torched a tavern run by a mixed-race couple. The race riot that ensued pitted Irish Catholics from the southern suburbs against the free black community that straddled the city boundary. Lippard quickly penned a short story on the riot, which he worked into a lengthier novel, and while rejecting the romantic version of the Killers as advocates of the rights of labor, he refused to see the conflict purely in terms of internecine strife. For him, apprentices, bored young men, and a handful of the “very worst specimens of the savage of this large city” made up the gang, but at their head stood the son of a millionaire: as usual, then, Philadelphia’s moneyed elite orchestrated the mayhem.58
Beyond Lippard’s novella, little trace of the radical response to the riot remains, but in laying bare the racial as well as religious hatreds that divided the working class, the fighting presented them with another problem. In the giddy aftermath of 1848, African Americans had publicly linked the European revolutions to their own struggle for liberation, and had won praise for doing so. The California House Riot (so-called for the tavern that burnt to the ground), though, marked a return to the old pattern of race riots, where blacks who became too visible in public or crossed racial boundaries faced violent reprisals.59 Radical reformers did not know how to respond. Many, including William Elder, already had close ties to abolitionists. Antislavery activists like the feminist Lucretia Mott and African Americans Samuel Ringgold Ward and Robert Purvis spoke at Social Improvement Society meetings. Elder’s land reform club sent the black abolitionist John C. Bowers—another SIS debater—as a delegate to the National Industrial Congress in 1851.60 While Lippard and Campbell sometimes argued southern slaves were better off than northern workers, they did not mean to trivialize the sufferings of the former. Campbell’s Theory of Equality, indeed, denounced slavery in all its forms, and attacked his own Democratic Party for failing to abolish it. Lippard, like Campbell, held British abolitionists in contempt for their blindness to the evils of capitalism, but wondered how any radical could “attack Wages Slavery and be silent about Chattel Slavery.” He proudly printed mail from southern whites who accused him of belonging to the “school of Robespierre and Fourier.”61
The coincidence of sectional and social conflict forced radicals to confront slavery. In 1848, with Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot’s proposal on the table to keep slaveholders out of any land acquired from Mexico, antislavery Democrats—Kelley among them—supported the measure. Elder, a veteran Liberty Party organizer, backed the Free Soil movement, while Lippard and Campbell stumped for the Whig and Democratic nominees, respectively.62 Such political fragmentation was nothing new, but with the future of the nation at stake, radicals began to think more often about the relationship of black and white labor. Toward the end of 1850, the SIS regularly discussed the Fugitive Slave Law, and soon moved onto a series of debates—reportedly drawing large audiences—which considered whether the African race was capable of civilization. Most radicals answered in the affirmative, and over the following years, they provided a phalanx of opposition to the act: the operation of which in Philadelphia formed the backdrop to Lippard’s final, unfinished novel. Such a course ought to warn us off schematic outlines of the making of a working class committed to white supremacy, but as the California House Riot showed, radical reformers could not debate racial conflict away.63
Nativism and slavery combined to sink one of the most ambitious projects for class consolidation. In October 1850, representatives of the various trades gathered at the county courthouse to consider a plan to “free each individual from the arbitrary and oppressive rule of capital.” Though Lippard and Campbell were absent—only journeymen were allowed to participate—many of their radical associates attended, including land reformers like William J. Mullen and John Shedden. Out of the meeting emerged the trades’ assembly first mooted in 1847. Unlike its predecessor in the 1830s—the GTU—the citywide body only included skilled male workers, which left out the Irish, black, and female laboring poor. Still, its organizers aimed to build a movement culture based around cooperative enterprise, a regular paper, and a political party. By early 1851, it represented more than thirty trades.64
Cracks soon began to show. In mid-1851, when Elder’s land reform club sent the African American abolitionist Bowers to the National Industrial Congress, he had secured his seat over the protests of some members. The trades’ assembly, acting in the name of Philadelphia’s “Industrial Classes,” disclaimed any connection with Evans’s organization in disgust. Soon after, the new Workingmen’s Party nominated Kelley, a longstanding “advocate of the Rights of Labor,” as its candidate for the Court of Common Pleas. Kelley, who had just lost the Democratic nomination for his apostasy in a contested election case, had strong radical credentials—as a young man he had struck for the ten-hour workday, and Louis Kossuth later singled him out for thanks for his support of Hungarian liberty—but he was also a known abolitionist sympathizer. This troubled some workingmen less, however, than his hostility to nativism. Despite his Presbyterian roots, he held “church-burners” in contempt, and had pursued rioters in court after 1844. In the second half of 1851, his ardent internationalism still had its adherents. That summer, radicals fighting for land reform, laborers’ rights, and equal exchanges declared that with the “world being our country, it is hoped that all nations will flock around our standard.” A few months later, the rump of the trades’ assembly expelled a group of nativists who had come to the meeting to solicit support for their ticket. But Kelley’s candidacy still split the party.65
In the thick of the debate over immigration and slavery, Campbell, who had recently been described as a “brawling abolitionist,” redrew the boundaries of the producing class to exclude African Americans. Barred (to his evident displeasure) from the assembly, and finding diminishing returns from his attempts to rally workers to his banner with Theory of Equality, he changed tack. His allies at the NIC had walked out after the admission of the black delegate Bowers, and in a letter copied to the negrophobic New York Herald, he explained to the congress why he backed them. His objections partly derived from racist pseudoscience. “The negro is inferior to the white,” he argued, and any association between the two would act to the detriment of the latter. But he also pointed to tactical considerations. Admitting an African American would “array all the prejudices of ninetynine hundredths of the whites against the cause of land reform,” he insisted; and after twenty years of working to “emancipate labor,” he refused to sacrifice his cause on the altar of racial equality when it had finally acquired “national importance.” “It behooves us to act wisely,” he concluded, “and not permit any element introduced among us which may either distract or divide us.”66
Campbell was being disingenuous, for with nativism on the rise and his own Irish roots leaving him vulnerable, race was no longer a distraction for him but rather the foundation of his project for white working-class consolidation. He accused British abolitionists of trying to destroy the Union and argued their wealthy American allies turned a blind eye to wage slavery.67 When the Philadelphia trades’ assembly endorsed his stand against integration at the NIC, he must have taken heart, and over the summer of 1851, he cribbed together Negro-mania, a hastily edited compendium of ethnology inspired by the SIS debates on race. While the book veered wildly, Campbell tried to show that the only racial boundary that mattered lay between black and white. Chillingly, he concluded, Pennsylvania had to rid itself of its free people of color by “colonization or otherwise.” Campbell, though, built his white supremacist ideology on the foundations of antebellum radicalism. For radicals like Lippard, the conviction that nonproducers lived off the fruits of others’ labor had provided a bedrock for an emancipatory politics, but when Campbell made it bear the sophistry of racial science, he claimed that idle freedpeople would impose an impossible burden on white workers. He therefore exiled blacks beyond the borders of his producers’ republic.68
But Campbell’s project of class consolidation, which aimed to overcome the divide between Protestant and Catholic and unite white producers around threats from below as well as above, did not work.69 The Trades’ Assembly could not overcome the divisions between nativists and their critics, while Campbell’s about-turn fractured radical unity. Surveying the wreckage, Elder (who Campbell had confronted
