Radicals, surveying the wreckage of the riots, realized the biggest obstacle they confronted lay in working-class fragmentation. The main beneficiaries of the riots had been the nativist American Republicans, whose candidates swept Democrats from office in most of the suburban districts, including Kensington and Southwark. Their ascendancy did not last long, but like radicals, they established a foothold in working-class neighborhoods. The Order of United American Mechanics, a fraternal association of Protestant masters and journeymen, welcomed employers into the producers’ community but excluded the fast-growing Catholic working class.54
In their religion, radicals ran the gamut from atheist infidelity to evangelical Protestantism, but they agreed that sectarianism threatened association. Lippard provides an instructive example. Critics have picked up on the anti-Catholic tropes in his work: the “monks” who make up The Quaker City’s bourgeoisie meet in a former monastery, after all.55 Yet the novelist who conjured up images of conspiring priests loathed militant Protestantism. In 1846, he began a novel, The Nazarene, that blamed the nativist riots on religious intolerance; when a home missionary tells his audience he had seen Catholic bishops doing good work in the “alleys of Southwark and Moyamensing,” his hateful audience accuse him of blasphemy. A few years earlier, in The Quaker City, he had satirized nativist Pope-baiting with the “Universal Patent Gospel Missionary Society,” who combine “violent appeals to excited mobs” with “insidious endeavours to create those very mobs.” Even in 1849, when in response to the Catholic archbishop of New York’s support for the Pope in his struggle with the Roman Republic, Lippard asked if “the Assassins of the Roman people” have “their paid minions on American soil,” he admitted to speaking “of this subject with great reluctance,” and prefaced the article with a lengthy recapitulation of his hostility to “No-Popery bigots.” The Irish-born Campbell also disdained nativism. In 1850, he asked readers of the Tribune whether “American citizens” could really say to “the flying refugee from the despotism of Europe ‘Back, back again to your stripes and chains, killed dungeons and scaffolds!’”56
Campbell invoked the spirit of solidarity that followed the 1848 Revolutions here to unite producers regardless of creed. Among radicals he was not alone. Within a few days of the Independence Square meeting, German workers raised the cry to “operate in concert with the American Laboring Classes in this city.” The Social Improvement Society (SIS), which drew a mixture of active trade unionists and middle-class reformers, often debated immigration, and while there is no record of their meetings, we can assume from the figures involved that an unreformed social system rather than an influx of foreign labor was said to present a greater danger to native-born workers. “Humanity is of no caste, country, or clime,” began The Almighty Dollar, which has the Killers street gang welcoming natives and naturalized alike. One of the leaders encapsulated the gang’s ecumenical approach: “We’re all brothers when oppressed.”57
In practice, though, the Killers proved rather less tolerant. After a summer of endemic fighting among Moyamensing firemen and street gangs in 1849, members of the gang crossed fifty yards into the city proper, where they torched a tavern run by a mixed-race couple. The race riot that ensued pitted Irish Catholics from the southern suburbs against the free black community that straddled the city boundary. Lippard quickly penned a short story on the riot, which he worked into a lengthier novel, and while rejecting the romantic version of the Killers as advocates of the rights of labor, he refused to see the conflict purely in terms of internecine strife. For him, apprentices, bored young men, and a handful of the “very worst specimens of the savage of this large city” made up the gang, but at their head stood the son of a millionaire: as usual, then, Philadelphia’s moneyed elite orchestrated the mayhem.58
Beyond Lippard’s novella, little trace of the radical response to the riot remains, but in laying bare the racial as well as religious hatreds that divided the working class, the fighting presented them with another problem. In the giddy aftermath of 1848, African Americans had publicly linked the European revolutions to their own struggle for liberation, and had won praise for doing so. The California House Riot (so-called for the tavern that burnt to the ground), though, marked a return to the old pattern of race riots, where blacks who became too visible in public or crossed racial boundaries faced violent reprisals.59 Radical reformers did not know how to respond. Many, including William Elder, already had close ties to abolitionists. Antislavery activists like the feminist Lucretia Mott and African Americans Samuel Ringgold Ward and Robert Purvis spoke at Social Improvement Society meetings. Elder’s land reform club sent the black abolitionist John C. Bowers—another SIS debater—as a delegate to the National Industrial Congress in 1851.60 While Lippard and Campbell sometimes argued southern slaves were better off than northern workers, they did not mean to trivialize the sufferings of the former. Campbell’s Theory of Equality, indeed, denounced slavery in all its forms, and attacked his own Democratic Party for failing to abolish it. Lippard, like Campbell, held British abolitionists in contempt for their blindness to the evils of capitalism, but wondered how any radical could “attack Wages Slavery and be silent about Chattel Slavery.” He proudly printed mail from southern whites who accused him of belonging to the “school of Robespierre and Fourier.”61
The coincidence of sectional and social conflict forced radicals to confront slavery. In 1848, with Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot’s proposal on the table to keep slaveholders out of any land acquired from Mexico, antislavery Democrats—Kelley among them—supported the measure. Elder, a veteran Liberty Party organizer, backed the Free Soil movement, while Lippard and Campbell stumped for the Whig and Democratic nominees, respectively.62 Such political fragmentation was nothing new, but with the future of the nation at stake, radicals began to think more often about the relationship of black and white labor. Toward the end of 1850, the SIS regularly discussed the Fugitive Slave Law, and soon moved onto a series of debates—reportedly drawing large audiences—which considered whether the African race was capable of civilization. Most radicals answered in the affirmative, and over the following years, they provided a phalanx of opposition to the act: the operation of which in Philadelphia formed the backdrop to Lippard’s final, unfinished novel. Such a course ought to warn us off schematic outlines of the making of a working class committed to white supremacy, but as the California House Riot showed, radical reformers could not debate racial conflict away.63
Nativism and slavery combined to sink one of the most ambitious projects for class consolidation. In October 1850, representatives of the various trades gathered at the county courthouse to consider a plan to “free each individual from the arbitrary and oppressive rule of capital.” Though Lippard and Campbell were absent—only journeymen were allowed to participate—many of their radical associates attended, including land reformers like William J. Mullen and John Shedden. Out of the meeting emerged the trades’ assembly first mooted in 1847. Unlike its predecessor in the 1830s—the GTU—the citywide body only included skilled male workers, which left out the Irish, black, and female laboring poor. Still, its organizers aimed to build a movement culture based around cooperative enterprise, a regular paper, and a political party. By early 1851, it represented more than thirty trades.64
Cracks soon began to show. In mid-1851, when Elder’s land reform club sent the African American abolitionist Bowers to the National Industrial Congress, he had secured his seat over the protests of some members. The trades’ assembly, acting in the name of Philadelphia’s “Industrial Classes,” disclaimed any connection with Evans’s organization in disgust. Soon after, the new Workingmen’s Party nominated Kelley, a longstanding “advocate of the Rights of Labor,” as its candidate for the Court of Common Pleas. Kelley, who had just lost the Democratic nomination for his apostasy in a contested election case,