In Union There Is Strength
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In the 1840s, Philadelphia was poised to join the ranks of the world's great cities, as its population grew, its manufacturing prospered, and its railroads reached outward to the West. Yet epidemics of riot, disease, and labor conflict led some to wonder whether growth would lead to disintegration. As slavery and territorial conquest forced Americans to ponder a similar looming disunion at the national level, Philadelphians searched for ways to hold their city together across internal social and sectional divisions—a project of consolidation that reshaped their city into the boundaries we know today. A bold new interpretation of a crucial period in Philadelphia's history, In Union There Is Strength examines the social and spatial reconstruction of an American city in the decades on either side of the American Civil War. Andrew Heath follows Philadelphia's fortunes over the course of forty years as industrialization, immigration, and natural population growth turned a Jacksonian-era port with a population of two hundred thousand into a Gilded Age metropolis containing nearly a million people. Heath focuses on the utopian socialists, civic boosters, and municipal reformers who argued that the path to urban greatness lay in the harmonious consolidation of jarring interests rather than in the atomistic individualism we have often associated with the nineteenth-century metropolis. Their rival visions drew them into debates about the reach of local government, the design of urban space, the character of civic life, the power of corporations, and the relations between labor and capital—and ultimately became entangled with the question of national union itself. In tracing these links between city-making and nation-making in the mid-nineteenth century, In Union There Is Strength shows how its titular rallying cry inspired creative, contradictory, and fiercely contested ideas about how to design, build, and live in a metropolis.
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In Union There Is Strength
Series editors: Brian DeLay, Steven Hahn, Amy Dru Stanley
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Exceptionalism proved too strong for all the comparisons to stick, but the borrowing served its purpose. First, using “common referents” narrowed the gulf between the Old World and the New, making Atlantic exchange easier to imagine.47 After Henry Mayhew’s Life and Labor of the London Poor secured an American publisher, one Philadelphia paper concluded that the English capital “is only a type, on a large scale, of our great Atlantic cities,” while a reformer in 1855 found “life among the lowly” was “equally true” in the New World and the Old. Second, the threat of revolutionary violence separated citizens into orderly and disorderly, reminded the economic elite of the danger lurking in the suburbs, and enforced the kind of class discipline the North American would push over the following decade. To sympathize with mobs was to succor Jacobinism.48
Indulgence also threatened the city’s prosperity. Philadelphians were counting the “cost of riots” even before the militia stood down in 1844. Pamphlets published in the months that followed tried to quantify the destruction, with early estimates putting the losses at a minimum of $250,000.49 The burden of paying for the posse and militia fell on the county treasury, while the Catholic diocese sued the city proper for its failure to stop the mob from torching St. Augustine’s, which stood a few yards inside the original corporate boundaries. But the economic consequences of the violence extended far beyond claims for compensation. During the Kensington riots, a New Yorker warned Board of Trade president Thomas Pym Cope that Philadelphia bonds would struggle to find a buyer in Manhattan, while a few days after the Southwark conflagration, a rumor reached him that shipbuilding on the Delaware had come to a halt in the face of demands for an all-native waterfront. Cope worried about the “great injury to our future prosperity.” “Prudent men,” after all, would “be afraid to place capital in manufactories in a place where the populace may at any time lay them waste.”50 A city still suffering from the financial aftershocks of the Panic of 1837 could hardly afford to drive away investors.
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