had to stand together regardless of social status. They had to stand together too regardless of where they lived and worked, for the riots offered a sanguinary lesson in metropolitan interdependence. In targeting creed rather than color, the mobs of 1844 proved less discriminating than usual. “It appears that though this was a riot against the Catholics,” one writer noted, “the loss has also fallen heavily upon Protestant owners and tenants of property.”51 The “infected districts,” as they quickly came to be known, may have stood in turbulent suburbs, but violence, like the epidemics that visited the antebellum city, proved hard to quarantine.52 And strangers in distant markets paid no more heed to the lines on the county map than the rioters. As a result, the Ledger wrote of the city and districts in 1844, “all the parts suffer for the wrongs committed by one of them.”53
Yet measured in economic terms, interdependence had its merits. The 1844 riots coincided with a long-awaited upturn in the city’s fortunes. Suburban manufacturing, citizens assumed, had to play a leading role in any recovery. In the 1820s and 1830s, merchants invested heavily in developing the vast anthracite reserves of northern Pennsylvania, and the coal coursing into Philadelphia along canals and railroads fueled expansion. The city lacked an equivalent of the Boston Associates, but men from commercial backgrounds, like Merrick and Wood, branched into industry, while others lent to capital-hungry factory owners. Even in the 1830s, relations between the mechanics’ Franklin Institute and the merchants’ Board of Trade were cooperative rather than competitive. Members of both organizations broadly agreed on the need for a high tariff, a national bank, and government-sponsored internal improvements; and Frederick Fraley, a lawyer who later played a leading role in the Consolidation campaign, served as an officer on both bodies. Manufacturers may have lacked the social cachet of the largest merchants, but as the city fell further behind New York in the race for foreign trade, they became all the more important. With a national debate over protection raging in 1845, the Board of Trade stooped to notice manufacturing for the first time, announcing that “imperfect statistics” showed an advance in the city’s industry, “which has astonished those whose attention has not been particularly called to this subject.”54 Over the next few years, the claim that Philadelphia would serve as the workshop of the New World became an article of dogma in promoters’ creed.
How to preach that to the world vexed boosters. Philadelphia, they complained, had proved inept at “making her position and greatness … known.” The Board of Trade blamed the city and commonwealth’s destructive self-deprecation.55 Such modesty probably owed less to Quaker humility than it did to New York’s networks of finance, commerce, and publishing. Lingering resentment in Europe at Pennsylvania’s default in 1842—which prompted William Wordsworth (a self-described “Surly Creditor”) to pen a bitter sonnet on the state’s “degenerate men”—hardly helped either. Others blamed the “insufficient experience” and “limited information” of leaders in city government. But whatever the cause, the sense that strangers in distant markets saw Philadelphia as a “speck on the horizon” spurred schemes to market the metropolis, which ranged from lobbying diplomats to dispatching lecturers across the Atlantic.56
Boosters needed evidence to make their claims credible. “The friends of Philadelphia,” one writer complained in the late 1850s, “have not been furnished with facts” to counteract the “prejudicial statements” of rival cities. In an Atlantic World shaped by Enlightenment rationalism, ostensibly objective data offered a firmer foundation for decision-making than mere opinion, and numbers had the power to sway. To McMichael’s North American, indeed, statistics offered “the basis of various useful speculations regarding the influences that affect the material and moral fortunes of society.”57 Bitter experience strengthened the statistician’s hand. The boom and bust in the mid-1830s, when speculators poured paper money into imaginary cities, left investors in Europe and the United States wary of acting without credible information. To take on New York, Philadelphians needed to arm themselves with abstractions of metropolitan might. They therefore set out to map urban manufacturing.
In doing so, boosters ran into many of the same obstacles that obstructed a wider “great study” of Philadelphia. Production proved much harder to measure than commerce: goods were often consumed before they could be counted, and factories were dispersed across the city. Manufacturers, moreover, rarely wanted to open their books to rivals, workers, and tax assessors. A Statistical Society, formed in 1846 to investigate the city’s industry, “suddenly evaporated” a year later when workshop owners ignored its request for information. But the Board of Trade, Franklin Institute, and leading newspapers took up the baton, calling on the municipal authorities to follow New York’s lead and conduct a census that would measure the “social civilization of a community.” Following the union of city and districts in 1854, however, the North American was still having to urge Philadelphians to “consolidate our statistics.”58
The refusal of the new city government to act led to a renewal of associational efforts. With support from the Board of Trade, the Corn Exchange, and a handful of businessmen, boosters hired Edwin T. Freedley to write a lengthy book on the city’s manufactures, which they distributed to western markets. Freedley had published a self-help manual for aspiring capitalists, explaining “How to Become Millionaires,” and the book’s popularity either side of the Atlantic probably convinced his backers in Philadelphia that he was the man to popularize their cause. Learning from the “numerous attempts” over the preceding decade to undertake an industrial census, Freedley shunned statistics and relied instead on his conversations with experts in the trades he encountered as he surveyed suburban districts. Much of his lengthy compendium therefore offered overviews of the city’s various industries, and the final product, as he put it, provided “a readable exhibit” rather than a definitive statement of the city’s productive might. Its utility to boosters, though, was clear enough: the first third of the manuscript used general principles and particular examples to demonstrate Philadelphia’s destiny as the first manufacturing city of the continent. Like so much city knowledge, the book was as much about foreseeing the future as mapping the present.59
Freedley’s amalgam of company biographies and booster prophecy ran counter to the tale of decay and disorder that came out of the depression. Philadelphia and Its Manufactures passed over the riots in a couple of sentences, and rather than linger on the violence, it enlisted producerism and patriotism in the service of the economic elite. Borrowing from the rhetorical arsenal of Jacksonian Democracy, which just a few years earlier had been aimed at Chestnut Street’s Second Bank, it claimed that Penn’s metropolis rested on productive labor, the true foundation of wealth. The implied contrast between manufacturing Philadelphia and commercial New York may have been overdrawn, but it fulfilled a valuable purpose: again and again after 1844, boosters pointed to historical precedent to show that trading marts never dominated for long, and that, as Freedley argued, industry was “more important in every truly national point of view than Foreign Trade.” By placing their metropolis ahead of its great rival in terms of historical progress, boosters reframed Philadelphia’s space and society, as riotous suburbs became heralds of an industrial future rather than vestiges of a barbarous past.60
Marketing the metropolis fostered institutional integration too among the economic elite. The short-lived Statistical Society brought successful manufacturers like Matthias W. Baldwin into contact with leading merchants. Industrialists, though, remained outside the mercantile Board of Trade. By 1854, after the North American demanded “a practical social union” of merchants and manufacturers, the organization discussed opening its doors to factory owners, which it did three years later. For McMichael, this corrected a grave error. The Board, his paper charged, had failed to represent “the diversified business interests of the community,” and as a result, myopic individualism inhibited “combination.” Given that “every man takes pleasure in the elevation of the social class to which he belongs,” it argued, businessmen needed a “habitual resort.” The revamped organization would open a reading room, collect statistics, and “disseminate useful knowledge,” enabling bourgeois Philadelphians to act in association.61
Despite
