had come together as an associated whole. Philadelphia, he insisted, illustrated the “growth of large social unities out of the union of smaller ones.” Thompson was referring specifically here to Philadelphia’s Consolidation Act of 1854: a measure that extended the territory of the twosquare mile “city proper” across the entire county, more than doubled the metropolitan population, and made the municipality the largest by territory in the nation. Consolidation annexed two-dozen townships, boroughs, and districts to Philadelphia’s metropolitan empire and marked one of the most ambitious urban reforms of the nineteenth century (see Maps 1 and 2). But he read the 1854 charter as more than a merely municipal matter; instead, it expressed a “fact of social science.” “This is the natural method of growth the whole world over,” Thompson explained, for “all great communities have been formed by this consolidation of smaller but older communities.” With the Civil War no doubt in mind, he reminded his audience that the “revolution” could not go backward, as the “larger unity cannot again be sundered into its component parts.” The law of association applied to nations as well as cities.2
Map 1. Philadelphia, pre-1854. Prior to Consolidation in 1854, independent districts, boroughs, and townships surrounded the two-square–mile city proper. Philadelphia’s outlying suburbs outnumbered the city in population from 1820.
Map 2. Philadelphia after Consolidation. The 1854 charter erased the old district lines and divided the new city into twenty-four wards. At nearly 130 square miles, Philadelphia became the nation’s largest city in territorial terms.
Thompson wrote at the end of an age of consolidation that stretched across the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Between the 1840s and 1870s, economic development, territorial conquest, and civil war transformed a divided republic into a national state. Further afield, loose federations and geographic expressions yielded to the integrative force of nationalism. And from the American West to Qing China, colonial powers forcibly incorporated peripheries into imperial systems. Municipal consolidation seemed to illustrate the same process on a metropolitan scale. Cities from Brooklyn to Paris joined Philadelphia by extending their borders around midcentury in pursuit of order, economy, and the prestige that came with a larger population; they embarked too on what contemporaries called “practical consolidation” by forging the institutional and infrastructural bonds to hold their metropolis together. The language of nation and empire helped to naturalize urban expansion: Philadelphians even talked about the “manifest destiny” of their city. But to see consolidation at any level as the inevitable working out of a natural law was a leap too far. Thompson’s “large social unities” came out of conflict as much as consensus.3
This book explores battles over the metropolitan future in that age of consolidation by linking city, nation, and empire. The people who fill its pages confronted a fundamental question: How could power be brought to bear on a city in a manner that prevented growth from leading to disintegration? My story begins in the 1840s with the republic’s “great cities” rolling back their own frontiers as the boundaries of the American republic leapt toward the Pacific. Philadelphia, despite falling behind New York in the race for urban supremacy, still doubled in size every twenty years, as meadows gave way to streets, factories, and homes. Boosters hoped to make it the London and Paris of the continent: a center of economic dynamism and cultural display that would profit from and proudly reflect the might of an American empire. But growth brought growing pains, as epidemics of riots, strikes, and disease ravaged its streets. Here, social strife in the antebellum city paralleled sectional struggles over slavery extension, and led citizens to wonder whether divisions would pull polities apart.4
In 1880, with Philadelphia a place of relative repose amid the tumult of Gilded Age America, Thompson cast consolidation as an inevitable and beneficial process that had remade metropolis and nation. Under the consolidationist impulse, a city of mobs had become a city of homes; these United States had become the United States. But the unionism that underpinned consolidationist schemes should not be read as a straightforward adjustment to the challenges posed by a complex and interdependent society. The entangled projects of city- and nation-building were far more fraught than Thompson implied. On the urban terrain, they involved drawing boundaries that left some out as they drew others in. They forced consolidators into confronting questions about citizenship, urban design, and the organization of social and economic life. They led them to question stark divisions between public and private. And they inspired opposition from Philadelphians who feared the financial and political effects of centralizing designs. Consolidation here provides a window onto the remaking of city and nation over the middle decades of the nineteenth century.
Over the following pages, I use “consolidation” in two ways. Consolidation with a capital “C” refers to the ten-year campaign that concluded in the passage of Philadelphia’s 1854 city charter. In drawing 127 square miles of streets and fields under a single government, the Consolidation Act created a territorial and financial leviathan, and provided a precedent when cities like New York looked to expand their boundaries later in the century. When used in the lowercase, in contrast, “consolidation” pertains to a broader project of boundary-drawing and community-making that often took place beyond the sphere of the state. In this respect I follow nineteenth-century usage. Citizens at the time saw consolidation as the tightening of affective or associational ties: as any process that brought individuals or communities into closer communion. The Consolidation of 1854 marked just one expression of this impulse. Building internal improvements, forging class consciousness, or soothing social and sectional tensions could all count as consolidation too.
The men who battled over municipal Consolidation in the decade leading up to 1854 were consolidators in that wider sense. Consider, for instance, two figures who appear frequently over the following chapters. Morton McMichael (1807–1879) came to the city as a young man, and as a poet impressed Edgar Allan Poe. Before long, though, McMichael sacrificed his literary ambitions for a career in politics and publishing. As county sheriff, he failed to stop two vast riots in 1844, and thereafter turned his attention to consolidating the city across its social and spatial boundaries, using his talents as a public speaker and his command of the city’s leading bourgeois newspaper, the North American and United States Gazette. A Whig and Republican in national affairs, he proved more loyal to class than party at the metropolitan level, and made it his mission to ensure the city’s best men worked together in preserving order, building up the city, and holding together the nation. McMichael was among the leaders of the municipal Consolidation movement and helped to found the nationalist Union League a few years later. Few figures better exemplify Thompson’s consolidationist impulse.5
Like McMichael, George Lippard (1822–1854) was a writer and newspaperman, who won plaudits from Poe, but his consolidationist ambitions took him in the direction of radical reform rather than civic boosterism. His 1845 novel, The Quaker City, was the best-selling work of American fiction prior to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and scandalized respectable Philadelphians with its thinly veiled caricatures of eminent citizens. Readers who dismissed the work as sensationalist drivel, though, ignored Lippard’s social criticism. Influenced by Christian communitarianism, utopian socialism, and revolutions at home and abroad, the author imagined a consolidated city and federal union purged of injustice. Where McMichael looked to unite a bourgeoisie around the promise of an imperial metropolis, Lippard urged producers to combine in pursuit of social regeneration.6
For all their ideological differences, McMichael and Lippard had much in common. Each came of age in an antebellum world shaped by democratic opportunity, urban and national expansion, and social and sectional divisions. In Philadelphia they witnessed these forces playing out in battles at the ballot box, struggles on workshop floors, and riots over immigration and abolitionism. Shaped by such
