Bring them a system of rights and remedies in this interest, and they will listen.” For him, only a political movement that could unite the interests of black and white workers would win support, and three years later, he joined the new Republican Party, in which he became one of the strongest advocates of the “harmony of interests” doctrine in Philadelphia.70 Over the course of the 1850s, indeed, figures like Elder came to embrace a different kind of class consolidation: not one that united a bourgeoisie or proletariat, but one that associated labor and capital.
* * *
Lippard did not join this movement himself. When radicalism splintered, he continued to build his Brotherhood and remained active in the national struggle for land reform, even as he lamented the “want of unity and organization” in the movement.71 His consolidationist convictions had not faded. When the storm of counterrevolution and sectional strife rained down on Europe and America after 1848, Lippard sought shelter in association. Assailing the agitators who were trying to prize the republic apart, he praised the “Thirty United Nations” that made up his country as “a type of perfect Brotherhood,” which would eventually embrace “not only the inhabitants of the American continent, but the vast Family of Man.” “We love the Union,” he proclaimed, and “there is not an evil now in existence, that cannot better be reformed with the Union, than without the Union.” Lippard had no intention of compromising with slaveholders—“we abhor with the same hatred the White Slavery of the North, and the Black Slavery of the South,” he declared—but for all its faults, his nation remained the last, best hope on Earth.72
Lippard’s unionism transposed easily to the urban form. His writing on the metropolis may have emphasized its divisions—“Philadelphia is manifold,” he once wrote—but he saw bonds of interdependence holding it together. Following the lead of the Consolidators who had demanded a union of the city and districts on the same night as the theater e´ meute, he too called for overriding the lines on the municipal map. Philadelphia needed “ONE City, under ONE government, and under ONE code of municipal laws,” proclaimed the Quaker City in 1849. But it was not enough to redraw political boundaries. The metropolis required a thorough social reconstruction: it had to house its apprentices, reform its theaters, and purge sin from the “purlieus of the city.” Moreover, voters must overthrow the “petty Oligarchy” of twenty or thirty families who held the reins of power, and restore control to good citizens.73 To consolidate Philadelphia, then, Monk Hall had to be torn down, and a model republic erected on its ruins. His city, Union, and world awaited the redemptive labor of social reconstruction.
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