In this three-hundredth year of Jewish life in America, Charles Reznikoff looks back on some of the characters of the Colonial period, when Jews were well on the way to establishing themselves in the wide community, sketching and shading his portraits with sharp, honest strokes. The first section of this gallery, devoted to earlier worthies, appeared last month.
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A traveler attended divine service at New York’s Shearith Israel in September, 1744, and described his visit as follows: “I went in the morning . . . to the Jews’ sinagogue where was an assembly of about 50 of the seed of Abraham chanting and singing their doleful hymns, (they had 4 great wax candles lighted, as large as a man’s arm, round the sanctuary where was contained the ark of the covenant and Aaron’s rod), dressed in robes of white silk. Before the Rabbi, who was elevated above the rest, in a kind of desk, stood the seven golden candlesticks transformed into silver gilt. They were all slip shod. The men wore their hats in the synagogue and had a veil of some white stuff which they sometimes threw over their heads in their devotion; the women, of whom some were very pritty, stood up in a gallery like a hen coop. They sometimes paused or rested a little from singing and talked about business. My ears were so filled with their lugubrous songs that I could not get the sound out of my head all day.”1
Some of the Jews in colonial New York, in the 18th century, were practicing a handicraft. The Jewish freemen of the city—“freedom of the city” included the right to engage in a handicraft and sell at retail—numbered a peruke-maker, a tailor, a cordwainer (shoe-maker), a saddler, a baker, a distiller and tobacconist, a watchmaker, a worker in brass, and a silversmith. Myer Myers (d. 1795), a native of New York, became chairman of the “Gold and Silver Smiths’ Society.” The sacred scrolls of the Torah in the synagogues then at Newport, New York, and Philadelphia have ornaments he made. Most of the Jewish freemen, however, were just plain merchants, and some were listed as “shopkeeper,” “chandler” (probably a retailer of provisions and groceries), “vendue master” (auctioneer), or “retailer.”
In the second half of the 18th century, Sampson Simson was among the important Jewish merchants of New York, and his name is often mentioned as the owner of vessels in foreign trade. He was a member of the New York Chamber of Commerce. During the French and Indian War (as the Seven Years’ War was known in the Colonies), a number of his ships were commissioned as privateers, and similar commissions were issued to Hayman Levy and Judah Hays. Among the announcements in the newspapers of those days, one may still read Hayman Levy’s advertisements of equipment for the soldiers: shoes, hose, shirts, knee and stock buckles, “hair cockades,” and scarlet broadcloth.
Judah Hays had a sedan chair which he kept in a public stable. He owned Negroes, too, as did other Jewish merchants and men of property generally. Sometimes, they freed them, as did Benjamin Gomez by his will (1770): “My trustee wench, Katty, is to be free from the yoke of slavery, as a reward for her fidelity.” A number of the Jewish merchants had Hebrew books, the Pentateuch usually: “my Five Books of the Law of Moses in parchment with the ornaments of plate belonging thereto” (Joseph Buena’s will); “my five books of Moses, and one pair of silver ornaments thereto belonging” (Mordecai Gomez’s will).
Isaac Pinto published his translation of the Sephardic ritual as used in Shearith Israel because, the preface reads, Hebrew was “improperly understood by many” (1766). On the other hand, one or two Jews were beginning to drink of the learning of the Gentiles. Isaac Abrahams, who was, it has been supposed, the son of the schoolmaster in Shearith Israel’s school, was graduated from King’s College (afterwards Columbia).
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The Franks Family
At the beginning of the 18th century, there had landed at New York from London, Moses Levy, a wealthy merchant, formerly a Marrano born in Spain (according to the tradition of his descendants). With him from London, according to that tradition, came a young Jew about seventeen years of age, who had been born in Germany. His name was Jacob Franks, and he is supposed to have had sufficient learning to be a rabbi.
Moses Levy (d. New York, 1728) became the pumas, or president, of Shearith Israel. He had a house in the country at Rye with about seventy-five acres of land. His daughter, Bilhah Abigail, married Jacob Franks. Her younger sister, Rachel, married Isaac Mendes Seixas, formerly a Marrano, who had come to New York from Lisbon by way of Barbados. These estimable ladies were much devoted to the congregation. They are said to have founded the first charitable society of Shearith Israel; and the name of Bilhah Abigail Franks is remembered to this day in a prayer for the dead, recited by the congregation on the Day of Atonement, because she helped build the synagogue in 1729. Her husband, Jacob Franks, whose name is likewise remembered with hers, was one of the trustees of the lot on Mill Street where the synagogue was built. (In those days real property for the use of the Jewish community was held in the names of trustees, for a Jewish congregation had no standing at law and could not own property in its own name.) Jacob Franks (d. New York, 1769) succeeded to the honor that had been his father-in-law’s—parnas of Shearith Israel. Indeed, he was the parnas when the synagogue was dedicated in 1730. As merchant he had the distinction of acting as agent of the king and furnished supplies to the troops in New York and the Northern colonies.
Jacob and Bilhah Abigail’s son, David (b. New York, 1720), was a clever boy. It is said of him that when he was thirteen he knew enough Hebrew to be able to read from the scroll of the Law—without the vowel signs as in the prayerbooks. He was also one of the Jews of New York who, in 1738, were enrolled in a militia company. The Jewish community, naturally, expected that he would be a worthy successor to his father and grandfather. He married a Gentile. His sister, Phila (Bilhah), also married a Gentile, Oliver Delancey, whose mother was a Van Cortlandt.
Their mother wrote to her eldest son, Naphtali, in London, from her summer home in “Flatt bush”: “I am now retired from town and would from my self (if it were possiable to have some peace of mind). . . . Good God, wath a shock it was when they acquainted me she had left the house and had bin married six months. I can hardly hold my pen whilst I am writing it. . . . My spirits was for some time soe depress! that it was a pain to me to speak or see any one. I have over come it soe far as not to make my concern soe conspicuous but I shall never have that serenity nor peace within I have soe happyly had hittherto. My house has bin my prison ever since. I had not heart enough to goe near the street door. Its a pain to me to think off goeing again to town and if your father’s buissness would permit him to live out of it I would never goe near it again. I wish it was in my power to leave this part of the world; I would come away in the first man of war that went to London.2
Seven or so years after the marriage, Oliver Delancey and some of his friends with blackened faces smashed the windows and burst open the door of a poor Dutch Jewish immigrant in New York; they “pulled and tore everything to pieces . . . and used very indecent language.” Phila and her husband lived in a great house at Broad and Pearl Streets, afterwards (1762) owned by Samuel Fraunces. He made a tavern out of it and here, as is generally known, Washington said farewell to his officers. Oliver Delancey was not among them. Like the rest of his family, in contrast to the patriotic Livingstons, he was an ardent Loyalist. He was in the British Army as a brigadier-general during the Revolution and afterwards he and his wife lived in England.
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David Franks and his wife also lived in a great house—in Philadelphia, her native city; and he was admitted to a select society, organized on the basis of “ancestral bearings and associations.” He had Jews among his clerks and partners. He was the representative of his brother Moses, who in London obtained contracts for provisioning the British troops in America during the French and Indian War. For a number of years, afterwards, David Franks’s firm supplied the British garrisons on the Mississippi.
David Franks’s eldest child, a daughter named after his mother, Abigail, married Andrew Hamilton (attorney-general of Pennsylvania in 1768), a nephew of Governor James Hamilton. Franks’s other daughter, Rebecca, married Sir Henry Johnson, then a lieutenant-colonel and later a general in the British Army. They lived at Bath after the Revolution, and their children were members of its aristocracy.
At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, David Franks, because he had been an agent for supplying the British troops, was appointed by the Continental Congress “commissary of British prisoners” and authorized to supply them with necessaries—at the expense of the British. He had signed a non-importation agreement in 1765 but was suspected of being a Loyalist. He was arrested in 1778 on the basis of an intercepted letter; freed but arrested again in 1780; and ordered to leave Philadelphia for the enemy’s lines. He put it off as long as he could. In 1782 he was in England.
He was not happy there. To begin with, as he wrote Michael Gratz, he was in need of money and the cost of living in England was high. He had landed with forty or fifty pounds and was living with his eldest son, Moses, “a person of independent fortune.” According to the minutes of his case before the commission for the relief of American Loyalists, he had been worth no less than twenty thousand pounds sterling in personal property, to say nothing of his extensive interests in real estate. The commission gave him one hundred and twenty-five pounds for his losses, about 10 per cent of what he asked for, and he was recommended for an allowance of one hundred pounds a year. Perhaps as a Jew without money he was not quite welcome in the aristocratic circles in which his half-Gentile children moved. (By his will he gave his son Jacob a “preference to the rest of my children as some atonement for his and his wife’s very kind attention to me.”) Whatever the cause, he returned to America. It is on record that in 1792, in a matter before a Federal judge in Philadelphia, David Franks took his oath on the Five Books of Moses as a Jew. He died in that city in 1793 of yellow fever.
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Joseph Simon
Just as the merchants of Newport, New York, and Charlestown had their eyes to the Atlantic, the Jews of Philadelphia—and elsewhere in Pennsylvania—were looking west: to trade with the Indians and ownership of the fertile lands in what is now the Middle West. Joseph Simon (d. Lancaster, 1804) had the largest store in Lancaster, on the square in the center of town, and at one time he owned thousands of acres in the Ohio and Illinois country. The Jews of Lancaster met for prayer in Joseph Simon’s house, and here he had an ark, two scrolls of the Law, and silver plate for use in the service. One of his, to note another instance of early intermarriage, was Nicholas Schuyler of Albany, a surgeon in the Revolutionary army.
During the Revolutionary War, Simon supplied the Continental army with rifles, ammunition, drums, blankets, and provisions. Five Jews were among the subscribers in 1777 for a person “to ride between Lancaster and general Washington’s army with & for intelligence.” Joseph Simon’s name was at the head of the list, and Barnard Gratz’s second.
But one by one, after the Revolution, the Jews moved away from Lancaster, and Joseph Simon was probably the last Jew of the old community to be buried there.
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Barnard and Michael Gratz
The most outstanding of the five sons-in-law of Joseph Simon was Michael Gratz (1740-1811). Barnard and Michael Gratz, born in Silesia, Germany, were well trained in London in the counting-house of their cousin, Salomon Henry, a merchant of standing. It was a connection they had sense enough to use and value. In 1759 Michael Gratz joined his elder brother, Barnard (1738-1811), in Philadelphia, several years after Barnard’s arrival in this country. Michael, when young, had worried friends and relatives. He had been in Berlin and Amsterdam and in the East Indies and had not established himself anywhere. In 1758, as his elder brother wrote Solomon Henry in London: “I likewise heard my brother Michael is coming back from the East Indies, which am very sorry for, and I should be glad to know his reason for returning. . . . If he could content himself with living in the country, or else with living here (Philadelphia), at Mr. David Franks’s in my place . . . I believe I could soon get him my place, where he could learn the business of this country by staying with him two or three years. . . . This place requires honesty, industry, and good nature, and no pride, for he must do everything pertaining to the business.”
In Philadelphia, the brothers became partners. At first their trade was chiefly with other ports in America and through their cousin in London with Amsterdam and elsewhere on the continent of Europe. The non-importation agreement of 1765, which they signed as good Americans, limited them to the American market for purchases. Joseph Simon of Lancaster had been shipping them furs and, after the peace of 1763 with France, Lancaster became more important than ever for furs and pelts from the West. In 1769 Michael Gratz married one of Simon’s daughters and settled in Lancaster. Barnard continued to live in Philadelphia and finally Michael, too, returned to that city as a resident.
A portrait of Barnard Gratz by Charles Peale Polk shows a smiling elderly man with a high wide forehead, a shrewd glance, and a stout good-natured face. He is holding a pair of spectacles in his right hand but, by the few books in the case behind him, he did not lose his sight reading. The portrait of Michael Gratz by Thomas Sully, when the younger brother was also well on in years, shows an aggressive, intelligent man, earnest, even somber.
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Solomon Bush
Solomon Bush, the son of Mathias Bush, a merchant of Philadelphia and brother-in-law of Barnard Gratz, had his thigh bone broken in 1777 in a skirmish and was carried to his father’s house on Chestnut Hill, near Philadelphia. He had been appointed that year a deputy adjutant-general of the Pennsylvania militia. “. . . the surgeons,” he wrote in a letter, “pronounced my wound Mortal 7 days after the Enemy came: who treated our family with the utmost respect: they did not take the least trifle from us, though our neighbors, the poor Tories lost every thing. Howe’s March this way has made many wigs [Whigs]. . . .” Two years later he was still helpless. Bush, who then held the rank of major in the Continental army, was made a lieutenant-colonel for his services, particularly for those in the winter of 1776 “when the service was critical and hazardous”; and so became the highest ranking officer among the Jews in the combat units of the Continental army.
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Aaron Levy
One of Joseph Simon’s partners, about 1780, was Aaron Levy (1742-1815), a native of Amsterdam. He came to America when a young man and for a long time lived in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where he traded with the Indians. A great speculator in land—like David Franks, Joseph Simon, and the Gratz brothers—in 1786 he laid out Aaronsburg (population about 350 in 1950), the first town in Center County. During the Revolutionary War, he lent the Continental Congress money, some of it through Robert Morris, and was never fully repaid. His will lists his silver plate, item by item, as well as his walking-cane with an agate head and his silver snuffbox: a man who liked possessions and held them precious.
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Myer Hart
Myer Hart (d. 1795) was one of the founders in 1750 of Easton, another frontier town in which Jews lived. There were then eleven families in all: the stockade—it was as yet hardly a town or even a village—had a ferryman, a carpenter, a mason, a smith, a baker, a butcher, a lawyer, a court clerk, and two tavernkeepers. Hart was the storekeeper. By 1763 his county tax was the largest in Easton. He owned three houses and several Negroes. That year he became an innkeeper, too. During the Revolutionary War he was the agent of David Franks in caring for the British prisoners at Easton (1777-78). But his prosperity did not last. In 1786 his property was sold by the sheriff. A son, Michael, “the stuttering Jew,” lived on in Easton as a storekeeper until his death (1813).
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Gershom Mendes Seixas
When the Revolutionary War broke out, the Jewish congregation in New York, Shearith Israel, was as divided in its loyalty as the rest of the city.
The hazan, Gershom Mendes Seixas, born in New York in 1745, was (like David Franks) a grandson of Moses Levy. (It was not until many years later that a Jewish congregation in the United States had a minister ordained to be a rabbi.) When the city was about to be taken by the British in 1776, Seixas, an ardent Patriot, left New York for Stratford, Connecticut. A majority of the congregation finally settled in Philadelphia—at least until they could return to New York. Among those who remained in New York and signed an address of loyalty to the British were Abraham Gomez and Moses Gomez, Jr. The name of David Hays is also on the list. A German Jew, Alexander Zuntz, who held a non-military appointment as commissary with the Hessians, acted as head of Shearith Israel.
Seixas, who had come to Philadelphia in 1780, suggested the manner of dedicating the first synagogue in the city, there was to be neither instrumental nor choral music and no preaching. Seixas was elected hazan. His salary was two hundred pounds Pennsylvania currency a year, his firewood, and the perquisites of his office.
The decorum of all in his congregation Was, perhaps, not always irreproachable. There is a record of a motion “that we now bind ourselves by the strictest ties of honor to behave with decency and decorum in time of the worship, and that if any man behaves improperly, the Parnas [president] shall stop him. . . .” Another motion of the early minutes is by Isaac Da Costa of Charlestown, probably the elder Da Costa: “No person shall be suffered to speak to each other. They must address the Parnas. . . .” There was an attempt, too, as in the congregation of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of London, for example, to discipline members who violated the Sabbath. Ezekiel Levy, one of the founders of the Philadelphia congregation, was charged before the trustees in 1782 with shaving on a Sabbath in Baltimore.
By 1784, most of the members of Shearith Israel of New York, including Seixas, returned to New York. Here Seixas resumed his old post of hazan of Shearith Israel at a salary of fifty pounds every three months of the Hebrew calendar, six cords of hickory wood, and the usual perquisites. He changed the ritual to include a prayer for the government in English instead of in Spanish. Among other honors, he was elected a trustee of Columbia College (Episcopalian) and his picture hangs in one of its assembly rooms to this day. He died in 1816.
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Haym Salomon
Salomon was in New York when the British captured the city. A native of Lissa, Poland, he had probably come to America that very year (1776) or the year before. He knew not only English but German and French. “Please mention to my father,” he wrote in 1783 to the man in New York who was to answer—in Yiddish—his parents’ letters, “the difficulty that I have laboured under in not having any learning, and that I should not have known what to have done had it not been for the languages that I learned in my travels, such as French, English, etc. Therefore would advise him and all my relations to have their children well-educated, particularly in the Christian language [s], and should any of my brothers’ children have a good head to learn Hebrew, would contribute towards his being instructed.”
Salomon was arrested by the British as an agent of “the rebels”—a member of what would now be called the “American underground” or “fifth column”—and lodged in jail. However, he was soon turned over to a Hessian commander to be useful as an interpreter. He was also employed “in the Commissary way as a purveyor chiefly for the Officers.” With this limited freedom, he was of service to the French and American prisoners in New York by supplying them with money and enabling some to escape. Finally, when New York became too dangerous for him and he was searched for by the British, he, too, escaped in 1778. Like other Patriots among the Jews, he went to Philadelphia. In a petition to the Continental Congress asking for employment, he stated that he had lost “his Effects and Credits to the amount of Five or six thousand Pounds Sterling and left his wife and child of a month at New York.”
The Continental Congress did not employ him. But he managed to establish himself as a broker, chiefly of bills of exchange. In 1781, the treasurer of the French forces in America was employing him for that purpose. When Robert Morris became the superintendent of finance that year, Salomon was his chief agent in selling the bills of exchange from France, Holland, Spain, and elsewhere. With the consent of Morris, Haym Salomon advertised (1782) that he was “broker to the Office of Finance, to the Consul General of France and to the Treasurer of the French Army.”
But Salomon was not above customers of less importance. His last advertisements read that he was a “Factor Auctioneer and Broker” for any kind of merchandise. (He spelled his name in his advertisements “Solomon,” “Solomons,” “Salomon,” or “Salomons.”)
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Shortly before his death he sent his mother a gold chain and bought his father denization rights and a burial plot. He gave his fellow Jews of Philadelphia a third of what they collected for the building of their synagogue in 1782.
That year, Madison wrote to his friend Edmund Randolph—the quotations are well known but it will do no harm to look at them again as one glances at a favorite photograph—“I have for some time been a pensioner on the favor of Hayne Solomon, a Jew Broker”; and in the same year, a month later: “The kindness of our little friend in Front Street, near the coffee-house, is a fund that will preserve me from extremities, but I never resort to it without great mortification, as he obstinately rejects all recompense. The price of money is so usurious that he thinks it ought to be extorted from none but those who aim at profitable speculations. To a necessitous Delegate, he gratuitously spares a supply out of his private stock.”
In 1784 Salomon bought a house in New York at Wall and Pearl Streets, intending, no doubt, to return to New York. But in January of the next year he was dead at the age of forty-five. He left a young widow and four children, all under seven. They had nothing of his estate for it proved to be insolvent in the hard times after the war.
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David S. Franks
David Salisbury Franks, as he is called in an official document (but he has also been referred to as David “Solebury” or “Salesby” Franks), was a merchant in Canada. Franks says of himself in a letter: “I was born in this Town [Philadelphia] & have ever held myself (tho’ absent a few years) Subject to this State.” In his application to President Washington for an appointment “in the Consul’s Department for a Port of Europe,” Franks wrote: “Early in the Year 1774, I settled in Montreal with a small capital and a considerable Credit as a Merchant & was successful in Business. . . .”
In 1775, when Montgomery and Arnold were trying to capture Canada for the Americans, someone wrote in French on the bust of the English king in Montreal: “This is the pope of Canada and the fool of England.” Franks was in the crowd that listened to the proclamation offering a reward for the arrest of the writer and said it was a “small” offense. He was arrested and imprisoned a week.
Three or so years later, upon letters of recommendation of the American Board of War, David S. Franks (as he was generally known) joined the French forces helping the Americans. From 1778 until 1780, when Benedict Arnold turned traitor, Franks was the junior of his aides-de-camp and had the rank of major. After the plot was discovered, Arnold wrote Washington from a British ship, the Vulture, asking him to see Mrs. Arnold safely to her family in Philadelphia. In a postscript, Arnold added that Major Franks knew nothing of the plot. Military procedure called for the arrest of Franks. He was freed as not guilty but Franks was eager for a fuller inquiry; tried again at his own request, he was completely exonerated.
In 1781, Robert Morris sent Franks to France with dispatches and in 1784 he was on another mission abroad. By this time his rank was lieutenant-colonel. He was appointed vice-consul at Marseilles, where his knowledge of the French language and people was useful, and he helped the American consul at Marseilles negotiate a treaty with the Emperor of Morocco. Franks brought the treaty to America (1787). However, he did not secure another appointment in the diplomatic service.
Having tasted life as a soldier and a diplomat, Franks had no wish to return to the life of a merchant. He applied to Washington for the position of consul-general in France (1789). The following year he applied to Jefferson, just appointed Secretary of State, for a position as private secretary—subordinate to Jefferson only—and he would be content with the salary of “a common clerk” and “the Pay of the Interpreter of the french Language (if you thought proper to give me the Office).” For Franks was reduced, in his own words, “to the last Modicum of what little Property I once was master of,” and, as he wrote to a creditor, “I have not had a Dollar to spare from the daily & necessary Expenses of living, Cloathes, etc.” But as early as 1783 Jefferson had written to Madison of Franks, underlining the passage: “He appears to have a good eno’ heart, and understanding somewhat better than common, but too little guard over his lips. I have marked him particularly in the company of women where he loses all power over himself, and almost [ms. interrupted] . . . his temperature would not be proof against their allurements, were such to be employed as engines against him. This is in some measure the vice of his age, but it seems to be increased also by his peculiar constitution.” In 1787 Jefferson wrote again to Madison: “You will see Franks, and doubtless he will be asking some appointment. I wish there may be any one for which he is fit. He is light, indiscreet, active, honest, affectionate.”
Franks was granted four hundred acres of land in the West (1789) for his services during the Revolutionary War, and he became an agent for a land company that was bringing settlers from France to the Ohio—where they were massacred by the Indians. In 1791 Franks was an assistant cashier of the United States Bank in Philadelphia, and he died in the epidemic of yellow fever in that city in 1793. There is a painting of Franks by Charles Wilson Peak: he is wearing a wig and is in uniform; his nose is somewhat conspicuous and one eye has a squint; but he has a pleasant, genial face. It is the face of the man who spoke out in an angry crowd to say of the scrawl on the king’s bust that it was a “small” offense rather than the face of a diplomat.
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Isaac Franks
A native of New York, Isaac Franks (1759-1822) was the son of a nephew of Jacob Franks and thus related to David Franks. (So, more distantly, was David S. Franks.) When Isaac Franks was seventeen, equipped at his own expense, he joined a “six months” regiment of the American army and took part in the battle of Long Island. He retreated with the army to New York but was captured when the city was taken by the British while he was “on a detached guard . . . at the Fly Market on the East River.” He escaped to New Jersey from the “Bear Market” on the Hudson in “a small leaky craft with only a single paddle.” The following year (1777), he was assistant forage-master in the quartermaster’s department and, promoted to forage-master, was stationed at West Point. Here, in 1781, he became an ensign in a Massachusetts regiment but resigned the next year because of ill health.
In 1782 Isaac Franks married a non-Jewess in Philadelphia. He was a broker in that city until 1789. That year he was appointed a “Notary and Tabellion Public” for Pennsylvania. He was commissioned a lieutenant-colonel of the state militia in 1794 and a justice of the peace in 1795. Washington, according to family tradition, was a friend and stayed in his house. His house in Germantown was certainly thought good enough for the President when the government left Philadelphia in 1793 because of the epidemic of yellow fever, but the house was rented for Washington’s use. There is a record of a bill by Franks presented on “account of Extraordinary Expenses, occurred . . . to Accomodate the President of the United States. . . .” The bill includes a claim for “Cash paid for Cleaning my house and putting it in the same condition the President rec’d it” and a claim “For the damage done to a large double Japand waiter [tray] made use of in the service of the president . . . [as well as for] one flat Iron missing . . . One large fork . . . (and) 4 Platters. . . .”
Isaac Franks had his portrait painted by no less than Gilbert Stuart in 1802: it shows a handsome man with a deeply cleft chin. In another decade he was in want of money and in 1819 he was granted a Federal pension of twenty dollars a month for his services during the Revolutionary War on proof of “reduced circumstances.” He had probably little to leave his children but advice, and that was to be “good Christians.”
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* * *
The American Revolution began when the colonists first landed. The underlying cause was the independence of a people who had been free in fact if not at law; and the Revolution was to establish at law what had been so in fact. But “democracy,” as we understand it, was the result, and not a cause, of the Revolution; and in no colony, at the Declaration of Independence, was there the religious freedom of the United States today. The first Federal government, weak as it was, was more truly the child of the Revolution than any state government. The Ordinance of 1787, accordingly, provided against slavery and for religious freedom in the great western territory from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi and from Canada to the Ohio.
With respect to religious freedom, however, in 1777 the first constitution of New York had in effect provided that Jews were to have the same political rights as non-Jews: “The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed within this State to all mankind” (Art. XXX). And in 1785, Jefferson, through the efforts of Madison, succeeded in “having an act “Establishing Religious Freedom” passed in Virginia: it provided that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatever . . . but . . . all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions. . . .”
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1 Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, edited by Carl Bridenbaugh.
2 Quoted by Jacob Rader Marcus, Early American Jewry. Other quotations following are from the same source (Vols. I and II).
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