Philadelphia (Repplier)/Chapter 19
FOR many years the City of Brotherly Love had been preëminent for the bitterness of her hostile factions, and for the unruly behaviour of her mob. The populace had learned its lawless lessons during the Revolution. It had sincerely enjoyed breaking the windows of Quaker citizens, or raiding the houses of Tories. These diversions coming to a close when the Republic was firmly established, were succeeded by other and no less lively demonstrations. Genet's heroic sympathizers had threatened Washington and the administration with open violence. Labour riots had become more and more common, as times grew harder and harder. The weavers in Kensington defied the sheriff, routed the police, and destroyed the hated machinery. The volunteer fire companies, "brigand firemen," as Mr. Fisher calls them, added a powerful element of disorder to the city they were supposed to serve. Rival companies fought desperately for the possession of plugs, while houses burned to the ground, and favoured thieves, to whom the firemen had granted their patronage and protection, pillaged the property of all that could be swiftly seized. If a mob fired a building,—no unusual occurrence,—and the hose companies sympathized with the mob, they refused to extinguish the flames. If their sympathies were on the other side, they naturally preferred fighting their opponents to bothering about the conflagration. In either case, householders suffered, and so powerful had these ruffians become, so influential were they in city politics, that no man dared to protest openly against their evil doing.
The anti-slavery agitation, which grew more violent after 1830, awoke such passionate resentment and opposition in the hearts of the masses that riot followed riot. Negroes were pelted in the streets, white men, who pleaded their cause, were pelted on the platform. Houses occupied by negroes were burned to the ground, and their inmates fled in abject terror beyond the city limits. In May, 1838, the Abolitionists held their meetings in Pennsylvania Hall, on Sixth Street, and many prominent agitators denounced the accumulated evils of slavery. Among the rest, John Greenleaf Whittier, then editing the Pennsylvania Freeman, read a poetical address, in which he rejoiced—prematurely—over the consecration of the hall to the noble cause of emancipation.
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All this sustained defiance of law and order paved the way for the serious riots of 1844, the "Native American Riots" as they were called, because they arose from the clamorous opposition offered by the Native American Association to the equally vehement demand of the Roman Catholics that children belonging to their church should, when attending religious instruction in the public schools, be permitted to use the Douai instead of the King James Bible. This controversy being well established, and a consecrated character given to the impending struggle between two nationalities, the outbreak began, as most outbreaks do begin, through the inordinate desire of one faction to hold meetings and denounce their opponents, and the irresistible impulse of the other faction to break up the meeting with brickbats.
That the Native Americans should have selected to gather together and expound their views in the immediate vicinity of the Hibernia Hose Company, showed either a readiness for the strife, or a painful lack of perspicuity. The habit, long acquired, of holding pitched battles over disputed fire-plugs had made mighty fighters of all the volunteer companies. That the Hibernians should have sallied forth and attacked the meeting evangelical, was, while neither wise nor right, hardly a matter of surprise to those who knew the Irish temperament, and the pure joy it feels in breaking heads. A lively combat ensued, in which guns were fired, some of them from the windows of the Hibernia Hose House, many people were injured, and one lad killed. At seven in the evening the sheriff, Mr. Morton McMichael, arrived on the scene, but was powerless to check the rioting, which grew fiercer and fiercer under cover of the darkness. An attempt was made by the Native Americans and their upholders to burn a schoolhouse occupied by the Sisters of Charity and their pupils,—helpless creatures who had been guilty of no violence, and who could not even avoid being in danger's way. They were stanchly defended, however, by the Irishmen; and, as the battle deepened, a number of "innocent spectators," who should have been at home, were severely wounded, and houses tenanted by Roman Catholics had all their windows broken.
It was a bad night's work. Several injured men died after being carried to the hospital; and the general excitement was fast reaching fever heat. The Native Americans held another meeting the following day, passed resolutions, denounced the Catholics, and, growing angrier and angrier under the spur of their own eloquence, marched in a body to attack the Hibernia Hose House. The Irishmen were there to meet them, and a fierce struggle followed, in which six of the invaders were killed. They succeeded at length in firing the house, and the flames spread with appalling rapidity to all the neighbouring properties. Alarm was given, and a number of engines came to the rescue; but the mob, now blind with fury, and unable to distinguish between friend and foe, refused to allow any of the firemen to approach the burning buildings. It was only the arrival of the First Brigade, commanded by General Cadwalader, which calmed their emotions, and persuaded them to sullenly disperse. The conflagration was checked, but not before thirty houses and the old "nanny-goat market" were reduced to smouldering ruins.
Up to this point there had been little to choose between the lawlessness of either faction. Honours were easy, and upon all shoulders rested the burden of blame. But the passions of the mob had been heated to danger-point, and it was pleased to side with the Native Americans, and to profess the same religious enthusiasm which lent zest to the Gordon riots in London. The torch has ever been the favourite weapon of the populace, and it was used with terrible efficacy and good-will. The Catholics were no longer able to defend their property. Bishop Kenrick issued a manifesto, entreating and commanding them to offer no violence under provocation, but to trust to the protection of their country's laws. The struggle did not lie now, as in the beginning, between the Native American Association and the Irishmen, but between the mob and the military, between open outlawry and the authority of the State.
One day of quiet lulled the city into a false sense of security, and on the next, a maddened crowd, rising like locusts from the ground, swept through the streets of Kensington, and at broad noon applied the torch to St. Michael's Roman Catholic Church, and to the schoolhouse, the "nunnery" as it was called, which had so narrowly escaped destruction three days before. Both buildings were burned to the ground, and the rioters decided to prolong the entertainment by firing the rectory and some adjacent houses. They were sincerely anxious, or so they affirmed, to confine their attentions to members of the erring creed; but unluckily the flames recognized no polemical distinctions, and spread straight on, consuming two rows of humble residences, and filling all hearts with consternation and dismay. It was five o'clock before the arrival of the soldiers dispersed the mob, and saved the entire quarter from destruction; and in the meantime another body of rioters had gathered in front of St. Augustine's Catholic Church, at Fourth and Vine Streets. This was in the heart of the city, far from the scene of the previous disturbances, far from the offending hose company, and the homes of the Irish weavers. The City Troop was stationed near; Philadelphia's mayor was present on the spot. Apparently, mayor and military were alike disregarded. The incendiaries broke open the church, and set it on fire. The flames, mounting rapidly and without hindrance, licked the roof and the wooden cupola, surmounted by a gilded cross. When this cross fell crashing to the ground, cheer after cheer burst from the throats of the surrounding mob. While men shrieked their approval and delight, the City Troop rode by at full gallop, their brilliant trappings lit by the glare of the conflagration. The rioters defied them doggedly, and went on with their work of destruction.
Adjoining the church was the schoolhouse. It had been turned into a hospital during the dreadful summer of 1832, and in it the Sisters of Charity had nursed the sick and dying cholera patients through those long months of burning heat and pestilence. Now it was once more a school, and contained the valuable library of the Augustinian priests. There were over a thousand books, many of them rare old editions of the classics, which could not be duplicated in the United States. The mob flung these books out of the windows, kicked them into heaps, and made bonfires of them in the street. A few were saved, many were stolen, before the flames spread to the schoolhouse, and consumed all the rest in one swift, hopeless destruction. By morning nothing was left save a mass of ruins, and the blackened walls of the church, on one of which, high over the spot where the desecrated altar had stood, might still be deciphered the prophetic words, "The Lord Seeth." Men looked at them and wondered, as they look to-day at the dim figure of Christ with outstretched arms, which, whitewashed rudely over by Moslem hands, still stands faintly but ineffaceably portrayed above the apse of St. Sophia.
The city began to realize the gravity of the situation, and the extent of its own danger. Mayor Scott called a meeting, enrolled a number of citizens in the "peace police," and divided them into patrols for the protection of life and property. Bishop Kenrick ordered all Catholic churches to be closed the following Sunday, lest fresh provocation should lead to fresh disorder; and for the first time, since the early history of Philadelphia, men stayed in their homes because they dared not assemble for service. St. John's, then the Catholic cathedral, and St. Mary's had both been threatened by hostile mobs; and St. John's had been saved from the torch by the timely appearance of General Cadwalader, who found the rioters ready for their work, and gave them five minutes in which to disperse. So great, however, was the feeling of insecurity, so menacing the attitude of the populace, that the sacred vessels and the vestments were removed from the churches, and concealed in private houses. Even the Catholic orphans were not permitted to remain in the asylums which no longer afforded them a safe shelter.
The grand jury, then in session, presented a long and feeble statement, "regretted" the extent of the violence, intimated that it was really time the disturbances should cease, and charged the beginning of the outbreak to "the efforts of a portion of the community to exclude the Bible from the public schools";—hardly a fair assertion, inasmuch as the Douai version of the Scriptures, while less beautiful as English literature than the translation authorized by King James, is still "the Bible,"
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and to read it is not to exclude Holy Writ from education. Nevertheless a sentiment prevailed that the street riots were in some sort religious and devotional, a nineteenth century crusade, unduly zealous perhaps, but stimulated—like the Gordon riots—by pious fervour. The Native American Association grew rapidly from a few hundreds to many thousands; and, conscious of its own strength and of the weakness of its opponents, it prepared for a grand demonstration on the Fourth of July, a demonstration which should effectually but peacefully reveal its imposing size and majesty.
For provoking quarrels and for disseminating contagion, nothing is so preëminently successful as a parade. The Catholics were, indeed, more impressed than was altogether desirable by the mighty preparations for the Fourth. They were thoroughly alarmed for the safety of their churches, and the congregation of St. Philip Neri's applied to the arsenal for arms, with which a volunteer company under a commissioned officer could protect the property, if attacked. Twenty-five muskets were furnished on an order from Governor Porter. These were never used, because no assault was made on the day of the great procession; but when it was generally known that guns and powder had been stored in the church, a strong feeling of hostility was aroused. If people were to be permitted to defend their possessions after this martial fashion, there would be an end to all the pleasant pastimes of the last fortnight. The sheriff accordingly removed the objectionable arms the following morning, but the excitement did not subside; and, on the sixth of July, the slow gathering of the mob, which grew denser and denser as night approached, gave ominous warning of the trouble still to come. General Cadwalader, who by this time had grown pardonably weary of the populace and its diversions, strove hard to clear the streets; and the soldiers, though taunted and insulted by the rioters, succeeded by midnight in dispersing them for a few hours,—the lull before the storm. Day had not dawned before they were back again, sullen, resolute, ripe for any form of violence, a force not easily reckoned with nor subdued. In a few hours they had broken the windows and battered down the door of St. Philip Neri's, forced the militia who were guarding it to withdraw, and established themselves triumphantly in the church, as in a fortress that had been carried by storm.
Once more General Cadwalader prepared to dislodge them, and this time he realized the nature of the impending strife. The troops were ordered to clear Queen Street. It was no facile task. The mob, well-armed, and well supplied with ammunition, fought fiercely in the narrow highways. Through the long summer afternoon, and far into the night, the battle raged. From windows and from pointed roofs the rioters fired down upon the soldiers. They dragged three cannons from a ship lying at the wharf, loaded _69.png)
them with bolts, chains and spikes, and discharged them again and again, the result being as fatal to the crowd as to their opponents. They stretched ropes across the darkening streets to obstruct the passage of the cavalry. It was picturesque, and exceedingly like Perugia in the Middle Ages, when the Baglioni and their rivals fought in the great square of the Cathedral; but it was not at all like Penn's City of Peace, which he had founded as an asylum for the oppressed, where no sword was to be drawn, and no man persecuted for his creed.
The soldiers, hemmed in on every side, were well-nigh exhausted. They also had two cannons, brought from the battery at Second and Queen Streets; but their ammunition was nearly gone when the arrival of the First State Troop forced the mob to give way. By midnight the firing ceased, and by dawn, twenty-four hours after the rioters had assembled in front of St. Philip's Church, the streets were clear, and peace restored to Philadelphia. Only the wounded and the dead were left to tell the price she paid.
This was the last mad outbreak of the populace. Governor Porter, now fully awake to the public peril, called together all the troops that could be spared from Pennsylvania's more tranquil towns, and the presence of five thousand soldiers calmed the angry passions, and chilled the religious enthusiasm of the mob. Nor had the city learned her lesson without profit therefrom. It was clearly evident that the old system of boroughs and townships no longer afforded a safe or strong municipal government, and that some closer bond was necessary to draw together the different parts of one great whole, and unite them in a single corporation. In 1849 a meeting of prominent citizens, under the leadership of Eli K. Price, began the work of reform, which was so successfully concluded by the Consolidation Act of 1854. Philadelphia, instead of being divided and subdivided in a fashion which lent itself to perpetual strife and a dangerous weakening of responsibility, became one united, consolidated city. The pernicious system of taxation, which was all cost and no returns, disappeared in favour of more practical methods. The volunteer fire companies were shorn of their political power, compelled to modify their methods, and finally abolished altogether, when many dry eyes witnessed their departure. The police corps was reorganized, and bands of ruffians, like the "Bouncers" and the "Schuylkill Rangers," no longer found themselves at liberty to terrorize one district, and retreat safely to another, where the arm of the law could not reach them. The common schools were securely established, and education took a great leap forward,—a leap in the dark, said the discontented, but anything seemed better than standing perfectly still. In fact, the city had grown weary of immobility; weary of the torpor which had bound her for the past forty years, and had reduced her to a dead level of mediocrity; weary of narrow ways, of insignificance, and provincialism. New life was tingling in her veins, new hopes and fears were beating in her heart. Already the shadow of strife was darkening over the land, and drowsy Philadelphia awoke to play her part in the coming struggle. The voice to which she had ever responded had been the voice of war.