A Divided City
J. C. Sydney’s richly detailed 1849 cartography of the city hinted at Philadelphia’s divisions. Like most maps from the 1830s onward, it portrayed the entirety of the built-up metropolis.6 Philadelphia had grown phenomenally over preceding decades, but with land scarce in the center, the population pushed outward to the metropolitan frontier. Between 1820 and 1850, the inhabitants of the two-square–mile “city proper” nearly doubled from 63,802 to 121,376. The rest of the county, however, expanded almost fourfold to close to three hundred thousand. Yet as builders transformed farmland into streets, houses, and workshops, the boundaries of the two-square–mile city proper stayed fixed at their seventeenth-century limits, and by 1850, the boroughs and districts marked off by thick lines on Sydney’s map included several of the largest municipalities in the United States. Spring Garden, the Northern Liberties, and Kensington, all north of the city center, ranked ninth, eleventh, and twelfth, respectively, in the nation in the midcentury census, with Southwark and Moyamensing to the south not far behind. Each of these subdivisions were more or less self-governing, and prior to 1850, only the Board of Health and county officers like the sheriff had metropolitan-wide powers. For most common functions of municipal government—maintaining order, regulating streets and markets, providing gas and water—the districts had independent jurisdiction. Sydney showed a city that looked like a miniature of the Holy Roman Empire.7
Advocates of municipal consolidation between 1844 and 1854 called these boundaries “imaginary lines,” but the city proper and its suburban offspring had been growing apart for decades.8 If it is easy to romanticize the “unity of everyday life” in the late colonial era, it is because the city could be traversed on foot, and differences of rank and status were more evident within households than across neighborhoods. The slow death of bound labor and the quick march of the Market Revolution, however, pushed the city outward and redrew its social geography. At midcentury, burgeoning suburbs varied in character, yet in general were poorer, more prone to disorder, and more dynamic than a center that had stagnated since the Panic of 1837.9
By the 1840s, the failure of the merchants of the city proper to arrest their decline as a national force had begun to tilt the economic balance of power toward the suburbs too, even if wealth continued to congregate in the center. For some time after 1787, Philadelphia remained the nation’s foremost foreign port, but New York’s superior harbor and Erie Canal enabled it to overhaul its rival. In the 1820s, Philadelphia boosters persuaded the Commonwealth to build its own route to the West, but the canals and railroads of the Main Line of State Works failed to deliver the promised benefits. The city’s fortunes waned in finance too. Andrew Jackson’s Bank War hurt Chestnut Street’s institutions, which were then hit by panics in 1837 and 1841, the latter compounded by the state’s default on its internal improvement debt. The crises saw Philadelphia lose $40 million in banking capital. One booster, surveying the wreckage from midcentury, compared the events to a “volcano” or “earthquake.”10
While commerce and finance in the city proper declined, however, suburban manufacturing prospered. An ample supply of skilled and unskilled labor, power in the form of nearby anthracite coal, and a prosperous hinterland market spurred growth. In the suburbs, though, industry developed unevenly, creating a mixed metropolitan landscape in both scale and organization. Take for instance the two riot districts in 1844: Kensington and Southwark. In the western portion of the former, where Irish handloom weavers were fighting a rearguard action against mechanization, masters either put out work or consolidated production in small workshops; large mills were the exception rather than the rule. The district commissioner Hugh Clark was the wealthiest man in the vicinity, but the fortune he accumulated from the weavers’ labor paled in comparison to industrialists elsewhere in the county.11
Southwark’s iron manufacturers, in contrast, built big factories from the 1830s onward. On the block below Fourth and Washington, Sydney’s map showed the sizeable foundry co-owned by Samuel Vaughan Merrick, a leader in the Consolidation movement. Philadelphia’s typical manufacturer, if such a thing existed, looked more like the boss weaver Clark than the iron founder Merrick, and as most workshops only employed a dozen or so hands, proprietors often worked on the shop floor. Even some of the most prosperous proprietors like the Spring Garden locomotive builder Matthias W. Baldwin—a former jeweler who left his Market Street premises for a vast suburban lot—often started off as apprentices themselves.12
If Philadelphia’s transformation into a manufacturing metropolis was well underway in the outlying districts by the 1840s, the pace and character of industrialization varied. Handloom weavers eked out a living from a preindustrial craft, while confronting the pressure of factory competition. Locomotive builders, on the other hand, owed their prosperity to the revolutionary technology of the era: the steam engine. Yet even these businesses—heralds of a new age rather than vestiges of handicraft production—were organized as proprietorships rather than business corporations, and employed skilled native labor, instead of assembly-line hands. The most common suburban workers, meanwhile, were neither artisans nor operatives, but laborers, stevedores, and servants. Irish immigrants and African Americans often found themselves forced into these poorly paid positions.13
Unskilled workers in both the city proper and suburbs tended to find shelter in the other divide discernible on Sydney’s map: the interstices of the city’s seventeenth-century grid. At a glance, Philadelphia looked far from opaque, as square after square stretched outward over the suburbs and into open countryside. Sydney’s straight lines of unbuilt streets, reaching miles into the outlying county, provided a reference point for real estate developers and a prophecy of how the city would subdue its rural frontier.14 But in Philadelphia’s built-up districts, where Sydney captured present conditions rather than future prospects, the grid struck visitors, and not always favorably. The British visitor Frances Trollope conceded the plan made the metropolis “commodious to strangers,” yet disliked its “almost wearisome regularity.”15 Dullness may have been the price of legibility. Indeed, James C. Scott, one of the most perceptive writers on modern statecraft, contrasts William Penn’s transparent layout to inscrutable medieval towns.16
Initial impressions, though, can deceive. Looked at more closely, Sydney’s map revealed the division of rectangular blocks into lanes, alleys, and courts, especially along the southern borderlands of the city proper. The practice was almost as old as Philadelphia itself, for while Penn—who grew up in a London ravaged by plague and fire—is often said to have pictured a “greene country towne” of evenly spaced houses, his settlers clung to the Delaware front. Responding to demand, landowners cut small streets through their property, which soon led to a distinct pattern of segregation: wealthier residents took houses on the main thoroughfares, while the poor clustered in claustrophobic warrens behind. In the city proper, this produced pockets of poverty hidden from the fashionable promenader; in the suburbs, it created neighborhoods known as early as the 1850s as slums.17
City and districts, streets and alleys: on the six plates of Sydney’s map, the cartographer captured the metropolis as a whole, while hinting at its divisions. Those with the leisure time to move through its neighborhoods would have read in Sydney’s lines and symbols the boundaries between wealth and poverty, commerce and industry, and virtue and vice, but no one would have experienced it all. Claims that the city was unknowable could therefore be read as a boast or a lament. On the one hand, they conveyed Philadelphia’s vastness; but on the other, they conceded the difficulty of comprehending something so big.
Philadelphia’s political geography proved easier to plot. Partisan boundaries proved far from impermeable, but citizens in the city proper tended to gravitate toward the pro-Bank Whigs, while suburban journeymen and laborers rallied in sufficient numbers to the Democratic flag to give that party control of most of the outlying districts prior