Most interesting of all, we find in this faithful, accurate, unemotional diary a very clear and graphic picture of Philadelphia on the eve of the Revolution and after the Declaration of Independence, when deepening discontent and the sharp strife of opposing factions had forever destroyed the old placid, prosperous colonial life. Every one knows how stubborn was the opposition offered by the Quakers to the war; how they were hurled from their high estate by the impetuosity of a patriotism which would brook no delay; and how, with the passing away of the Assembly, they lost all vestige of political power. Scant mercy was shown them after their downfall by the triumphant Whigs, and scant justice has been done them since by historians who find it easier to be eloquent than impartial. There appears to have been something peculiarly maddening in the passive resistance of the Friends, and in their absolute inability to share the emotions of the hour. The same quiet antagonism which they had manifested to the Stamp Act, to the three-penny duty on tea, and to all unconstitutional measures on the part of England, they offered in turn to the mandates of Congress, and to the exactions of the Executive Council. They would not renounce their allegiance to the crown; they would not fight for king or country; they would not pay the new state tax levied for the support of the troops; they would not lift their hands when the tax collector carried off their goods and chattels in default of payment; they would not hide their valuables from the collector’s eyes; they would not run away when General Howe’s army entered Philadelphia in the autumn of 1777, nor when the American troops took possession the following June. They would not do anything at all,—not even talk; and perhaps silence was their most absolutely irritating characteristic, at a time when other men found pulpit and platform insufficient for the loud-voiced eloquence of strife.
In reading Elizabeth Drinker’s journal, we cannot but be struck with the absence of invective, and, for the most part, of comment. Anxiety and irritation are alike powerless to overcome the lifelong habit of restraint. Her husband appears to have been a stubborn and consistent Tory, though the restrictions of his creed compelled him to play an idle part, and to suffer for a lost cause without striking a blow in its behalf. He was one of forty gentlemen, nearly all Friends, who were banished from Philadelphia in the summer of 1777; and his wife, with two young children, was left unprotected, to face the discomforts and dangers of the times. She was more than equal to the task. There is as little evidence of timidity as of rancour in the quiet pages of her diary. She describes the excitement and confusion which the news of General Howe’s approach awakened in Philadelphia, and on the 26th of September writes: “Well! here are ye English in earnest. About two or three thousand came in through Second Street, without opposition or interruption,—no plundering on ye one side or ye other. What a satisfaction would it be to our dear absent friends,”—of whom one was her absent husband,—“could they but be informed of it.”
From this time, all public events are recorded with admirable brevity and accuracy (Cæsar would have respected Elizabeth Drinker): the battle of Germantown, the difficulty of finding shelter for the wounded soldiers, the bombardment and destruction of the three forts which guarded Franklin’s chevaux de frise and separated General Howe from the fleet, the alarming scarcity of provisions before the three forts fell. Despite her Tory sympathies and her husband’s banishment, Elizabeth sends coffee and wine whey daily to the wounded American prisoners; rightly thinking that the English ran a better chance of being looked after in the hospitals than did her own countrymen. She suffers no molestation save once, when, as she writes, “a soldier came to demand Blankets, which I did not in any wise agree to. Notwithstanding my refusal, he went upstairs and took one, and with good nature begged I would excuse his borrowing it, as it was by General Howe’s orders.”
Annoyances and alarms were common enough in a town overrun by redcoats, who were not infrequently drunk. Elizabeth, descending one night to her kitchen, found a tipsy sergeant making ardent and irresistible love to her neat maidservant, Ann. On being told to go away, the man grew bellicose, flourished his sword, and used the forcible language of the camp. He had reckoned without his host, however, when he thought to have matters all to his own liking under that quiet Quaker roof. A middle-aged neighbour,—a Friend,—hearing the tumult, came swiftly to the rescue, collared the rascal, and wrenched the sword out of his hand; whereupon Elizabeth, with delightful sense and caution, carried the carnal weapon into the parlour, and deliberately locked it up in a drawer. This sobered the warrior, and brought him to his senses. To go back to his barracks without his sword would be to court unpleasant consequences. So after trying what some emphasized profanity would do to help him, and finding it did nothing at all, he grew humble, said he had only yielded up his arms “out of pure good nature,” and announced his willingness to drink a glass of wine with such peaceable and friendly folk. No liquor was produced in response to this cordial condescension, but he was conducted carefully to the step, the sword returned to him, and the door shut in his face; upon which poor foolish Ann, being refused permission to follow, climbed the back fence in pursuit of her lover, and returned to her duties no more.
Of the brilliant gayety which marked this memorable winter, of the dinners and balls, of the plays at the old Southwark Theatre, of the reckless extravagance and dissipation which filled the lives of the fair Tory dames who danced the merry nights away, there is not the faintest reflection in the pages of this diary. Even the Mischianza—that marvellous combination of ball, banquet, and tournament—is dismissed in a few brief sentences. “Ye scenes of Vanity and Folly,” says the home-staying Quaker wife, though still without any rancorous disapprobation of the worldly pleasures in which she has no share. To withstand steadfastly the allurements of life, yet pass no censure upon those who yield to them, denotes a gentle breadth of character, far removed from the complacent self-esteem of the “unco guid.” When a young English officer, whom Elizabeth Drinker is compelled to receive under her roof, gives an evening concert in his rooms, and the quiet house rings for the first time with music and loud voices, her only comment on the entertainment is that it was “carried on with as much soberness and good order as the nature of the thing admitted.” And when he invites a dozen friends to dine with him, she merely records that “they made very little noise, and went away timeously.” It is a good tonic to read any pages so free from complaints and repining.
The diary bears witness to the sad distress of careless merrymakers when the British army prepared to take the field, to the departure of many prominent Tories with Admiral Howe’s fleet, and to the wonderful speed and silence with which Sir Henry Clinton withdrew his forces from Philadelphia. “Last night,” writes Elizabeth on the 18th of June, 1778, “there were nine thousand of ye British Troops left in Town, and eleven thousand in ye Jerseys. This morning, when we arose, there was not one Red-Coat to be seen in Town, and ye Encampment in ye Jerseys had vanished.”
With the return of Congress a new era of discomfort began for the persecuted Friends, whose houses were always liable to be searched, whose doors were battered down, and whose windows were broken by the vivacious mob; while the repeated seizures of household effects for unpaid war taxes soon left rigid members of the society—bound at any cost to obey the dictates of their uncompromising consciences—without a vestige of furniture in their pillaged homes. “George Schlosser and a young man with him came to inquire what stores we have,” is a characteristic entry in the journal. “Looked into ye middle room and cellar. Behaved complaisant. Their authority, the Populace.” And again: “We have taxes at a great rate almost daily coming upon us. Yesterday was seized a walnut Dining Table, five walnut Chairs, and a pair of large End-Irons, as our part of a tax for sending two men out in the Militia.” This experience is repeated over and over again, varied occasionally by some livelier demonstrations on the part of the “populace,” which had matters all its own way during those wild years of misrule. When word came to Philadelphia that Lord Cornwallis had surrendered, the mob promptly expressed its satisfaction by wrecking the houses of Friends and Tory sympathizers. “We had seventy panes of glass broken,” writes Elizabeth calmly, “ye sash lights and two panels of the front Parlour broke in pieces; ye Door cracked and violently burst open, when they threw stones into ye House for some time, but did not enter. Some fared better, some worse. Some Houses, after breaking ye door, they entered, and destroyed the Furniture. Many women and children were frightened into fits, and ’tis a mercy no lives were lost.”
When peace was restored and the federal government firmly established, these disorders came to an end; a new security reigned in place of the old placid content; and a new prosperity, more buoyant but less solid than that of colonial days, gave to Philadelphia, as to other towns, an air of gayety, and habits of increased extravagance. We hear no more of the men who went with clubs from shop to shop, “obliging ye people to lower their prices,”—a proceeding so manifestly absurd that “Tommy Redman, the Doctor’s apprentice, was put in prison for laughing as ye Regulators passed by.” We hear no more of houses searched or furniture carted away. Elizabeth Drinker’s diary begins to deal with other matters, and we learn to our delight that this sedate Quakeress was passionately fond of reading romances;—those alluring, long-winded, sentimental, impossible romances, dear to our great-grandmothers’ hearts. It is true she does not wholly approve of such self-indulgence, and has ever ready some word of excuse for her own weakness; but none the less “The Mysteries of Udolpho” and its sister stories thrill her with delicious emotions of pity and alarm. “I have read a foolish romance called ‘The Haunted Priory; or the Fortunes of the House of Rayo,’” she writes on one occasion; “but I have also finished knitting a pair of large cotton stockings, bound a petticoat, and made a batch of gingerbread. This I mention to show that I have not spent the whole day reading.” Again she confesses to completing two thick volumes entitled “The Victim of Magical Illusions; or the Mystery of the Revolution of P—— L——,” which claimed to be a “magico-political tale, founded on historic fact.” “It may seem strange,” she muses, “that I should begin the year, reading romances. ’Tis a practice I by no means highly approve, yet I trust I have not sinned, as I read a little of most things.”
She does indeed, for we find her after a time dipping into—of all books in the world—Rabelais, and retiring hastily from the experiment. “I expected something very sensible and clever,” she says sadly, “but on looking over the volumes I was ashamed I had sent for them.” Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women” pleases her infinitely better; though she is unwilling to go so far as the impetuous Englishwoman, in whom reasonableness was never a predominant trait. Unrestricted freedom, that curbless wandering through doubtful paths which end in social pitfalls, offered no allurement to the Quaker wife in whom self-restraint had become second nature; but her own intelligence and her practical capacity for affairs made her respect both the attainments and the prerogatives of her sex. In fact, she appears to have had exceedingly clear and definite opinions upon most matters which came within her ken, and she expresses them in her diary without diffidence or hesitation. The idol of the Revolutionary period was Tom Paine; and when we had established our own republic, the enthusiasm we felt for republican France predisposed us still to believe that Paine’s turbulent eloquence embodied all wisdom, all justice, and all truth. In Philadelphia the French craze assumed more dangerous and absurd proportions than in any other city of the Union. Her once decorous Quaker streets were ornamented with liberty-poles and flower-strewn altars to freedom, around which men and women, girls and boys, danced the carmagnole, and shrieked wild nonsense about tyrants and the guillotine. The once quiet nights were made hideous with echoes of “Ça ira” and the Marseillaise. Citizens, once sober and sensible, wore the bonnet rouge, exchanged fraternal embraces, recited mad odes at dinners, and played tricks fantastic enough to plunge the whole hierarchy of heaven into tears,—or laughter. “If angels have any fun in them,” says Horace Walpole, “how we must divert them!” Naturally, amid this popular excitation, “The Rights of Man” and “The Age of Reason” were the best-read books of the day, and people talked about them with that fierce fervour which forbade doubt or denial.
Now Elizabeth Drinker was never fervent. Hers was that critical attitude which unconsciously, but inevitably, weighs, measures, and preserves a finely adjusted mental balance. She read “The Age of Reason,” and she read “The Rights of Man,” and then she read Addison’s “Evidences of the Christian Religion,” by way of putting her mind in order, and then she sat down and wrote:—