Introduction
The lessons from France and political economy helped inform conservative attempts to build local governments in the mid-1850s. In these years, cities like New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn supported what was often called ‘consolidation’: merging cities and suburbs into larger big city governments. Others, like Boston and New York, sought to reform their charters, police, and institutions as an alternative route to strong government. Conservatives in these cities drew on similar processes of centralization they had described in Paris and from criticisms of urban imperialism. They described a process of centralization of power into the hands of rioters and urban voters, a state within a state that exercised power over the entire city. However, again, conservatives used this threat of centralization to justify a centralization of their own. They often hoped to centralize power geographically in larger city governments and claimed that economic ties over suburbs and neighbourhoods could tie disorderly cities together. Politically they hoped to remove barriers to state institutions and, concentrate political decision-making in the hands of institutions and propertied elites.
Conservatives may not have had the chance to reform politics on a national level, but looking at how conservatives used centralization as a process and political weapon in local government can highlight conservative state-building and attempts to restructure political power in midcentury America.
American cities in the 1850s had a long history of urban violence, which drove movements for consolidation. Echoing their censure of the Paris crowd in the Second Republic, conservatives warned that American mobs and voters had become a single source of violent power with potential to subject the city to its rule. Urban disorder confirmed to conservatives the danger of allowing the people to usurp government control over public space, just as the events in France between 1848 and 1852 had done. Moreover, conservatives, drew from a radical tradition that saw rioting as a part of American democracy, a way for the people to assert their authority over public space and officeholders who defied the will of the people. Conservatives, though, looked upon this with horror. To these Americans, consolidation took a wider significance than just bringing law and order to seemingly disorderly cities. Consolidation therefore showed how conservatives believed they could reassert the authority of government in public space over the people and their democratic capacity in a republic that supposedly embraced universal white male suffrage.
Having warned that the people were centralizing power in American cities, conservatives were able at reject republican warnings that consolidating government authority a local level to led to tyranny. Movements supporting police reform and enlarging the boundaries of city governments in particular gave conservatives opportunities to strengthen local governments and bring order to the American metropolis. Suggesting that balanced government and local decentralization were less important in city government, conservatives hoped that they could remove institutional and geographic checks on power, and enable the law-enforcing power of the centre. These reformers often embraced the assumption that removing outdated institutional and geographic checks on power through creating police forces and annexing independent districts could impose order on growing cities. Such measures helped conservatives strengthen government in response to urban
disorder, and ensure that centralization as a process benefited a conservative-directed state rather than a violent democratic rabble.
When confronted with stronger city government in the hands of their partisan opponents or democratic control, however, the strongest conservative reformers could become avid decentralizers. Conservatives used decentralization of authority in the spheres of property and finance, especially as a tool to prevent urban majorities from usurping power too. This, perhaps, helps to explain why research on municipal government in the 1850s can seem so contradictory. While some see the antebellum years as moments of aggressive state-building, others, notably Robin Einhorn, argue that decentralization allowed propertyowners to insulate property from majority rule.1 However, both centralization and decentralization of government authority here allowed conservatives to ensure control over state power remained in the right hands. Local centralization – coupled to occasional decentralizing measures – therefore helped conservatives pursue their own programme of state strengthening without embracing the kind of European-style national centralization they had critiqued in France.
The percent power relationships between people and government consolidation could set locally was also of national importance. Despite the distinctions historians have drawn between federal and local power, however, city reformers – conservatives prominent among them – moved back and forth between local and national centralization in making their case, sometimes treating cities as microcosms of the Union as a whole.2 One reformer in Philadelphia, for instance, proposed to consolidate the city into not one but two municipalities, a South Philadelphia and a North Philadelphia, just after Congress adopted popular sovereignty in the territories as a solution to the sectional crisis.3 As well as providing a window onto seeing how national federalism shaped local politics, though, the local experience of reform also came to inform how conservatives responded to the national sectional crisis too. Municipal reform therefore formed part of a much wider conservative response to midcentury challenges posed by turbulent democracy, economic transformation, and divisions over slavery, and provided one arena for conservatives to pursue an agenda that predated the turn to retrenchment in the 1870s.
Conservative supporters of municipal reform in the 1850s used ideas about centralization to fight over democracy, power, and union in their cities and the country as a whole. Their battles offer insights into how they expected the state to modernise in the face of industrialisation, urbanisation, and sectional conflict on both a local and national scale.
At a local level, it allowed them to argue that the people were responsible for a process of centralization, just as they were in Paris, but their responses had national implications. The conservatives studied here recognised their governments needed to evolve over time, rather than remain static, if they were to maintain the proper distribution of power between the state and the people. The debates surrounding consolidations and policing helped them explore what that evolution might look like: 1848-style republic or British-style propertied rule; a patchwork of local governments or a centralized unitary state; a powerful government shielded from democratic sway or one directly amenable to the people. Midcentury
1 See Einhorn, Property.
2 For more on how Americans applied lessons over national political economy at a local level, see Einhorn, Property, pp. 68-86; Heath, ‘In Union There is Strength’, pp. 101-24; Scobey, Empire, pp. 15-54.
3 Thomas Fernon, Minority Report of the Select Committee on the Subject of the Consolidation of the City of Philadelphia, With Enlarged Boundaries (Harrisburg, 1851).
municipal reform, in addressing some of these questions, allows us to see how conservatives hoped to build their own path to modernity.
Examples of municipal centralization – often called consolidations – in the 1850s, suggest that centralization was more than just a political weapon to describe phenomena on an international, national, or regional scale. Urban conservatives also used the concept to contest the legitimate institutional and geographic centres of authority within cities. In so doing, they helped define a conservative approach to building a government quite different to that of their republican eighteenth-century forbearers, and the ostensibly egalitarian vision of Jacksonian democrats. And when applied on a national scale, their approach can help us understand their response to the slavery crisis.
Riot and Reform in Midcentury America
Questions about the where power belonged in the metropolis arose while American cities confronted a problem of urban disorder. Like in Paris, it seemed that the people had the potential to monopolise violence in public space outside of the control of the institutions of republican government. 4 For conservatives, these questions about disorder were closely related to concerns about democratic overreach. In response, they looked to the many city reform movements of the era. In this period, smaller cities like Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and New Orleans merged with surrounding townships, counties, and municipalities to form larger city governments, often citing the need for strong policing as a reason. Others, including New York and Boston, engaged in institutional reform, merging separate police forces, strengthening city executives, and reforming city charters. To opponents, these reforms seemed like a dangerous curb on American democracy, and they drew from ideas like states’ rights to demonstrate their opposition. But for proponents, this process of geographic centralization in more expansive municipalities and centralization in formed an important part of how they hoped to build stronger conservative government fit for the pressures of the nineteenth-century.
Historians have described the 1840s and 1850s as particularly violent decades, as ethnic, class, and political tensions often led to outbreaks of unrest. Just one riot in Philadelphia in 1844 between Irish Catholics and nativist Protestants led to over twenty deaths and over fifty wounded, and while the death toll was unusually high, the street fighting was not. The Philadelphia nativist riots followed riots against abolitionists and African-Americans in particular in 1842, and resulted in the burning and looting of many black churches and property. New York experienced major riots through the 1830s and 1840s, culminating in 1849, when class and ethnic tensions exploded at a performance of Macbeth, leading to the death of 25 people and over one hundred injuries. In the 1850s, the city’s two rival police forces fought each other and, in this power vacuum, the city’s gangs started a year-long violent gang war. In this decade armed uprisings also successfully ruled
4 Bailyn, Origins, pp. 272-301; Cleves, Terror in America, pp. 20-57; Fritz, Sovereigns; Grimsted, ‘Rioting in its Jacksonian Setting’, pp. 361-397; Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy, pp. 1-7.; Maier, ‘Popular Uprisings’, pp. 3-35; Richards, Property and Standing, pp. 85-111; Ryan, Civic Wars, pp. 94-131; Smith, Dominion, pp. 11-86; Towers, The Urban South; Towers, ‘Mobtown’s Impact’, pp. 469-475; Wilentz, American Democracy, pp. 15-31. James Madison also warned against a similar phenomenon when defending the United States Constitution. See also James Madison, ‘The Same Subject Continued’ in J. Miller (ed.), The Federalist Papers (Mineola, 2014), pp. 41-47.
New Orleans and San Francisco in the period, and Baltimore too experienced violence at the hands of nativists and firemen.5
Moreover, much of this rioting was inherently political. Not only did rioters often have political aims, such as protesting abolitionism, brawling gangs were often politically connected to volunteer fire companies, ward bosses, and police forces. Urban Americans also had a long tradition of using rioting as a legitimate way for the citizens themselves to settle disputes between the governed and the governors. Even eminent citizens often accepted that rioting was a form of democratic expression, even if by the 1840s most had come to oppose it.From the revolutionary era onwards, many Americans had seen in popular violence – ranging from violent urban protest to the Shays and Dorr rebellions – the potential for the people themselves to claim sovereignty outside the formal channels of elections. Some, drawing on earlier traditions of legitimate revolt and community justice, saw this as legitimate. Even wealthy citizens sometimes headed the crowd in the Jacksonian era.6
But to conservatives, this right to rebel increasingly looked more like a licence for insurrection, anarchy, and mob rule.7 If crowd violence could be read as democratic excess, elite control over public space could also become a tool to curb a wider definition of popular sovereignty.8 Defenders of white male democracy suspected as much. Their concerns often stymied plans for a stronger police force in many cities.9 Conservatives might not have openly discussed disenfranchisement as a tool to curb the democratic rights of the masses and create a British-style government in the hands of a smaller number of propertied citizens, though such proposals did occasionally surface in the Nativist movement.10 However, this thinking – that democracy and mob violence were intrinsically linked – was central to how conservatives in the 1850s understood urban disorder as a centralization of power in the assemblage of the people themselves, and in their response, they looked to both restore law and order and curb urban democracy.
Looking at midcentury in this way can help bridge understand the links in antidemocratic politics between the Jacksonian era and the late nineteenth century.
5 For work on rioting generally, see Feldberg, Turbulent Era; Gilje, Mobocracy; Grimstead, Mobbing; Howe, Hath God Wrought, pp. 432-434; Prince, ‘Great Riot Year’, pp. 1-19; Richards, Property and Standing; Smith, Dominion, pp. 51-86. For the Philadelphia Nativist Riots, see Feldberg, Riots of 1844; pp. Geffen, ‘Industrial Development’, pp. 307-362; Warner, Private City, pp. 143-151; Weigley, ‘Border City’, p. 368. For rioting in New York City, see Beckert, Metropolis, p. 49-50; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, pp. 135-841; Keller, Triumph, pp. 158-168; Wilbur Miller, Cops and Bobbies (Chicago, 1977); James Richardson, ‘Mayor Fernando Wood and the New York Police Force, 1855-57’, New York Historical Society Quarterly 50 (1966), pp. 5-30; Ryan, Civic Wars, 151-157. For vigilance committees in New Orleans and San Francisco, see Ethington, Public City, 86-169; Rousey, Policing, pp. 66-67;
Ryan, Civic Wars, pp. 135-180. Baltimore, see Amy Greenberg, ‘Mayhem in Mobtown: Firefighting in Antebellum Baltimore’, Maryland Historical Magazine 90 (1995), pp. 164-179; Towers, ‘Mobtown’s Impact, pp.
469-475.
6 Richards, Property and Standing.
7 Bailyn, Origins, pp. 272-301; Cleves, Terror in America, pp. 20-57; Fritz, Sovereigns; Grimsted, ‘Rioting in its Jacksonian Setting’, pp. 361-397; Maier, ‘Popular Uprisings’, pp. 3-35; Richards, Property and Standing, pp. 92-111; Ryan, Civic Wars, pp. 94-131; Smith, Dominion, pp. 11-86; Towers, The Urban South; Towers, ‘Mobtown’s Impact, pp. 469-475; Wilentz, American Democracy, pp. 15-31, 62-65.
8 Scott, Seeing Like a State, pp. 9-190.
9 Johnson, Policing, pp. 15-38, 90-122; Miller, Cops and Bobbies, pp. 25-73; Rousey, Policing, pp. 2-6; Spann, Metropolis, pp. 313-340; Stevenson, Policing, pp. 14-19.
10 For disenfranchisement in the Know-Nothing movement, see Keyssar, Right to Vote, pp. 49-53; Bruce Levine,
‘Conservatism, Nativism, and Slavery’, pp. 455-488. For disenfranchisement campaigns after the Civil War, see Beckert, Metropolis, pp. 207-236; Keyssar, Right to Vote, pp. 117-171; Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 488-499.
Historians often take the Gilded Age as the beginning of a major conservative turn in approaches to American city government. The most spectacular example of this lies in New York. In 1871, wealthy taxpayers revolted against the high-spending regime of city boss William Tweed, who had used patronage and corruption to reconcile the city’s fractured class and ethnic groups. These taxpayers demanded lower taxes, smaller government, and democratic retrenchment; the official inquiry into preventing another Tweed Ring in New York recommended all cities in New York State effectively disenfranchise non-propertyowners in most municipal decision-making.11 However, conservatives in the 1850s – who were hardly enthusiastic converts to the creed of Jacksonian democracy – used American cities as an opportunity to redefine centralization in the people as a threat to republican government. Like their attempts to combat economic centralization in empire cities, they used urban disorder here to legitimise their own state-building programme, and linked strengthening government to forms of democratic retrenchment.
The riotous antebellum era saw substantial experimentation in local government too. Unlike the 1870s, though, municipal reform tended to mean creating stronger governments rather than just opposition to property taxation and perceived government corruption. Conservatives at midcentury inhabited fragmented cities in which state power – though often considerable in theory – was widely dispersed in practice. Big cities like Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and New Orleans were often divided among multiple municipalities and townships that provided their own police, services, and regulations. Others, including Boston and New York, devolved power among multiple wards and institutions. Police forces, for instance, were sometimes split between different officeholders, and ward aldermen often had substantial authority over criminal justice and improvements within their district. In this regard, American cities resembled the American government, with power divided among many smaller municipalities and states. It is perhaps therefore unsurprising that the response to both national and local disorder came to involve a similar programme of centralization.
11 For details on the Tweed regime as a tool to maintain order in New York, see Beckert, Metropolis, pp. 141, 173-175; Bernstein, Draft Riots, pp. 195-209; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, p. 1008. For details on the turn against democratic politics in response after 1871, see Beckert, Metropolis, pp. 172-204, 207-236; Bernstein, Draft Riots, pp. 228-236; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, pp. 1008-1035; Scobey, Empire City, pp. 258-261. See also Evarts et al., Report of the Commission.
Illustration 6: Map of the Circuit Ten Miles Around the City of Philadelphia
Source: ‘Map of the Circuit Ten Miles Around the City of Philadelphia’ David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, http://www.davidrumsey.com [Accessed August 19, 2016]. Image copyright © 2000 by Cartography Associates. Image may be reproduced or transmitted, but not for commercial use.
This map shows the area that would become the City of Philadelphia as it existed in 1847, divided among many municipalities each with their own government, debts, and police. The Act of Consolidation, 1854 amalgamated the highlighted area north of the Delaware River into a single city after many years of intense lobbying by municipal reformers.
To many city-dwellers, this decentralized system represented an American tradition of self-government, yet it was one that could seem increasingly outmoded. In the 1850s, many cities turned away from divided municipal authority in favour of what they often called ‘consolidation’. Charter reforms in 1853 saw New Orleans and New York restructure their divided city governments. One year later, Brooklyn and Philadelphia annexed their surrounding municipalities and formed big city governments. 12 (For example, see Illustration 6 above.) Reformers saw their projects in centralizing terms. Philadelphian reformer Eli Kirk Price, for example, cited conflict between the intricate networks of elected and appointed boards, commissions, and offices as a reason for consolidation, claiming instead that these needed to be placed under the aegis of a single city government.13 While these movements took place in individual cities, and were different in each metropolis, Americans saw the consolidation of cities across the nation as part of a national trend towards centralized municipal government.14
Other cities removed institutional, rather than geographic, boundaries to government power. Police reform also gave reformers an opportunity to respond to the changes taking place within American cities. Until the 1840s and 1850s, city policing – like municipal government more widely – remained decentralized in the hands of a variety of institutions, notably separate day marshals and night watches, but also ward constables, marshals, and lamp lighters. These often had little overall control and direction. Beginning with New York in 1845, cities therefore began merging these inefficient law-enforcing systems into modern police departments, often accountable directly to the city mayor, and considered tools like uniforms, telegraphs, and firearms to give them more authority over city streets.15 These were not simple modernizations, even if they were sometimes seen as such, and they often involved fierce political conflict. When the Republican New York State Legislature created a metropolitan wide force in 1857, for example, the existing Municipal Police rejected the authority of the new force, and, instead of disbanding, fought with its
12 For a general overview of the movement towards consolidation, see Curry, Corporate, pp. 1-32; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Teaford, City and Suburb, pp. 5-31; Teaford, Municipal Revolution. For coverage of the Boston consolidation and annexation, see Lawrence Kennedy, The City Upon a Hill: Boston Since 1630 (Amherst, 1992), pp. 43-108; Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (London, 2010); Allen Wakstein, ‘Boston's
12 For a general overview of the movement towards consolidation, see Curry, Corporate, pp. 1-32; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Teaford, City and Suburb, pp. 5-31; Teaford, Municipal Revolution. For coverage of the Boston consolidation and annexation, see Lawrence Kennedy, The City Upon a Hill: Boston Since 1630 (Amherst, 1992), pp. 43-108; Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (London, 2010); Allen Wakstein, ‘Boston's