Through Colonial DoorwaysWharton, Anne Hollingsworth
History
Through Colonial Doorways
Wharton, Anne Hollingsworth
United States -- Social life and customs -- 1775-1783; United States -- Social life and customs -- To 1775
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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