The 1848 Revolutions lifted radical morale. Over the preceding years, they had built an institutional base from which to challenge bourgeois ideology. A stronger economy after 1844 gave craft unions the chance to flourish alongside the Chartist leagues and Fourierist associations. By 1847, trade unionists who hoped to revive the spirit of the General Trades’ Union were discussing plans for some form of citywide organization.43
Radicals’ designs for consolidating producers extended beyond workplace bargaining into organization and education. Lippard, convinced that secret fraternal orders had prepared the way for the French Revolutions in 1789 and 1848, tried to “bind the masses together” in a “one-minded body.” In 1849, he founded the Brotherhood of the Union, which soon spread across the republic. Lippard’s Brotherhood looked to the bloodless overthrow of capital and the union of the “Workers of the World” (unlike Marx and Engels he actually used the term). But it embraced reform as well as revolution. Like Campbell, Lippard advocated cooperative enterprise, factory regulation, and free homesteads in the West. Indeed, both radicals joined George Henry Evans’s national land reform movement.44
Institutional consolidation—whether via national organizations like Lippard’s Brotherhood of the Union and Evans’s National Industrial Congress (NIC), or local ones, like trade assemblies—mattered to radicals who saw “association” as a path to power. Most often, association referred to the principle of workers pooling capital and sharing profits, effectively cutting out the merchant or manufacturer who claimed a portion of their labor. Schemes for producer and consumer cooperatives abounded around midcentury. But association, as the call for “fraternity” in 1848 and “brotherhood” in Lippard’s secret society implied, had other meanings too. Perhaps most importantly, it marked a cry for producer solidarity in the wake of the riots. Association meant here the “Union of the Workers against the Idlers who do not work.”45
Radicals crafted a role for themselves that today we might call that of the “organic intellectual.” To raise the consciousness of the city’s producers and awaken them to their common interests, however, required challenging the economic elite in civil society. Radicals attacked the American bourgeois press for its hostility to European revolutions, for instance, while Lippard decried Philadelphia’s “Anti-Socialist” papers. In The Quaker City, the author portrays a newspaper editor, the risible Buzby Poodle, as one of the “monks” lording it over Philadelphia.46 Class consolidation required continually challenging such voices.
The years leading up to midcentury saw a host of efforts to ensure a counterhegemonic voice could be heard in the city. Philadelphia’s district halls, mechanics’ institutes, and open lots offered a promising terrain for association. Campbell, who believed “the monopoly of education” left producers ignorant of the processes that reduced them to penury drew on his experience as an itinerant lecturer for British Chartists in tramping from meeting to meeting to rally support. Lippard’s Brotherhood, meanwhile, urged members to “open your halls to the public of both sexes” to discuss “Land, Labor, and Social Reform.”47 Radicals also sought to establish a rival to the bourgeois-dominated press. Impressed by Greeley’s Tribune, for which he occasionally wrote, Campbell toyed with the idea of starting a reform paper of his own, as did several craft unions. Instead, though, he entered the publishing trade with a fellow Chartist exile, Edward P. Powers. Their first pamphlet, by the judge and former factory reformer William D. Kelley, decried the “heartless theory” that “points to the labouring population reduced to want and pauperism.” Lippard, just as convinced of his vanguard role, did set himself up as an editor. The Quaker City, a weekly, which made its bow in 1848, serialized his fiction, served as a mouthpiece for the Brotherhood of the Union, and cheered on revolution and reform.48
Radicalism in the late 1840s may have lacked the impact of the GTU, but its institutional piquancy and ideological thrust troubled the economic elite. The sense that Lippard, Campbell, and their allies were (as one historian has said, in a related context) “domesticating foreign struggles” proved particularly alarming.49 Bourgeois consolidators began to respond. McMichael’s North American—the paper that fought harder than any other for the economic elite to speak with one voice—attacked the “radical, fiery, Fourierish” tone of Foster’s French Revolution of 1848, and its singling out of the “bourgeoisie” for criticism especially. The daily found the definition of the term Foster arrived at “tolerably just,” but rejected his take on the class’s boundaries and politics, arguing that the word was simply a synonym for what the English called “the middle classes” and Americans called “the business men of our towns and cities—merchants, manufacturers, master mechanics, employers of all kind, but including capitalists, house owners and house holders.” “In America in fact,” it argued, “we all belong to the bourgeoisie,” for “every head of a family, is a bourgeois—a free citizen.” Rather than finding solace in the republic’s exceptionalism, though, the paper cast the class in international terms. “The bourgeoisies of all countries have great respect for the rights of property,” it declared, and “desire and require peace and quiet, and order, for the successful prosecution of trade.” Thus “a civil tumult of any kind” could “offer nothing but severe loss and suffering.” Bourgeois Frenchmen had joined the 1848 Revolution then only at great sacrifice.50
The North American simultaneously defined the bourgeoisie as an international class while denying the existence of class distinctions: a rhetorical strategy it would employ frequently over the following decades in seeking to harmonize social interests across the city. McMichael did all he could to break down barriers between propertied citizens, yet here his paper claimed that class had no meaning. To admit Foster’s point, however, risked legitimizing labor conflict. McMichael saw such battles at firsthand as county sheriff in the 1840s and in his own office in the 1850s, when he confronted (usually without success) well-organized printers. Newspaper publishers, indeed, continually found themselves negotiating with staff, which may help account for their hostility to craft unions more generally: even the Public Ledger—a paper more sympathetic than most to journeymen—dismissed Campbell’s design for “equal exchanges” and toed the liberal line that laws of supply and demand properly regulated the price of labor.51
Workplace militancy, revolutionary turmoil, and radicals’ determination to plot the present and future course of the city drew Philadelphia’s economic elite into confronting the labor question well before the Civil War. Richard Rush, who as U.S. minister to France had recognized the Second Republic in 1848, returned to his home city around midcentury, concerned that North might prove fertile ground for “Communism.” About the same time, the iron manufacturer Stephen Colwell called socialism “one of the greatest events of this age,” and warned that “no man can understand the progress of humanity or its present tendencies who does not … watch its movements.” Rush and Colwell played prominent roles in the battle for metropolitan Consolidation over the following years, but even Sidney George Fisher, who remained aloof from upstart manufacturers and reform politics, exchanged ideas about labor and capital in the mid-1850s with a British factory owner who had written one of the first treatises on industrial relations. Fisher probably never set foot on a factory floor, but he acted as the attorney for the strike-plagued Reading Railroad, and by the postbellum era, read his running battles with household servants as a miniature of the wider struggle between employer and employee: one fought in homes, streets, and polling booths as well as suburban workshops and southern plantations.52
Here, at least, radicals and workers had succeeded in unsettling propertied citizens, as a joke insert in an April 1851 issue of the Ledger—which none too subtly name-checked various radicals—indicated. “Let the mechanics and Workingmen Beware,” it began, “of the POWERS of the DEVIL and the CAMP-BELLS of HELL” that “would make America another Atheistical France” and “under the garb of ‘Reformers,’ establish Brutalism!” Either side in the newspaper stood notices for meetings of a trades’ assembly, two craft unions, and a cooperative store.53 But the vigor of midcentury radicalism, so evident in the advertising columns of the Ledger, masked inner divisions. Those fractures would soon be exposed.