In 1844 the American Republicans — a Protestant Nativist
group — announced that they would hold a meeting in
Philadelphia’s Third Ward, an Irish stronghold in the
Kensington district. On May 3 and again on May 6, the
Irish repelled their unwanted visitors with force. After the
second incident, in which a young Protestant man was killed,
the city was in an uproar. On May 7, a Protestant mob
marched to the Irish section. On that day and the next, the
mob burned down more than 30 homes. The Church of St.
Michael was set ablaze as was the Church of St. Augustine,
along with its monastery and splendid library. Firemen were
kept away. When Mayor John Morin Scott…pleaded for
calm, he was struck on the head with a stone and knocked
unconscious. 1
The Philadelphia Riots of 1844 exemplify a particularly grim portion of US history. Anti-Catholic, anti-immigration sentiment stoked by urbanization, industrialization, and an economic depression erupted in several days of violence in May and again in July of that year.
Protestant native-born Americans, the Nativists, were upset with the changes taking place in the growing country and blamed the new immigrants, particularly the Irish Catholics. The Nativists saw the Catholics’ allegiance to the Pope as a threat to democracy and questioned their loyalty to America. They accused the Irish Catholics of isolating and not assimilating into American society. Irish and German Catholics had been immigrating since the 1820s and 1830s, and the influx brought overcrowding and even more unsanitary conditions to distressed neighborhoods. The economic depression which hit the country from 1839-1843 left citizens in poor economic straits, exacerbated with the mechanization of work which turned skilled labor into unskilled factory jobs. Many skilled artisans lost their jobs, while the wages for factory work were being driven even lower by the surplus of unskilled immigrant labor.
Times were tough, and discontented, disenfranchised people in the cities expressed their anger violently. In 1834 a Protestant mob burned a Catholic convent to the ground in Boston. In 1844, 1200 Protestants carrying anti-Catholic banners staged a demonstration in New York City and threatened to burn down St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Kensington, then a predominantly Irish suburb of Philadelphia, had been the scene of much violence since the 1820s. Weavers in the town had held violent strikes for better wages. Mobs had aggressively protested the installation of a railroad line through the area (using tactics which included tearing up railroad tracks on Front Street and burning down a tavern). As the Protestants blamed the unskilled Irish Catholics for taking their jobs and lowering wages, so the Irish Catholics blamed the African Americans, staging attacks against them and anyone promoting anti-slavery. Fire companies, usually drawn along ethnic, religious, or ideological lines and often having ties to street gangs, were frequently engaged in fights. It was a dog-eat-dog world which reached its boiling point in 1844.
Not unlike politicians today, the Nativists used religious rhetoric to further their cause. The Protestant King James Bible was required reading in public schools, and Catholics wanted their children to read the Catholic Bible instead or be excused from those lessons. Nativists exaggerated the situation with cries of ‘save the Bible from foreign influence,’ claiming that Catholics were trying to take the Bible out of the schools altogether. Philadelphia pastor Thomas Brainerd wrote a sermon that illustrates the Nativist feeling with extreme dramatic eloquence:
If our civil and religious liberties are about to be annihilated
--if the light of Protestant Christianity be here flickering in
the socket--if the Bible be about to be re-consigned to the
cobwebs of convents, and the returning mists of the middle
ages are threatening to re-enshroud in darkness and gloom,
the glorious sun of righteousness, then the alarm cannot
sound too loud or too long. 2
The riots broke out when Protestant Nativists staged anti-Catholic, anti-immigration rallies in the mostly Irish suburb of Kensington. In the chaos of everyone running for shelter from a rainstorm that started, no one knew who fired the first shot. Nativists looted and burned Irish homes, a fire house, the market.
The fighting continued, became fiercer. Brickbats flew in
every direction, firearms were discharged indiscriminately.
A handful of Catholics sallied from the hose house and laid
about so furiously with axes that the Americanists retreated
into the market. But they surged out again in a moment and
by sheer force of numbers drove the firemen to cover. The
Catholics all fled, sought refuge in houses on Cadwallader
Street and Master Street and Germantown Road; but they
hurled missiles at their pursuers from the windows…. Doors
were battered in, windows broken, furniture was thrown into
the streets and demolished. They riddled the walls with bullets
…. Sister Mary opened the front door and showed herself,
thinking that the sight of a woman would pacify the mob. She
was greeted with a storm of missiles; a brick knocked her
down unconscious. 3
The fighting, looting, and burning went on for three days. As city officials had no jurisdiction over the suburbs, the constable had to summon the county sheriff who summoned the volunteer posse, which was not only mostly Protestant and thus reluctant to protect Irish-Catholic property, but also unpaid. And unarmed. So not much in the way of mitigating the riots went on until the state militia was called in. (Who, while also not very interested in helping out the ethnic and religious minority and also unpaid, did at least have weapons.)
Additional riots took place in July in the mostly Irish suburb of Southwark (now Queen Village in South Philadelphia) when Nativists organized a parade near the Catholic church of St. Philip Neri. The church, warned of possible attack, had obtained weapons which the Nativists suspected were there and wanted removed. The Protestant mob commandeered a canon from the docks and dragged it to the church, though the one shot fired in confusion mainly missed its target. When a state militia unit from Germantown, another suburb further north, arrived, its presence as an outside force antagonized the Protestant mob further. Riots which began as Protestant Nativists fighting Irish Catholics morphed into Protestant Nativists against the militia. It was the first time in US history that the government raised arms against its own civilians.
All of the rioting that year left 20 dead and more than 100 injured but did lead to several constructive outcomes. In 1850 the city and its suburbs created a unified, professional police force and in 1855 a single, professional fire department. In 1854 the outlying suburbs of Kensington, Northern Liberties, Southwark, and others which were less patrolled and more prone to lawlessness were incorporated into the city of Philadelphia. And rather than continue to fight for the right to read the Catholic Bible in public schools, ecclesiastical authorities founded the first free Catholic school in America at St. Philip Neri church, a pre-cursor to the parochial school system in America.
Strains of these Nativist sentiments have been seen throughout American history and are still evident in the current controversy over immigration issues and the mistrust instilled by terrorist attacks. The nineteenth century Catholic response, Address of the Catholic Lay Citizens...in Regards to the Causes of the Late Riots in Philadelphia, may be just as fitting today as it was back then.
In this age and country, and especially in the city to which
William Penn gave the name and impress of brotherly love,
we presume it is unnecessary to put forward a plea in support
of the constitutional and legal right to have our religious
predilections respected….
We are Philadelphians, and we love our city. Many of us can
say, it is the home of our childhood, the habitation of our wives
and children--it contains the talus of our fathers. 4
-- More written by the author can be found at www.marianneruane.com
Sources:
The Kensington Riots of 1844
St. Michael’s
History, Nativist Riots “Three Days of Horror”
Excerpts from “Old St. Michael’s, The Story, 1834-1934,” by Rev. William J. Boyle
Excerpts from “Old St. Michael’s, The Story, 1834-1934,” by Rev. William J. Boyle
(originally found at http://home.catholicweb.com/StMichaelsHistory/index.cfm/NewsItem?ID=124685)
City of Unbrotherly Love: Violence in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
Riots in the City of Brotherly Love
Chaos in the Streets! The Philadelphia Riots of 1844
1 St. Michael’s History, Nativist Riots “Three Days of Horror”↩
2 Chaos in the Streets! The Philadelphia Riots of 1844↩
3 St. Michael’s History, Nativist Riots “Three Days of Horror”↩
4 Chaos in the Streets! The Philadelphia Riots of 1844↩
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