Introduction

TL;DRAbstract

How odd that "the City of Brotherly Love," observed the New Englander and Yale Review in 1844, was the site of violence and bloodshed, "the scene of action, as a burlesque upon the name." Although nearly every major city in the United States had been disgraced by riots of one form or another in the 1830s and 1840s, Philadelphia had been in a league of its own. Riots against abolitionists in 1834 were followed by periodic violence aimed at the African American community in the 1830s and 1840s that drove many black families out of the city and made the situation for those black residents who remained increasingly unpredictable. Philadelphia was the scene of violence again, in 1840, when the Philadelphia and Trenton Railroad intruded into a residential community and was destroyed, and, four years later, when a weavers' strike turned violent. Philadelphia by the early 1840s clearly had gained "the unenviable distinction" as "the theatre of popular tumults."

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