Quaker Studies has a special issue out on John Woolman. I’ve written about this well-known Friend, many times, naturally, including a three part series back in 2006, but it’s great to have academics share the latest takes. As guest editor Jon Kershner writes in his introduction, “The fresh ground cultivated by these authors demonstrates that there is much still to say about Woolman.” Best of all, this is open access! I think it’s really tragic that so much good academic writing today is completely inaccessible and I’m not sure why, as I don’t think the authors are getting much of the money. I hope new academic publishing models start to win out, as it’s important for lay Friends to think about history in a more thoughtful way. I’m a big stan, as the kids say, of Jean Soderlund, and am devouring her contribution to this special edition.

I looovvee Goldie’s, the Philly Israeli-American vegan falafel mini-chain, so I’m not just appalled but personally upset that some pro-Palestinian protesters accused its owners of genocide. Once again people: it is possible to be against violence on all sides and also to not scapegoat any side. It sounds like owner Michael Solomonov’s response has been muted and understanding: good for him. I do hope this dies down. Protesters on all sides say stupid things in the heat of the moment and it sounds like they were there for less than four minutes. Can we move on?

Also, chef’s kiss to the writer of The Inquirer headline, Berks County woman named Time’s 2023 Person of the Year.

Despite his contribution to U.S. history and his intentions of founding a colony built on “brotherly love,” William Penn owned 12 slaves in his estate, Pennsbury.

Twelve slaves. As part of my job is fact-checking, I like to double-check numbers like that. Pennsbury Manor, the museum devoted to Penn’s life in his colony, just refers to a slave community and provides five names (Sam, Sue, Yaff, Jack, and Peter). So how has 12 become a cited number? Let’s go diving.

I don’t know FCNL’s sources but a recent editorial submission came to me in recent months citing an August 2020 article by Michaela Winberg in the online publication Billy Penn, “William Penn kept enslaved people. These are some of their names”:

The records that exist aren’t totally clear, but it seems as if Penn enslaved roughly 12 people at his Pennsbury Manor estate, which was located in what is now the Philly suburbs. These people were purchased off the first slave ship known to have arrived in Philadelphia, and were of African and Carribean [sic] descent.

I’m a fan of Billy Penn but it’s not an academic source. Fortunately they gave a link to their assertion, a September 2012 article by Jack H. Schick in… oh dear, my own publication, Friends Journal!In “Slavery in Pennsylvania” he wrote:

Quakers, though concerned and in the forefront of efforts to end the institution of slavery, were not innocent. While living on his estate at Pennsbury Manor, before he returned to England forever in 1701, William Penn kept 12 slaves.

No citation was given but as Jack’s editor I can affirm he is fond of Wikipedia. I’m fairly confident that he got his reference from this entry, “History of slavery in Pennsylvania”:

William Penn, the proprietor of the Province of Pennsylvania, held 12 slaves as workers on his estate, Pennsbury. They took part in construction of the main house and outbuildings. Penn left the colony in 1701, and never returned.

If you ask Google “How many slaves did Penn have?” it gives you “12 slaves” as its instant answer and links to this Wikipedia page. Given that the all-knowing search engine thinks this a vetted answer worthy of a 32-pixel headline, how much can we trust it?

The immediate answer is: not much. Wikipedia has no citation (as of this writing; I should probably go edit it myself). The trail would go cold there if not for the platform’s obsession with keeping its revision history. Through that one can find that the claim on Penn’s slaves dates to the October 2007 creation of the entry.

William Penn, the founder of the Pennsylvania colony, owned 12 slaves on his estate, Pennsbury; however, he gradually became a supporter of the abolition of the institution.

Thirteen years of edits has reworked the sentence quite a bit but the 12 number remains from the beginning and in that first Wikipedia draft there was a citation to a USHistory.org page. This is a still-extant website produced by the Independence Hall Association, a Pennsylvania nonprofit founded in 1942. The process of link rot is at work, alas, and Wikipedia’s 2007 link gives a “page not found” today. Thankfully Archive.org can take us back in the early aughts and let us read it in all of its early-oughts design glory (it takes me back to see a background image used to create a column!). The USHistory post is just a cut-and-paste of a 2003 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer (again, accessible thanks to Archive.org). Reporter Melissa Dribben’s lede goes right to the point:

William Penn owned at least 12 slaves. During his life he gradually came around to advocating abolition, but when he died in 1718, Pennsylvania was a long way from ending the practice.

Further down she mentions Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund and their 1991 book, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. For the first time in this train of citations we’ve actually come to trained historians! And I’d be hard pressed to think of any two academics I would trust more to document this era of colonial Pennsylvania than Nash or Soderlund. It’s long out of print but Google Books’s preview gives us the mother lode:

Quaker proprietor and his associates made no effort to prohibit black slavery in the City of Brotherly Love and its environs. Indeed, Penn owned at least twelve slaves himself and stated at one point that he preferred them to white indentured servants because slaves could be held for life. Though in one early will the proprietor provided for manumission, slaves worked on his Pennsbury estate in Bucks County throughout his tenure. One of these slaves was Black Alice who died in 1802 at age 116. She recalled often lighting the proprietor’s pipe.¹³

The paragraph has a citation [see update, below] but the limited Google Books preview doesn’t include the citation index and used copies are a bit too pricey for me (by chance I am currently reading Nash’s very fascinating Forging Freedom, which is available as a used book for a much more reasonable price).

I do wish that this trail of citations didn’t end at a book that’s celebrating its thirty year anniversary. I’m sure we’ve had a number of ambitious historians digging through basement archives since the early 90s. Surely they’ve uncovered more evidence. (For example, Black Alice, a fascinating figure, seems not to have been Penn’s slave at Pennsbury but instead was enslaved by fellow-Quaker Samuel Carpenter, a friend of Penn, and owner of an oyster house where Alice worked from age five.) But at least this one assertion—that Penn owned exactly or around or over twelve slaves—has a solid academic source at its root.

Update March 18, 2021:

I emailed Jean R. Soderlund, who gave me the sources for that paragraph in Freedom by Degrees!

The citations in note 13 are: Dunn et al., eds, Papers of William Penn, 3:66–67; 4:113–14; Hannah Penn to James Logan June 6, 1720, and Logan to Hannah Penn, May 11, 1721, Penn Papers, Official Correspondence, 1:95, 97, HSP; Samuel P. Janney, The Life of William Penn (reprint 1970), 421; Nash, Forging Freedom, 12.

She did quite a bit of work digging through the records concerning Pennbury after publishing the book and says “I don’t remember being concerned about the reference to ‘at least twelve’ in Freedom by Degrees.”

I’ve also edited Wikipedia. Thirteen-plus years after their stat showed up on the “History of slavery in Pennsylvania” page, Nash and Soderlund finally get the citation.

This guy in Streetview is standing near the spot where the world’s first #selfie portrait was taken in 1839.

Robert Cornelius was one of the first people to try to reproduce Louis Daguerre’s photographic technique after news of the breakthrough reach Philadelphia. A chemist working at his family’s gas lighting company, Cornelius started experimenting with different chemical combinations until he found a way to reduce exposure times so that a person to sit still long enough for a portrait. In October 1839 he took a picture himself “in the yard back of his store and residence, (old) 176 Chestnut Street, above Seventh (now number 710), in Philadelphia,” according to an oral history published half a century later (PDF). Cornelius recounts:

It was our business to make a great variety of articles of plated metal. Very soon afterwards, I made in the factory a tin box, and bought from McAllister, 48 Chestnut Street, a lens about two inches in diameter, such as was used for opera purposes. With these instruments I made the first likeness of myself and another one of some of my children, in the open yard of my dwelling, sunlight bright upon us, and I am fully of the impression that I was the first to obtain a likeness of the human face.

Remarkably, in 2014, the Cornelius and Co. building is still there on Chestnut Street, though barely recognizable, with an extra floor on top and extensive facade changes. It’s a discount drug store. The back is the narrow alley named Ionic Street, home to dumpsters and people wanting to stay out of sight. The yard is to the right of these dumpsters. With #selfie such a popular hashtag, Cornelius’s picture has circulated on a lot of internet lists as the “world’s first selfie.” But it’s historical significance is far greater: it is the first photographic portrait of our species. I’m not typically one for hyperbole, but we humans started seeing ourselves differently after that portrait.

I originally assumed the building on the right of the alley stood where the yard had been but a satellites turns up a surprise: the yard is still there! Looking at the 710 property from above, the buildings facing Chestnut and Ionic are separate–with a large open space in between! There are two sections that look almost to be garden beds.

Yo Philly, how has 710 Chestnut Street not been snatched up and turned into a museum of photographic history? The first floor could focus on nineteenth century Philadelphia innovation, with the still-existent inner courtyard turned into a tourist destination? It would be like catnip. What self-respecting modern tourist wouldn’t walk the few blocks from Independence Hall to take their picture at the very site of the world’s first selfie? I know Philly typically doesn’t respect any history past 1776 but come on!

Update March 2021: Katie Park in the Inquirer reporting an all-too-predictable story: Philly L&I approves demolition of Chestnut Street properties that preservationists had tried to protect. It’s not Cornelius’s house at 710 but it’s just a few doors down the block at 730–732. The article has some great info from Justin Brooks, a lawyer who’s been trying to organize historic recognition for the 600, 700, and 800 blocks of Chestnut. One tidbit: in 1891 Chestnut Street was widened by the city, requiring “building owners to tear down their own facades to move farther back.” (You could write a tome on Philly history that’s been lost to road widening projects but at least this was “just” the 700 block facades.)

Metropolis is a “news, analysis and commentary” site from veteran Philadelphia reporter Tom Ferrick (Wikipedia). An alum of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Tom’s spent the last half-dozen years talking to everyone who will listen about the future of print and Philly news. He’s done talking and is showing what can be done on a budget budget. From “This is Metropolis,” the lead article:

Local newspapers, TV and radio stations are retreating from in-depth coverage of regional news either due to economic or audience considerations.

The retreat has been gradual, but no one expects it to stop. The company that owns the region’s largest newspapers — the Inquirer and Daily News — is in bankruptcy. The size of the editorial staffs at the papers continues to shrink. The prognosis for metro dailies here and elsewhere is not good. The journalism practiced by these papers is still robust, but the economic model that has sustained it is eroding. If these traditional sources of news falter or fail what will take their place?

The site was built in Movable Type. The most prominent feature is the slideshow display of featured articles. Tom has seen a similar effect on another journalism site and a search found the “Sliding Horizontal Banner Rotator” at Active Den, a great site to purchase pre-built Flash files. Movable Type entries are outfitted with custom fields to enter images and links. Movable Type then creates a custom XML file for the “Main Stories” feed, which is then picked up and displayed by the Flash banner. In addition, the site uses Google Adsense to provide income.

Visit: Philadelphia Metropolis

Client Testimonial:

“The list allowed me to click only three attributes, but for Martin I wanted to check them all. He is a wonderful, personable, creative person who also happens to be unflappable. I highly recommend his for web design.“
March 30, 2010

Tom Ferrick, Journalist/Publisher
Hired Martin as a Graphic/Web Designer in 2009
Top Qualities: Great Results, Personable, Good Value.

The “Making New Friends” outreach campaign is a central example in the article. It might have been more successful if it had been given more seasoning and if outsider Friends had been invited to participate. The campaign was kicked off by a survey that confirmed that the greatest threat to the future of the yearly meeting was “our greying membership” and that outreach campaigns “should target young adult seekers.” I attended the yearly meeting session where the survey was presented and the campaign approved and while every Friend under forty had their hands raised for comments, none were recognized by the clerk. “Making New Friends” was the perfect opportunity to tap younger Friends but the work seemed designed and undertaken by the usual suspects in yearly meeting.

Like a lot of Quaker organizations, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has spent the last fifteen years largely relying on a small pool of established leadership. There’s little attention to leadership development or tapping the large pool of talent that exists outside of the few dozen insiders. This Spring Jeavons had an article in PYM News that talked about younger Friends that were the “future” of PYM and put the cut-off line of youthfulness/relevance at fifty! The recent political battles within PYM seemed to be over who would be included in the insider’s club, while our real problems have been a lack of transparency, inclusion and patience in our decision making process.

Philadelphia Friends certainly have their leadership and authority problems and I understand Jeavons’ frustrations. Much of his analysis is right. I appreciated his regularly column in PYM News, which was often the only place Christ and faith was ever seriously discussed. But his approach was too heavy handed and corporate to fit yearly meeting culture and did little to address the long-term issues that are lapping up on the yearly meeting doorsteps.

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard some very good things about the just-concluded yearly meeting sessions. I suspect the yearly meeting is actually beginning a kind of turn-around. That would be welcome.

Don’t miss:

• The Inquirer has an interesting comment thread on the article
• More blog chatter via these technorati links: Here and here (stupid blog-unfriendly Inquirer URL system)

The Baby Theo site has been a lot of fun and it’s had great comments and emails of support. It’s really a shame that the article only used it to strike that tired old refrain about the possible danger lurking on the internet.

The threat had nothing to do with Theo or with the baby blog. I’ve run a prominent antiwar website (closed, was at nonviolence.org) through two wars now, and in the nine years of its existence I’ve amassed quite a collection of abusive emails. I try not to take them too seriously: most come from soldiers or from the families of soliders, people desparately afraid of the future and surely torn by the acts they’re being asked to commit. The internet provides the psychological distance for otherwise good people to demonize the “commie Saddam-loving peacenik coward.” You could get mad at a President that actively misleads the country into war but it’s easier to turn your anger on some schmuck who runs an antiwar website in his spare time. Sending threatening emails is itself cowardly and anti-democratic, of course, and as I’ve written on Nonviolence.org, it’s terribly inappropriate for “military personnel to use government computers to threaten the free speech” of a dissenting American citizen. But it happens. And because it happens and because South Jersey has its share of pro-war hotheads, you won’t see our specific town mentioned anywhere on the site. When I asked the Inquirer reporter if they could not mention our town, she asked why, which led to the threatening emails, which led to the question whether Theo specifically had been threatened.

And yes, there was a retired Lieutenant Colonel who sent a particularly creepy set of emails (more on him below). The first email didn’t mention Theo. It was just one of those everyday emails wishing that my family would be gang-raped, tortured and executed in front of me. I usually ignore these but responded to him, upon which I received a second email explaining that he was making a point with his threat (“You, your organization and others like you represent the ‘flabby soft white underbelly’ of our Nation. This is the tissue of an animal that is the target of predators.” Etc., etc., blah, blah, blah). This time he searched the Nonviolence.org site more thoroughly and specifically mentioned Theo in his what-if scenario. This was one email out of the thousands I receive every month. It was an inappropriate rhetorical argument against a political/religious stance I’ve taken as a public witness. It was not a credible threat to my son.

Still, precaution is in order. I mentioned this story to the Inquirer reporter only to explain why I didn’t want the town listed. When I talked about the blog, I talked about old friends and distant relatives keeping up with us and sharing our joys via the website. I talked about how the act of putting together entries helped Julie & I see Theo’s changes. I told Kathy how it was fun that friends who we had met via the internet were able to see something beyond the Quaker essays or political essays. None of that made it through to the article, which is a shame. A request to not publish our home town became a sensationalist cautionary tale that is now being repeated as a reason not to blog. How stupid.

The cautionary lesson is only applicable for those who both run a baby blog and a heavily used political website. When your website tops 50,000 visitors a day, you might want to switch to a P.O. Box. End of lesson.

Fortunately with the internet we don’t have to rely on the filter of a mainstream press reporters. Visitors from the Inquirer article have been looking around the site and presumably seeing it’s not all about internet dangers. Since the Inquirer article went up I’ve had twice as many visits from Google as I have from Philly.com. Viva the web!

More:
For those interested, the freaky retired Lieutenant Colonel is the chief executive officer of a private aviation company based in Florida, with contracts in three African nations that just happen to be of particular interest to the U.S. State Department. Although the company is named after him, his full name has been carefully excised from his website. I don’t suspect that he really is retired from U.S.-sponsored military service, if you know what I mean… Here’s your tax dollars at work.

A few newspaper websites have republished up the Inky article and two blogging news sites have picked up on it:

• Yet Another Baby Blogging story uncovers danger — but it’s not true ran in BloggingBaby.com: “When someone threatened his son on his Baby Theo Web page, he took the site down; but left up a pic on his home page. Well, that is, according to the article, which somehow managed to not check its facts (maybe, ummm–go to the link you included in your article?) and discover that, in fact, Baby Theo’s page is alive and well. We’re glad, Theo’s a cutie.”
• Baby bloggers ran in Netfamilynews. “The $64,000 question(s) is: Is this a shift of thinking and behavior or, basically, a mistake?.. Martin Kelly, whose baby was threatened by someone who visited his baby page, would lean toward the mistake side of the question.” (No I wouldn’t, as I explained to the webmaster later)