In Union There Is Strength - Andrew Heath America in the Nineteenth Century

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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

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