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CHAPTER 1

“A Great City Is a Great Study”

In September 1854, just months after Philadelphia’s political consolidation had extended the urban boundaries to encompass almost 130 square miles, Morton McMichael’s North American and United States Gazette measured up the city and its people. The “vast multitudes” wandering the streets, the paper mused, embraced such a variety of “motives and men and actions” that the possibilities were “infinite.” All that was known was Philadelphia’s unknowability. “We who have lived from birth in the midst of this bustle know, comparatively, no more of the great city than the stranger who is within its gates,” the paper concluded.¹

European and American commentators over the middle decades of the nineteenth century observed the same disorienting effects of urban growth. In Manchester, the “shock city” of the Industrial Revolution, the liberal Alexis de Tocqueville and radical Friedrich Engels described “the disintegrating of society into individuals.” Across the Atlantic in Philadelphia, an evangelical worried that the metropolitan masses lacked the mutual “sympathy” required for moral order. While their prescriptions ranged from reform to revolution to redemption from sin, each saw cities as solvents of community and tradition, as all that was solid melted into the air. Few captured this better than Edgar Allan Poe in his “Man of the Crowd.” Set in London, but penned during the writer’s sojourn in Philadelphia, Poe’s narrator sorts the nameless people passing him by, before fixating on an inscrutable soul whose resistance to categorization hints at the anomie of “great cities.”²

Poe’s friend Morton McMichael had reason to share such pessimism. In 1844, soon after starting a term as county sheriff, he failed to stop the growth of two riots, which metastasized into the largest urban disorders in the history of the Union. Blamed for allowing the metropolis to fall apart, he made it his mission to put it back together. Consolidating the city across its divisions preoccupied him from the 1840s to the 1870s. Over decades in which federated republics, multiethnic empires, and geographic expressions converged as national states, McMichael set about building a nation in miniature. Philadelphia, having grown too big to know informally, needed imagining as a whole.

McMichael joined others in a quest for legibility. As the North American hinted in 1854, the more complex a society became, the harder it was to see. Nineteenth-century state builders tried to overcome their “partial blindness” by bringing territory and population into focus. The maps and censuses they produced helped incorporate colonial frontiers into national domains.³

One of those frontiers was the city. On both sides of the Atlantic, reformers, journalists, and novelists tried to illuminate the shadowy spaces of their cities and incorporate the urban wilderness. Gridironed Philadelphia may have looked the model of a transparent, modern metropolis, but in the courts and alleys that ran off the main thoroughfares and the unknown suburbs in which riot and disease held sway, it—like Poe’s man of the crowd—defied the surveyor’s gaze. McMichael, who wanted to sort the discordant phenomena of urban life, made the “great city” a “great study” for his paper. Scattered in Philadelphia’s soil—his daily insisted—lay the seeds of metropolitan empire, but only knowledge could nourish their growth.⁴

The problems McMichael and his allies encountered in trying to make the city legible reveal the pitfalls of reducing the story to a linear tale of modernization. In contrast to most modernizing states, Philadelphia’s pre-Consolidation municipalities evinced little interest in knowing their territory and people. Their inaction frustrated the North American, but when Philadelphians associated voluntarily to measure their metropolis, they struggled to make sense of what they found. “However we may con it over, we shall never know it thoroughly,” McMichael’s paper wrote of Philadelphia, “for continually some new phase … starts up to astonish and bewilder us.” Rather than settle for still lifes of a place in perpetual motion, citizens searched for laws of cause and effect, asking not only what the metropolis was, but also what it might become. Their prophecies had the power to shape the city.⁵

In mapping Philadelphia’s present and future, citizens imagined the city as an interdependent whole, while exposing its divisions. Here, the project of collecting, interpreting, and sharing knowledge of the city helped to consolidate an economic elite. At McMichael’s urging, merchants, manufacturers, and professionals came together in counting the cost of riots and weighing up the productive power of the suburbs. Radicals, whose different take on Philadelphia I explore in Chapter 2, aimed to unite producers around their reading of the urban process. In doing so, each group grappled with questions of national import: Was the United States exceptional? Could a distended, divided republic endure? Did capitalism necessarily lead to an anomie the likes of which Tocqueville and Engels had seen in Manchester? The city here provided a laboratory for a “great study” with significance well beyond municipal boundaries.

A Divided City

J. C. Sydney’s richly detailed 1849 cartography of the city hinted at Philadelphia’s divisions. Like most maps from the 1830s onward, it portrayed the entirety of the built-up metropolis.⁶ Philadelphia had grown phenomenally over preceding decades, but with land scarce in the center, the population pushed outward to the metropolitan frontier. Between 1820 and 1850, the inhabitants of the two-square–mile “city proper” nearly doubled from 63,802 to 121,376. The rest of the county, however, expanded almost fourfold to close to three hundred thousand. Yet as builders transformed farmland into streets, houses, and workshops, the boundaries of the two-square–mile city proper stayed fixed at their seventeenth-century limits, and by 1850, the boroughs and districts marked off by thick lines on Sydney’s map included several of the largest municipalities in the United States. Spring Garden, the Northern Liberties, and Kensington, all north of the city center, ranked ninth, eleventh, and twelfth, respectively, in the nation in the midcentury census, with Southwark and Moyamensing to the south not far behind. Each of these subdivisions were more or less self-governing, and prior to 1850, only the Board of Health and county officers like the sheriff had metropolitan-wide powers. For most common functions of municipal government—maintaining order, regulating streets and markets, providing gas and water—the districts had independent jurisdiction. Sydney showed a city that looked like a miniature of the Holy Roman Empire.⁷

Advocates of municipal consolidation between 1844 and 1854 called these boundaries “imaginary lines,” but the city proper and its suburban offspring had been growing apart for decades.⁸ If it is easy to romanticize the “unity of everyday life” in the late colonial era, it is because the city could be traversed on foot, and differences of rank and status were more evident within households than across neighborhoods. The slow death of bound labor and the quick march of the Market Revolution, however, pushed the city outward and redrew its social geography. At midcentury, burgeoning suburbs varied in character, yet in general were poorer, more prone to disorder, and more dynamic than a center that had stagnated since the Panic of 1837.⁹

By the 1840s, the failure of the merchants of the city proper to arrest their decline as a national force had begun to tilt the economic balance of power toward the suburbs too, even if wealth continued to congregate in the center. For some time after 1787, Philadelphia remained the nation’s foremost foreign port, but New York’s superior harbor and Erie Canal enabled it to overhaul its rival. In the 1820s, Philadelphia boosters persuaded the Commonwealth to build its own route to the West, but the canals and railroads of the Main Line of State Works failed to deliver the promised benefits. The city’s fortunes waned in finance too. Andrew Jackson’s Bank War hurt Chestnut Street’s institutions, which were then hit by panics in 1837 and 1841, the latter compounded by the state’s default on its internal improvement debt. The crises saw Philadelphia lose $40 million in banking capital. One booster, surveying the wreckage from midcentury, compared the events to a “volcano” or “earthquake.”¹⁰

While commerce and finance in the city proper declined, however, suburban manufacturing prospered. An ample supply of skilled and unskilled labor, power in the form of nearby anthracite coal, and a prosperous hinterland market spurred growth. In the suburbs, though, industry developed unevenly, creating a mixed metropolitan landscape in both scale and organization. Take for instance the two riot districts in 1844: Kensington and Southwark. In the western portion of the former, where Irish handloom weavers were fighting a rearguard action against mechanization, masters either put out work or consolidated production in small workshops; large mills were the exception rather than the rule. The district commissioner Hugh Clark was the wealthiest man in the vicinity, but the fortune he accumulated from the weavers’ labor paled in comparison to industrialists elsewhere in the county.¹¹

Southwark’s iron manufacturers, in contrast, built big factories from the 1830s onward. On the block below Fourth and Washington, Sydney’s map showed the sizeable foundry co-owned by Samuel Vaughan Merrick, a leader in the Consolidation movement. Philadelphia’s typical manufacturer, if such a thing existed, looked more like the boss weaver Clark than the iron founder Merrick, and as most workshops only employed a dozen or so hands, proprietors often worked on the shop floor. Even some of the most prosperous proprietors like the Spring Garden locomotive builder Matthias W. Baldwin—a former jeweler who left his Market Street premises for a vast suburban lot—often started off as apprentices themselves.¹²

If Philadelphia’s transformation into a manufacturing metropolis was well underway in the outlying districts by the 1840s, the pace and character of industrialization varied. Handloom weavers eked out a living from a preindustrial craft, while confronting the pressure of factory competition. Locomotive builders, on the other hand, owed their prosperity to the revolutionary technology of the era: the steam engine. Yet even these businesses—heralds of a new age rather than vestiges of handicraft production—were organized as proprietorships rather than business corporations, and employed skilled native labor, instead of assembly-line hands. The most common suburban workers, meanwhile, were neither artisans nor operatives, but laborers, stevedores, and servants. Irish immigrants and African Americans often found themselves forced into these poorly paid positions.¹³

Unskilled workers in both the city proper and suburbs tended to find shelter in the other divide discernible on Sydney’s map: the interstices of the city’s seventeenth-century grid. At a glance, Philadelphia looked far from opaque, as square after square stretched outward over the suburbs and into open countryside. Sydney’s straight lines of unbuilt streets, reaching miles into the outlying county, provided a reference point for real estate developers and a prophecy of how the city would subdue its rural frontier.¹⁴ But in Philadelphia’s built-up districts, where Sydney captured present conditions rather than future prospects, the grid struck visitors, and not always favorably. The British visitor Frances Trollope conceded the plan made the metropolis “commodious to strangers,” yet disliked its “almost wearisome regularity.”¹⁵ Dullness may have been the price of legibility. Indeed, James C. Scott, one of the most perceptive writers on modern statecraft, contrasts William Penn’s transparent layout to inscrutable medieval towns.¹⁶

Initial impressions, though, can deceive. Looked at more closely, Sydney’s map revealed the division of rectangular blocks into lanes, alleys, and courts, especially along the southern borderlands of the city proper. The practice was almost as old as Philadelphia itself, for while Penn—who grew up in a London ravaged by plague and fire—is often said to have pictured a “greene country towne” of evenly spaced houses, his settlers clung to the Delaware front. Responding to demand, landowners cut small streets through their property, which soon led to a distinct pattern of segregation: wealthier residents took houses on the main thoroughfares, while the poor clustered in claustrophobic warrens behind. In the city proper, this produced pockets of poverty hidden from the fashionable promenader; in the suburbs, it created neighborhoods known as early as the 1850s as slums.¹⁷

City and districts, streets and alleys: on the six plates of Sydney’s map, the cartographer captured the metropolis as a whole, while hinting at its divisions. Those with the leisure time to move through its neighborhoods would have read in Sydney’s lines and symbols the boundaries between wealth and poverty, commerce and industry, and virtue and vice, but no one would have experienced it all. Claims that the city was unknowable could therefore be read as a boast or a lament. On the one hand, they conveyed Philadelphia’s vastness; but on the other, they conceded the difficulty of comprehending something so big.

Philadelphia’s political geography proved easier to plot. Partisan boundaries proved far from impermeable, but citizens in the city proper tended to gravitate toward the pro-Bank Whigs, while suburban journeymen and laborers rallied in sufficient numbers to the Democratic flag to give that party control of most of the outlying districts prior to a nativist insurgency in 1844. All parties were coalitions. Democratic radicals coalesced around the antimonopoly, producerist creed of the Locofocos, while their allies, particularly in Irish neighborhoods, turned to politics to defend their turf from Protestants and blacks. Neither wing, however, had much time for the city proper’s Whigs, who saw Andrew Jackson as the devil incarnate and held militant workers and Catholic immigrants in low regard. The city proper was known as the “Whig Gibraltar”: a speck of rock menaced by the hostile and often Romish electorate beyond its borders.¹⁸

Prior to 1854, however, the street politics of the suburbs gave residents of the city proper greater cause for concern than anything that transpired at the ballot box. Conflicts over labor, race, religion, and politics all had the potential to spill over into violence. Crowd action in the city’s “turbulent era” tended to conform to one of two types. The first, more frequent but less destructive, sprang from the “sporting male subculture” of the antebellum city. Young men in the suburbs flocked to volunteer fire companies and street gangs that often reflected partisan, pietistic, or ethnic loyalties. Firemen and gangsters played a muscular role in suburban politics, and commanded neighborhood respect, but their tendency to fight each other rather than fight fires made nighttime battles with brickbats, stones, and even pistols a familiar feature of urban life.¹⁹

The second form of violence, less common but more destructive, followed long-established patterns of popular action, in which a crowd would demand redress for a particular grievance, with trouble escalating if the authorities failed to respond. Rioters chose their targets carefully, striking at African Americans (1834, 1842, and 1849), abolitionists (1836 and 1838), and political rivals (1828 and many elections thereafter), and they often got their way. When a mob reduced a new Garrisonian meeting place to a smoldering ruin within days of it opening, for instance, the city authorities blamed antislavery agitators for inciting trouble. A few years later, Moyamensing commissioners responded to a white supremacist pogrom by condemning a black temperance hall as a nuisance. Although such crowds contained plenty of the sporting male “rowdies,” who filled the ranks of fire companies and street gangs, they sometimes had “gentlemen of property and standing” at their head.²⁰

By the early 1840s, however, wealthy Philadelphians tended to look down on mobs as counter to norms of reason and restraint, and anathema to their booster aspirations. The two riots over the summer of 1844—the biggest urban upheavals the republic had witnessed—consolidated elite opinion against the crowd. Over the preceding months, rumors circulated that Philadelphia’s Catholic bishop wanted to banish the King James Bible from the city’s public schools, and the outrage proved a valuable recruiting tool for a new political movement, the anti-immigrant American Republican Party. On May 3, and then again on May 6, the party tried to hold meetings on an open lot in the northern suburb of Kensington’s heavily Irish third ward, but on each occasion Catholics fought them off. Gathering in far greater numbers at Independence Hall on May 7, Protestants marched back to the site, where they were met with a barrage of stones, clubs, and gunfire. The fighting continued over the next two days, and once natives wrested the initiative, they torched homes and churches, forcing Irish residents to flee to nearby woods. With the rioters overwhelming Sheriff McMichael and the civil authorities, the governor reluctantly ordered the state militia onto the streets and imposed martial law (see Figure 1).²¹

Figure 1. The Kensington “Bible Riot” of 1844. The frequency and severity of riots in Philadelphia during the 1830s and 1840s convinced many residents in the city proper that their fate was entwined with that of the suburban districts. Source: Reprinted from A Full and Complete Account of the Late Awful Riots in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: John B. Perry, 1844). Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia.

The peace did not last long. A few weeks later, after injured veterans of the Kensington violence joined a large nativist parade on July 4, Protestants in the southern district of Southwark gathered outside the Catholic church of St. Phillippe de Neri, where the priest’s brother had secured permission to stockpile arms in self-defense. This time, the militia quickly arrested some of the ringleaders, but on July 7, a group broke into the church to search for weapons and release the prisoners. Returning to the scene, where they were met with a barrage of missiles, General George Cadwalader’s militia fired into the crowd. The volley killed two rioters, whose comrades retreated to the nearby riverfront, secured a pair of cannon, loaded them with scrap metal, and turned them on the troops. Their improvised grapeshot took out two militiamen, and over the following hours, artillery dueled on the district’s streets. At least fifteen people died in the battle.²²

In scale and substance, the 1844 riots were new. Commentators called them a “civil war,” for what had begun in Kensington with the familiar spectacle of sectarian strife, concluded in Southwark with an armed battle between citizen and state.²³ For the first time, both sides had used firearms; for the first time, too, militiamen had poured fire onto the crowd. Unlike earlier riots, which usually petered out once the mob had meted out punishment to a few exemplary victims, the violence persisted for days, and left the county under military rule. Martial law, for a few weeks at least, consolidated the city.

Rioters’ refusal to respect the political boundaries on the county map brought about this short-lived metropolitan union. Every major disturbance between 1828 and 1849 took place in the suburbs or on the borderlands between city and districts. The three biggest race riots occurred within about two hundred yards of one another, in an Irish and African American neighborhood that straddled the boundary between Philadelphia and the southern district of Moyamensing. But in 1844, Philadelphians could not rely on their frontier as a buffer. While the trouble in Southwark might have been contained within a few blocks, Kensington’s arsonists soon turned to targets in Philadelphia proper. Rumors circulated that every Catholic church in the county would be torched.²⁴ Nowhere seemed safe.

Sydney captured the metropolis as a whole, but though his map gave clues about differences in government, economy, and space, his snapshot could not capture the divisions of class, color, and creed that manifested themselves in the endemic and episodic violence of the “great city.” After 1844, mapping the causes and consequences of that violence, and finding ways to end it, helped to consolidate a divided economic elite. They would come together too in searching for a way out of the commercial and financial malaise that also threatened to relegate the metropolis to the second rank. Pacifying and promoting Philadelphia required understanding what the “great city” was and determining the laws that governed its behavior.

Consolidating Class

How to prop up Philadelphia’s divided house at midcentury preoccupied citizens. What, they asked, made its foundations so unstable? When government failed to undertake the North American’s “great study,” the economic elite took on the task themselves. They did so to advertise the metropolis to outsiders, while explaining its inner workings to citizens. The maps, censuses, and sketches they produced served the twin causes of boosterism and reform, and while these objectives sometimes jarred, they each tended toward reading the metropolis as a complex but interdependent whole.

Few enlisted in the project as eagerly as Philadelphia’s press. The city’s first penny paper, the Public Ledger, boasted a midcentury circulation in the tens of thousands, though most dailies, like McMichael’s North American, catered to a far narrower audience. Though newspapers often served as party mouthpieces, even the most partisan editors claimed the higher ground of the “common good.” Publishers stood as self-appointed—and self-important—stewards of the public interest. To the Ledger, no “moral, social and political engine” proved “half so powerful as the newspaper press.”²⁵

Their power knocked down municipal walls. Proprietors had good reason to portray their city as a whole. Claiming the entirety of Sydney’s map as their purview enabled them to sell to the growing suburban market and portray the picaresque world of the outlying districts for citizens of the city proper. It also increased circulation further afield, where merchants relied on East Coast papers for commercial knowledge. In the golden age of local boosterism, the commitment of men like McMichael to the cause rivaled their counterparts in the upstart towns of the West. Philadelphia’s press, a Boston journal noted in 1854, “constantly labors in behalf of the interests of the city.”²⁶

Newspapers self-consciously set out to reveal a Philadelphia that had outgrown any one individual’s ability to comprehend. Only the press, the Ledger argued while reporting on suburban expansion, had the perspective to provide the public with “any definite idea of the progress that surrounds them.”²⁷ Journals followed its lead in carrying news of metropolitan developments; printing copy from remote districts, which read as if it had been dictated by suburban speculators; and venturing into the courts and alleys that lay behind gridironed streets.²⁸

The “great study” of the city in these respects bore similarities to the project of nation-building. Benedict Anderson has traced the link between print and patriotic sentiment, showing how the newspaper, by enabling people to consume events together, creates “that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.”²⁹ But in antebellum America, newspapers that carried national news catered primarily to city markets. From the 1840s, then, papers devoted columns to local affairs and lobbied in leader columns on behalf of their metropolis. In their pages, readers could grasp the city as a whole. The press profited from Philadelphia’s fragmentation—a good riot surely did wonders for circulation—yet publishers provided a centripetal force. Unity came out of division.

Newspapers also helped to overcome social balkanization. McMichael in particular used print in pursuit of bourgeois consolidation. Philadelphia’s wealthiest residents, his paper often declared, needed to speak with one voice.³⁰ It had a point. “Proper Philadelphians,” as historical sociologists have sometimes termed the city’s upper class, proved wary of arrivistes. The center’s merchants and attorneys often held their noses when forced to interact with suburban manufacturers. When the scion of an old merchant family took the reins at a Southwark foundry in the 1830s, his decision, a friend remembered, involved “little less than social degradation.”³¹

Old money’s reluctance to intermingle with new has led some historians to conclude that a hereditary aristocracy held sway in antebellum society. Admiration for an aristocratic ethic ran deep. Sidney George Fisher, a gentleman tied by birth and marriage to several of the city’s first families, saw land and breeding as the mark of a real elite, and in his company the taint of “bourgeois origin” proved hard to wash off. His diary gives the impression of a man continually circling the wagons against the rising “parvenu.” Fisher’s status-anxious snobbery, if extreme, was not uncommon. The first families of the city proper rarely married, worshipped in the same churches, or attended the same parties as suburban manufacturers. Socially and spatially they kept their distance.³²

Such divisions, however, may have proved easier to surmount in Philadelphia than in other northern cities. In New York, the rift between merchant and manufacturing capital only healed once civil wars—in both the South and the streets—vindicated free labor ideology and reminded propertied citizens of the danger they faced from free laborers.³³ Before 1863, Manhattan merchants aligned with workers and proslavery Democrats, helping to build the alliance of planters, northern businessmen, and workingmen that determined national elections for much of the antebellum era. Insurgent manufacturers, who rejected the free trade and paternalistic ethos of the mercantile elite, turned to the Republican Party after 1854, albeit with more success nationally than locally. The story in Philadelphia, though, must give more emphasis to cooperation than competition. A tilt to manufacturing in the urban economy, the investment patterns of the city proper’s elite, and boosters’ ambition to reclaim from Manhattan the mantle of “Empire City” all drew wealthy industrialists into the orbit of old money; so too did the social crisis of the riots.

The charismatic and cosmopolitan McMichael played a vanguard role in the battle to unite a bourgeoisie.³⁴ Born to a gardener on the New Jersey estate of Napoleon Bonaparte’s exiled brother in 1807, McMichael arrived in Philadelphia as a young man, where he trained in the law, worked for city newspapers, and wrote what Poe called “remarkably vigorous” poetry.³⁵ In the prosperous suburb of Spring Garden, politics soon drew his attention, and a brief flirtation with Jacksonian Democracy quickly gave way to a lifelong commitment to the Whig Party and its Republican heir. In 1843, he won election as county sheriff, though he could do little to stop the riots that ravaged the city a year later. Shaken by the experience of economic and social unrest, McMichael turned to the challenge of consolidation, and steadfastly adhered to the maxim “In Union There Is Strength.” Over the course of a career that stretched from the Age of Jackson to the end of Reconstruction, he headed several reform efforts—from the battle for a new city charter to the foundation of the nationalist Union League—but he extended the principle to the economic elite itself, using his personal contacts and oratorical gifts to bully merchants, manufacturers, and professionals into cooperation. “His peculiar talents are so fitted for society and for public affairs,” one of his friends later recalled, “that he rapidly became the representative man of the community.”³⁶

His main weapon, though, was his newspaper. In 1847, McMichael acquired the North American, which he soon merged with another Whig daily, the United States Gazette. On national questions, the journal followed the orthodox line of the Whig leader Henry Clay, but its first loyalty lay with class rather than party, and genteel Democrats found a warm welcome in the publisher’s circle.³⁷ By the 1850s, the paper provided McMichael with a pulpit to preach unionist sermons to a bourgeoisie whose boundaries, he believed, needed enlarging. “The creation of a mutuality of interests,” his paper argued, needed “that habit of constant and familiar intercourse among our merchants, capitalists, real estate owners, and trades people generally.” One of its correspondents warned that a “community broken into isolated fragments” lacked “the rudimental principles which form the basis of great mercantile and metropolitan character.”³⁸ The project of class consolidation for the publisher had the power to arrest the city’s disorder and decline.

McMichael believed a ruling class could only rule if it understood its own interests—one reason he attached such importance to the great study of urban society. His newspaper tried to steer a divided economic elite on a common course. Like others in the age of consolidation, he saw individualism as disintegrative, and his paper rarely neglected to remind readers of the virtues of association. The daily floated above the fray of warring businessmen and disciplined a bourgeoisie that lacked the broad view to act in its own benefit. If McMichael used print as a weapon of social control, then he aimed it at Philadelphia’s propertied as well as its poor.

The North American prodded propertied citizens toward a “concurrence of sentiment action.” At ten times the price of the Public Ledger, only wealthy citizens subscribed, and the high-minded tone drew prosperous Democrats as well as Whigs to its pages. Meanwhile, as McMichael depended on businessmen for advertising and loans, he found himself at their beck and call. Radicals accused McMichael of being a slave to his bourgeois masters, but who controlled whom is hard to tell. Take for instance, Richard D. Wood, a Quaker merchant and “Proper Philadelphian,” who visited McMichael in 1859 to sell him a pet railroad project, and recorded that the proprietor “assented to my views and promised to serve.” A few years earlier, though, Wood had invested thousands in a canal, having “made up my mind, no doubt partly influenced by several articles published, for a few days past, in the North American.”³⁹ His recollections hint at how the paper provided a forum for the circulation of ideas and information among Philadelphia’s economic elite. By urging cooperation, boosting business, and reminding a bourgeoisie where its boundaries lay, the daily labored to produce a politically powerful class.

The urgency of McMichael’s calls for bourgeois unity might be read as evidence of the rift between merchants and manufacturers. Yet even before he had taken control of the North American, wealthy citizens recognized the need to cooperate. During and after the 1844 riots, bourgeois Philadelphians worked together to comprehend what was happening to their city; over the following years, their alliance extended into railroad-building, real estate, and urban reconstruction. The project of consolidating a powerful class seemed to be making progress.

Measuring the Metropolis

Fear of what Philadelphia was and hopes of what it might become spurred bourgeois citizens to take up McMichael’s “great study.” Between the riots and the Civil War, boosters and reformers strove to map the social and economic life of the city and in doing so advanced the cause of urban and class consolidation. Disorder catalyzed prosperous Philadelphians into action, for the scale and substance of the 1844 violence troubled them more than earlier tumult. The seemingly indiscriminate destruction made it harder for the wealthy to indulge the crowd. “Every mob must be suppressed instantly,” one observer of the Kensington battle insisted, “by using as much force as will put it down at once.” “The duty of everyone,” a meeting of prominent citizens resolved, “is to resist the rioters or to retire.”⁴⁰

The city proper’s elite turned decisively against crowd action in 1844 and sanctified the state’s monopoly on the use of force. Most of those at the meeting, which vindicated the militia’s decision to fire, were merchants and lawyers, many of them with “Proper Philadelphian” names: Fisher, who had exacting standards, said the few dozen or so present were made up of the “better class of citizens.”⁴¹ Earlier, in the Kensington troubles, he joined associates from the Philadelphia bar to defend a Catholic church, having concluded that service alongside his fellow attorneys was preferable to the ward associations “in which one is thrown with a great many low people.”⁴² Fisher shared the anti-Catholic prejudices of the nativists but preferred the rule of law to the civil war unfolding on the streets. Nor was he alone. Thomas Pym Cope, a Quaker, councilman, and president of the Board of Trade, excused himself from debates over the use of force on religious grounds, but the agonized conclusion in his diary could have served as a motto for the city proper’s elite: “order must [be] maintained.”⁴³

But could it be? Here the “great city” served as a laboratory. Was selfgovernment possible in a polity made up of divided interests and propertyless voters? Fisher thought he knew the answer. “I have long had an idea,” he wrote a few weeks after the Kensington riot, “that the present civilization of the world, Europe & America, is destined to be destroyed by the irruption of the dark masses of ignorance & brutality which lie beneath it.” If the “barbarians each country contain within itself,” he continued, did not rise up in violent rebellion, they might capture the state at the ballot box and “destroy the fair fabric of knowledge, elegance, refinement & power.” For him, the Union’s course had been foreshadowed in the fate of Rome. Republics died when they devolved too much power to the people.⁴⁴

The depth of Fisher’s antidemocratic conviction might have been rare, but rioting crystallized conservative fears about popular government. Philadelphians took comfort in the claim that the “ruffians” were a troublesome minority whose capacity to commit outrages rested on the supine ways of respectable citizens. Few, however, could deny that mobs enjoyed considerable support. After a long night of racial violence in 1849, for example, one correspondent to McMichael’s paper conceded that “our worst riots have been sustained at the time by local popular sympathy.”⁴⁵ If investing power in the people led to anarchy, then was the United States any different to the Old World, with its cycle of revolution and reaction?

Some citizens certainly learned from the riots that their “great city” had more in common than they hoped with the European metropolis. For the president of the Board of Trade, the sound of the State House Bell summoning volunteer firemen during the riots reminded him “of the awful tocsin of Revolutionary France.” Over the following years, bourgeois Philadelphians used European markers to map the American metropolis. Inhabitants of courts and alleys sometimes became the “canaille,” riots “emeutes,” suburbs “faubourgs,” and radical workingmen “red republicans.” “The American and French people have many characteristics in common,” argued one supporter of Consolidation after an 1849 riot. “They are both armed, brave, impulsive, and disposed to offer forcible resistance to real or fancied wrongs.”⁴⁶

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.

Both the scale of destruction and the threat it posed to prosperity demanded an energetic response. Respectable classes had to stand together regardless of social status. They had to stand together too regardless of where they lived and worked, for the riots offered a sanguinary lesson in metropolitan interdependence. In targeting creed rather than color, the mobs of 1844 proved less discriminating than usual. “It appears that though this was a riot against the Catholics,” one writer noted, “the loss has also fallen heavily upon Protestant owners and tenants of property.”⁵¹ The “infected districts,” as they quickly came to be known, may have stood in turbulent suburbs, but violence, like the epidemics that visited the antebellum city, proved hard to quarantine.⁵² And strangers in distant markets paid no more heed to the lines on the county map than the rioters. As a result, the Ledger wrote of the city and districts in 1844, “all the parts suffer for the wrongs committed by one of them.”⁵³

Yet measured in economic terms, interdependence had its merits. The 1844 riots coincided with a long-awaited upturn in the city’s fortunes. Suburban manufacturing, citizens assumed, had to play a leading role in any recovery. In the 1820s and 1830s, merchants invested heavily in developing the vast anthracite reserves of northern Pennsylvania, and the coal coursing into Philadelphia along canals and railroads fueled expansion. The city lacked an equivalent of the Boston Associates, but men from commercial backgrounds, like Merrick and Wood, branched into industry, while others lent to capital-hungry factory owners. Even in the 1830s, relations between the mechanics’ Franklin Institute and the merchants’ Board of Trade were cooperative rather than competitive. Members of both organizations broadly agreed on the need for a high tariff, a national bank, and government-sponsored internal improvements; and Frederick Fraley, a lawyer who later played a leading role in the Consolidation campaign, served as an officer on both bodies. Manufacturers may have lacked the social cachet of the largest merchants, but as the city fell further behind New York in the race for foreign trade, they became all the more important. With a national debate over protection raging in 1845, the Board of Trade stooped to notice manufacturing for the first time, announcing that “imperfect statistics” showed an advance in the city’s industry, “which has astonished those whose attention has not been particularly called to this subject.”⁵⁴ Over the next few years, the claim that Philadelphia would serve as the workshop of the New World became an article of dogma in promoters’ creed.

How to preach that to the world vexed boosters. Philadelphia, they complained, had proved inept at “making her position and greatness … known.” The Board of Trade blamed the city and commonwealth’s destructive self-deprecation.⁵⁵ Such modesty probably owed less to Quaker humility than it did to New York’s networks of finance, commerce, and publishing. Lingering resentment in Europe at Pennsylvania’s default in 1842—which prompted William Wordsworth (a self-described “Surly Creditor”) to pen a bitter sonnet on the state’s “degenerate men”—hardly helped either. Others blamed the “insufficient experience” and “limited information” of leaders in city government. But whatever the cause, the sense that strangers in distant markets saw Philadelphia as a “speck on the horizon” spurred schemes to market the metropolis, which ranged from lobbying diplomats to dispatching lecturers across the Atlantic.⁵⁶

Boosters needed evidence to make their claims credible. “The friends of Philadelphia,” one writer complained in the late 1850s, “have not been furnished with facts” to counteract the “prejudicial statements” of rival cities. In an Atlantic World shaped by Enlightenment rationalism, ostensibly objective data offered a firmer foundation for decision-making than mere opinion, and numbers had the power to sway. To McMichael’s North American, indeed, statistics offered “the basis of various useful speculations regarding the influences that affect the material and moral fortunes of society.”⁵⁷ Bitter experience strengthened the statistician’s hand. The boom and bust in the mid-1830s, when speculators poured paper money into imaginary cities, left investors in Europe and the United States wary of acting without credible information. To take on New York, Philadelphians needed to arm themselves with abstractions of metropolitan might. They therefore set out to map urban manufacturing.

In doing so, boosters ran into many of the same obstacles that obstructed a wider “great study” of Philadelphia. Production proved much harder to measure than commerce: goods were often consumed before they could be counted, and factories were dispersed across the city. Manufacturers, moreover, rarely wanted to open their books to rivals, workers, and tax assessors. A Statistical Society, formed in 1846 to investigate the city’s industry, “suddenly evaporated” a year later when workshop owners ignored its request for information. But the Board of Trade, Franklin Institute, and leading newspapers took up the baton, calling on the municipal authorities to follow New York’s lead and conduct a census that would measure the “social civilization of a community.” Following the union of city and districts in 1854, however, the North American was still having to urge Philadelphians to “consolidate our statistics.”⁵⁸

The refusal of the new city government to act led to a renewal of associational efforts. With support from the Board of Trade, the Corn Exchange, and a handful of businessmen, boosters hired Edwin T. Freedley to write a lengthy book on the city’s manufactures, which they distributed to western markets. Freedley had published a self-help manual for aspiring capitalists, explaining “How to Become Millionaires,” and the book’s popularity either side of the Atlantic probably convinced his backers in Philadelphia that he was the man to popularize their cause. Learning from the “numerous attempts” over the preceding decade to undertake an industrial census, Freedley shunned statistics and relied instead on his conversations with experts in the trades he encountered as he surveyed suburban districts. Much of his lengthy compendium therefore offered overviews of the city’s various industries, and the final product, as he put it, provided “a readable exhibit” rather than a definitive statement of the city’s productive might. Its utility to boosters, though, was clear enough: the first third of the manuscript used general principles and particular examples to demonstrate Philadelphia’s destiny as the first manufacturing city of the continent. Like so much city knowledge, the book was as much about foreseeing the future as mapping the present.⁵⁹

Freedley’s amalgam of company biographies and booster prophecy ran counter to the tale of decay and disorder that came out of the depression. Philadelphia and Its Manufactures passed over the riots in a couple of sentences, and rather than linger on the violence, it enlisted producerism and patriotism in the service of the economic elite. Borrowing from the rhetorical arsenal of Jacksonian Democracy, which just a few years earlier had been aimed at Chestnut Street’s Second Bank, it claimed that Penn’s metropolis rested on productive labor, the true foundation of wealth. The implied contrast between manufacturing Philadelphia and commercial New York may have been overdrawn, but it fulfilled a valuable purpose: again and again after 1844, boosters pointed to historical precedent to show that trading marts never dominated for long, and that, as Freedley argued, industry was “more important in every truly national point of view than Foreign Trade.” By placing their metropolis ahead of its great rival in terms of historical progress, boosters reframed Philadelphia’s space and society, as riotous suburbs became heralds of an industrial future rather than vestiges of a barbarous past.⁶⁰

Marketing the metropolis fostered institutional integration too among the economic elite. The short-lived Statistical Society brought successful manufacturers like Matthias W. Baldwin into contact with leading merchants. Industrialists, though, remained outside the mercantile Board of Trade. By 1854, after the North American demanded “a practical social union” of merchants and manufacturers, the organization discussed opening its doors to factory owners, which it did three years later. For McMichael, this corrected a grave error. The Board, his paper charged, had failed to represent “the diversified business interests of the community,” and as a result, myopic individualism inhibited “combination.” Given that “every man takes pleasure in the elevation of the social class to which he belongs,” it argued, businessmen needed a “habitual resort.” The revamped organization would open a reading room, collect statistics, and “disseminate useful knowledge,” enabling bourgeois Philadelphians to act in association.⁶¹

Despite the difficulties they faced, antebellum boosters enjoyed some success in measuring Philadelphia’s economic might and bringing merchants and manufacturers together. They did not deny the differences between the city proper and outlying suburbs, but rather implied that both had their place in a metropolitan division of labor with the interests of capital in each mediated through associated bodies: the Statistical Society, the Board of Trade, and—in the ambitions of Consolidators—a government with greater reach. As a way of selling the city and promoting social intercourse among the economic elite, their methods were fit for purpose.

On the pressing matter of disorder, though, they had understandably little to say. Boosters’ portrait of prosperous manufacturing suburbs offered a welcome antidote to depictions of a violent suburban frontier. But the two could not be separated so easily. Kensington and Southwark’s rioters in 1844 had not taken to the streets as a working-class, but they came from heavily working-class districts, and if Philadelphia’s destiny lay in industry, then the men and women who made up mobs would surely multiply in number. Promoters would need to find a way to consolidate suburban labor as well as capital into the urban community.

Surveying the Suburban Frontier

In the immediate aftermath of 1844, though, only a few radical reformers read the riots as a symptom of a coming conflict between labor and capital. As we will see, Philadelphia’s radicals blamed the violence on a corrupt social system, and accused an idle aristocracy of stirring up sectarian strife. Though bourgeois citizens sometimes compared the street battles to the French Revolution, few believed that the city’s industrial transformation led directly to the trouble, and even the pessimistic Fisher doubted whether the upheavals he witnessed really mirrored European experience. Why, he wondered, had trouble broken out “in a country where the usual causes of popular tumult do not exist”? Forgetting his usual fine gradations of rank, Fisher fell back here on the most common explanation from the time, dividing citizens into friends or foes of order. Attacks on Catholics, blacks, and employers, he argued, were merely the manifestations of “the growing spirit of misrule.”⁶² Disorder for him sprang from the disintegrative influence of democracy rather than of capitalism. It would take another wave of European revolutions in 1848 for the two to conjoin in studies of the city.

Yet bourgeois observers did see suburban disorder as part of a wider crisis of social discipline. While that crisis extended into the workplace, its roots lay elsewhere. Philadelphia’s manufacturers, like their counterparts across the industrializing world, struggled to impose time and work discipline on laborers accustomed to the rhythms of preindustrial life.⁶³ To maximize returns, they experimented with the likes of wage labor, piece rates, and new managerial structures.⁶⁴ But the challenge of controlling labor within workshops was made harder by the changes that had taken place outside them. The problem seemed to spring from the prizing apart of work and home. As factories slowly superseded household production, masters’ power over apprentices waned, freeing young men to enjoy the city’s taverns, fire companies, and street gangs. Here, rioting could seem like a generational revolt, albeit one made possible by the new social geography of the industrial city. Commentators who noted mobs’ youthful character blamed a want of discipline at home and work. Trouble sprang from “the lamentable neglect of domestic training of the young,” one citizen wrote, for “neglected youths” formed the “nucleus around which mobs gather.” Cities, as an evangelical put it in 1841, allowed the nation’s young “to throw off parental restraints.”⁶⁵

Reformers looked to refasten the shackles. In the Southwark riot, wealthy citizens urged “heads of families and masters” to “keep their young men and boys at home during the prevailing excitement.” Baldwin banned young men in his factory from joining fire companies. Others suggested that restoring apprenticeship offered a better solution to disorder than centralizing projects like a citywide police or government. Incapable of intervening in disorderly suburbs themselves, they imagined devolving power to respectable heads of household, rather than consolidating control in a strengthened bureaucracy.⁶⁶

More often, though, the city’s economic elite attempted to establish vantage points to survey and reform the suburban poor. Manufacturers, who had played a supporting role when “respectable” citizens rallied against the rioters, came to the fore, creating a network of institutions that aimed to impose moral order on the districts. These associations—part of antebellum reformers’ “benevolent empire”—were often led by evangelical and Quaker industrialists. They proved particularly influential in the Philadelphia Society for the Employment and Instruction of the Poor (PSEIP). William J. Mullen—an erstwhile radical who, like many of his comrades in the General Trades’ Union, had embraced evangelical Protestantism after the Panic of 1837—formed the society with the suburban iron founder Merrick just two years after the riots. They set themselves up in Moyamensing, the poorest and most violent of Philadelphia’s satellites and one that lacked the industrial base of neighboring Southwark. Donors and managers included several of the wealthiest manufacturers below the city proper. But in contrast to New York, where a similar institution was an industrialist stronghold, the mercantile and professional elite were well represented too. Supporters and managers included several Proper Philadelphian names, the Board of Trade president Cope, and the attorney and Consolidation leader Eli Kirk Price. Like the Statistical Society, then, the organization brought different branches of the economic elite into closer communion, though this time with the object of saving rather than selling the city.⁶⁷

Mullen and Merrick’s society prescribed manufacturing as a medicine for Moyamensing’s ills in much the same way as boosters recommended it as tonic for the whole city. Following a transatlantic trend that stretched back to the 1820s, the association argued “indiscriminate almsgiving” encouraged dependence and burdened taxpayers, not least as the cost of poor relief fell on the whole county. The idle needed to be put to work and that required distinguishing between the worthy and unworthy pauper; a later proposal even suggested that employers furnish a central committee with a list of the laborers they had laid off in hard times to sort the unlucky from the work-shy. Here was benevolence with a hard edge.⁶⁸

The Society’s “general plan” in Moyamensing suggests how bourgeois citizens envisaged incorporating a supposedly wild and worthless frontier as a productive part of a manufacturing metropolis. Aiming to get near to the “very centre of destitution,” the managers began work in 1848 on a House of Industry, just below the notorious Bedford Street (see Figure 5), and opposite a market house said to double as the den of a riotous gang, the Killers. In the new building, designed by the architect of the Capitol, Thomas U. Walter, able-bodied paupers sewed rags and crushed bones. Reformers linked such “employment” to the “moral and intellectual improvement” of their inmates. On the shop floor, managers believed, “vicious and squalid vagrants will be lured to lives of industry and virtue,” while the children who “ran wild” despite living in a “civilized city” would be reformed. Such a systematic approach to poverty sought to reconstruct character as much as to provide relief.⁶⁹

In the years after the riots, new philanthropic institutions colonized the suburbs. Soup kitchens, workhouses, and domestic missions sprang up over the following decade. During the hard winter of 1855, a sharp economic downturn, which all but emptied the treasury of the Union Benevolent Association, led Horace Binney, McMichael, Merrick, and several other veterans of efforts to suppress rioters and reform paupers to propose bringing public and private relief under one organization. The report they commissioned calling for a “consolidation of charities”—a measure that would have predated London’s influential Charity Organization Society by fourteen years—was coauthored by the future financier of the Union war effort and devout Presbyterian Jay Cooke. Though the plan secured support from the North American, amalgamating state, secular, sectarian, and ecumenical institutions proved impossible. It nevertheless represented an extraordinary proposal for a bourgeois seizure of the city’s entire welfare apparatus.⁷⁰

Legibility mattered as much for the economic elite in their philanthropic interventions as it did for their business investments. The want of “accurate statistics” of “missionary labor,” McMichael’s paper complained, impeded “a rightly ordered and organized system of charitable effort.” Reformers sought to see troublesome neighborhoods from the street and the sky. Charity consolidators, for instance, planned to set aside “centres of wretchedness and depravity” as “Special Districts,” for an Executive Committee to investigate “the causes of pauperism and want.” Ward organizations would assess applicants for aid in person, then forward their reports to metropolitan-wide overseers, who would use their synoptic overview to make strategic decisions. By encouraging closer contact between the benevolent rich and the supplicant poor, the plan built on long-established patterns of paternalistic almsgiving, but married traditional practice to a scientific, centralizing ethos.⁷¹

Institutions that managed to penetrate suburban “purlieus” awakened residents of the historic center to what lay beyond their boundaries. “The public looked with but little faith upon the facts which it became its province to lay bare,” Mullen’s society said of its early career in 1851, for while the beggars of Philadelphia proper could be ignored as “social outcasts,” it was harder to accept “that within a few minutes walk of the courts of justice there dwelt a community of such.” The North American agreed. When the poor hid in “obscure alleys, courts, lanes, and by-ways,” they were hard to know.⁷²

Juxtapositions of visible wealth and veiled poverty—so common in midcentury writing on “great cities”—stressed social distance and spatial proximity in a manner that blurred metropolitan borders. Sensational journalists and evangelical reformers drew on jarring contrasts to good effect. The Inquirer guided its readers from the “crowds of elegantly dressed people” on Chestnut Street to the “small streets” a few blocks south, where humanity appeared “in forms so degraded that it can hardly be recognized as part of that which proudly displays itself on the fashionable promenade.” Similarly, a postbellum writer, horrified by a “plague-spot in the very heart of our civilization,” pictured “Wealth and Poverty” sitting “down side by side,” staring “one another in the face,” and “each asking his neighbor, What right do you have to be here?”⁷³

When searching for metaphors to make sense of such stark differences, Philadelphians turned to empire. Domestic missionaries compared their work with the “HOME HEATHEN” of the city’s “dark regions” to that of their counterparts among the Hottentots; Bedford Street became a “Citadel” awaiting capture. Others invoked the West to justify their civilizing mission. In gangs of young men, newspapers saw “mighty tribes of Philadelphia Indians.” In riotous Southwark, they mapped “the Coast of California.” Even Mullen’s society, which preferred sentimentalism to sensationalism, depicted Moyamensing as a wilderness.⁷⁴

Reformers encountered forms of resistance that resembled anticolonial politics. Among the officers of the PSEIP, only the old radical Mullen lived in the southern districts, with the remaining merchants, manufacturers, and professionals residing in the city proper. Their attempts to enclose the suburban frontier rarely went down well. Moyamensing’s Board of Commissioners looked to protect their Catholic constituents from meddling Protestants by trying to block construction of the House of Industry, but if local government could not protect them, citizens took matters into their own hands. Residents overlooking the Bedford Street mission, for instance, reportedly pelted evangelical preachers with “a shower of dead cats and rats,” stones, and brickbats: a replay on a smaller scale of the troubles that had started the Kensington riots in 1844. Such stories should be read with a skeptical eye, but they hint at the limits on consolidators’ power. One newspaper sympathetic to calls for a door-to-door sanitary census in Moyamensing even warned that “such a system of espionage” would probably “excite a violent resistance.”⁷⁵

Ironically, though, the same imperial metaphors that made the suburbs seem so different could serve as a justification for extending the power of the center outward. Journalists, missionaries, and reformers who ventured off-grid did portray an upside-down world that turned the bourgeois order of the city proper on its head. Almost every report raises the specter of racial amalgamation by showing white women and black men mingling promiscuously. There is no doubt here that the lives of the suburban poor became a prized commodity in the literary marketplace.⁷⁶ But readers could be titillated and terrified at the same time, as the popularity of works on the French Revolution attests, and accounts of the city’s “plague spots” urged citizens to act before the epidemics that ravaged them consumed the whole city. And if comparisons to Paris and London legitimized an authoritarian response to disorder, frontier metaphors in the heyday of Manifest Destiny held out the possibility of domesticating the foreign. To speak of Philadelphia harboring “savages in civilization,” as the North American did as war raged in Mexico, implied an intolerable contradiction. Subduing the suburbs here mirrored the work of nation-building. “The instinct of self-preservation ought to nerve every muscle of philanthropy to the work of regeneration,” the Evening Bulletin had argued of Henry Mayhew’s London, or else “the Metropolis, and with it the nation, will sink eventually into the vast, yet extending abyss.” That lesson in interdependence applied to Philadelphia too where “portions of Southwark and Moyamensing” harbored “a population so morally and physically diseased,” it was “a miracle the whole county is not infected.”⁷⁷

Here Fisher’s 1844 prophecy of an insurgent underclass threatened to come true in Philadelphia’s riot districts. All “great cities” were “infested” by revolutionary “barbarians” and “canaille,” the North American declared, and home missionaries and houses of industry could only ameliorate their condition. Until “a combined and powerful effort” incorporated the suburbs, such outcasts “must make the orderly portion of society their prey.”⁷⁸ But where did the roots of those evils lie? Cartographies of the city proved insufficient as an answer; the rules of the metropolis needed to be explained instead.

Explaining the City

Beyond mapping the suburbs, reformers sought to understand the workings of the “great city.” They strove to comprehend the causes of the epidemics of riot and disease that visited Philadelphia in order for their metropolis to heal and grow. Strikes troubled them, but prior to 1848, wage labor—in combating idleness—appeared more often as a solution than a problem. It was not so much relations within workshops, then, but the relation between people and places that came to characterize midcentury bourgeois thinking on the city.

For many critics, the root of the city’s problems lay in rum. The miseries of one Moyamensing alley, a paper wrote in 1845, were simply “the offspring of the countless groggeries that abound in that purlieu.” Campaigners insisted that the drinker’s lack of self-restraint brought disorder to the streets and disease into the home. Across the nation, the ranks of temperance advocates swelled in the 1840s, and while the movement drew workers as well as bosses, bourgeois Philadelphians broadly agreed on the need for some kind of action against the city’s rum shops. In Irish and German neighborhoods, however, it struggled to win converts. Where persuasion failed, reformers looked for legal remedies, albeit with mixed results. Mullen alone brought sixty private prosecutions against Moyamensing’s unlicensed innkeepers. Consolidators hoped that a stronger municipal government would prove more effective than individual efforts in turning the city dry.⁷⁹

But grog could be the consequence as well as the cause of disorder. Links between drink, disorder, and disease seemed perfectly clear to the midcentury bourgeoisie. When respectable Philadelphians talked about the “infected districts,” the symptoms they had in mind were often rum, riot, and the cholera, and not infrequently all three. From what though did each spring? Midcentury medical knowledge held that epidemics emanated miasmically from rotting matter. Sanitary reports and mortality statistics seemed to support the hypothesis that foul vapors arose in warrens of courts and alleys. Historians have sometimes seen miasmatic theory as convenient for merchants, for whom the rival, contagionist epidemiology threatened maritime trade.⁸⁰ But citizens’ readiness to apply it as a way of explaining moral as well as physical well-being indicates its deep roots. The sense that environment molded character had a long history in American thought. Thomas Jefferson justified the Louisiana Purchase by arguing new land would alleviate overcrowding, while the urbanists of the Early Republic equated orderly space with orderly citizens. The conviction that corrupt institutions would eat away at the health of the republic, indeed, transposed easily onto urban space, where physical decay threatened a similar malaise. Even evangelicals eager to close down taverns conceded that sound family life was all but impossible in “pent-up courts and alleys.” Filth caused more than fever: it corroded the moral fiber of the metropolis.⁸¹

The link between urban disorder, disease, and degradation made the physical condition of Philadelphia’s suburbs a matter of concern for prosperous residents of the city proper. Some went so far as to embrace a rigid environmental determinism. A prize-winning essay submitted to the House of Refuge in 1855 argued that a child “from the most luxurious palace and most refined family,” if forced to work in a filthy factory and “retire to a dirty, offensive court,” would struggle to “resist the demoralizing influences” surrounding him. “All these abide together,” the author said of poverty, intemperance, brutality, and crime, and “vice is produced, directly, by impure air.” Those who wanted to purge the city of sin would have to reconstruct space as well as save souls.⁸²

Such moral environmentalism focused minds on metropolitan interdependence. Neighborhoods were harder to quarantine than ships. Pestilence spawned in filthy “cellars and garrets,” one paper warned in the 1850s, threatened to “decimate alike the high and low.” With city life “a singular sodality,” a reformer had observed a few years earlier, the citizen should not “flatter himself that he is segregated” from evil influences “in person or property.” Moral and physical epidemics paid no more heed than rioters to district boundaries.⁸³

Institutions that mapped the suburban frontier helped to popularize these ideas about environment, health, and moral order. Mullen’s society saw its workhouse as a refuge from the street. “The comparative comfort which its inmates found themselves to enjoy while leading lives of order, cleanliness and temperance,” the managers argued in their 1848 report, disposed “their minds to receive moral instruction.” The practice of isolating people from corrupting influences had a long history in Philadelphia. Eastern State Penitentiary, which received its first inmate in 1829, cut convicts off from the world beyond their cells, and calls for returning apprentices to the homes of master craftsmen in the aftermath of the riots amounted to a milder dose of the same medicine. Even the humane judge and future Radical Republican William D. Kelley admitted in 1849 that the city’s House of Refuge shared with prisons the ethos of secluding “inmates from society.” Philadelphia’s institutional landscape at midcentury reflected assumptions about the corrupting nature of the urban environment. Penitentiaries, schools, and workhouses each removed citizens from the immoral streets beyond.⁸⁴

The limitations of this policy, though, were self-evident: to quarantine the entire population would bring the city to a standstill, halting the flow of people and goods through the streets. By the early 1850s, new plans circulated, championed first and foremost by McMichael’s North American, and closely tied to the project of Consolidation. These envisaged reconstructing Philadelphia’s savage suburbs as cathartic spaces, capable of nurturing peaceful, productive, and healthy citizens, rather than riotous, idle, and sickly ones.

The Limits of Consolidation

Either side of midcentury, bourgeois citizens sought to understand how their city worked and where they belonged within it. Through statistics, social surveys, maps, and comparisons, they explored Philadelphia’s present conditions and future prospects. In counting the cost of riots and the potential of manufacturing, they began to incorporate a suburban frontier into their imagined community. Their efforts brought together branches of the economic elite and forged alliances with evangelicals and newspapermen.

Though shaken by the experience of disorder and decline, few were as pessimistic about democracy’s place in the city as Fisher, yet plenty doubted whether Jacksonian politics were thrusting the right men to the fore. Many of those who came of age in the troubles of the 1840s led a series of bourgeois-dominated reform movements over the following decades that attacked corruption, pushed for Consolidation, and eventually invoked the professional authority of “social science” against the might of the city’s postbellum Republican machine.

Yet the terms of the suburbs’ consolidation with the city remained contested. With only a few exceptions, bourgeois Philadelphians backed the militia’s assault on the crowd in Southwark, but they were well aware that relying on citizen soldiers to police the streets proved neither practical nor popular. In an 1838 riot, for instance, men in a militia company, fearing they were about to be ordered to fire on the crowd, had requested leave to bake bread. General George Cadwalader received threats after his men did train cannon on a mob in 1844. With only a few watchmen and constables scattered through the districts, though, a civilian police force barely existed. Fugitives could flee the law by crossing municipal borders. The months that followed the riots saw intense debate over how to impose order. Some advocated a permanent armed force; others warned of aping the “martial despotism” of the Old World.⁸⁵

Enlarging the terrain of the civil authorities, though, offered a plausible republican alternative. On November 11, 1844, just months after the summer’s violence, a group of Philadelphians assembled at the county courthouse to plea for a union of the city and its outlying districts. The chair of the meeting, Samuel Webb, had counted the cost of riots before. An antislavery Quaker, he helped organize the construction of Pennsylvania Hall, which a proslavery mob torched within days of its opening in 1838. Worried that a “scattered, sub-divided and sectioned” system of metropolitan government could not protect public order, these pioneering Consolidators called for political boundaries to correspond to what was “in reality but one city and one community.” The meeting marked the first stirrings of a decade-long campaign.⁸⁶

That it took ten years to consolidate the city appears surprising. A measure promising to extend the city’s authority over turbulent suburbs seemed likely to win considerable support from an economic elite horrified by the summer’s riots, and several merchants and attorneys attended the November meeting. Much as Baron Haussmann would do in 1860, when he extended Paris’s police control outward “to gain mastery over a ceinture sauvage,” advocates of Consolidation focused on the problem of public order. They did not blame religion, democracy, parenting, rum, or environment for the violence, but the city’s political geography. To the Ledger, the “egregious error of dividing and subdividing” had cost the population its “homogenous character.” From this initial mistake, the city’s “unseen divisions” had become the “real divisions of sentiment and action.” Consolidating a new metropolis across those arbitrary lines would nourish the “alliances,” “common interests,” and “common feelings” on which any republic had to rest. This was the nineteenth-century language of nationalism applied to the metropolis.⁸⁷

Soon, however, a powerful anti-Federalist movement coalesced. Within a few days of the courthouse gathering, many of the city proper’s prominent citizens organized against Consolidation. At their head stood the attorney Horace Binney, who had led the meeting of gentleman in the Southwark riots, but feared the costs of civic union. Others worried about absorbing district debts and having to bankroll their improvements. Even Thomas Pym Cope, who supported Consolidation in principle, feared that the city “will not be met on fair & liberal terms.” When Pennsylvania defaulted on its debt in 1842, Philadelphia had suffered for being part of a larger whole, and the economic elite were reluctant to risk further financial chaos.⁸⁸

But critics of Consolidation cared about more than dollars and cents. They also feared that a hastily arranged marriage between the Whig center and Democratic suburbs would bring little domestic harmony. The Court House meeting drew natives, Whigs, and abolitionists, but leaned Democratic, with suburban party leaders and wealthy supporters from the city in the audience. To Fisher, who equated the Democrats’ rank and file with Jacobins, political concerns explained bourgeois opposition. “The chief objection to the proposed plan is one which cannot be insisted on publicly,” he confided in his diary. While “the city is conservative, the districts are radical.”⁸⁹ Couched in more euphemistic tones, his argument would become a central tenet of opposition to Consolidation. It signaled a drawing of the battle lines between two segments of the economic elite: those who favored strong, active local government, and those who believed such a centralization of power would threaten their property and political authority.

Opponents questioned the unionist claims of the urban expansionists. Where Consolidators, echoing nineteenth-century nationalism, stressed the need to overcome sectional interests for the good of the metropolitan whole, their critics embraced subdivision as a natural byproduct of republican rule. “The districts are distinct from the city and from one another, in the character, pursuits and interests of the people who compose them,” argued one correspondent to the Pennsylvanian, “and government ought in all cases, to grow out of natural combination, and be the expression of actual, social distinctions.” “It is not democracy; it is not federalism; it is centralization,” the writer insisted. These themes recurred in the anti-Consolidation movement’s memorial to the legislature. The remonstrance pointed to the advantages of fragmentation, “where the interest of a part was different from the whole.” The wisdom of past precedent stood in stark contrast to proposals for an enlarged city. “There never was embraced within the same limits a greater conflict and opposition of interests,” the memorialists protested. One opponent of annexation a few years later even warned of amalgamation, evoking the fear of racial mixing that fueled rioters’ rage at Pennsylvania Hall.⁹⁰

For all the evidence of interdependence the riots had offered, the union of city and suburbs still seemed unnatural. When the state legislature met in Harrisburg in January 1845, it rejected the Consolidation bill in favor of a proposal to improve the county police. Even that act, however, did not tinker with the city’s political boundaries. Ordering each district to maintain one policeman for every one hundred and fifty taxables, the new law sought to nip riots in the bud, without providing for cooperation across municipal boundaries.⁹¹ For Consolidators, such a limited measure was never likely to be enough, but in 1845, the reform’s wealthier backers found themselves in a minority even among their own class. To unite Philadelphia, they would have to heal their rift with prominent citizens, and persuade them that an interdependent metropolis needed one government.

* * *

As Consolidation’s opponents in Philadelphia were winning the battle to prevent the enlargement of their city in February 1845, Congress approved the annexation of Texas. Fisher, who wrote to the United States Gazette against a scheme he believed would end the “separate existence”92 of the city proper, had pondered the previous year the prospect of national dissolution: “A Union between two people who, in fact, in all important characteristics are broadly contrasted, must be a weak one…. In such a country there can be no strong national feeling, no sentiment of identity, none of the thousand ties formed by a community of origin, recollections, hopes, objects, interests & manners, which make the idea of country sacred & dear. Such a Union is one of interest merely, a paper bond, to be torn asunder by a burst of passion or to be deliberately undone whenever interest demands it.”⁹³

Fisher’s prescient words closely resembled the case against Consolidation: they hint at how the political construction of city and nation stood on similar foundations. Indeed, over the next decade, sectional conflict often shaped debates over municipal union. Questions about the wisdom of incorporating a population that looked very different to the prosperous Protestants of the city proper would recur just as they did with the annexation of Mexico. So too would concerns over whether a union divided by party, class, and creed could ever hold together. This, then, was the question that the “great study” had to answer: How could a metropolis made up of such manifestly different parts ever associate as one?