F the impulse towards learning early given by the American Philosophical Society has found expression in Philadelphia, and other cities, in historical societies, scientific schools, academies of natural science, and kindred institutions, its more genial and social side has long been represented in the city of its birth by the Wistar Parties.
As this old club has, within a few years, been reorganized, it may be interesting to turn back to the period of its inception, and even further back into the past century, when Dr. Caspar Wistar held, at his own house, those informal gatherings to which the Wistar Parties of to-day owe their name. How large a place this club filled in the social life of the period may be gathered from the fact that most Philadelphians of distinction, if not actual members, were its frequent guests, while all strangers of note were introduced into the circle of choice spirits,—choice in the full sense of the word, because chosen for particular gifts or attainments, the original Wistar Club being composed of members of the American Philosophical Society, a close organization that has ever striven to keep its eye single to the interests of science, literature, art, history, and the promotion of all useful knowledge. Although Silas Deane, the Marquis de Chastellux, and John Adams grow quite enthusiastic when describing the luxurious living prevalent among “the nobles of Pennsylvania,” the latter admits, with what in a New-Englander may be considered rare generosity, that there was something to be found here better than our high living, as he speaks of the “high thinking” of some of those old Philadelphians, in one of his charming letters to his wife which are only less charming than her own.
That John Adams does not mention Dr. Wistar’s hospitable house, and the company met there, is attributable to the fact that the seat of government, and with it John Adams as its head, removed from Philadelphia to Washington about the time that these receptions began.
The Wistar Parties have frequently been spoken of as first held on Sunday, which erroneous impression was probably due to the fact that Dr. Wistar’s family and friends were in the habit of dropping in upon him on Sunday evenings, knowing him to be more at leisure then than through the week. The following account, from the pen of Dr. Hugh L. Hodge, entirely disproves the Sunday origin of these parties, which were begun before Dr. Wistar’s second marriage:[25]
“His [Dr. Wistar’s] house had become the centre of the literary and scientific society of Philadelphia. He was in the habit of receiving his friends to a frugal entertainment every Saturday evening. To these reunions the most distinguished foreign visitors in the city brought introductions, and the most intellectual of the professional residents gathered.
“Mrs. Bache, a very superior and high-toned woman, had, previous to her marriage [in 1797], kept house for her brother for several years, during which time she, with her friend Miss Eddy, afterwards Mrs. Dr. Hosack, of New York, had the great pleasure and advantage of attending these remarkable Saturday evening meetings.”
These early reunions were informal, but as years rolled on a pleasant custom crystallized into an established usage, the same friends meeting, week after week, in Dr. Wistar’s house, at the southwest corner of Fourth and Prune Streets, whose beautiful garden extended to St. Mary’s church-yard. The entertainment was simple, as the host’s idea was an intellectual rather than a convivial gathering. Tea, coffee, and other light refreshments were offered to the guests; ice-creams, raisins, and almonds were later added to the regale. Even then the name of Sybarite could not be applied to those early convives: the terrapin and oyster decadence was of much later date. A table was seldom spread. The number of guests varied from ten to fifty, but usually included between fifteen and twenty-five persons. The invitations were commenced in October or November, and continued to March or April. During this period Dr. Wistar welcomed to his home, each week, his old friends and colleagues, and any strangers whom they chose to bring with them.
In 1804 Dr. Wistar issued an invitation to his friends to meet Baron von Humboldt, the great naturalist, and his young friend the botanist Bonpland, who stopped in Philadelphia on their return from a scientific expedition through Mexico and the West Indies. Here also was introduced the latest sensation, in the form of Captain Riley, long a prisoner among the Arabs; also the learned and eccentric Dr. Mitchill, first Surgeon-General of New York, later satirized by Halleck and Drake in “The Croakers:”
“We hail thee!—mammoth of the State,
Steam frigate on the waves of physic,
Equal in practice or debate
To cure the nation or the phthisic!”
Dr. Hosack, of the same city, who was present at the fatal duel between Hamilton and Burr, was another early guest; while under the formal organization of 1818, and in a time nearer our own, England’s most brilliant novelist recalls an evening spent at what he is pleased to call a “Whister party.”
It is not strange that Philadelphians were glad to take the guests of the city to these parties, where was gathered together, both in the last century and in this, the best that our New World civilization could produce, whether of talent and learning or of courtly grace and good breeding, and here down all the varied years has flashed that genial flow of wit without which no social gathering is complete. Here, in early days, came the learned and witty Abbé Correa de Serra, Mr. Samuel Breck, of Boston, and Dr. John W. Francis, of New York, whose wit and social qualities were said to resemble those of the much-loved Lamb; and later came Robert Walsh and Joseph Hopkinson, both distinguished for their brilliant colloquial abilities, while Nicholas Biddle would save for the learned brotherhood his freshest bon mot, and Dr. Nathaniel Chapman would bring hither his most irresistible witticism.
If the older physicians, whose portraits were recently collected at the centenary of the College of Physicians, could step down from their frames, after the fashion of a scene in a well-known drama, we should have before us, in propria persona, a number of Dr. Wistar’s guests of the medical fraternity. Presumably among these was Dr. Benjamin Rush, who has been called the American Sydenham, but who combined so many gifts that, like certain plants of various characteristics, it is almost impossible to classify him. Perhaps in a larger sense than it can be said of most men, even of the good physician, he belonged to humanity.[26]
A frequent guest was Dr. Adam Kuhn, who studied in Edinburgh, and brought home treasures of learning as his contribution to this “feast of reason.” Here were also the Shippens, father and son,—both Williams, both practising at the same time, and both so eminent that they have frequently been confused by the historian. An honorable line of Shippens, in different callings, but notably in law and medicine, has come from that Edward Shippen of whom Boston was not worthy, and who, after being lashed and driven through the town at the cart’s tail, because, forsooth, good Puritans couldn’t abide good Quakers, came to Philadelphia in 1693, to be its first mayor and the founder of a distinguished family.[27] Here also shone the kindly face of Dr. Samuel Powel Griffitts, who seems to have brought with him, wherever he went, an atmosphere of “peace and good will to men.” And here, these gatherings being formed of men of various callings and professions, came such lawyers as William Rawle, who was ready to discuss theology as well as law,—perhaps a little readier to talk of the one than of the other. One day he is writing his notes on the Constitution of the United States, while upon another such subjects as Original Sin and the Evidences of Christianity engage his versatile pen.
Among legal gentlemen who were frequent guests of Dr. Wistar were William Tilghman, of Maryland, later Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, who in an interesting biographical sketch has embalmed the memory of his host; George Clymer, statesman and patriot, whose name is appended to the Declaration; and Peter Du Ponceau, who, although a Frenchman, had an ardent admiration for American institutions and the primitive simplicity that characterized the old Quaker régime in Philadelphia. And that the cure of souls might not be neglected, we find here John Heckewelder, the Moravian missionary, an intimate of Wistar, and a correspondent of Du Ponceau, who later translated Heckewelder’s interesting work on Indian manners and customs into the French. Here also was John Vaughan, the Unitarian philanthropist, of whom it has been said that “he represented this city as faithfully as its own name ‘Brotherly Love.’” Did they meet and talk together, these two at the extreme poles of doctrine, the devout Moravian and the Arian whose life was consecrated to the service of his brother man? If they met, and in their discourse fell upon such subjects as engage the characters in “Paradise Lost” and the “Divina Commedia,” we may be sure that in their large mutual love for mankind they found abundant sympathy,
“Nor melted in the acid waters of a creed
The Christian pearl of charity.”
A goodly company, among whose members there is no one more worthy to be remembered than the host, generally known as Dr. Caspar Wistar, Jr., being descended from another Caspar Wistar, who came to this country in 1717. We are informed by a German scholar and a genealogist that all the Wisters, whether ter or tar, come from one common stock in Germany, where the name is written Wüster, and that Caspar, who came to Philadelphia in 1717, son of Hans Caspar and Anna Katerina Wüster or Wister, in having a deed of conveyance prepared was put down Wistar by the clerk. This mistake he did not take the trouble to correct, and from this first Caspar has come a line of tars, of which Dr. Caspar Wistar, Jr., was the most distinguished. A second son of old Hans Caspar Wister, of Hilsbach, Germany, coming over later, had his papers made out properly, according to the German orthography of the name, and thus established the Philadelphia line of ters. We venture to give this rather lengthy explanation in view of the fact that the spelling of Wister has been a fertile subject for discussion in the Quaker City for some years, and because it is a most reasonable one, as will be admitted by all who have studied the records of past generations. In old letters and papers of the last century it is not unusual to find a surname variously spelled in the same letter, or even on the same page. This is notably the case in the voluminous “Penn and Logan Correspondence,” where Jenings and Jennings, Ashton and Assheton, Blaithwaite and Blathwayt, used interchangeably, hopelessly confuse the reader.
A student of the schools of Edinburgh, Professor in the College of Philadelphia, and later in the University, Dr. Wistar has the honor of being the author of the first American treatise on anatomy. Eminent as a physician, teacher, and man of science, this large-brained and busy man found life incomplete without the cultivation of its social side.
It is to be regretted that Mr. Vaughan, Mr. Du Ponceau, or the learned Dr. Benjamin Rush, who at times used a pen with a humorous nib, or some of the other habitués of these unique gatherings, have not left us pleasant and gossiping reminiscences of the Wistar Club, which would serve to render us as familiar with these old figures as contemporaneous writers have made us with the frequenters of the Kit-Cat Club, where the wits of Queen Anne’s time gathered, or that later circle at the Turk’s Head, dominated by the great burly figure of the dictionary-maker. Garrick, Reynolds, and all the rest are grouped about him; and Boswell is ever at hand, taking notes. Did humble Boswell realize that he was painting pictures for the future, as well as, even better than, the elegant Sir Joshua, who sat near him? Goldsmith was at it too, giving us life as it was, not some fanciful picture of it; and to them we owe it that these men live before us now. The following is the nearest approach that we can find to such a picture, and this, from the pen of the late Chief Justice Tilghman, gives us only one figure, when we would like to be presented to the whole company.
After dwelling upon the modest dignity and bland courtesy of Dr. Wistar’s bearing as President of the Philosophical Society, and the ardor with which he incited its members to diligence in collecting, before it should be too late, the perishing materials of American history, Mr. Tilghman says,—
“The meetings of this committee he [Dr. Wistar] regularly attended. It was their custom, after the business of the evening was concluded, to enter upon an unconstrained conversation on literary subjects. Then, without intending it, our lamented friend would insensibly take the lead; and so interesting were his anecdotes, and so just his remarks, that, drawing close to the dying embers, we often forgot the lapse of time, until warned by the unwelcome clock that we had entered on another day.”
Here is another pen-sketch from a writer signing himself “Antiquary,” which has a touch of life in it, and shows the good doctor’s ready tact in setting a gauche stranger at his ease. Mr. John Vaughan introduced into the learned circle what the narrator is pleased to call “a living, live Yankee, a specimen of humanity more rare,” he says, “forty or fifty years ago than now.” It would appear that this compatriot was received into the company with emotions similar to those awakened, later, by the advent of the “American Cousin” in England.
“He was,” says the writer, “a man remarkable for his mechanical turn of mind, but entirely unused to society. No workshop could turn out a more uncouth individual. I was standing near the door when John Vaughan brought him in. Between the blaze of light, the hum of conversation, and the number of well-dressed men, he was completely overcome, and sank into the first chair he could reach. Mr. Vaughan could not coax him out of it, and I expected every minute the door opened that he would make a bolt for the street. Presently Dr. Wistar, who had the happy knack of suiting his conversation to all ages and classes, was introduced to the shy Yankee. Soon the ice was broken, and I saw the shy mechanic conversing freely with scientific men, explaining to them his views upon mechanism, etc.”
When, in 1818, the good old doctor went out to join “the innumerable company,” the little circle here, which he had drawn together, resolved to commemorate the pleasant meetings at his house, and to keep fresh his memory, by forming an organization called the Wistar Parties. This is, in brief, the raison d’être of the association, as given by a subsequent member, Mr. Job R. Tyson, in his interesting paper entitled “Sketch of the Wistar Party,” read before that honorable society September 26, 1845. He says,—
“I have ascertained that the following gentlemen, in the autumn of the year 1818, formed themselves into an association and agreed to give three parties every year, during the season: William Tilghman, Robert M. Patterson, Peter S. Du Ponceau, John Vaughan, Reuben Haines, Robert Walsh, Jr., Zacheus Collins, and Thomas C. James.”
There were only eight to begin with; in 1821 the number had increased to sixteen, and in 1828 to twenty-four.
Mr. Tyson tells us that two essential laws of the existence of the organization were, “first, that no one is eligible to membership who is not a member of the American Philosophical Society; and, second, that unanimity is necessary to a choice.” Numerous regulations were added, “which,” he says, “with some modifications, have since been observed.”
The number of Philadelphians who could be invited to one party was twenty, and these it appears were picked citizens, selected rather for their attainments and attributes than for their “long descent.” With regard to the number of strangers invited, no limit was set.
The members were pledged to attend themselves, and procure the attendance of strangers, punctually at the hour of eight o’clock; and “the sumptuary code enjoined, as consentaneous with the scheme and objects in view, that the entertainments should be marked by unexpensive, if not frugal, simplicity.” No tea, coffee, cakes, or wine were to be served before supper. It was recommended that the collation consist of one course, and be so prepared as to dispense with the use of knives at table. No ice-creams were allowed. This in 1828.
In 1835 Mr. Job R. Tyson bought Dr. Caspar Wistar’s old house, at Fourth and Prune Streets, when once more it opened its doors to the learned and jovial brotherhood.
In 1840 the number of citizens who could be invited was raised to forty, while in the years succeeding the organization of the club many guests from over the sea, and from the different States of the Union, had been welcomed to the Wistar Parties. One of the latter writes,—
“During my stay in Philadelphia I was present at several of these Wistar meetings, and always returned from them with increased conviction of their beneficial tendency.
“These meetings are held by rotation at the houses of the different members. The conversation is generally literary or scientific, and, as the party is usually very large, it can be varied at pleasure. Philosophers eat like other men, and the precaution of an excellent supper is by no means found to be superfluous. It acts, too, as a gentle emollient on the acrimony of debate. No man can say a harsh thing with his mouth full of turkey, and disputants forget their differences in unity of enjoyment.”
Better known abroad in the early part of the century than any other American city, all travellers of consequence came to Philadelphia. Among these we find such men as General Moreau, counted after Bonaparte the greatest general in the French Republic; the younger Murat, who married Miss Fraser, of South Carolina; the Marquis de Grouchy, whose name will be forever associated with the defeat of Waterloo; the poet Moore, whose singing drew tears from the beautiful eyes of Mrs. Joseph Hopkinson; the Prince de Canino, son-in-law of Joseph Bonaparte, ex-king of Spain, who, himself residing at Bordentown until 1830, was doubtless a guest of the Wistar Association, although, after the fashion of princes, it was his pleasure to entertain rather than to be entertained. These and many more, including President Madison, and the witty and able Virginia gentleman William Short, who, as secretary of legation under Thomas Jefferson, chargé-d’affaires to the French Republic, and minister to Spain and the Netherlands, had seen much of foreign official and social life. An acquaintance of Talleyrand, himself a diplomatist, life abroad offered Mr. Short many attractions, which a friend and contemporary assures us were more than balanced by the terrors of the sea, which menaced him in the form of sea-sickness. This gentleman, a surviving member of the Wistar Association of 1837, recalls no social intercourse in Old-World cities more delightful than that of this informal club.
While on a visit to Philadelphia in 1825, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar makes the following entry in his journal:
“At Mr. Walsh’s I found a numerous assembly, mostly of scientific and literary gentlemen. This assembly is called ‘Wistar Party.’... The conversation generally relates to literary and scientific topics. I unexpectedly met Mr. E. Livingston in this assembly. I was also introduced to the mayor of the city, Mr. [Joseph] Watson, as well as to most of the gentlemen present, whose interesting conversation afforded me much entertainment.”
This German nobleman, who was well “wined and dined” in old Philadelphia, seems to have possessed a happy faculty of replying aptly to the pretty compliments paid him and his country by Judge Peters, Mr. Charles J. Ingersoll, and other social magnates of the period. To the toast “Weimar, the native country of letters,” he replied, with ready wit, “Pennsylvania, the asylum of unfortunate Germans.” Can we not hear the laughter and applause that greeted that toast? They were not allowed to subside, either, as the venerable Judge Peters followed the toast with a song which he had composed the previous evening, and which he sang with great vivacity and spirit. Are there any such gatherings now, and do our octogenarians sing songs of their own composing with vivacity?
The Duke of Saxe-Weimar describes another Wistar Party, this at the house of Colonel Clement C. Biddle, at which John Quincy Adams, then President of the United States, was a guest. Of him he says,—
“The President is about sixty years old, of rather short stature, with a bald head, and of a very plain and worthy appearance. He speaks little, but what he does speak is to the purpose. I must confess that I seldom in my life felt so true and sincere a reverence as at the moment when this honorable gentleman, whom eleven millions of people have thought worthy to elect as their chief magistrate, shook hands with me.”
In the same year Chief Justice Tilghman records a Wistar Party held at his house, at which were present such citizens as Roberts Vaux, Mathew Carey, the Irish protectionist, his son Henry C. Carey, political economist and writer, Joseph Hopkinson, the elder Peale, who had studied at the Royal Academy in London and came home to paint portraits of Washington and his generals, Dr. Frederick Beasley, and many more, with a sprinkling of foreigners,—Mr. Pedersen, Minister from Denmark to the United States, the Prince de Canino, who was an enthusiastic ornithologist, Colonel Beckwith, who had left a leg upon the field of Waterloo, and several French chevaliers. The whole company, numbering about one hundred, was regaled with chicken salad, oysters, ices, wine, punch, and the like, at an expense of twenty-four dollars and eighty-nine cents. This moderate sum, the accurate transcriber tells us, included the whiskey for the punch, the spermaceti candles, oil for the lamps, and extra fire in one room.
Later in the history of the Wistar Club, after the good founders had gone, and left it to its own devices, serious innovations were made in the old sumptuary code, whereupon severe strictures were instituted against the dainty fare set before the wise men, in the local journals and elsewhere. One of these attacks upon the Wistarians appeared in the then recently established Daily Courier, and is interesting not only because the slashing editorial of the young writer ended the brief career of his paper, but because its demise is intimately connected with the rise of two prominent journals of to-day. It happened that many of the subscribers to the Daily Courier were members or guests of the Wistar Parties. These persons instantly withdrew their patronage. The Courier was shaken to its foundations, and the unfortunate young Scotchman, James Gordon Bennett, whose pen had proved too sharp for Philadelphia, sold his journal to Mr. Jesper Harding, upon which the Daily Courier was merged in the Pennsylvania Inquirer, and Mr. Bennett, having transplanted his talents to the more congenial soil of New York, later employed them in founding the New York Herald.[28]
Written invitations to the Wistar Parties seem to have been used up to 1835, when Mr. Vaughan first speaks of a printed invitation. This bore the quaint queued head of Dr. Wistar, and is in all respects similar to that issued by the Wistar Association redivivus of 1886.
In 1838 and 1839 printed lists appeared, naming the hosts of the season, and giving the dates of the several entertainments. To these were appended sumptuary regulations, which were of course born to die. Just when the terrapin, game, croquette, and like dainties replaced the original decanters, flanked with ice, cakes, and one substantial course, Mr. Tyson does not record. When the terrapin came, however, it came to stay, until the hot discussions incident to the disturbances of the late civil war routed it and the guests alike.
Thackeray carried away from Philadelphia such pleasant recollections of the Wistar Parties, and the mirth and good cheer there enjoyed, that he thus refers to them in a letter written to Mr. William B. Reed from Washington in 1853. He has just heard of the death of his friend Mr. William Peter, British Consul to Philadelphia.
“Saturday I was to have dined with him, and Mrs. Peter wrote saying he was ill with influenza: he was in bed with his last illness, and there were to be no more Whister parties for him. Will Whister himself, hospitable pig-tailed shade, welcome him to Hades? And will they sit down—no, stand up—to a ghostly supper, devouring the ιφθιμους ψυχας of oysters and all sorts of birds?”
Something else than the mighty oysters impressed the genial novelist, and that was the face and figure of John Irwin, a well-known head-waiter, who so resembled the terrapin over which he presided that Thackeray has, in a few rapid pencil-strokes, put him down on paper as a fine specimen of a diamond-back. Those who still remember Irwin’s great paunch and shining face will recognize his portrait in Mr. Thackeray’s “Orphan of Pimlico.” Thus, this latter-day Bogle, although there arose in his time no poet, like Nicholas Biddle, to embalm his virtues in humorous verse, has, like the “colorless colored man,” been immortalized by the hand of genius.
The pleasing side of Philadelphia social life must have left its impress upon the receptive mind of Thackeray, as he writes from Switzerland in July of the same year,—
“Since my return from the West, it was flying from London to Paris, and vice versa, dinners right and left, parties every night. If I had been in Philadelphia I could scarcely have been more feasted. Oh, you unhappy Reed! I see you (after that little supper with McMichael) on Sunday at your own table, when we had that good Sherry-Madeira, turning aside from the wine-cup with your pale face! That cup has gone down this well so often (meaning my own private cavity) that I wonder the cup isn’t broken, and the well as well as it is.... I always remember you and yours, and honest Mac, and Wharton, and Lewis, and kind fellows who have been kind to me and I hope will be kind to me again.”
The “Mac” is evidently Mr. Morton McMichael, to whose whiskey punch Mr. Thackeray alludes with tenderness in another letter, and who is described by all who knew him as the most genial of men, a very “king of good fellows.” So great were his social talents that, like Shenstone’s Frenchwoman who could “draw wit out of a stone,” he possessed the power to redeem from stagnation the dullest of dinners by his happy faculty of giving his best and leading others to do the same.
The “Lewis” alluded to by Mr. Thackeray is Mr. William D. Lewis, more recently dead; another delightful dinner-talker. Possessed of rare bonhomie, and furnished with a fund of anecdotes of travel,—for he had lived some years in Russia,—he brought mirth and cheer into the circles to which he was welcomed, and was even known, on occasions, to sing some familiar household verses, as “Home, Sweet Home,” in the Russian language, to the great amusement, if not to the edification, of his hearers.
In 1842, Mr. Tyson records only two of the original members of 1818 still surviving, Dr. R. M. Patterson and Robert Walsh. The kindly face of Mr. Vaughan (Johnny Vaughan, as his intimates called him), first Dean of the Wistar Association, had only lately disappeared from the circle. Although death had sadly thinned the ranks of original membership, a number of honored names filled the blanks: among these, Horace Binney, William M. Meredith, John Sergeant, Joshua Francis Fisher, Judge Kane, Langdon Cheves, from South Carolina, Thomas Isaac Wharton, and, there always being a large proportion of medical men, such distinguished sons of the healing art as Dr. Robert Hare, Dr. Thomas C. James, Dr. John K. Mitchell, Dr. Isaac Hays, physician and writer, Dr. Franklin Bache and his friend Dr. George B. Wood closely associated with him in medical literature, Dr. Charles D. Meigs, and Moncure Robinson, Esq., who, among the many who have come and gone, still [1887] recalls delightful evenings spent at the Wistar Parties. Dr. Isaac Lea was in 1843 Dean of the association, which office he held until the stirring events of ’60 and ’61 scattered its members, not again to unite until 1886, within a few months of his death, when he was succeeded in this office by his son, Mr. Henry C. Lea.[29]
Writing during this hiatus of many years, Dr. George B. Wood says,—
“I have always regarded the Wistar Club not merely as an ornamental feature of Philadelphia society, but as a very useful institution; bringing as it did persons together of various pursuits, who would not otherwise perhaps have met, thus removing prejudices and conciliating friendly feeling; and, by a regulation regarding strangers which gave each member the right to introduce one or more to the meetings, facilitating their intercourse with citizens, and contributing to the reputation of our city for hospitality.”
It may be that these words hold something of a prophecy for the future, as well as a résumé of the past; and now that the old-time invitation, bearing the “hospitable pig-tailed” head of the founder, has once more begun to circulate, an important influence may be exercised by it, in drawing together the best and ablest of the various professions and callings of this city, and in affording, as of old, a pleasant and informal means of entertaining stranger guests. Such a club as this forecasts a meeting-ground where British and Continental scientists and literati, professional men and men of affairs, may clasp hands with American workers on the same lines; where the large philanthropy of England may meet an even larger New-World philanthropy; where, under some hospitable roof, questions in social and political science, or the latest discovery in chemistry or physics, may be discussed over croquettes and oysters, and with a dash of hock or sherry (no sparkling wines are allowed) the seas that wash widely-separated shores shall be bridged in an instant, and, meeting on some congenial ground of knowledge, of thought, or of interest, Old and New World denizens shall feel the delightful thrill of a common brotherhood.
