Suppression of Vice and Immorality” (New York, 1841), 3, 9; Robert W. Doherty, The Hicksite Separation: A Sociological Analysis of Religious Schism in Early Nineteenth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967), 28–29; Journal of the Life and Labors of Elias Hicks (1832; New York: Arno Press, 1969); William Gribbin, The Churches Militant: The War of 1812 and American Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 126; Tucker, Springfield Meeting, 21; CMM minutes, October 25, 1819, DMM Minutes, January 30, 1815, and Springfield Preparative Meeting minutes for the entire year, 1826–27, FHL. 39. Deed Book T, p. 370 (October 27, 1835), Register of Deed Office, DCCH; Delaware County Daily Times, February 15, 1964; Crozer, Biographical Sketch, 24–25; Ashmead, History of Delaware County, 535; Wiley, Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia, 101. 40. Christopher Clark, “Economics and Culture: Opening Up the Rural History of the Early American Northeast,” American Quarterly 43 (June 1991): 282. Simler acknowledged in 1990 that “the Delaware County tax records for the early nineteenth century … do not always provide data similar to that found on Chester

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County lists” (“The Landless Worker,” 192), while Clemens worked entirely from probate inventories in Chester County rather than Delaware County (Clemens, “Consumer Culture,” 622), as did Joan Jensen (in Loosening the Bonds) and Adrienne Hood, who makes an impressive case for the market orientation of household textile weavers but who does not extend her analysis beyond Chester County. It is worth noting, too, that Hood draws attention to the important example offered by Rhenish, Swiss, and Irish immigrants in producing textiles at home for market use; however, Springfield and Upper Darby received almost nothing in terms of such immigration in the eighteenth century. See Hood, The Weaver’s Craft: Cloth, Commerce, and Industry in Early Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 3, 22–27, 38–39.

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