Prior to 1854, however, the street politics of the suburbs gave residents of the city proper greater cause for concern than anything that transpired at the ballot box. Conflicts over labor, race, religion, and politics all had the potential to spill over into violence. Crowd action in the city’s “turbulent era” tended to conform to one of two types. The first, more frequent but less destructive, sprang from the “sporting male subculture” of the antebellum city. Young men in the suburbs flocked to volunteer fire companies and street gangs that often reflected partisan, pietistic, or ethnic loyalties. Firemen and gangsters played a muscular role in suburban politics, and commanded neighborhood respect, but their tendency to fight each other rather than fight fires made nighttime battles with brickbats, stones, and even pistols a familiar feature of urban life.19
The second form of violence, less common but more destructive, followed long-established patterns of popular action, in which a crowd would demand redress for a particular grievance, with trouble escalating if the authorities failed to respond. Rioters chose their targets carefully, striking at African Americans (1834, 1842, and 1849), abolitionists (1836 and 1838), and political rivals (1828 and many elections thereafter), and they often got their way. When a mob reduced a new Garrisonian meeting place to a smoldering ruin within days of it opening, for instance, the city authorities blamed antislavery agitators for inciting trouble. A few years later, Moyamensing commissioners responded to a white supremacist pogrom by condemning a black temperance hall as a nuisance. Although such crowds contained plenty of the sporting male “rowdies,” who filled the ranks of fire companies and street gangs, they sometimes had “gentlemen of property and standing” at their head.20
By the early 1840s, however, wealthy Philadelphians tended to look down on mobs as counter to norms of reason and restraint, and anathema to their booster aspirations. The two riots over the summer of 1844—the biggest urban upheavals the republic had witnessed—consolidated elite opinion against the crowd. Over the preceding months, rumors circulated that Philadelphia’s Catholic bishop wanted to banish the King James Bible from the city’s public schools, and the outrage proved a valuable recruiting tool for a new political movement, the anti-immigrant American Republican Party. On May 3, and then again on May 6, the party tried to hold meetings on an open lot in the northern suburb of Kensington’s heavily Irish third ward, but on each occasion Catholics fought them off. Gathering in far greater numbers at Independence Hall on May 7, Protestants marched back to the site, where they were met with a barrage of stones, clubs, and gunfire. The fighting continued over the next two days, and once natives wrested the initiative, they torched homes and churches, forcing Irish residents to flee to nearby woods. With the rioters overwhelming Sheriff McMichael and the civil authorities, the governor reluctantly ordered the state militia onto the streets and imposed martial law (see Figure 1).21
Figure 1. The Kensington “Bible Riot” of 1844. The frequency and severity of riots in Philadelphia during the 1830s and 1840s convinced many residents in the city proper that their fate was entwined with that of the suburban districts. Source: Reprinted from A Full and Complete Account of the Late Awful Riots in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: John B. Perry, 1844). Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia.
The peace did not last long. A few weeks later, after injured veterans of the Kensington violence joined a large nativist parade on July 4, Protestants in the southern district of Southwark gathered outside the Catholic church of St. Phillippe de Neri, where the priest’s brother had secured permission to stockpile arms in self-defense. This time, the militia quickly arrested some of the ringleaders, but on July 7, a group broke into the church to search for weapons and release the prisoners. Returning to the scene, where they were met with a barrage of missiles, General George Cadwalader’s militia fired into the crowd. The volley killed two rioters, whose comrades retreated to the nearby riverfront, secured a pair of cannon, loaded them with scrap metal, and turned them on the troops. Their improvised grapeshot took out two militiamen, and over the following hours, artillery dueled on the district’s streets. At least fifteen people died in the battle.22
In scale and substance, the 1844 riots were new. Commentators called them a “civil war,” for what had begun in Kensington with the familiar spectacle of sectarian strife, concluded in Southwark with an armed battle between citizen and state.23 For the first time, both sides had used firearms; for the first time, too, militiamen had poured fire onto the crowd. Unlike earlier riots, which usually petered out once the mob had meted out punishment to a few exemplary victims, the violence persisted for days, and left the county under military rule. Martial law, for a few weeks at least, consolidated the city.
Rioters’ refusal to respect the political boundaries on the county map brought about this short-lived metropolitan union. Every major disturbance between 1828 and 1849 took place in the suburbs or on the borderlands between city and districts. The three biggest race riots occurred within about two hundred yards of one another, in an Irish and African American neighborhood that straddled the boundary between Philadelphia and the southern district of Moyamensing. But in 1844, Philadelphians could not rely on their frontier as a buffer. While the trouble in Southwark might have been contained within a few blocks, Kensington’s arsonists soon turned to targets in Philadelphia proper. Rumors circulated that every Catholic church in the county would be torched.24 Nowhere seemed safe.
Sydney captured the metropolis as a whole, but though his map gave clues about differences in government, economy, and space, his snapshot could not capture the divisions of class, color, and creed that manifested themselves in the endemic and episodic violence of the “great city.” After 1844, mapping the causes and consequences of that violence, and finding ways to end it, helped to consolidate a divided economic elite. They would come together too in searching for a way out of the commercial and financial malaise that also threatened to relegate the metropolis to the second rank. Pacifying and promoting Philadelphia required understanding what the “great city” was and determining the laws that governed its behavior.
Consolidating Class
How to prop up Philadelphia’s divided house at midcentury preoccupied citizens. What, they asked, made its foundations so unstable? When government failed to undertake the North American’s “great study,” the economic elite took on the task themselves. They did so to advertise the metropolis to outsiders, while explaining its inner workings to citizens. The maps, censuses, and sketches they produced served the twin causes of boosterism and reform, and while these objectives sometimes jarred, they each tended toward reading the metropolis as a complex but interdependent whole.
Few enlisted in the project as eagerly as Philadelphia’s press. The city’s first penny paper, the Public Ledger, boasted a midcentury circulation in the tens of thousands, though most dailies, like McMichael’s North American, catered to a far narrower audience. Though newspapers often served as party mouthpieces, even the most partisan editors claimed the higher ground of the “common good.” Publishers stood as self-appointed—and self-important—stewards of the public interest. To the Ledger, no “moral, social and political engine” proved “half so powerful as the newspaper press.”25
Their power knocked down municipal walls. Proprietors had good reason to portray their city as a whole. Claiming the entirety of Sydney’s map as their purview enabled them to sell to the growing suburban market and portray the picaresque world of the outlying districts for citizens of the city proper. It also increased circulation further afield, where merchants relied on East Coast papers for commercial knowledge. In the golden age of local boosterism, the commitment of men like McMichael to the cause rivaled their