may have been the price of legibility. Indeed, James C. Scott, one of the most perceptive writers on modern statecraft, contrasts William Penn’s transparent layout to inscrutable medieval towns.16
Initial impressions, though, can deceive. Looked at more closely, Sydney’s map revealed the division of rectangular blocks into lanes, alleys, and courts, especially along the southern borderlands of the city proper. The practice was almost as old as Philadelphia itself, for while Penn—who grew up in a London ravaged by plague and fire—is often said to have pictured a “greene country towne” of evenly spaced houses, his settlers clung to the Delaware front. Responding to demand, landowners cut small streets through their property, which soon led to a distinct pattern of segregation: wealthier residents took houses on the main thoroughfares, while the poor clustered in claustrophobic warrens behind. In the city proper, this produced pockets of poverty hidden from the fashionable promenader; in the suburbs, it created neighborhoods known as early as the 1850s as slums.17
City and districts, streets and alleys: on the six plates of Sydney’s map, the cartographer captured the metropolis as a whole, while hinting at its divisions. Those with the leisure time to move through its neighborhoods would have read in Sydney’s lines and symbols the boundaries between wealth and poverty, commerce and industry, and virtue and vice, but no one would have experienced it all. Claims that the city was unknowable could therefore be read as a boast or a lament. On the one hand, they conveyed Philadelphia’s vastness; but on the other, they conceded the difficulty of comprehending something so big.
Philadelphia’s political geography proved easier to plot. Partisan boundaries proved far from impermeable, but citizens in the city proper tended to gravitate toward the pro-Bank Whigs, while suburban journeymen and laborers rallied in sufficient numbers to the Democratic flag to give that party control of most of the outlying districts prior to a nativist insurgency in 1844. All parties were coalitions. Democratic radicals coalesced around the antimonopoly, producerist creed of the Locofocos, while their allies, particularly in Irish neighborhoods, turned to politics to defend their turf from Protestants and blacks. Neither wing, however, had much time for the city proper’s Whigs, who saw Andrew Jackson as the devil incarnate and held militant workers and Catholic immigrants in low regard. The city proper was known as the “Whig Gibraltar”: a speck of rock menaced by the hostile and often Romish electorate beyond its borders.18
Prior to 1854, however, the street politics of the suburbs gave residents of the city proper greater cause for concern than anything that transpired at the ballot box. Conflicts over labor, race, religion, and politics all had the potential to spill over into violence. Crowd action in the city’s “turbulent era” tended to conform to one of two types. The first, more frequent but less destructive, sprang from the “sporting male subculture” of the antebellum city. Young men in the suburbs flocked to volunteer fire companies and street gangs that often reflected partisan, pietistic, or ethnic loyalties. Firemen and gangsters played a muscular role in suburban politics, and commanded neighborhood respect, but their tendency to fight each other rather than fight fires made nighttime battles with brickbats, stones, and even pistols a familiar feature of urban life.19
The second form of violence, less common but more destructive, followed long-established patterns of popular action, in which a crowd would demand redress for a particular grievance, with trouble escalating if the authorities failed to respond. Rioters chose their targets carefully, striking at African Americans (1834, 1842, and 1849), abolitionists (1836 and 1838), and political rivals (1828 and many elections thereafter), and they often got their way. When a mob reduced a new Garrisonian meeting place to a smoldering ruin within days of it opening, for instance, the city authorities blamed antislavery agitators for inciting trouble. A few years later, Moyamensing commissioners responded to a white supremacist pogrom by condemning a black temperance hall as a nuisance. Although such crowds contained plenty of the sporting male “rowdies,” who filled the ranks of fire companies and street gangs, they sometimes had “gentlemen of property and standing” at their head.20
By the early 1840s, however, wealthy Philadelphians tended to look down on mobs as counter to norms of reason and restraint, and anathema to their booster aspirations. The two riots over the summer of 1844—the biggest urban upheavals the republic had witnessed—consolidated elite opinion against the crowd. Over the preceding months, rumors circulated that Philadelphia’s Catholic bishop wanted to banish the King James Bible from the city’s public schools, and the outrage proved a valuable recruiting tool for a new political movement, the anti-immigrant American Republican Party. On May 3, and then again on May 6, the party tried to hold meetings on an open lot in the northern suburb of Kensington’s heavily Irish third ward, but on each occasion Catholics fought them off. Gathering in far greater numbers at Independence Hall on May 7, Protestants marched back to the site, where they were met with a barrage of stones, clubs, and gunfire. The fighting continued over the next two days, and once natives wrested the initiative, they torched homes and churches, forcing Irish residents to flee to nearby woods. With the rioters overwhelming Sheriff McMichael and the civil authorities, the governor reluctantly ordered the state militia onto the streets and imposed martial law (see Figure 1).21
Figure 1. The Kensington “Bible Riot” of 1844. The frequency and severity of riots in Philadelphia during the 1830s and 1840s convinced many residents in the city proper that their fate was entwined with that of the suburban districts. Source: Reprinted from A Full and Complete Account of the Late Awful Riots in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: John B. Perry, 1844). Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia.
The peace did not last long. A few weeks later, after injured veterans of the Kensington violence joined a large nativist parade on July 4, Protestants in the southern district of Southwark gathered outside the Catholic church of St. Phillippe de Neri, where the priest’s brother had secured permission to stockpile arms in self-defense. This time, the militia quickly arrested some of the ringleaders, but on July 7, a group broke into the church to search for weapons and release the prisoners. Returning to the scene, where they were met with a barrage of missiles, General George Cadwalader’s militia fired into the crowd. The volley killed two rioters, whose comrades retreated to the nearby riverfront, secured a pair of cannon, loaded them with scrap metal, and turned them on the troops. Their improvised grapeshot took out two militiamen, and over the following hours, artillery dueled on the district’s streets. At least fifteen people died in the battle.22
In scale and substance, the 1844 riots were new. Commentators called them a “civil war,” for what had begun in Kensington with the familiar spectacle of sectarian strife, concluded in Southwark with an armed battle between citizen and state.23 For the first time, both sides had used firearms; for the first time, too, militiamen had poured fire onto the crowd. Unlike earlier riots, which usually petered out once the mob had meted out punishment to a few exemplary victims, the violence persisted for days, and left the county under military rule. Martial law, for a few weeks at least, consolidated the city.
Rioters’ refusal to respect the political boundaries on the county map brought about this short-lived metropolitan union. Every major disturbance between 1828 and 1849 took place in the suburbs or on the borderlands between city and districts. The three biggest race riots occurred within about two hundred yards of one another, in an Irish and African American neighborhood that straddled the boundary between Philadelphia and the southern district of Moyamensing. But in 1844, Philadelphians could not rely on their frontier as a buffer. While the trouble in Southwark might have been contained within a few blocks, Kensington’s arsonists soon turned to targets in Philadelphia proper. Rumors circulated that every Catholic church in the county would be torched.24 Nowhere seemed safe.
Sydney captured the metropolis as a whole, but though his map gave clues about differences in government, economy, and space, his snapshot could not capture the
