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NOTES AND DOCUMENTS
Tales from the Chew Family Papers: The Charity Castle Story
| Two recent developments will soon make the rich historical documentation of the Chew Family Papers, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania's largest collection of family papers, available to scholars to an unprecedented extent. One is the transfer of a substantial number of papers from Cliveden, the Chew family country house in the Germantown section of Philadelphia,1 to the Historical Society, which brings the collection together in one research institution for the first time. The second is the Historical Society's receipt of a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete the processing of this extensive and extremely valuable collection. The letters presented below showcase some of the wealth of material that will soon be more accessible to researchers and document just one of the many stories waiting to be uncovered and told. |
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The Chew Family donated its papers to the Historical Society in 1982, and at that time all the known papers were transferred from Cliveden to the society.2 But such was their volume and ubiquity throughout the mansion that by 2000 Cliveden staff had assembled a secondary archive consisting of eighty shelf-feet of additional documents. Fortunately, all of these materials were transferred to HSP in 2006.3 |
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The Chew Family Papers document the history of one of Philadelphia's leading families from the late seventeenth century through the 1970s. The early focus of the collection is on Benjamin Chew (1722–1810), who arrived in Philadelphia in 1754 and served as attorney general of the Province of Pennsylvania (1755–1769), as a member of the governor's council (1755 until the Revolution) and, later, as chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court (1774 until the Revolution). The papers covering the prerevolutionary period have garnered the most scholarly attention thus far, due in part to their extensive documentation of Chew's involvement in colonial government and their coverage of the Pennsylvania-Maryland boundary dispute and the government's negotiations with Native Americans. As a retainer of the Penn family, Chew managed to sidestep the minefields of the Revolution. His family emerged as one of the luminaries of the so-called Republican Court, the social center of the American capital in Philadelphia. According to one historian, it was social suicide to be "not at home" when the Misses Chew came to call.4 During the postcolonial decades, his progeny retained their blueblood status and benefited from a growing nation, society, and economy. The collection details investments in western lands, turnpikes, canals, and railroads; internecine battles over inheritances; interests in business and manufacturing; trips to Cape May; membership in hereditary societies; trust funds, boarding schools, and more. In addition, the estimated two hundred thousand documents, by the blessing of their completeness, also have a great deal to say about the Chews' servants, enslaved workers, domestic arrangements, and myriad other contemporary social issues. |
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The story the following letters tell is set in 1814 and is related primarily from the point of view of Benjamin Chew Jr.,5 the son of the chief justice. It takes place as Chew's sister Harriet's (1775–1861) marriage to Charles Carroll Jr. (1775–1825) is collapsing. While the marriage to Charles (known as Charles Carroll of Homewood) had originally been a happy one, a long series of unfortunate events, including an operation and the death of two children, had led Charles into alcoholism. His behavior became abusive, eventually so much so that both families agreed that Harriet and their children needed to be separated from Charles.6 As the story begins, Harriet had temporarily moved back to her family's home in Philadelphia with the enslaved servant Charity Castle. |
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