In Union There Is Strength
AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Series editors: Brian DeLay, Steven Hahn, Amy Dru Stanley
America in the Nineteenth Century proposes a rigorous rethinking of this most formative period in U.S. history. Books in the series will be wide-ranging and eclectic, with an interest in politics at all levels, culture and capitalism, race and slavery, law, gender, and the environment, and regional and transnational history. The series aims to expand the scope of nineteenth-century historiography by bringing classic questions into dialogue with innovative perspectives, approaches, and methodologies.
In Union There Is Strength
Philadelphia in the Age of Urban Consolidation
ANDREW HEATH
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved.
Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Heath, Andrew, author.
Title: In union there is strength: Philadelphia in the age of urban consolidation / Andrew Heath.
Other titles: America in the nineteenth century.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019] | Series: America in the nineteenth century | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018031786 | ISBN 9780812251111 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Philadelphia (Pa.)—History—19th century. | Philadelphia (Pa.)—Politics and government—19th century. | Philadelphia (Pa.)—Social conditions—19th century. | Urbanization—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—History—19th century.
Classification: LCC F158.44 .H43 2019 | DDC 974.8/11—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031786
CONTENTS
Introduction. Philadelphia in an Age of Consolidation
Chapter 1. “A Great City Is a Great Study”
Chapter 2. “The Guilty and Blood-Stained City”: Radicals and the Second American Republic
Chapter 3. “The Manifest Destiny of Philadelphia”: Making Antebellum Growth Politics
Chapter 4. “To Give Shape to the Destinies of Our City”: Molding the Metropolis
Chapter 5. Out of Many, One: Remaking the Polity
Chapter 6. Consolidating City and Nation: Philadelphia in Civil War and Reconstruction
Chapter 7. Philadelphia Redeemed
ABBREVIATIONS
| AHR | American Historical Review |
| HSP | Historical Society of Pennsylvania |
| JAH | Journal of American History |
| JUH | Journal of Urban History |
| LCP | Library Company of Philadelphia |
| PMHB | Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography |
INTRODUCTION
Philadelphia in an Age of Consolidation
In 1880, the pioneering social scientist Robert Ellis Thompson set out to explain the patterns of political growth. The “modern city,” he argued with his own Philadelphia in mind, was “meant for a people whose social life takes place under the roof of home.” For Thompson, this distinguished the ancients, who had privileged civic space over private comforts, from the men and women of an industrial age. But what twentieth-century critics would come to call the “fall of public man” appeared to him as a salutary change that brought peace, prosperity, and cohesion to a fractious metropolis.1 His private city produced public benefits.
Even as Thompson charted the city’s division into family homes, he showed how it had come together as an associated whole. Philadelphia, he insisted, illustrated the “growth of large social unities out of the union of smaller ones.” Thompson was referring specifically here to Philadelphia’s Consolidation Act of 1854: a measure that extended the territory of the twosquare mile “city proper” across the entire county, more than doubled the metropolitan population, and made the municipality the largest by territory in the nation. Consolidation annexed two-dozen townships, boroughs, and districts to Philadelphia’s metropolitan empire and marked one of the most ambitious urban reforms of the nineteenth century (see Maps 1 and 2). But he read the 1854 charter as more than a merely municipal matter; instead, it expressed a “fact of social science.” “This is the natural method of growth the whole world over,” Thompson explained, for “all