Philadelphia's Radical Revolution: From the Stamp Act to the Federal Constitution

Philadelphia’s Radical Revolution: From the Stamp Act to the Federal Constitution

On view at The Library Company of Philadelphia from May 18th – October 9th

In Philadelphia, artisans and tradesmen drove the Revolution more forcefully than in any other colony. Early in the Revolution, the city’s political and economic elites, many of whom rejected the spirit of rebellion, had been pushed aside by working men who seized political power, reshaped Pennsylvania’s wartime government, and wrote a new state constitution that proved to be the most radically democratic constitution of the entire Revolution.

These ardent patriots, backed by the militia, demanded absolute loyalty to the American cause. Before and after the occupation of Philadelphia by the British army in 1777-1778, they forced citizens to choose: swear an oath of allegiance to Pennsylvania or risk imprisonment, confiscation of property, or even death.

After the war was won, the radicals retained much of their power, but in the early 1780s, Philadelphia’s long tradition of political moderation slowly re-emerged. Many now feared that revolutionary excess could be as dangerous as elite rule had been before. When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, the city’s delegates brought this spirit of moderation to its deliberations and were influential in designing a federal government that balanced popular power with checks and restraints.

This exhibition does not attempt to tell the whole story of the Revolution. It focuses on what happened in Philadelphia and the dramatic shifts its citizens endured—from disaffection, to radicalism, to moderation—through broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, and prints collected in the city during the Revolution itself. It is shaped by the unique perspectives of two avid contemporaries: the Swiss emigrant, Pierre Eugène Du Simitière, who collected and preserved many items that others disregarded, and John Dickinson, the famously moderate “penman of the Revolution” at the center of Revolutionary politics. Together they preserve one of the richest records of Philadelphia’s radical experiment in democracy.