Philadelphia drank deeply from the cup of misery for more than three centuries. Slavery in Philadelphia documents the profits and suffering generated by this Northern city, beginning with the prominent families who purchased Africans to do their bidding. In the late eighteenth century it was the center of the Mid-Atlantic grain trade, processing thousands of tons of slave-produced grain into flour from plantation in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware for shipment overseas. By the 1850s the city was a major textile center, driving the expansion of Southern enslavement through its thirst for cotton. The story continues to the present day through the management of wealth generated over a century of slave-supported industry. Slavery itself was vile, but commerce was the real culprit: Benjamin Franklin got rich not from the servants he owned, but from the runaway slave advertisements he published in his newspaper.This book follows the story of the Chew family, Pennsylvania's leading slaveholders, from their arrival in Jamestown to their residence on the social register today. Based on newly discovered records preserved for centuries by the family itself, these papers relate a series of rich, intimate, and often astonishing accounts that include slave rebellions, separations of families, nineteenth-century legal battles, and the Chew family's own efforts to erase and purify the past. Slavery in Philadelphia expands on these instances to document the full breadth of slavery in the Mid-Atlantic region, and encompasses memoir, African American history, industrial records, elite ancestry, and a fascinating money trail.