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Betsy Ross and the Making of America

Henry Holt and Company

The Light Within

Elizabeth "Betsy" Griscom's story begins on a New Jersey farm near the Delaware River, on a tract of land along Newton Creek. Five thousand tons of Bethlehem steel shadow the spot today: the house, fields and waterfront that sustained the first American Griscoms have given way to the towering eastern pier of the Walt Whitman Bridge and the deck truss spans that support its approach. But stare hard enough, and it is possible to gaze out from the Pennsylvania shore and imagine the empty banks of the Delaware when Betsy's great-grandfather, Andrew Griscom, arrived in the Quaker colony at West Jersey in 1680, a year before William Penn founded the City of Brotherly Love. It was not long before Griscom felt Philadelphia's gravitational pull; by the time Betsy Griscom was born seven decades later, four generations of Griscoms had made their lives and livelihoods in the city and its environs. Understanding Andrew Griscom's roots in the city establishes Betsy's own, and not just because, over a century later, she would come to live in a house he built. As he laid the foundation for a new colony, he created the tangible world into which his great-granddaughter would enter, while also setting the family on the artisanal course that she too would travel. Her story, then, rightfully begins with Andrew's, in the migration of thousands of Protestant dissenters seeking relief, opportunity and adventure in the New World.

Andrew Griscom's exact origins are clouded in family memory that was already fading by the time his great-grandchildren tried to recall them in the nineteenth century. They weren't altogether sure where Andrew had lived before making the decision to migrate. Betsy's sister Sarah had always told her daughter that the Griscom family came from Wales, and cousin Deborah Griscom Stewart thought so, too. Another cousin agreed that it was Wales — or was it Scotland? — while yet another thought it was England. Apparently by the time Betsy's generation reached adulthood, the memory of the family's Old World origins was already becoming foggy, indistinct.

If he cannot be grounded in space, he can be placed only slightly more closely in time. Andrew Griscom's life began about 1650, just around the time Charles I was beheaded in the Puritan ascendancy that accompanied England's civil war. His childhood unfolded during Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, and as an adult he watched as Charles II regained the throne, unleashing the excesses of Restoration England. The appearance and growing availability of the first English-language Bible around the turn of the seventeenth century — a watershed development in European history — had prompted unprecedented theological innovation. Griscom felt drawn to one group of religious, political and social dissenters whose vigorous critique of the Church of England was transforming lives across Europe. These religious radicals wanted to return Christianity to its most primitive origins. Among the most influential was George Fox, who left his home in Leicestershire at the age of nineteen to pursue a spiritual quest. Finding little inspiration among his country's religious leaders, the by-then twenty-three-year-old seeker became increasingly disillusioned. At last, however, he heard a mystical voice speaking to him, saying, "There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition." Fox came to believe that God's spirit is present within everyone, that each person has an intrinsic capacity to apprehend God's word and to cultivate and share opinions on spiritual matters. The principle was shocking in an age that had long located spiritual authority elsewhere — in the clergy, according to the Church of England, or the Bible, according to the adherents of the Puritan effort to reform the Church. What Fox and his followers proposed would prove anathema to both.

Fox developed a theology grounded in the presence of Inward Light, that is, in the direct access between laity and deity. "It is not enough," wrote one adherent, "to hear of Christ, or read of Christ, but this is the thing — to feel him my root, my life, my foundation." That core principle led naturally to other beliefs, including a radical commitment to equality (for the light of God's presence glimmered within all); a disdain for ceremonies, rituals or other "empty forms" that gestured toward artificial hierarchies; and a belief in human potential. Adherents to the emerging faith refused to pay tithes to the state Church. They would not take oaths in court, and they rejected social customs that implied deference to superiors. Discarding the extraneous trappings of religious practice, Fox and his followers worshipped largely in silence; people spoke only when moved by the Holy Spirit. They refused to engage in combat during wartime or in any way to support state-sanctioned violence. The belief that there is "that of God" within all also gave rise to an intense concern for the disadvantaged, including (in time) slaves, prisoners and residents of asylums, prompting Friends to agitate for social change in ways that their neighbors sometimes found agitating indeed. Because the clutter of the material world could distract them from attending to the light within, they embraced simplicity in all things, eschewing holidays, theater, wigs, jewelry and other types of ornamentation. They disapproved of alcohol and other forms of high living. In speech, too, they strove for simplicity of expression and preferred the biblical cadence of thee and thou to the common English usage of their day.

As "Friends of Truth" (from John 15:15), these dissenters came to consider themselves as the Society of Friends. Critics, however, had another term for them: Quakers. Given the quiet nature of their worship, the term seems a misnomer. The term was allegedly coined after an incident in which Fox was hauled into court and had the temerity to suggest that the judge "tremble at the word of the Lord." The judge sarcastically referred to Fox as a "quaker," and the term stuck, even to today. He was not alone in his derision; adherents, in rejecting the authority of both the Church of England as well as the Puritan critics who had gained control of the government in the decades around midcentury, threatened the social order, while many countrymen simply found their in-your-face piety abrasive, taking offense at men and women who seemed to think themselves, literally, holier than thou.

Reaction to the emerging faith was not limited to mere contempt. During the second half of the seventeenth century, thousands of Friends were jailed for their beliefs. Hundreds died. Many of Fox's followers, Andrew Griscom among them, began leaving Britain to escape persecution; that the New World offered unprecedented opportunity in more temporal concerns as well was the carrot that came with the stick.

By the time Andrew Griscom emigrated about 1680, he was an able and experienced carpenter, motivated by faith and fortune to try his luck in North America. In 1675, the first shipload of Quakers sailed up the Delaware — a river as broad as the Thames at Woolwych, colonists noted with satisfaction — and came ashore in West Jersey. Over the course of the next five years, the Griffen, the Kent, the Willing Mind, the Martha, the Mary and the Shield and other English vessels made their way from British ports to Jersey shores, bringing some fourteen hundred migrants in just five years' time. From one of those ships stepped Andrew Griscom, who purchased land in the West Jersey colony, perhaps fifty to a hundred acres of it, north of Newton Creek around present-day Camden.

About thirty when he made this move, Griscom was a man of conviction, confidence, optimism and ambition. By 1681, the West Jersey colony was reporting (in necessarily upbeat literature intended to impress readers back home) flourishing herds of cattle and hogs, crops "considerably greater" than England's (from which colonists obtained good bread, beer and ale) and "plentiful" natural provision of fish, fowl and fruit. Flax, hemp and wool were already being converted to cloth and then clothing, and animal hides to leather for shoes and hats. The soil was better, the winter shorter and the trees more varied and abundant. The latter was most important to artisans like Andrew Griscom, who were already converting the native oak, chestnut, cedar, walnut and mulberry trees to furniture, barrels, fences and houses. Structures rose across the settlements, some of brick, some of wood, that were "plaister'd and ceil'd" just as in England. Timber by timber, colonists recreated in West Jersey the English towns they had left behind.

When William Penn — among the most influential Englishmen to embrace the community of Friends — launched his own venture, Pennsylvania, on the opposite bank of the Delaware River, the Friends' fortunes expanded once again, and so too did Andrew Griscom's. Penn's father, Sir William, had been a celebrated admiral, and in 1681 King Charles II gave the younger Penn, out of "regard to the memorie and merits of his late father" (and to discharge a large debt due the Penn family) a huge tract of land in North America, honoring the admiral by naming it Pennsylvania, or Penn's Woods. Penn also persuaded his friend the Duke of York (about to become King James II) to grant him title to the three counties of Delaware in order to secure access to the sea. Fox's followers, anxious to practice their faith in peace, finally had a refuge. Religious tolerance would prove the colony's most cherished achievement. In promotional tracts that circulated across Europe, Penn reminded readers that his new colony — which lay "six hundred miles nearer the Sun" than dreary old England — would need not just merchants, mariners and farmers to succeed, but also men of the "laborious handicrafts," especially carpenters, masons, sawyers, hewers, joiners and other building and timber tradesmen.

The house carpenter Andrew Griscom knew an opportunity when he saw one: when Penn began offering land in his large grant across the Delaware River with plans to build a city there, Griscom acquired close to five hundred acres, which also entitled him to a town lot on what would become South Second Street. At first, Penn's agent Thomas Holme assigned lots by lottery, but Penn eventually took over this task and brought a decidedly different approach to the matter. Penn cherished commitment over chance. In determining the all-important question of who would get which lots in his new city — assignments that would shape the fortunes of families for generations — he weighed a number of factors, including the assets (tangible and intangible) a person brought to the colonization effort, the size of the investment they chose to make, the quality of life they had given up in England to migrate, and how fast they were likely to improve any property they acquired. Men who bought ten thousand acres would receive 204 feet of choice river frontage on the city's two waterfronts, the Delaware and the Schuylkill, as well as four interior lots, each 102 feet in breadth and the depth of a full city block. Five thousand acres secured a riverfront property half that size and a city lot on High Street; a thousand acres netted a waterfront lot running twenty feet for every thousand acres purchased, and a High Street lot calculated the same way. In September 1682, Griscom bought a tract just a sliver shy of five hundred acres, so he, alongside other artisans like fellow carpenter John Parsons, the brazier William Smith and the linen draper John Moon, received a comparatively modest lot on Second Street, some 51 by 300 feet — Penn's logic apparently being that tradesmen like these would add depth, figuratively and literally, to his project as their craft skills accelerated Philadelphia's development into a comfortable colonial city.

Carpentry would prove an especially useful and lucrative occupation in a bubbling new settlement. In those first five years of Andrew Griscom's life as a colonist, close to ninety ships disembarked some eight thousand immigrants on the banks of England's colonies in North America's Mid-Atlantic — a "population buildup unmatched in the annals of English colonization," according to the historian Gary Nash. Fifty ships sailed in 1682–83 alone. William Penn cautioned those thousands of migrants to "look for a Winter before the Summer comes," but summer came soon enough. Penn's city rose quickly and comfortably, thanks in part to the sweat of Andrew Griscom's determined brow.

Griscom's skills were indispensable. In the earliest years of the settlement, he built dozens of timber houses for English families eager to move from the makeshift caves along the Delaware River that sheltered rich and poor alike in the province's earliest years. The first houses were only slightly more elaborate affairs: Griscom and other builders erected post-and-hole houses as well as small, sixteen-foot-square, one-room cottages. The colony's leaders carefully managed the natural resources being so quickly harvested throughout the countryside. On one occasion, for instance, Andrew Griscom petitioned on "Behalf of John Murray" to be allowed two additional trees "to help finish the said Murray's house." By February 1684, about 150 such houses were up in and around Penn's fledgling city, all of them wooden.

But Penn and his fellow colonists had another vision for Philadelphia, one shaped in large part by the disastrous fire that had consumed London in 1666. More than thirteen thousand houses and almost ninety churches had been reduced to ashes; close to four hundred acres — fully 80 percent of the city — lay in ruin. London authorities responded quickly with measures that favored brick construction over timber. When Robert Turner hired builders for his new brick house in Philadelphia, he had the London Rebuilding Act of 1667 in mind.

Claims to the building of the first brick house in Philadelphia are oddly reminiscent of claims to making the nation's first flag: there are several, and just enough evidence to support all or none of them. Most histories of early Philadelphia credit the Dublin linen draper (and Penn agent and ally) Robert Turner as the builder of the city's first brick house. Descendants of Andrew Griscom claim that the first three brick houses to rise in Philadelphia were their ancestor's handiwork. Descendants of the brickmason Richard Cantril make a similar claim. But these assertions need not necessarily compete or contradict one another, since clients, carpenters and bricklayers alike — and more than one of each — would have been necessary to erect such a large and impressive house, and everyone involved in such a landmark undertaking would surely have noted that fact to their children and grandchildren. What's surprising is not that there are three competing claims, but that there are not more.

Andrew Griscom had his own Second Street lot surveyed in April 1683, at the start of the year's building season. No description of the house Griscom built for himself survives today, but the building that rose next door to the south was a "large house of double front," with a "great display of dormer windows" and "five or six steps ascent." Twenty-five years later, that dwelling was still fashionable enough that it continued to be sought after; in the early eighteenth century, Philadelphia's Samuel Preston was house hunting on behalf of Jonathan Dickinson and wrote to advise him that he was "most inclined" to this house, which he described as much like Edward Shippen's (another impressive structure), "but larger — a story higher, and neatlier finished, with garden, outhouses, &c.," all down to Dock Creek. "I know it will suit," Preston assured Dickinson, "or none in Philadelphia."

Andrew Griscom was in good company and was fast becoming an influential man in the city's community of builders. Among the grandest homes to rise in the new colony was Penn's own estate, Pennsbury, and though Andrew Griscom was not among the men employed to build the manor house, he was the man engaged to "measure" it — that is, to inspect the carpentry and determine what wages were due his fellow craftsmen. As Penn's home rose, so too did Griscom's prospects.

The number of buildings multiplied quickly in the new city, to the public benefit of the city and to the private benefit of Andrew Griscom. Raising and dismantling scaffolding alone could make a man rich. Timber frames, roofing, doors, windows — there was possibly no better place for a house carpenter in the whole of the British Empire than Philadelphia in the 1680s and '90s. By 1684, Philadelphia boasted "three hundred and fifty-seven Houses," many of them "large, well built, with good Cellars, three stories, and some with balconies." In 1689, Charles Pickering could easily predict that "Philadelphia will flourish," adding that "more good houses" would be built the coming summer "than ever was in one year"; the following season, another observer confirmed that "the people go on building very much," and houses were rising rapidly "on the Front, at least twenty this year." No fewer than six cart-men were employed all day every day simply carrying timber, bricks, stone and lime to and from building sites. By 1698, one observer would exclaim that the "Industrious (nay Indefatigable) inhabitants have built a Nobel and Beautiful City ... which contains above two thousand Houses, all Inhabited; and most of them Stately, and of Brick, generally three Stories high, after the mode in London."

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Excerpted from Betsy Ross and the Making of America by Marla R. Miller. Copyright © 2010 Marla R. Miller. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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