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CHAPTER 2

“The Guilty and Blood-Stained City”

Radicals and the Second American Republic

On the evening of November 11, 1844, Philadelphians on their way to the Consolidation meeting at the county courthouse might have hurried past a crowd outside Chestnut Street Theater. The people had gathered to protest the cancellation of the premiere of George Lippard’s “The Monks of Monk Hall.” Lippard had adapted the play from serialized extracts of his scandalous novel, The Quaker City, a thinly veiled attack on Philadelphia’s bourgeoisie. Its main target was the merchant Singleton Mercer—a relative and namesake of a wealthy supporter of the Philadelphia Society for the Employment and Instruction of the Poor (PSEIP)—whom a jury had recently acquitted of murdering his sister’s seducer. The prospect of the affair being played out on the stage so troubled Mercer that he reputedly purchased three hundred tickets with the intention of distributing them to arson-happy Southwark “rowdies.” In a city the mob had torched twice during the preceding months, the rumor sufficiently unnerved the mayor for him to bar the performance from proceeding. This brought Lippard’s admirers out in force, and “for hours,” a newspaper reported, “there was every appearance of a destructive outbreak.” The “emeute,” as one journal (borrowing a term that evoked revolutionary violence in France) called the incident, no doubt focused Consolidators’ minds as they met a few hundred yards down the street.¹

Chestnut Street Theater that night avoided the fate meted out a few months before to Catholic churches. For Lippard, though, the affair provided another example of wealth arraying itself against the people. Critics might have dismissed the twenty-two-year-old as “a mere boy” with an effervescent “spleen,” but the author defended his writing as a way to “delimate principles.”² The Quaker City in this regard provided a cartography of Philadelphia’s present and a prophecy of its future that traced the terrain of a corrupt elite. Where bourgeois citizens saw danger in the miasmas emanating from the courts and alleys of working-class suburbs, then, Lippard argued the real “mysteries” of Philadelphia lay behind the facades of the mansions that lined the main streets. Conspiracies hatched in the drawing rooms and clubhouses of the rich impoverished the real producers of the city’s wealth.

Throughout the Atlantic World in the mid-nineteenth-century, radicals joined businessmen, reformers, and governments in trying to comprehend the workings of the new metropolis. Radicals like Lippard shared boosters’ conviction that the age of the “great city” had arrived, and that Philadelphia had more in common with a London, Paris, or Manchester, than with provincial American towns. But from this common point, the knowledge they produced diverged. Bourgeois surveyors sought to mold the discordant phenomena of urban life into a coherent whole with discernible rules and manipulable parts. For Morton McMichael and his Old World counterparts, the “great city” might have been an ugly, violent, and even insurrectionary place, but it contained within it the potential for beauty, order, and wealth. Radicals did not share their optimism. Take for instance Friedrich Engels, who published Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, the same year The Quaker City appeared in full.³ Engels’s analysis of social relations and the urban form mapped the city in a very different way to Lippard’s gothic mysteries, but both writers argued that capital produced space in a manner that pressed down on the working class. Metropolitan growth did not scatter its benefits evenly, but left a trail of misery in its wake, as the labor that built up the city found itself banished to insalubrious quarters for shelter.

Philadelphia’s radicals found common ground in their reading of the “great city.” Heirs to a tradition of artisanal politics that went back to 1776, they drew on classical republicanism, the labor theory of value, and Atlantic revolutionary upheavals to critique the society and space of unreformed capitalism. Lippard and his allies cast themselves as an intellectual vanguard: missionaries tasked with explaining the workings of the city to the workers who built it. Their project of consolidating class involved imagining a different society in which producers, rather than capitalists, reaped the rewards of what they had sown.⁴ Radicals, then, differed from their booster contemporaries. Bourgeois Philadelphians targeted manufacturing suburbs and riot districts for consolidation. Once they could dictate terms, they would incorporate the metropolitan frontier into the city, enclose the city’s borderlands, and inoculate themselves against epidemics of disorder and disease. Lippard, in contrast, equated industry with exploitation, and believed moral miasmas festered in wealthy homes rather than rickety tenements. For him, the work of purification began in mansions, not hovels.

For Lippard, as for McMichael, reconstructing Philadelphia required association. The memory of worker fighting worker in 1844 haunted radicals. In the years that followed the riots, they tried to rebuild solidarities, and link the city’s producers to national and international struggles for the rights of labor. Their own fragmentation, though sometimes overstated, worked against them.⁵ Some were middle-class reformers swayed by the appeal of utopian socialism; others, working-class journeymen with long experience of the shop floor. Some rallied around party flags; others urged independent political organization. Some saw craft unionism as a panacea for workingmen; others believed strikes offered short-term gains at most, and envisaged a more lasting social reconstruction. But if factions argued over the best way to consolidate Philadelphia’s producers, radicals agreed on the need for union—and especially in the wake of the 1848 European Revolutions—mounted a powerful attack on the bourgeois understanding of the city.

Even then, however, they found it hard to agree on the boundaries of the producers’ community in a city divided by creed, color, and class. In the sectional crisis of 1850, the divided house of radicalism tumbled to the ground. Yet the challenge Lippard and his allies presented before midcentury left an imprint on metropolitan life up to the Civil War and beyond in an associational politics hostile to individualism.

The Labor Question in the Riot Era

Philadelphians confronted what would come to be called the “labor question” long before the Gilded Age. When masters and merchants began to reorganize production in the Early Republic, they faced resistance. “Traditionalists” fought attempts to impose time and work discipline; radical artisans channeled the rationalist spirit of Tom Paine to oppose the new order. By the Jacksonian era, indeed, the growing metropolis had become a frontline in a battle to define the terms of American capitalism. Workers, though, were not simply fighting a rearguard action; instead many imagined that the power of industrialization could be put to work in their interests. In this regard day-to-day struggles on the shop floor and ambitious designs for social reconstruction each informed the way citizens thought about the relations between labor and capital.⁶

By the time Lippard published The Quaker City, Philadelphia had been a center of labor organizing for more than two decades. In 1827, journeymen from across the city’s trades came together in the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations, the nation’s first metropolitan-wide labor federation.⁷ A few years later, at the height of the Jacksonian boom, coal heavers walked off the wharves on the Schuylkill River, beginning a strike that drew twenty thousand workers together across lines of craft and culture: “an awakening of class solidarity,” David Montgomery argued, “as significant as any in American history.” Under the leadership of the General Trades’ Union (GTU), Philadelphia’s workers brought the city to a halt, and despite the best efforts of the municipal authorities, businessmen struggled to fight back. The Panic of 1837 succeeded where others had failed in destroying the GTU, and in the dog days of the depression, its leaders either decamped to the antimonopoly wing of the Democratic Party or were swept up in the Protestant revivals that burnt over the city. Workingmen who had marched under the banner, “We are all day laborers,” found new solidarities in political parties and confessional culture—a path that led to the atavism of the 1844 riots.⁸

Yet simmering unrest in the hard times that followed the Panic reminded employers that the labor question had not gone away. Ethnic affinities, which the GTU had worked hard to overcome, now became a basis for solidarity, especially among Irish coal heavers and handloom weavers. The former torched a Reading Railroad bridge in 1842; the latter chased off the sheriff and his posse during a dispute in Kensington a few months later. But strikers, like most Jacksonian Americans with a grievance, tended to use violence discriminately, targeting bosses and journeymen who ignored union scales. Another coal heavers’ strike, this one on the Richmond wharves of the Reading just a few weeks before the first 1844 riot, provides a telling illustration. Demanding an increase in pay, the men forced “all the different laborers in the vicinity to join them,” and by the time Sheriff Morton McMichael turned up with his posse, the employer had evidently caved in.⁹

For bourgeois Philadelphians, the “labor question” in the early 1840s could seem like just another manifestation of suburban disorder in a city that had become a “war-field for every faction and party.” Thomas Pym Cope read the May 1844 riot in this vein as one more episode in a district characterized by “the frequent demolition of private property.”¹⁰ Strikers, who tended to coalesce around a trade, neighborhood, or culture, lacked the metropolitan-wide reach of the GTU, and their militancy proved easy to subsume into a broader pattern of suburban violence. Few assumed their disturbances had roots in the relationship between labor and capital.

Wealthy residents of Philadelphia, however, could not afford to ignore militancy even where it was geographically contained. The city proper’s economic elite may have had few reasons to follow the battle between handloom operatives and master weavers in Kensington—a struggle in a dying craft that pitted impoverished workers against petty entrepreneurs—but plenty paid taxes to support the sheriff’s posse or owned stock in the strikeplagued Reading Railroad. Moreover, frequent strikes risked further damage to the city’s reputation. By 1845, then, even Cope’s merchant-dominated Board of Trade had identified fraught industrial relations as a threat to the “prosperity of Philadelphia,” as it attacked the “mad attempts” to “resist by combination and by open violence, the law of demand and supply.”¹¹

Lippard and his allies saw virtues where the board saw vices. For them, combination offered the best form of resistance to the commodification of labor, which for all the elegance of liberal theory reduced free men to what they termed wage slaves. In the years after the riots, they launched an attack on the “law of demand and supply” that led them to explore how the city worked. If citizens wanted to understand the earthquakes that shook Philadelphia, radicals insisted, they needed to look beneath the surface and map its social fault lines.

The Social Cartography of Radical Philadelphia

The man who caused such a stir at the Chestnut Street Theater, George Lippard, shared McMichael’s sense of the city as an interdependent but illegible whole, yet saw the metropolis very differently than the North American publisher. Born in 1822, he grew up in Germantown, a rural borough annexed to the city in 1854, and after turning his back on careers in the church and law, began writing in the shadow of the Panic of 1837. Lippard spent the hard times as a jobbing journalist and romance author, and having slept rough in the city’s streets and cellars, started work on his first political novel, The Quaker City, which appeared in serial form in the months that followed the 1844 riots. He was working on the book when the mayor halted the stage adaptation—Lippard alluded to the censorship in subsequent chapters—but the controversy heightened public interest and secured him a salary. When it appeared in 1845, it sold 60,000 copies, making it the most popular American novel prior to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Before his death at 31—just a decade after his literary breakthrough—he wrote over twenty books and countless newspaper articles. He became best known for his “city mysteries” fiction: novels that lifted the veil on metropolitan life.¹² Through his writing and politics, he played a leading role in a radical subculture that challenged bourgeois citizens’ reading of the city.

Lippard was both a product and a critic of Philadelphia’s capitalist transformation. New printing technology and rising literacy created a mass market for cheap fiction, and mysteries novelists’ audience crossed social boundaries.¹³ But if genteel Philadelphians sometimes enjoyed a snigger at Lippard’s tales, the author saw himself, in the words of a radical cleric, as “the age’s leading spokesman for the common man.” He found his calling in the task of consolidating the toiling but ignorant masses around a project of social reconstruction. Lippard wielded his pen as a weapon in a class war, which a recent critic sees as the “literary equivalent” of the riots.¹⁴

Lippard’s task, as he stated in an 1849 preface to his best-known book, lay in explaining “all the phases of a corrupt social system, as manifested in the city of Philadelphia.” His mysteries fiction did so in ways that would have resonated with veterans of the GTU and generations of American populists. Like them, he divided the world into producers and idlers, lauding the former for creating value through their labor, and lambasting the latter for living off the work of others. Lippard hurled invective here not just at bankers, merchants, and lawyers, but also at politicians, publishers, priests, and the manufacturers he called “white slaveholders.”¹⁵ Ignoring divisions among Philadelphia’s economic elite, he portrayed such figures as a conspiring cabal. In trying to unite producers, Lippard consolidated a bourgeoisie.

His writing guided readers through a metropolis that class had corrupted. Mysteries novels crossed the Atlantic from France, where Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris—published just a few months before Lippard began The Quaker City—captured the attention of writers ranging from Edgar Allen Poe to Karl Marx. The magnitude of fast-growing American metropolises gave works that purported to reveal their secrets wide appeal and inspired authors in Philadelphia and elsewhere to mimic Lippard’s method. Only some of these imitators shared his radical politics, and few embraced the gothic elements that owed more to Poe than Sue, but nearly all of them blurred the boundary between fact and fiction in their depiction of the city.¹⁶ Indeed, novelists frequently insisted on the veracity of their findings and emphasized the labor that had gone into their research. “He who would learn the mysteries and miseries” of New York and Philadelphia, wrote one, “must, as we have done, make it” his “sole occupation.” To “penetrate all the haunts of dissipation and crime,” he claimed to have divided the city into eight districts, which he systematically explored over the course of six months. Lippard made no pretense of social scientific rigor but still promised to bring to the surface “the strange and thrilling scenes that lie buried beneath” the “exterior of society.”¹⁷

In doing so, he demystified the shadowy spaces of urban capitalism. Like Marx, Lippard asks his audience to see beyond labor’s objectification in the commodity, and gaze instead on the hidden process of production. As he walks his readers through the riot district of Kensington in The Nazarene (1846), for instance, he points to the windows of an immense factory, behind which “miserable forms, swarming to their labour,” work from before dawn to after dusk.¹⁸

But Lippard’s cartography also mapped the inequality woven into the urban form and plotted how a morally bankrupt capitalism reproduced it. Like lithographers, Lippard sometimes saw Philadelphia synoptically, rising above its rooftops to look down on the metropolis below. Where the bird’s eye view gave boosters a sanitized snapshot of urban greatness, Lippard used the panorama to show the city’s social depravity, bringing into view chains of interdependence and exploitation. From a pulpit on the dome of the new Girard College, for instance, “a writer of immoral books” surveys the “great city.” The vantage point allows the preacher—a thinly disguised version of the author himself—to see the metropolis as a whole. “Sweep the roofs from this large City at midnight,” he tells his congregation, and the “anatomy of civilization lies open to your gaze.” Lippard’s perspective soon shifts from sky to street, as he peers into the homes of wealthy judges and starving widows, juxtaposing “dens of want, in the narrow alleys” and “the great mansion, where the revel, bought with the poor man’s labor, roars on from midnight until break of day.” As he stresses the gulf between what he called the “upper tenth” and “lower million,” he also suggests how the two classes are bound together, with one’s wealth the fruits of the other’s toil.¹⁹

When he wanted to show the power wielded by a consolidated class, though, Lippard distilled Philadelphia to a single setting. Monk Hall, a mansion that connects his novel’s subplots, compresses the “social and sexual relations” of the city. That is not to say it is easy to navigate. The structure, “lonely even amid tenements and houses,” lies hidden amid a “tangled labyrinth of avenues,” defying the legible grid. Within its walls, a young man warns his companion, “it is easy enough for a stranger … to find his way in, but it would puzzle him like the devil to find his way out.”²⁰ Riddled with secret passages and subterranean lairs, the building sets Philadelphia’s mystique in stone.

Yet when Lippard resumes his role as guide, it becomes evident that the disorienting space disguises clear social divisions. The powerful people who plot urban fortunes in its rooms are easy enough to identify. Monk Hall’s “monks” are not the despised papists targeted by the church burners of 1844, but a canting, conniving bourgeoisie. “Here were lawyers from the court, doctors from the school, and judges from the bench,” Lippard writes, as parsons, publishers, and politicians scheme frauds and seductions. If the conspiracies are hard to decode, the class that hatches them is perfectly readable.²¹

By vesting metropolitan power in a powerful and corrupted class, Lippard and his allies challenged bourgeois readings of the riots. Monk Hall’s Southwark setting might be telling here. After the July clash between the militia and the mob, wealthy Philadelphians blamed the district’s turbulent population for civil war on the streets; The Quaker City, in contrast, identifies “respectable citizens” as the real dangerous classes. “The poor man toils in want,” its author insists, “and the rich man riots in his sweat and blood.” As another radical put it, the “authorized fraud and force of orderly society” lay behind the “spontaneous outbursts” of mobs.²² To them, the 1844 violence sprang more from a dissolute rich than a disorderly poor.

Lippard and other radicals thus linked a corrupt environment and civic ruin.²³ But their environmental determinism differed from that of their bourgeois contemporaries. Where elements of the economic elite worried about the moral miasmas emanating from suburban courts and alleys, Lippard labeled luxury as corrosive. In his account of an 1849 race riot, for instance, a fictionalized leader of the real street gang that provoked the outrage was ruined by a childhood that tended “to pamper the appetite and deprave the passions.” Elsewhere Lippard chastised newspapers for failing to pay more attention to “Respectable Killers”: not the boys who “get up riots, hunt negroes and burn houses,” but rapacious manufacturers, landlords, and bank presidents.²⁴

When he did portray a dissolute poor, they were brutalized by avarice. Devil-Bug, more monster than man, was described by a contemporary of his creator as “the product of a rotten civilisation,” while The Quaker City has him raised “in full and continual sight of scenes of vice, wretchedness and squalor.” Philadelphia’s “outcasts”—“vagabond tribes” who speak “a language of their own”—are kept “in the underground recesses of Monk Hall by day before being set loose “to beg, to rob, or … to murder” at night.²⁵ In Lippard’s city, producers confronted the conspiracies of capital and the savagery of its slavish victims.

No republic, Lippard believed, could long endure in such a state. Alluding, perhaps, to a year of apocalyptic fervor—a few weeks before the Kensington riot, a millenarian sect, the Millerites, had loudly proclaimed the End Times were at hand—he foretold the “Last Day of the Quaker City” in a reverie, which carried the keeper of Monk Hall, Devil-Bug, forward to 1950. Lippard’s futuristic Philadelphia had degenerated almost beyond recognition from its egalitarian roots. The ruins of Independence Hall provide stone for a royal palace; Washington Square had given way to a penitentiary and gallows. Carriages of a “proud and insolent nobility,” who had “wrung the sweat from the brow of the mechanic,” ride past beggars on wide boulevards. As “slaves of the cotton Lord and the factory Prince” prepare to crown their king, the dead rise from the grave, chanting “Wo Unto Sodom.” Judgment day arrives as lightning rains down from the sky and houses fall into the ground. For Lippard, the fate of the “guilty and blood-stained City” is retribution for its moral rot.²⁶

His radical cartography mapped the city in a very different way than the bourgeoisie. The sermon from Girard College used the form of evangelical piety in pursuit of radical ends; the prophesy of Philadelphia’s destruction turned booster dreams of what the metropolis might become into a nightmare that multiplied the horrors of the riots. Outward signs of wealth—“temples of marble,” “glittering domes,” “the grandeur and magnificence of the streets”—fail to cover the corruption within.²⁷ The path to peace and prosperity did not run through industry and commerce. As long as the social system remained unreformed, urban growth would multiply misery within, hastening the city’s doom.

Lippard therefore joined boosters in employing Philadelphia’s past, present, and future as political weapons. McMichael and his allies used visions of civic greatness to bring together a bourgeoisie, but the radical novelist warned that unless citizens awoke to the danger, the metropolis would decay into an imperial oligarchy. Seeing glaring inequality all around them, he and his allies aimed to demystify the process of expropriation that enriched the few at the expense of the many, and consolidate producers around a project of social reconstruction to redeem the Quaker City.²⁸

The blood spilled in 1844 made association imperative. After the riots, the lyceums and halls that had flourished before the Panic of 1837 provided meeting places for rebuilding, as radicals tried to turn theory into practice. Working people and their allies formed fraternal clubs, Fourierist sects, cooperative stores, craft unions, Chartist sympathy leagues, and social improvement societies. Historians have sometimes seen the rush to associate in Jacksonian America as part of a search for belonging, as the intimacy of the “walking city” gave way to the anonymity of the industrial metropolis.²⁹ But the community envisaged by radicals pursued social ends as much as it met psychic needs. Organizations varied, with some inviting African Americans, abolitionists, and women to their meetings, and others limiting themselves to white, male producers. They ran the gamut ideologically too from utopian socialism to a brand of producerism that would not have looked out of place in the two major parties. Democrat, Whig, Liberty, and Free Soil partisans all participated. But their fragmentation is easy to overstate. Radicals often moved from one organization to another and shared basic principles: capital, at least in the form it had assumed in industrializing Philadelphia, exploited labor, and the consequences of that process were engrafted into the urban form. Only through union could producers emancipate themselves. “COMBINATION! ASSOCIATION! These are the words of the last Gospel which God has uttered to man,” Lippard declared in 1849.³⁰ By then he had found a model abroad.

The Second American Republic

Radicals’ inspiration in the 1840s came not only in the inheritance from the Jacksonian labor movement, but also along the revolutionary currents of the Atlantic. The tide of immigration from the British Isles and Germany brought an infusion of militancy. From Yorkshire came John Shedden, a radical tailor who later joined the First International, Knights of Labor, and Sovereigns of Industry. The Irish-born handloom weaver John Campbell fought for working-class suffrage in the factory districts of northern England as a leader in the Chartist movement before fleeing to the United States after a failed general strike in 1842. Such figures, having seen firsthand the industrial transformation of the Old World and the New, understood Philadelphia’s development in world historical perspective.³¹

The European Revolutions of 1848 gave them hope. Initially, Philadelphians, like most Americans, welcomed the fall of France’s July Monarchy as a vindication of the principles of 1776. That consensus was supposed to have found expression at a vast public meeting on Independence Square in late April. Citizens from across the city’s partisan and ethnic divisions gathered to the strains of the Marseillaise to hear eminent speakers proclaim the rights of man. Among them was McMichael, who admired how dynasties that “seemed indestructible” had “melted away or, thrown into the crucible of reform,” had “assumed new forms and new existence.”³²

Radicals sang from the same hymn sheet but added an extra verse. For them, the Second French Republic—and especially the National Workshops, which guaranteed employment to the poor—could inspire a Second American Republic. When Francis J. Grund took to the stand, he surveyed the history of Europe from 1789. The revolutionaries who uprooted the Ancien Re´ gime, Grund argued, “had to pull down the social culture of Europe as well as the political one,” but once they had done so, “the Bourgeoisie” rose on the ruins of the nobility, and “the struggle between capital and labor commenced.” Assailing classical political economy, he warned that the law of supply and demand degraded man “to a marketable commodity,” and praised the French government for embracing “associated labor.”³³

Grund’s dialectical materialism echoed radical readings of the European Revolutions. Lippard, who devoted column after column of his weekly paper the Quaker City to making sense of 1848 and its aftermath, described the events in France as a reaction to “social” more than “constitutional” evils. The journalist and reformer George G. Foster, who also spoke at Independence Square, coauthored a hastily written account of affairs in Paris with Thomas Dunn English. Foster and English rejected the common assumption that the French had merely emulated the American example. Instead, Parisians had embarked on a glorious new course, for their revolution had social consequences as well as origins. “Capital arrayed itself against labor; and the latter only awaited the proper moment for its emancipation,” they argued, but the Second Republic’s pledge “to guarantee work and existence to the laborer” had addressed “the problem of the Nineteenth Century!”34

The authors joined Grund in blaming the “bourgeoisie” for France’s woes. Bourgeois citizens became a kind of Monk Hall International, who, they hinted, threatened American liberty too. The class’s corrupting influence extended from the throne to the factory. An “oligarchy of the bourgeoisie” made King Louis Philippe its head; their “sordid desires” and “thirst for accumulation” led them to “acquiesce in any state of affairs which gratifies their avarice.” Encompassing all the “capitalists,” “tradesmen,” “bankers,” “monopolists,” “venders,” and “men reposing on their cotton bales,” the bourgeoisie marked a new name for the corrupt elite that Lippard portrayed lording over Philadelphia. But above all Foster and English defined them by their antithesis: productive citizens. Out of this dialectic came the 1848 Revolution: “the working class” in its “final struggle” had “emancipated itself from the chains of the bourgeoisie.”³⁵ They did not just describe a class, but a class struggle.

Class struggle stalked Philadelphia too, for radicals rejected any idea that the United States enjoyed immunity from the social processes ravaging Europe’s great cities: “Labor itself, under the influence of unlimited competition, is forced down and down, until it is compelled to accept gladly of the merest and least possible amount of wages that will prevent absolute starvation. Under this state of things, the laboring classes, forced to pack themselves into filthy garrets and noisome cellars … either become beasts, or learn to pray for death. Such is the condition of the great mass of laborers throughout the world.”³⁶

When he introduced Philadelphia’s “bourgeoisie” to a domestic audience, Foster became more circumspect, but he still mapped French social relations onto an American urban form. In late 1848, he wrote a series on Philadelphia for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, the radical Whig paper, which would soon hire Karl Marx as its European correspondent. Events in Europe, Foster noted, had familiarized citizens with the “bourgeoisie,” though he doubted that many of the writers who used it “know what it means.” Despite the problems of determining the word’s “true signification,” Foster claimed that “the most distinguishing characteristic of Philadelphia is its Bourgeoisie,” for it had “reached a higher state of development” in the city than anywhere else in the Union. The first of his “slices” of Philadelphia life therefore dissected the class, and while he stressed its mercantile character, he did not leave out manufacturers: a bourgeois was “a man who keeps a shop or lives by making a profit from the product of the labor of others.” His sketch of staid respectability in the city proper, though, provided a foil for subsequent forays into turbulent suburbs. Here his interest in social taxonomy faded as he turned to recounting salacious stories of street gangs and dance halls.³⁷

Hints of Foster’s radicalism nevertheless crept in as he mapped Philadelphia’s people and progress. In taking a similar path to Southwark as Lippard’s “monks of Monk Hall,” he pointed out “the immense army of proletaires which exist in every city, who live hardby in poor cabins and shanties, and whose labour supplies the profits upon which the merchantprinces and their aristocratic families subsist in luxury.” Here, he made the city look rather like Paris, with its prosperous center surrounded by an oppressed suburban poor. Later, in visiting Independence Hall, Foster asked whether Americans had “suffered Europe to overtake and pass us.” Had citizens, he wondered, “secured to Strength Employment” and “to Employment Reward” by “developing all the benignant powers of the elements for the benefit of the whole people”? Or were Americans now “enviers of the progress of others”? He left readers to ponder the matter themselves.³⁸

Among Philadelphia’s radicals, affinity for European revolutions ran deep. The year before the 1848 Revolutions, an anonymous novel, The Almighty Dollar, portrayed Moyamensing’s Killers as primitive rebels who promise to liberate the land “from the iron sway of the rich.” Although the gang take the Jacobin club as their model, it soon becomes clear that they owe as much to George Washington as to the Committee of Public Safety, but the links the novel draws between the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and antebellum urban violence are striking. In reality, an Irish American gang made up mostly of apprentices and laborers hardly amounted to “proletarian heroes,” but its reinvention in the hands of an anonymous author hints at the way radicals challenged the widespread anti-Jacobinism of the antebellum republic. Campbell and one of his collaborators, indeed, heaped praise on Robespierre, Marat, and St. Just for attempting “to secure to the producers all that they produced.”³⁹

But it was 1848 rather than 1789 (or 1793, for that matter) that focused minds in Philadelphia by raising the possibility of millennial social transformation. Campbell, who had been putting the finishing touches to his Theory of Equality—a pamphlet that ranged across continents and centuries by weaving Rousseauian inequality, Paineite republicanism, and Democratic antimonopoly into a project for social reconstruction—hastily added a fawning dedication to the new French government, lauding its efforts to “elevate the proletarians.” And Lippard hoped the 1848 Revolutions would reverberate in the United States. “Shall the world look for the redemption of the workers from the chains of social wrong,” he asked, “and our Union be left hopeless and desolate?” The land reformer William Elder, who had shared the stage with McMichael and Foster at the Independence Square meeting, renounced the cry of “bread or blood,” but warned that conservative wealth “must expect at last to meet its victims at the barricades.” “Gradual reform or violent revolution,” he counseled, “is the necessity of our condition.”⁴⁰

Rival interpretations of what the 1848 Revolutions were—and what they might mean for Philadelphia—shattered the consensus of the Independence Square meeting. In one corner, free blacks had assembled to welcome the abolition of slavery in French colonies, and when a policeman tried to end the gathering by stopping one of the speakers, whites intervened and “bade him go on.” African Americans’ readiness to claim 1848 as their own illustrated that the economic elite enjoyed no monopoly in making sense of the upheaval. Yet when Elder, in words dripping with socialist and abolitionist sentiment, persuaded the main meeting to resolve that the Second Republic’s destruction of slavery; its organization of industry; and its proclamation of liberty, equality, and fraternity revealed the principles “of our own Revolution,” the resolutions were left off the published proceedings. A few weeks later, radicals and abolitionists returned to the spot to protest the “mutilation” of the record.⁴¹

The 1848 Revolutions divided the meeting but bound radicals together. European turmoil gave them a vocabulary to name what was happening in Philadelphia, an understanding of how their republican ideal differed from that of the bourgeoisie, and a spirit of solidarity that brought rival factions together. By the summer, the elation that had greeted the revolutions had given way in much of the Union to skepticism about their permanence and doubts about their character, especially among conservatives in the North and South. But when the North American backed the Second Republic’s bloody suppression of labor unrest in the June Days, and began to worry about “red republicanism” in American cities, radicals continued to praise Parisian workers.⁴² In Philadelphia, the three years that followed 1848 witnessed an upsurge in radical association. The likes of Lippard and Campbell set about the task of consolidating producers around the project of building their own second republic.

Consolidating Producers

The 1848 Revolutions lifted radical morale. Over the preceding years, they had built an institutional base from which to challenge bourgeois ideology. A stronger economy after 1844 gave craft unions the chance to flourish alongside the Chartist leagues and Fourierist associations. By 1847, trade unionists who hoped to revive the spirit of the General Trades’ Union were discussing plans for some form of citywide organization.⁴³

Radicals’ designs for consolidating producers extended beyond workplace bargaining into organization and education. Lippard, convinced that secret fraternal orders had prepared the way for the French Revolutions in 1789 and 1848, tried to “bind the masses together” in a “one-minded body.” In 1849, he founded the Brotherhood of the Union, which soon spread across the republic. Lippard’s Brotherhood looked to the bloodless overthrow of capital and the union of the “Workers of the World” (unlike Marx and Engels he actually used the term). But it embraced reform as well as revolution. Like Campbell, Lippard advocated cooperative enterprise, factory regulation, and free homesteads in the West. Indeed, both radicals joined George Henry Evans’s national land reform movement.⁴⁴

Institutional consolidation—whether via national organizations like Lippard’s Brotherhood of the Union and Evans’s National Industrial Congress (NIC), or local ones, like trade assemblies—mattered to radicals who saw “association” as a path to power. Most often, association referred to the principle of workers pooling capital and sharing profits, effectively cutting out the merchant or manufacturer who claimed a portion of their labor. Schemes for producer and consumer cooperatives abounded around midcentury. But association, as the call for “fraternity” in 1848 and “brotherhood” in Lippard’s secret society implied, had other meanings too. Perhaps most importantly, it marked a cry for producer solidarity in the wake of the riots. Association meant here the “Union of the Workers against the Idlers who do not work.”⁴⁵

Radicals crafted a role for themselves that today we might call that of the “organic intellectual.” To raise the consciousness of the city’s producers and awaken them to their common interests, however, required challenging the economic elite in civil society. Radicals attacked the American bourgeois press for its hostility to European revolutions, for instance, while Lippard decried Philadelphia’s “Anti-Socialist” papers. In The Quaker City, the author portrays a newspaper editor, the risible Buzby Poodle, as one of the “monks” lording it over Philadelphia.⁴⁶ Class consolidation required continually challenging such voices.

The years leading up to midcentury saw a host of efforts to ensure a counterhegemonic voice could be heard in the city. Philadelphia’s district halls, mechanics’ institutes, and open lots offered a promising terrain for association. Campbell, who believed “the monopoly of education” left producers ignorant of the processes that reduced them to penury drew on his experience as an itinerant lecturer for British Chartists in tramping from meeting to meeting to rally support. Lippard’s Brotherhood, meanwhile, urged members to “open your halls to the public of both sexes” to discuss “Land, Labor, and Social Reform.”⁴⁷ Radicals also sought to establish a rival to the bourgeois-dominated press. Impressed by Greeley’s Tribune, for which he occasionally wrote, Campbell toyed with the idea of starting a reform paper of his own, as did several craft unions. Instead, though, he entered the publishing trade with a fellow Chartist exile, Edward P. Powers. Their first pamphlet, by the judge and former factory reformer William D. Kelley, decried the “heartless theory” that “points to the labouring population reduced to want and pauperism.” Lippard, just as convinced of his vanguard role, did set himself up as an editor. The Quaker City, a weekly, which made its bow in 1848, serialized his fiction, served as a mouthpiece for the Brotherhood of the Union, and cheered on revolution and reform.⁴⁸

Radicalism in the late 1840s may have lacked the impact of the GTU, but its institutional piquancy and ideological thrust troubled the economic elite. The sense that Lippard, Campbell, and their allies were (as one historian has said, in a related context) “domesticating foreign struggles” proved particularly alarming.⁴⁹ Bourgeois consolidators began to respond. McMichael’s North American—the paper that fought harder than any other for the economic elite to speak with one voice—attacked the “radical, fiery, Fourierish” tone of Foster’s French Revolution of 1848, and its singling out of the “bourgeoisie” for criticism especially. The daily found the definition of the term Foster arrived at “tolerably just,” but rejected his take on the class’s boundaries and politics, arguing that the word was simply a synonym for what the English called “the middle classes” and Americans called “the business men of our towns and cities—merchants, manufacturers, master mechanics, employers of all kind, but including capitalists, house owners and house holders.” “In America in fact,” it argued, “we all belong to the bourgeoisie,” for “every head of a family, is a bourgeois—a free citizen.” Rather than finding solace in the republic’s exceptionalism, though, the paper cast the class in international terms. “The bourgeoisies of all countries have great respect for the rights of property,” it declared, and “desire and require peace and quiet, and order, for the successful prosecution of trade.” Thus “a civil tumult of any kind” could “offer nothing but severe loss and suffering.” Bourgeois Frenchmen had joined the 1848 Revolution then only at great sacrifice.⁵⁰

The North American simultaneously defined the bourgeoisie as an international class while denying the existence of class distinctions: a rhetorical strategy it would employ frequently over the following decades in seeking to harmonize social interests across the city. McMichael did all he could to break down barriers between propertied citizens, yet here his paper claimed that class had no meaning. To admit Foster’s point, however, risked legitimizing labor conflict. McMichael saw such battles at firsthand as county sheriff in the 1840s and in his own office in the 1850s, when he confronted (usually without success) well-organized printers. Newspaper publishers, indeed, continually found themselves negotiating with staff, which may help account for their hostility to craft unions more generally: even the Public Ledger—a paper more sympathetic than most to journeymen—dismissed Campbell’s design for “equal exchanges” and toed the liberal line that laws of supply and demand properly regulated the price of labor.⁵¹

Workplace militancy, revolutionary turmoil, and radicals’ determination to plot the present and future course of the city drew Philadelphia’s economic elite into confronting the labor question well before the Civil War. Richard Rush, who as U.S. minister to France had recognized the Second Republic in 1848, returned to his home city around midcentury, concerned that North might prove fertile ground for “Communism.” About the same time, the iron manufacturer Stephen Colwell called socialism “one of the greatest events of this age,” and warned that “no man can understand the progress of humanity or its present tendencies who does not … watch its movements.” Rush and Colwell played prominent roles in the battle for metropolitan Consolidation over the following years, but even Sidney George Fisher, who remained aloof from upstart manufacturers and reform politics, exchanged ideas about labor and capital in the mid-1850s with a British factory owner who had written one of the first treatises on industrial relations. Fisher probably never set foot on a factory floor, but he acted as the attorney for the strike-plagued Reading Railroad, and by the postbellum era, read his running battles with household servants as a miniature of the wider struggle between employer and employee: one fought in homes, streets, and polling booths as well as suburban workshops and southern plantations.⁵²

Here, at least, radicals and workers had succeeded in unsettling propertied citizens, as a joke insert in an April 1851 issue of the Ledger—which none too subtly name-checked various radicals—indicated. “Let the mechanics and Workingmen Beware,” it began, “of the POWERS of the DEVIL and the CAMP-BELLS of HELL” that “would make America another Atheistical France” and “under the garb of ‘Reformers,’ establish Brutalism!” Either side in the newspaper stood notices for meetings of a trades’ assembly, two craft unions, and a cooperative store.⁵³ But the vigor of midcentury radicalism, so evident in the advertising columns of the Ledger, masked inner divisions. Those fractures would soon be exposed.

The Midcentury Crisis of Union

The project of consolidating producers ran into many of the same problems as projects for consolidating the economic elite or the city and districts. In each case, the difficulty lay in drawing boundaries, and determining who belonged in or out of the community. For radicals, the civil wars that raged on the city’s streets—Protestants fighting Catholics, whites fighting blacks—made this question unavoidable. Designs for working-class association ultimately foundered on the conundrum, but midcentury radicalism left a critique of urban capitalism that shaped growth politics and its critics.

Radicals, surveying the wreckage of the riots, realized the biggest obstacle they confronted lay in working-class fragmentation. The main beneficiaries of the riots had been the nativist American Republicans, whose candidates swept Democrats from office in most of the suburban districts, including Kensington and Southwark. Their ascendancy did not last long, but like radicals, they established a foothold in working-class neighborhoods. The Order of United American Mechanics, a fraternal association of Protestant masters and journeymen, welcomed employers into the producers’ community but excluded the fast-growing Catholic working class.⁵⁴

In their religion, radicals ran the gamut from atheist infidelity to evangelical Protestantism, but they agreed that sectarianism threatened association. Lippard provides an instructive example. Critics have picked up on the anti-Catholic tropes in his work: the “monks” who make up The Quaker City’s bourgeoisie meet in a former monastery, after all.⁵⁵ Yet the novelist who conjured up images of conspiring priests loathed militant Protestantism. In 1846, he began a novel, The Nazarene, that blamed the nativist riots on religious intolerance; when a home missionary tells his audience he had seen Catholic bishops doing good work in the “alleys of Southwark and Moyamensing,” his hateful audience accuse him of blasphemy. A few years earlier, in The Quaker City, he had satirized nativist Pope-baiting with the “Universal Patent Gospel Missionary Society,” who combine “violent appeals to excited mobs” with “insidious endeavours to create those very mobs.” Even in 1849, when in response to the Catholic archbishop of New York’s support for the Pope in his struggle with the Roman Republic, Lippard asked if “the Assassins of the Roman people” have “their paid minions on American soil,” he admitted to speaking “of this subject with great reluctance,” and prefaced the article with a lengthy recapitulation of his hostility to “No-Popery bigots.” The Irish-born Campbell also disdained nativism. In 1850, he asked readers of the Tribune whether “American citizens” could really say to “the flying refugee from the despotism of Europe ‘Back, back again to your stripes and chains, killed dungeons and scaffolds!’”⁵⁶

Campbell invoked the spirit of solidarity that followed the 1848 Revolutions here to unite producers regardless of creed. Among radicals he was not alone. Within a few days of the Independence Square meeting, German workers raised the cry to “operate in concert with the American Laboring Classes in this city.” The Social Improvement Society (SIS), which drew a mixture of active trade unionists and middle-class reformers, often debated immigration, and while there is no record of their meetings, we can assume from the figures involved that an unreformed social system rather than an influx of foreign labor was said to present a greater danger to native-born workers. “Humanity is of no caste, country, or clime,” began The Almighty Dollar, which has the Killers street gang welcoming natives and naturalized alike. One of the leaders encapsulated the gang’s ecumenical approach: “We’re all brothers when oppressed.”⁵⁷

In practice, though, the Killers proved rather less tolerant. After a summer of endemic fighting among Moyamensing firemen and street gangs in 1849, members of the gang crossed fifty yards into the city proper, where they torched a tavern run by a mixed-race couple. The race riot that ensued pitted Irish Catholics from the southern suburbs against the free black community that straddled the city boundary. Lippard quickly penned a short story on the riot, which he worked into a lengthier novel, and while rejecting the romantic version of the Killers as advocates of the rights of labor, he refused to see the conflict purely in terms of internecine strife. For him, apprentices, bored young men, and a handful of the “very worst specimens of the savage of this large city” made up the gang, but at their head stood the son of a millionaire: as usual, then, Philadelphia’s moneyed elite orchestrated the mayhem.⁵⁸

Beyond Lippard’s novella, little trace of the radical response to the riot remains, but in laying bare the racial as well as religious hatreds that divided the working class, the fighting presented them with another problem. In the giddy aftermath of 1848, African Americans had publicly linked the European revolutions to their own struggle for liberation, and had won praise for doing so. The California House Riot (so-called for the tavern that burnt to the ground), though, marked a return to the old pattern of race riots, where blacks who became too visible in public or crossed racial boundaries faced violent reprisals.⁵⁹ Radical reformers did not know how to respond. Many, including William Elder, already had close ties to abolitionists. Antislavery activists like the feminist Lucretia Mott and African Americans Samuel Ringgold Ward and Robert Purvis spoke at Social Improvement Society meetings. Elder’s land reform club sent the black abolitionist John C. Bowers—another SIS debater—as a delegate to the National Industrial Congress in 1851.⁶⁰ While Lippard and Campbell sometimes argued southern slaves were better off than northern workers, they did not mean to trivialize the sufferings of the former. Campbell’s Theory of Equality, indeed, denounced slavery in all its forms, and attacked his own Democratic Party for failing to abolish it. Lippard, like Campbell, held British abolitionists in contempt for their blindness to the evils of capitalism, but wondered how any radical could “attack Wages Slavery and be silent about Chattel Slavery.” He proudly printed mail from southern whites who accused him of belonging to the “school of Robespierre and Fourier.”⁶¹

The coincidence of sectional and social conflict forced radicals to confront slavery. In 1848, with Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot’s proposal on the table to keep slaveholders out of any land acquired from Mexico, antislavery Democrats—Kelley among them—supported the measure. Elder, a veteran Liberty Party organizer, backed the Free Soil movement, while Lippard and Campbell stumped for the Whig and Democratic nominees, respectively.⁶² Such political fragmentation was nothing new, but with the future of the nation at stake, radicals began to think more often about the relationship of black and white labor. Toward the end of 1850, the SIS regularly discussed the Fugitive Slave Law, and soon moved onto a series of debates—reportedly drawing large audiences—which considered whether the African race was capable of civilization. Most radicals answered in the affirmative, and over the following years, they provided a phalanx of opposition to the act: the operation of which in Philadelphia formed the backdrop to Lippard’s final, unfinished novel. Such a course ought to warn us off schematic outlines of the making of a working class committed to white supremacy, but as the California House Riot showed, radical reformers could not debate racial conflict away.⁶³

Nativism and slavery combined to sink one of the most ambitious projects for class consolidation. In October 1850, representatives of the various trades gathered at the county courthouse to consider a plan to “free each individual from the arbitrary and oppressive rule of capital.” Though Lippard and Campbell were absent—only journeymen were allowed to participate—many of their radical associates attended, including land reformers like William J. Mullen and John Shedden. Out of the meeting emerged the trades’ assembly first mooted in 1847. Unlike its predecessor in the 1830s—the GTU—the citywide body only included skilled male workers, which left out the Irish, black, and female laboring poor. Still, its organizers aimed to build a movement culture based around cooperative enterprise, a regular paper, and a political party. By early 1851, it represented more than thirty trades.⁶⁴

Cracks soon began to show. In mid-1851, when Elder’s land reform club sent the African American abolitionist Bowers to the National Industrial Congress, he had secured his seat over the protests of some members. The trades’ assembly, acting in the name of Philadelphia’s “Industrial Classes,” disclaimed any connection with Evans’s organization in disgust. Soon after, the new Workingmen’s Party nominated Kelley, a longstanding “advocate of the Rights of Labor,” as its candidate for the Court of Common Pleas. Kelley, who had just lost the Democratic nomination for his apostasy in a contested election case, had strong radical credentials—as a young man he had struck for the ten-hour workday, and Louis Kossuth later singled him out for thanks for his support of Hungarian liberty—but he was also a known abolitionist sympathizer. This troubled some workingmen less, however, than his hostility to nativism. Despite his Presbyterian roots, he held “church-burners” in contempt, and had pursued rioters in court after 1844. In the second half of 1851, his ardent internationalism still had its adherents. That summer, radicals fighting for land reform, laborers’ rights, and equal exchanges declared that with the “world being our country, it is hoped that all nations will flock around our standard.” A few months later, the rump of the trades’ assembly expelled a group of nativists who had come to the meeting to solicit support for their ticket. But Kelley’s candidacy still split the party.⁶⁵

In the thick of the debate over immigration and slavery, Campbell, who had recently been described as a “brawling abolitionist,” redrew the boundaries of the producing class to exclude African Americans. Barred (to his evident displeasure) from the assembly, and finding diminishing returns from his attempts to rally workers to his banner with Theory of Equality, he changed tack. His allies at the NIC had walked out after the admission of the black delegate Bowers, and in a letter copied to the negrophobic New York Herald, he explained to the congress why he backed them. His objections partly derived from racist pseudoscience. “The negro is inferior to the white,” he argued, and any association between the two would act to the detriment of the latter. But he also pointed to tactical considerations. Admitting an African American would “array all the prejudices of ninetynine hundredths of the whites against the cause of land reform,” he insisted; and after twenty years of working to “emancipate labor,” he refused to sacrifice his cause on the altar of racial equality when it had finally acquired “national importance.” “It behooves us to act wisely,” he concluded, “and not permit any element introduced among us which may either distract or divide us.”⁶⁶

Campbell was being disingenuous, for with nativism on the rise and his own Irish roots leaving him vulnerable, race was no longer a distraction for him but rather the foundation of his project for white working-class consolidation. He accused British abolitionists of trying to destroy the Union and argued their wealthy American allies turned a blind eye to wage slavery.⁶⁷ When the Philadelphia trades’ assembly endorsed his stand against integration at the NIC, he must have taken heart, and over the summer of 1851, he cribbed together Negro-mania, a hastily edited compendium of ethnology inspired by the SIS debates on race. While the book veered wildly, Campbell tried to show that the only racial boundary that mattered lay between black and white. Chillingly, he concluded, Pennsylvania had to rid itself of its free people of color by “colonization or otherwise.” Campbell, though, built his white supremacist ideology on the foundations of antebellum radicalism. For radicals like Lippard, the conviction that nonproducers lived off the fruits of others’ labor had provided a bedrock for an emancipatory politics, but when Campbell made it bear the sophistry of racial science, he claimed that idle freedpeople would impose an impossible burden on white workers. He therefore exiled blacks beyond the borders of his producers’ republic.⁶⁸

But Campbell’s project of class consolidation, which aimed to overcome the divide between Protestant and Catholic and unite white producers around threats from below as well as above, did not work.⁶⁹ The Trades’ Assembly could not overcome the divisions between nativists and their critics, while Campbell’s about-turn fractured radical unity. Surveying the wreckage, Elder (who Campbell had confronted at an abolitionist meeting) complained of the “frequent and flagrant apostacies from principle in the ranks of allies which the friends of Liberty relied upon with the greatest assurance.” “In truth,” he said of the immigrant working class, “it is the great problem of labor, its relations to capital, or the system of property, that occupies these people. Bring them a system of rights and remedies in this interest, and they will listen.” For him, only a political movement that could unite the interests of black and white workers would win support, and three years later, he joined the new Republican Party, in which he became one of the strongest advocates of the “harmony of interests” doctrine in Philadelphia.⁷⁰ Over the course of the 1850s, indeed, figures like Elder came to embrace a different kind of class consolidation: not one that united a bourgeoisie or proletariat, but one that associated labor and capital.

* * *

Lippard did not join this movement himself. When radicalism splintered, he continued to build his Brotherhood and remained active in the national struggle for land reform, even as he lamented the “want of unity and organization” in the movement.⁷¹ His consolidationist convictions had not faded. When the storm of counterrevolution and sectional strife rained down on Europe and America after 1848, Lippard sought shelter in association. Assailing the agitators who were trying to prize the republic apart, he praised the “Thirty United Nations” that made up his country as “a type of perfect Brotherhood,” which would eventually embrace “not only the inhabitants of the American continent, but the vast Family of Man.” “We love the Union,” he proclaimed, and “there is not an evil now in existence, that cannot better be reformed with the Union, than without the Union.” Lippard had no intention of compromising with slaveholders—“we abhor with the same hatred the White Slavery of the North, and the Black Slavery of the South,” he declared—but for all its faults, his nation remained the last, best hope on Earth.⁷²

Lippard’s unionism transposed easily to the urban form. His writing on the metropolis may have emphasized its divisions—“Philadelphia is manifold,” he once wrote—but he saw bonds of interdependence holding it together. Following the lead of the Consolidators who had demanded a union of the city and districts on the same night as the theater e´ meute, he too called for overriding the lines on the municipal map. Philadelphia needed “ONE City, under ONE government, and under ONE code of municipal laws,” proclaimed the Quaker City in 1849. But it was not enough to redraw political boundaries. The metropolis required a thorough social reconstruction: it had to house its apprentices, reform its theaters, and purge sin from the “purlieus of the city.” Moreover, voters must overthrow the “petty Oligarchy” of twenty or thirty families who held the reins of power, and restore control to good citizens.⁷³ To consolidate Philadelphia, then, Monk Hall had to be torn down, and a model republic erected on its ruins. His city, Union, and world awaited the redemptive labor of social reconstruction.