A hybrid fellow’s forum with Alexander Lawrence Ames, Director of Outreach & Engagement, the Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia from December 7, 2023. Recording available.
About the Presentation
French-American sailor, merchant, patriot, and philanthropist Stephen Girard of Philadelphia (1750-1831) fancied himself a product of the Enlightenment and fashioned his identity around the French philosophes. He filled his sizeable library with works by these thinkers and even built four “Philosopher Ships” that sailed the seas in support of his vibrant merchant trade: the Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Helvétius. In many respects, Girard, who pioneered systematic approaches to civic projects and charitable giving that presaged the work of later American businessmen-philanthropists, lived out an Enlightenment vision of social and political progress. Yet like so many “Enlightened” men, Girard also supported racial hierarchy and enslaved Black Americans. How can modern Philadelphians, who live in the shadow of this businessman’s philanthropy, make sense of the mixed legacy of a little-understood local icon? And how can other Americans situate Girard within a pantheon of slaveholding revolutionary patriots who contributed to both the most admirable and most shameful traditions in American civic and social life?
Girard has remained inscrutable to most modern commentators because of the insufficient attention paid to the literary, cultural, and intellectual foundations of his identity as a patriotic republican citizen. Drawing on the theories and methods of intellectual history, book history, maritime history, and material culture studies, this presentation will examine the possibilities and limitations of the French and American Enlightenments, comparing Girard’s self-fashioning to the intellectual lives of other Enlightened thinkers, including pivotal figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, and Abolitionist activists including Benjamin Lay, Rev. Richard Allen, and Rev. Absalom Jones. Ames will introduce Stephen Girard’s life and philanthropy in Philadelphia before discussing his research in process at the Jefferson Library, which compares the merchant’s commitment to the French Enlightenment to that of Thomas Jefferson, who famously fashioned his identity (and home décor) with French taste in mind. Ames will also report on the next stage of the research for this project, which will take him to New England to trace the long and bizarre afterlife of the most famous—and photographed—of Girard’s Philosopher Ships.
Cover of The Will of the Late Stephen Girard, Esq. with a Short Biography of His Life (Philadelphia: Thomas Deliver, 1849). Bound in Henry Simpson, The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians, Now Deceased… (Philadelphia: William Brotherhead, 1859). Call no. A 859liv v.5. Courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum & Library. Photo by Rasheena Wilson.
About Alexander Lawrence Ames
Alexander Lawrence Ames, Ph.D., is Director of Outreach & Engagement at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, where he oversees the institution’s tours, public programs, and exhibition galleries. This research project was inspired by Bass Otis’s posthumous portrait of Stephen Girard, which hangs in the Rosenbach’s stair hall.