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

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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.

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