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

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it is easy to navigate. The structure, “lonely even amid tenements and houses,” lies hidden amid a “tangled labyrinth of avenues,” defying the legible grid. Within its walls, a young man warns his companion, “it is easy enough for a stranger … to find his way in, but it would puzzle him like the devil to find his way out.”20 Riddled with secret passages and subterranean lairs, the building sets Philadelphia’s mystique in stone.

      Yet when Lippard resumes his role as guide, it becomes evident that the disorienting space disguises clear social divisions. The powerful people who plot urban fortunes in its rooms are easy enough to identify. Monk Hall’s “monks” are not the despised papists targeted by the church burners of 1844, but a canting, conniving bourgeoisie. “Here were lawyers from the court, doctors from the school, and judges from the bench,” Lippard writes, as parsons, publishers, and politicians scheme frauds and seductions. If the conspiracies are hard to decode, the class that hatches them is perfectly readable.21

      By vesting metropolitan power in a powerful and corrupted class, Lippard and his allies challenged bourgeois readings of the riots. Monk Hall’s Southwark setting might be telling here. After the July clash between the militia and the mob, wealthy Philadelphians blamed the district’s turbulent population for civil war on the streets; The Quaker City, in contrast, identifies “respectable citizens” as the real dangerous classes. “The poor man toils in want,” its author insists, “and the rich man riots in his sweat and blood.” As another radical put it, the “authorized fraud and force of orderly society” lay behind the “spontaneous outbursts” of mobs.22 To them, the 1844 violence sprang more from a dissolute rich than a disorderly poor.

      Lippard and other radicals thus linked a corrupt environment and civic ruin.23 But their environmental determinism differed from that of their bourgeois contemporaries. Where elements of the economic elite worried about the moral miasmas emanating from suburban courts and alleys, Lippard labeled luxury as corrosive. In his account of an 1849 race riot, for instance, a fictionalized leader of the real street gang that provoked the outrage was ruined by a childhood that tended “to pamper the appetite and deprave the passions.” Elsewhere Lippard chastised newspapers for failing to pay more attention to “Respectable Killers”: not the boys who “get up riots, hunt negroes and burn houses,” but rapacious manufacturers, landlords, and bank presidents.24

      When he did portray a dissolute poor, they were brutalized by avarice. Devil-Bug, more monster than man, was described by a contemporary of his creator as “the product of a rotten civilisation,” while The Quaker City has him raised “in full and continual sight of scenes of vice, wretchedness and squalor.” Philadelphia’s “outcasts”—“vagabond tribes” who speak “a language of their own”—are kept “in the underground recesses of Monk Hall by day before being set loose “to beg, to rob, or … to murder” at night.25 In Lippard’s city, producers confronted the conspiracies of capital and the savagery of its slavish victims.

      No republic, Lippard believed, could long endure in such a state. Alluding, perhaps, to a year of apocalyptic fervor—a few weeks before the Kensington riot, a millenarian sect, the Millerites, had loudly proclaimed the End Times were at hand—he foretold the “Last Day of the Quaker City” in a reverie, which carried the keeper of Monk Hall, Devil-Bug, forward to 1950. Lippard’s futuristic Philadelphia had degenerated almost beyond recognition from its egalitarian roots. The ruins of Independence Hall provide stone for a royal palace; Washington Square had given way to a penitentiary and gallows. Carriages of a “proud and insolent nobility,” who had “wrung the sweat from the brow of the mechanic,” ride past beggars on wide boulevards. As “slaves of the cotton Lord and the factory Prince” prepare to crown their king, the dead rise from the grave, chanting “Wo Unto Sodom.” Judgment day arrives as lightning rains down from the sky and houses fall into the ground. For Lippard, the fate of the “guilty and blood-stained City” is retribution for its moral rot.26

      His radical cartography mapped the city in a very different way than the bourgeoisie. The sermon from Girard College used the form of evangelical piety in pursuit of radical ends; the prophesy of Philadelphia’s destruction turned booster dreams of what the metropolis might become into a nightmare that multiplied the horrors of the riots. Outward signs of wealth—“temples of marble,” “glittering domes,” “the grandeur and magnificence of the streets”—fail to cover the corruption within.27 The path to peace and prosperity did not run through industry and commerce. As long as the social system remained unreformed, urban growth would multiply misery within, hastening the city’s doom.

      Lippard therefore joined boosters in employing Philadelphia’s past, present, and future as political weapons. McMichael and his allies used visions of civic greatness to bring together a bourgeoisie, but the radical novelist warned that unless citizens awoke to the danger, the metropolis would decay into an imperial oligarchy. Seeing glaring inequality all around them, he and his allies aimed to demystify the process of expropriation that enriched the few at the expense of the many, and consolidate producers around a project of social reconstruction to redeem the Quaker City.28

      The blood spilled in 1844 made association imperative. After the riots, the lyceums and halls that had flourished before the Panic of 1837 provided meeting places for rebuilding, as radicals tried to turn theory into practice. Working people and their allies formed fraternal clubs, Fourierist sects, cooperative stores, craft unions, Chartist sympathy leagues, and social improvement societies. Historians have sometimes seen the rush to associate in Jacksonian America as part of a search for belonging, as the intimacy of the “walking city” gave way to the anonymity of the industrial metropolis.29 But the community envisaged by radicals pursued social ends as much as it met psychic needs. Organizations varied, with some inviting African Americans, abolitionists, and women to their meetings, and others limiting themselves to white, male producers. They ran the gamut ideologically too from utopian socialism to a brand of producerism that would not have looked out of place in the two major parties. Democrat, Whig, Liberty, and Free Soil partisans all participated. But their fragmentation is easy to overstate. Radicals often moved from one organization to another and shared basic principles: capital, at least in the form it had assumed in industrializing Philadelphia, exploited labor, and the consequences of that process were engrafted into the urban form. Only through union could producers emancipate themselves. “COMBINATION! ASSOCIATION! These are the words of the last Gospel which God has uttered to man,” Lippard declared in 1849.30 By then he had found a model abroad.

      The Second American Republic

      Radicals’ inspiration in the 1840s came not only in the inheritance from the Jacksonian labor movement, but also along the revolutionary currents of the Atlantic. The tide of immigration from the British Isles and Germany brought an infusion of militancy. From Yorkshire came John Shedden, a radical tailor who later joined the First International, Knights of Labor, and Sovereigns of Industry. The Irish-born handloom weaver John Campbell fought for working-class suffrage in the factory districts of northern England as a leader in the Chartist movement before fleeing to the United States after a failed general strike in 1842. Such figures, having seen firsthand the industrial transformation of the Old World and the New, understood Philadelphia’s development in world historical perspective.31

      The European Revolutions of 1848 gave them hope. Initially, Philadelphians, like most Americans, welcomed the fall of France’s July Monarchy as a vindication of the principles of 1776. That consensus was supposed to have found expression at a vast public meeting on Independence Square in late April. Citizens from across the city’s partisan and ethnic divisions gathered to the strains of the Marseillaise to hear eminent speakers proclaim the rights of man. Among them was McMichael, who admired how dynasties that “seemed indestructible” had “melted away or, thrown into the crucible of reform,” had “assumed new forms and new existence.”32

      Radicals sang from the same hymn sheet but added an extra verse. For them, the Second French Republic—and especially the National Workshops, which guaranteed employment to the poor—could inspire a Second American Republic. When Francis J. Grund took to the stand, he surveyed the history of Europe from 1789. The revolutionaries

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