Philadelphia riots

Significance: From May 6 to July 5, 1844, during a period of rising immigration and intercultural friction, nativists rioted against Irish Catholic workers.

Rapid population growth, industrialization, and cultural conflict characterized urban America in the 1840s and helped produce bloody anti-Irish riots in Philadelphia’s industrial suburbs of Kensington and Southwark in the summer of 1844. Already the second largest US city in 1840, Philadelphia grew by more than one-third in the 1840s, from twenty-five thousand people to thirty-six thousand. Irish immigrants, hard-pressed by the Great Famine that had decimated the potato crops in their homeland, stimulated this growth and made up 10 percent of Philadelphia’s population in 1844. Prior to commuter railroads and automobiles, most people lived near their workplaces and cities were densely populated. Low-income newcomers such as the Irish resided in cheap, substandard housing and symbolized the ill effects of disorderly urban growth to longtime Philadelphians.

Nativist Sentiment

Lacking in job skills and capital, Irish immigrants filled the bottom rungs in the emerging industrial order’s occupational ladder. As its population grew, Philadelphia expanded its involvement in large-scale manufacturing. By 1840, half of Philadelphia’s sixteen thousand working adults labored in manufacturing, and 89 percent of the workers in Kensington toiled in industrial trades. American-born whites predominated in such well-paying craft occupations as ship carpenter and ironmaker, leaving low-paying jobs requiring less skill, such as weaving, for Irish newcomers. Perceiving immigrants and African Americans as competitors, many white American workers used violence to drive them from trades and neighborhoods.

In the 1830s, Philadelphia, like other major cities, hosted a strong working-class trade union and political movement. At its height, the General Trades Union (GTU) of Philadelphia City and County included more than ten thousand workers representing more than fifty different trades. Collective action in an 1835 general strike for a ten-hour day succeeded in winning shorter hours and wage hikes in numerous workplaces. GTU activists voted against conservative Whigs opposed to strikes and Catholic immigrants. The Panic of 1837 weakened the GTU and undermined the solidarity of its culturally and occupationally diverse constituency.

In the 1840s, native-born Protestant skilled workers fought for a dwindling supply of jobs and received little help from the financially weakened GTU. Evangelical Protestants from all social classes joined moral reform campaigns for temperance and strict observance of the Sabbath. Temperance and Sabbatarianism symbolized American-born white workers’ efforts to survive hard times through personal discipline. Workers made up the majority of temperance societies in industrial suburbs such as Kensington and Southwark. Moral reforms often attacked immigrant cultural institutions, such as the Roman Catholic church and Sunday tavern visits. Economic contraction and moral reform eroded the GTU’s bonds of working-class solidarity, which might have prevented ethnic conflict in 1844.

The American Republican Party, dedicated to eliminating the influence of Catholic immigrants in public life, best exploited the anxieties of native-born workers. The party flourished briefly in eastern cities in the mid-1840s, drawing support from American-born workers and middle-class professionals such as Philadelphia’s Lewis Levin, a struggling lawyer and aspiring politician from South Carolina. In the spring of 1844, American Republicans campaigned against Catholic voters’ attempts to protect their children from Protestant religious instruction in the public schools. Protestant-dominated Philadelphia schools used the King James version of the Bible as a classroom textbook. Objecting that the King James version was not authoritative, Catholics preferred the Douay Bible, which included annotations written by the Vatican. Philadelphia’s Catholic bishop, Francis Kenrick, wanted public schools to allow Catholic students to bring their Bibles to class or be exempted from Protestant religious instruction. American Republicans accused Philadelphia Catholics of plotting to remove the Bible from the schools entirely and to have priests take over classrooms.

In April 1844, American Republicans staged rallies across the city to whip up support for their nativist program. Violence between the Irish and nativists broke out when nativists gathered near Irish neighborhoods. American Republicans scheduled a mass meeting for May 6 in Kensington’s third ward, a neighborhood composed mainly of Irish weavers. On May 6, rain drove hundreds of nativists who traveled to the third ward rally to seek cover at the Nanny Goat Market, a covered lot of market stalls. Approximately thirty Irish waited at the market, and one yelled, “Keep the damned natives out of the market house; it don’t belong to them. This ground is ours!” Samuel Kramer, editor of the pro-American Republican Native American newspaper (named for Anglo-American nativists, not American Indians), tried to finish his speech against the Catholic proposals for the Douay Bible, but Irish hecklers drowned him out. A shoving match escalated into fistfights and gunfire as nativists and Irish battled for control of the market house. Police arrived at dusk and temporarily restored order. Four men died, three of them nativists, and many more were wounded in the fighting.

The next day, nativists massed in Kensington for revenge. The Native American ran the headline: “Let Every Man Come Prepared to Defend Himself!” A parade of nativists marched through Kensington under a US flag and a banner declaring, “This is the flag that was trampled underfoot by Irish Papists.” Nativist mobs rampaged through Kensington for two more days, burning homes and invading two Catholic churches, where rioters defaced religious objects and looted valuables. Although Sheriff Morton McMichael tried to calm public disorder, police were too few in number to stop the violence. Needing reinforcements, McMichael called on General George Cadwalader, commander of the First Brigade of Pennsylvania state militia, stationed in Philadelphia. On May 10, state troops brought peace to the city and kept it under martial law for a week.

Tension prevailed in June, amid criticism of city officials and militia commanders for failing to prevent violence. American Republicans still had public support, and Catholics worried about more violence. Catholics feared that nativists would use July 4 patriotic celebrations as a pretext to riot. Parishioners at St. Philip’s Church in Southwark, just south of Philadelphia, hoarded weapons inside the church in order to defend it. Hearing of the arms cache, on July 5, Levin led thousands of nativists, including volunteer militia with cannons, to St. Philip’s to demand the weapons. Stung by earlier criticism, Cadwalader’s militia promptly seized the church and ordered nativists away. When the mob refused to move, Cadwalader opened fire and a pitched battle involving cannon and rifle fire ensued for a day and a half. The militia, helped by city police, prevailed in fighting that left two rioters dead and dozens of state troops and civilians wounded.

Consequences

The American Republican Party campaigned on the riots by attacking reigning politicians as the allies of Irish Catholics and making martyrs of the nativists killed in the riots. In October, Levin and another American Republican won election to the US House of Representatives, and nativists captured several county offices, mostly on the strength of votes from working-class Kensington and Southwark. The American Republicans faded in the late 1840s, but nativists returned in the 1850s under the aegis of the American, or Know-Nothing, Party.

The riots forced Irish Philadelphians to band together as an ethnic group. The most prominent Irish opponent of the mobs was Hugh Clark, a master weaver and ward politician worth more than thirty thousand dollars in 1850. Clark had stridently opposed striking Irish journeymen weavers prior to 1844. Master weavers, some of them Irishmen like Clark, cut journeymen’s wages in the wake of the Kensington riot, confident that few non-Irish workers would protest the cuts. Bishop Kenrick urged conciliation and softened his public position on the Bible controversy. American Republican anger at police and militia actions temporarily stalled police reform, but in the 1850s, Philadelphia and other cities established professional police departments to prevent more riots like those of 1844.

Bibliography

Davis, Susan G. Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1986. Print.

Feldberg, Michael. The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict. Westport: Greenwood, 1975. Print.

Knobel, Dale T. Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1986. Print.

Lannie, Vincent P., and Bernard C. Diethorn. “For the Honor and Glory of God: The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844.” History of Education Quarterly 8 (1968). Print.

Laurie, Bruce. Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1980. Print.

Montgomery, David. “The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in the Kensington Riots of 1844.” Journal of Social History 5 (1972). Print.

Warner, Sam Bass, Jr. The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1968. Print.