Ashes to Ashes: Social Stratification After Death in Philadelphia’s Burial Grounds
PHILADELPHIA gained the moniker “city of homes” to refer to its vast neighborhoods where home ownership and livelihood were present. Yet these homes, each of which could contain three, four, even more lives, can be seen as relatively permanent objects. The citizens that inhabit them, from all backgrounds and all walks of life, are not. And when these people pass, it is the cemeteries and burial grounds that support them and become their homes.
Of course, to say everyone in Philadelphia had a home and everybody lived in the same type of home is a bit naïve. Philadelphia has existed with numerous social divisions and inequalities throughout its history, most acutely reflected in its housing stock and set up. Just as these divisions don’t cease in the present day, they don’t cease after death, either. Throughout Philadelphia’s history, the inequalities present in life translate to those presented after death and in our representations of the dead. Inequality manifests itself as much as it does in the homes of the living than it does in the homes of the dead — cemeteries, graveyards, and burial grounds. Though this occurs throughout neighborhoods in the city and across eras, these inequalities are easily seen through the investigation of three case studies: that of Washington Square, Lebanon Cemetery, and Lafayette Cemetery.
Divided Remembrance: Washington Square
“I have spent an Hour, this Morning, in the Congregation of the dead . . . I never in my whole Life was affected with so much Melancholly” — John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 13 1777, on visiting the potter’s field in Southeast Square. [1]
When William Penn laid out the city of Philadelphia, he incorporated into his idealized plan four squares in each quadrant of the city. Washington Square, located in the southeastern section near the Delaware River, was the first to be laid out as the city grew westwards from the Delaware. Of course, the square existed long before its namesake Washington did, and it was simply known as Southeast Square. Southeast Square was not renamed Washington Square until 1833.[2]
In 1706, very early in the city’s history, a patent signed by William Penn’s commissioners established Southeast Square as a potter’s field.[3] A potter’s field describes an area of land used for public, anonymous, and often unmarked burial. This means that the ground now filled with luscious trees and views of colonial row homes was originally used as a burial ground for Philadelphia’s lower class who could not afford traditional burial plots. Additionally, bodies that were unidentified or unclaimed were often buried in the potter’s field.
The presence of bodies in Washington Square’s potter’s field was fueled by the proximity of several institutions that served the poor, ill, and disadvantaged: the almshouse, Pennsylvania Hospital, and the Walnut Street Jail. Each of these institutions buried bodies within the confines of the square, as it was not economically possible for the institutions or the individual’s families to have them buried elsewhere.[4] During the Revolutionary War, numerous soldiers were buried in the square from both sides of the conflict from deaths due to battle, disease, or the intolerable conditions for prisoners of war at the Walnut Street Jail.[5,6] Epidemics such as the yellow fever of 1793 lead to thousands more bodies being buried within the square. Though there was no law that directly abolished burial practices in Washington Square, burials are said to have taken place as late as 1815, prior to the square’s development as public grounds in the 1820s.[7]
Early Philadelphia’s Washington Square, then, was not home to the ritzy or the colonial, but to the impoverished, the poor, and the excess. Washington Square included not just paupers but revolutionaries — both British and American, and burials in the square likely intersected across class and racial boundaries.
Fast forward to present day and Washington Square is just another one of many sites within Philadelphia with tall trees, comfortable benches, and historical markers. Presiding over the square is the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary Soldier, a monument created for the many American soldiers buried within the park. Shown above, the monument contains the remains of an unidentified American soldier, next to a statue of Washington and several patriotic inscriptions. This monument speaks to how the dead are stratified within Washington Square.
This is present not only in the nature of the monument but also of its creation. In 1954 The Washington Square Planning Commission conceived the idea of the monument as a way to beautify the square. Yet the body located in the monument had to be exclusively searched for — at least three other bodies of paupers or otherwise “undesirable” bodies were found during excavations in 1956 before a body was deemed suitable enough to be interred in the monument.[8] In this way, the members of the Washington Square Planning Commission worked to create stratification among the memory of bodies that, when buried, were likely on equal footing.
As participants in a nationalist and capitalist system, American society seeks to assign value to those that have done something “productive” with their lives. We see soldiers who fought for our ideals as valuable and worth remembering, yet fever victims, poor citizens, and those who lead otherwise commonplace lives are not included. By creating a monument to a single social group that has perceived patriotic status, they erased an entire other history, culture, and group of citizens.
Washington Square, while home to thousands of bodies, only acknowledges those that relate to its namesake. The other bodies, submerged in darkness and long forgotten below the park, cannot speak for themselves. Yet they demand an answer. Freedom may be a light that many have died for in darkness, but for the thousands of unacknowledged bodies below Washington Square, that light has yet to shine.
Divided Bodies: Lebanon Cemetery
As Philadelphia grew into a metropolis, it developed a complex network of cemeteries in which to inter the dead. These cemeteries, along with old and other newly established potter’s fields, were the resting place of Philadelphia’s deceased. Different faiths and churches developed their own graveyards across the city. Many of these cemeteries became segregated, that is, members of Philadelphia’s black community were only allowed plots in certain sections of the cemetery.[9] In reaction to this, the black community developed their own graveyards for burial.
Founded in 1849 as a nonsectarian burial ground for African Americans, Lebanon Cemetery became a popular option for burial within a city strife with racial tensions.[10] However, this site became the focal point of new tensions in the 1880s.
Throughout the 1800s there was an explosive growth in the number and size of Medical schools in America.[11] Jefferson Medical College, as other medical and anatomical schools across the country, was constantly in need of cadavers for study. Jefferson Medical College claimed that its bodies were only supposed to come from unclaimed bodies in the morgue, prison, hospital, almshouse, and other locations.[12] However, this population was not nearly enough to satisfy the instructional needs of the instituion — so educators turned to body snatching.[13] Members of the privileged upper class were able to protect their graves from robbing through the location of burial, grave depth, security presence, and other methods. However, the poor, the disadvantaged, and the racially oppressed did not have the resources to carry out these protections. Additionally, public systems of burial assistance provided that some bodies of the lower class must be used as dissection material before they could be buried.[14]
Within this milieu, on a night in December 1882 four grave robbers were intercepted hauling bodies from Lebanon Cemetery and put under citizen’s arrest. Through ensuing investigations and trials, it was revealed that Jefferson Medical College had been receiving bodies from Lebanon Cemetery. In some accounts, the process had been going on for as long as nine years,[15] with deliveries of three or more bodies being brought to Jefferson once or twice a week.[16] The high-profile figure Dr. William S. Forbes, scholar and chair of anatomy and surgery at Jefferson Medical College, was complicit in the affair and indicted on several counts.[17]
Ironically enough, Forbes was a principal author of the 1867 Pennsylvania Anatomy Act, a law that “provided legal means to obtain cadavers.” Though Forbes was acquitted in the 1883 trial, there was a large deal of incriminating evidence against him. Keys to Forbes’ preparation room at Jefferson College were found on the body haulers during their arrest.[18] Additionally, on one account of the acquittal of Dr. Forbes, the evidence was described as being “practically complete” and that the acquittal depended in large part of character testimony of his colleagues, as well as rebuttal from the fraternal white male population of Jefferson Medical College.[19]
Black Bodies, White Health
The indignant nature of extracting black bodies from their resting place is quite obvious. Yet the weight of these events is something to be ruminated over and that mustn’t be discounted. The removal of bodies from Lebanon Cemetery was not happenstance, an accident, or a product of proximity or chance. It was a direct, conscious action taken by Jefferson Medical College to use the bodies of black Philadelphia to educate its white, landed, upper-class student body. The dead don’t have a respite from racism; it is a system that continues to subjugate and deprive those who are not living.
This impact on the dead reverberates back to the living. During the height of the December 1882 scandal, the black citizenry of Philadelphia met during several emotional and at times verging on riotous meetings.[20] And rightfully so: the emotional insecurity brought about by not knowing whether loved ones still remain in their graves cannot be minimized. In fact, several families chose to dig up the graves in order to ensure that the bodies were undisturbed. Additionally, the racial allegations against Dr. Forbes and Jefferson Medical College created an intense amount of backlash from the College’s students. This heightened tension, violence, and harassment as the white male college population reacted to the scandal with racist humor and denial of the events.[21]
There is no justification for these acts, and no excusing their actions as part of the “spirit of the times” or fitting into a narrative of social and scientific progress. After all, as stated by Dr. Miller in a contemporary sermon published in The Christian Recorder in 1882, their very actions were in contradiction with themselves and required a deliberate awareness of their racist action:
Very many scientists and philosophers have written long and learned arguments to demonstrate the fact that as a race, we were not really human beings . . . Proclaim no more, ye philosophers and sages, our inferiority because of color. No, the same bones, ligaments, veins run alike through the human race, despite the outside hue . . . The students of Jefferson, perhaps all unconscious of the source from whence the bodies before them came, go worth into the world with a grander conception of the unity of the races, and the brotherhood of man, than those of any other institution in our land. Surely they cannot, they dare not join in the cry of race inferiority, nor in the efforts of another nature to debase our race, when they, as now developed, for several years past, have been demonstrating the fact that in science, color is nothing . . . Jefferson College declares we are men, even though they have to dig up the body to acknowledge it. [22]
Divided Governance: Lafayette Cemetery
Lafayette Cemetery, one of the city’s many neighborhood cemeteries, was opened for use in 1839 on a plot bounded by 10th, 9th, Passyunk, and Federal streets. Throughout its history, the cemetery served as a resting place for a numerous amount of Philadelphia’s citizenry. Because of its location in an increasingly densely populated section of the city, Lafayette cemetery became increasingly overgrown, unkempt, and crowded. By the 1940s, an estimated 47,000 bodies were interred in the space. [22]
Seeing the state of the cemetery and its prime real estate location, city officials launched plans to remove the bodies and turn the cemetery into a park or open it for development. These plans came to fruition when the city partnered with Thomas A. Morris to remove the bodies in the cemetery. Morris, president of Evergreen Cemetery in Bensalem township outside Philadelphia, agreed to remove the bodies with dignity, reinter them in individual marked graves, and provide perpetual maintenance for the grounds. Morris was paid a great deal of money to do this, as well as given a deed to the old Lafayette Cemetery grounds. However, this is where matters took a turn for the worse.
The transfer of the land to Morris quickly became embroiled in the 1947 mayoral election wherein Morris, who had ties to powerful Republican figures in the city, was accused of colluding with them to gain the land and to make a profit reselling it to Philadelphia at a higher price than it was assessed. With the focus on the land value of the now former cemetery, Morris was able to avoid most of the promises he made in the original deal. He buried the 47,000 bodies in unmarked mass graves, and nothing was heard of it. The true story of what Morris did with the bodies from Lafayette Cemetery was not discovered until long after his death. In 1988 during the construction of a new mall near Evergreen Cemetery, a few unmarked graves were discovered which lead to officials finding the unmarked trenches in which the Lafayette bodies resided and the uncovering of an unnoticed, corrupt deal in the city’s history.[23]
The unjust removal of the bodies of Lafayette cemetery exhibits a more insidious type of social inequality present in America’s system, that between the government and the citizenry it rules. Though America may be a democracy, the fact is that our political system still creates a system of hierarchy whereby elected and unelected officials alike enjoy a great deal of power that lay citizens do not have. This power dynamic is clearly played out in terms of benefits, privileges, and the like afforded to government officials, as well as the ability to influence and control policymaking. In the case of Lafayette cemetery, it’s clear that these decisions impact not only the living but also the dead. The actions of a few men rerouted the course of death for over 47,000 citizens of Philadelphia — with little justice to be found. Government officials have power and control over common citizens not just in life, but in death.
Death, at least in its western contexts, is associated with serenity, escape, and peace. Yet death, when conceived of in terms of bodily remains, is as fraught with as much social conflict as life is. Whether it’s the representation of death, the tension for land in an urban metropolis, or the desire for scientific knowledge — these actions dealing with the dead reproduce the inequities we have in dealing with living human beings. That is, inequality crosses the divide between life and death.
The point is that death is not the end, and it is not a reprieve. The point is that death and the remnants of it matter: these violations are not insignificant. Death and life live in tandem: to disrespect one is to disrespect the other. If we are to live in a world with peace, justice, and humanity, we must extend those concepts to the remains, memory, and history of those no longer living. Only then, after looking backward, can we move forward.
Citations
[1] Butterfield, L.H. Adams Family Correspondence: Volume 2: June 1776-March 1778. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1963. Page 209.
[2] Frey, Carroll. Philadelphia’s Washington Square. Philadelphia, Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company. 1952. Page 11.
[3] Frey, Page 3.
[4] Newman, Simon P. Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. 2003. Page 131.
[5] Frey, Page 7.
[6] Cotter, John L; Roberts, Daniel G; Parrington, Michael. The Buried Past: An Archaeological History of Philadelphia. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. 1992. Pages 206–7.
[7] “Digging up Human Bones.” Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer. April 13 1890.
[8] Cotter, John L et. al. Pages 205–10.
[9] Keels, Thomas. Philadelphia Graveyards and Cemeteries. Chicago, Arcadia Publishing. 2003. Page 79.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Sappol, Michael. A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, Princeton University Press. 2002. Page 2.
[12] “Colored Citizens Roused.” Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer. December 8 1882.
[13] Sappol, Pages 3–4.
[14] Braddock, Alan C. “’Jeff College Boys’: Thomas Eakins, Dr. Forbes, and Anatomical Fraternity in Postbellum Philadelphia.” American Quarterly 57.2 2005: 335–383. Pages 358.
[15] “Colored Citizens Roused” and “The Resurrectionists.” Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 6 1882.
[16] “Dr. Forbes Trial.” Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 15 1883.
[17] Schultz, Suzanne M. Body Snatching: The Robbing of Graves for the Education of Physicians in Early Nineteenth Century America. London, McFarland & Company. 1991. Pages 81–2.
[18] ”The Resurrectionists”
[19] Braddock, Page 378.
[20] “Colored Citizens Roused.”
[21] Braddock, Pages 369–70.
[22] Braddock, Pages 379–80.
[23] Keels, Thomas H. Wicked Philadelphia: Sin in the City of Brotherly Love. Charleston, The History Press. 2010, Pages 106–113.
[24] Ibid.
