disorder and disease. Lippard, in contrast, equated industry with exploitation, and believed moral miasmas festered in wealthy homes rather than rickety tenements. For him, the work of purification began in mansions, not hovels.
For Lippard, as for McMichael, reconstructing Philadelphia required association. The memory of worker fighting worker in 1844 haunted radicals. In the years that followed the riots, they tried to rebuild solidarities, and link the city’s producers to national and international struggles for the rights of labor. Their own fragmentation, though sometimes overstated, worked against them.5 Some were middle-class reformers swayed by the appeal of utopian socialism; others, working-class journeymen with long experience of the shop floor. Some rallied around party flags; others urged independent political organization. Some saw craft unionism as a panacea for workingmen; others believed strikes offered short-term gains at most, and envisaged a more lasting social reconstruction. But if factions argued over the best way to consolidate Philadelphia’s producers, radicals agreed on the need for union—and especially in the wake of the 1848 European Revolutions—mounted a powerful attack on the bourgeois understanding of the city.
Even then, however, they found it hard to agree on the boundaries of the producers’ community in a city divided by creed, color, and class. In the sectional crisis of 1850, the divided house of radicalism tumbled to the ground. Yet the challenge Lippard and his allies presented before midcentury left an imprint on metropolitan life up to the Civil War and beyond in an associational politics hostile to individualism.
The Labor Question in the Riot Era
Philadelphians confronted what would come to be called the “labor question” long before the Gilded Age. When masters and merchants began to reorganize production in the Early Republic, they faced resistance. “Traditionalists” fought attempts to impose time and work discipline; radical artisans channeled the rationalist spirit of Tom Paine to oppose the new order. By the Jacksonian era, indeed, the growing metropolis had become a frontline in a battle to define the terms of American capitalism. Workers, though, were not simply fighting a rearguard action; instead many imagined that the power of industrialization could be put to work in their interests. In this regard day-to-day struggles on the shop floor and ambitious designs for social reconstruction each informed the way citizens thought about the relations between labor and capital.6
By the time Lippard published The Quaker City, Philadelphia had been a center of labor organizing for more than two decades. In 1827, journeymen from across the city’s trades came together in the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations, the nation’s first metropolitan-wide labor federation.7 A few years later, at the height of the Jacksonian boom, coal heavers walked off the wharves on the Schuylkill River, beginning a strike that drew twenty thousand workers together across lines of craft and culture: “an awakening of class solidarity,” David Montgomery argued, “as significant as any in American history.” Under the leadership of the General Trades’ Union (GTU), Philadelphia’s workers brought the city to a halt, and despite the best efforts of the municipal authorities, businessmen struggled to fight back. The Panic of 1837 succeeded where others had failed in destroying the GTU, and in the dog days of the depression, its leaders either decamped to the antimonopoly wing of the Democratic Party or were swept up in the Protestant revivals that burnt over the city. Workingmen who had marched under the banner, “We are all day laborers,” found new solidarities in political parties and confessional culture—a path that led to the atavism of the 1844 riots.8
Yet simmering unrest in the hard times that followed the Panic reminded employers that the labor question had not gone away. Ethnic affinities, which the GTU had worked hard to overcome, now became a basis for solidarity, especially among Irish coal heavers and handloom weavers. The former torched a Reading Railroad bridge in 1842; the latter chased off the sheriff and his posse during a dispute in Kensington a few months later. But strikers, like most Jacksonian Americans with a grievance, tended to use violence discriminately, targeting bosses and journeymen who ignored union scales. Another coal heavers’ strike, this one on the Richmond wharves of the Reading just a few weeks before the first 1844 riot, provides a telling illustration. Demanding an increase in pay, the men forced “all the different laborers in the vicinity to join them,” and by the time Sheriff Morton McMichael turned up with his posse, the employer had evidently caved in.9
For bourgeois Philadelphians, the “labor question” in the early 1840s could seem like just another manifestation of suburban disorder in a city that had become a “war-field for every faction and party.” Thomas Pym Cope read the May 1844 riot in this vein as one more episode in a district characterized by “the frequent demolition of private property.”10 Strikers, who tended to coalesce around a trade, neighborhood, or culture, lacked the metropolitan-wide reach of the GTU, and their militancy proved easy to subsume into a broader pattern of suburban violence. Few assumed their disturbances had roots in the relationship between labor and capital.
Wealthy residents of Philadelphia, however, could not afford to ignore militancy even where it was geographically contained. The city proper’s economic elite may have had few reasons to follow the battle between handloom operatives and master weavers in Kensington—a struggle in a dying craft that pitted impoverished workers against petty entrepreneurs—but plenty paid taxes to support the sheriff’s posse or owned stock in the strikeplagued Reading Railroad. Moreover, frequent strikes risked further damage to the city’s reputation. By 1845, then, even Cope’s merchant-dominated Board of Trade had identified fraught industrial relations as a threat to the “prosperity of Philadelphia,” as it attacked the “mad attempts” to “resist by combination and by open violence, the law of demand and supply.”11
Lippard and his allies saw virtues where the board saw vices. For them, combination offered the best form of resistance to the commodification of labor, which for all the elegance of liberal theory reduced free men to what they termed wage slaves. In the years after the riots, they launched an attack on the “law of demand and supply” that led them to explore how the city worked. If citizens wanted to understand the earthquakes that shook Philadelphia, radicals insisted, they needed to look beneath the surface and map its social fault lines.
The Social Cartography of Radical Philadelphia
The man who caused such a stir at the Chestnut Street Theater, George Lippard, shared McMichael’s sense of the city as an interdependent but illegible whole, yet saw the metropolis very differently than the North American publisher. Born in 1822, he grew up in Germantown, a rural borough annexed to the city in 1854, and after turning his back on careers in the church and law, began writing in the shadow of the Panic of 1837. Lippard spent the hard times as a jobbing journalist and romance author, and having slept rough in the city’s streets and cellars, started work on his first political novel, The Quaker City, which appeared in serial form in the months that followed the 1844 riots. He was working on the book when the mayor halted the stage adaptation—Lippard alluded to the censorship in subsequent chapters—but the controversy heightened public interest and secured him a salary. When it appeared in 1845, it sold 60,000 copies, making it the most popular American novel prior to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Before his death at 31—just a decade after his literary breakthrough—he wrote over twenty books and countless newspaper articles. He became best known for his “city mysteries” fiction: novels that lifted the veil on metropolitan life.12 Through his writing and politics, he played a leading role in a radical subculture that challenged bourgeois citizens’ reading of the city.
Lippard was both a product and a critic of Philadelphia’s capitalist transformation. New printing technology and rising literacy created a mass market for cheap fiction, and mysteries novelists’ audience crossed social boundaries.13 But if genteel Philadelphians sometimes enjoyed a snigger at Lippard’s tales, the author saw himself, in the words of a radical cleric, as “the age’s leading spokesman for the common man.” He found his calling in the task of consolidating the toiling but ignorant masses around a project of social reconstruction.
