Four Centuries and a Cloud of Dust

Four Centuries and a Cloud of Dust
By STACY SCHIFF February 6, 2005 NYTIMES OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

"It has always been just under 300 miles from Boston to Philadelphia. But long before 100 yards of Florida turf divided them, they were universes apart.

From its inception Boston was the Puritan redoubt, theocratic and autocratic, narrower in its thinking, the hierarchical land of the ministerial Mathers. Men were sacrificed in Boston to their dissenting opinions, as Harvard's first president discovered. He had the temerity to challenge the institution of baptism, after which he lost his job.

Philadelphia was the Quaker colony, the seat of tolerance and equality, heterogeneous in the extreme, closer to the democratic ideal. Money went further in that colony than did authority. In the words of one 18th-century immigrant, "Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans and hell for officials and preachers." Even from a distance the regional differences stood out in high relief. To the European mind, New England was a benighted backwater in which good Quakers were persecuted. Philadelphia was a utopia on earth.

No one better grasped that divide than - or crossed it to such stunning effect as - Benjamin Franklin."

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