where physical decay threatened a similar malaise. Even evangelicals eager to close down taverns conceded that sound family life was all but impossible in “pent-up courts and alleys.” Filth caused more than fever: it corroded the moral fiber of the metropolis.81
The link between urban disorder, disease, and degradation made the physical condition of Philadelphia’s suburbs a matter of concern for prosperous residents of the city proper. Some went so far as to embrace a rigid environmental determinism. A prize-winning essay submitted to the House of Refuge in 1855 argued that a child “from the most luxurious palace and most refined family,” if forced to work in a filthy factory and “retire to a dirty, offensive court,” would struggle to “resist the demoralizing influences” surrounding him. “All these abide together,” the author said of poverty, intemperance, brutality, and crime, and “vice is produced, directly, by impure air.” Those who wanted to purge the city of sin would have to reconstruct space as well as save souls.82
Such moral environmentalism focused minds on metropolitan interdependence. Neighborhoods were harder to quarantine than ships. Pestilence spawned in filthy “cellars and garrets,” one paper warned in the 1850s, threatened to “decimate alike the high and low.” With city life “a singular sodality,” a reformer had observed a few years earlier, the citizen should not “flatter himself that he is segregated” from evil influences “in person or property.” Moral and physical epidemics paid no more heed than rioters to district boundaries.83
Institutions that mapped the suburban frontier helped to popularize these ideas about environment, health, and moral order. Mullen’s society saw its workhouse as a refuge from the street. “The comparative comfort which its inmates found themselves to enjoy while leading lives of order, cleanliness and temperance,” the managers argued in their 1848 report, disposed “their minds to receive moral instruction.” The practice of isolating people from corrupting influences had a long history in Philadelphia. Eastern State Penitentiary, which received its first inmate in 1829, cut convicts off from the world beyond their cells, and calls for returning apprentices to the homes of master craftsmen in the aftermath of the riots amounted to a milder dose of the same medicine. Even the humane judge and future Radical Republican William D. Kelley admitted in 1849 that the city’s House of Refuge shared with prisons the ethos of secluding “inmates from society.” Philadelphia’s institutional landscape at midcentury reflected assumptions about the corrupting nature of the urban environment. Penitentiaries, schools, and workhouses each removed citizens from the immoral streets beyond.84
The limitations of this policy, though, were self-evident: to quarantine the entire population would bring the city to a standstill, halting the flow of people and goods through the streets. By the early 1850s, new plans circulated, championed first and foremost by McMichael’s North American, and closely tied to the project of Consolidation. These envisaged reconstructing Philadelphia’s savage suburbs as cathartic spaces, capable of nurturing peaceful, productive, and healthy citizens, rather than riotous, idle, and sickly ones.
The Limits of Consolidation
Either side of midcentury, bourgeois citizens sought to understand how their city worked and where they belonged within it. Through statistics, social surveys, maps, and comparisons, they explored Philadelphia’s present conditions and future prospects. In counting the cost of riots and the potential of manufacturing, they began to incorporate a suburban frontier into their imagined community. Their efforts brought together branches of the economic elite and forged alliances with evangelicals and newspapermen.
Though shaken by the experience of disorder and decline, few were as pessimistic about democracy’s place in the city as Fisher, yet plenty doubted whether Jacksonian politics were thrusting the right men to the fore. Many of those who came of age in the troubles of the 1840s led a series of bourgeois-dominated reform movements over the following decades that attacked corruption, pushed for Consolidation, and eventually invoked the professional authority of “social science” against the might of the city’s postbellum Republican machine.
Yet the terms of the suburbs’ consolidation with the city remained contested. With only a few exceptions, bourgeois Philadelphians backed the militia’s assault on the crowd in Southwark, but they were well aware that relying on citizen soldiers to police the streets proved neither practical nor popular. In an 1838 riot, for instance, men in a militia company, fearing they were about to be ordered to fire on the crowd, had requested leave to bake bread. General George Cadwalader received threats after his men did train cannon on a mob in 1844. With only a few watchmen and constables scattered through the districts, though, a civilian police force barely existed. Fugitives could flee the law by crossing municipal borders. The months that followed the riots saw intense debate over how to impose order. Some advocated a permanent armed force; others warned of aping the “martial despotism” of the Old World.85
Enlarging the terrain of the civil authorities, though, offered a plausible republican alternative. On November 11, 1844, just months after the summer’s violence, a group of Philadelphians assembled at the county courthouse to plea for a union of the city and its outlying districts. The chair of the meeting, Samuel Webb, had counted the cost of riots before. An antislavery Quaker, he helped organize the construction of Pennsylvania Hall, which a proslavery mob torched within days of its opening in 1838. Worried that a “scattered, sub-divided and sectioned” system of metropolitan government could not protect public order, these pioneering Consolidators called for political boundaries to correspond to what was “in reality but one city and one community.” The meeting marked the first stirrings of a decade-long campaign.86
That it took ten years to consolidate the city appears surprising. A measure promising to extend the city’s authority over turbulent suburbs seemed likely to win considerable support from an economic elite horrified by the summer’s riots, and several merchants and attorneys attended the November meeting. Much as Baron Haussmann would do in 1860, when he extended Paris’s police control outward “to gain mastery over a ceinture sauvage,” advocates of Consolidation focused on the problem of public order. They did not blame religion, democracy, parenting, rum, or environment for the violence, but the city’s political geography. To the Ledger, the “egregious error of dividing and subdividing” had cost the population its “homogenous character.” From this initial mistake, the city’s “unseen divisions” had become the “real divisions of sentiment and action.” Consolidating a new metropolis across those arbitrary lines would nourish the “alliances,” “common interests,” and “common feelings” on which any republic had to rest. This was the nineteenth-century language of nationalism applied to the metropolis.87
Soon, however, a powerful anti-Federalist movement coalesced. Within a few days of the courthouse gathering, many of the city proper’s prominent citizens organized against Consolidation. At their head stood the attorney Horace Binney, who had led the meeting of gentleman in the Southwark riots, but feared the costs of civic union. Others worried about absorbing district debts and having to bankroll their improvements. Even Thomas Pym Cope, who supported Consolidation in principle, feared that the city “will not be met on fair & liberal terms.” When Pennsylvania defaulted on its debt in 1842, Philadelphia had suffered for being part of a larger whole, and the economic elite were reluctant to risk further financial chaos.88
But critics of Consolidation cared about more than dollars and cents. They also feared that a hastily arranged marriage between the Whig center and Democratic suburbs would bring little domestic harmony. The Court House meeting drew natives, Whigs, and abolitionists, but leaned Democratic, with suburban party leaders and wealthy supporters from the city in the audience. To Fisher, who equated the Democrats’ rank and file with Jacobins, political concerns explained bourgeois opposition. “The chief objection to the proposed plan is one which cannot be insisted on publicly,” he confided in his diary. While “the city is conservative, the districts are radical.”89 Couched in more euphemistic tones, his argument would become a central
