How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev

Author:Noel Ignatiev
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-135-07069-4
Publisher: Routledge

5

THE TUMULTUOUS REPUBLIC

Why you see, a party of us one Sunday arternoon, had nothin’ to do, so we got up a nigger riot. We have them things in Phil’delphy, once or twice a year, you know? I helped to burn a nigger church, two orphans’ asylums and a school-house. And happenin’ to have a pump-handle in my hand, I aksedentally hit an old nigger on the head. Konsekance wos he died. That’s why they call me Pump-Handle.

That is a passage from The Quaker City, an 1844 novel by one of the most remarkable writers the country has ever known, George Lippard. Now forgotten, Lippard was the best-selling author in America before Harriet Beecher Stowe. Before he died in 1854, two months shy of his thirty-second birthday, he wrote twenty-three separate books, ranging from thick volumes to pamphlets, scores of uncollected stories and “legends,” hundreds of news and editorial columns, and wrote or collaborated on several plays; he also founded his own publishing house, edited his own weekly paper, and lectured widely. Among other accomplishments, he was responsible for naming Philadelphia the “Quaker City,” and for popularizing the Liberty Bell as the symbol of the republic. All these efforts were subordinate to his life’s work, founding and directing a secret society, the Brotherhood of the Union, to “espouse the cause of the Masses,” a society which may have laid the foundation for the Knights of Labor and that survives to this day as an association providing burial insurance.

To Lippard, “a literature which does not work practically, for the advancement of a social reform, or which is too dignified or too good to picture the wrongs of the great mass of humanity, is just good for nothing at all.” In case there was any doubt as to the social reform he had in mind, or the means he advocated to achieve it, he declared, “When Labor has tried all other means in vain—when the Laborer is deprived of Land, of Home, and of the Harvest of his toil—when the Few will not listen to the voice of Justice, nor the Gospel of Nazareth—then we would advise Labor to go to War, in any and in all forms.…”

The overwrought plots and flat characters make Lippard’s novels unreadable today. But they are unsurpassed as sources of information about the life and attitudes of the “Lower Million” (to borrow from one of his titles).1

A “n——riot” in “Phil’delphy” once or twice a year, said Pump-Handle. Scholars have been able to document only nine major mob attacks against black people in Philadelphia in the years 1834 through 1849, of which seven occurred between 1834 and 1838. Undoubtedly there were other incidents too small to make the newspapers. One of the best studied has been the “Flying Horse Riot” of 1834.2

On a lot near Seventh and South Streets in Philadelphia, an entrepreneur had for some time been operating a merry-go-round called “Flying Horses.” It was popular among both black people and whites, and served both “indiscriminately.” Quarrels (not necessarily racial) over seating preference and so forth were frequent.

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