economic might and bringing merchants and manufacturers together. They did not deny the differences between the city proper and outlying suburbs, but rather implied that both had their place in a metropolitan division of labor with the interests of capital in each mediated through associated bodies: the Statistical Society, the Board of Trade, and—in the ambitions of Consolidators—a government with greater reach. As a way of selling the city and promoting social intercourse among the economic elite, their methods were fit for purpose.
On the pressing matter of disorder, though, they had understandably little to say. Boosters’ portrait of prosperous manufacturing suburbs offered a welcome antidote to depictions of a violent suburban frontier. But the two could not be separated so easily. Kensington and Southwark’s rioters in 1844 had not taken to the streets as a working-class, but they came from heavily working-class districts, and if Philadelphia’s destiny lay in industry, then the men and women who made up mobs would surely multiply in number. Promoters would need to find a way to consolidate suburban labor as well as capital into the urban community.
Surveying the Suburban Frontier
In the immediate aftermath of 1844, though, only a few radical reformers read the riots as a symptom of a coming conflict between labor and capital. As we will see, Philadelphia’s radicals blamed the violence on a corrupt social system, and accused an idle aristocracy of stirring up sectarian strife. Though bourgeois citizens sometimes compared the street battles to the French Revolution, few believed that the city’s industrial transformation led directly to the trouble, and even the pessimistic Fisher doubted whether the upheavals he witnessed really mirrored European experience. Why, he wondered, had trouble broken out “in a country where the usual causes of popular tumult do not exist”? Forgetting his usual fine gradations of rank, Fisher fell back here on the most common explanation from the time, dividing citizens into friends or foes of order. Attacks on Catholics, blacks, and employers, he argued, were merely the manifestations of “the growing spirit of misrule.”62 Disorder for him sprang from the disintegrative influence of democracy rather than of capitalism. It would take another wave of European revolutions in 1848 for the two to conjoin in studies of the city.
Yet bourgeois observers did see suburban disorder as part of a wider crisis of social discipline. While that crisis extended into the workplace, its roots lay elsewhere. Philadelphia’s manufacturers, like their counterparts across the industrializing world, struggled to impose time and work discipline on laborers accustomed to the rhythms of preindustrial life.63 To maximize returns, they experimented with the likes of wage labor, piece rates, and new managerial structures.64 But the challenge of controlling labor within workshops was made harder by the changes that had taken place outside them. The problem seemed to spring from the prizing apart of work and home. As factories slowly superseded household production, masters’ power over apprentices waned, freeing young men to enjoy the city’s taverns, fire companies, and street gangs. Here, rioting could seem like a generational revolt, albeit one made possible by the new social geography of the industrial city. Commentators who noted mobs’ youthful character blamed a want of discipline at home and work. Trouble sprang from “the lamentable neglect of domestic training of the young,” one citizen wrote, for “neglected youths” formed the “nucleus around which mobs gather.” Cities, as an evangelical put it in 1841, allowed the nation’s young “to throw off parental restraints.”65
Reformers looked to refasten the shackles. In the Southwark riot, wealthy citizens urged “heads of families and masters” to “keep their young men and boys at home during the prevailing excitement.” Baldwin banned young men in his factory from joining fire companies. Others suggested that restoring apprenticeship offered a better solution to disorder than centralizing projects like a citywide police or government. Incapable of intervening in disorderly suburbs themselves, they imagined devolving power to respectable heads of household, rather than consolidating control in a strengthened bureaucracy.66
More often, though, the city’s economic elite attempted to establish vantage points to survey and reform the suburban poor. Manufacturers, who had played a supporting role when “respectable” citizens rallied against the rioters, came to the fore, creating a network of institutions that aimed to impose moral order on the districts. These associations—part of antebellum reformers’ “benevolent empire”—were often led by evangelical and Quaker industrialists. They proved particularly influential in the Philadelphia Society for the Employment and Instruction of the Poor (PSEIP). William J. Mullen—an erstwhile radical who, like many of his comrades in the General Trades’ Union, had embraced evangelical Protestantism after the Panic of 1837—formed the society with the suburban iron founder Merrick just two years after the riots. They set themselves up in Moyamensing, the poorest and most violent of Philadelphia’s satellites and one that lacked the industrial base of neighboring Southwark. Donors and managers included several of the wealthiest manufacturers below the city proper. But in contrast to New York, where a similar institution was an industrialist stronghold, the mercantile and professional elite were well represented too. Supporters and managers included several Proper Philadelphian names, the Board of Trade president Cope, and the attorney and Consolidation leader Eli Kirk Price. Like the Statistical Society, then, the organization brought different branches of the economic elite into closer communion, though this time with the object of saving rather than selling the city.67
Mullen and Merrick’s society prescribed manufacturing as a medicine for Moyamensing’s ills in much the same way as boosters recommended it as tonic for the whole city. Following a transatlantic trend that stretched back to the 1820s, the association argued “indiscriminate almsgiving” encouraged dependence and burdened taxpayers, not least as the cost of poor relief fell on the whole county. The idle needed to be put to work and that required distinguishing between the worthy and unworthy pauper; a later proposal even suggested that employers furnish a central committee with a list of the laborers they had laid off in hard times to sort the unlucky from the work-shy. Here was benevolence with a hard edge.68
The Society’s “general plan” in Moyamensing suggests how bourgeois citizens envisaged incorporating a supposedly wild and worthless frontier as a productive part of a manufacturing metropolis. Aiming to get near to the “very centre of destitution,” the managers began work in 1848 on a House of Industry, just below the notorious Bedford Street (see Figure 5), and opposite a market house said to double as the den of a riotous gang, the Killers. In the new building, designed by the architect of the Capitol, Thomas U. Walter, able-bodied paupers sewed rags and crushed bones. Reformers linked such “employment” to the “moral and intellectual improvement” of their inmates. On the shop floor, managers believed, “vicious and squalid vagrants will be lured to lives of industry and virtue,” while the children who “ran wild” despite living in a “civilized city” would be reformed. Such a systematic approach to poverty sought to reconstruct character as much as to provide relief.69
In the years after the riots, new philanthropic institutions colonized the suburbs. Soup kitchens, workhouses, and domestic missions sprang up over the following decade. During the hard winter of 1855, a sharp economic downturn, which all but emptied the treasury of the Union Benevolent Association, led Horace Binney, McMichael, Merrick, and several other veterans of efforts to suppress rioters and reform paupers to propose bringing public and private relief under one organization. The report they commissioned calling for a “consolidation of charities”—a measure that would have predated London’s influential Charity Organization Society by fourteen years—was coauthored by the future financier of the Union war effort and devout Presbyterian Jay Cooke. Though the plan secured support from the North American, amalgamating state, secular, sectarian, and ecumenical institutions proved impossible. It nevertheless represented an extraordinary proposal for a bourgeois seizure of the city’s entire welfare apparatus.70
Legibility mattered as much for the economic elite in their philanthropic interventions as it did for their business investments. The want of “accurate statistics” of “missionary labor,” McMichael’s paper complained,
