The Burning of Pennsylvania Hall
Abolitionists built a monument to liberty and free speech steps from Indepdence Hall in Philadelphia. Then a mob burned it the ground.
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“As a Southerner I feel it is my duty to stand up here tonight and bear testimony against slavery…I was brought up under its wing: I witnessed for many years its demoralizing influences, and its destructiveness to human happiness. It is admitted by some that the slave is not happy under the worst forms of slavery. But I have never seen a happy slave.”1
Angelina Grimké didn’t waver as she spoke. Before her was a sea of three thousand expectant faces–black and white, man and woman, all seated side by side in Philadelphia's new Pennsylvania Hall. The three-story structure, which featured polished walnut benches and state-of-the-art gas lighting, was one of the largest event venues in the city. Above the platform where Grimké stood, the state motto unspooled across a grand arch in regal gold letters: “Virtue, Liberty and Independence."2
Her speech should have been a triumphant one. She and the other local abolitionists, black and white, had helped spearhead the creation of this grand monument to their moral crusade. For three days in 1838, they had hosted a litany of passionate abolitionist speakers, hopeful that the righteousness of their argument would shift the mindsets of the white Philadelphians who were rushing to slavery’s defense long after it was outlawed in the city. But as Grimké spoke, her words were punctuated by the sound of rocks battering the windows of the building. Angry, vulgar jeers outside carried the edge of expected violence. The hearts of white Philadelphians were not thawing–they were hardening. And now, a mob was forming.
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Pennsylvania Hall was supposed to supercharge political momentum abolitionists had built over the course of the 1830s. In 1833, William Lloyd Garrison and James Forten helped form the American Anti-Slavery Society, which advocated for the immediate emancipation of all U.S. slaves.3 The stance was deemed radical by much of white America, but the abolitionist movement was gaining new adherents every year. By 1838, more than 100,000 people were members of the organization, which boasted more than a thousand local chapters across the country.4
Women played an especially vital role in the growing movement. Because the American Anti-Slavery Society only included men, a group of Philadelphia women formed a companion group in the wake of its founding. The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society pushed to end slavery immediately as well as eliminate “prejudice against free blacks.” The group was biracial from the beginning and used multiple tactics to pursue abolition. Members held regular petition drives to pressure Congress to abolish slavery in federally controlled districts and helped lead the “free produce” movement, an effort to convince Americans to stop buying goods created with slave labor. They also aided the city’s growing free black population by building a school for black children.5
When Angelina Grimké and her sister Sarah joined the Society in 1835, they became star lecturers because of their unusual backstory. They were well-to-do white women from a slaveholding family in South Carolina but became abolitionists after witnessing the brutality of the practice up close. The Grimkés often spoke in front of mixed-gender audiences, itself a taboo of the time.6
As abolitionism’s salience grew, however, it was met with a growing backlash, even in so-called “free states” of the North. Many white Philadelphians resented the free black people who were flocking to the city because of its reputation as a haven of liberty. A newly drafted state constitution stripped black men of their voting rights in 1838. Rhetoric around liberty and equality in the place that birthed American independence was replaced with talk of the superior white race.7
Abolitionists soon found that assembly halls and churches in the city refused to host their meetings, often for fear of mob attacks (Phildaphelia was wracked by multiple race riots in the 1830’s). So they decided to build their own meeting house, where they could organize, convert more people to their cause, and celebrate the persuasive power of free speech. Forty thousand dollars were raised during a quick stock-offering campaign, with many of the initial funders being women. "Here shall Free Discussion find a refuge and a home!" one abolitionist said at a fundraising event.8
When Pennsylvania Hall opened on May 14, 1838, it was one of the city’s grandest structures. The first floor boasted an abolitionist bookstore, offices for the abolitionist newspaper the Pennsylvania Freeman, and several meeting spaces available for rent to the public. The large auditorium on the second floor, known as the “Grand Saloon,” was envisioned as a place where lively debates on the issues of the day would unfold. Abolitionists from across the North attended the opening ceremonies–white leaders like William Lloyd Garrison and Lucretia Mott, as well as black ones like James Forten and Sarah Mapps Douglass. This was the space where the nation could chart a course to an egalitarian future.
But white Philadelphians seethed when they observed men and women attending meetings in the same space–and worse, seeing black and white people walking arm in arm together into the building. A rumor spread that the abolitionists were championing “amalgamation”--intermarriage between the races. The evening after the Hall opened, anonymous placards were placed around the city, defending slaveholders’ rights and urging white people to head to the hall to “interfere, forcibly if they must” in the opening activities.9
The next morning a rowdy crowd formed outside the hall and grew more belligerent as the day wore on. Philadelphia’s ineffectual mayor and sheriff did little to quell their anger. The women abolitionists, for their part, refused to be cowed. They continued with their meetings and speeches as the mob grew. “What would the breaking of every window be? What would the leveling of this Hall be?” Angelina Grimké mused from the main stage. “What if the mob should now burst in upon us, break up our meeting and commit violence upon our persons — would this be anything compared with what the slaves endure?”10
On Thursday, May 17, the situation turned even darker. One white female delegate recalled witnessing “the worst language” and “the most hideous countenances” as she and other abolitionists walked arm in arm with their black colleagues to try to shield them from the mob.11 In the afternoon meetings at the hall were canceled and the doors were locked as a precautionary measure. But few police were present to take control of the angry crowd, and a call for civilians to step in and serve as deputies went unheeded.12
Around 8 p.m., roughly three hundred men broke into the building, using axes and crowbars provided by some of Philadelphia’s shipwrights. The frenzied mob smashed the Hall’s furniture and used the texts from the abolitionist bookstore as kindling for a great fire. The gas pipes were busted open and pointed at the growing flame. Outside, as firemen approached the scene, a larger group of onlookers blocked them from dousing the blaze. Local women waved handkerchiefs from their windows in celebration of the carnage, while roving members of the mob looked for black people or abolitionists to assault in the streets. The flames of Pennsylvania Hall burned so agonizingly bright that night, they turned blue.13
The entire structure was destroyed, save for an eerie skeleton of charred granite walls. Though there were no fatalities, black Philadelphians still bore the brunt of the mob’s violence, with some black abolitionists assaulted in the streets and a black orphanage being burned the following day. While a handful of men were arrested, city officials failed to dole out any serious punishments for the attack. A committee convened by the city council instead blamed abolitionists for angering the community with their “repulsive” and “inflammatory” ideas.14 The owners of the hall waged a yearslong legal battle to get the local government to reimburse them for their losses, but they ultimately received only a fraction of what they had put into the venue. Pennsylvania Hall was never rebuilt.15
The mob’s goal that day was to crush the spirit of the abolitionist movement. On that front, at least, they failed. The brutal attack cast supporters of slavery as violent and chaotic, while the abolitionists were holding up the tenets of free speech. “What opened the eyes of most whites,” observed historian Beverly C. Tomek, “was what such mob action meant for their own freedom.”16
The women of the Philadelphia Anti Slavery Society met the very next day in the classroom of one of their members. Angelina Grimké’s sister Sarah proposed a resolution vowing to sit with black Philadelphians at church, walk with them publicly in the streets, visit them in their homes and “[receive] them as we do our fellow white citizens.”17 The group quickly approved it, doubling down on their vision of a racially mixed society. Hate would not win this day, even when it burned white-hot.
Kriska Desir contributed research to this report.
Pennsylvania Hall Association, The History of Pennsylvania Hall (Philadelphia, PA: Merrihew & Gunn, 1838), 123-24.
Beverly C. Tomek, Pennsylvania Hall: A ‘Legal Lynching’ in the Shadow of the Liberty Bell (Oxford University Press, 2013).
“Portrait of James Forten, 1818,” National Park Service.
Ira V. Brown, “Racism and Sexism: The Case of Pennsylvania Hall,” Phylon (1960-) 37, no. 2 (1976): 126.
Pennsylvania Hall: ‘A Legal Lynching’; Ira V. Brown, “Cradle of Feminism: The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, 1833-1840,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 102, no. 2 (1978).
Debra Michals, “Angelina Grimké Weld,” National Women’s History Museum, 2015.
Eric Ledell Smith, “The End of Black Voting Rights in Pennsylvania: African Americans and the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention of 1837-1838,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 65, no. 3 (1998).
Pennsylvania Hall: ‘A Legal Lynching.’
Ibid.
The History of Pennsylvania Hall.
Report of a Delegate to the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women (Boston: I.Knapp 25 Cornhill, 1838), 17.
Pennsylvania Hall: ‘A Legal Lynching.’
Ibid.
“Racism and Sexism: The Case of Pennsylvania Hall.”
Pennsylvania Hall: ‘A Legal Lynching.’
Ibid.
“Cradle of Feminism: The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.”