In Union There Is Strength. Andrew Heath

the second half of 1851, his ardent internationalism still had its adherents. That summer, radicals fighting for land reform, laborers’ rights, and equal exchanges declared that with the “world being our country, it is hoped that all nations will flock around our standard.” A few months later, the rump of the trades’ assembly expelled a group of nativists who had come to the meeting to solicit support for their ticket. But Kelley’s candidacy still split the party.⁶⁵

      In the thick of the debate over immigration and slavery, Campbell, who had recently been described as a “brawling abolitionist,” redrew the boundaries of the producing class to exclude African Americans. Barred (to his evident displeasure) from the assembly, and finding diminishing returns from his attempts to rally workers to his banner with Theory of Equality, he changed tack. His allies at the NIC had walked out after the admission of the black delegate Bowers, and in a letter copied to the negrophobic New York Herald, he explained to the congress why he backed them. His objections partly derived from racist pseudoscience. “The negro is inferior to the white,” he argued, and any association between the two would act to the detriment of the latter. But he also pointed to tactical considerations. Admitting an African American would “array all the prejudices of ninetynine hundredths of the whites against the cause of land reform,” he insisted; and after twenty years of working to “emancipate labor,” he refused to sacrifice his cause on the altar of racial equality when it had finally acquired “national importance.” “It behooves us to act wisely,” he concluded, “and not permit any element introduced among us which may either distract or divide us.”⁶⁶

      Campbell was being disingenuous, for with nativism on the rise and his own Irish roots leaving him vulnerable, race was no longer a distraction for him but rather the foundation of his project for white working-class consolidation. He accused British abolitionists of trying to destroy the Union and argued their wealthy American allies turned a blind eye to wage slavery.⁶⁷ When the Philadelphia trades’ assembly endorsed his stand against integration at the NIC, he must have taken heart, and over the summer of 1851, he cribbed together Negro-mania, a hastily edited compendium of ethnology inspired by the SIS debates on race. While the book veered wildly, Campbell tried to show that the only racial boundary that mattered lay between black and white. Chillingly, he concluded, Pennsylvania had to rid itself of its free people of color by “colonization or otherwise.” Campbell, though, built his white supremacist ideology on the foundations of antebellum radicalism. For radicals like Lippard, the conviction that nonproducers lived off the fruits of others’ labor had provided a bedrock for an emancipatory politics, but when Campbell made it bear the sophistry of racial science, he claimed that idle freedpeople would impose an impossible burden on white workers. He therefore exiled blacks beyond the borders of his producers’ republic.⁶⁸

      But Campbell’s project of class consolidation, which aimed to overcome the divide between Protestant and Catholic and unite white producers around threats from below as well as above, did not work.⁶⁹ The Trades’ Assembly could not overcome the divisions between nativists and their critics, while Campbell’s about-turn fractured radical unity. Surveying the wreckage, Elder (who Campbell had confronted at an abolitionist meeting) complained of the “frequent and flagrant apostacies from principle in the ranks of allies which the friends of Liberty relied upon with the greatest assurance.” “In truth,” he said of the immigrant working class, “it is the great problem of labor, its relations to capital, or the system of property, that occupies these people. Bring them a system of rights and remedies in this interest, and they will listen.” For him, only a political movement that could unite the interests of black and white workers would win support, and three years later, he joined the new Republican Party, in which he became one of the strongest advocates of the “harmony of interests” doctrine in Philadelphia.⁷⁰ Over the course of the 1850s, indeed, figures like Elder came to embrace a different kind of class consolidation: not one that united a bourgeoisie or proletariat, but one that associated labor and capital.

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      Lippard did not join this movement himself. When radicalism splintered, he continued to build his Brotherhood and remained active in the national struggle for land reform, even as he lamented the “want of unity and organization” in the movement.⁷¹ His consolidationist convictions had not faded. When the storm of counterrevolution and sectional strife rained down on Europe and America after 1848, Lippard sought shelter in association. Assailing the agitators who were trying to prize the republic apart, he praised the “Thirty United Nations” that made up his country as “a type of perfect Brotherhood,” which would eventually embrace “not only the inhabitants of the American continent, but the vast Family of Man.” “We love the Union,” he proclaimed, and “there is not an evil now in existence, that cannot better be reformed with the Union, than without the Union.” Lippard had no intention of compromising with slaveholders—“we abhor with the same hatred the White Slavery of the North, and the Black Slavery of the South,” he declared—but for all its faults, his nation remained the last, best hope on Earth.⁷²

      Lippard’s unionism transposed easily to the urban form. His writing on the metropolis may have emphasized its divisions—“Philadelphia is manifold,” he once wrote—but he saw bonds of interdependence holding it together. Following the lead of the Consolidators who had demanded a union of the city and districts on the same night as the theater e´ meute, he too called for overriding the lines on the municipal map. Philadelphia needed “ONE City, under ONE government, and under ONE code of municipal laws,” proclaimed the Quaker City in 1849. But it was not enough to redraw political boundaries. The metropolis required a thorough social reconstruction: it had to house its apprentices, reform its theaters, and purge sin from the “purlieus of the city.” Moreover, voters must overthrow the “petty Oligarchy” of twenty or thirty families who held the reins of power, and restore control to good citizens.⁷³ To consolidate Philadelphia, then, Monk Hall had to be torn down, and a model republic erected on its ruins. His city, Union, and world awaited the redemptive labor of social reconstruction.