LITMIR.BIZ

      “The Guilty and Blood-Stained City”

      Radicals and the Second American Republic

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

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

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

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

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

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

      The Labor Question in the Riot Era

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

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

      Yet simmering

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