those who favored strong, active local government, and those who believed such a centralization of power would threaten their property and political authority.
Opponents questioned the unionist claims of the urban expansionists. Where Consolidators, echoing nineteenth-century nationalism, stressed the need to overcome sectional interests for the good of the metropolitan whole, their critics embraced subdivision as a natural byproduct of republican rule. “The districts are distinct from the city and from one another, in the character, pursuits and interests of the people who compose them,” argued one correspondent to the Pennsylvanian, “and government ought in all cases, to grow out of natural combination, and be the expression of actual, social distinctions.” “It is not democracy; it is not federalism; it is centralization,” the writer insisted. These themes recurred in the anti-Consolidation movement’s memorial to the legislature. The remonstrance pointed to the advantages of fragmentation, “where the interest of a part was different from the whole.” The wisdom of past precedent stood in stark contrast to proposals for an enlarged city. “There never was embraced within the same limits a greater conflict and opposition of interests,” the memorialists protested. One opponent of annexation a few years later even warned of amalgamation, evoking the fear of racial mixing that fueled rioters’ rage at Pennsylvania Hall.90
For all the evidence of interdependence the riots had offered, the union of city and suburbs still seemed unnatural. When the state legislature met in Harrisburg in January 1845, it rejected the Consolidation bill in favor of a proposal to improve the county police. Even that act, however, did not tinker with the city’s political boundaries. Ordering each district to maintain one policeman for every one hundred and fifty taxables, the new law sought to nip riots in the bud, without providing for cooperation across municipal boundaries.91 For Consolidators, such a limited measure was never likely to be enough, but in 1845, the reform’s wealthier backers found themselves in a minority even among their own class. To unite Philadelphia, they would have to heal their rift with prominent citizens, and persuade them that an interdependent metropolis needed one government.
* * *
As Consolidation’s opponents in Philadelphia were winning the battle to prevent the enlargement of their city in February 1845, Congress approved the annexation of Texas. Fisher, who wrote to the United States Gazette against a scheme he believed would end the “separate existence”92 of the city proper, had pondered the previous year the prospect of national dissolution: “A Union between two people who, in fact, in all important characteristics are broadly contrasted, must be a weak one…. In such a country there can be no strong national feeling, no sentiment of identity, none of the thousand ties formed by a community of origin, recollections, hopes, objects, interests & manners, which make the idea of country sacred & dear. Such a Union is one of interest merely, a paper bond, to be torn asunder by a burst of passion or to be deliberately undone whenever interest demands it.”93
Fisher’s prescient words closely resembled the case against Consolidation: they hint at how the political construction of city and nation stood on similar foundations. Indeed, over the next decade, sectional conflict often shaped debates over municipal union. Questions about the wisdom of incorporating a population that looked very different to the prosperous Protestants of the city proper would recur just as they did with the annexation of Mexico. So too would concerns over whether a union divided by party, class, and creed could ever hold together. This, then, was the question that the “great study” had to answer: How could a metropolis made up of such manifestly different parts ever associate as one?
CHAPTER 2
“The Guilty and Blood-Stained City”
Radicals and the Second American Republic
On the evening of November 11, 1844, Philadelphians on their way to the Consolidation meeting at the county courthouse might have hurried past a crowd outside Chestnut Street Theater. The people had gathered to protest the cancellation of the premiere of George Lippard’s “The Monks of Monk Hall.” Lippard had adapted the play from serialized extracts of his scandalous novel, The Quaker City, a thinly veiled attack on Philadelphia’s bourgeoisie. Its main target was the merchant Singleton Mercer—a relative and namesake of a wealthy supporter of the Philadelphia Society for the Employment and Instruction of the Poor (PSEIP)—whom a jury had recently acquitted of murdering his sister’s seducer. The prospect of the affair being played out on the stage so troubled Mercer that he reputedly purchased three hundred tickets with the intention of distributing them to arson-happy Southwark “rowdies.” In a city the mob had torched twice during the preceding months, the rumor sufficiently unnerved the mayor for him to bar the performance from proceeding. This brought Lippard’s admirers out in force, and “for hours,” a newspaper reported, “there was every appearance of a destructive outbreak.” The “emeute,” as one journal (borrowing a term that evoked revolutionary violence in France) called the incident, no doubt focused Consolidators’ minds as they met a few hundred yards down the street.1
Chestnut Street Theater that night avoided the fate meted out a few months before to Catholic churches. For Lippard, though, the affair provided another example of wealth arraying itself against the people. Critics might have dismissed the twenty-two-year-old as “a mere boy” with an effervescent “spleen,” but the author defended his writing as a way to “delimate principles.”2 The Quaker City in this regard provided a cartography of Philadelphia’s present and a prophecy of its future that traced the terrain of a corrupt elite. Where bourgeois citizens saw danger in the miasmas emanating from the courts and alleys of working-class suburbs, then, Lippard argued the real “mysteries” of Philadelphia lay behind the facades of the mansions that lined the main streets. Conspiracies hatched in the drawing rooms and clubhouses of the rich impoverished the real producers of the city’s wealth.
Throughout the Atlantic World in the mid-nineteenth-century, radicals joined businessmen, reformers, and governments in trying to comprehend the workings of the new metropolis. Radicals like Lippard shared boosters’ conviction that the age of the “great city” had arrived, and that Philadelphia had more in common with a London, Paris, or Manchester, than with provincial American towns. But from this common point, the knowledge they produced diverged. Bourgeois surveyors sought to mold the discordant phenomena of urban life into a coherent whole with discernible rules and manipulable parts. For Morton McMichael and his Old World counterparts, the “great city” might have been an ugly, violent, and even insurrectionary place, but it contained within it the potential for beauty, order, and wealth. Radicals did not share their optimism. Take for instance Friedrich Engels, who published Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, the same year The Quaker City appeared in full.3 Engels’s analysis of social relations and the urban form mapped the city in a very different way to Lippard’s gothic mysteries, but both writers argued that capital produced space in a manner that pressed down on the working class. Metropolitan growth did not scatter its benefits evenly, but left a trail of misery in its wake, as the labor that built up the city found itself banished to insalubrious quarters for shelter.
Philadelphia’s radicals found common ground in their reading of the “great city.” Heirs to a tradition of artisanal politics that went back to 1776, they drew on classical republicanism, the labor theory of value, and Atlantic revolutionary upheavals to critique the society and space of unreformed capitalism. Lippard and his allies cast themselves as an intellectual vanguard: missionaries tasked with explaining the workings of the city to the workers who built it. Their project of consolidating class involved imagining a different society in which producers, rather than capitalists, reaped the rewards of what they had sown.4 Radicals, then, differed from their booster contemporaries. Bourgeois Philadelphians targeted manufacturing suburbs and riot districts for consolidation. Once they could dictate terms, they would incorporate
