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In Union There Is Strength. Andrew Heath
Читать онлайн.Название In Union There Is Strength
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isbn 9780812295818
Автор произведения Andrew Heath
Серия America in the Nineteenth Century
Издательство Ingram
The city proper’s elite turned decisively against crowd action in 1844 and sanctified the state’s monopoly on the use of force. Most of those at the meeting, which vindicated the militia’s decision to fire, were merchants and lawyers, many of them with “Proper Philadelphian” names: Fisher, who had exacting standards, said the few dozen or so present were made up of the “better class of citizens.”41 Earlier, in the Kensington troubles, he joined associates from the Philadelphia bar to defend a Catholic church, having concluded that service alongside his fellow attorneys was preferable to the ward associations “in which one is thrown with a great many low people.”42 Fisher shared the anti-Catholic prejudices of the nativists but preferred the rule of law to the civil war unfolding on the streets. Nor was he alone. Thomas Pym Cope, a Quaker, councilman, and president of the Board of Trade, excused himself from debates over the use of force on religious grounds, but the agonized conclusion in his diary could have served as a motto for the city proper’s elite: “order must [be] maintained.”43
But could it be? Here the “great city” served as a laboratory. Was selfgovernment possible in a polity made up of divided interests and propertyless voters? Fisher thought he knew the answer. “I have long had an idea,” he wrote a few weeks after the Kensington riot, “that the present civilization of the world, Europe & America, is destined to be destroyed by the irruption of the dark masses of ignorance & brutality which lie beneath it.” If the “barbarians each country contain within itself,” he continued, did not rise up in violent rebellion, they might capture the state at the ballot box and “destroy the fair fabric of knowledge, elegance, refinement & power.” For him, the Union’s course had been foreshadowed in the fate of Rome. Republics died when they devolved too much power to the people.44
The depth of Fisher’s antidemocratic conviction might have been rare, but rioting crystallized conservative fears about popular government. Philadelphians took comfort in the claim that the “ruffians” were a troublesome minority whose capacity to commit outrages rested on the supine ways of respectable citizens. Few, however, could deny that mobs enjoyed considerable support. After a long night of racial violence in 1849, for example, one correspondent to McMichael’s paper conceded that “our worst riots have been sustained at the time by local popular sympathy.”45 If investing power in the people led to anarchy, then was the United States any different to the Old World, with its cycle of revolution and reaction?
Some citizens certainly learned from the riots that their “great city” had more in common than they hoped with the European metropolis. For the president of the Board of Trade, the sound of the State House Bell summoning volunteer firemen during the riots reminded him “of the awful tocsin of Revolutionary France.” Over the following years, bourgeois Philadelphians used European markers to map the American metropolis. Inhabitants of courts and alleys sometimes became the “canaille,” riots “emeutes,” suburbs “faubourgs,” and radical workingmen “red republicans.” “The American and French people have many characteristics in common,” argued one supporter of Consolidation after an 1849 riot. “They are both armed, brave, impulsive, and disposed to offer forcible resistance to real or fancied wrongs.”46
Exceptionalism proved too strong for all the comparisons to stick, but the borrowing served its purpose. First, using “common referents” narrowed the gulf between the Old World and the New, making Atlantic exchange easier to imagine.47 After Henry Mayhew’s Life and Labor of the London Poor secured an American publisher, one Philadelphia paper concluded that the English capital “is only a type, on a large scale, of our great Atlantic cities,” while a reformer in 1855 found “life among the lowly” was “equally true” in the New World and the Old. Second, the threat of revolutionary violence separated citizens into orderly and disorderly, reminded the economic elite of the danger lurking in the suburbs, and enforced the kind of class discipline the North American would push over the following decade. To sympathize with mobs was to succor Jacobinism.48
Indulgence also threatened the city’s prosperity. Philadelphians were counting the “cost of riots” even before the militia stood down in 1844. Pamphlets published in the months that followed tried to quantify the destruction, with early estimates putting the losses at a minimum of $250,000.49 The burden of paying for the posse and militia fell on the county treasury, while the Catholic diocese sued the city proper for its failure to stop the mob from torching St. Augustine’s, which stood a few yards inside the original corporate boundaries. But the economic consequences of the violence extended far beyond claims for compensation. During the Kensington riots, a New Yorker warned Board of Trade president Thomas Pym Cope that Philadelphia bonds would struggle to find a buyer in Manhattan, while a few days after the Southwark conflagration, a rumor reached him that shipbuilding on the Delaware had come to a halt in the face of demands for an all-native waterfront. Cope worried about the “great injury to our future prosperity.” “Prudent men,” after all, would “be afraid to place capital in manufactories in a place where the populace may at any time lay them waste.”50 A city still suffering from the financial aftershocks of the Panic of 1837 could hardly afford to drive away investors.
Both the scale of destruction and the threat it posed to prosperity demanded an energetic response. Respectable classes had to stand together regardless of social status. They had to stand together too regardless of where they lived and worked, for the riots offered a sanguinary lesson in metropolitan interdependence. In targeting creed rather than color, the mobs of 1844 proved less discriminating than usual. “It appears that though this was a riot against the Catholics,” one writer noted, “the loss has also fallen heavily upon Protestant owners and tenants of property.”51 The “infected districts,” as they quickly came to be known, may have stood in turbulent suburbs, but violence, like the epidemics that visited the antebellum city, proved hard to quarantine.52 And strangers in distant markets paid no more heed to the lines on the county map than the rioters. As a result, the Ledger wrote of the city and districts in 1844, “all the parts suffer for the wrongs committed by one of them.”53
Yet measured in economic terms, interdependence had its merits. The 1844 riots coincided with a long-awaited upturn in the city’s fortunes. Suburban manufacturing, citizens assumed, had to play a leading role in any recovery. In the 1820s and 1830s, merchants invested heavily in developing the vast anthracite reserves of northern Pennsylvania, and the coal coursing into Philadelphia along canals and railroads fueled expansion. The city lacked an equivalent of the Boston Associates, but men from commercial backgrounds, like Merrick and Wood, branched into industry, while others lent to capital-hungry factory owners. Even in the 1830s, relations between the mechanics’ Franklin Institute and the merchants’ Board of Trade were cooperative rather than competitive. Members of both organizations broadly agreed on the need for a high tariff, a national bank, and government-sponsored internal improvements; and Frederick Fraley, a lawyer who later played a leading role in the Consolidation campaign, served as an officer on both bodies. Manufacturers may have lacked the social cachet of the largest merchants, but as the city fell further behind New York in the race for foreign trade, they became all the more important. With a national debate over protection raging in 1845, the Board of Trade stooped to notice manufacturing for the first time, announcing that “imperfect statistics” showed an advance in the city’s industry, “which has astonished those whose attention has not been particularly called to this subject.”54 Over the next few years, the claim that Philadelphia would serve as the workshop of the New World became an article of dogma in promoters’ creed.
How to preach that to the world vexed boosters. Philadelphia, they complained, had proved inept at “making her position and greatness … known.” The Board of Trade blamed the