The Slave Business in Philadelphia

Phillip Seitz, Slavery in Philadelphia: A History of Resistance, Denial and Wealth (Create Space: Philadelphia, 2014).

"Your cotton smells of blood." William Lloyd Garrison in The Liberator, 1852

List of Negroes at & belonging to Whitehall, c. 1803

Friday night March 31 my neighbor, wife and I attended Phillip Seitz's talk about his recent book Slavery in Philadelphia: A History of Resistance, Denial and Wealth at Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting in Philadelphia. This is the story of the privileged Chew family of Cliveden House, the National Trust Historic Site at 6401 Germantown Ave. in Mt. Airy, and their slaves. The grounds were the site for the bloody Battle of Germantown during the Revolutionary War in 1777. Seitz was the Curator of History at Cliveden House from 2000-2011, and still lives in Mt. Airy. His book is a vignette of Philadelphia's deep connection to slavery, and in a larger sense, the role of slavery in financing the North and emerging capitalism. This is not the history we learned in school. Nor is it the romantic history generally told at colonial monuments and museums. But it should be.

Phillip Seitz

The family story begins with John Chew (1587-1668) arriving at Jamestown VA in 1623 attended by two indentured servants. John was a successful merchant seeking fortune in the New World. He became a trader, planter, and legislator in the Virginia colony. On his death, he bequeathed four slaves to his second wife Rachaell. It should be noted by this date chattel slavery (ie slaves for life) had been firmly established in the colony for Africans. Half the immigration from Europe before Independence were indentured servants, but they earned their freedom in five years typically.

There are many Samuels and Benjamins in this chronology. It is confusing.

John's third son Samuel Chew (1630-1677) settled in Maryland and served in the Assembly and the Provincial Court. In a propitious development, he met the Quaker founder George Fox in 1672 and joined the Society of Friends, and became associated with the William Penn family, future owner of Pennsylvania and the "Three Lower Counties" (DE). Samuel's will left a 600 acre plantation to his wife and first born son, as well as slaves and indentured servants. Samuel's eldest son owned 160 slaves. Samuel's sixth son Benjamin Chew (1671-1699) more modestly owned ten slaves and contracts for three indentured servants. 

Benjamin's (1671-1699) first son Samuel Chew (1693-1743) became a hard working doctor and secured the financial fortunes for future Chew generations in Philadelphia. Samuel became the legal representative to the Penn family, moved to Philadelphia in 1734, and received a grant of 3000 acres in Delaware from Penns' private reserve. He later moved to Delaware (then known as the Lower Counties) and managed his three plantations. He was the largest slaveholder in Delaware. He was still a Quaker.

Samuel's (1693-1743) first son Benjamin Chew (1722-1810) obtained a first class education at Middle Temple in London, and had a long legal career including Chief Justice of Pennsylvania in 1774. He built his elegant summer retreat Cliveden House in then suburban Germantown between 1763 and 1767. He was wealthy. He was legal counsel to the Penn family, a money lender, and landowner of nine plantations in Delaware and Maryland, and large slaveholder. Like the Penns, he left the Society of the Friends in the 1760s for the Anglican Church (Church of England). Because of his association with the British rulers, he was detained by the Continental Congress during the British occupation of Philadelphia. The Chew family were persona non grata for 20 years after the Revolutionary War, but their wealth remained intact. Benjamin's only son Benjamin Chew Jr. (1758-1844) managed the family estates in Maryland and Delaware and speculated in land with indifferent results. One successful investment was Philadelphia's earliest railroad in the 1830s connecting suburban Germantown to downtown Philadelphia. Benjamin Jr. and his son also named Benjamin (1793-1864) dissipated their fortune by the 1850s.

It was up to grandson Samuel Chew (1832-1887) to restore the family fortune and Cliveden House. He married the daughter of David S. Brown, a wealthy textile magnate in Philadelphia and New Jersey. Samuel became a manager in Brown's corporation, and later the executor of Brown's estate in 1877. This became the basis for the Chew family wealth up to the present day.

Cliveden House 1878

Seitz could recount this complicated history because the Chew family saved extensive written records from the earliest days. In 2006 the Historical Society of Pennsylvania received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (now threatened by Trump budget cuts) to catalog the voluminous Chew Family Papers, which filled 885 boxes. Seitz began mining this material, and discovered accounts of slaves who worked the Chew plantations and estate in the 18th and 19th century. This is the part of American history that has generally been omitted from history books. Just recently Washington's slaves in Philadelphia and Mt. Vernon, and Jefferson's slaves at Montecello have been acknowledged and included in the historical memorials. Chattel slavery and wage slavery built this country. These are the true founding fathers and mothers, rather than the wealthy landowners who met at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia in 1774. Seitz tells some of their stories.

Slaves were not passive victims. Seitz devotes one chapter to Chief Justice Benjamin Chew's (1722-1810) Whitehall Plantation, the largest in Delaware with 1000 acres and 60 slaves. He first grew tobacco, and later diversified into wheat, fodder and livestock. Seitz reprints correspondence between Benjamin Chew in Philadelphia and his overseers during the 1790s. The overseers were having trouble with recalcitrant slaves and seeking assistance from Chew. The slaves were so unruly that Benjamin Chew finally decided to sell Whitehall in 1803. He could not find a buyer willing to purchase the land with its troublesome enslaved Black people. Delaware law prohibited selling slaves out of state, and Chew could not find a buyer for his slaves in state. He finally liberated his slaves at Whitehall and sold the plantation at a loss to a neighboring farmer.

In Pennsylvania the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery passed in 1780. It was a conservative bill. It freed a child of a slave woman at age 28, which meant slavery lingered on in Pennsylvania for decades. It also stated any slave brought into Pennsylvania and retained for more than 6 months would be freed. This complicated life for slaveholders in Philadephia like George Washington and Benjamin Chew.

Charity Castle 

Seitz tells the story of the enslaved woman Charity Castle at Cliveden House in 1814. Charity accompanied her mistress Harriet Chew, who was escaping an abusive marriage in Maryland, back to her family home at Cliveden. As the six month deadline approached, Harriet's husband made efforts to retrieve Charity from Philadelphia before she could legally claim her freedom. Charity did not want to return to slavery in Maryland. She had also been abused- probably raped- by Harriet's husband. Charity then fell on the woodpile behind Cliveden, and was badly injured and could not travel. A contentious legal battle ensued between Benjamin Chew Jr., Harriet's husband, and Philadelphia lawyer William Lewis representing Charity Castle's free black husband. William Lewis argued "accident made her a slave, accident made her free, and it seems right that she should avail herself of it." Phillip Seitz does not know how the case resolved. Sometimes the abolitionists won.

During the 19th century the Chew family gradually sold or lost their plantations and slave holdings in Delaware and Maryland. With Samuel Chew (1832-1887) they became manufacturers and capitalists in David Brown's Washington Manufacturing Company. The Philadelphia Chews no longer owned slaves; instead they owned mills that processed slave cotton with waged labor. Actually, much of Phildelphia's economy depended on the products of slavery- tobacco, wheat and cotton. In the run-up to the Civil War, the Philadelphia ruling class and many white workers defended slavery. It brought wealth and jobs to the city, even though slavery was manifestly inhuman and unstable. Once secession and the Civil War commenced, the North had to win the war to save their industries, save the republic, and subsequently emancipate the slaves.

Cliveden today

The legacy of slavery in America is exemplified by the Chew story at Cliveden House. Much of the industrial revolution and Northern wealth was financed by slave labor. How much is hotly debated by historians. The large present day wealth gap between white families and black families in the US derives from 250 years of chattel slavery and 100 years of de jure discrimination. The divisions of race and class are still with us, and still dominate US politics today. Phillip Sietz's local history of the Cliveden House in Mt. Airy is sadly contemporary.

Abolitionist Legacy in LaMott PA

Donald Scott Sr., Camp William Penn (Images of America: Pennsylvania). (Charleston SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008).

Historic La Mott, Pennsyvania, http://www.historic-lamott-pa.com/content/thegrowthofthevillage/index.cfm

Recruitment poster for Camp William Penn, 1863

I live in an historic neighborhood. My township of Cheltenham PA on the northern boundary of Philadelphia was a center of abolitionist activity in the 19th century. The area was known as Chelten Hills then. It is now divided into Elkins Park, Melrose Park (my home), and LaMott. 

"Roadside" home of James and Lucretia Mott

La Mott was the site of the first and largest Union training ground for African American troops at Camp William Penn during the Civil War from 1863-1865. The land was leased to the Federal government by Edward M. Davis, who was the son-in-law of abolitionist and reformer Lucretia Mott. Lucretia and husband James retired to their son-in-law’s Chelten Hills farm in 1857 to an old farmhouse called “Roadside”. Their home was a stop on the underground railroad en route to freedom for escaped slaves. She hosted many prominent abolitionist leaders at Roadside – Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Octavius V. Catto, William Still, Robert Purvis, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison. Even Mary Brown stayed at Roadhouse while her husband John Brown awaited trial for his raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859.

AME Church of LaMott

Chelten Hills was also home to Lucretia’s banker friend Jay Cooke

(1821-1905), who became known as the financier of the Civil War. Between 1862 and 1865 he sold $830 million in war bonds, at a commission of .375%. It was good politics and good business. He and Edward Davis were members of the Union League of Philadelphia (ULP), formed in 1862 “to discountenance and rebuke by moral and social influence all disloyalty to the Federal Government.” The ULP raised money to recruit troops for the Union, and sponsored five black regiments of US Colored Troops (USCT) at Camp William Penn. Before the Civil War, abolitionist sentiment was weak in Philadelphia. Abraham Lincoln received only 2000 votes out of 76,000 cast in the city in the 1860 election. The ULP converted Philadelphia to the Republican cause during the war. They even endorsed Radical Reconstruction after the war, including desegregating the streetcars.

Donald Scott Sr. has written two books about Camp William Penn -

Camp William Penn (Images of America: Pennsylvania), and Camp William Penn: 1863-1865 (2012). Scott is an English Professor at Community College of Philadelphia, and a Cheltenham resident and booster. He has assembled an amazing collection of 19th century photographs of the Camp and the township. I wish more historians made an effort to include illustrations. It adds interest and sells books. Old history books and fiction always had photographs or artwork. Maybe modern publishers will revive this tradition. It would create employment for illustrators and photographers. All that remains of Camp William Penn today is the restored front gate and main entrance on Sycamore Street. A neighborhood community group, Citizens for the Restoration of Historic LaMott, has made an on-and-off effort over the years to establish a museum and park commemorating the unique history of LaMott. The old 1910 LaMott fire station on Willow Avenue is the temporary home to archives and artifacts from Camp William Penn. Tours of the museum are by appointment only.

Camp William Penn served as the training ground for 11 regiments, 10,940 men, between July 1863 and July 1865. 1056 soldiers from Camp William Penn perished during the war. It is an ugly story, but many black soldiers and their white commanders were executed if they were captured in battle by Confederate troops. The burial ground for local US Colored Troop veterans of the Civil War is Butler Cemetery in Camden NJ at Ferry Avenue and Charles Street. I have not visited the site, but it appears to be incorporated into present-day Evergreen Cemetery on Google Maps.. There is also the African American Civil War Museum in Washington DC which documents the history of the US Colored Troops. I must investigate. After the War, some USCT veterans served as Buffalo Soldiers and fought in the Indian wars in the West.

After Camp William Penn was decommissioned, Edward Davis sold off lots and became the prime real estate developer of the new working-class neighborhood called Camptown. As a devout Hicksite Quaker, Davis sold to blacks and whites. To encourage development, Davis built a schoolhouse in 1878, and donated land for a community church in 1888, now the site of the AME Church of LaMott on Cheltenham Avenue. In 1885 the village received its first US post office and changed its name officially to LaMott in honor of their revered resident Lucretia Mott (1793-1880). In the late 19th century it became one of the early interracial communities in the nation. It remains so today. The latest arrivals to the township have been Asian-Americans in the last 40 years. The 2010 census reports the population was 56.6% White, 32.8% Black or African American, 0.2% Native American, 7.7% Asian, and 2.5% were two or more races, 3.9% of the population were of Hispanic or Latino ancestry.

African American Memorial, Washington DC

I think Lucretia Mott would be pleased. She wrote her sister in 1863, “The neighboring camp seems the absorbing interest just now. Is not this change of feeling and conduct towards this oppressed class beyond all that we could have anticipated, and marvelous in our eyes?” This from a staunch pacifist. The Civil War would finally banish chattel slavery from the US, as nonviolent efforts had failed.

The New Left in Philadelphia 1960-1970

Lyons, Paul. The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

“The people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities” (C. Wright Mills words) are the subject of Paul Lyon's study of the New Left in the 1960s Philadelphia. Mills felt the early focus on alienation, community, and meaning evident in The Port Huron Statement (1962) distinguished the New Left from the Old Left, with its rigid socialist and communist doctrines. Paul Lyons chronicles the distinctive New Left community that blossomed in Philadelphia and nearby suburbs during the 1960s. He argues the New Left was less sectarian and more ecumenical here due to the dominant influence of the Quakers, in the form of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and the Quaker schools and colleges. The Quaker institutions remain central to social justice activities in the Philadelphia to this day. The religious institutions have held up better than the New Left, needless to say.

Author Paul Lyons was a member and observer of the New Left in Philadelphia. He was a history instructor at Temple University from 1967-71, and then taught high school history at Miquon Upper School (now called Crefield School), a private school in Philadelphia until 1980. He received his PhD from Bryn Mawr College in 1980 in social work, and then taught history, social welfare policy, and Holocaust studies for many years at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. His dissertation became his first book, Philadelphia Communists, 1936-1956 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). He has also written about the New Right, also born in the 1960s, and conservatism, which pervades the American landscape today. Lyon's was a much beloved professor at Stockton who died too young in 2009. The college has since established the annual Paul Lyons Memorial Lecture in American Studies in his honor.

The People of This Generation is a fun book for alumni of the New Left in Philadelphia. I found many old friends and adversaries scattered throughout Paul Lyon's account. I arrived in Philadelphia in Fall 1971, a little after Lyon's timeline in the aftermath of the 1960s. One of my close friends was Carl Gilbert, who informed Lyons about campus politics at Temple University 1960-1968. Temple was a subway commuter school, often regarded like City University of New York, with a large compliment of red diaper babies enrolled. Carl, also a red diaper baby, became chairperson of Student Peace Union chapter (SPU), and later a leader of Students for a Democratic Society chapter (SDS) when it formed in 1965. Carl had one foot in the Old Left, and one foot in the New Left. He was a member of Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL aka Yipsels), the youth group of the Socialist Party, which controlled SPU. Carl was already a Marxist and anti-Stalinist in high school, conversant with the ideological debates within the Old Left. At Temple he embarked on the New Left with SPU and SDS. SPU brought issues and prominent speakers to campus, volunteered in local public schools, joined with Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in civil rights protests in Philadelphia and the South. The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (aka SANE) and W.E.B. DuBois Club (led by English graduate student Jim Quinn), the youth group of the Communist Party, were also important actors at Temple. By 1966 the central issue for the New Left became the Vietnam War and the draft. Students and some faculty joined in campus speak-outs on the war, and marches on Washington. Temple never became host to a big student strike like the University of Pennsylvania in February 1969. The most serious Temple activists enlisted in various socialist and communist organizations after the collapse of SDS in 1968. My friend Carl Gilbert left Temple for a graduate program in 1967. His Temple Master's Thesis From “Integration” to “Black Power”: The Civil Rights Movement in the City of Philadelphia, 1960-67 was his account of those years.

Philadelphia Resistance Print Shop 1969

Paul Lyons regards the antiwar and anti-draft Philadelphia Resistance and the antiracist People for Human Rights (PHR) as the most successful New Left organizations of the 1960s in Philadelphia. Philadelphia Resistance organized draft resistance locally and nationally. They also founded Philadelphia Resistance Print Shop as a movement and commercial union printer. I spent many hours at their print shop over the years as a customer, a union official, and fellow printer. PHR was founded by Episcopal priest Rev. David M. Gracie in 1967 as an interracial support group advocating for school funding, housing, health care, and employment in the city. Episcopal priests Rev. Paul M. Washington at the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia, and Rev. John M. Scott at St. Mary's at the University of Pennsylvania were also prominent voices for racial justice in the 1960s and many years thereafter.

Rev. David M. Gracie

Rev.Paul M. Washington

Many in Lyon's The People of This Generation got their political education in Philadelphia in the 1960s. Some still live here, making the City of Brotherly and Sisterly Love home.


Gilbert, Carl. From “Integration” to “Black Power”: The Civil Rights Movement in the City of Philadelphia, 1960-67. Master's Thesis, Temple University, 1967.

Philadelphia's Finest 18th Century Abolitionist

Jackson, Maurice, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

–---, “Anthony Benezet: America's Finest Eighteenth-Century Antislavery Advocate.” The Human Tradition in the American Revolution, ed. Nancy L. Rhoden and Ian K. Steele. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000.

Crosby, David L., ed. The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet 1754-1783: An Annotated Critical Edition. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2013.

Germantown Ave. and Wister St., Philadelphia

I don't know how I missed discovering Anthony Benezet in my undisciplined readings in US history. He may be the founder of the abolitionist movement in 18th century America, as well England and France, argues biographer Maurice Jackson in Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism. And he was a Philadelphia homeboy, living in Germantown and what is now Old City sections of Philadelphia, and born a French Huguenot. This first piqued my interest. My Gerould family (my father's side) was French Huguenot. According to our family genealogy, compiled by Mrs. Mildred Gerould Wood in 1970, Jacques Jerauld fled the Province of Languedoc, France, sometime after the Crown's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which had formerly offered religious tolerance to Protestants. My forebear Gamaliel Gerould was born in Medfield, Massachusetts, in 1719.

Anthony Benezet was born in Saint-Quentin, France in 1713 to a French Huguenot family. His family fled France in 1715, settled in London, then emigrated to Philadelphia in 1731 when Anthony was 18 years old. Anthony joined the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) in England in 1727, and joined the Friends in Philadelphia and environs at several meetings during his lifetime. He married Joyce Marriott of Burlington, NJ in 1731. She had been made a Quaker minister by the Philadelphia Meeting, surely a unique role for a young woman in colonial America. They had two children, who died in early childhood.

Benezet spent some years working unhappily in the trades. But his bookish nature, and love of children, led him to teaching. In 1739 he took a job as schoolmaster in Germantown (a neighborhood of Philadelphia, then a suburb), succeeding Francis Daniel Pastorius. He also worked as a proofreader, fluent in French, German, and English. In 1742 he began teaching at the Philadelphia Publick School, English (later known as William Penn Charter School), then located at 4th and Chestnut St. in present-day Old City Philadelphia. About 1750, Benezet also began teaching free black children in the evenings at no cost in his home, which he continued for 20 years. During this period he began an association with Quaker mystic John Woolman to advocate the end of the slave trade, and the abolition of slavery in the colonies. Quakers had debated the issue of slavery since at least 1688 when the Quakers of Germantown issued the first resolution condemning slavery. Slavery became a contentious issue in Quaker meetings in the colony and England for the next 100 years.



In 1753 John Woolman wrote Epistle to the Friends of Virginia, and in 1754 Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes: Recommended to the Professors of Christianity of Every Denomination, which called for the end of the slave trade and slavery. Benezet urged the Philadelphia Meeting to adopt Woolman's Epistle. The following year the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting decided that Friends may no longer import or purchase slaves. Many Quakers freed their slaves. Benezet became the most outspoken advocate for abolition in the colonies, enlisting Woolman, deist Benjamin Franklin, and physician Benjamin Rush in the cause. From his daily association with free and enslaved Africans in Philadelphia, Benezet regarded blacks as the intellectual equals of whites, a very advanced position for the times. He cited Acts 17:24-26: “God, that made the world, hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the bounds of their habitation.” And he set out to prove it with a steady stream of tracts, the mass media of the day, which are all collected in The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet, 1754-1783: An Annotated Critical Edition, ed. David L. Crosby. He documented the horrors of the slave trade in West Africa, and achieved mass circulation in the colonies, England, and France. His arguments were religious and secular/philosophical, drawing from theology and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. He corresponded or influenced all the major abolitionists in England and France: John Wesley, founder of Methodism; Tom Paine, son of an English Quaker; Granville Sharp; Thomas Clarkson; William Wilberforce; Olaudah Equiano. It is inspiring in our dispirited times to see what he accomplished. This humble Philadelphia Quaker was a brilliant organizer.

Other Benezet exploits: in 1754 he resigned from the Publick School and opened the first school for girls in America under the auspices of the Society of Friends in Philadelphia; in 1755 he organized the relief for hundreds of Acadian French expelled from Nova Scotia, refugees of the French and Indian Wars; in 1775 he organized The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage with Pennsylvania Quakers, with Benjamin Franklin the honorary chair after the Revolution War. Benezet died in 1784, and bequeathed his estate to the African Free School which he founded. He said, “I can with truth and sincerity declare, that I have found amongst the negroes as great variety of talents as among a like number of white; and I am bold to assert, that the notion entertained by some, that the blacks are inferior in their capacities, is a vulgar prejudice, founded on the pride or ignorance of their lordly masters.” He was buried at the Friends Burial Ground at 4th and Arch Street, Philadelphia in an unmarked grave, as was the custom.

Observations on the Enslaving, Importing and
Purchasing of Negroes, Anthony Benezet 1759

The biographer Maurice Jackson is Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies and Affiliate Professor of Performing Arts (Jazz) at Georgetown University. He also scores points with me as a former shipyard rigger, longshoreman, housepainter, community organizer, and fellow Antioch College alumnus. He did a lot of research in Philadelphia at the Library Company and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on Locust Street. I'm sorry I missed his lecture at the Library Company in December 2013, available on YouTube. I hope he comes again.