attached such importance to the great study of urban society. His newspaper tried to steer a divided economic elite on a common course. Like others in the age of consolidation, he saw individualism as disintegrative, and his paper rarely neglected to remind readers of the virtues of association. The daily floated above the fray of warring businessmen and disciplined a bourgeoisie that lacked the broad view to act in its own benefit. If McMichael used print as a weapon of social control, then he aimed it at Philadelphia’s propertied as well as its poor.
The North American prodded propertied citizens toward a “concurrence of sentiment action.” At ten times the price of the Public Ledger, only wealthy citizens subscribed, and the high-minded tone drew prosperous Democrats as well as Whigs to its pages. Meanwhile, as McMichael depended on businessmen for advertising and loans, he found himself at their beck and call. Radicals accused McMichael of being a slave to his bourgeois masters, but who controlled whom is hard to tell. Take for instance, Richard D. Wood, a Quaker merchant and “Proper Philadelphian,” who visited McMichael in 1859 to sell him a pet railroad project, and recorded that the proprietor “assented to my views and promised to serve.” A few years earlier, though, Wood had invested thousands in a canal, having “made up my mind, no doubt partly influenced by several articles published, for a few days past, in the North American.”39 His recollections hint at how the paper provided a forum for the circulation of ideas and information among Philadelphia’s economic elite. By urging cooperation, boosting business, and reminding a bourgeoisie where its boundaries lay, the daily labored to produce a politically powerful class.
The urgency of McMichael’s calls for bourgeois unity might be read as evidence of the rift between merchants and manufacturers. Yet even before he had taken control of the North American, wealthy citizens recognized the need to cooperate. During and after the 1844 riots, bourgeois Philadelphians worked together to comprehend what was happening to their city; over the following years, their alliance extended into railroad-building, real estate, and urban reconstruction. The project of consolidating a powerful class seemed to be making progress.
Measuring the Metropolis
Fear of what Philadelphia was and hopes of what it might become spurred bourgeois citizens to take up McMichael’s “great study.” Between the riots and the Civil War, boosters and reformers strove to map the social and economic life of the city and in doing so advanced the cause of urban and class consolidation. Disorder catalyzed prosperous Philadelphians into action, for the scale and substance of the 1844 violence troubled them more than earlier tumult. The seemingly indiscriminate destruction made it harder for the wealthy to indulge the crowd. “Every mob must be suppressed instantly,” one observer of the Kensington battle insisted, “by using as much force as will put it down at once.” “The duty of everyone,” a meeting of prominent citizens resolved, “is to resist the rioters or to retire.”40
The city proper’s elite turned decisively against crowd action in 1844 and sanctified the state’s monopoly on the use of force. Most of those at the meeting, which vindicated the militia’s decision to fire, were merchants and lawyers, many of them with “Proper Philadelphian” names: Fisher, who had exacting standards, said the few dozen or so present were made up of the “better class of citizens.”41 Earlier, in the Kensington troubles, he joined associates from the Philadelphia bar to defend a Catholic church, having concluded that service alongside his fellow attorneys was preferable to the ward associations “in which one is thrown with a great many low people.”42 Fisher shared the anti-Catholic prejudices of the nativists but preferred the rule of law to the civil war unfolding on the streets. Nor was he alone. Thomas Pym Cope, a Quaker, councilman, and president of the Board of Trade, excused himself from debates over the use of force on religious grounds, but the agonized conclusion in his diary could have served as a motto for the city proper’s elite: “order must [be] maintained.”43
But could it be? Here the “great city” served as a laboratory. Was selfgovernment possible in a polity made up of divided interests and propertyless voters? Fisher thought he knew the answer. “I have long had an idea,” he wrote a few weeks after the Kensington riot, “that the present civilization of the world, Europe & America, is destined to be destroyed by the irruption of the dark masses of ignorance & brutality which lie beneath it.” If the “barbarians each country contain within itself,” he continued, did not rise up in violent rebellion, they might capture the state at the ballot box and “destroy the fair fabric of knowledge, elegance, refinement & power.” For him, the Union’s course had been foreshadowed in the fate of Rome. Republics died when they devolved too much power to the people.44
The depth of Fisher’s antidemocratic conviction might have been rare, but rioting crystallized conservative fears about popular government. Philadelphians took comfort in the claim that the “ruffians” were a troublesome minority whose capacity to commit outrages rested on the supine ways of respectable citizens. Few, however, could deny that mobs enjoyed considerable support. After a long night of racial violence in 1849, for example, one correspondent to McMichael’s paper conceded that “our worst riots have been sustained at the time by local popular sympathy.”45 If investing power in the people led to anarchy, then was the United States any different to the Old World, with its cycle of revolution and reaction?
Some citizens certainly learned from the riots that their “great city” had more in common than they hoped with the European metropolis. For the president of the Board of Trade, the sound of the State House Bell summoning volunteer firemen during the riots reminded him “of the awful tocsin of Revolutionary France.” Over the following years, bourgeois Philadelphians used European markers to map the American metropolis. Inhabitants of courts and alleys sometimes became the “canaille,” riots “emeutes,” suburbs “faubourgs,” and radical workingmen “red republicans.” “The American and French people have many characteristics in common,” argued one supporter of Consolidation after an 1849 riot. “They are both armed, brave, impulsive, and disposed to offer forcible resistance to real or fancied wrongs.”46
Exceptionalism proved too strong for all the comparisons to stick, but the borrowing served its purpose. First, using “common referents” narrowed the gulf between the Old World and the New, making Atlantic exchange easier to imagine.47 After Henry Mayhew’s Life and Labor of the London Poor secured an American publisher, one Philadelphia paper concluded that the English capital “is only a type, on a large scale, of our great Atlantic cities,” while a reformer in 1855 found “life among the lowly” was “equally true” in the New World and the Old. Second, the threat of revolutionary violence separated citizens into orderly and disorderly, reminded the economic elite of the danger lurking in the suburbs, and enforced the kind of class discipline the North American would push over the following decade. To sympathize with mobs was to succor Jacobinism.48
Indulgence also threatened the city’s prosperity. Philadelphians were counting the “cost of riots” even before the militia stood down in 1844. Pamphlets published in the months that followed tried to quantify the destruction, with early estimates putting the losses at a minimum of $250,000.49 The burden of paying for the posse and militia fell on the county treasury, while the Catholic diocese sued the city proper for its failure to stop the mob from torching St. Augustine’s, which stood a few yards inside the original corporate boundaries. But the economic consequences of the violence extended far beyond claims for compensation. During the Kensington riots, a New Yorker warned Board of Trade president Thomas Pym Cope that Philadelphia bonds would struggle to find a buyer in Manhattan, while a few days after the Southwark conflagration, a rumor reached him that shipbuilding on the Delaware had come to a halt in the face of demands for an all-native waterfront. Cope worried about the “great injury to our future prosperity.” “Prudent men,” after all, would “be afraid to place capital in manufactories in a place where the populace may at any time lay them waste.”50 A city still suffering from the financial aftershocks of the Panic of 1837 could hardly afford to drive away investors.
Both
