Through Colonial Doorways

by Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

“As soon as we were out of the city and felt the flush of air, we were like school-boys in the playground on a holiday; and we began to kill time by all the means that our imagination could suggest. Flashes of wit shot their coruscations on all sides; puns of the genuine Philadelphia stamp were handed about; old college stories were revived; macaroni Latin was spoken with great purity; songs were sung,—even classical songs, among which I recollect the famous Bacchanalian of the Archdeacon of Oxford, Mihi est propositum in tabernâ mori; in short, we might have been taken for anything else but the grave counsellors of the celebrated bar of Philadelphia.”

Mr. Du Ponceau it is who is accredited with the well-known story of the lawyer whose client came in and deposed that “his brother had died and made a will.” A gentleman who read law with the facetious Frenchman relates that it was only when a fee was placed in Mr. Du Ponceau’s hand that he translated the phrase into, “Ah! you mean that your brother made a will and died.” We can imagine the laugh with which the philosophers would greet this most practical of jokes.

Quite as celebrated as the dinners of the society were Mr. John Vaughan’s breakfasts, which held the same prominence in the social life of the time as Dr. Wistar’s evening parties or as the Sunday afternoon vespers of Mr. Henry C. Carey, where, during the late war, and after its close, soldiers, politicians, statesmen, and civilians met together and discussed the great issues and events that shook the nation from 1860 to 1865. So at Mr. Vaughan’s breakfasts were discussed the agitating questions of the last decade of the century, Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, as they were beginning to be called, meeting together around his hospitable board. Mr. Vaughan himself was a Federalist, although not a violent partisan. Riding, one day, with Mr. Jefferson, his horse became unmanageable, disturbing somewhat Mr. Vaughan’s serenity, upon which the latter, gathering his reins firmly, muttered under his breath, “This horse—this horse is as bad as a Democrat!” “Oh, no,” replied the high-priest and leader of the party; “if he were a Democrat, he would have thrown you long ago.” Mr. Vaughan, for many years librarian and treasurer of the society, had his rooms in the building on Fifth Street, in one of which, before its generous old-fashioned fireplace and high carved mantel, Washington sat for his well-known portrait by the elder Peale. The general, whom Mr. Vaughan numbered among his friends, had already been elected a member of the society; but we find few records of his presence at its meetings or at the famous breakfasts. One of these breakfasts, given in the latter years of Mr. Vaughan’s life, is still remembered by Dr. William H. Furness, then a young man, recently come from New England to take charge of the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. The breakfast lasted from nine until one. Whether the guests breakfasted upon roast peacocks and nightingales’ tongues, or upon plain beefsteak and chops, Dr. Furness does not remember; but he will never forget the circle gathered around that table. There were John Quincy Adams, Colonel Drayton of South Carolina, Mr. Du Ponceau, and Dr. Channing, who exercised such an influence on the religious thought of New England, and of whom the orthodox clergy were wont to say that his theology was “Calvinism with the bones taken out.” A goodly company of leading minds, “joined later,” says Dr. Furness, by Albert Gallatin and the Rev. William Ware, pastor of the First Unitarian Church in New York. Among other visitors of note entertained by Mr. Vaughan were Sir Charles Lyell, and George Robins Gliddon, the Egyptologist, who were both in this country about 1841.

Mr. John Vaughan, whose most distinguishing trait was love for his fellow-men, whom, it was said, he took more delight in serving than most men take in making and hoarding dollars, belonged to a family distinguished in statesmanship, letters, and affairs. The Vaughan brothers were of English birth, sons of Samuel Vaughan, a London merchant trading with America. The most prominent of this large family was Benjamin Vaughan, M.D., LL.D., sometime secretary to Lord Shelburne, and acting as confidential messenger in the peace negotiations between Great Britain and America in 1783. Deeply tinctured with the revolutionary spirit of the time, a liberal to the extent of admiring the system of the Directory in France, and writing in favor of it, Benjamin Vaughan finally found it expedient to quit the Old World for the more congenial political atmosphere of the New. He settled in Hallowell, Maine, as did his brother Charles, where descendants of the name still reside. The death of Dr. Benjamin Vaughan, of Hallowell, was announced to the society in 1836, and Mr. Merrick, his kinsman, was appointed to prepare a notice of him. Another brother, Samuel, settled in Jamaica; William, the successful banker of the family, remained in London; while John, one of the younger brothers, came to Philadelphia, where he established himself as a wine merchant, and a prominent member of the First Unitarian Church. Generous to a fault, “Johnny Vaughan,” as his intimates were wont to call him, seems to have objected to parting with but one single earthly possession,—his umbrella. A lady who knew Mr. Vaughan when he was a very old gentleman remembers one of flaming red, whose color should have insured its staying qualities. A story is also told of his having printed on the outside of another one in large characters, “This umbrella was stolen from John Vaughan.” One day a friend of Mr. Vaughan’s started off with this umbrella, and, quite unconscious of its equivocal inscription, hoisted it in broad day. Mr. Vaughan’s Portuguese office boy, who could speak or read no English, but who knew the umbrella, and what the printing stood for, chanced to meet the gentleman who carried it, and with speechless but entire devotion to his master’s interests followed it, and “froze on to it,” as the narrator expressed it, with such persistency that the holder was fain to relinquish it and make his escape from the jeers of the by-standers.

It was over such a circle of learned men and beaux-esprits that Mr. Jefferson was called to preside, when he came to Philadelphia, in 1797, to act as Vice-President of the United States in an uncongenial Federal administration. It is not strange that, with his scholarly and scientific tastes, he found in the rooms of the Philosophical Society a grateful retreat from political wrangling and the cares of state. Party feeling ran so high, at this period, that “social intercourse between members of the two parties ceased,” says Mr. Parton, “and old friends crossed the street to avoid saluting one another. Jefferson declined invitations to ordinary social gatherings, and spent his leisure hours in the circle that met in the rooms of the Philosophical Society.” Not that its membership was Republican, many of its prominent members being Federalists; notably, Dr. Benjamin Rush, Chief Justice Tilghman, Judge Peters, Jared Ingersoll, who was Federalist candidate for the Vice-Presidency of the United States in 1812, Dr. Robert Patterson, and Mr. Du Ponceau. This was a place, however, where science, art, and literature occupied the ground and where politics and party differences were forgotten in the discussion of some subject that touched the general weal, as when Dr. Caspar Wistar discovered a new bone; or Robert Patterson presented a paper on improved ship-pumps; or Jonathan Williams one on a new mode of refining sugar; or when John Fitch exhibited “the model, with a drawing and description, of a machine for working a boat against the stream by means of a steam-engine;” or, later, when Mr. Charles Goodyear was induced, by Franklin Peale, to demonstrate to the society that vulcanized rubber could be made from the juice of the cahuchu tree. And here, as if to prove that science and religion may be allied in closest union, came two distinguished Moravian divines, John Heckewelder and the Rev. Lewis D. de Schweinitz, the latter with his “Synopsis Fungorum in America.”

John Adams, the Federalist President, was a member of the Philosophical Society, and speaks of it with warm admiration. Comparing Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, he says, in one of his letters to his wife,—

“Particular gentlemen here [in Philadelphia], who have improved upon their education by travel, shine; but in general old Massachusetts outshines her younger sisters. Still, in several particulars they have more wit than we. They have societies, the Philosophical Society particularly, which excites a scientific emulation, and propagates their fame. If ever I get through this scene of politics and war, I will spend the remainder of my days in endeavoring to instruct my countrymen in the art of making the most of their abilities and virtues, an art which they have hitherto too much neglected. A philosophical society shall be established at Boston, if I have wit and address enough to accomplish it, some time or other. Pray, set Brother Cranch’s philosophical head plodding upon this project. Many of his lucubrations would have been published and preserved for the benefit of mankind, and for his honor, if such a club had existed.”

Mr. Madison, who was far more congenial to Mr. Jefferson, politically, than the sturdy New Englander, had been for years a member of the society; but he was out of office now, and living quietly at his rural home in Orange County, Virginia. It was during his residence here, in 1794, that the sprightly widow, who afterwards became his wife, writes of her first meeting with “the great little Madison.” She tells us, in her charming letters, that Aaron Burr brought him to see her. On this occasion she wore “a mulberry-colored satin, with a silk tulle kerchief over her neck, and on her head an exquisitely dainty little cap, from which an occasional uncropped curl would escape.”

These were still days of picturesque dressing, with both men and women. “Jeffersonian simplicity” had not yet come in, in full force. Watson, the annalist, describes Mr. Jefferson, a few years earlier, in “a long-waisted white cloth coat, scarlet breeches and vest, a cocked hat, shoes and buckles, and white silk hose,”—an elegant figure, the life and centre of the group of men gathered together in the society’s rooms on Fifth Street. The great Rittenhouse had, in 1797, set forth upon a wider range among the stars; but Dr. Benjamin Rush was there,—physician, scientist, philanthropist, and statesman, a host in himself. His kindly face and the recollections of his contemporaries tell us that he was a pleasant companion, with all his learning, which cannot always be said of the learned ones of the earth. There also was the Rev. William Smith, first provost of the University of Pennsylvania, a man of science as well as an able divine; Dr. Barton, nephew of Dr. Rittenhouse, an original worker, who contributed largely to the scientific literature of the day, and gave to Americans their first elementary treatise on botany; and Dr. Caspar Wistar, the learned physician and genial companion, who not only enriched the society by his own work and teachings, but by his correspondence with Humboldt and Soemmering in Germany, Camper in Holland, Sylvester in Geneva, Pole and Hope in Great Britain, and many more of that ilk, kept its members en rapport with scientific work abroad. Dr. Wistar succeeded Dr. Rush as President of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, which early uttered its protest against slavery. Nor was Dr. Wistar solely interested in the cause of the negro; that of the American Indian, which we are wont to regard as one of the latest fads in the philanthropic world, also engaged his attention at this early date.

Dr. Wistar was elected president of the Philosophical Society on the resignation of Mr. Jefferson, in 1815. Some years prior to this, Dr. Wistar introduced to its circle the Baron von Humboldt, whom he invited to that smaller coterie of learned men, at his own house, which composed the Wistar Club. A gala day it must have been at the Philosophical Society when it opened its doors to this greatest naturalist of his time, perhaps of any time. The Baron von Humboldt was returning from an extended tour in South America, Mexico, and the West Indies. His young friends Montufar and Bonpland were with him,—the same Bonpland who later gave the Empress Josephine flower-seeds from the West Indies to plant at Malmaison, who became her intendant there, and who stood by her bedside when she was dying.