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

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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.

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      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

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