Davis, Allen F., & Haller, Mark H., editors.

The Peoples of Philadelphia; a History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790 -1940. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973.

 

[Excerpt taken from Michael Feldberg's essay, "Urbanization as a Cause of Violence: Philadelphia as a Test Case.}

 

Pages 57-61, 68.

 

Aside from the shared values and camaraderie which artisans developed in their workshops, craft cohesion was reinforced by such factors as occupational clustering in neighborhoods,(27) socializing in taverns, and the many violent strikes, which punctuated labor relations in such industries as shoe making and weaving. Journeymen within a craft found their ties drawn more closely together by fights against the sheriff's posse or groups of scabbing workers.

 

Even in the city's first nativist riot in 1828, the natives attacked not random Irish victims but Irish weavers who congregated at a Kensington tavern. The nativists' fury was redoubled when the weavers hung their banner from the tavern's second-floor window.(28) The native artisans gave philosophical legitimacy to their violent defense of social values or economic interests by -propounding their own version of American political and social theory. The artisan claimed equality and individual rights as the result of American victory in the War for Independence.(29) Discussing this legacy, David Montgomery asserts that "the mechanics proudly preserved an intellectual heritage blended of Ben Franklin's maxims and Tom Paine's 'Rights of Man.'" (30) Referring to the artisan districts of Southwark and Moyamensing (scene of the Native American riots in July 1844), Warner has described them as "intensely patriotic, white-equalitarian, anti-Negro, anti-foreigner, in short, strong followers of the old radical Revolutionary tradition." (31) Drawing on this heritage, the craftsman argued that he need never take a back seat to men from any class in society. The butchers' guild, for example, liked to think of itself as a "fraternity of men" which no less than merchants or bankers was "essential and indispensable to the body politic." (32) On the Fourth of July, orators praised the craftsmen as the city's backbone, and on Election Day middle-class candidates vied for the title "workingman's friend." (33)

 

Violence fit neatly into the artisans' version of their Revolutionary heritage. In the Jacksonian era, the Philadelphia artisan still clung to his "right of resistance" to governmental abuse or unjust market relationships, and he understood the notion of "popular .sovereignty" to mean that the rights of minorities had to be subservient to the will of the majority.(34) When government failed to act, such as in enforcing the assize of bread (35) or protecting the community from disruptive ideas, the working classes considered it legitimate to take limited though violent action on their own behalf. Such a formulation helps explain the Wilson riot, the burning of Pennsylvania Hall, or the Kensington anti-railroad riots described below. Pauline Maier expressed it well when she defined American majoritarian forms of collective violence as "extralegal" defense of "community interest." (36) In all these cases, action was motivated, or at least rationalized, by appeals to natural justice, constitutional rights, and the notion that community interest superseded private rights.

 

Such a struggle between community and private rights precipitated one of the era's little known but most characteristic "instrumental" riots, the Kensington anti-railroad riot of 1840. Kensington's struggle against the railroad lasted for two years. Early in 1840, the Pennsylvania state legislature granted the Philadelphia and Trenton Railroad a right of way down Kensington's busy Front Street, despite protests from the entire Philadelphia delegation. Because they ran right on the street, spewing hot coals from their smokestacks, railroads were then considered a dangerous innovation. Their roadbeds tended to block local wagon traffic, and Kensington's draymen were among those most actively opposed to the grant. Front Street property owners opposed the trains because they posed a threat to their wooden homes and shops. Their hostility was further increased by the legislature's failure to include any financial compensation for the disruption during construction or the decline in property values. The district's tenants, mostly weavers, opposed the railroad for the nuisance and dangers it posed to pedestrians and children playing in the street. When the legislature refused to reverse its grant to the railroad and the courts upheld the grant's legality, the various factions in Third Ward Kensington united to take limited but direct action on their own.

 

The weavers and draymen entered into coalition with their middle-class landlords and employers, as well as professional politicians, to resist the railroad. Their diverse interests were reconciled under the umbrella of appeals to natural and constitutional rights and resistance to legislative tyranny, rhetorical formulas with roots in radical Revolutionary ideology. Today we would label the issue one of community control. The railroad's opponents argued that "a public highway . . . could not be legally or properly chartered out to a private corporation," especially since the local community opposed that charter. A strongly Locofoco neighborhood, Third Ward Kensington called for "No Monopoly! Free Passage to All!" "We ask nothing but what is Right, and Submit to nothing Wrong. . . . The Constitution protects the People in the Use of their Highways." (37) To protect these constitutional guarantees, both respectable property owners and turbulent weavers used their right of resistance to unjust laws.

 

The neighborhood's struggle against the company shifted tactically from violent confrontation to legal action to political organization and back to violence. The force employed in these instances was clearly limited in its goals: the crowd destroyed railroad ties and diverted shipments of rails. No one was seriously injured, much less killed. Violence was used only in conjunction with political organization to persuade the company to give up its grant. Violence was no more than an extension of the bargaining process.(38)

 

Space does not permit more than a cursory summary of the struggle. In all, the anti-railroad fight lasted from March 1840 through June 1842, when the legislature was finally persuaded to repeal the charter. For two years, whenever work gangs came to dig up Front Street and lay ties, neighborhood men, women, and children used the upturned paving stones ("ground apples," as they were known) to drive the work gangs off. They then burned the ties. This scene recurred at least four different times between March 2, 1840, and February 3, 1841. In mid-March 1840, the county sheriff obtained an injunction deputizing all Kensington citizens into his posse and making those who opposed his efforts to guard the workmen subject to prosecution for treason. Despite the severe penalty, the railroad thought it best to suspend work rather than risk any further loss of supplies and willing laborers.(39) On another occasion, the sheriff arrived in Kensington with a posse intent on guarding the workers, but even this group, armed with maces, was driven off by weavers using their dye-sticks and paving stones as weapons. That evening, a crowd attacked and burned Emery's Tavern, Front and Phoenix Streets, which had served as the posse's headquarters. While Emery was temporarily out of business, the real loser was Joseph Naglee, president of the Philadelphia and Trenton, who rented the tavern to Emery.(4o)

 

While the Third Ward crowd held up construction, Philadelphia's Democratic party leadership was busily making political capital out of this David and Goliath confrontation between popular rights and monopoly capitalism. Among the politicos prominent in the agitation were William English, one of the original founders of the Philadelphia Workingmen's Party and a perennial foe of corporate charters; Edward Penniman, a Democratic "workingman's friend" then sitting in the state legislature; ex-Congressman and Southwark tavern keeper Lemuel Paynter, later a leading nativist; and renegade patrician Charles Jared Ingersoll, lone Democrat in an old-line Whig family. These politicians persuaded Democratic governor David R. Porter to pardon all those convicted of burning Emery's tavern. They also led a Kensington rally, which called on the district commissioners to refrain from reimbursing the sheriff for his efforts to maintain order. The meeting also urged the commissioners to confiscate as a public nuisance any railroad property left in the streets.(41)

 

In this manner the struggle dragged on sporadically for two years: violence, political rallies, new court appeals to overthrow the railroad's charter, a dropping-off of interest in the subject, renewed attempts in the dead of winter to start construction again (apparently the long, hot summer was a factor in Philadelphia 1840 as well as today), another violent response by the Third Ward's residents, and further lobbying in the state legislature by both sides in the dispute.(42) In May 1841 the state legislature offered to pay reparations to Front Street's property owners, at that late date such a gesture was not enough to win acquiescence of owners or their tenants. Finally, in June 1842 Ledger reported the end of hostilities between the railroad directors and the people. After several "investigations and enactments" by the state legislature, Kensington representative Thomas M. Scott finally persuaded that body to repeal the railroad's grant. His achievement made him a local hero, and the neighborhood celebrated the repeal with two days of illuminations and street parties. Even the Ledger, which in so many other cases condemned the city's propensity to "mob rule," blamed this instance of "discord and contention" on the legislature's "misdirected legislation." (43) Thus even Philadelphia's most law-and-order press vindicated the neighborhood's belief in its right of resistance to unjust laws. The railroad was never built.

 

Footnotes:

 

27. For a discussion of artisan neighborhood clustering, see Sam Bass Warner, "If All the World Were Philadelphia," American Historical Review 74 (Oct. 1969) :38.

28. Scharf and Westcott, History of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: L. H.

Everts, 1887), vol. 1, p. 623.

29. Alfred Young, "After Carl Becker: The Mechanics and New York City Politics, 1774-1801," Labor History 5 (Fall 1964) :215-24.

30. Montgomery, "Working Classes," p. 13.

31. Warner, Private City, p. 88.

32. Public Ledger, July 19, 1836.

33. Ibid., Oct. 2, 1842.

34. For a discussion of "popular sovereignty" in the context of collective violence, see Richard Maxwell Brown, "The History of Extralegal Violence in Support of Community Values," Violence in America, Thomas Rose, ed. (NY: Vintage Books, 1969), p. 90.

35. Public Ledger, Jan. 4, 1837.

36. Pauline Maier, "Popular Uprisings," p. 5.

37. Public Ledger, June 22,1842.

38. Nieburg, Political Violence, p. 5.

39. Public Ledger, March 3, 13, and 14, 1840.

40. Ibid., July 28, 1840.

41. Ibid., Aug. 4, 1840.

42. Ibid., Feb. 17; December 16, 1841; June 22,1842.

43. Ibid., June 22, 1842.