causes and consequences of that violence, and finding ways to end it, helped to consolidate a divided economic elite. They would come together too in searching for a way out of the commercial and financial malaise that also threatened to relegate the metropolis to the second rank. Pacifying and promoting Philadelphia required understanding what the “great city” was and determining the laws that governed its behavior.
Consolidating Class
How to prop up Philadelphia’s divided house at midcentury preoccupied citizens. What, they asked, made its foundations so unstable? When government failed to undertake the North American’s “great study,” the economic elite took on the task themselves. They did so to advertise the metropolis to outsiders, while explaining its inner workings to citizens. The maps, censuses, and sketches they produced served the twin causes of boosterism and reform, and while these objectives sometimes jarred, they each tended toward reading the metropolis as a complex but interdependent whole.
Few enlisted in the project as eagerly as Philadelphia’s press. The city’s first penny paper, the Public Ledger, boasted a midcentury circulation in the tens of thousands, though most dailies, like McMichael’s North American, catered to a far narrower audience. Though newspapers often served as party mouthpieces, even the most partisan editors claimed the higher ground of the “common good.” Publishers stood as self-appointed—and self-important—stewards of the public interest. To the Ledger, no “moral, social and political engine” proved “half so powerful as the newspaper press.”25
Their power knocked down municipal walls. Proprietors had good reason to portray their city as a whole. Claiming the entirety of Sydney’s map as their purview enabled them to sell to the growing suburban market and portray the picaresque world of the outlying districts for citizens of the city proper. It also increased circulation further afield, where merchants relied on East Coast papers for commercial knowledge. In the golden age of local boosterism, the commitment of men like McMichael to the cause rivaled their counterparts in the upstart towns of the West. Philadelphia’s press, a Boston journal noted in 1854, “constantly labors in behalf of the interests of the city.”26
Newspapers self-consciously set out to reveal a Philadelphia that had outgrown any one individual’s ability to comprehend. Only the press, the Ledger argued while reporting on suburban expansion, had the perspective to provide the public with “any definite idea of the progress that surrounds them.”27 Journals followed its lead in carrying news of metropolitan developments; printing copy from remote districts, which read as if it had been dictated by suburban speculators; and venturing into the courts and alleys that lay behind gridironed streets.28
The “great study” of the city in these respects bore similarities to the project of nation-building. Benedict Anderson has traced the link between print and patriotic sentiment, showing how the newspaper, by enabling people to consume events together, creates “that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.”29 But in antebellum America, newspapers that carried national news catered primarily to city markets. From the 1840s, then, papers devoted columns to local affairs and lobbied in leader columns on behalf of their metropolis. In their pages, readers could grasp the city as a whole. The press profited from Philadelphia’s fragmentation—a good riot surely did wonders for circulation—yet publishers provided a centripetal force. Unity came out of division.
Newspapers also helped to overcome social balkanization. McMichael in particular used print in pursuit of bourgeois consolidation. Philadelphia’s wealthiest residents, his paper often declared, needed to speak with one voice.30 It had a point. “Proper Philadelphians,” as historical sociologists have sometimes termed the city’s upper class, proved wary of arrivistes. The center’s merchants and attorneys often held their noses when forced to interact with suburban manufacturers. When the scion of an old merchant family took the reins at a Southwark foundry in the 1830s, his decision, a friend remembered, involved “little less than social degradation.”31
Old money’s reluctance to intermingle with new has led some historians to conclude that a hereditary aristocracy held sway in antebellum society. Admiration for an aristocratic ethic ran deep. Sidney George Fisher, a gentleman tied by birth and marriage to several of the city’s first families, saw land and breeding as the mark of a real elite, and in his company the taint of “bourgeois origin” proved hard to wash off. His diary gives the impression of a man continually circling the wagons against the rising “parvenu.” Fisher’s status-anxious snobbery, if extreme, was not uncommon. The first families of the city proper rarely married, worshipped in the same churches, or attended the same parties as suburban manufacturers. Socially and spatially they kept their distance.32
Such divisions, however, may have proved easier to surmount in Philadelphia than in other northern cities. In New York, the rift between merchant and manufacturing capital only healed once civil wars—in both the South and the streets—vindicated free labor ideology and reminded propertied citizens of the danger they faced from free laborers.33 Before 1863, Manhattan merchants aligned with workers and proslavery Democrats, helping to build the alliance of planters, northern businessmen, and workingmen that determined national elections for much of the antebellum era. Insurgent manufacturers, who rejected the free trade and paternalistic ethos of the mercantile elite, turned to the Republican Party after 1854, albeit with more success nationally than locally. The story in Philadelphia, though, must give more emphasis to cooperation than competition. A tilt to manufacturing in the urban economy, the investment patterns of the city proper’s elite, and boosters’ ambition to reclaim from Manhattan the mantle of “Empire City” all drew wealthy industrialists into the orbit of old money; so too did the social crisis of the riots.
The charismatic and cosmopolitan McMichael played a vanguard role in the battle to unite a bourgeoisie.34 Born to a gardener on the New Jersey estate of Napoleon Bonaparte’s exiled brother in 1807, McMichael arrived in Philadelphia as a young man, where he trained in the law, worked for city newspapers, and wrote what Poe called “remarkably vigorous” poetry.35 In the prosperous suburb of Spring Garden, politics soon drew his attention, and a brief flirtation with Jacksonian Democracy quickly gave way to a lifelong commitment to the Whig Party and its Republican heir. In 1843, he won election as county sheriff, though he could do little to stop the riots that ravaged the city a year later. Shaken by the experience of economic and social unrest, McMichael turned to the challenge of consolidation, and steadfastly adhered to the maxim “In Union There Is Strength.” Over the course of a career that stretched from the Age of Jackson to the end of Reconstruction, he headed several reform efforts—from the battle for a new city charter to the foundation of the nationalist Union League—but he extended the principle to the economic elite itself, using his personal contacts and oratorical gifts to bully merchants, manufacturers, and professionals into cooperation. “His peculiar talents are so fitted for society and for public affairs,” one of his friends later recalled, “that he rapidly became the representative man of the community.”36
His main weapon, though, was his newspaper. In 1847, McMichael acquired the North American, which he soon merged with another Whig daily, the United States Gazette. On national questions, the journal followed the orthodox line of the Whig leader Henry Clay, but its first loyalty lay with class rather than party, and genteel Democrats found a warm welcome in the publisher’s circle.37 By the 1850s, the paper provided McMichael with a pulpit to preach unionist sermons to a bourgeoisie whose boundaries, he believed, needed enlarging. “The creation of a mutuality of interests,” his paper argued, needed “that habit of constant and familiar intercourse among our merchants, capitalists, real estate owners, and trades people generally.” One of its correspondents warned that a “community broken into isolated fragments” lacked “the rudimental principles which form the basis of great mercantile and metropolitan character.”38 The project of class consolidation for the publisher had the power to arrest the city’s disorder and decline.
