in every city, who live hardby in poor cabins and shanties, and whose labour supplies the profits upon which the merchantprinces and their aristocratic families subsist in luxury.” Here, he made the city look rather like Paris, with its prosperous center surrounded by an oppressed suburban poor. Later, in visiting Independence Hall, Foster asked whether Americans had “suffered Europe to overtake and pass us.” Had citizens, he wondered, “secured to Strength Employment” and “to Employment Reward” by “developing all the benignant powers of the elements for the benefit of the whole people”? Or were Americans now “enviers of the progress of others”? He left readers to ponder the matter themselves.38
Among Philadelphia’s radicals, affinity for European revolutions ran deep. The year before the 1848 Revolutions, an anonymous novel, The Almighty Dollar, portrayed Moyamensing’s Killers as primitive rebels who promise to liberate the land “from the iron sway of the rich.” Although the gang take the Jacobin club as their model, it soon becomes clear that they owe as much to George Washington as to the Committee of Public Safety, but the links the novel draws between the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and antebellum urban violence are striking. In reality, an Irish American gang made up mostly of apprentices and laborers hardly amounted to “proletarian heroes,” but its reinvention in the hands of an anonymous author hints at the way radicals challenged the widespread anti-Jacobinism of the antebellum republic. Campbell and one of his collaborators, indeed, heaped praise on Robespierre, Marat, and St. Just for attempting “to secure to the producers all that they produced.”39
But it was 1848 rather than 1789 (or 1793, for that matter) that focused minds in Philadelphia by raising the possibility of millennial social transformation. Campbell, who had been putting the finishing touches to his Theory of Equality—a pamphlet that ranged across continents and centuries by weaving Rousseauian inequality, Paineite republicanism, and Democratic antimonopoly into a project for social reconstruction—hastily added a fawning dedication to the new French government, lauding its efforts to “elevate the proletarians.” And Lippard hoped the 1848 Revolutions would reverberate in the United States. “Shall the world look for the redemption of the workers from the chains of social wrong,” he asked, “and our Union be left hopeless and desolate?” The land reformer William Elder, who had shared the stage with McMichael and Foster at the Independence Square meeting, renounced the cry of “bread or blood,” but warned that conservative wealth “must expect at last to meet its victims at the barricades.” “Gradual reform or violent revolution,” he counseled, “is the necessity of our condition.”40
Rival interpretations of what the 1848 Revolutions were—and what they might mean for Philadelphia—shattered the consensus of the Independence Square meeting. In one corner, free blacks had assembled to welcome the abolition of slavery in French colonies, and when a policeman tried to end the gathering by stopping one of the speakers, whites intervened and “bade him go on.” African Americans’ readiness to claim 1848 as their own illustrated that the economic elite enjoyed no monopoly in making sense of the upheaval. Yet when Elder, in words dripping with socialist and abolitionist sentiment, persuaded the main meeting to resolve that the Second Republic’s destruction of slavery; its organization of industry; and its proclamation of liberty, equality, and fraternity revealed the principles “of our own Revolution,” the resolutions were left off the published proceedings. A few weeks later, radicals and abolitionists returned to the spot to protest the “mutilation” of the record.41
The 1848 Revolutions divided the meeting but bound radicals together. European turmoil gave them a vocabulary to name what was happening in Philadelphia, an understanding of how their republican ideal differed from that of the bourgeoisie, and a spirit of solidarity that brought rival factions together. By the summer, the elation that had greeted the revolutions had given way in much of the Union to skepticism about their permanence and doubts about their character, especially among conservatives in the North and South. But when the North American backed the Second Republic’s bloody suppression of labor unrest in the June Days, and began to worry about “red republicanism” in American cities, radicals continued to praise Parisian workers.42 In Philadelphia, the three years that followed 1848 witnessed an upsurge in radical association. The likes of Lippard and Campbell set about the task of consolidating producers around the project of building their own second republic.
Consolidating Producers
The 1848 Revolutions lifted radical morale. Over the preceding years, they had built an institutional base from which to challenge bourgeois ideology. A stronger economy after 1844 gave craft unions the chance to flourish alongside the Chartist leagues and Fourierist associations. By 1847, trade unionists who hoped to revive the spirit of the General Trades’ Union were discussing plans for some form of citywide organization.43
Radicals’ designs for consolidating producers extended beyond workplace bargaining into organization and education. Lippard, convinced that secret fraternal orders had prepared the way for the French Revolutions in 1789 and 1848, tried to “bind the masses together” in a “one-minded body.” In 1849, he founded the Brotherhood of the Union, which soon spread across the republic. Lippard’s Brotherhood looked to the bloodless overthrow of capital and the union of the “Workers of the World” (unlike Marx and Engels he actually used the term). But it embraced reform as well as revolution. Like Campbell, Lippard advocated cooperative enterprise, factory regulation, and free homesteads in the West. Indeed, both radicals joined George Henry Evans’s national land reform movement.44
Institutional consolidation—whether via national organizations like Lippard’s Brotherhood of the Union and Evans’s National Industrial Congress (NIC), or local ones, like trade assemblies—mattered to radicals who saw “association” as a path to power. Most often, association referred to the principle of workers pooling capital and sharing profits, effectively cutting out the merchant or manufacturer who claimed a portion of their labor. Schemes for producer and consumer cooperatives abounded around midcentury. But association, as the call for “fraternity” in 1848 and “brotherhood” in Lippard’s secret society implied, had other meanings too. Perhaps most importantly, it marked a cry for producer solidarity in the wake of the riots. Association meant here the “Union of the Workers against the Idlers who do not work.”45
Radicals crafted a role for themselves that today we might call that of the “organic intellectual.” To raise the consciousness of the city’s producers and awaken them to their common interests, however, required challenging the economic elite in civil society. Radicals attacked the American bourgeois press for its hostility to European revolutions, for instance, while Lippard decried Philadelphia’s “Anti-Socialist” papers. In The Quaker City, the author portrays a newspaper editor, the risible Buzby Poodle, as one of the “monks” lording it over Philadelphia.46 Class consolidation required continually challenging such voices.
The years leading up to midcentury saw a host of efforts to ensure a counterhegemonic voice could be heard in the city. Philadelphia’s district halls, mechanics’ institutes, and open lots offered a promising terrain for association. Campbell, who believed “the monopoly of education” left producers ignorant of the processes that reduced them to penury drew on his experience as an itinerant lecturer for British Chartists in tramping from meeting to meeting to rally support. Lippard’s Brotherhood, meanwhile, urged members to “open your halls to the public of both sexes” to discuss “Land, Labor, and Social Reform.”47 Radicals also sought to establish a rival to the bourgeois-dominated press. Impressed by Greeley’s Tribune, for which he occasionally wrote, Campbell toyed with the idea of starting a reform paper of his own, as did several craft unions. Instead, though, he entered the publishing trade with a fellow Chartist exile, Edward P. Powers. Their first pamphlet, by the judge and former factory reformer William D. Kelley, decried the “heartless theory” that “points to the labouring population reduced to want and pauperism.” Lippard, just as convinced of his vanguard role, did set himself up as an editor. The Quaker City, a weekly, which made
